Larian Studios' acclaimed RPG Divinity: Original Sin is getting the board game treatment, and the project is doing the old Kickstarter dance right now.

Divinity: Original Sin - The Board Game, as it shall be known, is the work of Lynnvander Studios, a team whose portfolio predominantly features licensed titles including board game adaptation of Cowboy Bebop, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dragon Ball Z, and more.

Lynnvander's Divinity: Original Sin is described as a branching, narrative adventure for up to four players, "filled with tactical combat and meaningful choices". It's set in the world of Rivellon and, despite lacking the number at the end of its title, is specifically based on Divinity: Original Sin 2, albeit with new stories, side quests, skills, items, and monsters.

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Larian Studios has been gripped with the spirit of generosity once more, and has tossed another sack of free Divinity: Original Sin 2 DLC at all players on PC, Mac, Switch, PS4, and Xbox One.

This latest round of free DLC for the excellent RPG comes in the form of a new Gift Bag offering, and Larian is calling this one Order & Magic - following on from Beauty Salon and Song Of Nature - mostly because it focusses on, yes, order and magic.

Larian's latest Gift Bag includes six new features, and the developer notes that each one can be disabled or enabled individually, depending on whether you want to bask in their additive glory, or simply stick with the vanilla experience.

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"And now, as I still continued to step cautiously onward, there came thronging upon my recollection a thousand vague rumors of the horrors of Toledo. Of the dungeons there had been strange things narrated - fables I had always deemed them - but yet strange, and too ghastly to repeat, save in a whisper. Was I left to perish of starvation in this subterranean world of darkness; or what fate, perhaps even more fearful, awaited me?"

Edgar Allan Poe, The Pit and the Pendulum.

If you're playing a lot of games, there's no escaping the dusty depths of dungeons. They are everywhere; their twists and turns and nooks and crannies filled with monsters, traps and loot form the spine of countless games.

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Among the most celebrated RPGs to hit PC over the last few years, Divinity Original Sin 2 makes a surprise debut on Switch with a unique and compelling new feature: the ability to share saves with the Steam version of the game, effectively allowing you to take your game on the go, then return your progress back to the PC version. We've seen the rise of cross-play in the likes of Fortnite, but this again shows Switch coming into its own as a perfect complement to the home experience - but beyond the intriguing cross-save mechanic, can such a complex, challenging game transition effectively to Nintendo's console hybrid?

Of course, Divinity 2 is quintessentially a PC experience. From its lush visuals - a vibrant mix of forests and dungeons powered by developer Larian's in-house engine - down to its turn-based RPG mechanics, it's rich with fine detail. It's so dense with options, in fact, that I had doubts that a satisfying portable version would work at all. Beyond the usual constraints involving Switch's limited CPU and GPU power, there's also the matter of transitioning the core UI across. And yet, a port exists - and the developer has risen admirably to the challenge.

Yes, there are big cutbacks. It's unavoidable. A 39GB PC game install is pruned back to 11GB, after all. As ever though, it's a matter of which cutbacks can you accept to get the benefits - and Larian appears to have made smart choices. This is fundamentally a feature complete version of Divinity 2, right down to a four person multiplayer option, and the freedom to carve out your own path using your chosen character's abilities and traits. Visually speaking, the art direction comes through effectively despite a huge hit to resolution, whether playing portably or docked. Equally, the reduced frame-rate is something of a distraction. 30 frames per second is the target, and the game can drop a lot lower, but as a turn-based game, the impact isn't quite as dramatic as that sounds on paper.

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Five of the Best is going to be a series! Every Friday lunchtime, UK time, we're going to celebrate a different incidental detail from the world of games. The kind of thing we usually just WASD past, oblivious. But also the kind of thing which adds unforgettable flavour if done right.

Potions! We've been drinking them for years. In games I mean! I hope you haven't been knocking them back in real-life, they're bad for you. Imagine drinking something which alters your behaviour - how ridiculous! But potions we've been drinking for years. Red ones, blue ones... They're so common they've become a universal language. We don't even really see them any more. We just slosh them back when needed. Gulp!

