The PC Gamer Game of the Year Awards are selected by our global team. We all throw in our six nominations for candidates, then get together on a long call to figure out our shortlist. We then pick award titles that suit each game—so you'll see a different set of awards this year compared to previous years. Here are all of the games that came up during the shortlisting process. 

We'll be updating this list with a new award and personal pick from a PCG staff member every day until the end of December. 

The Awards

Game of the Year 2017: Divinity: Original Sin 2Best Expansion: XCOM 2: War of the ChosenBest Strategy Game: Total War: Warhammer 2Best Platformer: Hollow KnightBreakout Game: PlayerUnknown's BattlegroundsBest Setting: Tacoma

Personal picks

These games didn't make the cut for the main awards, but they're still worth highlighting in their own right. Each of our staff has picked one favorite game and produced a longer piece about why they felt it was significant in 2017. We'll be posting new picks throughout the rest of December along with the primary awards above.

Andy Kelly: Resident Evil 7Steven Messner: Final Fantasy XIV: StormbloodSamuel Roberts: Stories UntoldTom Senior: Diablo 3: Rise of the NecromancerWes Fenlon: UnexploredJoe Donnelly: Football Manager 2018

Past awards

Game of the Year Awards 2016Game of the Year Awards 2015Game of the Year Awards 2014Game of the Year Awards 2013

Divinity: Original Sin 2 is PC Gamer's overall Game of the Year for 2017, as voted for by our global editorial team. The following commentary comes from the game's biggest supporters on staff. Look out for the rest of our awards and staff personal picks at our GOTY hub as we head towards the end of December.

Phil Savage: Was there ever any doubt? Divinity: Original Sin 2 was the obvious Game of the Year choice. It's a massive, sprawling RPG for one thing. But more than that, it embraces the chaotic, player-driven nature of all of PC Gamer's GOTY picks for the last few years. Original Sin 2's element-focused combat system is a revelation, giving you scope for wildly inventive, unpredictable solutions. Its fights are a test of wit, and often result in bewildering chain reactions. Whether you're electrifying someone's blood, or combining spells to kill a boss by doing an absurd amount of damage to yourself, experimentation is not only allowed, but rewarded.

Steven Messner: It’s hard to overstate just how robust the combat is in Original Sin 2 and how beautifully it weaves into your personal power fantasy. By act two, my melee tank healed himself by standing in the blood of his enemies, a tactic so ruthless that I was cackling with each drop of blood that was spilled. That’s just one of the dastardly tactics I use to my advantage. My rogue uses a spell that inflicts bleeding damage with each step an enemy takes and then turns them into literal chickens that flee combat. With dozens and dozens of combinations like these just waiting to be discovered, Original Sin 2 is like a theory crafter's dream come true.

Joe Donnelly: It took me a full ten hours to leave Divinity: Original Sin 2's opening area. In that time I murdered a man, lied to his grieving daughter to obtain a key item, learned how to teleport, got double crossed, and pissed everyone else off I spoke to. It's so big and so much fun. 

Jody Macgregor: I'll scrub cheekbone sliders back and forth for fun but my favorite character creation system is actually just "choose one of these cool characters." Original Sin 2 gives you both options, but its origin characters are so great I can't imagine not picking one. (Other games should steal the way they explain their own backstories out loud so you hear which voice actors sound best.) 

After a solid 30 minutes of deliberation I chose to play as Beast, a dwarf who is the former leader of a failed rebellion, who is also a pirate captain with an emotional attachment to his bicorne hat, who is named Fran. Every one of the origin characters is just as layered, and thank god you can take three of them with you as companions so that I didn't have to leave behind the bard possessed by a demon, or the exiled prince who is also a big red lizard, or Fane.

It's a long game that's hard to finish even once, and yet during every conversation with a ghost chicken or fight where I caught fire again, I was wondering how my next character would handle it.

