At the top of the attention-seeking tree at this year’s Game Awards was Larian—the massive independent studio behind 2023’s most fantastic game, Baldur’s Gate 3—with their silly statue in the desert and then the most astonishingly unpleasant trailer for their next RPG project, Divinity. I couldn’t be more thrilled about the prospect of returning to Rivellon, but given there will be years left to wait for that, I’m instead delighted to notice that the previous game in that series, Divinity: Original Sin II, is now officially updated for Switch 2.
2017’s release of DOS2 was the moment Larian really established itself as one of the all-time leading RPG developers. The Divinity series began with the decent enough action-RPG Divine Divinity in 2002, followed by the decidedly mediocre Beyond Divinity in 2004, which was slammed for its crappy story and lack of originality. Things didn’t improve enormously in 2009 when Divinity II came out riddled with bugs, dragged down further by a poor Xbox 360 version, but they started to look up a year later when an improved and much-fixed re-release appeared and won people over. Things went quiet for a fair while, with the peculiar but successful decision to release a real-time strategy game set in the same universe in 2013, but it was in 2014 that Divinity: Original Sin appeared and blew everyone’s socks off.
Suddenly this studio known for somewhat generic action-RPGs appeared with an epic, old-school, party-based RPG that was delighting crowds. Its story was still its weaker area, but this was like a butterfly compared to Larian’s previous caterpillars. However, it would be three years later than every single element would come together into one glorious whole with the release of Divinity: Original Sin II, one of the all-time best RPGs ever released.
Funded by Kickstarter and released into Early Access in September 2016, a year’s development followed in communication with its community, and this seemed to be the magic ingredient Larian needed. That, and releasing a beefed-up, improved and lengthened Definitive Edition a year later.
The game was so good that it allowed hundreds of thousands of people to feel extremely smug when Baldur’s Gate 3 broke through to the wider mainstream in 2023 (following its own Early Access), knowing they were there before it was cool. But now, with the announcement of Larian’s next project Divinity, an awful lot of people are going to want to go back and fill in the gaps.
If you’re one of those people, you really don’t need to worry about anything before DOS. You can pick that up on PC, Xbox and PlayStation. But honestly, if I were you, I’d just dive straight into the sequel. It’s a standalone story, and it’s a superior game. It’s one of the superior games! And now it’s been given a sprucing up to shine on modern consoles, including the Switch 2.
I’m absolutely psyched for an excuse to play it all over again. I’m going to pick this up for Switch 2, and I’m going to remember to get the trait for speaking to animals from the very start. (Seriously, if you don’t, you’ll miss out on so much.)
