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Divinity: Original Sin 2 [official site] is out of Early Access and fully released. Adam and John have both spent many, many hours with the alpha, and are now beginning to chew their way through the full version. That makes it an ideal time to get together to chat about their thoughts on the game so far, the experience of playing an RPG before it’s finished, and how to break the news of a death to a baby bear.
John: Adam – I just murdered a sad dog because he got cross when I fed him a human leg.
Adam: I hope you’re pleased with yourself. Last week, I found a shark that appeared to be stuck on a beach. I was going to return it to the sea but we had a bit of a chat and then I…well, I decided to sample some of the meat it had stuck between its teeth, John. I ate the meat from the shark’s mouth.
And that’s how I found out exactly who the shark had eaten and later that day, I broke the news to that person’s friends. The shark, as far as I know, is still rotting on the beach.
Divinity is quite odd, isn’t it?
John: It is. But somehow incredibly tightly choreographed for such a huge and adapting RPG.
Adam: It’s probably worth explaining how you knew the dog was cross and why we’re feeding legs to dogs and eating human remains in the first place. It’s because eating body parts gives elven characters access to the memories of the deceased and because there’s a talent called Pet Pal that lets you talk to animals.
As you say, it’s a game that adapts to the players’ actions and tries to accommodate every strange decision you make, and it does that by piling up all kinds of consequences for all kinds of actions. Essentially, Larian know you might decide to kill the person who gives you a vital quest so they figure they should ensure you can get the information you need by eating that person’s corpse, or talking to their ghost, or through some other means.
It’s a game that refuses to acknowledge the concept of ‘plot armour’, that pesky stuff that prevents Important People from dying, and so much of the strange rules of its world stem from that.
John: I could probably go back another step and ask, did you play the first Original Sin?
Adam: Think harder and you’ll remember my excellent and thorough review of it. I’m sure you said it deserved a Pulitzer at the time, or whatever award people hand out to the likes of us (it’s a Peperami and can of Tizer – ed).
It’s a very good game but Original Sin 2 is better in just about every way that matters. Part of that is budgetary, I think. Both were Kickstarted but that’s a fraction of the costs involved – with Original Sin 1 there are areas that feel undercooked, particularly toward the end. The sequel is much more confident. It seems strange to say given how successful it became, but the first was quite experimental. A big, systemic RPG that didn’t have much in common with either of the Bethesda or BioWare poles that loom over the landscape.
It’s a different beast to the Infinity Engine inspired games that have come along recently as well – the likes of Pillars of Eternity – and I wasn’t sure it’d find an audience. In the end it found a big enough audience for the sequel to have much more money behind it and I’m hoping that means it’s solid right through to the end. I still haven’t finished it though so I can’t say for sure just yet!
John: Adam! Adam, if you go into the cave with the Royal Fire Slug with Pet Pal as a skill, she starts barking on at you about her falling out with Braccus! They were going to get married! I mean, she wasn’t a fire slug then.
This really rather extraordinarily captures for me just how good this game is. I played it through before, and this cave offered me one of the toughest fights in the game (playing on Explorer mode in the alpha was considerably harder than it is in the released version – I’m about to raise the difficulty as the fights are a bit dull now). But this time it’s a gamble of wits as I try to bluff my way through a conversation with this monstrous creature, right now faced with a 50:50 guess over whether he was left or right handed. You don’t know if Braccus was left or right handed, do you? (It’s a trick question.)
Adam: The main thing I remember about Braccus is that you absolutely should freeze Braccus. Freeze him until he is so frozen that you might accidentally mistake him for a iced lolly and eat him on a hot day.
Let’s not get back to eating people though. Let’s just say that I agree with you about how great it is to compare notes with other people who are playing. You know that old Austin Powers gag, that’s probably been used in many other places, where the henchmen are shown to have their own live away from the evil headquarters? Original Sin 2 is full of moments like that – you clear out a dungeon and then talk to someone else who went through the same place and made friends with all the people in it. They were just faceless, voiceless minions to one player, but another one might know their entire backstory and their favourite colour and everything.