Tyler Wilde: Jody's right. I somewhat regret my custom character, but the good news is that outside of inner-party chatter, you can play Original Sin 2 'as' one of the origin characters, simply by initiating dialogue with them instead of with your character. I love Fane, an ancient undead fellow who's trying to figure out what happened to his kind, and who regards the fleshy inhabitants of the world as mundane and mostly useless, interesting only in the way they resemble his skeleton race (except with a bunch of unnecessary organs and gross skin).

My favorite thing about Original Sin 2, though, is that it shipped with extensive mod tools. The whole engine is available. You can create levels, script NPCs, add items and spells. You could build Original Sin 3 if you wanted to. They're kind of buggy (as of right now, I have a really hard time rotating the camera) but hopefully future updates will help. 

Wes Fenlon: Straight up: there's never been an RPG with a story or characters this interesting that you can play co-op with four players. Divinity executes on this promise so flawlessly it just feels natural. Of course you can listen in to conversations your friends are having to follow the story. Of course you can all wander around a massive map, seamlessly looting and questing and shopping and fighting. Of course combat becomes a glorious mess of saving each other with cool abilities and accidentally nuking each other in equal measure. Divinity just wouldn't be the best co-op RPG ever made if you couldn't.

I played my entire run of D:OS2 with a pair of friends, and it really changed how we perceived the adventure, and especially our characters. Solo, I'd be controlling an entire party, following their stories and weighing the experience of the group above all. But we're all invested in our own stories. Lohse is my character, and I care about the resolution of her battle with an inner demon more than I care about Beast's vendetta against the dwarven crown. I also like that I don't see and do everything my friends do when we're apart. There's so much mystery left in the world, and I know that next time I play, whether I'm controlling a whole party or simply a different character, it'll practically be a whole new journey.

For more Divinity: Original Sin 2 coverage, check out our review and our best stories from playing the game. 

Whether or not Divinity: Original Sin 2 is up there with the greatest RPGs of all time is a matter of debate. What's not up for discussion is that it is a big hit for developer Larian Studios. 

That number comes not much more than two months after the game was released. For such an unabashedly old-school RPG, that's a remarkable achievement. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of those sales came by way of Steam: SteamSpy indicates 921,000 owners on the platform, leaving around—probably a little under—ten percent for GOG.

Lots of people are still playing it, too: Today's peak concurrent player count topped 14,000, keeping it well in the middle of the Steam Top 100 pack.

It will surely come as no surprise that Divinity: Original Sin 2 is in the running for our coveted Game of the Year award for 2017. Get a sense for why from these fantastic, totally true tales of surprises, mishaps, and exploding pigs. 

It’s no secret that from the start, the Divinity series has had its sights set on respectfully dethroning Ultima 7. "Everything out there after Ultima 7 never did it as good as Ultima 7," Larian founder Swen Vincke once said. It's for RPGs what The Secret Of Monkey Island is to adventures, what Doom is to shooters, and what Shakespeare is to English literature, and not just because it's the last time a game was able to get away with 'thou', 'doth' and the rest of ye olde English without the world justifiably taking yonder piss with a catheter.

It hasn't been an easy road. The first Divinity game suffered from trying to do Ultima 7 without the lessons of first making Ultima 1-6. The passion was there, but the time wasn't right. Similarly, later games soon set a trend of having phenomenal ideas—psychic powers, turning into a dragon, being soul-bonded with a death knight and so on—but without the budget or RPG foundations to really make them sing.

With Divinity: Original Sin though, Larian finally pulled it off, gambling everything on a game that nearly bankrupted them. The multiplayer-first design meant that every system had to be rock-solid, Kickstarter offered both the money and the need to build a reasonable framework, and in those limits, the company's passion and talent finally found the home that it deserved. Fast-forward, and Divinity: Original Sin 2 is even better, tightening up the storytelling, greatly improving the characters and questing, and still overflowing with ideas and humour, without being quite as goofy as its predecessor, and offering a less convoluted but far stronger plot.

