Considering getting D:OS 2

[Rooksx]

There's a good Steam sale on for Divinity: Original Sin 2 right now, so I'm considering buying it. I had two major problems with the first game though:

1. The writing. DOS1's writing was as camp as PoE1's was long-winded and overly serious. Neither did anything too positive for me, but I actually found the sheer campness of DOS's world and dialogue off-putting.
2. At least on higher difficulties, I thought that the much-vaunted environmental effects overwhelmed the combat. As I recall, I did the same thing in so many fights: summon a rainstorm to create puddles, then cast a lightning bolt to stun enemies. Melee characters were a pain to play because they seemingly couldn't move without being stunned, burned, poisoned or some such. That female NPC would spend half the fight incapacitated. This resulted in combat being quite static and tactics that revolved around disabling mobs to too high a degree.

Have things changed in the sequel in relation to the above, or will I simply not like DOS2 if I didn't like the first one?

Edited May 5, 2019 by Rooksx

[Wormerine]

There is slight attempt to address both “issues” but not by much.

1) story and characters of DoS2 are still absurd and inconsistent. The overwhelming amount of puns from DoS1 is toned down, but due to open nature of DoS2 I found it actually less compelling, and it felt to me like a bag full of short skits with such a loose (or flexible) quest design that punchlines didn’t get proper buildup. Still, due to its nature, I found it difficult to care about anything that happens and in DoS2 I truly dreaded seeing a new city with tons of NPCs to talk to. Now, to its credit, DoS2 has bits of brilliance, both in its humour, quest design, and consistent use of mechanics, but I just found too much crap between these enjoyable moments to be able to soldier forward. For example - elves have ability to eat flesh and see glimpses of memories of the person they eat. That opens come cool alternative ways of continuing quests, some of which are quite clever and funny. However, to not make it too easy to find those valuable pieces of meat, the game is littered with pieces of meat - so if you don’t want to miss those cool ones you spend a decent amount of time stuffing meat down your elves throat, and mostly reading useless garbage. Same with seeing ghosts, same with talking to animals. I feel it might work better if one plays in coop (every one takes on himself a piece of exploration) but managing the full team and going through all those chores to find couple cool bits is exhausting and boring. And the story is absurd, inconsistent, sometimes funny.

2) the only major change to combat, that I can remember is the armor system - characters have physical and magical armor which, gets decreased with every physical/magical attack (pretty much extra health bar) before enemy can chip on your health. As long as a character has physical or magical armor, status effects won’t work in him (so for example you can’t knock down someone with physical armor, or stun with lighting if they have magical armor). So the game isn’t anymore about stunning enemies before they stun you, it’s about taking down their armor as quick as possible, before they can take down yours, and then stunning them. Granted variations in enemy armor composition, might force a slight change of strategy, but it pretty much works, as it did before.

Gave up on it somewhere halfway through, and I sort of plan to return to it, now when the enhanced edition is out, but I don’t really want to play it anymore. I actually liked DoS1 better, it felt more focused. DoS2 seems like a pretty darn good toy box, if one is into creating custom adventures.