Divinity: Original Sin 2
| Developer: Larian Studios | Graphics: |
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| Publisher: Larian Studios | Sound: |
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| Year: 2017 | Difficulty: |
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| Genre: Role-playing game | Lastability: |
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| Number of players: 1 to 4 alternating | Rating: |
7/10 | |
This review covers the definitive edition, released in 2018, which benefits from numerous balance adjustments and interface improvements.
Remember Divine Divinity? A “rustic” role-playing game influenced by Diablo and Baldur’s Gate, notorious for being impossible to complete due to its countless bugs. This game spawned several sequels set in the same universe (Rivellon). The character of Lucian the Divine, for instance, whom you’ll frequently hear about, is the hero of the first game. This series allowed the studio to experiment with different styles: a single playable character, then two, then a group of four; real-time action, active pause, turn-based combat; isometric view, third-person perspective…
Regarding their most ambitious project to date, Divinity: Original Sin (2014), they settled on turn-based combat with an isometric view and turned to crowdfunding. The title achieved considerable success thanks to its polished execution. However, it left me with a bitter taste for three reasons:
- The two imposed main characters are uninteresting and the plot is utterly flat.
- In my opinion, chance has too great an influence on combat outcomes, particularly depending on whether a “debilitating” or elemental spell is resisted or not.
- The battle against the final boss constitutes one of my worst gaming memories! We played exclusively in cooperation with a friend, with only the two heroes. An non-player character, meant to help us, would stand motionless in the middle of the fray and get killed repeatedly. This would trigger a game over. Our experience with the game, our level, our powers, our equipment—none of it mattered. We were overpowered, but this dolt forced us to restart ad nauseam.
Divinity: Original Sin 2 retains most of the mechanics from the previous instalment (four characters, turn-based combat, an isometric view and virtually identical presentation). Credit where it’s due for the polish of both games, by the way. Very few bugs, a clean interface. I’m particularly sensitive to that. The voice acting is also of good quality, even if one can tell there were few voice actors.
The main innovation comes from this controversial system of physical and magical armour, designed to reduce the element of chance… I’ll come back to that later. Let’s start with the plot!
The Story:
The world of Rivellon, populated by humans, elves, dwarves, bipedal lizards and more … is steeped in magic. Nearly everyone you meet can cast spells. However, there exists another form of magic, primordial, called Source. Its rare practitioners, the Sourcerers, are severely repressed. The Magister order accuses them of involuntarily attracting dangerous monsters. This bears a striking resemblance to the plot of Dragon Age 2 (2011). You have forbidden magic that produces abominations, around which two factions revolve: authoritarian zealots seeking control, and rebel mages seeking liberation. Moreover, the “original sin” mentioned at the end of the game will likely remind Bioware fans of the Tevinter Empire’s incursion into the Black City…
In short, you and your companions are captive Sourcerers, en route to Fort Joy, a prison island where your kind get “cured”.
I found the story rather conventional, but masterfully staged at the beginning. The characters are likeable and well written (particularly the Red Prince). The atmosphere is darker and more “down-to-earth” than the previous game, without taking itself too seriously. There’s a solid background, interesting mythology (Braccus Rex, Divine Lucian…) and opposing forces with credible motivations. I appreciate the dialogue and narration tinged with dark humour, which tackle heavy themes like slavery, torture, or genocide; and I don’t know if it’s just me, but what happens at Fort Joy inevitably reminds me of Nazi extermination camps.
Lovely atmosphere, isn’t it?
Alas, the main story gradually dissolves into the routine of side quests from the second act onwards. I felt a clear loss of pace starting from the third act. The likeable characters fall silent. The mythology that added so much depth to the universe reveals itself as a plot device once you realise, at the end, that all these “distant and illustrative” characters are closely linked and directly participate in the events. It results in an impression of smallness. The final revelation, by the way, really feels like an episode of Scooby-Doo. You know, when a character removes their mask…
I almost forgot, there are also romances (non-graphic), and they’re rather naff…
The Exploration:
Let me break the spell straight away. The core of the game consists of thoroughly exploring vast regions packed with characters who provide dialogues or quests, not to mention the eternal “containers” (chests, drawers, barrels, jars, tree trunks … often empty). Once you’ve fully explored a region, you’ll be granted a narrative morsel (the main story will advance a few steps) before being served a pristine new region… To start it all over again. A true Sisyphean task.
Why does it work in the first act? Because there’s a pretext to talk to everyone and nose about everywhere. You’re imprisoned within a fortified camp and seeking a means of escape. But once out, why should I comb through the area, exactly? Oh right, I’m looking for “Source Masters” from whom to increase my powers… But do I really need to search this cave full of spiders then? This is the challenge of an “outdoor” role-playing game: justifying the effort of turning over every stone. I think there are too many side activities and not enough story to bind them together. And by story, I mean development.
For example, at the beginning of the second act, you learn that you must go “urgently” to the city of Arx, but obviously, the game won’t let you leave before clearing all areas, in an order determined by the level of enemies encountered. Thus, the main story is put on pause for dozens of hours. It feels more like putting together a puzzle than living an adventure; or visiting an amusement park, given the density of side quests per square metre. Especially since the NPCs wait around foolishly before playing their scenes, like actors waiting for the director’s clapperboard. It becomes laughable at times, when said characters are in “frozen” emergency situations. The static world, limited interaction with companions, and enormous quantity of distractions that have nothing to do with the “main quest” harm player engagement. One feels overwhelmed with things to do, to the point of no longer knowing what one is doing there. One gets bored. One puts the game aside for months… That was my experience.
Dragon Age: Origins better created the illusion of being pressed by dramatic events, or that the world was evolving. The player was guided more, the environments notably more confined, but you approached them one at a time. It was digestible.
