Divinity: Original Sin 2 is an exceptional RPG, but that doesn’t mean mods can’t make it even better. With its robust editing tools and intuitive Game Master mode, expect to see lots of tweaks, new features and entire campaigns in the future. We’ll be updating this list over time, but we’ve already found plenty of helpful mods. Here are the best Divinity: Original Sin 2 mods so far.
Free pet pal
Steam Workshop | Nexus
The pet pal talent is objectively and irrefutably the best ability in the game. Giving you the power to talk to critters, it’s an endless source of jokes, hints and hidden quests. By not picking it, you’d be missing out on many of the adventure’s greatest moments. This mod simply makes it a free ability, so you can use it straight away without being forced to pick between it and one of the many other handy talents. You’ll be able to blather away with Rivellon’s chatty animals to your heart’s content. An update to the mod also makes it affect everyone in your party, not just your character.
Expanded party size
Steam Workshop | Nexus
Original Sin 2’s companions are all worth bringing along on your journey, adding elaborate personal quests to your journal that span the game and providing plenty of roleplaying opportunities. Unfortunately, with the maximum party size of four, you’ll have to leave at least two of them behind. The expanded party size mod, not surprisingly, lets you take all of them with you. There are some minor UI and dialogue issues, but nothing game breaking. Combat will be a bit unbalanced, however, so you might want to consider a higher difficulty.
Infinite spirit vision
Spirit vision lets you strike up a conversation with ghosts, opening up new ways to solve quests. It’s basically pet pal with spectres. Unlike pet pal, however, it’s an ability you have to cast, and it doesn’t last forever. This makes it easy to forget that there could be several more characters floating about. Infinite spirit vision keeps it on all the time, effectively making it a passive ability. If you’re in an area that’s haunted, there’s no faffing required, and you’ll notice right away. The original mod has vanished from Steam and Nexus, but this newer one comes with an expanded radius so you’ll see ghosts that are further away.
Origin and racial skill books
Steam Workshop | Nexus
Several skills in Original Sin 2 are exclusive to specific races and character origins. It’s one of the few restrictions in what is an otherwise very flexible, classless system. The origin and racial skill books mod makes these skills unlockable in the same way as all the others by turning them into skill books. This includes pet summons, so you’ll be able to make a custom character that can control Ifan’s wolf and the Red Prince’s dragonling, but it doesn’t include the abilities granted by Fane’s Shapeshifter’s Mask. The skill books can be found in specific book shelves. The mod is no longer being updated as of December 2017.
Artificer and Bard skills
Steam Workshop | Nexus
This mod adds a whopping 50 new skills to the game. They can be mixed and matched with other skills or used to create Bard and Artificer characters. The Bard skills call to mind its D&D counterpart, revolving around buffing and debuffing, but the cherry on top is the weaponised lute you can get your hands on. Artificer skills are based around messing with items, like duplicating potions and cursing objects, handy both in and out of combat. Both of these skill sets are great for support characters.
Tempest skills
Spears are kind of weird in Original Sin 2. They’re finesse weapons, but unlike daggers and bows, they don’t have any skills specifically associated with them . Unless you download the Tempest skill pack, that is. This mod gives spears piercing damage, bypassing armour, and also introduces ten spear-based skills that run the gamut from simple jabs to summoning an intimidating barrage of spears.
Chronicles of Divinity map collection
Steam Workshop | Nexus
If you’d rather kick off a campaign without building every single map yourself, the Chronicles of Divinity map collection adds 12 new maps for GMs to throw into their games or tweak to their heart’s content. The collection includes a dingy pirate’s cove, an ancient Elven forest and a prison filled with lava. More maps are being added, including an alternate version of Fort Joy. The maps all come from the in-development Chronicles of Divinity mod, an unofficial expansion to the main game that introduces new classes, quests and the ability to sail around in your very own ship.
Combat sneak
Steam Workshop |Nexus
By reducing the AP cost of sneaking in the middle of a fight down to two, the combat sneak mod makes stealth a viable combat tactic. At 4 AP, it's normally too expensive to make it all that useful. You'll still need to watch out for archers who might spot you, of course, and you'll want to take advantage of cover and stay out of the red view radius while you're sneaking up on your targets or getting out of dangerous situations. This mod is particularly useful if you take the Guerilla perk, which increases damage by 40% when attacking from stealth.