In short, I absolutely love Divinity: Original Sin 2. It's one of my favourite RPGs in years, and when I put that in the context of having not liked the original Divine Divinity much at all, that's only to reinforce how glad I am that Larian kept pushing forwards, kept the faith, kept evolving, and finally created a sequel that unquestionably carries the spirit of Ultima while still having its own very different, distinct soul. On any terms, it's an absolute triumph.

But speaking as an old-school RPG fan, how goes its quest to beat it? Is it finally time to stop bringing up the 90s classic in every conversation and move on?

A legend returns

I know it's an unfair comparison, because it’s not really Ultima 7 the Divinity series is going up against, but the legend of Ultima 7—the Platonic ideal of the open world RPG that was established back in 1992. I was thirteen when I not simply played it but got blown away by it. That huge open world. That freedom. The fact that you could bake bread and eat it. It was both a design and technical milestone in an era where 256 colours were still a novelty. The villain could talk to you. In real speech! You could blow up the world with Armageddon!

Never mind that games like Minecraft have long since surpassed its scripted, largely sign-posted crafting, or that the combat was dreadful, or that the world isn’t actually THAT big if you take a step back. No game will never supplant my love of Ultima 7 because no matter how much tech or how much brilliance you put it in it, it will never fill my soul with the magic that those chunky VGA sprites and a few speech files did back then. The same goes for many longtime RPG players, who hold Ultima 7 in high esteem - perhaps even Vincke himself. And no, you'll never experience that same feeling now, if you play Ultima 7 in a world with the likes of Planescape: Torment and Skyrim and Dragon Age. You missed it. Sorry.

At the same time, Ultima 7 doesn’t just cast a shadow. In being that illusion of a perfect RPG, even if in practice it’s far from it, it offers a great guiding light for Divinity as a whole—highlighting both how far it’s come, and where the issues still are. Again, it’s come a hell of a long way. As much as I hate to say it, Divinity: Original Sin 2… deep breath… is a better game than Ultima 7 in pretty much every way, from the depth of its world simulation to its raw mechanics and combat and character building. Certainly, as a standalone adventure.

But what more might it be? What else has Ultima 7 to teach?

Pathfinder

Let’s start with the world. By far the worst part of both D:OS and D:OS 2’s design is that they pretend to be an open world, but they’re not. In practice, there’s a strict path that you’re meant to follow around the world. Trouble is, it’s unmarked, usually makes little logical sense, and is managed by the fact that enemies with even a slight level distance on you are notably more powerful and will typically squish you flat.

To use Reaper’s Coast as an example, you start on a main road leading north, with a town off to the west. Despite the map pushing you onwards and upwards, exploring that way only going to lead to your death. The design actually wants you to go into down and poke around there. While less problematic than some of D:OS’ pathing, this fights against both your natural inclination to explore, and often the drive of your character’s own quest at that, and the fact that the goal of the map is open in a similar way as Baldur’s Gate 2’s second chapter—to hook up with Sourcerers and learn from them, in essentially isolated modules that feel like you should have more freedom than you do.

Let’s compare to Ultima 7. One of the big lies of Ultima 7 is that it’s an open world game. This is true to a point, in that you can go almost anywhere, but in practice the intended journey around it is linear (this is why when you die, you return to the same place to be told where the people you’re chasing have gone next, to put you back on the correct course). The map itself is then typically controlled not by beef-gate monsters and impossible fights but environmental hazards like poison swamps and locations it’s pretty clear you’re not equipped for. It’s a far more naturalistic approach than just throwing in some assassins or similar to block the way, especially when the scenery itself can convey the hint that you’re getting out of your depth.

Whether Divinity wants to convey the feel of an open world or not, this is something that needs improving next game. This doesn’t mean dragging the player around by the ears or cutting out exploration, just better guidance. More clearly name checking the next camp they have to go to. Having extra NPCs and encounters point them in the right direction, and making the map progression feel like encountering natural resistance instead of punishment for not reading the map designer’s mind. The guards in Reaper’s Coast who warn you away from one of the local evil Sourcerers are a great example of D:OS2 addr—you’re welcome to ignore them and head off into a spooky part of the map anyway, but it’s on your own head.