John: Talking of backstory, let me set this up for those who haven’t had the pleasure. At the start you pick a character, either pre-made, which strikes me as fairly essential what with all the background they all have, or your own custom build. You’re all Sourcerers, people with magic, and have been rounded up, collared with an anti-magic neckpiece, and are on a boat sailing to the island on which you’ll be imprisoned. Along with all the other pre-built characters you didn’t choose! So did you go pre-built?
Adam: Yeah. I am an aristrocatic lizard, which is just about as far from Actual Adam as it’s possible to get, me being a scruffy urchin of a primate. When I play RPGs I tend to play ‘as myself’, in that I’ll do what I think is right and always try to romance the strong, silent type rather than the quirky one. Divinity has been odd because I’m genuinely trying to roleplay as this snooty lizard prince and it’s kind of liberating. I’m being a bit of a dick, John, and it’s very entertaining.
John: Heh. Being an aristocratic lizard, this is too easy for me. So first time I was Sebille, the assassin elf, and this time (save games don’t transfer across, to my horror) I’ve gone with new character Fane, a skellington who wears ripped off faces to pass as not a walking skellington. He’s apparently a bit more challenging, as you’ll send the NPCs into panic if they ever accidentally see your bony visage.
Adam: I had a little go at being a skellywobble earlier and a man saw me and shouted, “THE DEAD ARE RISING”, so I killed him and was instantly annoyed that I’d sort of proved his point and probably made it much harder for every other undead person who wanted to integrated into society. I was part of the problem.
We should mention that we could be doing all of this together, in co-op. I talked about how much fun it is comparing notes with other players, but imagine if you had befriended a bunch of brigands who were more like Merry Men than pillagers and plunderers, and then I met up with you later that same day wearing the face of their leader and started bragging about how I’d wiped out “some real bad sorts”.
You’d be outraged!
John: Imagine knowing someone else and having enough overlapping time. Imagine such a world.
I need to share the strangeness of voices being added in this released version. The alpha had just text, which was odd at the very start, but then settled in to normality for me – indeed, even your Pillars and the like are only sporadically spoken. But now everything and everyone has a voice, and because I’ve already met them, THEY’VE ALL GOT THE WRONG VOICES. It’s such an odd experience, like watching a film of a book you read and their matching nothing of how you’d imagined it.
Adam: I’ll turn off the voices. I’ll take out my headphones and unplug the speakers if I have to. If voice acting isn’t absolutely top notch I’d rather go without it, and I have very exacting standards. And it’s not even just about quality, as you say, it’s that I already know a lot of these characters.
But there’s another level as well: the writing is brilliant. It’s witty and it’s clever and occasionally it’s even quite moving as you come to the end of some of the major plotlines that have their hooks deep into characters you’ve come to care about. But so much of that writing feels like it was constructed to be read from a page (or screen) rather than performed.
John: Yeah, it’s very pleasant to read, in a way RPGs really usually are not. It’s not turgid purple prose lore guff nonsense, but pleasing writing. I think it’s a bit less pleasing to listen to. Which isn’t a slight at (most of) the voice actors (the person who did the little girl elf’s voice can maybe not do that again please), but more that – I dunno – I don’t think I’d even consider switching it off if I hadn’t played the alpha. Still, clicking past it as I read right now.
Also, Adam, Sebille just learned first aid by eating a man’s head.
And oh no, I’m just remembering the time I broke it to a baby bear that his mummy was dead. I mean, this is a game in which I explained the concept of death to a dog, but the bear scene really stands out to me. Because it wasn’t part of something else. At one point I’d found a dead bear. At another, this cub. And I could choose to lie to the poor wee thing, or I could tell it the cold miserable truth. And you can’t lie to anyone about whether their mum’s dead or not. That’s just never ok. And this poor little creature. And that was that, the game didn’t refer to it again. It was just a deeply peculiar moment, not even accessible if you don’t have the right skill.
