The level of customization possible in Divinity: Original Sin 2 is staggering, whether you want to focus on a smooth-talking teleporter with a ton of skills, an undead soldier who knocks down all enemies, an archer who summons corpses, or nearly anything else you can imagine.
In this guide, we're going to go over four epic Original Sin 2 builds with vastly different focuses, from a stealth assassin to a masochistic necromancer who revels in taking damage. With any of these builds, you could either co-op or even potentially solo your way through the game.
Rogue Assassin Build
With this build, you always want to be positioned behind an enemy for backstabbing and generally avoiding detection. On the attribute side, Finesse is probably a better idea than Strength. Don't discount Wits though, as you get a bonus to initiative and critical chance. For your ability points, you want to put your points into Scoundrel for the critical bonus, and of course Stealth for the sneaking.
On the skills, Adrenaline is a must for getting enough action points to kill with a backstab in one turn. Throwing Knife and Backlash also lets you deal backstab damage, while Chloroform can knock out an enemy at the end of your turn without breaking stealth.
If you go for a secondary ability beyond Scoundrel, oddly enough Polymorphing can be helpful, since it lets you fly around and avoid terrain or remove all negative status effects quickly. The Polymorphing skill Chamelon Cloak gives you two turns of pure invisibility without breaking stealth. Warfare isn't nearly as useful as you'd think, since many of the associated attacks aren't helpful for backstabbing and Scoundrel already gives you a bonus to Finesse-based attacks.
Pros
So long as you pick skills that don't break stealth and you have a weapon that benefits from the high Finesse, you can essentially cheese your way through any combat by staying hidden and then quickly backstabbing or knocking an enemy unconscious before they react. Getting items early that provide teleportation abilities will be a must so you have maximum mobility.
Cons
You will generally have lower armour ratings, since you are focused on staying hidden, meaning that status effects will hit you more often. The game is also a good deal slower and more tense if you are always sneaking and having to pay attention to line-of-sight cones.
Rogue Assassin Build
Solo Masochist Necromancer Build
Put either two points into the Necromancer skill, or one in Necromancer and one in Warfare for the bonus damage. When you level up, place your combat points into Retribution. For your weapon, you probably want a big two-handed weapon that does the most base damage possible with devastating criticals.
From the Necromancer side, you absolutely want the Bloodsucker ability, which lets you heal from the ever-present pools of blood on the ground. You may also want to invest in the Leech talent to automatically heal from blood sources if you aren't going the solo route. Mosquito Swarm is another one that both deals damage and heals. If you are mixing Necromancer and Warfare instead of straight necro, either Crippling Blow or Battle Stomp is the way to go.
Pros
Your idea here is to always be healing yourself while reflecting damage back to the enemy. Every point in Necromancer means you automatically heal damage when you deal it, and each point in Reflection increases the amount of damage you automatically deal back to anyone who hits you. In other words, just walking around getting damaged in combat lets you both kill and heal.
Cons
With the Necromancer skill, your vitality only heals when dealing damage directly to enemy vitality, so any enemy with high physical / magical armour will prevent you from healing.
It also takes several levels for the bonuses from Necromancer and Retribution to actually hit useful levels (starting at a measly 10% and 5% with only one point each at first level). However, this can be overcome by taking the Lone Wolf talent instead of Leech.
With Lone Wolf, each skill point is effectively doubled, which halves the amount of time for those skills to reach useful levels. Despite the name, Lone Wolf actually lets you bring along one companion in addition to your main character while still retaining all the benefits of the talent.
Necromancer Skills
Paladin Build
Your archetypal holy knight, this build revolves around battlefield control. You should be dealing out decent damage, knocking down opponents for control frequently, and then healing your party when necessary.
Hydrosophist and Warfare should be your ability picks, giving access to healing and armor boosting spells, in addition to the bonus to straight damage. For skills, your starting picks should be Restoration and Armour Of Frost (which removes negative status effects) -- and your Warfare pick should probably be Battle Stomp, since it gives battlefield control and doesn't affect allies like most area effect spells.
On the weapon front, either sword and shield combo or a two handed weapon focus compliment the build.
Pros
The Paladin build is excellent for your main character because it overcomes a lot of the weaknesses of the five other origin companions. While you won't be flinging fireballs and creating poison clouds, you can gain easy battlefield control and ensure the rest of the party doesn't go down in flames. There are a lot of combos you can do with other party members as well by first creating wet conditions using your Hydrosophist abilities and then creating electrified areas.
Cons
Outside of combat the build isn't nearly as useful, since a simple bedroll you can grab directly at the beginning of game in the ship prevents the need for healing items outside of battle. You also won't be the stealthiest.
Building a Custom Paladin
Elemental Mage / Summoner
Taking the Lizard class for this fire build is a decent idea, since you get the Dragon's Blaze bonus ability to breathe fire. However, you may want to go with Undead instead, since they heal damage from poison, and you will frequently be creating poison clouds.
Your attributes should be focused on Intelligence for bonus spell damage and Memory so you have a broad range of spells to use and are never in a situation with all your skills in cool down. For abilities, of course you want Pyrokinetic and Geomancer.
On the skills, Ignition is less useful than you'd think because it does damage around you, which can hit allies and of course set off oil puddles and end up hurting yourself or other friendlies. Fossil Strike pairs well with Searing Daggers to create a fiery battlefield -- and for maximum map controlling damage, don't forget Poison Dart creates a poison cloud.
For a twist, instead of Pyrokinetic, switch over to Summoning but keep Geomancer. Now pick Conjure Incarnate instead of Searing Daggers. If you summon your Incarnate in a poison cloud, he will deal tons of poison damage to your enemies for you, essentially acting as a bonus free companion.
Pros
AoE is the name of the game here, as you set large swathes of the battlefield on fire or fill it with poisonous vapors. Dual-wielding elemental wands is a great idea so you can deal bonus damage to fleeing enemies who are on fire or poisoned. Even when you aren't hitting, you will still be dealing damage due to everything being on fire.
Cons
It's incredibly easy to end up damaging your own team here with all the area fire and poison effects, and you don't have much of anything in the way of healing or physical armour.
Undead Wizard
These are the four best Divinity: Original Sin 2 builds we've had the most luck with playing through the campaign and dominating in combat. What's your favorite build, and what combos would you recommend for getting through different acts of the game?
If you're looking for more tips on this huge fantasy game, be sure to checl out our full list of Divinity: Original Sin 2 guides to get the most out of your roleplay.
Ahead of the upcoming Definitive Edition release, Divinity: Original Sin 2 developer Larian Studios said that mod support for Xbox One is being explored.
As one of the most acclaimed games of 2017, in just over two weeks players on PS4 and Xbox One will finally get to experience Divinity: Original Sin 2 in the form of its upcoming Definitive Edition. While both platforms will enjoy the benefits of new content and enhanced visuals, the more PC-like experience of integrating mods may be on the horizon for the console iteration of the game according to the studio, though its arrival at this time is unknown.
Speaking with DualShockers, Larian Studios product manager Kieron Kelly shared several details on the upcoming Divinity: Original Sin 2: Definitive Edition, which brings over the acclaimed 2017 CRPG to PS4 and Xbox One owners later this month for the first time, alongside several notable updates and enhancements incorporated since the release of the base game last fall.
On the subject of mod support for the console version of the game (and in our original question, specifically that for the Xbox One version of the game), Kelly explained that Larian Studios has explored the potential to bring mods over to Divinity: Original Sin 2 on consoles and that it has not only been “looked into,” but that support for mods has been “not ruled out just yet.”
While Kelly explained that mod support is something that won’t be a feature that will be immediately available with the Definitive Edition‘s release later this month, it’s clear that Larian has at least expressed interest in seeing how to bring mod support–something that the PC community for the game has already been heavily involved in–over to the console versions of the game, though it’s unclear at this time when that might be able to happen.
Divinity: Original Sin 2 is available now on PC, while the game’s upcoming Definitive Edition will be arriving for PS4 and Xbox One owners on August 31st, 2018. Stay tuned for our upcoming full interview with Larian Studio’s Kieron Kelly for more details on what to expect from the game’s upcoming console release later this month. If you have yet to pick up the game, there is still time to pre-order it through Amazon now.
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Divinity: Original Sin 2 is one of the best RPGs I’ve ever played. It’s massive, complex, and beautiful, but its many layers are riddled with kinks and bugs. Fortunately, the game’s modding community has dedicated itself to smoothing things out.
Original Sin 2 has been out since last September, which has given modders time to do everything from paving over cracks to remolding the game in their image. Here are the best of the thousands-strong bunch.
Quality of life improvements
Infinite spirit vision
Midway through Original Sin 2, you gain the ability to scan for and talk to ghosts. The only downside is that you have to do it manually, and you can only peel back the curtain between this world and the next within a certain range. This mod takes away the duration limit and extends Spirit Vision’s range.
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Start in Fort Joy
Original Sin 2's tutorial is by no means bad, but on subsequent playthroughs, it’s just a blockade between you and the good stuff. This mod lets you skip it.
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Auto identify
No more manually identifying items after a character’s Loremaster stat is five or higher! Thank goodness.
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Let there be tooltips!
This mod displays tooltips for interactive objects that don’t otherwise get them, even when highlighted. Is that extremely barrel-looking, feeling, and tasting object really a barrel? Now you know.
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Free pet pal
Pet pal is a skill that makes Original Sin 2 a million times better by letting you talk to any animal in the game. Despite it being one of the few sources of surefire joy in a rapidly decaying world (and in the game), it costs a point in character creation by default. This mod grants the pet pal skill to all characters for free right at the start of the game.
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Fast run speed
Wanna go fast? Now you can go fast. (This mod only changes animation speed, not combat stats.)
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Tidy skillbars
My tombstone is going to read “lost his mind removing every random item that got auto-added to his skillbar in Divinity: Original Sin 2.” This mod disables that. Now I’ve gotta figure out something else to put on my tombstone. Damn it.
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Overhauls
Crafting overhaul
For a lot of Original Sin 2, crafting isn’t strictly necessary, feeling instead more like an overly-fiddly afterthought. This mod adds a whopping 1,600 new recipes, 550 new items, and new mechanics like elemental swords, craftable crafting stations, and armor dyeing.
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Interesting uniques
This mod tweaks the stats and effects of unique items so that they feel more special and powerful instead of, well, kinda interchangeable.
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Sourcery worthy of a collar
For all the fearful whispering and concentration camp corralling that surrounds Original Sin 2's vaunted Source Magic, the actual Source abilities you gain access to end up being kind of anticlimactic. This mod adds apocalyptically powerful Source spells that let you rain down hellfire and not-very-nice ice on entire towns. Be wary, however: they come with (slight) drawbacks.
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Character creation plus
Adds a ton of snazzy and/or ridiculous character customization options. Finally, you can start the game with a bucket on your head!
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Combat sneak
Reduces the AP cost for sneaking in combat, making mid-battle stealth a much more viable tactic.
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Expanded party size
Allows for more than four members in your party, meaning that certain.. ill fates won’t befall characters who aren’t traveling with you. This does, however, pretty significantly alter the game’s balance, so consider cranking the difficulty a little.
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Slim’s day/night cycle + dynamic weather
Adds a day/night cycle and weather effects to many areas of the game. This doesn’t really change as much as other overhaul mods, but it looks cool!
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AI controlled combat NPCs
Don’t feel like making up your party members’ minds for them in combat? This mod grants you the option to put one or all of them on auto-pilot. You can also disable their pesky “free will” whenever you want, if things get too hairy.
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Reduced number bloat
This mod makes gear scale differently so that you don’t constantly have to look for new gear after leveling. You can pick between a few different types of scaling for a feel that hopefully suits your tastes.
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Abilities and classes
Dragon Knight
Adds abilities and options that allow you to play as one of the Divinity series’ most-vaunted mainstays: the Dragon Knight. Jump really high! Breathe fire! Oh, and of course: transform into a gosh dang dragon.
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Blood mage
As seen in games like Dragon Age, this class revolves around sacrificing your own life to become more powerful. You can then transform your own blood into spears and explosions. A grand time for the whole bloody family.
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Elemental warfare
60 new skills that combine warfare attacks with elemental effects (like fire).
Fairy
A custom class that specializes in flying and healing (so basically, Mercy from Overwatch). This one also has a great backstory. “OK, so I often play Divinity with my wife, who requested this class,” wrote mod maker Claivain. “She wanted a character who could fly around and heal, throwing spells with pretty sparkly effects. Oh, and also kick ass.” Apparently, his wife is quite pleased with the result.
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Bard and Artificer
Adds 50 new skills that allow you to play as a lute-wielding bard or an item-cursing artificer.
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Valkyrie
Lets you play as a Valkyrie from Norse mythology. Fly softly and carry a big spear.
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Trickster
One of the more unique class mods out there, this one is built around pranking your enemies to death. This can mean anything from fooling someone into sitting on a tack to transforming them into a cow.
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Arcanist
An arcane mage based on Dungeons & Dragons. Adds 27 new skills, up to and including D&D classics like magic missile.
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Misc.
Barkus Rex
Changes a dog named Rex’s name to Barkus Rex. A very dumb in-joke I can’t help but admire.
Divinity Original Sin 2 Pickpocket Mod 2
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NoSpider
Changes spider enemies into squirrels. Makes the game playable.
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The level of customization possible in Divinity: Original Sin 2 is staggering, whether you want to focus on a smooth-talking teleporter with a ton of skills, an undead soldier who knocks down all enemies, an archer who summons corpses, or nearly anything else you can imagine.
In this guide, we're going to go over four epic Original Sin 2 builds with vastly different focuses, from a stealth assassin to a masochistic necromancer who revels in taking damage. With any of these builds, you could either co-op or even potentially solo your way through the game.
OfflineWelcome back to Vice City. Gta vice city apk. Vice City, a huge urban sprawl ranging from the beach to the swamps and the glitz to the ghetto, was one of the most varied, complete and alive digital cities ever created. Welcome back to the 1980s.From the decade of big hair, excess and pastel suits comes a story of one man’s rise to the top of the criminal pile.
Rogue Assassin Build
With this build, you always want to be positioned behind an enemy for backstabbing and generally avoiding detection. On the attribute side, Finesse is probably a better idea than Strength. Don't discount Wits though, as you get a bonus to initiative and critical chance. For your ability points, you want to put your points into Scoundrel for the critical bonus, and of course Stealth for the sneaking.
Divinity Original Sin 2 Pickpocket More Than Once Mod
On the skills, Adrenaline is a must for getting enough action points to kill with a backstab in one turn. Throwing Knife and Backlash also lets you deal backstab damage, while Chloroform can knock out an enemy at the end of your turn without breaking stealth.
If you go for a secondary ability beyond Scoundrel, oddly enough Polymorphing can be helpful, since it lets you fly around and avoid terrain or remove all negative status effects quickly. The Polymorphing skill Chamelon Cloak gives you two turns of pure invisibility without breaking stealth. Warfare isn't nearly as useful as you'd think, since many of the associated attacks aren't helpful for backstabbing and Scoundrel already gives you a bonus to Finesse-based attacks.
Pros
So long as you pick skills that don't break stealth and you have a weapon that benefits from the high Finesse, you can essentially cheese your way through any combat by staying hidden and then quickly backstabbing or knocking an enemy unconscious before they react. Getting items early that provide teleportation abilities will be a must so you have maximum mobility.
Cons
You will generally have lower armour ratings, since you are focused on staying hidden, meaning that status effects will hit you more often. The game is also a good deal slower and more tense if you are always sneaking and having to pay attention to line-of-sight cones.
Rogue Assassin Build
Solo Masochist Necromancer Build
Put either two points into the Necromancer skill, or one in Necromancer and one in Warfare for the bonus damage. When you level up, place your combat points into Retribution. For your weapon, you probably want a big two-handed weapon that does the most base damage possible with devastating criticals.
From the Necromancer side, you absolutely want the Bloodsucker ability, which lets you heal from the ever-present pools of blood on the ground. You may also want to invest in the Leech talent to automatically heal from blood sources if you aren't going the solo route. Mosquito Swarm is another one that both deals damage and heals. If you are mixing Necromancer and Warfare instead of straight necro, either Crippling Blow or Battle Stomp is the way to go.
Pros
Your idea here is to always be healing yourself while reflecting damage back to the enemy. Every point in Necromancer means you automatically heal damage when you deal it, and each point in Reflection increases the amount of damage you automatically deal back to anyone who hits you. In other words, just walking around getting damaged in combat lets you both kill and heal.
Divinity Original Sin 2 Pickpocket Mod 1
Cons
With the Necromancer skill, your vitality only heals when dealing damage directly to enemy vitality, so any enemy with high physical / magical armour will prevent you from healing.
It also takes several levels for the bonuses from Necromancer and Retribution to actually hit useful levels (starting at a measly 10% and 5% with only one point each at first level). However, this can be overcome by taking the Lone Wolf talent instead of Leech.
With Lone Wolf, each skill point is effectively doubled, which halves the amount of time for those skills to reach useful levels. Despite the name, Lone Wolf actually lets you bring along one companion in addition to your main character while still retaining all the benefits of the talent.
Necromancer Skills
Paladin Build
Your archetypal holy knight, this build revolves around battlefield control. You should be dealing out decent damage, knocking down opponents for control frequently, and then healing your party when necessary.
Hydrosophist and Warfare should be your ability picks, giving access to healing and armor boosting spells, in addition to the bonus to straight damage. For skills, your starting picks should be Restoration and Armour Of Frost (which removes negative status effects) -- and your Warfare pick should probably be Battle Stomp, since it gives battlefield control and doesn't affect allies like most area effect spells.
On the weapon front, either sword and shield combo or a two handed weapon focus compliment the build.
Pros
The Paladin build is excellent for your main character because it overcomes a lot of the weaknesses of the five other origin companions. While you won't be flinging fireballs and creating poison clouds, you can gain easy battlefield control and ensure the rest of the party doesn't go down in flames. There are a lot of combos you can do with other party members as well by first creating wet conditions using your Hydrosophist abilities and then creating electrified areas.
Cons
Outside of combat the build isn't nearly as useful, since a simple bedroll you can grab directly at the beginning of game in the ship prevents the need for healing items outside of battle. You also won't be the stealthiest.
Building a Custom Paladin
Elemental Mage / Summoner
Taking the Lizard class for this fire build is a decent idea, since you get the Dragon's Blaze bonus ability to breathe fire. However, you may want to go with Undead instead, since they heal damage from poison, and you will frequently be creating poison clouds.
Your attributes should be focused on Intelligence for bonus spell damage and Memory so you have a broad range of spells to use and are never in a situation with all your skills in cool down. For abilities, of course you want Pyrokinetic and Geomancer.
On the skills, Ignition is less useful than you'd think because it does damage around you, which can hit allies and of course set off oil puddles and end up hurting yourself or other friendlies. Fossil Strike pairs well with Searing Daggers to create a fiery battlefield -- and for maximum map controlling damage, don't forget Poison Dart creates a poison cloud.
For a twist, instead of Pyrokinetic, switch over to Summoning but keep Geomancer. Now pick Conjure Incarnate instead of Searing Daggers. If you summon your Incarnate in a poison cloud, he will deal tons of poison damage to your enemies for you, essentially acting as a bonus free companion.
Pros
AoE is the name of the game here, as you set large swathes of the battlefield on fire or fill it with poisonous vapors. Dual-wielding elemental wands is a great idea so you can deal bonus damage to fleeing enemies who are on fire or poisoned. Even when you aren't hitting, you will still be dealing damage due to everything being on fire.
Cons
It's incredibly easy to end up damaging your own team here with all the area fire and poison effects, and you don't have much of anything in the way of healing or physical armour.
Undead Wizard
These are the four best Divinity: Original Sin 2 builds we've had the most luck with playing through the campaign and dominating in combat. What's your favorite build, and what combos would you recommend for getting through different acts of the game?
If you're looking for more tips on this huge fantasy game, be sure to checl out our full list of Divinity: Original Sin 2 guides to get the most out of your roleplay.
Divinity: Original Sin II is the sequel to Divinity: Original Sin by Larian Studiosnote . Thanks to the success of the original, Larian had enough funds to produce it on their own, but took to Kickstarteronce more to attract additional funding, build up a player community early, and to sign Chris Avellone on as a stretch goal. The game was originally projected for release in December 2016, but having smashed through every single Kickstarter stretch goal with over $2M in pledges, delays were inevitable. It released on September 14, 2017, almost exactly one year after the first act of the game was released to Early Access by the developers.
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A few decades have gone by since Divine Divinity, and Lucian the Divine has passed away after winning the Great War against the Black Ring. His death has weakened the Seven Gods, however, who watch idly as monsters from the Void now threaten to overrun Rivellon. These 'Voidwoken' are drawn to manifestations of the Source, so Bishop Alexander, Lucian's son and the new leader of his Divine Order, has decreed that all Sourcerers be corralled on a remote island of Fort Joy. You play as one of Fort Joy captives and have to band with the others to escape from the island before the Divine Magisters subject you all to a Fate Worse than Death. From there on, you uncover the mysteries of the Voidwoken, divinity, and the Source, in order to stop the Void from swallowing the whole world.
The Central Theme of the game is how your origins affect who you are and what chances you get in life, which is expressed in your main Player Character's origin story having massive impact on how others in the world treat you. You can play as either a fully-customized Featureless Protagonist with a generic background, or one of six pregenerated characters with intricate backstories and personal quests interwoven with the main storyline. Up to three of these can be recruited into the Player Party early in Fort Joy and each is just as capable of handling dialogue and story events as the 'main' PC. This is further expanded in the innovative multiplayer mode, which allows all three to be controlled by other players, who are then free to aid or to interfere with you as they please. The much praised Turn-Based Combat system of D:OS also makes its return with a lot of added depth.
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The game would get a follow-up with Divinity: Fallen Heroes, which stars the six Origin characters in a more tactics-focused game.
The game provides examples of:
Actually Pretty Funny: One of the NPCs, a dwarf minstrel, sings a Pro-Royalist song about Beast falling out with his cousin the queen and being kicked out of her court. Beast himself thinks the song has some clever lyrics and his overall review is 'too funny to get mad about.'
Sometimes if you play with the Jester tag or as Lohse (who has the Jester tag) you can make non sequitur comments from time to time. On occasion, an NPC might actually laugh at what you had to say.
The Alcatraz: Fort Joy is established as one, having had zero escapes, in part due to being on an island far from anything else, making most escape attempts doomed to failure. Your job through Act One is to find a way to escape this penal colony.
All There in the Manual: All there in the artbook and lorebook that come with the 'Divine Ascension' DLC, which provide in-universe, though indirect, information about various characters, as well as out-of-universe design decisions and planning for the world and said characters.
Animal Motif: The Dwarven Kingdom is obsessed with Wolves. Almost every Dwarven weapon or piece of armor has a wolf's head on it. The banner of the kingdom is adorned with a wolf. Even the furniture is covered in wolf faces. Their carts are pulled by massive wolves, and the carts themselves are of course also adorned with stylized wolves. The unnamed Goddess who was Duna's consort is depicted riding a wolf, which might explain it.
And I Must Scream: Braccus Rex rather enjoyed inflicting these on those who challenged him. For example, you can find three brothers in a completely dry well, suffering from extreme thirst, having been there since the time of Braccus' rule, as well as a man, called the Historian, who's been trapped on a pedestal, permanently on fire, and a woman who was turned into a pig and also permanently on fire. Fortunately you can end their suffering, then speak to them if you know what to do.
A victim of The Doctor has his hands, eyes, and tongue removed and lives in agony for an unknown length of time. An Elf character can inhabit these memories by eating flesh of his remains.
