Divinity: Original Sin II Stories at PC Gamer

A number of PC Gamer contributors, including Richard Cobbett of RPG Scrollbars fame, have recently sat down to discuss their most memorable moments from Larian’s recently released and already critically acclaimed RPG Divinity: Original Sin II. As a result, you can now read detailed accounts of Original Sin II’s encounters or unexpected interactions the folks at PC Gamer consider their favorite, and go either “been there, done that,” or “huh, that’s neat.” An excerpt:

Richard Cobbett: Fun with Teleportation

Easily my favourite thing about Divinity’s combat is that it’s consistent. Sure, occasionally you find enemies with elemental resistances and clever tricks, but it’s brave enough to avoid just outright letting enemies no-sell your best attacks. Enter a certain troll. Trolls are a real pain because every turn they regenerate, and my team wasn’t able to hand out quite enough pain to beat this guy and access the important, plot-critical cave behind him. Ah, but what’s that over there? A small river of lava? Fun fact—lava is the BFG of elements. And so, instead of beating him down, I just had one of my guys teleport his ass into fiery oblivion. Easy.

These semi-cheats are all the better because the game doesn’t draw them to your attention. That telekinesis spell (or glove, from the first island) never stops being useful, and nor does its partner, good old Netherswap. You can break so much with it, and the game’s happy—sometimes even calling you out on it. Along with combat, there’s a bit where… let’s just say you’re in a race. I won’t spoil the context, but it’s important. I quickly realised that my main girl Lohse wasn’t going to win… but there was nothing stopping me rushing to a good vantage point, waiting for someone else to almost reach the end, and casually swap places.

Yeah, I may be a bad loser. But I’m a Lohse-y winner.

[…]

Wes Fenlon: That time I made a poor pig explode

I really didn’t mean to, honest. Divinity: Original Sin 2 has a pretty strange world: there are alligators that teleport, ancient skeletons that walk around without souls, and pigs that are eternally on fire. The pigs, it turns out, were actually people at one point, but they were turned into pigs as a curse and then double-cursed by being set on never ending fire, just to rub it in. When I learned a powerful Source spell to bless things, I was excited to try it out on those twice-damned pigs, and sure enough, I was able to put their fires out. Believe it or not, this is actually the start of a quest chain in Original Sin 2.

As you can probably guess, I didn’t exactly follow that quest all the way to the end. Things were looking pretty good at first, though. Fires: doused. Pigs: talked to, with the Red Prince, my regal companion who can talk to animals. One particular pig was eager to remove the curse and become human again, so I directed her to a shrine of the goddess Amadia, where a pool of water would surely cleanse her of the remaining curse. Except… well, I’d already kind of pissed off Amadia by telling her about the demon living inside me and confessing some of the terrible things I’d done. Instead of blessing the pool, Amadia decided to turn it into blood. Blood that didn’t really cure my pig friend, so much as cause her to spontaneously combust.

I still feel guilty about it, but I love how willing Original Sin 2 is to let you mess up, and how many of its quests let you succeed or mess up in totally different ways.