JRavens GM Toolkit
Steam Workshop | Nexus
While the GM mode comes with a mountain of assets—everything from incidental props and window dressing to ships and castles— you can never have too many toys to play with when you're building your very own campaign. This toolkit expansion adds hundreds of items, both entirely new and stuff that Larian created but either didn't finish or left out of the final version. It also makes the maps larger and more customisable, letting you remove previously fixed elements like rocks and trees. Particularly handy are the empty maps that allow you to create custom areas for your campaign without the need to make them on the separate editor. The mod is still in development, but its creator has been fixing bugs. They recommend starting a new campaign rather than using it in a pre-existing one.
Void Knight
Steam Workshop | Nexus
Another new class mod, Void Knight introduces a slew of skills that combine martial and magical attacks that debuff any unfortunate enemies that get in their way. There are skills for strength-based warriors, including knockdowns, charges and leaps, but these are joined by magical abilities that summon shadows and transform the caster into a void dragon. It's a broad set of skills, but the void mark system lends the class some cohesion. Certain attacks apply a void mark on enemies, cursing them and reducing their resistances, and when the number of void marks on a target hits four it empowers that skill. You’ll be able to make a Void Knight in character creation, but you can also pick up the skills from a vendor in Fort Joy and, later, on the Lady Vengeance.
Crafting overhaul
Steam Workshop| Nexus
If you’ve found the perfect set of armour but hate the colour, or if you desperately need to craft a sword in the middle of the woods, then the crafting overhaul mod has you covered. Along with more than 1600 new crafting recipes and over 550 new items, it introduces armour dyes, unique craftable gear, fancy elemental weapons and extra conveniences like portable crafting stations and bags. And you’ll also be able to get your hands on the grisly corpse harvester: a weapon that lets you harvest parts from the corpses of your fallen enemies. And why would you need body parts? To craft new items, of course. I suspect Fane’s a big fan of this nasty piece of kit.
Update Night is a fortnightly column in which Rich McCormick revisits games to find out whether they’ve been changed for better or worse.
I’m being stalked by six-legged space demons, I’m on the run from the fantasy police, and my chosen deity is being slowed squeezed to death by a spectral tree, but my biggest problem in Divinity: Original Sin 2 is a talking squirrel.
Not just any talking squirrel. Sir Lora is — he says — a preeminent wizard, in addition to being the target of an order of fluffy animal knights hell-bent on hastening the end of the world with the coming of the “Great Acorn.” Lora certainly stands out, riding a skeletal cat and talking in a plummy accent, commenting occasionally (and derisively) on my quest to save the world. Sadly, for what he’s gained in arcane knowledge, he’s lost in common sense: Sir Lora is an absolute liability in dangerous situations.
Across 70-plus hours of play, Sir Lora made it his business to run gleefully through traps, to throw himself in front of fireballs, and to just generally die whenever the chance arose. I lost count of the times I finagled my way through a tricky, 20-minute long battle only to realise that Sir Lora had been incinerated on turn two. A more sensible person would have mourned quickly, put their head down, and carried on, aware that the recently refurbished world of Rivellon would be too dangerous for little talking squirrels, but despite the irritation, I just couldn’t do it to the little guy. Sir Lora is Cute and Fun and therefore must be protected, total lack of self-preservation instincts be damned.
Sir Lora comes as part of DOS 2’s Definitive Edition, released for free to owners of the base game earlier this month. Fortunately, he’s just about the only part of that upgrade that frustrates. Developers Larian Studios have used the opportunity to bring a bucketload of improvements to the already-very-good DOS 2, ranging from the technical — graphical upgrades mean that fire and other environmental effects are less taxing on hardware — to the more esoteric. That includes a revamped script that’s home to 100,000 new lines, according to Larian. A good proportion of these have been slotted into the game’s third and fourth acts, both of which were accused of being understaffed with NPCs and lower on quests than the areas of acts one and two. This was in part a comparison problem — the initial areas are ludicrously busy with people to talk to, jobs to complete, and battles to have, even for this kind of traditional RPG — but Larian have added whole new questlines anyway.
Rivellon is a world of Magisters and Black Rings, of battles between Voidwoken and Godwoken, with a history of Source and the Sourcerers who wield it. Your tolerance for this kind of made-up fantasy language will vary, but it’s only the last one that ever stuck in my craw — a bad pun that still makes my eye twitch every time I heard it. For the most part, the rejiggled script does do its best to explain these concepts early on, pitching a fight between the Stasi-esque Magisters who want to control the use of Source, the Sourcerers who find it awoken inside them, and the monstrous Voidwoken who are drawn to its use.
