Recently I've discovered the joy of CRPGs, having previously only dabbled in them without spending any significant time on the genre.
With Baldur's Gate 2 just around the corner, which I'm sure many of us are hyped for, I wanted to try a similar CRPG to get a feel for whether I'm going to want to play it. Enter DOS2; this game is made by Larian Studios, the same studio making BG2, and is an absolutely incredible game.
From the graphics, which are stunning even 6 years on from release, to the combat which makes you think about your moves in a manner similar to how you might do in a game like chess, and best of all stories which are for the most part genuinely interesting. I frequently found myself surprised at events / characters / quests I found throughout the world, even small things like hearing someone screaming nearby then discovering they had been torn to pieces by voidwoken.
I recently just finished Act I and just started Act II but wanted to share a bit of love for this game as it is an absolute masterpiece with a well deserved 95% positive rating with 144k reviews on steam.
Please share your experience with DOS2 and whether or not you have fully completed the game!
A friend and I tried this game and enjoyed it up to a point, a particular fight we could not get past.
Finally looking online for a guide, we discovered that every guide we could find suggested cheesing the fight in various ways.
We both decided that any game that required the player to both know a fight was about to happen (when it was impossible from context to predict) and cheese the fight to win was a bad game. Even if this was only one fight, it was a fight that blocked all progress. We quit and neither of us have wanted to play the game again.
Note: We have, either together or on our own, completed other games - like BG 1-2, NWN, PoE, DOS1 - without resorting to guides, cheats, foreknowledge, or cheese.
We were, and remain, very disappointed with DOS2 because of this, and we're "suspicious" of BG3 because of DOS2 (but, charitably, perhaps Larian made a mistake in DOS2 and won't repeat it in BG3).
EDIT: Please don't ask me what fight this was, because I really don't remember as it was now years ago. We were pretty deep into the game, bopping along pleasantly and thinking we were succeeding. As I recall, we had no side-quests to do (so no way to level IF we were under-leveled - I remember looking to see if we had missed some corner and needed to quest there). We basically entered a room in some dungeon/temple with no other direction on the map to go and experienced TPK. Over and over until we finally gave up. Looking at Steam, it says we were ~~93.3~~ 118 hours into the game.
Without knowing what fight you stopped at it's hard to really talk about your experience, but I promise you don't need to know a fight is coming or cheese the fight. There's a point where the fights just click for you and become easier. There's also plenty of content you can go to instead to level up, if you're under leveled.
There's only 1 fight I can think of that's balls to three weeks nuts (the Blackpits) and my brother and I still beat it legitimately, just took like 6 attempts.
See EDIT.
Fair. All things considered though, my friend who couldn't get through DOSII has been begging me to get the BG3 early access with him. So without playing it, it seems more approachable!!!
You are wrong, you can cheese in DoS2 but you don´t have to. It is an option, not a requirement. Source: I (as probably many others did too) finished the game without using any cheese once.
I suspect you reflexively cheesed the game, mainly because I absolutely recall that when we gave-in and looked up guides for this fight, every single one of them that we found at the time advised us to cheese the fight. Not one simply presented a strategy or alternative. They were all like, "Oh, yeah, that fight. You gotta cheese it." We both found the idea of having to cheese a fight to win distasteful, so we just quit with a shrug.
That was our experience. It was a bad game for us because of that, and I thought I had made that clear.
I respect your individual experience but please believe me that cheesing is not necessary to beat DoS2.
Which fight was this?
I knew getting into the game that the combat was punishing - especially in Act 1 before you built your team. But I don't recall having to cheese a fight to get pass it.
See EDIT.
I found that lowering the difficulty was just required. The early game, you have a LOT stacked against you. When you level up, get more abilities, better gear - then you don't have to pull them behind a doorway or something.
It made sense that you were completely outgunned in the start, but as you progress, it's a little easier.
However, the emphasis on surfaces was bad. It was way too easy to make necrotic fire that was 2 turns to dispel a small portion of. And in the beginning, it's very hard to get rid of it. Late game, you can turn it into a healing fire.
But other than those gripes, it was a fantastic game. Well with the time invested to learn it. Just, lower the difficulty.