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The Explorer Mode proved more forgiving, designed to still “reward clever thinking in and out of battle.” But it didn’t go nearly as far as the lowest rung of difficulty in Divinity’s peers – the Story Time Mode in Pillars of Eternity, or Story Mode in Beamdog’s Baldur’s Gate remasters. Killing off or ditching too many of Fort Joy’s potential companions in the first act can leave you with a severely underpowered party that will struggle to brute force their way through some of Divinity 2’s difficulty spikes. It also, in my experience, requires a certain amount of selective roleplaying. The blurb asks for cunning, resourcefulness, and preparedness. While Classic Mode is officially considered Divinity: Original Sin 2’s ‘normal’ difficulty, it’s far more demanding than the ‘normal’ you might find in any triple-A RPG. Is another 50 or 100 hours of this experience worth it? But, of course, there’s another significant investment involved in playing this uncompromising RPG: time. The upgrade is completely free for those who already own the game, which makes the purchasing decision easy for the many among you who picked up this Steam bestseller already.
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