Divinity: Original Sin 2

Divinity: Original Sin 2 is a 2017 party-based, turn-based role-playing video game developed and published by Larian Studios for Windows, and later ported to PlayStation 4, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and the Nintendo Switch 2.¹⁵¹⁷¹⁹ The sequel to Divinity: Original Sin (2014) and an entry in the long-running Divinity series set in the world of Rivellon, it casts the player as a “Sourcerer” hunted for wielding a powerful and feared magic called Source, washed up at the prison colony of Fort Joy and set on a quest to ascend to godhood in a world whose Divine is dead.⁴⁵¹⁸ It was released on September 14, 2017.¹⁵¹⁷

Divinity: Original Sin 2 – Gameplay Overview Trailer | PS4PlayStation

Setting and story

The game is set in the fantastical world of Rivellon, an expansive setting ranging from dense forests and eerie swamps to bustling towns, brought to life with fully voice-acted dialogue and a highly interactive environment.¹⁵¹⁶ The narrative centers on so-called Sourcerers, users of the powerful and dangerous Source magic whom the rest of the world clamps with magic collars to protect others from their abilities.⁴ In the first game’s aftermath the Sourcerers are hunted by Bishop Alexandar and the Divine Order, who declare themselves the only ones worthy of wielding Source and purge all others.⁵ Larian’s marketing frames the premise as one in which the Divine is dead and the Void approaches, and the player must choose their role in a BAFTA-winning story that reacts to who they are, ultimately laying waste to an oppressive order in a world afraid of magic.¹⁸ The sequel takes place centuries after the first game, when the settings and characters of the original have slipped into legend, and stands on its own tale.⁴

A central theme is how a character’s origins shape who they are and the chances they get in life.¹³ At creation the player chooses a race — Human, Lizard, Elf, Dwarf, or Undead — and an origin, tags that determine how the world reacts to who, or what, the player is.¹⁸ Origins are predefined character backgrounds that shape the character’s story, personality, and abilities, each carrying distinct tags, appearance options, and in some cases a talent.²² The player may select one of six predefined origin characters — the Red Prince, Sebille, Ifan Ben-Mezd, Beast, Lohse, and Fane — each connected to the main story with a unique backstory and additional interactions, or create a custom hero, in which case the unchosen origin characters can be recruited as companions.⁸²⁰ Players may romance any companion regardless of the character’s origin, gender, or race.²² Race is more than flavor: an elf encampment may give a human the cold shoulder while admitting elves, and undead characters heal from poison, are harmed by traditional cures, and are immune to the living-killing Deathfog.⁸

Gameplay

Combat is turn-based and driven by an action point system, in which both movement and abilities carry an AP cost, creating strategic play around AP management and positioning.⁸¹⁴ Larian overhauled the defensive systems of the first game: whereas the original used defense to reduce incoming damage and avoided status ailments on a percentage chance, the sequel rolls both functions into an armor stat that fully negates incoming damage until it is whittled away, after which the character loses hit points and becomes vulnerable to status effects.⁶¹⁴ Armor comes in physical and magic types, the latter negating magical attacks and negative status effects alike.⁶ Systems designer Nick Pechenin said the original’s armor could randomly block status effects, which “really prevented long-term planning,” so the sequel made outcomes largely deterministic while retaining a small variability to keep attacks feeling “spicy”.⁶ The change placed greater emphasis on maintaining armor and on deciding when and how to strip an opponent’s, letting players lock down entire groups of enemies with a particular status ailment.¹⁴

The game is built around dense systemic interaction, in which almost every object can be interacted with and the environment plays a crucial role in combat and exploration.¹⁶ Elemental interactions are central: laying lightning on water stuns, poison on fire explodes, and rain douses a blaze, while a new blessing and cursing mechanic can turn burning ground holy and healing or make it impossible to extinguish.⁸¹⁰ An extensive crafting system starts the player with basic recipes — simple healing potions or rudimentary weapons — and expands into complex recipes, rare materials, special arrows, and grenades.¹⁶ A skill-crafting system lets players combine skills to create new effects, so that mixing “rain” with “lacerate” produces clouds that rain blood, healing characters with a vampirism trait.⁵⁷ Source abilities are the strongest and most dangerous powers, their points hard to come by and replenished by consuming corpses — which shifts the player’s karma — by channelling from other characters, or by consuming the souls of the dead through charged bloodstones.⁷ Reviewers repeatedly stressed the freedom afforded to players, who can complete quests along multiple branching paths, talk their way past obstacles, teleport across impassable terrain, or kill a group outright rather than negotiate.⁸¹⁴

