The DOS system was great, but the lore and stories were relatively formulaic. I was super, super worried about Larian doing BG3 because of this, but they really do appear to have nailed it.

At least so far, the difficulty curve is much less steep which I suspect put a lot of people off DOS2. I certainly resented needing to kill everyone to remain on track with the XP curve, but that's presumably because Pillars has spoiled me.