Anti-Frustration Features:
Combining crossbows and bows into a catch-all 'Ranged'.
If you make a ranged attack you will see a path of where your projectile is traveling as well as a visual range. Very useful in tight corridors, and when firing arrows or projectile abilities.
If you learned a skill, you don't have to 're-learn' it, you actually remember it but can only use a set number at a time based upon your Memory stat.
You can respec in act 2 and for free.
Original Sin 2 is far more forgiving with the movement than the previous game. You get less action points than before, but it costs far less to move, and there are a load more mobility-enhancing abilities than before.
The game typically autosaves when you're entering an area where there will shortly be a really difficult fight and/or big decision. If you don't like how things went down, you can reload the save and possibly go somewhere else first.
Anti-Grinding: You can only get so much XP in the game, as enemies almost never respawn, with a few exceptions where you don't get any extra XP when you kill them more than once. Trompdoy's illusions, in the second fight with him, do provide (rapidly diminishing) XP gains when you kill them and they're respawned, however.
Arbitrary Headcount Limit: Even if you persuade a character to join you, they won't join you if you have four already in the group.
Armor Meter/Points: Each character has two armor meters: Physical and Magical, with each absorbing 1-for-1 the damage from the corresponding attack types. These meters are based on the character's equipment and don't regenerate in combat (without the use of special abilities), while running out of any type allows the character to be targeted by Status Effects (while the armor is up, only certain effects like Necrofire affect the character).
Artificial Brilliance: The AI has improved much since the previous game - if for example, you walk through a fiery field, your party members will break formation and follow you to avoid the damage. However, it goes both ways - tanks are considered to be worthless in this game because taunts don't become available until later, and enemies will ignore them and go for the obvious mage, making them reduced to just dealing Scratch Damage with a one-handed weapon.
Artificial Stupidity: That said, it's still possible to break the AI for a few encounters. Some enemies either won't attack going out of range, or will get stuck trying to move past other enemies in the way.
Outside of battle, party members will avoid hazards at all costs, even when they have enough armour to simply walk through the hazard with no damage whatsoever. This can result in them seeing a puddle of poison and then simply stand there if there is no path around it.
Party members can also get stuck on or behind ladders, which can only be traversed by one person at a time. And sometimes they can get stuck on a few objects and lag behind.
Most creatures outside of the game's main playable races are incapable of using ladders. This doesn't, however, prevent them from standing uselessly right in front of a ladder and preventing their own allies from climbing it. If you have one of the temporary NPC follower animals with you, sometimes you'll end up with your entire party lagging way behind because there's a chicken standing in front of the ladder.
Auntie Pennybags: Lady Kemm, once you get to Arx. The wife of the most prosperous man in the big city, but also perfectly content to be hostess to the lower classes for tea and a chat. Her husband, on the other hand..
Awesome, but Impractical: Source skills. While those that only use one Source point have their strategic uses, any that require two or three are a lot harder to justify since you'll likely only get to use them once per fight, they often cost a lot of action points as well, they take up more than one memory slot, and they need a great deal of setup to work correctly. That said, this stops being the case in the final battle, where your characters effectively have infinite Source and can use these abilities with absolute impunity.
Back Stab: A game mechanic, though exclusive to those wielding at least one dagger (read: rogues). It automatically grants a critical hit if it connects, and includes a helpful cone behind the enemy to determine where the backstab range is (plus there's an ability that automatically puts you in backstab position and all dagger based abilities can backstab).
Bad Powers, Good People:
Source basically utterly obliterates the souls of their targets and can be used to perform some.. very nightmarish things. Yet there are a few sourcerers who use it for good.
Almira is a succubus who basically traps her targets (usually men) in neverending lust to feed off of them and give their souls to the God King. However, by the time the player meets her, Almira's current target has made her actually feel true love - so now she wants nothing more than to be free of the God King and live a happy life.
Baleful Polymorph:
Chicken Claw turns its target into a chicken, who then cannot attack, or use skills. It also makes them so much easier to kill, as chickens, naturally, aren't very tough.
There is a rare status effect that turns you into a cow. On the Reaper's Coast, you can find two people who have been transformed this way. They will give you a quest to get them back to normal with a witch's brew. Better yet, even though they're both female bovines, when you transform them back, one of them is revealed to be a man.
Braccus Rex turned a princess he was engaged to and her entire court into Fire Slugs for annoying him. He also turned Sourcerers who questioned his rule such as Feder into pigs that were permanently set on fire.
Big Bad: At first, it appears to be Bishop Alexandar, but then it's later revealed (not so subtly) to be Magister Dallis. In the end she's just The Dragon to someone even more powerful.
Big-Bad Ensemble: Hoo boy. The story of the game could best be described as a war between multiple Big Bads, with your hapless team of adventurers caught in the middle and left with no choice but to kill them all. First you have the God King, who rules and controls the malignant Voidwoken invading the world. Lucian, Divine and leader of the Divine Order, is behind the purging of Sourcerers, the weakening of the Seven, and the unleashing of the Voidwoken upon Rivellon, causing the untold death of millions. The Seven created the Voidwoken in the first place, and have been exploiting mortals for millennia in order to feast on their Source. Braccus Rex is manipulating all of them to become a god in and of himself. Oh, and Adramahlihk is lurking on the side waiting to seize divinity for himself, which he just might, becoming the new Big Bad if you let him.
The Big Bad Shuffle: At the beginning of the game, you're led to believe that the main antagonist is going to be the current leader of the Divine Order, Alexandar. Once you take him out at the end of Act I, his dragon, Dallis, takes the reins. Then you find out that she's ultimately working for Lucian. Then you find out that BOTH of them are unknowingly being manipulated by Braccus Rex, who is in turn allied with the God King.
Big Beautiful Woman: The unnamed Goddess who was Duna's consort is depicted in statue form as a heavy-set, pregnant female dwarf. Dwarf characters (of both genders) describe her as 'a beaute'.
Book-Ends:
Act 1 begins and ends on a boat full of Sourcerers.
The game's prologue and the playable part of the epilogue take place on a ship, as well.
Boring, but Practical:
Backlash. If you're a rogue-y type character, get ready to use it a lot - it has a very short cooldown, teleports you behind the target (if possible) and gives backstab bonus.
The humble bedroll. Using it lets you heal a large, percentage based, amount of health, as long as there are no enemies nearby, making after-action healing much quicker. Best of all, you can get one within a minute of starting a game.
Knockdown and Chicken Claw. Most forms of crowd control are easily countered, and the AI will easily remove any forms of crowd control (Or they will just stand there if they are charmed, confused, or taunted), but Chicken Claw does not have any counters and the AI seems to never use Markman's First Aid or Summoner's Soul Mate (which are the only counters to knockdown), making them the most reliable forms of crowd control in the game. In fact, there's little to no Contractual Boss Immunity so you can even chain crowd-control bosses once you get rid of all their armour. You also learn abilities that can inflict knockdown from level one, whereas most others either come far later or have to use Source.
The 'Peace of Mind' spell only costs a single AP to cast, lasts for an impressive three turns, provides significant initiative and attack buffs, and protects against a variety of otherwise potentially devastating status conditions.
Botanical Abomination: The summonable Hungry Flower.
Boy Meets Ghoul: Any romance involving an undead character, whether it is your character or Fane as an NPC.
You can even have sex with Fane much earlier than any of the other characters, which he uses as an excuse to do research on this mysterious concept of 'sex'.
Brainless Beauty: Played for Laughs by the Cheese Merchant. 'I like my men the way I like my cheese..THICK!' Unless she meant a different kind of 'thick'.
Brick Joke:
On the ship to Fort Joy, if you talk to Red Prince, he will ask you how good you are at cooking and grooming. After answering him, he will tell you that he is going to let you be his slave. One of your dialogue options is to tell him you have half a mind to punch him in the face for his impudence. If he is alive and on good terms with you at the end of the game, he will once again offer you the opportunity to be his slave during your last conversation with him. One of your options is to punch him in the face.
In Fort Joy, there's a particular, seemingly-normal crab claiming to be a Sourcerer that a character with Pet Pal can talk to. On the Nameless Isle a couple of Acts later, there's another crab, and this one will claim to be a Source Hunter tracking down that exact crab from Act 1. Taunt him or implicate yourself as said Sourcerer-Crab's ally, and this crab will transform into a giant crab and attack you.
Call-Back: Braccus Rex is Back from the Dead - those familiar with the previous game could even recognise his voice.
Another one, doubling as a Brick Joke from the first Original Sin: the original had an (in)famous cheese vendor well known for spounting the same decree over and over again. This is nodded to throughout Original Sin 2 but never directly invoked until you reach Arx. There, an elven cheese vendor will also sell you a selection of rare rings and amulets if you approach her with the Outlaw tag. When pressed about how she comes across this merchandise, she hints that the mice in the city bring her the wares she sells because,
'After all, nobody has as many friends as the elf with many cheeses.'
Canon Identifier: Players can control one of six available origin characters with preestablished backgrounds or create a custom avatar. Regardless of choice you take on the role of a Sourcerer , one able to wield magical Source, and eventually Godwoken, a Sourcerer chosen by a god to become the next Divine and the majority of characters refer to the members of your party by one of these titles or your chosen race.
Cap: Combat and civil skills can only have so many points invested in each area (10 for combat skills, and five for civil skills), but this doesn't count against bonuses you can get from equipment and such, meaning you can have invested five points in thievery but have a score of seven because you have a piece of equipment that gives you two extra points in thievery, for example.
Cast From HP: Flesh Sacrifice the Elf racial. Though in actuality it's more of a Maximum HP Reduction.
Becomes a Subverted Trope with the Leech trait - the pool of blood created by this ability provides an instant burst of healing.
Chainmail Bikini: Elves of both genders dress this way. Notably, all races have their armor in their own racial style, so equipping Chainmail Armor that looks like a full surcoat on a human will inexplicably become a literal Chainmail Bikini if an elf puts it on.
Chekhov's Gunman: In an early conversation, Fane will offhandedly mention having had a wife and daughter, which doesn't come across as particularly important. Turns out that aforementioned daughter is none other than Dallis the Hammer herself.
Chunky Salsa Rule: Averted to the extreme. Your character can explode, be raised from the dead, and explode again, but your party members can still revive them no problem. Hilariously, this is also Averted in-universe: Alexandar always survives your first fight and is merely comatose on the Lady Vengeance, no matter how he died. Yes, even after being Frozen and then shattered.
Cultural Chop Suey: Each of the races has some similarities to a blend of various world cultures, detailed further under Fantasy Counterpart Culture.The Eternals are an in-universe example of this. The seven gods were all Eternals, and based each race in their own image. Fane claims that The Eternals were 'a race from a time when the term 'race' was unnecessary'.
Combat Pragmatist: Melee rogues have no concept of a fair fight. Throwing sand in the enemy's eyes, rupturing their tendons making them lose heath when they walk, stabbing 'through' their armor, and numerous other dirty tricks are all fair game as far as they're concerned.
The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Debuffs that make the characters change allegiances (temporarily) seem to work way differently for players versus enemies. It seems to be that whenever a player is taunted or charmed, they will Shoot the Medic First, buff enemies, and chew through their entire backpack of one-shot items. When enemies are taunted or charmed, they'll just stand there. Note also that the Provoke skill when used by a player has to have that enemy's Physical Armor breached first, whereas the Computer can automatically provoke your guys even fully buffed. The different effects upon PCs vs. NPCs just add insult to injury.
The AI in general has been described as playing a tabletop game against someone who is metagaming, with AI behaviours that seem blatantly out of place within the game's context. Part of this is due to the fact that the AI examines you with loremaster before their turn, meaning they know all your resistances and whether or not you're undead, and there's no visual or even in-game indication they are doing this, so they come off as psychic.
