Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.
– Terry Pratchett
Three days ago I chose to reinstall a video game called Divinity: Original Sin 2 (DOS2 for short), this was on the two-year anniversary of it’s launch. This post is going to be about that game, and why it’s worth playing.
DOS2 is a role-playing game set in a richly developed fantasy realm. If this seems exceedingly childish and uncool, then this post probably isn’t for you, but you’re welcome to read regardless.
Larian Studios – the development team responsible for creating DOS2 – have an almost unique attitude to the relationship between product and consumer: They understand that games are meant to be fun. A revolutionary concept in a market so dominated by easy cash grabs.
DOS2 is a lot like playing D&D with a fun GM that sets clearly defined sensible rules, and then lets you abuse those rules until it just about breaks the game, and they don’t mind at all – in fact, they encourage it.
First and foremost, DOS2 is a campaign with pre-defined quests. There are milestones you need to get past, but you’ve got a lot of freedom in terms of how you want to reach those milestones.
Yeet or be yoten
Currently, I’m making my way through the game for the second time. My current strategy is to stuff my backpack with heavy items, and lobbing this suspiciously spacious and above all indestructible backpack at enemies. Focusing on Wits and Scoundrel for my stats, I get an increase to critical strike chance, critical strike damage, initiative which is high enough to always get the first move in combat – and some points in Telekinesis to allow me to fling this backpack around like it’s nothing, despite the fact that it’s about as dense as a neutron star.
Other ways to break the game
So it turns out that this is far from the only way to make clever use of game mechanics. You could make infinite money with herb gardening, and use that infinite money to buy high quality items. You can also use your herbs to brew tea, which has the interesting effect of reducing the cost of your abilities to 0 if you drink enough of it, making you an unstoppable force.
You can also combine a series of spells in such a way that when the enemy takes damage, you are healed, and when you are healed, your ally is healed – except your ally is undead or afflicted with decaying touch which means he takes damage instead, and then you can make it so that your ally cannot die for two turns, and also make it so any damage taken by your ally is also mirrored to your enemy. I’m sure you can see where this is going.
And then.. Then there’s whatever completely insane gamebreaking black magic fuckery this is: