The sequel to one of the best role-playing games of recent years (and my favorite of 2014) is now out for PCs — and your feedback can help make it better.
Larian Studios’ Divinity: Original Sin 2 is now available for $45 in early access on the Steam PC gaming digital store. It includes the first act of the story (the developer notes this is somewhere between 8 to 12 hours of playtime), a new game engine, combat mechanics, and four-person mulitplayer (co-op or competitive questing).
Early access has been a boon for developers like Larian and Amplitude‘s Endless line of strategy games, as it enables them to sell their games while they are still working on them — and then gather feedback from players to tweak systems and make other improvements (though some also discredit the practice as giving other, less scrupulous studios an avenue to profit off incomplete, sometimes broken games).
The sequel differs from the original in that you can opt for premade “Origin Stories” and characters (as I have with The Red Prince, a reptilian humanoid) that comes with its own set of quest lines. These come from noted RPG designer Chris Avellone of Obsidian Entertainment (Fallout, Planescape: Torment, Baldur’s Gate, Pillars of Eternity), who worked with Larian on the story.
The first Divinity: Original Sin started as a Kickstarter project, raising nearly $1 million. It’s old-school combat, deep storylines, and element interactions helped it carve out a place in RPG gaming, and Larian brought in a little more than $2 million with a second crowdfunding campaign.