But every so often, we do see them. Once in a while, a memorable potion pops up. Maybe it was a potion which typified a game for you - the port-key to remembering an adventure. A tonic from BioShock, perhaps. Or maybe it was one which made a character drastically more capable, or one which changed who - or what - we were. Can you think of any now? Good - hold onto that! Because I want your input below.

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It might not have been the best kept secret in the world but now it's ironclad official: Larian Studios, the creator of the superb Divinity: Original Sin role-playing games, is making Baldur's Gate 3.

It's been in development for a while - work was underway even before Divinity: Original Sin 2 shipped in September 2017 - but there's no word on when Baldur's Gate 3 will be released, and the only platforms Larian will talk about are PC and, wait for it, Google's stream-dream, Stadia.

I learnt this talking to Larian founder and creative director Swen Vincke earlier this week. But first, below, the Baldur's Gate 3 announcement trailer.

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Larian is teasing something with a 3 in it - and it looks like Baldur's Gate 3.

The Larian homepage has the number 3 emblazoned on it. The first thought this conjures is Divinity: Original Sin 3, although it feels a little early for that game. But someone had a dig around the code underpinning Larian's website, and it very much looks like this tease relates to Baldur's Gate 3 instead.

Twitter user kunkken went down the HTML rabbit hole and unearthed Baldur's Gate and Forgotten Realms licence holder Wizards of the Coast, which make this one something of a sure bet.

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Video game worlds are facades, and sometimes we catch a glimpse of what's beyond. Recently, while exploring one of the intricate levels of Dusk, I somehow managed to slip through the cracks and found myself on the other side of the invisible partition that upholds the illusion of coherent space. I'd entered a world of broken, gravity-defying architecture, and there in the middle of the level had opened a pit that revealed a vast grey void beneath my feet. Close by, there was an exasperated message on the ground: "YOU AREN'T SUPPOSED TO BE HERE, GO AWAY."

Anyone who's spent a lot of time playing games will have their own stories of discovering the cordoned-off spaces behind spaces. We know the strange feeling of clipping through the ground only to plunge into a bottomless void while the level we've been exploring recedes into the distant ether above us; a tiny island unto itself, a dwindling speck suspended in the great digital void.

These are accidents and glitches, but then again, if we're not supposed to gaze into the abyss, then why is the void such a popular trope in games? It seems any self-respecting fantasy game offers its players a tour of the void: There's the Void of the Dishonored games (read more about it here), the Fade of the Dragon Age series, the Realm Between Realms of God of War (2018). Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire also dip their toes into the great nothingness. These are metaphysical spaces inhabited by or associated with gods and spirits, the afterlife, and, most significant of all, origins and acts of creation. They are displaced and timeless, existing in between or beyond conventional space-time, and are only accessible through special pathways that pierce the veil: dreams, visions, rituals, death or magic.

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There are free treats coming to Divinity: Original Sin 2 in the shape of 'gift bags'.

These are not to be mistaken for loot boxes, developer Larian pointed out, "which are hard, ostensibly containing loot". "Gift bags are soft and contain gifts."

Each gift bag will cost nothing and be dropped into the game "periodically" on all three platforms: PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

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Larian visited the Eurogamer office to show me the new and improved Definitive Edition of Divinity: Original Sin 2 last week. To do this the developer ran two versions of the game - old and new - side by side to highlight the differences. On one screen we had DOS2 as it exists now, played on a gaming laptop; and on the other screen we had the Definitive Edition of DOS2 played on an Xbox One X dev kit. The difference was striking.

It wasn't a Digital Foundry-style controlled test, with the laptop fans wheezing and picture coming through an older 1080p screen, but it got the point across. The Xbox One X version, running in 4K resolution and with high dynamic range enabled, was brighter, crisper and more vibrant. It was smoother and more responsive too, and will apparently run native 4K30 on Xbox One X, and dynamic checkerboard 4K30 on PS4 Pro.

The reasons for the differences run deeper than hardware. The physics engine has been changed for the Definitive Edition and numerous improvements have been made, making the game up to four times faster in certain areas. The fire effect, for example - which spreads across a lot of environments a lot of the time - has been changed for one more economical and arguably better looking too. It's a similar story for many of the game's 'surfaces', and textures have been improved as well.

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