[i]Divinity: Original Sin 2 is an unforgettable adventure that I'd happily replay — if it weren't for the absolutely nightmarish game design.[/i]
[h1]Hard and humiliating[/h1]
I get the feeling Larian specifically wanted to humiliate players with this one. No matter how much CRPG experience you have, no matter how confident you are in your build-crafting, item management, or puzzle-solving skills — Original Sin 2 was made to put you in your place.
[h1]Inventory and crafting[/h1]
At every turn the game throws items at you — from useless bones and dishes to crafting materials and gear. How do you tell what's actually useful for crafting versus what's pure junk?
- Get a recipe.
- Open the recipe book.
- Check what the recipe needs.
- Memorize it. In your head.
By Act 4 — practically the end of the story — I realized I had almost no recipes in the armor and weapon sections. The ones I did have were things like "rock on a stick" and "DIY bow." For anyone who hasn't played: that gear was worse than your starting equipment. Way worse. And enemies are constantly dropping unique loot. This happened despite me actively checking every chest and puzzle along the way — recipes almost never showed up.
I kept thinking the game would eventually strand me on some deserted island where crafting would finally become essential... but nope. Never happened. So I ended up with a bag full of ingredients — fangs, bones, plants — worth nearly 50k gold combined, that never got used beyond basic potions and a couple of resurrection scrolls. But hey, at least you can nail spikes into your boots so you don't slip on ice. Cool right?
By the end your inventory is stuffed with thousands of ingredients, dozens of scrolls, grenades, weapons, armor, food — it's less of an organized inventory and more of a fever dream. The devs took pity and added a backpack-in-backpack system to try to fix this mess, but you can't shift-select multiple items to move them at once. Everything. One. Item. At. A. Time.
And then there's the magnifying glass. Almost every piece of gear needs to be identified with it using a specific skill — otherwise you can't even equip it. So you open this abyss called your inventory, already sweating, trying to find the armor you just picked up somewhere among hundreds of items. Then you have to find the magnifying glass in that same inventory and apply it to the armor icon. Still not scared? Great, we're just getting started.
[h1]Quest system[/h1]
Forget interactive quest interface. What you get here is a journal. Just text notes, written like "I was here, saw this guy, did this thing." And if you're running the "find the villain" quest, it might cross paths with the "save the princess" quest, so entries from one start bleeding into the other. Come back after a few days away from the game and you'll spend a solid 30 minutes just rereading your notes trying to remember what was going on.
The map is completely non-interactive and tells you almost nothing beyond basic orientation. Transition points to underground levels are often unmarked. Found a place you need to get back to but there's no fast travel nearby? Better drop a custom marker.
[h1]Classes, skills, leveling[/h1]
There are no traditional character classes here — just magic schools and sub-abilities, which means you can technically build an archer who throws fireballs and buffs the whole party. Sounds fun? It is, until combat starts. Your enemies are equally all-over-the-place — they'll summon skeletons, beat you with a sword, heal their allies, and mind-control one of your party members all in a single turn. I'm sure someone out there enjoys this, but the "anything goes" combat system creates genuinely painful conditions for the player. You'll be constantly cc'd, and no matter what build you run, the protection system is primitive — drain someone's magic armor and they're vulnerable to every debuff in the game. No additional stat checks, no ability rolls. Just 800/800 magic armor that evaporates in two hits, and suddenly you're getting charmed mid-fight, then turned into a chicken, then knocked down.
[b]Total humiliation.[/b]
Yes, the game is overflowing with skills. So many that I sometimes wonder — was DOS 2 originally designed as a multiplayer game? An elaborate but almost useless crafting system. Dozens of skills per combat style — no classes, remember — many of which are interchangeable and feel disposable. The whole thing feels like the original vision was one thing and the final product became something entirely different.
And then there's leveling. My favorite part of any CRPG — before I developed PTSD from Divinity: Original Sin 2. See, your enemies don't scale to your level. So you can hit a soft-lock where you transition to the next act — with no way to go back and finish quests — and every enemy is suddenly 3-4 levels above you. That hurts, believe me.
[h1]Puzzles — hours of pain or Google[/h1]
Almost every puzzle — and the level design in general — comes with the attitude of "we meant it to be this way and we don't care about your opinion." You'll almost never have enough clues to figure out what to do at any given moment, and you will be googling. Constantly. Every act.
If I were Larian, I'd create a special award fund for everyone who actually finished DOS 2. And a million dollars for anyone who did it without googling a single time.
[h1]Story[/h1]
From a narrative standpoint — Original Sin 2 is in my opinion a genuine masterpiece and a reference point for the genre. The atmosphere is unlike anything else. Every companion's motivations are clear from the first few minutes of dialogue. The line between good and evil is genuinely hard to find here — every moral choice feels gray, not right or wrong, just real — and you'll feel the consequences of every decision throughout.
You watch your companions' arcs develop naturally within the main story, and unlike Baldur's Gate 3 where the companion progression sometimes felt forced, here it feels earned. Each companion has their own storyline running parallel to yours. That said — go to any DOS 2 community on Reddit or Steam and the same companions always come up as the standouts. They're not balanced in terms of narrative importance. Some feel hollow, while others feel more central to the story than your own character.
If the storytelling weren't so fractured — where you can accidentally skip half of Act 3 and stumble into Act 4 — the narrative would feel much more cohesive. DOS 2 suffered from its own ambition, though it's clear Larian learned from their biggest mistakes in their next project, Baldur's Gate 3. Though even in BG3 I couldn't stand the inventory UI, the map, and the quest journal. Larian, please fire whoever is responsible for interface and inventory design — both games deserve better.
[h1]Music[/h1]
Composer Borislav Slavov created an entire story within the story through his score. Those gorgeous fantasy motifs I heard in Baldur's Gate 3 felt like a permanent benchmark for game soundtracks — until DOS 2 took the top spot. The music here sometimes feels like it has a life of its own, and honestly its quality outshines the game itself.
[h1]Overall[/h1]
My rating: 5 out of 10, where most of the positive weight lands on Story/Atmosphere/Music. On the other side — an overcomplicated UI, a broken crafting system, a deeply flawed leveling system, baffling puzzle design, and much more that turns your journey through Rivellon into a journey through Google.
I finished this game feeling everything from rage and frustration to complete immersion in one of the most incredible fantasy stories I've ever experienced. But I will never play DOS 2 again.
