PCGamesN: PvP combat in Divinity: Original Sin 2 is great fun already:

Divinity: Original Sin 2's PvP could be the game's unexpected masterstroke

Divinity: Original Sin 2, along with letting you fight hordes of monsters, villains and innocent NPCs, will allow you to get in brawls with your own dear allies. The brand of co-op here has a competitive streak running through it, inspiring betrayal and the murder of one-time companions.

Unexpectedly, after two days of hands-on time with the game, I found that I’d been in more PvP battles than any other kind, not because there’s so much PvP – that really depends on who you’re playing with – but because I kept being drawn back to the arena.

Allies can transform into enemies anywhere, even in the middle of another battle, but in the town that Larian had created for the demo there was also a tournament organiser – a gateway to a more curated PvP battlefield, an arena designed specifically for players to duke it out inside. 

I spent a lot of time in that dark, crumbling structure, surrounded by monolithic rocks and skeletons. It, like the rest of the demo, is a prototype, and perhaps even more experimental, as Larian weren’t sure if this kind of PvP would work at first. Yet it does, even in its barebones state. 

The foundation, the combat itself, is likely the main reason. Aside from the graphics upgrade and new spell effects, it’s the change in action points that currently separates the combat in the first Original Sin and the upcoming Enhanced Edition. They’ve been reduced to four, while the action point cost of moving, attacking and using items has been likewise simplified. 

Rather than streamline combat, in the pejorative sense, it makes turn-based fighting faster paced without sacrificing tactical complexity. Important decisions are still a dime a dozen, and with the addition of skill crafting, which allows you to combine spells to make new ones, like horrible invisible spiders or a gruesome downpour of blood there’s a hard-to-fathom number ways to approach a fight.

CEO and creative director Swen Vincke explained that, through spells and skills, they’ve been trying to open up more ways for players to manipulate the pen-and-paper-style ruleset. The team is putting together new spells and, perhaps more importantly, more spell combinations so that players will be able to employ them, both in and out of combat, to leverage more control over the environment. 

I confess that, and I must apologise to my fellow PCGN writers, I did not leave many battles as the victor. I let us all down. I wish I could come up with some excuse, maybe even blame it on using a controller. Lamentably that was fine, and the game works surprisingly well even with the more condensed control scheme. I only have myself to blame.

With each defeat, I dusted myself off and dragged myself back in. Every fight, despite involving the same four characters in the same arena, managed to inspire memorable duels, unexpected comebacks and their fair share of surprises. They all felt improbably different.

The spells are what lets the PvP to conjure up so much variety, especially when used a bit creatively. In one tense duel, my character’s health became tethered to its foe’s. The spell meant that any damage she took, my Dwarf took as well. That was unfortunate, as he was only one fireball away from killing her. That’s when the random nature of the arena took over.  [...]