Saw you were talking about Divinity! I know nothing about it, but I watched the Game Awards and saw the new trailer -- would love to hear your thoughts on it! Are you excited for the new game? Reserving judgment until a gameplay trailer is out??
I'm super excited! The trailer struck me as ... extremely Divinity with a bigger budget, lol, which is very promising for me personally as a Larian games fan since Divinity: Original Sin came out.
I wasn't 100% sure if you meant that you didn't know anything about Divinity the game itself or about the Divinity games in general. I went with the latter, so here's my Divinity: Original Sin long response about, actually, all my Divinity games feelings.
(Note: there are earlier Larian games in the series prior to Divinity: Original Sin coming out in 2014, but that's the earliest one I've played and where the story starts for me.)
So, when I was a kid in the 90s/early 2000s, I adored fantasy RPGs more than most things on the planet. As a tiny Anghraine, I got into both fantasy and creative writing via Secret of Mana on the SNES my parents saved up for; I'd watch them play for hours without any need to play myself, just kind of enthralled by how they did it and what was happening on the screen. I started writing fiction at age 8 because watching my parents play it completely rewired my brain.
I was raised Mormon and my parents, who were and remain devout yet extremely unorthodox (these are my mother and adoptive father, for those confused about the Anghraine family lore), made the executive decision that "Family Home Evening"—what's supposed to be family bonding activities of some vaguely spiritual nature—could totally encompass gaming together as a family. My mother's five-generation Mormon parents (Dad is a convert) thought any and all fantasy was probably of Satan, but Mama was too in love with dragons, witches, and creepy goth shit to accept this worldview. So we migrated from the SNES to playing PC video games together as a family, particularly the Heroes of Might and Magic / Might and Magic games as this ongoing integrated unfolding story.
Might and Magic VII in particular was a foundational beloved game for me because I'd control the mouse and solve puzzles and make story decisions with my mother, along side the three of us playing stuff like Icewind Dale and the original Neverwinter Nights (we still mock Mama for deciding her fighter's dump stat would be INT and then dropping it so low that said fighter lost the ability to speak). And then J took me under his wing and introduced me to more strategy games than HOMM, like my beloved Alpha Centauri (from 1999, still my favorite strategy game, lmao—defeating Sister Miriam for all of time and bringing her cultists under my malevolent rule of environmentalist democracy and academia never really gets old). So video games are a whole deal for me.
Meanwhile, Dad is obsessed with board games, mostly of the Kickstarter kind, and I mention all of this because he was the one to caught sight of Larian's Kickstarter for Divinity: Original Sin, a game very much of that kind of classic 90s/early 2000s fantasy RPG style but then-modern graphics, he thought it'd be fun for us and bought it on Kickstarter for all of us. So I tried it out and we really liked it.
D:OS was serious enough to be emotionally invested in things like my Source Hunters' ephemeral romance and various sibling dramas, but interlaced with both horror elements and a ton of really distinct whimsical comedy (some of the horror is very serious, some of it is completely indistinct from the silly elements).
The writing wasn't brilliant, I'd say, but it was engaging and fun, I really loved the old school mechanics handled in a very distinct way that get mediated through choices taken in the game, I liked the flexibility of the class system, I was properly betrayed and furious when a companion deserted me for being too lawful (not lawful evil or neutral, even!), and I enjoyed fun twists like going from "fight all the orcs" to "befriend a tragic gay orc on a neighborhood bench and an adopted orc librarian." I also found that instead of making my mind increasingly sleepy, as most games (like MMOs) tend to do, D:OS would always make me feel more alert and wake me up, which actually helped me pull high passes on my master's exams in the space of one harrowing week with little sleep—when I'd get too tired to read more, I'd play 15 mins of D:OS and my brain would light up enough to keep going.
So. When Divinity: Original Sin 2 came out, we were super excited and Dad immediately got the Kickstarter version as well (which has a few extra perks that buying it later didn't have). This also meant that when they released the separate overhauled enhanced edition later, we automatically got it and all its updates for free. Three different people in my D&D group during my PhD (all from the same literature program, one of them still a good friend and the most god-tier DM I've ever had) turned out to be D:OS aficionados from before ever meeting each other. We'd excitedly chatter at each other about D:OS2 coming out when we weren't talking about British seventeenth-century divorce discourse or whatever.
I've logged a truly ridiculous number of hours in D:OS2. The vibe, I would say, is very much as I described D:OS, but far more polished and rewarding on pretty much every conceivable front. The ephemeral possible romance between your two Source Hunters turns into a wide variety of possible romances between the various PCs you can choose—not the characterless proto-Tav (unlike BG3, where you can genuinely develop your Tav's personality and have distinct romance plots based on their choices) but the romance goes quite differently and has very different trigger points and closure points if you play a "canon" PC and depending on what choices you make for both your character and your relationship with the other ones.