2005 sea doo bombardier. Adam: There’s an important lesson here. Sometimes a little tale to tell is its own reward. I don’t need every little thing to have consequences down the line or to be a Decision Moment that affects how people view my character or the ending that I get.
There’s also a lesson about the line between a white lie and a cold hard truth, but we won’t go into that. We should talk about combat instead. I love the combat but then I’m a sucker for almost anything turn-based, and all the elemental trickery delights me. You were finding it a bit cumbersome, I think?
John: Yeah, I’m not such a big fan. It’s better balanced now in this released version, but it still doesn’t have the right sweet spot between too easy, and just watching as the enemies get infinity turns in a row because all their attacks are disabling and it’s literally impossible to do anything other than sit there and watch as they murder you one by one. I think the game gives opponents way too many ways to steal turns, and it’s pretty boring when it does. So why do you lurrrrrve it?
Adam: I actually agree with you on the pacing. It can become a real pain when there are interrupts and steals all the time. It’s like a neat language with horrible grammar. But I like that there are so many possibilities, and that you can end up with a complete mess of a battleground because of all the different fluids that get spilled.
And as with the stories we’ve been telling, I like how daft it is. “Remember that time I made it rain knives and then electrified the blood of the people caught in the knife rain?” “Yes, and what about the time you blessed a fire so that it healed everyone and then somebody else made it rain actual water but the water was poison and we didn’t know what was hurting us or healing us anymore?”
Now that I’m thinking about it, I think all of the abilities – and there are so many, with craftable ones on top – might add a little too much noise and take away from the fun of the overlapping elements a bit. I’ll need to examine it all for another thirty hours to be sure.
John: It’s still far more interesting than the combat in the recent BioWare-alikes. And yes, it’s lots of fun to deliberate blow up a barrel of oil near where the enemy is standing, then set it on fire with your next character’s move. It feels much more involved, especially as those barrels never feel staged – they’re all over, and this is just where the fight’s happening. Although I do wish the otherwise amazing pathfinding (you can drop a marker the other side of the game map and have your crew make their way there on their own), during combat it’s a bit of a pain that they won’t run around oil or whatever, and so sacrifice action points to Slow, or get sick from Poison.
Adam: I should get back to playing the damn thing because apparently that is my job. It’s not a bad job, all told.
John: I’m playing it between typing sentences. I just chloroformed my own guy.
Adam: I’m so happy that you’re enjoying it. For a while back there I thought I was going to be levering it into our end of year calendar again, looking around for support and finding that NOBODY had time to play a sixty hour RPG. Outrageous.
And we’ll definitely have to play together at some point so that I can chloroform you and save you the effort of doing it to yourself.
John: Yes! Also, next week I’m going to explore the DM mode and try to make a little game for us all to play together.
Adam: Make sure there are plenty of woodland creatures and lovable pets for me to break bad news to. It’s the only way I can level up.
John: You will have to explain cancer to a kitten.
Divinity: Original Sin 2 is out now for Windows, and is available from gog and Steam for £29.99.
Divinity: Original Sin 2 is rich with possibilities. There are countless interactions to consider, to exploit, or to stumble into, and so far that’s been as exciting as it’s been exhausting.
I often find myself thinking about the limits of the games I play. When a game offers me three paths and I’m keening for some ideal fourth, I tell myself that developers can only anticipate and account for so much. When an object or an NPC behaves unrealistically, I remind myself that not every potential circumstance can be accounted for.
But I’m over 18 hours into Divinity: Original Sin 2, and in that time I can’t say that I’ve thought about its limits once. Of course it has them, as every game does, but they just haven’t leapt out at me the way I’m used to.
September 15, 2017 - the first 20 hours
From the very beginning Original Sin 2 feels wonderfully flexible. Players can customize their own characters (down to picking an instrument to highlight their personal soundtrack) or choose from several pre-made origins. Choosing an origin character doesn’t mean sacrificing any chance at customization, though. Players still have complete control over the origin character’s class, abilities and appearance, so there’s wiggle room even if you love a character concept but hate their weapon/hair/cannibalism-related clairvoyance.
