This was just the beginning of the demo of Larian Studios’ latest Divinity: Original Sin 2, which hit early access recently. Fans of the original – which was an unexpected hit – should brace themselves for excitement. Not only will the sequel be dishing up more isometric environmental turn-based combat, but this time the team have brought Chris Avellone on board. Avellone is to RPGs what Andrew Stanton is to Pixar films – you’re pretty much guaranteed one hell of a story if he’s involved. The addition of a renowned writer is key since the first game offered superb combat but a slightly hollow story, mainly due to the party members being fully customised and therefore lacking personalities of their own. This time around you can either go down that same route of building a character from scratch, or instead pick one of the pre-scripted choices, all of whom have interesting backstories, motivations and interactions. The Red Prince is an arrogant prat. Ifan ben-Mezd is an assassin with a dark past. Lohse is an enchanter who loves a good pun. Sebille is an elf that eats people to increase her knowledge. Each of them have a distinct voice in their conversations, made all the more impressive by the entirety of the dialogue being scripted rather than spoken.
What’s more intriguing is how these characters have quests that interact – or indeed, conflict. Whilst veterans will no doubt be used to the Black Isle / Bioware mechanics of bickering between party members, in Original Sin 2 the multiplayer aspect could actually cause consequences to disputes. Since you have the option of playing fully controllable characters independently within your party, you may well end up triggering certain quest events which are at odds with someone else in your team. Perhaps you need to get information from a character, which someone else in your party wants dead. Do you let the lead die, or turn on your “friend”? There is huge potential for playthroughs which are utterly unique, not least because nothing is safe. You can kill pretty much anything or anyone, even vital quest-givers. The game will obviously not lock you into a unretrievable state, but certain doors may be closed to you purely down to the actions of other players, all of whom with their own agenda. It’s an exciting improvement on the first game, as you now have the motivation to roleplay the person you have chosen, along with all of their quirks and desires.
Combat itself will be familiar to those who have played Original Sin, but also fans of Wasteland 2 and other turn-based RPGs. Portraits of each of your characters and your enemies are lined up, indicating the order in which they can act. By expending Action Points (AP), they can either move, attack, or use a special ability – either offensive, or defensive – until their AP is used up, or they decide to end their turn and conserve remaining AP for the next turn. This is strategy in its purest form, so fans of hack-and-slash action RPGs may not be too enamoured with the mechanics. After a few turns, though, you begin to understand the rhythm as well as the environment. A number of hazards can be found in most encounters, to help or hinder you. Barrels of flaming oil are on hand to explode over the battlefield, whilst crates of toxic ooze are breakable with a well-placed arrow to rain down poisonous gas. Even harmless features such as puddles of water can be rendered lethal by simply casting electricity-based spells at them, frying anyone who has dipped a toe – friend or foe alike. You can also collect environmental items, like these barrels, water balloons and so on, to use in combat to make your own hazards. Larian haven’t messed with a good thing, and the combat was the pinnacle of the previous game so it is pleasing to see it intact, albeit with a graphical upgrade to really make the encounters shine.
The story is equally intriguing, although the demo dropped us in a little way into the narrative and handed us a lot of information via dialogue, which we needed to piece together. Thankfully, the writing is brimming with energy and character, so it wasn’t too difficult to decipher after spending some time with the NPC crowd. You play as a bound Sorcerer, in a land where magic is forbidden and wielders of The Source are constrained by an energy collar before being farmed out to Fort Joy to keep the rest of the populace safe. The previous Divine is dead, and the tyrannical Bishop Alexandar has taken over, much to the chagrin of the common folk. It may not be the most original plot, riding on the heels of Dragon Age’s circle of magi and the tranquilising of mages, but the writing is crisp and rich and has a depth of its own.
What sets Original Sin 2 apart is the way in which you can approach quests. At one point we’re tasked with finding a way out of the Fort via an underground jail. There are an astounding number of ways of tackling this. You could help get an unjustly imprisoned guy out of a pickle who might give you the location of an entrance. Perhaps you might help a magister track down a half-crazed ogre for reasons of her own, in return for the details. Or maybe you’ll decide to make a full-frontal assault on a guard tower and pummel your way in. There were at least five different ways we found of getting to the end goal, and this was just a single quest.
There are still a few hangovers from the first game that might cause consternation. The inventory is still quite clunky, with rollover text often obscuring the party’s equipment. Pathfinding behind buildings continues to be a pain, as the melting effect that lets you see “through” obstacles sometimes doesn’t prevent you from clicking on the road you’re trying to take – and rotating the map using the mouse’s wheel button is finicky. Yet these are minor annoyances rather than major issues, and they may well be resolved before the game’s release next year. We’ve not even touched on the crafting system, or the skills and talents that grant you bonuses to things like lock-picking and lore and let you talk to animals. Nor have we mentioned the wonderful score, or the environments that feel like they’ve descended from the Ultima lineage with interesting NPCs and quests. There is an incredible amount of depth in Larian’s sequel that has been enriched further by an intriguing narrative, and we’re very much looking forward to getting our hands on the full game in 2017.
