Does Baldur's Gate 3 share DOS2's flaws?

[Sephyrias]

Don't get me wrong, I liked Divinity Original Sin 2 enough to spend 170 hours on it back in 2019, but the more playthroughs I made, the less I wanted to play it again. If BG3 is just more DOS2 (same devs), then I might pass.

To be more specific, these are my biggest gripes with DOS2:
1. Combat is broken. Just to name a few examples: there is an item that you can get in the first half, which makes your team unkillable if you have multiple of it ("Idol of Rebirth"). Next, you can have a character leave combat while the enemy is waiting for another of your characters to do their turn (which lets the character outside act for free and revive the whole team, etc.). You can also teleport the boss itself or their minions out of the arena, which breaks their AI and/or splits the fight into separate battles. The list goes on.
2. The leveling system hinders exploration. Every encounter is unique, you can't grind levels. However, every level matters a lot, a level 15 encounter is unbeatable at lvl 12 without using exploits. Playing the game blind can be miserable. You walk around looking for the next level up, get ambushed, oneshot, and sent into another 30 second loading screen. Even worse, the game has points of no return, so you can make yourself permanently underleveled by skipping too much.
3. I like the story concepts, but not the implementation. Many main character arcs got rushed/underwhelming conclusions, lots of gameplay and story stuff doesn't make sense (especially Act 3), including oversights that cause continuity errors, like dead characters being alive again despite you having their literal head in your inventory, etc.
4. Dialogue abilities matter way too much. If you randomly walk into a dialogue with the wrong character, it can result in an unwanted fight, which then means another 30 second loading screen, just to do the same dialogue again, but with the designated "Persuasion" character initiating it.
5. Lastly, I think this has since been patched, but at least back in 2019, your base movement speed was super slow. If it hadn't been for the fast-walking mod, I would've quit DOS2 after just a few hours.

So overall, Divinity Original Sin 2 was a relatively unpolished game at the time I played it. It had lots of strengths too, which I assume Baldur's Gate 3 has as well, but these 5 points would be dealbreakers for me.

[Haesis]

Well with what you've said, it seems you will dislike almost the same things about Baldur's Gate.
But, just so you know, I didn't liked Divinity either and didn't finish it, but I'm absolutely in love with BG3 for some reason.

[Naamtar]

1. It follows 5e ruleset, Divinity II did not. There are some powerful one use items in the game (that usually have consequences for obtaining) but I've not come across anything extremely broken yet and most of the magical gear in the game is fairly mundane.

2. The leveling is very front loaded, there are encounters you will not be able to overcome due to level differences but they are few and far between. For example I was able to kill at level 8 boss at level 5. I'm not sure if you can underlevel and brick yourself in progress or not as I'm pretty thorough in my exploration.

3. A handful of quests seem to be rushed, whether their conclusions are intended or not is still up for debate. Whether you find them unsatisfying or not is subjective. I haven't run into an issue where a dead NPC is suddenly alive again, personally.

4. Dialogue is just as important as it was in Divinity II if you want the most favorable outcome, but in my experience choosing to roll with the punches is still possible in the majority of scenarios.

5. Base movement speed out of combat isn't bad at all. There are a lot of teleports this time around that will take you back to key areas instead of having to walk there. Divinity II's were definitely more sparse.

[juppsen]

If you don't want an item, that makes you unkillable, just don't use it!? Imho there's no class, item or spell wich is completly OP. Of course there are better and worse ones, it's DnD.

[Nobby]

1) don't use cheese tactics then. Don't think there is a TP spell here, but you can for example plant 10 explosive barrels before aggroing and blow everyone up, but you can also just choose not to.
Having the choice is what makes it more fun (imo at least) and provides flexibility. Also in dos2 you can only have 1 of those rebirth items (you can charge them after use iirc, but you can only have 1.

2) Imo it's more the reverse, the leveling system encourages exploration. If you want to become strong you have to explore every nook and cranny of the map. So far I haven't encountered a fight that I couldn't win when exploring the map.
You get a pretty significant boost at around level 5 usually, for any class which can allow you to roflstomp the rest of the game. I think I did skip a few areas for the moment where I thought it might be better to come back later, mainly because I didn't want to get side tracked too much and focus on my quests (ominous looking caves and all that).
If you ofc skip to act 2 straight away (which you can), you'll have issues, but you're meant to be playing the game anyway ie exploring the map. Look at d2 for example, you can run straight to andariel, but if you get there at level 2, it's gonna be a tough fight.
Think there is also enough to do to easily reach max level. The game always gives you a very explicit message when you reach a point of no return and gives you the option to keep exploring before continuing.