The old school vs. the new order

On a similar level, and this isn’t unique to Divinity by any stretch, D:OS2 features a lot of old school moments where the designer’s intent simply isn’t clear and intuition doesn’t cut it. Many older fans chafe at modern niceties like flags on maps and being led through every step of a quest, and that’s fine. The catch is that you can’t simply remove them without having something to take their place, especially with a map and suite of skills as big as D:OS2’s. I remember not being able to find a location I ‘knew’ was on a creepy island because I was failing a stat check, despite it being on my main character’s critical path. Later, almost at the end of the game, being Mr. Clever about one puzzle solution involving a judgemental statue meant never even speaking to the character who was meant to tell me how to get past a later puzzle. Cue a vast amount of frustration and resorting to Google.

Now, Ultima 7 offered no in-game quest log at all. True. It was the era where you were expected to have a notebook on standby. However, it was good at directing players to the next location, and its puzzles and situations weren’t typically that complicated when you arrived. For all the baking bread talk and world simulation going on, dungeons tended to be about basic stuff like pressure plates and dragging things onto things versus pen-and-paper style adventure modules.

When you’ve got as many characters and subquests as a modern narrative game, a notepad doesn’t necessarily cut it. Modern narrative driven RPGs offer far more tools and possibilities than the Avatar and friends had, and that player feedback is important. It’s not a question of dumbing down, but designing so that the player can better intuit what the designer wants. After all, in real life if someone asked you to deliver a package, you could at least outright say “OK. Where to, exactly?"

What we fight for

Most of this is of course implementation rather than design philosophy per se, and again, D:OS2 is a massive jump over its predecessor. The same applies to the story. It’s a wonderfully simple concept where all your party members are competing to become the next Divine, against a background of wider political and metaphysical messing around. It’s a fantastic RPG story because it’s simple enough to grasp and appreciate the implications of, wide enough to allow more or less any smaller story within its confines, and feels both epic and personal. It’s not as complex as, say, Planescape Torment, but it works in a similar way.

So why does Ultima 7 still feel like it has an edge? A couple of reasons. The first is that its world of Britannia is a place that doesn’t simply have lore, but history. You’ve visited it as the same character, and adventured with the same Companions, and seen the same towns many times over. It’s like a virtual home away from home, kept interesting by the constant changes to the status quo in each game—in Ultima 7, the biggest being that you’ve been gone for 200 years and life has moved on without you. You see it as you explore, both in the stories you hear and the quests you complete, and in the incidental details as people go to work, go to bed, head to the local tavern, and otherwise show off all kinds of NPC scheduling fun that’s all the more incredible for how hard that stuff is for games even twenty-five years later.

That sense of life would of course be wonderful to see in Divinity. However, even excluding it and focusing on the sense of Home that Ultima 7 offered, it’s not hard to see how the series has squandered its potential somewhat and doesn’t have the same foundation. The big reason is that despite all the games being set in the world of Rivellon and having a few recurring characters, each game time-jumps and focuses on completely different areas each time. They’re connected by lore, yes, but that’s not the same visceral sense of returning to a beloved world that you get in long running series like, say, Tex Murphy’s Chandler Avenue and Monkey Island’s corner of the Caribbean, nor are there many familiar characters there to greet you and feel like old friends who are glad to see you back.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with this approach per se, but it does mean that the familiar tends to be mechanical, like the Pet Pal perk, or mythological like its pantheon of gods, versus recurring characters to deal with on a more human level, like Bracchus Rex, Damien and of course Lucian the Divine.

The second is that while their success has arguably been overly glorified over the years, the Ultima games from U4 onwards were overtly About Something in a way that very few RPGs manage to be. Ultima 4 of course was about becoming a hero, Ultima 5 about the misapplication of justice, Ultima 6 about racism and tolerance, Ultima 7 about corruption and the power of religion, and Ultima 8 about a hero forced into a position of doing evil for the sake of the greater good.

(We don’t talk about Ultima 9).