Towards the end, you'll lose count of the number of times the NPCs get a free opening salvo fireball or similar effect that pretty much destroys the Magic Armor of half of your team, and the next enemy or so in the initiative will start doing Crowd Control effects like Madness, Charm, or Terrified.
Player characters typically have 4 Action Points to spend each turn, and can never have more than 6 banked (there is some minmaxing to be done with skills and talents that will let a player character have more than 6, but they're clunky and situational). Using Loremaster shows that many enemies—even non-bosses—have as many as nine Action Points available every single turn.
Contractual Boss Immunity: Zig-zagged. Some bosses are immune to crowd control effects, but most bosses actually aren't.
Contrasting Sequel Main Character: In Original Sin, you played as Source Hunters. In the sequel, you play as the Sourcers on the run from the hunters.
Convection Schmonvection: Downplayed slightly, in that you get the 'warm' status effect if you go near lava, but, aside from that, you can get as close as you want to lava, and as long as you don't touch it (which is instant death), be perfectly okay.
Co-Op Multiplayer/Drop-In-Drop-Out Multiplayer: Like in the first game, co-op is a big thing here, except now you can play with three other people, rather than just one.
Critical Existence Failure: Barring status effects, as long as you have at least one health point, you will fight just as effectively as if you had full health, but when you have zero, you instantly die.
Cutting Off the Branches: One of the potential final bosses of the game is the Divine Lucian himself. If you've played Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga, you can see how this would become problematic as this game takes place before that one. However, one ending comes from doing what Lucian asks you to do, so that ending is presumably the canon one.
Critical Hit Class: You can make a critical hit focused version of any playstyle, but Dagger-wielding Rogues, Archers, and Two-Handed weapon Warriors are most suited to it.
As mentioned below, Humans get moreout of their crits than the other races.
Dangerous Forbidden Technique: The Source. While the original game initially treated it as pure Black Magic, it eventually revealed that the Source was not always corruptive and evil and can, in fact, be used for good. Abusing it, however, is very easy and quickly leads to a lot of suffering.
Darker and Edgier: In terms of overall tone, D:OS2 is to the original Original Sin what The Sith Lords was to the first Knights of the Old Republic. Where in D:OS you played a pair of heroic individuals with a secret heroic legacy out on a quest to stop an obvious evil through courage and mettle, in the sequel you play a bunch of deeply flawed individuals who just happen to be less flawed than everyone else in the world. And while the ending of D:OS is unambiguously triumphant, every single ending of the sequel is morally ambiguous in some way.
Heck, the game can be considered this for the Divinity series as a whole. In the past, the lines between good and evil were clearly defined, making it easy to be an all-out hero. In Original Sin 2, there are so many conflicting agendas between the nations, factions, gods, and even your own allies that being an unambiguous good guy is nearly impossible to pull off, and the situation is so dire that you're often left with no choice but to do some pretty rotten things just to move forward.
The Dark Side: You can quickly upgrade your Source Skills and recharge Source Points by slaughtering everyone in sight and consuming their life essence.. but it has some very unpleasant consequences in a long run.
Deader Than Dead: Depending on how far the player cares to take it, Sebille's revenge against the Master can take the form of killing him, exploding his corpse, eating his heart, and then devouring his soul for good measure.
Deadly Gas: Deathfog. Instant death for the living; anyone who's undead, like Fane, can pass through it fine.
Deal with the Devil: Becoming Sworn to the God King is very much this. On the bright side you gain power and potential immortality since the God King can revive his followers. On the downside, you have to follow every command your new master gives you and you can never disobey him. If you force the Sworn Mordus to reveal what he knows about the God King, his master makes him disintegrate before your very eyes. At least three characters who have become Sworn now regret it and seek a magical scythe called the Swornbreaker which has the power to undo magical binding oaths.
Death of the Old Gods: Sort of.. You see, the old gods all gave up half their magic to the divine (who they call the usurper) a long while back, and since the death of the divine, they're slowly losing the rest of it to the void, thus slowly dying. It's a bit closer to 'terminal illness of the old gods.'
Decapitated Army:
In general, averted. In most fights, even if you kill the leader, the rest will continue to fight. Some however die with the leader but [[Gameplay and Story Integration
Early on, you must battle an annoying spirit named Trompdoy, who at one point splits himself up into multiple targets. If you know to focus on one, the rest of them die alongside him.
If you focus exclusively on Braccus Rex in the final boss, all of his flunkies die with him.
Decoy Antagonist: Windego, the old lady who destroys the boat you are on with source magic at the beginning, seems set to be a major antagonist, even the fact that she is the narrator of the prologue and part of the ending. However, she ultimately factors very little into the plot - in fact, only Fane gives her any kind of different interactions on Fort Joy and her act 4 presence, wherein she takes a sizable Info Dump on the player is very very easily missed.
Dem Bones: Undead are walking, talking skeletons. You have the option of playing as one of any race.
Developers' Foresight: This game is very very well liked for having all sorts of foresight in terms of the dev team, allowing all sorts of variations within how (roughly half) of the quests are completed.
In fact, there is even an actual ending for taking Lohse with you without having completed her personal quest and killed Adrahmalihk.
Said quest apparently doesn't check for whether or not you learned his true name and used Malady's sidequest to weaken Adrahmalihk in-story, it only checks for whether or not you defeated the boss. As mentioned under Lord British Postulate, you can just kill them and it still considers the quest completed.
Multiple quests in which you are told to kill someone or find something can be instantly completed by presenting the item right there since you found it before.
On the Nameless Isle, you have to enlist either the aid of the Magisters or the Black Ring to progress. However, two party members will instantly lock you off and turn hostile no matter what you do - either Ifan for the Magisters or Lohse for the Black Ring. Should the player character have both in the party, the way into front door is closed. However, there is a back door which requires none. Said back door can actually be accessed without talking to any of them.
Difficulty Spike: When the player gets to Arx, enemies become a lot bulkier and it's essential to keep your gear up to date. This is a lot more notable in the Definitive Edition.
Disc-One Final Dungeon: The Nameless Isle in Act III. It's built up as the finale, as it's where you and your companions go to fulfill their destiny and become the Divine. Things don't go according to plan, and the fact that there's a lot of buildup, foreshadowing, and unfinished quests surrounding the city of Arx should tell you there's going to be a lot more to go.
Disc-One Nuke:
Teleport - partially for the damage (that ignores armour even), but mostly for the sheer utility. Teleport can be obtained very early via a glove (or even a skillbook). Players will most likely find themselves using it into the late game either to bring squishy casters or rangers over, or to send annoying enemies away.
The Chicken Claw + Rupture Tendons combo. Not only is it hilarious incorporating Chicken Claw as crowd control, Rupture Tendons then inflicts tons of damage since they are forced to flee (and trigger movement-based damage). This combo is cheap and even in Act 2 continues to pull weight, inflicting hundreds of damage.
If you have a rogue, killing a certain boss inside the Fort Joy Prison will cause him to drop his daggers that can inflict mute or bleeding. In the same area, there is a particularly strong bow hidden behind some (skippable, with a certain item or Pet Pal) dogs.
For ranged characters, bringing Ifan along will net you a very powerful crossbow from his personal quest immediately after escaping Fort Joy. Particularly notable is the fact that it deals piercing damage, which ignores armor.
Dissonant Serenity:
During The Reveal in the academy, most of the past events revolving around Lucian's actions see him with a gentle, comforting presence even as he personally slays any competitors for divinity.
At the climax Lucian's tone remains deathly calm, even as he discusses the death of his son, the Rage Against the Heavens plan and even when Vredman breaks free of his chains.
Distant Sequel: Divinity: Original Sin II is set 1200 years after Divinity: Original Sin, and although it is not a direct sequel to it (it actually more closely follows Divine Divinity), the two games form the two end points of the same story arc concerning the Dangerous Forbidden Technique Source as the origin of the divine power: D:OS explains how it got corrupted, while the sequel allows you remove it from the world entirely in some of the endings.
Divine Intervention: Your god saves you from drowning after the ship you're on is attacked by a kraken at the beginning of the game, allowing you to wash onshore at Fort Joy.
Does Not Like Shoes: All elves walk barefoot and forgo any kind of footwear.
Doomsday Device: You can find one under Arx, and activate it yourself, if you want to wipe out the whole city via the release of a huge cloud of deathfog.
Dual Wielding: More than doable, though the weapon in your off hand gets a 50% damage penalty. It's mostly done with rogues and their daggers, though you can find a couple of mages dual wielding wands.
Dump Stat:
Memory can be this for fighter-type characters - Memory increases the number of active skills you can have at a time. While skill slots are useful, fighters might not need as many since they can just Attack! Attack! Attack!. One talent, Mnemonic, essentially allows you to get away with ignoring it for a while.
Finesse for non-rogue builds. Unlike strength, which increases carrying capacity, and intelligence, which increases spell damage (and a number of classes do dabble in spellcasting) on top of increasing their respective weapons' damage, all finesse does is increase the damage done by finesse based weapons (bows, crossbows, and daggers), making it useless for anyone who doesn't use said weapons.
Dysfunction Junction: Pretty much everyone you can invite to your party (barring custom characters) has some sort of dark past that still affects them to this day, ranging from Ifan, who unwittingly unleashed death fog on an unsuspecting elven settlement while trying to save them; to Sebille, who was made a slave and forced to kill her own kind; to Lohse, who has a powerful demon inhabiting her body. Each character's quest is basically about resolving their issues or punishing those whose fault it was that these things happened.
Early Game Hell: Still in effect (fortunately it is nowhere near as bad as the first game). You begin the game without equipment, without physical or magical armor your characters can get afflicted by delibitating ailments, new skills are expensive and a new player doesn't know which ones they should use depending on the situation (new players may even seal their own fate by setting up poison and fire areas that they can't handle), some really game encounters are brutal, and overall you die extremely easily. Once you acquire decent equipment, skills and level up a little, the game gets progressively easier, though you can expect it to throw you a curveball at a moment's notice.
11th-Hour Superpower: Before the Final Boss, your characters get a prayer that removes the Source Cost for your skills that had before been Too Awesome to Use.
Elves vs. Dwarves: Averted. Elves and Dwarves don't have very many significant interactions in the backstory one way or another. Practically Inverted considering they share a mutual hatred of racist humans. Strangely, there are some elven NPCs that seem bigotted against dwarves, but they're few and far between, plus they sing the same tune as the aforementioned racist humans, so it's less an example of this trope than it is an example of a few prejudiced assholes.
Enemy Mine: At one point, you can call a truce with Bishop Alexandar. This is entirely optional though - you can also side with the Black Ring and kill Alexandar, or side with neither.
Eternal English: Characters trapped for three millennia speak the exact same language as your characters despite almost certainly not having had any contact with anyone in the intervening time. Justified later in the game when you learn that the seven gods that created the races are Eternals
Ethnic God: Except for Amadia, who is the patron of all wizards, and Xantezza who is the god of Imps but is worshipped as a goddess of mirth and laughter, the seven gods play this straight. This is Subverted on the Nameless Isle when you meet a Lizard who worships Tir-Cendelius, the god of Elves. He claims that he was the Godwoken of Zorl-Stissa, god of Lizards, but felt abandoned by her after failing to become the Divine.
Beast, Sebille, and The Red Prince's stories could each be described as a Decon-Recon Switch of this concept. Each of their motives to ascend is to bring their respective race glory because they are on the decline. Over the course of the story, it becomes increasingly obvious that because there can only be one Divine, each of the seven gods is expecting to come to power by stepping over the other races, leaving only one Ethnic God alive while the others suffer without divine patronage. This is reconstructed, however, if the player (as one of those three characters) rejects this racist, supremacist view and becomes a god that not only saves their own race, but is good to the others. If any of those three characters is one of your companions, then their story is about realizing that the player would make a better divine while also trusting that they have good intentions for the future of their own people. In any case, you can also Defy this trope by destroying the position of Divine by giving Sourcery to everyone in the world.
