Divinity: Original Sin 2 — the CRPG that paved the road for Baldur's Gate 3

Larian Studios released Divinity: Original Sin 2 on PC in September 2017, then brought a Definitive Edition to PS4 and Xbox One the following August with a full combat rebalance and a fourth-act rewrite. By the time Baldur’s Gate 3 arrived in 2023 wearing the same studio’s fingerprints, it was obvious where the ambition had been rehearsed. This is the game that worked out the recipe: origin characters with their own agendas, an environment that participates in every fight, and a rules engine transparent enough that a clever player can outthink the encounter designer rather than simply survive them.

It’s worth saying plainly how unusual that combination was in 2017. Isometric CRPGs of the period tended to pick one lane — BioWare’s choice-driven companion writing, or Obsidian’s systemic reactivity, or classic Infinity Engine tactical depth — and treat the others as secondary. Original Sin 2 refused to pick, and the friction of running all three systems at once is exactly what makes the game memorable rather than merely competent.

The armour system is the whole argument

Original Sin 2’s biggest departure from D&D-style CRPGs is its two-layer defence: Physical Armour and Magic Armour sit on top of a character’s actual hit points, and neither status effect nor crowd control lands until the matching layer is gone. Knockdown, stun, freeze and charm are physical; silence, madness and terrify are magical. A mage who dumps fireballs into a target still wearing Physical Armour achieves nothing more than damage — the burn and the knockdown are locked out until that second bar breaks.

The effect is that every fight has two separate puzzles running at once, and a party built to strip one layer fast (rogues, physical burst damage) frees up the other party members to land the control effects that actually decide the encounter. It also solves the classic CRPG problem where crowd control trivialises fights the moment a party gets access to it — here it is never free, it is always paid for with a first phase of grinding through a bar that regenerates every combat. A boss encounter becomes a scheduling problem: which layer goes down first, and which of your six abilities are wasted if you guess wrong.

Environmental combat rewards paying attention, not fetishising realism

The elemental interactions get the headlines — oil ignites, water conducts electricity, blood puddles can be frozen into slicks, poison clouds explode when hit with fire — but the interesting design decision is that Larian doesn’t gate any of this behind a specific class or spell list. A warrior with a fire-infused weapon, an oil barrel a player notices in the corner of the room, and basic positional awareness can chain the same devastating combo a fire mage spent skill points to unlock. The systems are legible enough that a first-time player can read the battlefield and improvise, rather than needing a wiki to know that Bloated Corpses explode when set alight.

Where this occasionally tips into farce — freezing a lake to skate an entire party across an otherwise-unreachable ledge, or teleporting an enemy caster directly into their own summoned totem — Larian leans in rather than patches it out. The Source Vampirism system layered on top, draining Source points from defeated enemies to fuel signature abilities, gives the whole thing a risk-reward spine: burn Source now for a huge advantage, or hoard it for the boss fight the game is clearly building toward.

Origin characters make the party the story

Where earlier Larian games let you build a silent custom protagonist and hire a rotating cast of mercenaries, Original Sin 2 makes the origin characters — Fane, Lohse, Sebille, Ifan, Beast, Red Prince — playable leads with their own quest chains, secrets and endings, discoverable whether you recruit them or meet them as NPCs first. Choosing to play as Sebille, an escaped slave hunting the man who owned her, changes dialogue options in scenes that have nothing directly to do with her personal arc, because the game is tracking who is doing the talking, not just what gets said.

This is also where the political spine of the plot sits: every origin character is Source-touched, hunted by an empire that has decided magic itself is the crime, and the central tension of the campaign — protect the god-candidate who might become the next tyrant, or refuse the crown altogether — plays out differently depending on whose personal stakes are in the room. It’s the same trick Dragon Age: Origins ran on a single dedicated Origins prologue per character, scaled up so every companion gets the full treatment simultaneously, all the way through the ending, and it is a genuinely rare thing for a CRPG to attempt.

The turn order and initiative economy

Original Sin 2 runs on a strict initiative queue rather than side-based turns, which sounds like a small mechanical choice until a party focuses its action economy on winning the initiative roll and killing the enemy’s spellcaster before that caster ever gets to act. Haste, Cloak and Dagger, and any effect that grants an extra turn become the highest-value spells in the game because tempo, not raw damage, is the resource that actually wins fights — a lesson the genre’s harder tactics games leaned into even further afterwards.

