Divinity: Original Sin II - Hands On @ PCGamesN

Fraser Brown (PCGamesN) with some early impressions on Divinity:Original Sin II :

Divinity: Original Sin 2’s Kickstarter, by the time you read this, has just ended. It’s made more than double from pledges than its predecessor and unlocked every stretch goal, making the already extremely ambitious RPG even more expansive. 

For a day, as Larian staff ran around organising streams and PvP tournaments, on top of working on the soon-to-be-released Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition and, of course, Original Sin 2 itself, I sat on an absurdly comfortable bean bag and played through the entirety of the sequel’s demo. 

It’s good. Damn, is it good. 

 

You may have seen some of the demo on a livestream – Larian’s been keen to show it off – but you probably won’t get to play it. The demo has been tailored for previews, a proof of concept that contains everything that’s ready so far, with quests, characters and locations that probably won’t make it into the finished game.

So it’s a container full of Larian’s big ideas and fascinating features. And I dunked my head right into it and drank in as much as I could.

I fought, over and over again, with one of Larian’s writers, from the Dublin studio, in surprisingly compelling PvP matches where the entire arena was nothing but corpses and blood and toxic goo. I tried to comfort a suicidal cow who had presented herself to a seemingly disinterested dragon for dinner. I murdered a woman to solve her attempted murder. I was racist to a Dwarf.

There’s a lot going on in the demo, clearly. At its core, though, and this I am told will be at the heart of the finished game, is this story of hunted men and women, the game’s protagonists, and the strange powers they have. 

Origins count for a lot in Original Sin 2. Who your character was before the game informs how people will interact with them and their pre-existing relationships. Their race and social standing matter just as much. My party of four included two humans, a Dwarf and an Elf, and their experiences differed greatly, with even throwaway conversations taking very different forms depending on which character I used. 

Entering the main city, for instance, was a doddle for my upper class human. She was mistrusted because of her use of Source magic, which is illegal and in the process of being eradicated, and her mother was in jail, accused of the attempted murder of the mayor, but the guards still let her pass. The Dwarf, on the other hand, was given a hard time and ultimately was denied access to the city, necessitating a new mission: find a secret way into the city.

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