Tracking the story is easier now the game’s journal has been overhauled, but with so much going on, the script does still falter sometimes. As I reached the middle of act two, with a journal groaning with quest entries, I found that my chosen character — grizzled assassin Ifan Ben-Mezd — was commenting on people he hadn’t met and ideas I didn’t yet understand. It betrayed the RPG engine under the hood somewhat, the grinding gears of quest completion breaking down for a second, but these psychic comments only bent my immersion rather than breaking it.
Perhaps because I was always only a few seconds from another fully voiced conversation. Other RPGs have tried to sell their worlds with a few introductory spoken lines, relying on text once the pleasantries are out of the way. DOS 2 goes the whole way, giving voices to everyone from ghostly god to randy rabbit. Slightly weirdly, everyone seems to be British or Irish — Larian apparently share the widely held view that the American accent has no place in fantasyland — but there’s any enjoyably wide range of accents from the Isles in the in the English-language version of the game. Best of all, Larian seem to have actually hired people with the actual accent they’re trying to mimic, rather than finding someone to make a flailing attempt at Scottish-adjacent.
Some of these performances have also been re-recorded, in cases where the original tone or timbre needed some tweaking, but you might be hard-pressed to call out specific examples unless you’re fresh off the back of a previous playthrough. I couldn’t recall enough about specific line delivery to judge individual differences, but the majority of the performances are confident and convincing enough for the trad-fantasy world of Rivellon.
There are a few stumbles along the way. My Ifan Ben-Mezd came off more arch than grizzled, for example, audibly smirking more than you’d expect for a man who saw his life destroyed. Lohse, too, sounds like she’s got her tongue firmly in her cheek, but it makes more sense for her bard character, the jokes she makes the light against the shadow of a demon coiled around her soul. The majority of repeat speakers remain in the good-to-great tier, though. Walking skeleton Fane is just the right amount of detached for the last representative of a race of ancient eternal beings, but my favourite voice belongs to the Red Prince. He’s a hoity-toity lizard lord, and speaks with the kind of dripping sneer reserved for Bond villains and the truly posh.
Fights have been rebalanced across the entire campaign, too, part of Larian’s effort to smooth out some difficulty spikes in the first and second acts. Those spikes aren’t gone completely, though. Even on the standard “Classic” difficulty and with a well-specced party, I came up short against similarly leveled enemies on numerous occasions. A large pitched battle against a Magister group to close out the first act was a particular stumbling block for my gang — until, that was, I realised I could just hang back and wait for the fight’s second stage. From there, with a huge Voidwoken worm distracting my targets, I could take potshots at both sides, whittling them down until there were just stragglers left.
There are similarly sneaky ways around other tough fights, and their continued inclusion in this Definitive Edition feel like tacit nods from Larian to use the game’s systems against itself. I committed my whole party in a hand-to-mouth fight against a shark until I realised that the shark’s natural enemy wasn’t the sword, the fireball, or the crossbow — it was land. Teleporting the shark to the beach cut the battle short and left my squad both bloody and sheepish. Teleportation also solved a problem in the forest north of Driftwood. My party had been spotted by the floating form of a crucified witch, three levels above us and capable of wiping everyone with a single spell. We couldn’t beat her, but we didn’t need to — just down the road was a demonologist with a monster in a cage and a hotbar full of spells. Teleporting the witch in range meant I could hide behind his coattails as he made short work of the witch and bagged me some experience points in the process.
These tough fights are technically beatable without these kinds of tricks — DOS 2 has a lot of room for min-maxers looking to craft the perfect build — but I typically preferred to duck out and come back later. Battles run long on standard difficulty, and it’s hard to know how they’re going to go when you start them, in part thanks to the unpredictability of the game’s environmental system. Fire spells leave burning surfaces, rain deposits water that can be electrified, vaporised, or poisoned, oil can be laid down and then set alight. These effects linger on a battlefield, creating no-go areas where characters take continuous damage, get knocked down, become cursed, and so on.