Specifically, Ultima 7 features persuasive moral philosophy and shows how it can be perverted to promote selfishness and obedience to a cause, the much denied but blatant fact that the villains are a pastiche of Scientology, and smaller stories involving many important themes of the time such as drugs and the growing violence of the media, as seen by the fact that your first encounter is a bloody sacrificial murder site full of assorted giblets.

This isn’t to call out Divinity: Original Sin 2 for not following the same storytelling path. Both its main story and its character based plotlines are excellent. It is however a big part of Ultima’s core design philosophy—that RPGs can be about more than gods and monsters and saving the world. Though nothing else has truly surpassed it, bits of that have wormed their way into many RPGs since, to make them more than the sum of their adventures. Planescape has ‘What can change the nature of a man?’, while Fallout followed both its catchphrase ‘War never changes’ and the unspoken ‘even as the world does’ in developing its world.

These are the touches that help a story really resonate; to sink their claws in and stick with you as meaningful long after the credits rolled. That resonance is also a big reason why other classic RPGs like Might and Magic and Gold Box games may be beloved by fans, but the likes of Ultima and Wasteland remain nothing short of legendary decades after their time.

A legacy within reach

The Divinity series isn’t quite at that level yet. But as I said at the start, that’s not intended as a criticism—talking in these terms, and about that possibility, is intended as a huge compliment. Nothing has ever gotten closer to beating Ultima 7 at its own game, and that includes its sequels. To accomplish that and still have time for ideas as great as Pet Pal, talking to ghosts, and a campaign that works just as well if you play it straight or if you team up with friends and murder everyone Diablo-style is nothing short of incredible.

The fact that there’s still inspiration to be taken from the classics is honestly exciting, especially after seeing the love and commitment in every part of the jump between D:OS and D:OS2. Maybe the next Divinity: Original Sin will finally push over the edge, or maybe the company will go in a different direction entirely—to take the vast amount learned so far and create something that’s entirely their own, as, say, Troika did with Vampire: Bloodlines, Toby Fox did with Undertale and BioWare did with, ooh, let’s say 2.9 Mass Effects.

But that’s for tomorrow. For now, let’s stick with what really matters. Whether Ultima 7 can ever officially be ‘beaten’ or not, nobody has come half as close as Divinity: Original Sin 2. It’s a great RPG on its own terms. It does the greatest RPG of all time proud. Most of all though, it should give RPG fans everywhere reason to be excited about the future of both the Divinity series, and the as-yet unknown promise of anything else Larian might have bubbling away over in its labs. Anyone else’s fingers crossed for urban fantasy?

Larian Studios, the maker of the outstanding fantasy RPG Divinity: Original Sin 2, took a moment today to tease something on Twitter. Something "wicked."

And that's it—no follow-ups, and no response to replies. Naturally, speculation abounds. Something wicked—a wicked witch, which sounds a lot like the Switch? Possibly, although I'm not sure what an apple would have to do with it. (Not that apples and witches don't have a sordid history, but that's a different story altogether.) Perhaps a Mac version is coming? Or it's something to do with Ray Bradbury? That seems even less likely. The man's been dead for years.

It's possible that Larian is working on a Halloween event of some sort, those are quite popular at this time of year. But you can already play the game as a literal skeleton, so how they'd Halloween that up even further, I couldn't even begin to guess. Or maybe it's just an expansion, or some other kind of DLC. I reached out to a studio rep for more information, but alas, it was not forthcoming.    

When we do find out what's going on, we'll let you know. In the meantime, enjoy some of our best Divinity: Original Sin 2 stories, including Wes' tale about making a pig explode and the time Fraser killed a guy who was just trying to help. 

We're still playing Divinity: Original Sin 2, and we're still loving it—it even featured prominently in our preliminary GOTY discussions. One of the things we love about it is its 'brute force' style of RPG design: fill the world with items and spells and NPCs and quests and scripts and things that you can do that theoretically all work together, and then watch the virtual dungeon master try its best to keep up. For every time that approach breaks something, it builds a bizarre personal story that makes up for it and then some.

