- the story after Cyseal was bland and unexciting, the characters were boring and unmemorable, the writing was cheesy and low effort, the lore was basically non-existent, and the worldbuilding was trash. How can you even take Rivellon seriously when there are NPCs saying "crikey" and "sayonara"? PoE gets a lot of flak in here for having a boring story, but its writing is a Nobel prize for literature-worthy work when compared to DOS.
- I hated the camera during combat. It kept automatically readjusting and focusing on a current character, making me do stupid mistakes and misclicking. I press LMB to shoot someone with a bow, then i click LMB to shoot again, but the camera suddenly decides to readjust, so i misclick near the enemy instead, and my archer walks towards the enemy and wastes her turn.
- UI in general was kinda shit and unresponsive, I believe it's mostly because of wonky TB implementation. You can't skip animations even when outside of combat, you can't queue actions when outside of combat, you can't give commands to multiple party members at the same time, you can't even open an inventory while one of your characters is casting a spell or trying to stand up after having slipped on ice. Your glass cannon mage is on fire after the combat has ended? Tough luck, you won't be able to put the fire out in time, because the guy with "helping hand" ability is currently picking his nose and the button is inactive.
- Another jab at UI - no "quest items" inventory tab. There's a fuckton of quest-related items, quite often the game doesn't use them automatically and requires you to find an item in your inventory manually, and it sucks. There's already a lot of items in your inventory (some of which have identical icons), and then you're being asked to use some shitty spell scroll that you have found maybe 10 hours ago and already forgot its name. And sometimes said scroll is in "magic items" tab, but sometimes it's in the "miscellaneous" tab with all the books and notes. Also, was it that hard to implement "you have already read that book" label when hovering a cursor over some crafting recipe book? Those books all have generic names like "secrets of the scroll 1", "secrets of the scroll 2" etc, did they really expect me to remember them all?
- At first (during the character generation) I liked the RPG system - it looked like there was a lot of cool options for potential builds. But then I realized that it's classless, and in the end there are basically only three-four archetypes that can do everything. The game gives you four recruitable NPCs - dual-wielder, archer, figher with a two-hander and a water+air mage, so with correctly built main characters you can cover pretty much everything the game has to offer. And the balance is out of whack - a lot of skills seemed useless (like most of the soft crowd-control spells), levelling certain abilities was a trap because you can equip two or three items each for +1, perks are either godlike ("bully") or trash (rest them honestly), and a lot of magic consumables are useless. Initially I was pleasantly surprised with the amount of options for my archer and other non-mage characters (all those special arrows, grenades and shit), but in the end most of them turned out to be worthless. Blinding, weakening, lowering resistances - most of the time it doesn't work because of enemy's successful saving throw, and even if it works it's still worse than a simple knockdown/stun, so why bother when you can just use dash, lightning bolt or freezing?
- Speaking of items that give you +1 to skill. I hate it when the game gives you equipment that increases your non-combat stats, because you either "waste" skillpoints, or suffer by regularly equipping and reequipping items. Each time I wanted to identify an item, I had to go through the motions of equipping a ring and an amulet "+lore", and since the game showers you with shitty randomly generated loot, I had to swap those items very often. Yeah yeah it's my own fault and I shouldn't have been a skillpoints cheapskate, but still. Seem like a bad design to me.
- In fact, everything about itemization is a bad design. You can't build your character around specific items because they drop randomly. Your epic legendary sword of doom will become obsolete after you find a rusty pitchfork just because pitchfork's level and thus damage stats are higher. You won't feel the excitement after digging a secret chest or finding a loot cache, because it will contain another levelled item that will be identified and sold to a nearest vendor. Levelled loot ruins the exploration and it's and the worst thing about this game.
- Crafting! Now, I don't hate crafting mechanics, in theory if done well crafting can be very fun (see Arcanum or Underrail), not to mention that in an RPG with levelled diabloesque itemization it can allow players to ignore lootdrops and just craft their own gear. Unfortunately, it's not exactly the case here, DOS' crafting is kinda shit. It bloats an already bloated inventory management with a ton of garbage components, the recipe menu is unintuitive and awkward to use, and thanks to a stupid two-items combination system you need to go through multi-step process to craft. You want to craft a freezing arrow? In any other game it would be as simple as combining a wood with a freezing element. In DOS there's a fuckton of transitional items, so in order to craft a freezing arrow you must saw a wooden log, then use wood to craft an arrow shaft, then craft arrowhead using a knife with a bone/stone, then combine freezing element with an arrowhead, and then combine arrow shaft with a freezing arrowhead. Yes, you can find already crafted transitional items in the wild or on sale at different vendors, but still - why was this all implemented in the first place? Thanks to that there are like thrice more components than the game actually needed.
- Another thing that annoyed me was an overly restricted exploration. The world is level-gated, and if you try to venture somewhere you're not supposed to go you will get fucked by strong enemies. And if you somehow prevail and defeat higher-level enemies, you will bork the power curve and all the loot you skipped on an easier path will now become obsolete.
- Puzzles were interesting the first couple of times you solved them, but they got old very fast because there was no variety. Pressure plates, drag that barrel over a poisonous hole in the ground, avoid sentinel statues - rince and repeat throughout the whole game. There were like two interesting ones (like the one where you remotely control dog/cat/mouse on a chessboard), but rest of them are all solved by sending a roguey with winged feet skill and teleporting the rest of your party via pyramide. Oh and I hated the mandatory pixel-hunting segments where you must scour the room for hidden switches. Why the fuck should I do that myself when there's a high PER character in my party?
- Also bugs. It's been years, I thought EE was supposed to be stable, but no. I got all kinds of bugs - from disappearing NPCs to the turn order messing up and showing dead enemies. And ZixZags bugged out and temporarily refused to open new portals in the Homestead, leaving me without master spells for a huge chunk of the game.
(with half).