They're more vibrant, engaging characters as allies and you can affect their development as people far more (and in more rewarding ways) when you play them personally (playing as the escaped elf thrall/assassin Sebille, for instance, gives you the opportunity to straight up stab a pro-slavery merchant to death at level 2 and steal his shit, then live with that choice). The mechanics are much smoother and more interesting, especially the cannibalism mechanic. Divinity elves are really fascinating and one of their defining cultural characteristics is that they ritually cannibalize each other death to preserve their memory and this was used as a pretext for a genocide against them that they're desperately struggling to handle the legacy of in D:OS2; basically, elves re-live the last memories of someone they eat, and some dead or dying elves will even request to be eaten by any fellow elf. So if you play as Sebille or a generic elf, you not only can do this but there's a fully voiced mechanic for it every time you choose to consume a body part and it also heals you, but will poison any non-elf who tries to do the same.
And in general the world just feels much more interactive: you have to consider NPCs' responses a lot more, but you also have more opportunities to interact with the physical environment in ways that actually get dialed down for BG3 but are always a ton of fun (I once managed to turn a pool of my own blood into cursed electrified Necrofire water that did... many things to anyone who came near me :D). More base mechanics like backstab and animal speech and the other wide variety of special super-talents—basically feats but very Divinity feats—are also just far more refined and hugely fun to choose and apply.
I like the action point economy better than classic D&D as well: basically, you have a maximum number of action points and a minimum number you regain each turn in combat. You can delay using a turn's APs to a later turn, but only up to the maximum, and you can do as much as have the APs for in a turn, so sometimes it's worth your while to unload multiple actions into a single turn if you can get all your ducks in a row. You can also sink resources into ways to raise the maximum etc, though this of course takes resources away from other stats, so it's just very customizable (the classes themselves are not "locked": you can pretty much infinitely modify any starting class to be anything, even in a lot of ways in character creation itself).
The good vs evil runs in D:OS2 are also highly dependent on who you play and your relationship with either your god or someone who very much is not your god, depending. So it's extremely replayable as well. I've heard the game called grimdark because there is a certain amount of cynicism and even more just general horrors baked in, but I didn't feel that way at all while playing (I have an old brief post about why I feel that way, actually).
It's a very good game. It's also a lot prettier than D:OS was (Divinity seems about as much of a leap forwards) and offers far more character customization etc while still having that 90s/early 2000s CRPG energy that I hope we get at least some of in Divinity—I'd say that D:OS2 has more of that than BG3, though D:OS2 is very much the mama to BG3.
While BG3 is certainly more ambitious in scope and more to the tastes of people who prefer a sort of classic Bioware-style RPG experience, D:OS2 has a really distinct, I'd say quirkier flavor of its own that I just really love. So I was personally hoping that the Larian game in the pipes was going to be a Divinity game and not a different universe or directly connected to BG3. This one looks at least comparable in scope to BG3, with a lot more resources than even D:OS2 had (and that was clearly a big jump above D:OS), but also without the constraints of D&D 5e or WOTC looming over their shoulders. So I'm super looking forwards to what Larian does this time, now that they're returning to their baby with something that seems very much in line with said baby, but now has a lot more freedom for serious ambition. Fingers crossed for sure, but I've yet to be disappointed by Larian.
Divinity: Original Sin II - Definitive Edition now available for PS5, Xbox Series, and Switch 2 - Gematsu
Larian Studios has released PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and Switch 2 versions of strategy RPG Divinity: Original Sin II – Definitive Edition, the developer announced. It is available as a free upgrade from the existing PlayStation 4, Xbox One, or Switch versions.
For new buyers, Divinity: Original Sin II – Definitive Edition is currently on sale at a a 75 percent-off discount price of $14.99 for PlayStation, 35 percent-off discount price of $17.49 for Xbox, and a 50 percent-off discount price of $24.99 for Switch.
Divinity: Original Sin II – Definitive Edition first launched for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC via Steam and GOG on August 31, 2018, followed by Switch on September 4, 2019, and iPadOS on May 18, 2021.
Here is an overview of the game, via Larian Studios:
From the creators of Baldur’s Gate III, experience the world of Divinity in this epic adventure where your choices shape fate itself.
The Divine is dead. The Void approaches. And the powers lying dormant within you are soon to awaken. Choose your role in a BAFTA-winning story, and explore a world that reacts to who you are, and the choices you make. With five races to choose from, and an adventure playable solo or as a party of up to four, lay waste to an oppressive order in a world afraid of magic. Become the God the world so desperately needs.
Divinity: Original Sin II – Definitive Edition is the most complete version of the best-selling, Metacritic Must-Play RPG.
Watch the launch trailer below.
PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and Switch 2 Launch Trailer
