Tactical role-playing game (RPG) Divinity: Original Sin 2 has been in my backlog for a couple of years now. Ever since I completed developer Larian’s next game, the superlative Baldur’s Gate 3, I’ve been looking for something that scratches that same itch. And when Larian announced its sequel, Divinity, I knew I had to stop dragging my heels and find out what I’d been missing.
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Having racked up a slightly terrifying 257 hours on my first playthrough of Baldur’s Gate 3, it’s safe to say that I was going to like Divinity: Original Sin 2. It’s the franchise that helped Larian hone their formula after all. And yet for all the similarities it shares with the game that followed it, the franchise is its own beast.
Far from being the same formula denuded of its D&D dressing, Divinity: Original Sin 2 very much stands apart, hewing closer to the CRPGs of old than Baldur’s Gate 3’s tabletop-imitating trappings. It feels far more tactical and strategically freer than the later game — if Larian is able to add to its solid bones some of the fantastic polish and depth it brought to BG3, I’ll be very excited about the upcoming Divinity.
Class action
Building a character in Divinity: Original Sin 2 feels incredibly fluid. Nominal classes exist as a starting point, with each focusing largely on two families of combat abilities. And these skill families steer away from CRPG cliches just enough to feel novel — yes, you can create standard rogue, cleric, or fighter builds, but others are more of a departure.
Each of the elemental magic schools feels unique and deep, while polymorph allows you to transform your limbs and body parts to suit the situation, and summoning lets you call up totems and demons that match elements on the battlefield, making it super versatile.
But it goes deeper than this. For those who are tired of being railroaded into specific class combinations, Divinity largely tears down class boundaries entirely. You can invest points in whichever stats and combat abilities you see fit, then learn any skills you meet the criteria for by using consumable skill books. That allows you to create complicated classes for every character that suit your playstyle — or create unworkable builds that will get pulverized in every battle.
Not every element of its roleplay feels this deep and rewarding, though. The character creator feels limited, even for a game released in 2017, making it feel a little less immersive than it could have. And while the story and voice acting are perfectly decent, I rarely felt the kind of close connection with my party members and their struggles that I did while playing Baldur’s Gate 3. I engaged with Divinity: Original Sin 2’s lore as much as I could, but often Rivellon felt more like a gauntlet to run with my party than a living, breathing world in its own right.
Fight me, bro
While I have a lot of praise and some reservations over the roleplay elements, the area where I think Divinity: Original Sin 2 is unimpeachable is when it comes to combat.
Read almost any user comments about the game online, you’ll see people talking about how they struggled to get to grips with its combat system. I’ll happily admit: battles can be gruellingly hard if you’ve made mistakes with your build. And if you tangle with enemies above your level, you should expect to be spanked down hard – as anyone whose party ended up in the belly of a teleporting crocodile can attest.
Fortunately, once you understand the tactics involved, things start to slam into place like Tetris pieces. First off, enemies and allies have two types of shield, physical and magical, that soak up damage of each type before it reduces health. As a result, you have to focus on specific damage types for each enemy to ensure you’re maximizing the wounds inflicted. Rather than focusing on buffing or defence, this really rewards gung-ho, high-damage playstyles — that really appeals to me as someone who’ll always opt for a glass cannon over a bard or paladin.
But combat is at its most rewarding once you learn how to dominate and utilize the battlefield. Abilities like teleport make it easier to kite enemies or group them together to be pulped by an area of effect (AoE) spell. Higher terrain gives you a damage advantage over enemies in ranged attacks, while low terrain gives you a corresponding penalty.
Even more critical, the battlefield is splattered with a range of surfaces, including blood, poison, ice, and fire. Depending on your resistances and weaknesses, many of these can either heal or harm your allies and enemies, meaning where you stand is often as important as the attacks you choose.
And each surface causes its own effect. For instance, oil slows people down, but it’s also flammable, making enemies standing there vulnerable to a tossed flame. Water can be frozen into ice to trip characters, evaporated into steam, or electrified to stun enemies drenched in it. There’s a complicated interplay of these elements — and that’s before we even get into their blessed or cursed variants…
While most CRPG battles come down to the interplay of attacks and status effects, Divinity: Original Sin 2’s battlefields are an ally and an enemy in their own right. That makes every encounter satisfyingly knotty, and it’s something I’m glad I’ve mastered for the day that Divinity finally drops.
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josh.russell@futurenet.com (Josh Russell)