Below are a few of our favorite anecdotes from our playthroughs of Divinity: Original Sin 2—times when we tried something, and whether it worked or didn't, we wouldn't change a thing. Minor spoilers are ahead (though nothing about the main story). 

If you had something great happen in Original Sin 2 as well—which if you've played enough is bound to be the case—feel free to share your best story in the comments. If we get enough, we'll compile them into a new article next week.

Richard Cobbett: Fun with Teleportation 

Easily my favourite thing about Divinity’s combat is that it’s consistent. Sure, occasionally you find enemies with elemental resistances and clever tricks, but it’s brave enough to avoid just outright letting enemies no-sell your best attacks. Enter a certain troll. Trolls are a real pain because every turn they regenerate, and my team wasn’t able to hand out quite enough pain to beat this guy and access the important, plot-critical cave behind him. Ah, but what’s that over there? A small river of lava? Fun fact—lava is the BFG of elements. And so, instead of beating him down, I just had one of my guys teleport his ass into fiery oblivion. Easy.

These semi-cheats are all the better because the game doesn’t draw them to your attention. That telekinesis spell (or glove, from the first island) never stops being useful, and nor does its partner, good old Netherswap. You can break so much with it, and the game’s happy—sometimes even calling you out on it. Along with combat, there’s a bit where… let’s just say you’re in a race. I won’t spoil the context, but it’s important. I quickly realised that my main girl Lohse wasn’t going to win… but there was nothing stopping me rushing to a good vantage point, waiting for someone else to almost reach the end, and casually swap places.

Yeah, I may be a bad loser. But I’m a Lohse-y winner.

Tyler Wilde: Soul searching 

I'm facing off against three undead cranks somewhere beneath the surface of Fort Joy, disappointed I couldn't talk my way out of the fight. But there's been a nagging feeling of déjà vu leading up to the encounter: hints about a cave I already visited. This is one of those great moments in Original Sin 2 where you know more than the NPCs think you know, where their player-guiding hints are actually revealing their naivety. You think I didn't click on everything, including a secret cave on the coast, days ago? You think I ran away from a fight I was underleveled for?

The grumpy skeletons, at least before the fight, were trying to lead me toward a weapon stash I already conquered. And in that dungeon's final room, I had found a bunch of soul jars—for those who haven't played D:OS2, jars which literally contain the trapped souls of the undead. After a little back-and-forth between my companions about whether or not I should smash the jars and release their souls, I decided to stuff them into my backpack. And then I forgot about them.

Back in the present fight, I go a few clueless rounds with the skeletons before realizing my luck. These are the same damn ghouls whose names are inscribed on the jars rattling around in my inventory. What I expected to be an unremarkable battle turned out to be one of the best ways I've ever won a fight in an RPG: by chucking my opponents' own souls at them. Each time I fished a jar out of my bottomless backpack and smashed it, they wailed word of thanks as their spirit ascended and their bones clattered. Not only was it an easy win, I was doing something nice—aw.

Wes Fenlon: That time I made a poor pig explode 

I really didn't mean to, honest. Divinity: Original Sin 2 has a pretty strange world: there are alligators that teleport, ancient skeletons that walk around without souls, and pigs that are eternally on fire. The pigs, it turns out, were actually people at one point, but they were turned into pigs as a curse and then double-cursed by being set on never ending fire, just to rub it in. When I learned a powerful Source spell to bless things, I was excited to try it out on those twice-damned pigs, and sure enough, I was able to put their fires out. Believe it or not, this is actually the start of a quest chain in Original Sin 2.

As you can probably guess, I didn't exactly follow that quest all the way to the end. Things were looking pretty good at first, though. Fires: doused. Pigs: talked to, with the Red Prince, my regal companion who can talk to animals. One particular pig was eager to remove the curse and become human again, so I directed her to a shrine of the goddess Amadia, where a pool of water would surely cleanse her of the remaining curse. Except… well, I'd already kind of pissed off Amadia by telling her about the demon living inside me and confessing some of the terrible things I'd done. Instead of blessing the pool, Amadia decided to turn it into blood. Blood that didn't really cure my pig friend, so much as cause her to spontaneously combust.