This system allows for clever play, but it also fosters a sense of chaos that can undo all your carefully constructed plans, walking a line between madcap fun and frustration. It’s not always clear where a surface or cloud technically begins, for one, and too often I was forced to watch as the party member I thought I had placed safely on the edge of an oil slick got engulfed in flame, or electrified themselves and had to sit out a turn. There’s also no easy way to work out the potential range of a spell or ability until your chosen character is in position, meaning you have to move them with baby steps until they’re close enough to launch the attack. An undo button for movement could solve this problem, but it’s not an option, even on the new “Story” mode. Instead, I fell back on the crutch of quicksaving to test distances, a decision that slowed my progress down.
Still in place is the two-fold armour system, where attacks are resisted by either physical or magic armour that must be stripped before their health bar takes damage. Some complained at launch that this forced players down funnels of team specialisation, demanding that they focus only on one type of damage at the expense of the other, and locking off wilder builds in the process. That’s still partially true, but the variance in enemies in the Definitive Edition mean that rolling with a mixed damage party isn’t a terrible idea.
My Ifan, Fane, and Red Prince all dealt physical damage, but I played Lohse as a pure caster, most of her attacks good only for stripping magical armour. Rather than hamstringing my composition, this usually meant I had an ace in the hole against melee-centric enemies, most of whom were tanked up against physical attacks but whose flimsy magical armour would crumble at the first flaming dagger. She also had the vital role of keeping the rest of my party alive with their own armour buffs and healing spells, and for being my primo teleporter for place-changing shenanigans.
Having a healer remains a priority for most parties. Even on Classic difficulty, player characters go down easily once their armour is off, and you’ll need one of the game’s expensive resurrection scroll in order to bring them back to life. The new Story difficulty removes this hurdle, making resurrection an infinitely recastable spell, rather than a single-use scroll. It also boosts player damage and shrinks how hard enemies hit, making it — appropriately — the best option if you want fights to be over fast so you can get to the story.
Not that anyone will be ripping through Divinity: Original Sin 2. It was a hefty game before, and the Definitive Edition’s expansions to its third and fourth acts have only made it swole-er. Arx — the city that acts as the game’s last hub — has been stuffed with new and expanded quests and NPCs, making it feel closer to act two’s Driftwood in terms of general activity. Of these, the showstealer is a full battle against a tentacled kraken that’s made its home in the harbour, but smaller elements — like fellow lizards reacting appropriately to reptile posho the Red Prince — give the place extra life.
It’s because of this litany of changes — tracked here — that save games from the vanilla version won’t work with the Definitive Edition. It’s a frustration if you were some 50 hours into your story, but given the scope of the changes and the chance to try another party composition, it was a burden I could bear. Divinity: Original Sin 2 was bright and brilliant at launch, and its Definitive Edition has only made it bigger and better.
Pros
Cons
Key Specifications
I’m in flames. Again. This is going to be a very familiar situation over the course of my time with Divinity 2: Original Sin.
Almost a year after its retail release on PC, the sequel to Divinity: Original Sin, hailed as one of the 2017’s best RPGs, has come to consoles. It’s entering a small market. Traditionally, CRPGs with their top-down view and complex management systems have been PC games, as the C for “Computer” in the acronym implies. Much like many strategy titles, they are now carving out a console audience for themselves.
Even with games like Pillars of Eternity and Diablo 3 available on consoles, Divinity: Original Sin 2 adds an important game to a small selection of others just like it.
Set several thousand years after the first Divinity, the sequel throws you right into the action. Your character has been taken captive because they’re a versed wielder of the Source. The word used in the world of Rivellon for such people is “Sourcerer”, which should tell you what type of energy the Source is. (Anyone else notice a missed opportunity for a cooler name for people who use the Star Wars’ Force here?)
Using the Source apparently creates rifts in the Void, which separates the world of demons from Rivellon, letting demons called the Voidwoken run wild, and so all Sourcerers are outfitted with magic-suppressing collars and shipped off to Fort Joy, a prison colony.
Divinity Original Sin 2 Change Camera Angle Ps4
Related: Upcoming PS4 Games
Once escaped, the real story has only just begun, as your character has a vital role to play in restoring the barrier between worlds. D:OS 2 is essentially another take on the story of the Chosen One, and while confidently told, nothing revolutionary. It sometimes comes close to the world-building in Dragon Age but takes its plot down far more sprawling and complex paths.
Sprawling and complex are incidentally the two words that describe D:OS 2 best. This is mostly due to how closely the game plays by the rulebook of pen and paper role-playing games. If you’ve ever played Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder, you should feel at home with how your character’s attributes influence your progress and how battles are conducted.