The campaign runs to more than 80 hours and can be played solo or cooperatively with up to four players.¹³ For the first time in a co-operative RPG, party members are given different goals that they must complete, so that co-op becomes what Larian described as a “competitive cooperative game” in which players can undermine, betray, or deceive one another.²¹³ Founder and creative director Swen Vincke prefers the word “situation” to “quest,” saying “A quest implies a definite objective, a situation tells you to be reactive and to improvise”.⁷ A separate competitive multiplayer mode pits teams of two, three, or four heroes against each other in short arena encounters on maps stocked with treasure chests, Source points, and exploding barrels.⁹¹⁰ The game also includes a Game Master mode that lets a player guide custom scenarios for others in real time, much like a pencil-and-paper Dungeon Master.⁴

The Definitive Edition added extensive free downloadable content in the form of “gift bags,” treated as mods that disable achievements, offering options such as eight action points instead of the default four, animal empathy, enhanced summoning, and a vendor that raises the level of unique items.²⁰ Difficulty runs from an easy Story mode through Explorer, Classic, and Tactician up to an iron-man Honor mode that deletes the save on death.²⁰

Lineage and reception

Reviewers and players repeatedly likened Original Sin 2 to a video-game adaptation of Dungeons & Dragons, pointing to its classes, character builds, skill points, turn-based combat, party mechanics, and the ability to create custom campaigns for up to four friends.¹⁵ The system is very clearly inspired by D&D, while its engine descends from the Infinity Engine that powered the Baldur’s Gate series.²³ IGN wrote that the game was “designed in the spirit of decades-old RPGs like Baldur’s Gate 2,” that legacy serving only as a foundation for what Larian built on top of it, and Game Informer called it “the true modern successor to the heralded Baldur’s Gate II”.⁴⁸ The competitive arena mode drew directly on tabletop miniatures wargaming, a Game Informer preview describing the sense of “moving pieces around a gaming table complete with intricate terrain”.¹⁰

The game descends directly from Divinity: Original Sin (2014), the first entry, which won over 150 Game of the Year awards and nominations, including GameSpot’s “PC Game of The Year 2014”.¹³ It carried forward that game’s turn-based, party-based structure while deepening the narrative with a darker tone, extended lore, and origin stories, and improved on it through the reworked armor system and the six distinct origin characters with their own backstories and dialogue.⁶¹³¹⁴ Larian’s stated combat philosophy was for the player “to be as OP as they want to be,” with the game embracing rather than balancing out powerful exploits, though a steepened HP curve ensures found super-weapons are quickly superseded.⁶

The game was met with strong critical acclaim, with IGN scoring it 9.6 out of 10 and calling it “one of the best RPGs of the decade” and one that “will be remembered as one of the greats,” GameSpot awarding a perfect 10, and CGMagazine scoring it 9.5.⁴¹⁸ Its story won a BAFTA, and on Steam the Definitive Edition holds an “Overwhelmingly Positive” rating, with 95% of more than 82,000 reviews positive.¹⁷¹⁸ Critics praised the systemic freedom and the reactive, immersive world, while noting the exhaustively slow opening hours spent in the Fort Joy tutorial area, which could take upwards of ten hours to clear.²¹⁴

The Definitive Edition refined gameplay mechanics, added voice acting for nearly all dialogue, and polished the overall experience.¹⁶ The game later reached the Nintendo Switch, scoring a 9 out of 10 on that platform in 2019, and a Nintendo Switch 2 Edition released as a free update raised the docked frame rate to 60fps at 1080p with improved lighting and shorter loading times.¹⁹ Later console releases followed on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Switch 2 on December 15, 2025.¹⁰ Its success laid the groundwork for Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3, and on December 12, 2025, the studio announced a new franchise title, Divinity, at The Game Awards, billing it as its biggest game yet and showing a cinematic trailer of a village celebrating a Wicker festival.¹¹³