Ethnic Menial Labour: Dwarves in human lands do a lot of the menial jobs. One especially racist Magister even refers to Dwarves as pack mules, good for nothing but cheap labor.
Everyone Calls Him 'Barkeep': The Red Prince's only given name so far is.. The Red Prince. And it's not a lizard thing, as you can meet lizard folk with proper given names like Saam and Stingtail. Especially notable in The Red Prince's personal quest regarding The Red Princess, who when encountered in-game, is named Sadha.
Everyone Is Bi: Played straight with the romancable party members, all of whom are available regardless of gender. The only aversion in the entire game, in fact, is Papa Thrash, who can only be seduced by a female dwarf.
The Extremist Was Right: Despite all the atrocities he committed, and even though you have every reason to hate him, going through with Lucian's plan leads to the best overall ending for Rivellon. The Void is sealed, the Voidwoken threat is ended, and the the world enters an age of peace and prosperity. Meanwhile, the other endings paint a much less ideal picture for Rivellon's future.
Fantastic Nuke: Death Fog is a deadly superweapon made to kill people on a grand scale, and whose very existence is shown to be a game changer in the political landscape, with many nations scrambling to counteract it in some way. Of note is how Justinia attempts to launch a preemptive attack on Arx out of sheer paranoia that the Divine Order will unleash Death Fog on her kingdom just like it had on the elves.'
Fantasy Counterpart Culture: The humans have a general Medieval European Fantasy aesthetic while the other races have Cultural Chop Suey going on:
The Lizards are primarily a blend of 'Arabian Nights' Days and Imperial China. They live in the desert, use scimitars, have genies (in lamps, even!) and their fancier clothes involve light robes and turbans in vibrant color schemes. They're also an isolated and advanced empire with aloof and haughty nobles that look down on foreigners and live in a Forbidden City.
The Elves are a bit more all over the place. They have hints of Gaelic culture in their druidic lifestyle, and their status as refugees from lands conquered by a larger imperial power gives them some Native American parallels (The casting effect for Flesh Sacrifice, the Elven racial ability, resembles a Dreamcatcher pattern). Elven-style axes are Aztec style obsidian-studded clubs. The way that their culture treats cannibalism as an integral part of their code of honor gives them a slight Maori feel.
The Dwarves have Celtic knot patterns decorating their architecture and often wear Nordic looking braids. Their backstory involves a warrior-king confederating many tribes under his banner through conquest and diplomacy, not unlike Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan. The primary influence on their aesthetics, though, is Ancient Grome. Their Plate Armor sets are gilded and skirted while their cloth armors are basically decorated togas. They tend to have Latin sounding names like 'Marcus Miles' or 'Justinia'. Their more recent backstory, involving their Empire fracturing due to conquests by younger cultures that they view as barbaric, adds to this. They have some hints of post-Roman Renaissance Italy and Iberia, with their ornate and fancy weapons (their Axes often have rapier-like baskets around the hilts), a powerful merchant class, and a tradition of seafaring (and sea shanties of course). Less obviously, their presence in human cities as oppressed, barely tolerated, second-class citizens who often make a living as craftsman make them out to be similar to the medieval Jews.
Fantastic Racism:
Quite a few (but by no means all) humans have a lot of dislike for, and fear of, elves, due to the fact that they eat their dead, making them worry that the elves will eat them too. Interestingly, though, dwarves don't have any particular grudge against elves or vice versa.
Racism against lizards is also particularly pronounced from humans, partly due to the Ancient Empire being known slavers and their infamously stuck up attitudes. In particular, you can count the number of Magister lizards that make it to the end of the game on one hand.
Fate Worse than Death: When the Divine Order's Magisters catch a Sourcerer, they strip them of their powers, which has a side effect of essentially wiping out their personality and individuality. Some of them are even converted into Human Weapons for the Divine Order.
Fighter, Mage, Thief: The character creation and upgrade system is extremely flexible, allowing for mixing and matching as the player desires, but there are direct analogues to all three regardless. For example, there are weapon skills targeted towards one or more classes, as well as several areas that very much equate to one or another (e.g. Warfare for fighters, Marksman and Scoundrel for Rogues, and various forms of magic for mages).
Final Boss Preview:
The Kraken, you can tell, will be fought much later. It's fortunately a Skippable Boss though.
Magister Dallis and the cloaked figure at the beginning of act two. She's actually standing next to the True Final Boss.
Flunky Boss: Just about every boss you face is one of these, having three or more flunkies around to keep you on your toes. The few non-flunky bosses show why this is: a similarly leveled, well equipped, and well built party can keep the sole boss off balance and unable to attack, while wearing him down.
Fog of Doom: Death fog, which instantly kills anyone who enters it. It's apparently also mass manufactured, storable in crates and barrels, and a large shipment has gone missing..
Foreshadowing:
Note that most of the people on board the Lady Vengeance are killed by Meteor Storm, and by someone who sounds very similar to Braccus Rex. In Act 4, it's revealed that Dallis brought Braccus Rex back from the dead.
If Fane is in your party and you talk to Windego, someone takes over her voice.. the same voice of those voidwoken.
Game-Breaking Bug: It's not easy to pull of if you're not trying for it (or aren't a big fan of overkill) but in the final boss fight, if you damage Vredeman for far more health than he has left (say with a backstabbing rogue doing ridiculous damage), it's possible that he will give his dialogue for revealing himself to actually be Braccus Rex, but not actually spawn for part two of the fight, rendering it unwinnable, even if you do eliminate the other combatants who carried over, as Braccus must be defeated.
The game has quite a bit of bugs here and there - sometimes entire quests will end up bugged.
Gameplay and Story Integration: When the final phase of the Final Boss begins, Braccus Rex breaks free of Dallis's control. Sure enough, the Magisters, Dallis, and Lucian, if they are alive, will actually go after him - sometimes they will even prioritise him!
In character customization, Beast isn't allowed to be clean-shaven because of the multiple in-game references to his beard. Subverted when the first Gift Bag update added a beardless mustache option for male Dwarves, but Beast's thick facial hair is still mentioned even if you give it to him.
Gameplay and Story Segregation:
One of Fane's biggest quirks is that due to being locked inside a tomb for thousands of years, he knows next to nothing of the world he now finds himself in, or even basic concepts of what it means to be mortal. And yet, he has the scholar tag which allows him to chime in with knowledge about history and world lore. He was a great scholar before he was imprisoned, but it is odd that he can be a big source of historical knowledge of the present while also knowing nothing about it.
An unusual quirk of the 'Loremaster' stat has this happen. If your character is undead or Fane, in-universe when you are wearing a face of a living character, you look like one and this should fool virtually everyone into thinking you're undead. In-practice, the second you enter combat, enemies will somehow know the character is undead and will toss weaponised healing spells at them despite having no real reason in-universe to think to do that.
You can trade with NPCs at any time in their conversation. This includes before a fight with them. The trading interface means that they're fully willing to do so, no matter how absurd it is for a demon or what-have-you giving you some gold for whatever pots and pans you stole from their house before you fight them.
The leveling of items is cited as one of the few issues with the game. This is made apparent during the Artefacts of the Tyrant quest line, having you traipsing around Fort Joy for the hidden armor of the Source King, Bracchus Rex. Each piece has a curse on it that can only be removed by wearing the whole set. After completing this complicated quest chain and suspending the curse, the feared armor of the Source King—still whispered of in fear, 1000 years after his death—will be noticeably worse than bog-standard gear by level 9.
Gang Up on the Human: on occasion you might have magisters and voidwoken alongside one another. While a lot of them will help you out, (Notably at the end of Act one), they do often decide to go after you if you're close enough.
Averted in the Final Boss - if you allowed any Magisters to survive, or even Lucian or Dallis, they will go after Braccus Rex too. This can be used to your advantage since they will eat hits and weaken the Final Boss for you.
Gay Option: You can romance any of your living companions, regardless of your own gender, such as romancing Lohse with Sebille, or Beast with Ifan.
Geo Effects: The cornerstone of the combat system is, again, creating and combining different terrain effects.
The Ghost: Braccus Rex. Those who played the previous game killed him (or not), but since the first act is set on a Penal Colony that used to be one of Braccus Rex's strongholds, expect to hear him a lot.
Glass Cannon: There is a talent by this name, and boy does it live up to it. What it does is it allows you to start every turn with maximum AP (six, when everyone typically starts with four), but your physical and magic armor do not protect against environmental effects, like electrified water, fire, or poison clouds. Everyone can use the extra AP, not just the damage-y types, but the frequency of environmental damage makes it a careful tradeoff.
God Is Dead: The Divine is dead, which sends the world into chaos. There is to be a new god to replace the Divine, selected from the godwoken, six or seven people (depending on whether you choose a custom character or not) with destinies that either involve becoming gods or dying.
Gods Need Prayer Badly: At the end of the game, just before the final battle Lucian tells you that, over someone's life they gather source within their body, and when they die, their source goes to whatever god they prayed to in life, ensuring their survival.
This is implied even before that in the Blackpits, during the meeting with the Eternal Aetera, a member of Fane's species sealed away for her beef with the gods.
Go Fetch: One possible encounter with a pack of Source Hounds in Fort Joy can be resolved peacefully if you give them a shiny toy ball to play with.
Good Powers, Bad People: Lucian - He's one of the game's main antagonists.
Great Off Screen War: Lucian's Great War against the resurgent Black Ringnote still has a massive impact on the setting, despite having occurred years before the game. The last battle of the war in particular, fought in the ancestral forest of the elves, had far-reaching consequences, as it saw Lucian release the Deathfog to ensure no Black Ring members escaped — before all elven civilians could be evacuated. The result was, predictably, a massive genocide that had primed an entire race for extinction, leaving them understandably embittered. This event ties directly into two companions' personal quests: Ifan was Lucian's lieutenant ordered to deliver the Deathfog bomb, while Sebille is the Prime Scion of the elven race and, thus, the unwitting and unwilling last hope for their salvation.
Griefer: The game actually accounts for this type of multiplayer and weaves player characters' conflicts into the plot.
Groin Attack: Sebille is especially fond of these, especially around the first act.
First is the shakedown when you enter the Fort Joy Ghetto, where one option, with Sebille and the right dialogue options at least, is to cup the thug's cheek, grab his throat, then knee him hard in the groin. This can also be followed up by breaking his leg if you feel like adding salt to the wound. The best part is all the witnesses to said event gain a massive approval bonus with your party members when you do this.
The second is a threat against the inmate running the ghetto's kitchen, where to get the name of the Lone Wolves assassin who can give her the name of the Lone Wolf who can help her learn her master's whereabouts, Sebille can threaten to jam her needle into his private parts. It doesn't work, because he's surrounded by his thugs, but it counts.
A third case presents itself if you play as Sebille and kill Stingtail with The Red Prince in your party. After you kill Stingtail, The Red Prince will grab you by the throat, and one option to get him to let you go is a swift kick between the knees, which will cause him to drop you and stop being as angry.
Guide Dang It!: Fortunately the main game does not actually have this, but there are some sidequests that actually have this.
Kemm's Vault specifically, Arhu's prison can be accessed only once. The problem is, it's entirely possible to enter and complete those events before you know that it's actually the subject of two, up to three quests. A patch fortunately fixed it, however it's still fully possible to reach Kemm's vault without knowing that there is a key item within it - the Swornbreaker. You have to know where it is specifically unless you Pixel Hunt.
To get the optimal ending for The Red Prince's Quest, you have to pick up a Swornbreaker, from one of two places that are inaccessible after completing. On your first playthrough, by the time you learn that you can even do this there's a good chance you might have missed it.
The Swornbreakers. While Ryker gives a hint as to what it is, there is only one NPC (who is the subject of another quest) who will mention what it is specifically.. but the problem with that is, you have to go to the very most northeastern-point of the Reaper's Coast, which is an easily missable location. Confounding it is the only way to access it is to use an ability to cross a gap. A good number of players completed the game without even knowing that she was there!