3) tbh haven't encountered issues with this yet.

4) well it is an rpg set in d&d universe, it basically goes hand in hand. I like games having not only positive outcomes and where you can be put in a tough spot.

5) for me the speed feels fine, but the tracking/pathing could use some more work, companions not jumping over a cliff they can very obviously jump over, you switching to that character to have your Mc jumping back over the cliff and all that bollocks, or companions being stranded on a roof when there is a ladder 20 feet away etc... it's not bad, just could use some more polish.

If you got 170h out of the initial dos2 series I think you can easily get the same out of this one. Given its price I think it's more than worth it, and much more than you get out of most games these days. In total I'm at about 50ish hours now, not counting EA (doing a playthrough with 3 friends and a playthrough on my own, but I don't go further than my MP game so we get to explore it first time together), and not even halfway act 1 I think. During the solo playthrough I explore things a bit more thorough and then we can go revisit places or things we missed or skipped in our MP game

[Razorblade]

1. The flee radius is pretty far in BG3. You could theoretically jump out, chug potions (there is no sleeping bag equivalent in BG3), then jump back in, but it would be tedious as hell. It's definitely less spamable than D:OS2.

2. There is no per-level damage/armor scaling like in D:OS2, so level doesn't matter all that much. 5 is really important, since that's when martials get their second attack, but past that, levelling largely gives you small bonuses, not hard advantages.

There is no grinding still, but XP is plentiful. You will pretty much always hit max level in early to mid Act 3, no matter how much or how little side content you do. Not that that matters all that much, because, once again, level isn't terribly important past level 5.

3. Can't say I've seen any continuity errors.

4. Think you're exaggerating here; I can't think of a single instance in D:OS2 where a conversation had a proximity trigger and a Persuade option. Regardless, BG3 has this same "issue," although since passing dialogue checks involves RNG in BG3, you could technically pass a check, even with a character who is not specced into the relevant stat at all.

5. I think movement speed is fine, but I didn't have an issue with D:OS2's either.

[Chunk Funklerson]

1. I don't think there's anything too game breaking unless you run really specific builds you have to Google because they're unintuitive multiclass combos, and even then you can still definitely die. That said, the game is pretty forgiving about death, as long as you have at least one character escape an encounter.

2. I'd say it's definitely encouraged to see as much of the content as possible to continue gaining experience, but I've never felt pressured to do anything goofy like killing all of Fort Joy for experience. Just based on how 5E D&D works, it should be theoretically impossible to soft lock the game, though if you manage to get too underleveled you might have to get creative with some encounters, or do something cheesy like save scum until crowd control lands? I dunno. Personally I'm playing blind on the hardest difficulty and a suboptimal build and there's only a handful of fights that took more than one try.

3. I've had a couple quests where I was confused on how to continue them, but I haven't noticed anything being definitely broken. I know some people have, though, and some of it's been hotfixed, so... I dunno. If this is a problem, hopefully it won't be for long.

4. This is kind of a thing depending on the kind of player you are, but it's not as bad in BG3 as some games. For one, there's a number of ways to boost dialogue opportunities, especially if you have a cleric in your party to cast Guidance or Enhance Ability on you. For another, there's a built in "inspiration" system that gives you a resource that lets you reroll skill checks without reloading your save. And finally... I think it does a better job of letting you "fail forward" than a lot of games. I've never really felt like I'm losing out on content because of failing a check, mechanically it usually just means you have to do an extra fight or find extra clues. You'll probably have a few checks that make it tempting to reload (e.g., a check to save an NPC you really care about, or something), but I haven't noticed this being too much of an issue.

5. I don't think it's that slow. I wouldn't mind it being a little faster, but I dunno. The map's dense enough that you bounce between encounters pretty fast.

I kinda like DOS2 but never managed to stick with it long enough to finish it, partly because of the clunky movement, broken quests, and kinda weird character building/leveling. I don't think any of them are as bad here.