You can either construct your character from scratch or use an origin hero. Origin characters represent each of the different races and classes of Rivellon and have their own backstory you can follow through several additional quests. The origin characters you don’t pick appear as possible party members, although you can’t invite everyone into your group – up to three of them can assist you in your adventure. If you like, you can play with up to three friends in online multiplayer, too, even though you’ll perhaps want to follow the old RPG rule to never split the party unless absolutely necessary.
Divinity: Original Sin 2 doesn’t feel like much of an adventure at first, mired on an island with nowhere to go. What Divinity 2 does, however, is to show how each goal can be broken down into a myriad of small tasks, and how many different ways there are to accomplish them. Total war rome 2 emperor edition resource map. Investing your time is very rewarding. Every NPC is different, and while some quests are RPG classics, the strength of the presentation alone hooked me to the point I wanted to explore every nook and cranny. There is so much of Rivellon to see, but you can also miss a lot unless you’re willing to backtrack and take a closer look.
Related: Upcoming Xbox One Games
Something as straight-forward as getting to know the population of Fort Joy and finding a way out can thus take up to 20 hours alone. Some of the quests you solve here will have consequences hours later in the game, which keeps it constantly fresh and surprising. The trade-off for such surprises is Divinity 2’s frustrating refusal to tell you much of anything.
Every quest in painted in very broad strokes – it’s how you stumble around looking for the right person to talk to or the right way to go that you end up with a lot of sidequests, which will all equally pull you in because they’re interestingly written and worth following up on to the point where you resurface after several hours, only to remember you’ve done nothing to further the main quest and are still not sure how.
Especially in the beginning, such freedom can seem overwhelming. Should I feed my elven companion a limb to unlock a dead person’s memories? Should I take a witness statement from a farm animal? Bribe someone into giving me information? Beg, borrow and steal? All options are valid, not all of them are right, and so getting used to many possibilities also means accepting failure.
Of course, you can also load a save and try again, but unless you want to do that many times, you should accept that Divinity: OS2 was not designed to let you win, but to force you to make decisions.
Related: Sekiro – Shadows Die Twice
Divinity Original Sin 2 Top Down View Of Life
This is true for the round-based combat, as well. Even at the easiest difficulty setting, encounters can be challenging, especially if your party is in a state where avoiding it altogether would’ve been the healthier option. Once in battle, every move costs AP, which need to be managed smartly. If you end your turn early, AP can transfer to the next round, but you will need all of them often between moving into the range of an enemy and then actually attacking.
Here the flames mentioned earlier come in. And the acid. And the electricity. This game makes fantastic use of the elements in a way that your typical RPG’s elemental magic never does since a lot of damage is done from afar. Dousing a group of adversaries in oil and setting them on fire is a viable strategy to victory for both sides, and so is putting out fires using the rain, electrifying puddles and so on.
The enemy AI is smart and often reacts by mirroring your actions so that winning often comes down to simply being faster. While being stronger is important, especially since an enemy just one or two levels above you can easily crush you,the influence of magical and physical amour is also not to be underestimated. Removing the armour and upholding your own adds another layer to battles. It’s another aspect in which Divinity: OS 2 feels difficult to grasp at first, even though battles actually never take all that long.
It’s a game you have to put a bit of time into to truly learn. Unfortunately, it’s the console UI that often hampers this. In the PC version, descriptive text (of which you’re going to read a lot) appears on hover, the hot bar is a long stretch across your screen. In the console version, every description only appears at a button press and takes up a lot of the screen. You have to switch characters often, but during quests as well as for inventory management, and on consoles this requires going into at least two different menus, if not more.
Related: Devil May Cry 5
The hotbar is split into three parts, which you have to navigate with your shoulder buttons. Add to that the old problem of playing a CRPG when you’re 30 feet away from your screen – you can zoom in, but Divinity was not designed to be looked at up close. It also zooms back out at any opportunity.
Verdict
Overlook these little niggles and Divinity: Original Sin 2 is the best RPG to make it to consoles since The Witcher 3. It’s vast, engaging and surprising. The willingness to accommodate many different types of play may have its drawbacks, but once you’ve understood the systems and given thought to what kind of hero you want to be, you can sink literally hundreds of hours into your life on Rivellon.
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