The Black Root. While you are told by the Meistr that it grows somewhere in the Cloisterwood, she does not tell you where it grows specifically, just 'It's in the Cloisterwood'.
If you killed three bosses in act 3-4, they will appear in the Final Boss fight. There is no way for you to know this aside from that they are associated with the Black Ring.
The Act II quest 'A Trial for All Seasons,' requires you to create four specific surfaces in a small area. The first two are fairly straightforward: an ice surface caused by several common Hydrosophist skills (and given that Hydrosophist has the lion's share of the game's healing abilities, you probably have one at your disposal) and a blood surface (caused by, among other things, an Elf's innate skill). The third is a bit trickier, requiring stacking three common surfaces (fire, then water, then Shocked). The fourth requires creating a Fire Cloud, which can be created only by using several specific spells..which the quest does not make obvious.
Have You Tried Not Being a Monster?: At a few points, the game makes parallels between the suppression of Sourcerers and real-life prejudices. For example, one Magister refers to Sourcery as 'the magic that dare not speak its name'.
Hijacked by Ganon: After Dallis was built up as the Big Bad, it turns out, the Big Bad is actually Braccus Rex again.
Hitbox Dissonance:
Just like the first game, be very careful about talking to NPCs in areas with lots of items around because of how easy it is for the game to register you clicking on an item and not the person you're trying to talk to.
While improved, it's still highly possible to accidentally click on the floor around your target when you commanded them to attack. Fortunately if you move close enough it won't cost any AP, but it does lead to some attacks of opportunity.
Related to the above, it is also very easy to click on an ability or scroll and think you've used it and then click on the target point only to find out that the click did not take and your character gleefully charges over to the enemy instead of shooting them or casting a spell at them.
Hufflepuff House: Outside of a rare few appearances of their ghosts, orcs and imps play no role in the story. Their gods in turn are also very minor players, even though they're supposed to be on relatively equal standing with the rest of the Seven.
Humans Are Average: Played Straight in-universe, but Double Subverted in gameplay. Humans are described as being more diverse and adaptable compared to the other races. Gameplay-wise, though, they're a Critical Hit Class, as their passive ability gives them a bonus to critical hit chance and the crit multiplier. However, this bonus actually benefits any playstyle: rogues get free crits with backstabs, so they benefit from the extra crit multiplier. Warriors can learn Enrage to get guaranteed critical hits. Mages can learn Savage Sortilege to give their spells crit chance. Archers can get easily get high crit chance, so the more the better. Healers don't benefit from crits..unless you come up against Undead, in which case the damage from your healing spells can crit if you have Savage Sortilege.
Humans Are Diplomats: Played Straight in gameplay, as humans get a bonus to their Bartering Skill. In-universe, though, this is Inverted; Humans are on the receiving end of more Fantastic Racism than anyone else. Elves hate them for obliterating their homeland, Dwarves resent becoming a marginalized minority in human lands, and the Lizard Empire is openly at war with the Divine Order, which seems to run Human culture in Rivellon.
Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: The difficulty levels aren't intuitive at first glance, but do make sense, at least. They are, from easiest to hardest:
Explorer Mode
Classic Mode
Tactician Mode
Honour Mode (Basically Tactician Mode with only one save file period)
'I Know You're in There Somewhere' Fight: If you approach Saheila in Fort Joy with Lohse in your party, she will try to talk with the blind elf, then, if you allow her to, the demon will take over her body and try to kill Saheila. If you choose to side with the elves, you just have to do enough damage to Lohse to get her back in her right mind.
I'm a Humanitarian: Elves (and others who take the right perk) can eat body parts to see their deceased owners' memories. As you might expect, however, several people in-universe take issue with this, to the point of being concerned that an elf PC will eat them.
That meat stew in Driftwood is made of dead magisters.
Immortal Procreation Clause: A very real problem for the elves, who lost most of their people along with their homeland in the deathfog incident. Since they are very slow to reproduce, by virtue of being very Long-Lived, they're in danger of dying out if they don't start producing a lot more children.
Improvised Lockpick: Undead characters are able to pick locks using their fingers as skeleton keys.
Interface Spoiler: Examining certain NPCs can prematurely tell you that they're undead (and by extension, up to something nefarious) before they officially unveil themselves.
Jackass Genie: There is a lizard djinn in a lamp you can find on a beach in Reaper's Coast. If you pass the persuasion check to make it grant you a wish, it offers four choices: power, knowledge, wealth, and to never see your enemies again. As you might have guessed from the trope name, his interpretation of said wish leaves more than a little something to be desired. For example, wish for wealth and you'll get a necklace worth 1700 gold, but has the stolen tag (and 1700 isn't that much at this point, never mind that no shopkeeper will buy it from you for that price), or if you wish to never see your enemies again, you'll be struck permanently blind. At least his lamp is worth a pretty penny, once he's out of it.
There are four options for trying to persuade him to grant you a wish. Passing two of them will result in the scenario above, but the other two result in him giving you actually useful rewards for the same reward choices, like a non-stolen version of the same necklace, or a powerful spell scroll.
Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique: How Sebille ends up interrogating Stingtail. If your main character is Sebille, you can grab him by the throat, stab him, twist the needle you're stabbing him with, etc. just to get him to tell you who your master is.
Karma Houdini: Judging by the events of future (Chronologically) Divinity games, Lucian commits all kinds of atrocities and orders them, yet appears to canonically get away with it.
Karma Meter: Invisible, but present. The game keeps track of the actions you take throughout. If you do enough heroic or villainous deeds, then you'll be awarded with the Hero or Villain tag respectively. These tags are not mutually exclusive; it's possible to get both.
Kleptomaniac Hero Found Underwear: When looking through things like closets and trunks in people's home, whether scrupulously or not, one of the things you can find is pairs of panties that haven't been washed in quite some time.
Knife Nut: Sebille, while not particularly crazy (more angry than anything), loves daggers. She's seen wielding one in her character introduction video, two on loading screens, and when recruited, has two daggers as well.
Kraken and Leviathan: A Kraken destroys the ship your on at the beginning of the game, and is part of the final boss fight at the end.
Level Editor: The game ships with the updated version of the Divinity Engine, which Larian use to develop it.
Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: Inverted, interestingly enough. While mages are great damage dealers in the beginning, warriors and rogues, who are a bit slow to get off the ground, eventually just outdo them by a wide margin in damage and (in some ways) debuffing by endgame. Mages do have their place, through healing, buffing, and debuffing, but for damage, it's all about the physical attackers.
Living Ship: The Livewood ship, The Lady Vengeance, that you hijack at the end of act one. She even talks to you, once you find the controlling song, and admits that due to her own slave scar, etched into her wood, she literally can never be free.
Lizardfolk: One of the playable races. They think highly of themselves and look down on other races.
Loophole Abuse: During 'Shadow Over Driftwood', you are obviously intended to have the party members find keys and open doors to reunite with one another. Ain't No Rule saying you can just trade the pyramids back-and-forth and teleport to them and then wander around.
You must make a second Escort Mission with Saheila through a mill of dangerous enemies. The game actually assigns her to you as a minion - so you can simply teleport to a waypoint and she'll follow. This same trick also works to bypass some difficult stealth if you want to help Higba escape from Driftwood without having to fight the magisters.
Lord British Postulate:
Dallis at the end of Act one. You're obviously not supposed to be able to kill her, but if you manage to do so, she'll turn into a dragon and fly away.
It is also dealt with quite brilliantly with the Doctor. Unless you have Lohse in your party and do her and Malady's sidequest to weaken him, the Doctor is easily the most powerful boss in the entire game. If you do have Lohse in your party when you fight him, he additionally automatically wins the fight if you don't kill him in three rounds or so by possessing her. With this, the game (and Malady) outright tell you that killing the Doctor without weakening him first is impossible — but this is still a video game, and the Doctor has stats, so of course there are ways to do just that with proper Min-Maxing and Save Scumming. And yet, what Malady tells you is still true: there is no narrative reason for the Doctor to lose if you don't weaken him, and the primary way to achieve this is by abusing gameplay mechanics with complete disregard to the story. In other words, if you are playing for the narrative, you'll have to do the weakening sidequest, but if you're in it for the Turn-Based Combat, you have an awesome Bonus Boss to test your mettle against.
Marathon Boss: The Final Boss is very, VERY long.
Marathon Level: The Reaper's Coast is, hands down, the longest section of the game. (Even longer than the Cyseal area or Lucilla Forest in the previous Original Sin game) Especially if you decide to go for 100% Completion on it. Players who think they got everything may often find that they are still missing something, and that's not counting all the quests that can be made Unwinnable, either by mistake or by design.
Mauve Shirt: Everyone who is a Player Character but wasn't part of the main party after Dallis attacks the Lady Vengeance shall be dead by the time Dallis' rampage ends.
Medieval Stasis: Despite taking place 1200 years after the original, technology hasn't advanced much at all. However, with this particular game, it is justified - as the official timeline places this game just before Beyond Divinity.
Mêlée à Trois: The battle with Alexander near the end of the first act, becomes this when a third party (A voidwoken drillworm) joins in. Though the other side's forces will prioritize it, they will not hesitate to take potshots at you as well, especially if it's outside of their range.
This actually happens multiple occasions, but only when Voidwoken appear alongside Magisters. They do not simply Gang Up on the Human.
Even the Final Boss is one - it's a three way battle between the Magisters&Lucian, you, and Braccus Rex&The Black Ring. Sure enough, even Lucian and Dallis will go after Braccus Rex if he's alive.
Mind-Control Music: How Sebille's master controlled her. He would use a song to control her thoughts. In her character introduction video, she says she's planning to make him sing a very different kind of song.
This also happens to be Lohse's Source ability, though of the Insanity variety rather than direct control.
Mind over Matter: Telekinesis is a civil skill you can invest in, allowing you to move objects of any weight a certain distance, regardless of their weight.
Minmaxer's Delight: Most classes have one or two talents that they can take for powerful gains. For example:
Parry Master and The Pawn for dual wielding rogues. The former adds a 10% dodge bonus if you're dual wielding, which is huge as without the bonus you're liable to end up at around 25% dodge chance by endgame if you focus on finesse and wits, but 35% with it. The latter, in return for having at least one point in Scoundrel to take it, gives you one free AP of movement at the beginning of each turn, so if you can move 8.5 meters on one AP, normally, this will let you move 8.5 meters on zero AP, which, considering how mobile melee rogues need to be for full (backstabby) effectiveness, is a huge boon.
For archers, Duck Duck Goose, and Arrow Recovery. The first is an easy pick, as it allows you to avoid attacks of opportunity, and if someone gets close enough that they're allowed to hit you with an attack of opportunity, then it's time to relocate, and doing so with a reduced risk of damage is always beneficial. The latter gives you a one in three chance to get your special arrows back, which doesn't sound like much, but considering how effective they are when used at the right time (and how difficult it can be to stock up at times), can be a huge boon.
Warriors can't go wrong with Executioner, Opportunist, or Picture of Health. The first gives you two AP for the first foe you kill during your turn, which allows you to move onto another target or two during the same turn and do more damage. Opportunist allows attacks of opportunity if enemies try to get away from you, which, if they're weak, may just be enough to end them (and give you two AP for your next turn). Picture of Health, meanwhile, can supplement or let you ignore your constitution stat, depending on your build, because it adds 3% to your maximum HP for every level of Warfare you take, meaning you can add 30% to your health by endgame, where your health is typically in the low thousands anyway.
Mages get some fun ones too, like Far Out Man, which increases the range of non-touch spells by two meters, and Torturer, which increases the duration of the effects of all your spells and surfaces by one turn (though not direct damage from them), which means you can stun someone for two turns instead of the normal one, say, or poison them for an extra turn. And with the Definitive Edition, Torturer becomes even more useful, as it allows your magic to affect enemies even through their magic armor. So you can poison/burn/shock/what have you even before removing all of an enemy's magic armor.
