Divinity: Original Sin 2 is the Best Game Ever
Nov. 30, 2023Divinity: Original Sin 2 is the Best Game Ever
Divinity: Original Sin 2 is the best game ever made! In this article, we’ll discuss whyDivinity: Original Sin 2is actually the Best Game of All Time, and why you should play it, based on my completely unbiased and objective opinion that I am sure 100% of readers will agree with and will generate commentary only telling me how perfectly correct I am.
In this article we’ll talk about how Divinity: Original Sin 2 changed the dialogue aboutturn-based RPGs, and how it brought them back into mainstream gaming, picking up where its predecessor left off. Why was it DOS II that accomplished this and not the first game? That’s something we’ll also explore in this article.
This is the third in a series of articles exploring how many games have gotten impressively huge and committed fanbases, and what it’s great about each of them. If you haven’t noticed it yet, the title is not serious!
And one could even make the argument that the Kickstarter success of DOS 1 was in part thanks to the success of Pillars of Eternity, but one might also say that its initial sales numbers themselves might have suffered from launching before it.
Larian was relatively unknown at that time compared to Obsidian, and it’s likely many people were less excited about the title because of that. Additionally, previousDivinity gamesLarian had made were in real-time, a design choice that was heavily influenced by their publishers and the lack of turn-based games in the market place. Turn-Based games were few and far between during this time period, which may have also made players unaware that such games existed.
The irony for those snobby publishers who rejected the project is that after the success of DOS, Divinity: Original Sin 2 would go on to sell more than 7 million copies, out performingPillars of Eternity 1 and 2by a huge margin, and moving more copies than all Larian’s previous titles combined. By why is that? Let’s discuss.
Divinity: Original Sin was created by a group of table top players, players who enjoy the creativity that games like Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder are known for. And because of this, DOS took a very hands off approach to RPG gaming, allowing players the freedom to explore and tackle quests in the way that best suits their style of play.
There are so many fantastic things about Divinity, but the various ways you can solvequestsreally showcases the genius of Larian Studios. Can’t get through a locked door? Have you tried killing a party member, resurrecting them on the other side? This is the type of thing you can do in Divinity, that simply had never been done successfully in a game before.
In some ways, DOS shares a lot in common withElden Ringin giving the player agency over the world, which I discussed ina video about the two games earlier this year. Because you are sort of dropped in and left to your own devices with minimal guidance on where to go and what to do, and maximum freedom on who to kill, which is virtually unheard of in gaming this day and age, unless you are playing a FromSoftware title.
It was so bloody hard to tell the story in the way that we’re doing it—giving the player the freedom that they have, and the ability to kill every single person that you encounter. It’s a very hard game to make when you say: Okay, here’s a protagonist, oops! You killed him. We still have to tell the story.
We had to make sure everything worked together, where all the different permutations made sense to the player. That was very, very hard.
But it’s not just the freedom to explore and discover theworld of Rivellonat your own pace that makes Divinity such a great game, it is also the insanely goodcombatthat takes elemental interactions to the next level.
Never before had a game successfully created a combat system revolving completely around environmental interactions and reactions, that allows for a variety of different strategies depending on what elements you are focused on, and what enemies you are facing. DOS’s combat system alone is enough to make it an instant classic, but again this is just one aspect of its brilliance.
You throw in things like Cooperative play, including local coop, interesting and funcompanions, and a subtle humor that permeates the game, and DOS is vaulted into a category of its own. And then DOS II took it to the next level.
The sequel would spend 2 years in Early Access, being polished and tweaked, and eventually Larian produced a sequel that was not only better than the first, but accomplished something few games to date had. Every single dialogue from every single NPC in the DOS II was fully voiced, and fully voiced to the highest standards of gaming. This was a monumental feat for an isometric RPG that meant a delay in publishing and even a complete redo of the already-voiced lines, but it was so successful that it would prompt Josh Sawyer over at Obsidian to push for a fully voicedPillars of Eternity 2in order to compete.
It was very clear that people wanted us to voice everything, despite a number of people writing on the community forums that they didn’t care about voiceovers. We looked for opportunities to do so, but there was so much voicing to be done that initially it was not going to possible had we stuck to our original release date.
We actually redid the voices at one point. We started recording and eventually realised that the way that we were doing it was not going to work. We were well into recording at this stage and knew that we didn’t have too much time. But we knew we had to redo it.
Divinity: Original Sin 2 also had moreSkills, moreelemental combinations, including the new Cursed and Blessed effects. Players could also respec more easily, allowing for a lot more freedom to try differentBuilds. Status effects were changed to be tied to Armour, or a lack thereof instead of an RNG chance to trigger.
And, on top of all that, the DOS II featured4 player cooperative and competitive playand even ended up adding a Dungeon Master mode that let players create and run their own campaigns, further extending the play time of the game.
The key to the success of the sequel is that Larian didn’t change the fundamental formula of the game, still allowing players to explore Rivellon with freedom in the playstyle of their choosing. Many of the design decisions we see in Baldur’s Gate 3, are based on the same design choices of DOS II, only wrapped inside a DnD container.
Divinity: Original Sin 2 has been such a success that WotC tipped Larian to produceBaldur’s Gate 3, some 20 years after Baldur’s Gate 2, which released earlier this year and is very likely to win Game of the Year. We discussed how fitting it was that Larian would be the one to revive the Baldur’s Gate Series in our34 years of D&D History video, check it out if you want more details on how we got there.
BG3 was developed in the same engine, and players can see the similarities almost immediately when looking at the games, with the real difference being in the DnD ruleset and the cinematic dialogue interactions, interactions which will hopefully carry over to D:OS III.
Larian also had another spinoff project in the works calledDivinity: Fallen Heroes, that was supposed to be a mashup of X-COM and D:OS, but was later cancelled.A board gameis also set to release next year, based on Divinity: Original Sin 2, but the big news is of course Larian confirming that there will be a sequel to D:OS II, and that the franchise will continue.
This is music to the ears of all Divinity fans, and one cannot help but wonder when we will be hearing something about this project, and if it’s already in development. Will it be Kickstarted like the two previous games? Does it even need to be at this point? What sorts of changes will be made to the gameplay, and what can we expect from it? Time will tell, and we will of course keep you updated as soon as we hear anything!
If you want more out of Best Games series, check out nextElden Ring is the Best Game of All TimeandDragon’s Dogma is the Best Game Ever.
Castielle
Senior Editor at Fextralife. I enjoy gaming, playing and watching sports, cooking yummy food, watching a good movie and hanging out with Fex.