Origin characters will become companions if they aren’t picked as the player character, meaning that their stories and the unique interactions they can have aren’t completely locked off. Better still, they offer players the option to influence their class when they do join up, so a party that’s already brimming with magic users can nudge a new companion in a different direction to fill a skill gap. It’s a good idea to take advantage of this, since a more diverse set of skills can ensure a party is ready to deal with anything.
It’s an RPG that is overwhelmingly about planning ahead yet still being completely taken by surprise
And that’s incredibly valuable. A lot of different things can happen in Divinity: Original Sin 2; it’s an RPG that is overwhelmingly about planning ahead yet still being completely taken by surprise. A seemingly inconsequential conversation with someone can lead to them dropping dead from some unholy and unknown force. An arrow shot astray in a fight can cause an unrelated and cascading loop of fire, poison and electricity to render a nearby area completely impassable. A teleportation glove can lead someone too clever for their own good somewhere they’re absolutely not prepared to be.
Divinity 2 All Romances
Isolated into their most basic elements there’s a predictability to everything, a logic that can be employed in some situations (particularly combat) for perfectly unsurprising outcomes. Conversations, battles, and quests are all scenarios to be solved, one way or another. Of course murder’s always on the table, but maybe the real key is in an innocent red ball looted from a previous encounter (which hopefully no one traded for a lockpick). Maybe it’s in a healing spell cast over the wounded. Maybe it’s in the character themselves. Origins as well as tags (some of which are set at character creation, while others can be acquired) can impact a character’s options in many different situations. There’s a lot to be said for knowing who an NPC may or may not want to deal with.
But that density and complexity can have its costs, too. There are just so many pieces in play, so many potential points of failure or at least complication, that it’s an impossible feat to try and stay on top of them all. Even rolling back to older saves hasn’t been enough for me to undo some of my more disastrous accidents. It’s like standing in the middle of a sea of dominos, but only actually knowing where half of the lines start. Inevitably, someone’s going to make a mess.
Learning to accept that mess has been my biggest challenge
Learning to accept that mess has been my biggest challenge. I’m absolutely the player who needs to fill in every area of the map. I need to open every crate, talk to every NPC and solve every problem before I feel ready to move on from an area. I want clean edges and perfect solutions. And in that way, Divinity: Original Sin 2 has been somewhat suffocating for me, in spite of how much fun it is to poke and prod at all of its moving parts.
It wouldn’t be fair to call its world mean, because it’s not malice that’s standing between me and that perfect, clean save. It’s more accurate to say that the world is indifferent to player intent. It doesn’t necessarily matter if I want to be the hero, or if I want to do everything right. It doesn’t matter if I want to save the dying man surrounded by enemies. The second one of them ignites the oil around him, intention goes up in smoke just like the rest. Fire doesn’t care who or what it burns, and neither does Divinity. That degree of neutrality is uncommon in an RPG and I can appreciate that, even if it is simultaneously very stressful.
Another notable cost of all this complexity is that it can be hell to stay on top of everything. While the game’s journal keeps track of updates to quests in what should be a very tidy and helpful way, many entries are vague to the point of uselessness. Others require very specific (and sometimes easily missed) triggers to be hit. I have multiple quests open at the moment stuck on steps that I’ve completed with no idea of how to advance them further. This is a particularly big issue in regards to companion character storylines, as they need to be in the party to trigger related events, but cycling them in and out of the party in anticipation of these encounters is pretty annoying — an upgrade from the giant pain in the ass it was for the first 10 hours.
Obviously I still have a lot of questions yet to be answered, and a lot left to see. The story has only just started gaining momentum for one thing, so it’s difficult to say much about it yet. Likewise it’s hard to say if the mild annoyances I’m experiencing now will become big ones 20 hours from now, or if they’ll shrink to nothing in the face of all that messy possibility.