Mobile Shrubbery: Characters entering stealth mode will adopt a variety of disguises based on their current terrain, such as bushes in a natural environment or barrels in a settlement.
Mood Whiplash: If one makes Lohse sing at the end of personal quest, it follows an epic battle against a building full of possessed people, a giant demon, and (depending on your previous actions) a number of normal-sized demons.
Multiple-Choice Past: At character creation, you pick one of the available origin stories for your main PC, which has massive impact on how they will approach quests, dialogues, and general problem solving throughout the game. Even for custom characters, the tags you choose at character creation give you extra dialogue choices indicating a certain kind of past.
Multiple Endings: The game has five endings:
'Supreme Sacrifice': You side with Lucian and let Dallis purge all of Rivellon (including you!) of the Source, so it can be used to mend the Veil, permanently sealing away the Void, the Voidwoken, and the God King. If Malady is still alive, though, she can reverse your transformation into Silent Monks, allowing you to roam the world as regular humans once again.
'Risen': One of you becomes the new Divine and leads the world into the new golden age, like Lucian before you, but the threat of the Void still remains.
'Return of the King': You refuse to take up Divinity or just side with the God King, allowing him to return and to enslave all peoples of Rivellon.
'One For All': You redistribute the Source equally among everyone in Rivellon, which initially leads to a new golden age, and the God King is driven back, seemingly forever, but in the long run, the newly-empowered peoples descend into another global war.
'Angel and Demon': After making a deal with the Doctor, one of you ascends to Divinity together with him. The Void is driven back by the Doctor's demons, but soon an even worse war breaks out between both Divines.
Murder, Inc.: The Lone Wolves, a loosely bound group of assassins for hire, usually working alone (hence the name). Ifan is a member of this group, and is on a mission to kill Bishop Alexandar.
Mythology Gag: One quest has you enter a philosophical duel to the death with an undead philosopher. Normally, beating him requires either having the right origin tags or reading some specific books. However, an undead character can win the duel just by repeatedly pointing out the inherent impossibility of skeletons being being able to walk, talk, and think without any muscles, internal organs, vocal cords, or brains, recalling a similar conversation two skeletons had in Divine Divinity. And just like that game, it causes the hapless philosopher to explode in a Puff of Logic.
Nay-Theist: A number of the companions, namely Lohse and Fane, have a pretty dismal view of the Seven. By the end of the third act, all of them are absolutely contemptuous of the gods.
Nightmare Fetishist: Most people are rightly horrified and disgusted by Braccus Rex's legacy. The witch Radeka is one exception. If asked, she will gush about Braccus Rex's methods of torturing and killing people and admires the way he increased his own power by draining Source from others.
No 'Arc' in 'Archery': Zig zagged. With regular shots, your arrows do follow an arc, but with special shots (but not special arrows), like Marksman's Fang, the arrow goes in a perfectly straight line.
Non-Player Companion: Played with. Technically, there is the custom 'main' Player Character and their three companions, but unlike in most RPGs, all four can initiate and participate in conversations and make story decisions, like the Source Hunters in D:OS.
No Ontological Inertia: Zig-zagged:
Braccus Rex's curses are still active on Fort Joy.
Conjured beings will vanish if you kill their summoner.
Not Quite Dead: Alexandar survives your assassination attempt at the end of Act One.
Oh My Gods!: Characters regularly invoke the divine, the seven, and the void when something big happens or shit hits the fan (like Malady's 'For The love of the void' at the end of Act One), though there is one unusual invocation in-game, completely played for laughs.
What in the name of Lucian's prized pig is that?
One Stat to Rule Them All: While one should not ignore the stats like Strength, Finesse, or Intelligence, everyone should consider Wits, since it affects your initiative. Being able to act before most enemies makes a huge difference.
Possibly not true. Initiative will automatically be staggered between allies and enemies at the beginning of the fight. Beyond one character having a high initiative to start off, the rest will simply take turns with the enemies.
The Order: The Divine Magisters appear to be a religious order hell-bent on eradicating all Sourcerers (who aren't them).
Our Dwarves Are Different: The Dwarves of Rivellon are deeply divided between the upper and lower classes. Most of the dwarves you meet in-game fall into the category of homeless criminals and impoverished peasants or fabulously wealthy merchants and powerful nobles. Dwarven men tend to have beards, and the women tend to have elaborate hairstyles. Unusually compared to most depiction of Dwarves in a fantasy setting, the Dwarven nation is ruled by a Queen.
Our Elves Are Better: Elves are tall, lithe, elegant, beautiful, intelligent, long lived cannibals whose homeland was recently completely destroyed. Contrary to popular in-universe belief, though, most only eat those who are willing to be eaten after death, outside of special circumstances (eg starvation).
Overdrawn at the Blood Bank: Whacking each other around with physical weapons, bleeding effects, intentionally cutting yourself for some benefit, and eating body parts as small as a disembodied hand splashes around a patently ridiculous amount of blood, yet no matter how much blood they lose the characters seem unaffected until their HP hits zero.
Paper-Thin Disguise: Most NPCs will immediately attack any character they realize is undead. Fortunately, all it takes is a shirt, pants, and a hat to fool everyone around. Sure, you still have a grinning skull for a face.. but you're wearing a hat! At least until you enter combat and enemies start throwing weaponized healing spells at you.
Parabolic Power Curve: Inverted. While the number of attribute and Skill Points you gain per level is linear, your Hit Points and base weapon damage grow almost exponentially, so being even just one level above the enemies always represents a massive advantage.
Penal Colony: Fort Joy is a remote island off the coast of Rivellon that was once used by Braccus Rex as a testing ground for his newest dark magics. In the game, the Divine Magisters use it to corral all Sourcerers they can catch to better control them and to attempt to 'cure' them of the source using some of those old Braccus Rex magics they discovered on the island.
Permanently Missable Content: Anything you don't complete in the previous area will be lost, since you cannot backtrack, unlike in the previous game which had much fewer instances.
Pixel Hunt: Fortunately, you can hold the alt key to highlight loot, but even then, finding the Blackroot for Meistr Siva is a pain.
Point of No Return: Unlike the previous Original Sin game, once you complete an area (Fort Joy, Reaper's Coast, Nameless Isle, the Arx), you cannot return. The game does give you a warning once you hit each point that there's no turning back.
Pop Quiz: Cranley Huwbert will spring one on you if you have the Scholar tag and visit his home in Arx. His questions probe knowledge that's hidden damn deep within the readable lore books you've likely encountered in scores by then, but one of themnote is only mildly challenging, far less so if you're playing as the Red Prince or have been following his quest.
Prisoner's Dilemma: The whole game puts you under one. You and all your party members have been chosen by their affiliated gods to become the new Divine, but the catch is there can only be one Divine. To this end, the gods urge their respective champions to eventually betray their comrades, and your comrades in turn find more and more reasons to want to ascend. This ensures that an air of distrust hangs over the whole party's head even as they become Fire-Forged Friends.
Professional Killer: Quite a few of them, with two origins (Sebille and Ifan) having been assassins in their past, and the latter being on the island in part to kill Bishop Alexander.
Rage Against the Heavens: Lucian is intent on destroying the Seven Gods.
Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The party members are basically outcasts from all over Rivellon who band together for better chances of survival. In multiplayer, it is quite possible to drive this trope to its logical conclusion and play out all the in-fighting that should realistically come out of such a clash of personalities.
Reality Ensues: Steal things then attempt to sell them back to the shopkeeper? They'll immediately bust you. Kill them in self-defence when they attack you from being caught trying to pickpocket them and leave their dead bodies around? Guards will appear and start interrogating you. Manage to get away with stealing things? More guards will appear in the area and make it harder to rob people blind.
Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay: In many RP Gs, when pickpocketing, you can either only steal one specific item or the game will pause to let you select whatever you wish to steal at your leisure. Not here. NP Cs, both your mark and those around it, are constantly moving about in real time, meaning you have to be extremely quick and precise to not get discovered. One of the easiest ways to circumvent this problem? Use another of your characters to talk to the mark. They'll be distracted and have their back turned safely away as the pickpocket makes their move. This is precisely why most successful real-life pickpockets operate in groups.
Remember the New Guy?: Bishop Alexandar. He was never alluded to or even so much as mentioned in any other Divinity games, despite that he is the son of the Divine. (And you would think this would be an important thing to mention.) This is somewhat justified in that he doesn't live to the end of the game, thus justifying why the later chronological games wouldn't mention him.
Revive Kills Zombie: Healing spells do physical damage to undead, draining their physical armor (if they have any) or reducing their health (if they don't). Considering how common undead are in the first act, you can take advantage of this fact a lot. You do have to keep this in mind, though, if you have an undead party member, like Fane. Healing spells will damage them as well.
Right Through His Pants:
In the interlude between acts 2 and 3, you can have sex with another character in your party. At the end of the sex scene, you zoom out to find both characters are still wearing all their clothes.
Averted in the Optional Sexual Encounter with the Lizardkin courtesan in Driftwood: if you choose to peruse her.. services, your character will be stripped butt-naked while the screen fades to black and back again, with all of their gear and inventory put neatly into a bag container on the floor next to the bed. Which is kind of a problem, as a group of thugs will try to mug you the very next moment.
Rogue Protagonist: Lucian, the player character of Divine Divinity, is one of the bad guys here.
Save Scumming: Very common, especially if you are going to play a backstabber or sneaking type character.
The Secret of Long Pork Pies: The cook in the bar in Driftwood has been killing magisters and cooking them into her meaty stew, hence why Lodvik will not sell stew to an elf character as they'll be able to see the memories of a dead magister upon eating it. Not that it's hard to work around.
Sequence Breaking: The devs promise that even if you play competitive multiplayer (as in, actively hindering other players' quests), you will not be able to 'break' the main story.
That said, it's still possible to gain a quest item or even a quest objective before you are even told what it is. This enables the player to present the quest item right over to the person when they ask you to find it, but it has also sometimes caused quests to be bugged.
Set Bonus: There are two sets that provide bonuses as of Definitive Edition:
The Tyrant set in Act I. Each piece carries a curse, but the curses vanish when the entire set is worn.
The Faithful set in Act III. Each piece provides useful bonuses, and worn together they grant the wearer a permanent Blessing buff.
'Shaggy Dog' Story: In act 2, there is a quest to save a hen's eggs that were stolen by voidwoken. By the time you get there, only one is left which you take back to the hen who is at happy that at least one survived. If you come back later, all the chickens in the coop have been slaughtered, and only the just hatched chicken is alive and decides to follow you, calling you its mom. But it turns out that it was corrupted by the voidwoken and was the one who killed its mother and the other chickens and will attack you if it survives long enough. If you speak to the ghost of its mother, she will suggest taking him to his father, who she thinks can help him. However, once you do that, the rooster will simply suggest you kill the corrupted chick and put him out of his misery. The chick dies no matter what you do.
In act 1, you can build up a rapport with Butter in Fort Joy, and promise to meet up in Arx once you've both escaped. Two and a half acts later, when you finally reach Arx, Butter is nowhere to be found in the city. You can eventually stumble upon her on a small peninsula out by the shore.. dead, killed by a Voidwoken.
Shoot the Dog: True to the game's Black and Grey Morality, expect to do a lot of shady things for the greater good. Most notably, Act II requires you to seek local Sourcerers who can teach you how to channel more Source. The problem is that most of them are morally ambiguous at best, and their methods of training you involve doing some nasty things like killing all animals in the forest, obliterating multiple souls of the dead, or even making a pact with demons.
Shoulders of Doom: For some reason, many of the rogue and warrior armors (especially on elven women in the former case) have really massive, overelaborate shoulder pads on them.
Shout-Out:
One of the items you can find is the holy hand grenade. No word on if you have to count exactly to three to use it, however.
The female lizard prostitute at The Black Bull tavern is a reference to the Lusty Argonian Maid, and even refers to herself as 'just an innocent, sexy lizard maid' at one point.