You might say one isn’t obliged to do everything, to talk to every inhabitant of every village… But yes, you are. It’s absolutely necessary to “work” to earn the experience points, gold pieces, and equipment essential to maintain the expected level and survive upcoming confrontations, particularly in “tactician” mode (the most difficult). I was even tempted to kill all remaining villagers before leaving a region, for the precious experience points!
Another detail that broke my immersion was the sometimes “artificial” reaction of my companions. For example, it was said that one of the four heroes would become “divine” and rule alone over the world. Before starting the procedure, they discussed who would be the best candidate for the good of humanity. My character was Lohse, a witch possessed by one of the most dangerous powerful demons, and it had been repeatedly revealed that she was incapable of maintaining control over either her body or mind. She’s absolutely the last person you’d entrust with cosmic powers! Out of curiosity (or villainy), I proposed Lohse as a candidate. Immediate and unconditional support from my three companions! I had completed all their personal quests, after all. So, the fate of the world…
And the game’s ending is confusing. I apparently had a falling out with Ifan because someone I thought I’d killed five minutes earlier ended up on the throne due to my intervention. Really? I only remember teleporting the dude into the deathfog…
The Combat:
For me, there was a constant in old Japanese RPGs, particularly on Super Nintendo: I would try status spells (or debuffs such as sleep, petrify, charm…) once, they would systematically fail, and then I wouldn’t touch them again for the rest of the game…
In Divinity: Original Sin 2, attacks and spells are classified into two types: physical and magical, and they are “absorbed” by the corresponding armour: physical (grey bar) or magical (blue bar). When one of these bars is depleted, residual damage is transferred to the target character’s health bar (shown in red or purple) and any status effect is applied. If there remains any armour of the same type as your status spell, it fails. There’s no more chance involved. This makes combat progression more predictable and improves the strategic dimension, in my opinion. However, it becomes much more difficult to immobilise or weaken an enemy at the start of combat, because almost all of them wear both types of armour, which must be reduced to zero beforehand.
Oddly, the teleportation spell isn’t subject to this restriction. It’s one of the many ways to exploit the system. I love teleporting enemies to the feet of my bruisers, or in front of a “non-aligned” monster, or even into the middle of an inferno…
I acknowledge this system has its flaws, and wouldn’t want it to become standard. Nevertheless, I find it refreshing for one game, and I appreciate that they tried to reduce the chance factor. There’s still about a 5% risk of missing your target, but this can be easily minimised by raising our “accuracy” statistic. Moreover, the ability to attack two or even three times per turn greatly diminishes the resulting inconvenience. Additionally, the abilities to preserve unused action points for the next turn, or to delay one’s turn, provide interesting tactical options.
More generally, I find the combat mechanics easy to grasp and highly flexible. Plus, all characters are entirely customisable: from choice of statistics to spells to social skills… There aren’t strictly defined classes in this game, contrary to what the character creation module might suggest.
However, I should point out a recurring targeting issue. In turn-based mode, time stops, but the enemy doesn’t stop moving, and “its clickable surface” varies. It’s not uncommon to click just beside my target, then watch my archer skip towards it rather than shoot at it. That’s why you’d be well advised to click instead on the enemies’ (stationary) portraits at the top of the screen.
The difficulty is quite high at the beginning, as equipment takes time to acquire and you’re confronted with higher-level enemies. There’s strong temptation to “cheat” by using and abusing pickpocketing, explosive barrels, certain necromancy spells, telekinesis, teleporting everyone during dialogue phases… I never engaged in such trickery, of course! However, apart from some sporadic spikes, the difficulty decreases continuously in normal mode.
In tactician mode, the difficulty remains until the end. Remember to eat! Cooking in this game provides substantial bonuses. Still, I felt penalised by the finite amount of experience. I reached Arx at level 18, possessing an archer armour set stuck at level 18, which I didn’t dare replace until the end of the game. I suffered severely.
Random Rants:
This is where I’m going to start grumbling about everything and anything again. It’s cathartic…
There’s a crafting system, cooking recipes, blueprints and components to collect. That means interacting with menus. I find the exercise tedious. Neither better nor worse than other games. Then again, I don’t know a single title that has managed to make its crafting fun, except perhaps Minecraft?
One consequence is the messy inventory. You spend most of your time picking up mountains of items you’ll never use, then trying vainly to organise your belongings. If you don’t submit to this perpetual management, the cumulative weight will eventually prevent your character from walking.
I come to the personal trauma that has strongly coloured the image I’ll keep of the game. My hands are still shaking…
You should know that, like others, it invites you to create a “profile” during your first playthrough. This typically serves to separate users when, for example, several household members play on the same computer. I created a profile, then a character within this profile. I progressed until the end of act 2…
At this point, a friend suggested trying the multiplayer campaign cooperatively. So we started a new game together. I created a second character within my “profile”. We played all weekend without issue…
The following Monday, I could no longer find any saves from my solo game. Everything had been erased without warning, because only the thirty most recent saves within a profile are kept! Apparently, I should have created as many profiles as new games, which makes the very principle of a profile redundant.
To conclude, already in 2017, critics were citing Divinity: Original Sin 2 as an example, in contrast to a declining “AAA” industry obsessed with lootboxes and other microtransactions. It’s exactly the same discourse being rehashed for Baldur’s Gate 3 six years later. This argument is starting to irritate me. Who’s forcing you to buy and consume shoddy games?
Divinity: Original Sin 2 isn’t the messiah. It’s a conventional but polished RPG… And in its second half, let’s be honest, barely more entertaining than scratching one’s lower back with a brick!
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