Update: October 13, 2017 — The finished game and score
Twenty hours into Divinity: Original Sin 2, I saw a game that stretched out ahead of me with a horizon of possibilities. Seventy hours later, all I could see were painted walls.
Those early hours with this RPG were completely intoxicating, which should be clear from my initial glowing impressions. Even though my party was still comparatively weak (and incredibly vulnerable in the game’s tactics-heavy combat), as a player I felt armed with more tools than I could count. Every environment, every character, every item and every ability was at least a little bit useful to me. Even my companions could be altered to suit my specific needs and, after the first act, can be completely re-speced whenever the need strikes.
Whether I was in combat or out of it, every situation felt extremely malleable — and perpetually vulnerable to the right mix of cleverness and patience. The world was my very own beautiful (if gruesome) sandbox.
Players aren’t force fed any more backstory than they want to consume
This feeling was at its peak while the freedoms my created main character enjoyed were extremely limited. She and the rest of my party were prisoners, each one outfitted with a glowing collar that cut them off from the full breadth of their abilities. As members of an apparently dangerous subsection of the population of Rivellon capable of harnessing Source energy, they had been shipped off to the deceptively named Fort Joy in the hopes of containing — if not eventually curing — them of this ability. Source magic, we’re told, has the unpleasant side-effect of attracting wicked monsters from the depths of the Void into the mortal realm, and therefore must be excised from society for the well-being of all.
If that seems simple, I assure you it doesn’t stay that way. Set over a thousand years after the first Original Sin, sandwiched between Divine Divinity and Beyond Divinity, Original Sin 2 has hooks all through the series’ lore. Things get complicated fast, but players aren’t likely to suffer for any unfamiliarity with the older games. Every opportunity to share lore is taken through dialogue as well as the copious number of books scattered around the world, usually free for the taking. Players aren’t force-fed any more backstory than they want to consume, but there is an expansive buffet available for those that would.
And like the lore, the world itself is densely packed with secrets and surprises. Even deceptively small areas of the map tend to twist in on themselves in tantalizing ways, letting players decide just how deep they want to follow every little rabbit hole on their path. Engaging with NPCs, particularly rats and other animals, also feels more valuable than it did in the previous game. Every line of animal dialogue is unique and, for the most part, useful or illuminating in some way, making my compulsion to chase down every last squirrel feel far more justified than before.
This kind of enthusiastic exploration is usually rewarded. Sometimes that reward is a few coins and the feeling of triumph that comes with using a teleportation ability to craft a smart little shortcut, but often it’s more tangible. A new quest, a new character, a bit of lore about an incredibly powerful crab wizard; whatever it was, I rarely if ever regretted these detours.
But there’s a problem with all the density and mutability the world displays. Because for all that players can do in Original Sin 2, for all that they can affect, there are infinite things just waiting to break.
It’s inescapable to some degree. Games that traffic in open-ended possibility typically have many more moving pieces to account for, and the more pieces in play, the more likely conflict becomes.
Sometimes these broken pieces are the player’s own fault, and sometimes they are just circumstance. For instance, it’s entirely possible to kill critical NPCs, or for critical NPCs to get themselves killed in Original Sin 2. When I decided to show the dwarven queen mercy, only for her to run away from me and directly into a cloud of noxious (and lethal) gas, I accepted it. It was a funny little twist of fate; unfortunate, yes, but more a result of all these moving parts working mostly as intended than a sign of anything out of place.
But then there were the things that were just outright broken: dialogue that ignored major story-based changes to the state of the world, and quests that wouldn’t recognize I’d satisfied all their required steps or even tell me where I’d gone wrong, presumably because I’d stumbled into some aspect of it out of order over the course of exploring.
In one case, I was arrested for having a “stolen” necklace in my possession even though I had long since disposed of it. In another, I discovered that my ability to free allies who had been charmed … couldn’t actually target charmed allies. Whoops.