In a remote corner of the Arx sewer system, you can find a bonfire with a sword in the flames.
Schrödinger's Player Character: Averted. The Origin characters, if not selected as player characters, form recruitable party members.
Shut Up, Hannibal!: Can be done a number of times throughout the game, though by far the best example in-game would be right after Braccus Rex reveals himself, there is a dialogue option that goes 'Tell him to SHUT HIS GODSDAMNED MOUTH!' (Caps theirs). It doesn't change anything except some dialogue if you succeed the persuasion check in question, but it's still good fun to yell it at him.
Sinking Ship Scenario: Shortly after the beginning of the game, the ship you're on is attacked by a kraken, forcing you to try to abandon ship. Regardless of whether you go back to save the other survivors at the end of this sequence, you don't quite make it to the lifeboat. Divine Intervention ends up saving you from a watery grave.
Skippable Boss: Some enemies have a 'boss' flag, but can be skipped either by talking them out of it, or giving them an item that will allow them to let you pass.
Slave Brand: Sebille starts with one on her cheek, allowing her master, who is nowhere to be found, to control her. Her number one priority is to have it removed.
Soul Jar: You can find several In Fort Joy and the surrounding island. Except for a few fake ones in one specific quest, each contains a soul, and you can either smash the soul jar to free said soul, absorb the soul inside, or just carry it around. Freeing or absorbing the soul kills the person who's soul was in it, though at least two directly ask you to free their souls, having been in And I Must Scream scenarios for the past few millennia, courtesy of Braccus Rex.
Soundtrack Dissonance: Lohse, the game's resident Spoony Bard, does indeed sing. What happens is that you can make her do this in the middle of a room filled with pools of blood and dead bodies.
Spell Crafting: In addition to the Item Crafting from the first game, the sequel allows you to combine effects of several default spells into dangerous new combos.
Split Screen: Like the Original Sin Enhanced Edition, the game allows several players to play at the same PC and automatically enters the split-screen mode when they steer their characters too far apart from each other (only when playing with controllers).
Stripperiffic: The female and male elves both wear armor that reveals a lot of skin.
Summon Magic: Of the Western variety. The Summoner archetype also relies on this.
Super-Fun Happy Thing of Doom: The Magisters ship Sourcerers to a dilapidated prison island where they live in squalor with no semblance of law or order. Eventually they take certain prisoners and drain them of Source, essentially turning into soulless husks. This facility is called 'Fort Joy'.
Static Role, Exchangeable Character: There are six possible origin stories, but you can only pick one of them for your main PC and three for your companions (assuming you don't just make a custom PC).
Teleportation: You find the red-and-blue pair of teleporter pyramids from the previous games in Dallis' quarters on Lady Vengeance and two more (a green and a yellow one) in dungeons on the Reaper Coast. You can also instantly travel to any waypoint you have discovered, but only within the current act.
Theme Naming: A rather subtle, meta example during character customization. Instead of a standard color palette for hair and skin, the game offers such exotic hues as almandine, black grape, still water, and harvestman. Cycling through these reveals that the color scheme for a particular race is generally based on a theme related to that race. The aristocratic Lizards have colors named after gemstones and scenery. Dwarven colors reflect a love of food and drink. Humans, adaptable and ubiquitous, have hair colors representative of their many different trades.
Threatening Shark: Zigzagged. In Reaper's Coast, you can find a shark flopping around on the beach. Killing it will reveal it ate a child, but if you talk to it with the Pet Pal talent, you'll find out it beached itself on purpose, knowing that would kill it, because it couldn't bear to be in the ocean where the Voidwoken lurked.
Thriving Ghost Town: The Arx, In-Universe one of the biggest cities in Rivelon, is surprisingly small.
Time Skip: 1,200 YEARS have passed since the events of Divinity: Original Sin.
Although the first Original Sin is technically the outlier here; Original Sin II takes place firmly in between the events of the first few games.*
Time-Travel Tense Trouble: While not literal time travellers, elven culture has a different view of time from everyone else, and communally share the memories of the dead. This means traditional elves will often speak exclusively in the present tense, although some learn past and future tenses to communicate with outsiders easier. Non-traditional elves also don't have this speech pattern.
Troll Bridge: There are a couple of these in Reaper's Coast. One Troll, Marg, charges a pittance while the other troll, Grog, charges an exorbitant price for crossing. Each Troll is upset by the practices of the competition and asks you to remove his business rival. Helping the seemingly friendlier Marg backfires since he moves on to his former rival's bridge and charges an even higher price for crossing since he's got a monopoly on the bridge toll business now. Helping Grog doesn't reduce his prices, but he does agree to teach a free skill to your character.
Turn-Based Combat: Like the first game, the sequel features tactical turn-based combat with initiative, action points, and free movement.
Unfinished Business: A number of ghosts, when spoken to, will give you a quest that, when completed, will let them move on. Others move on after you finish their unfinished business for them, like the children's ghosts in Roost's room after you kill him.
The Unfought: The God King, whose minions you fight throughout the entire game, is never confronted unless you choose to seal off all Source, and even then, all it does is prevent him from being able to influence the world.
The Un-Reveal: The cloaked figure is Braccus Rex, which can be revealed to you ahead of time by Taraquin or by a note in the Magisters' Barracks. Hilariously, the player can invoke this by saying 'This explains nothing.'
Useless Useful Spell: Most debuffs, especially taunts, charm, and madden. They are far more deadly when they go off on you than on the enemies. For one, in order to charm an enemy or taunt them, you gotta remove their magic and physical armour (Respectively) for it to go off. After that, it's guaranteed.. but the smart AI will remove it almost instantly, sometimes even before their turn is next. If the computer doesn't, the mind-controlled/addled enemies will proceed to do the bare minimum to actually act as if they were charmed/taunted/confused, whereas your characters will go all out on you if not eat half their inventory in one round.
Video Game Caring Potential:
Thanks to you, Birdie the Source Hound can be persuaded into getting it's life back on track.
You can find a few victims of Braccus Rex's curses, such as the fire slugs, the flaming skeleton, Gratania, and the pigs cursed to burn. The player can indeed free them from their torment and suffering, and you are rewarded for doing so.
Video Game Cruelty Potential:
In Act 2 you learn to literally suck the Source from living and dead alike. While doing it to living people will only cause them to lose Source (if they have any), using it on ghosts will cause their soul to be utterly annihilated. While at first this hardly seems worse than the actions of many of your enemies in the game, it becomes more and more apparent as you progress that it is in fact one of the worst fates one can suffer. Even spirits that have been tortured for an eternity, begging for it to end, change their minds and cry out in terror when you use it upon them. Most will beg and plead while others will simply stare at you with all the hatred they can muster, but there is no one in the game who will thank you for it. Interestingly, this can be tried on every single spirit you encounter. Apart from only one or two unimportant apparitions that will disappear when you try, none will be able to resist or fight it. With most important characters becoming spirits after they die, there's a lot of room for cruelty here. You can be the maniac who laughs as immortal generals, arch-demons and some of the other most powerful beings in the region find out what fearing for one's non-existence actually feels like. Even Alexander can be destroyed this way. The kicker? Allies that died fighting with you are just as vulnerable to it, taking senseless betrayal Up to Eleven.
And sure enough, you can attack random people to make their lives a living hell, like throwing furniture and objects at them or just outright killing them.
Video Game Cruelty Punishment:
Throw chairs at people and their attitude towards you will lower.
Opting to sacrifice every animal in a forest in Reaper's Coast to gain better mastery over Source will cause your hero to permanently lose the ability to speak to any animals afterward if you possessed the ability to do so already.note
Villain of Another Story:
Certain characters in the world will take on this role if you don't recruit the companion to whom they're a personal enemy of. They're still present and you can still deal with them if you so choose, but you won't have a personal stake against them and they're only tangentially related to the main quest at most. These characters include the Shadow Prince, who plays a big role in both Sebille and the Red Prince's story, Queen Justinia, who is Beast's nemesis, and the demon possessing Lohse.
You hear a lot about Damian, learn that he may still be at large, and you have to deal extensively with his organization, the Black Ring, but he otherwise plays no role in the plot. He's a threat that's dealt with in Beyond Divinity and Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga.
Well-Intentioned Extremist: The Magisters - at least those that aren't Ax-Crazy - are holding Sourcerers captive and 'curing' them because they genuinely believe it's the only way to stop the Void creatures from attacking.
Wham Episode: The Academy and the Arena of the One at the end of Act III. Here, you learn many unpleasant truths: the Voidwoken are the Eternals, the Gods are merely using their worshippers to feast on their Source, and Divinity is snatched away from you at the deciding moment by Dallis when she takes the Wellspring for herself. The now Source-starved gods turn on you in fury and desperation for more Source, and you end up killing them. And depending on what choices you made, you may have even lost the favor of some of your companions.
What the Hell, Hero?: There are certain decisions that your Companions will absolutely not stand for. Not only will they call you out on it, particularly spiteful player actions can cause your party members to leave the party. Permanently. And often violently.
If you choose to disregard Sebille's wishes on The Nameless Isle and proceed into the Academy, she will leave for good to try and enact her revenge on her own.
Ifan makes it unmistakably clear that he will not tolerate the use of Deathfog for any reason. Crossing the Moral Event Horizon in Arx will enrage him to the point that he immediately turns and attacks you.
Beast will not appreciate the player's choice to kill Lohar in Driftwood.
The Red Prince will be quite understandably upset if, at the grand finale of his personal quest, you choose death for his and Sadha's children.
Nearly every party member will despise you if you let the God King win (with only Fane approving on any level). Same with if you let Lohse's demon gain divinity (with Beast seeming neutral to it and Lohse fully possessed. If you are good friends, Red Prince is disgusted in you but still hopes that you may realize you've made a terrible mistake, in which case he promises he will take up arms with you again. Ifan will also despise you if you let Lucian win and destroy Sourcery, as he is sure Lucian will take advantage of this to manipulate the world.
What the Hell, Player?: If you opt to let the God King take over and enslave all of Rivellon, the ending will really hammer it home that you screwed up and did something very bad.
Narrator: Are you proud of all you achieved? Or are you ashamed of your sins?
Why Am I Ticking?: There is a spell that turns its target into a walking, talking bomb, most notably used by the cloaked figure in the battle after you steal the Lady Vengeance. You don't die when you explode, just release a bunch of fire in the area around you. Cue sudden Action Bomb running into a group of foes.
Won the War, Lost the Peace: In the ending where you give the power of the Source to everyone, the Voidwoken are defeated once and for all with the now empowered people of Rivellon. However, without a common foe or a single Divine to unite them, and the balance of power thrown out of whack, the nations swiftly turn on each other and the world descends into global warfare.
World of Jerkass: Everyone is a jerkass in Divinity: Original Sin II. The Magisters are jerks. The Black Ring are jerks. The dwarf queen is a jerk. The dwarf rebels are jerks. The Void is definitely a jerk. The gods are jerks. The Divine is a jerk. The elf Mother Tree is a jerk. The Sourcerers are jerks. Even most of the playable characters are jerks to one extent or another. While there may be individuals that have good intentions, every single organization you encounter is responsible for atrocities. The one exception to this is the Paladins where this is reversed, who are generally good but are (secretly) led by a monster. Their slaughter of the magisters based on a crime they didn't commit is technically morally wrong, but knowing the crimes the magisters absolutely did commit limits sympathy for them. Despite colorful game design, the world is actually really, really bleak.
Your Normal Is Our Taboo: Eating parts of the dead is an elven tradition meant to honor them and share their memories, as they can see the memories of those they eat (a uniquely elven trait). To everyone else, though, eating the dead is one serious taboo, hence a lot of the fantastic racism against elves.
You All Meet in a Cell: The game kicks off with a group of Sourcerers (including your player character) put on a boat and shipped to prison. The first half of the starting chapter of the game is escaping the fortress you are kept captive in.