According to review aggregator Metacritic Divinity: Original Sin II received universal acclaim.The game’s plot takes place centuries after the first Divinity: Original Sin in a time of wars and religious persecution. Bishop Alexandar the Innocent declares all Sourcerers to be criminals, so a group of four Sourcerers embark on a quest to defeat him. Similar to Divinity: Original Sin, players can also play fully solo with only one character in their party.
Players are able to choose their character’s stats, race and origin story at the start of the game. They can recruit up to three companions to assist them. The companions can become playable characters in multiplayer modes. Up to three other players can compete or assist each other in multiplayer. The player can manipulate the environment to their advantage, with dialogue and quests differing depending on the character’s backstory. A skill crafting system allows players to mix and change their skills. A cover system is also featured and can be used in combat. The game also features a competitive multiplayer mode, where players are divided into two different teams and fight against each other in an arena map.
The game was first announced on 12 August 2015. It was announced that the game would launch on Kickstarter on August 26. The game reached its $500,000 goal on Kickstarter in less than 12 hours. Some of the stretch goals were reached before they were even announced. In the end, all of the available stretch goals were met, with over 2 million dollars collected in total. Larian announced that the company decided to head to Kickstarter again because they wanted the opinions from the community when developing the game, as well as allowing them to further expand the vision they originally had for this game. In February 2016, Larian announced that they had hired Borislav Slavov, who had previously led the soundtrack production of Crytek’s Crysis 3 and Ryse: Son of Rome, to compose the soundtrack for the game, replacing series composer, Kirill Pokrovsky, who died in 2015.
The game was released for early access for Microsoft Windows on 15 September 2016, and was fully released out of it on 14 September 2017. Despite a power outage in Ghent on the day of launch, the location of Larian’s studio, the game was successfully released and shortly had a concurrent player count of 75,000 within a few days, becoming one of the most played games on Steam.