When everything’s working as intended, it feels thoughtful and satisfying
My favorite example of Divinity: Original Sin 2’s sometimes frustrating jagged edges is the companion story boss I fought near the end of the game. This was an incredibly powerful demon who initially had a massive character model as well as an absurd amount of armor. Unfortunately, when I quick-saved and quick-loaded to undo a misstep during the fight, he shrank to half his original size, moved to another area of the map entirely, and was abruptly and miraculously armorless with a fraction of his original HP. At that point, I killed him with just two completely plain arrows fired in his direction.
Normally this game’s combat is high-risk and incredibly ponderous, in a good way. When everything’s working as intended, it feels as thoughtful and satisfying as solving a good puzzle, albeit with a lot more blood spilled.
But when it’s not working? Software company images hd. One major boss, two minor arrows. Fwip fwip.
I could easily list off dozens more examples of all the times I felt utterly robbed by some moving part or another slipping out of place in Original Sin 2. If I had to hazard a guess, I would say at least a quarter of the sidequests I came across broke in some manner while I was earnestly and carefully trying to advance them. I was only trying to do exactly what the gamebills itself on — following interesting-if-roundabout paths to goals of my choosing — only to find that, in so doing, some invisible element had gotten caught in the clockwork.
As the game went on, the kind of problem-solving I had initially reveled in also stopped producing results. While I’d enjoyed using healing and blessing skills to help certain ailing NPCs early on, for example, eventually those skills would work for a moment or two before the character would snap back to their previous state with no explanations given, no further clues differentiating their state as special or unique. The more I played and the more tools I had at my disposal, the more often that Original Sin 2 seemed to ignore its own playbook, closing off the creative paths that initially had me loving the game.
I found myself deeply apathetic about the outcome of everything I was doing
Combined with the sheer volume of bugs and busted elements I found as I explored, I eventually felt deeply apathetic about the outcome of everything I was doing. My investment in the world waned dramatically because my effort was so often rewarded with nothing more than a limbo state. I would tick all the boxes and get nothing for it and when I eventually had to move on to the next area, a generic line of text in my over-cluttered journal implied I’d abandoned the quest by choice.
As I said, I’m under no illusions that Original Sin 2 should be technically seamless. However, it should absolutely be better at getting this right. This is itsentire wheelhouse. It’s sold on its openness, its mutability, all those moving pieces and all those creative solutions. This is what the game is, and it should be able to bear that weight far better than it does.
If all these components interacted more smoothly, it would be so much easier to ignore its less glaring shortcomings. An occasional bit of placeholder text left in an item would seem completely petty. The numerous NPCs who can’t seem to get each others’ pronouns right, an honest editing oversight. The berry pie I crafted but for some reason was unable to ever sell to vendors, a quirky but harmless bug. And the awkward pulp novel romance scenes (which I mention as someone who is normally a fan of romance in RPGs) that blossom from incredibly underdeveloped relationships between characters? The other sex scene where I listened to the narrator intoning dryly about “two heats hot against one another” with anything but a straight face? They’d be funny but largely unimportant aspects of the overall experience.
These are all things I was completely happy to handwave at that halcyon 20-hour mark. I was still caught up in all the new toys I had to play with and, more importantly, all the little cracks in the game’s continuity still felt like just that: little cracks. But those fractures deepened over time until, inevitably, the whole experience began falling apart.
Wrap-up
Divinity: Original Sin 2 is stunningly ambitious but fails to pull all its pieces together
Divinity: Original Sin 2 has an abundance of things to see and do, a staggering amount of secrets to unearth and plenty of tricks up its sleeve. Yet almost every cool moment I experienced sits shoulder-to-shoulder with an equally weighted disappointment. Ambitious and impressive as it often is, it’s ultimately a collection of incredibly pretty beads that just don’t string together as well as they should.
Divinity: Original Sin 2 was reviewed using a final “retail” Steam download code provided by Larian Studios. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
Our review of Divinity: Original Sin 2
- PlatformWin
- PublisherLarian Studios
- Win Score7
- DeveloperLarian Studios