i enjoyed this a ton honestly
though the balance obviously very sketch. on my tactician playthrough i found the first four-five levels pretty brutal and had to avoid combat to dig up exp however else i could but by the end of the game i could just have my helm of arcane acuity bard do 100% hit chance hold monster + perilous stakes and watch my monk one turn everything
the cha classes are all pretty OP and I think it’s not a coincidence that you don’t get any of those companions by default
the first original sin was like this too and I think that was part of what endeared me to it so much — it was the first game with matsuno style combat in years and years that had a similar approach to its difficulty curve. namely that the combat design should progress as you get more powerful and not because attacks get more survivable, which also makes the beginning feel more difficult than the end with a good build. original sin also had the benefit of being a CRPG so you could consistently gain XP by doing non-combat stuff at the start too, which was a really good initial feedback loop
outside of the mega battles which were great (eg end of act 1, adramelk, oilfield, squid) original sin 2 probably has the worst combat of the 3 of these, the armor system was a little boring
the armor system kinda grew on me though it’s restrictive and annoying at first, when your damage output and skill load out are threadbare. I like that it emphasizes exploiting weaknesses and aggressively dismantling the enemy by attacking their move economy, and discourages a trad healer/support/tank/DPS party. its giving SMT Nocturne vibes almost
The most charming thing imo is how much Larian rewards lateral, “non-statistical” thinking eg. splitting the party to setup ambushes, manipulating the environment to create roadblocks, yeeting enemies away with teleport, stuff thats debatably “cheesy” while also feeling great and like an intended approach. Course it’s also very trial-and-error, rewarding save scumming to make your crazy plan work… but thats My Kinda Shit im looking forward to BG3 just so i can do “same thing but as a tiefling this time”
The combat is at its most fun when your ridiculous scheme fails and you just roll with it
hehe i kinda like the power fantasy of getting to tweak things until it works, but true eventually i usually have to go “welp close enough” and roll with it. Aided by playing the console version, where quickloads are not actually very quick
(though i also tend to mess up my plans by doing stupid shit by accident like attacking the ground in front of me & call a mulligan on that. the fiddly gridlessness is probably my biggest complaint)
This is the opposite of sketch though. It’s a reward for systems mastery. I don’t even know what “good balance” means in a single player rpg, honestly. All my favorite crpgs have “bad balance,” turns out I think this is what makes them good games.
You know a modern crpg that’s really balanced? Outer Worlds. Tim Cain is super proud of how balanced it is relative to his previous more unbalanced efforts. And guess what… it’s boring as shit.
yeah maybe phrased that wrong. i like the class balance etc. in this game because there’s a large variety of broken shit - a bunch i still haven’t touched in two playthroughs, and making everything boring as fuck in the name of balance is why i don’t play fighting games or destiny anymore
but the challenge does seem to evaporate when you hit level 5 or so beyond just having some systems mastery at that point
it’s true that even on tactician I didn’t have a ton of trouble with either the act 2 bosses (which I expected to, though the mob you fight before the actual bosses was really fun and tough) or orin, ansur, or raphael but all those fights were still tense and fun and required some planning with a full kit, which is how it should be
my monk is like level 3 and either whiffs entirely or kills whatever she encounters instantly, not really expressing a lot of “systems mastery” here yet tavern brawler would make my character even more broken despite me just making a standard ass monk. I was a system master when I stole those skeletons weapons so they were unarmed when they came to life though.
this is why this game is just nwn but fancier: all roads lead to accidentally making a character who trivializes the combat but nwns combat is like 100x faster to resolve so the fact that d&d takes fucking forever even when you are op is minimized
i don’t do a lot of stealth in this game and I’m glad I don’t because the way you can trivialize encounters by splitting the party etc which I again realized by accident would annoy the shit out of me. The barrelmancy shit in divinity was dumb too.
They named the game “Baldur’s Gate 3”
misleadingly imo
it’s extremely in line with the first two games though, it must be hard to be the divinity man and then have them gush over a dramatically inferior series while you know they’re wrong
if you give me infinite options i start to get annoyed when the most effective ones are stupid, like i could never respect the eidos deus ex games again because i spent half of them carrying vending machines and copy machines to conceal myself. on the other hand i also hate when games force me to do a specific dumb thing, like how the st mere eglise scenario in valor and victory more or less forces you to draw fire with one unit while everyone else goes into close combat and you are not allowed to use concealment so the entire strategy hinges on exploiting a game rule (you can only shoot once a turn)
I find larian barrelmancy so exhausting I think because it’s like a synthesis of these two things that annoy me
fair enough i just love playing a crpg that lets me run a party like theyre a bunch of dipshit adventure game protagonists. just a gaggle of Threepwoods cramming oil barrels into their pockets to solve overly elaborate combat puzzles
this game has just as bad of an inventory system as Ultima VI which is also fucking deranged. The way everyone’s just fine with the UI is unbelievable. I hate opening my inventory and I hate how many fucking mugs and plates are in every chest
I did the gather barrels for an hour and set them up thing in the first original sin, it was extremely tedious, and our reward for finishing act 1 was having the storyline break so we couldn’t progress, which was cool because the other storyline with the shards or whatever had already broken hours earlier. We had gotten literally as much XP as we could from every other source and could not beat the act 1 boss or his adds without doing this too. I dunno if it was the enhanced edition or not but not really a big fan of RPG devs having to re release a version of their game that doesn’t blow later in general. I wonder if they’ll inevitably do that for this too because they’re still changing parts of the story 6 months after release
I think after 6 posts in a row about how much you hate a game you’re legally allowed to stop playing it
cmon you know sb dont work like that
I love how all of you guys think I hate this game because I’m the slightest bit critical of it
Methinks the lady doth protest too much