The flip side is a difficulty curve that spikes hard whenever the AI gets the same tempo advantage — an ambush that alpha-strikes a squishy caster before the player’s first turn can undo an otherwise well-built party in two rounds. Original Sin 2 doesn’t apologise for this; it expects the player to scout, to use Pet Pal to interrogate the wildlife for warnings, and to retreat from fights that are clearly set up to punish an unprepared approach. Losing a fight here rarely feels arbitrary, because the tools to have avoided it were usually sitting in the environment a screen away.

Crafting, respec and a generosity toward experimenting

One quieter design decision does as much work as the flashier systems: Original Sin 2 lets a player respec a character’s entire build at any mirror, free of charge, for the whole game. Combined with a deep crafting system that lets almost any character reroll their gear’s elemental damage type on the fly, the game removes the single biggest deterrent most tactics RPGs carry — the fear that experimenting with a build will waste dozens of hours. A player can walk into a fight as a necromancer, discover the encounter is entirely resistant to that damage type, and walk back out to try again as something else without losing progress. Few CRPGs before or since have trusted their own systems enough to make failure this cheap to recover from, and it’s a large part of why the elemental interactions above get used rather than merely admired.

Four-player co-op with actual disagreement built in

Original Sin 2 supports full four-player co-op, and Larian didn’t treat that as a bolt-on network mode — dialogue choices in multiplayer can be contested, with a rock-paper-scissors minigame or a straight dice roll deciding whose answer the game acts on when two players pick different lines for the same conversation. A friend playing Sebille can push the party towards vengeance against a slaver NPC while the player controlling Ifan argues for restraint, and the resolution isn’t scripted around either of them — it’s adjudicated the way a tabletop group would settle a disagreement at the table, with a die.

That extends to the tactical layer too: four separate players can each be managing a character’s turn in real time, arguing over target priority mid-fight, which is a wildly different experience from the solitary optimisation most CRPGs assume. Tactician mode, the game’s hardest difficulty tier, sharpens enemy AI and adds new abilities to certain encounters rather than simply inflating health bars, which means the co-op arguments over strategy in that mode are usually the correct instinct rather than backseat noise. Few CRPGs before Original Sin 2 treated multiplayer as anything more than a curiosity; here it’s load-bearing enough that Larian built an entire narrative mechanic around the friction of four people disagreeing about what their party should do next.

Where the writing outruns the systems

The strongest stretch of the campaign is Fort Joy, the first act’s prison-island setup, because the sandbox is smallest there and every system introduced gets an immediate, legible use. Act two, the ghost-haunted Reaper’s Coast, keeps that density. The back half loosens — Arx, the capital city in act four, is enormous and generous with content but noticeably less tightly authored, with more of the plot delivered through exposition dumps than through the environmental storytelling the earlier acts favoured. It’s the same scale-versus-density trade every mega-CRPG eventually makes, and Original Sin 2 makes it later than most, which is a real compliment given how few games this size sustain quality even that far.

Spoilers below

The endgame choice — whether to let a party member ascend to godhood using the collective Source of every other Source-touched character, effectively erasing them, or to refuse the throne and leave the world without a new god — doesn’t have a mechanically “good” answer, and that’s the point. Ascension grants the ascending character overwhelming power for the final confrontation with the Divine-aligned forces, but the game is explicit in its coda that this recreates the tyranny the party spent forty hours escaping. Refusing ascension makes the final fight harder and leaves the world genuinely leaderless, which several NPCs treat as its own kind of failure rather than a clean moral win.

The Fane storyline resolves the game’s biggest lore reveal: the Godwoken ritual and the entire Divine hierarchy were built on a lie the Eternals constructed to seal away the true source of Source itself, the Veil separating the mortal plane from the void the Voidwoken pour through. Committing to Fane’s personal ending means choosing to potentially unmake that seal — the most systemically consequential companion choice in the game, and one many players don’t discover exists on a first run because it requires actively pursuing his questline rather than treating him as a background party member.

Compared to the game’s own successor, Pillars of Eternity kept its Watcher-soul mystery contained to a single protagonist; Original Sin 2 spreads the equivalent revelation across six playable characters and lets the choice of who you’re controlling change which parts of it you even see on a first playthrough. That’s the throughline to Baldur’s Gate 3’s own parasite plot three years later — a personal transformation mechanic that is also the central political crisis, worn by every party member at once, not just the one wearing the protagonist’s name.