I’m doing my first playthrough on Explorer mode and I’m pretty OP. I am terrible at these games. Compared to DOS:2 the game is a breeze, truly. I could probably bump the difficulty up to Balanced mode and still be fine.
In other words, the combat is much more accessible than DOS:2 in my opinion.
Why? There’s a bunch of different possibilities that can happen directly related to NG+. The game feels like it’s meant to be played endlessly with it.