I still feel guilty about it, but I love how willing Original Sin 2 is to let you mess up, and how many of its quests let you succeed or mess up in totally different ways.

Bonus: here's an even better story I told on the podcast, about a demon erupting from my cursed helmet in the middle of a fight and making things difficult.

Fraser Brown: Beating up buddies 

We had only just arrived in the Fort Joy camp, the first act’s hub, when my co-op partner and I started having serious differences of opinion. Some goons were trying to exploit some of the prisoners, demanding money for their protection racket, and I assumed we’d teach them a lesson. But no, not on my buddy’s watch. Before I knew it, we were in a fight with the very prisoners I wanted to help. 

But here’s the thing about Divinity: Original Sin 2’s co-op—it’s not all about playing nicely with friends. Indeed, you’re ultimately their competition. So if you don’t like the cut of their jib, or maybe you want to express your extreme disappointment at their life choices, you can let them know with violence. 

So as my pal laid into this innocent Elf that we’d only just met, I set him on fire and hit him with my axe. I turned on his new friends, the aforementioned goons, too. By the end, I didn’t know who was trying to kill who. It was just a giant tangled mess of summoned beasties, burning bodies, and pools of blood. Unfortunately, the Elf died. It’s OK. I got my revenge when I dragged us into a battle with teleporting crocodiles. He didn’t like that one bit.   

Evan: OK everyone, let's have a civil, sportsmanlike discussion about the PC games of 2017. All jabs at Mass Effect: Andromeda must be above the belt, and aimed directly at its poorly animated face.

James: Thankfully it's quite simple: it's Hollow Knight. It’s everything I love in games: challenge propped up by excellent controls and character abilities that make traversing the huge map a joy. The level design is so subtle that it doesn’t rely on collectibles to tell you where to go next. Every environment is dense and alive, as lively and foreboding as any real forest. And the story uses the form of a 2D side-scroller with utter grace, embedding tiny revelations in the gorgeous art and filling in details through small doses of ghostly dialogue. Seriously, if this game had the marketing reach of The Witcher 3 or Call of Duty, you’d all be in this tiny bug bed with me. Am I sweating?  

Jody: Bless you for suggesting an indie game right off the bat so I don't have to, James. But if Hollow Knight had more marketing reach I would just put off playing it for another year out of sheer bloody-mindedness. Hollow Knight's a good shout-out but I don't think it's going to be our GOTY.

Tim: Haha, it's definitely not Hollow Knight. Good try, though. I actually don't know if I'm allowed to pick an expansion, and I know PUBG is actually going to win, but for me it's XCOM 2's War of the Chosen expansion by the length of a comet's tail. It's not that I didn't love the game first time around, but the addition of these three gloriously annoying antagonists transports the experience to another level. Aside from the brilliance of sparring with them as the campaign unfurls, War of the Chosen also adds a raft of sweet new systems, characters and unique weapons. Sending two of your favourite soldiers out on a covert mission only for them to get ambushed makes for heart-stopping escape sequences, and the waves of Lost which assault you on some missions also create a zombie-style horde mode vibe that XCOM has never delivered before. 

Evan: I'm grappling with the same thing. Moments of War of the Chosen were some of the happiest I've been all year. The Chosen are exquisitely annoying villains that enhance every aspect of XCOM 2. We'll have to talk about how we judge expansions in the context of these awards.

Anyway, is it PUBG? We don't hand out GOTYs based on popularity. It's still in Early Access, and it has plenty of issues. Half a year in, I've stopped playing it. I find the art direction lifeless, and I think they'd have to perform a League of Legends-grade facelift for me to feel differently.

Chris: I'll climb out on that shaky limb and say an Early Access game like PUBG can be GOTY. I played DayZ standalone like crazy during its first year in EA, and at that point it was basically just the framework of a sandbox. But despite glitchy zombies, buggy ladders, and a spotty ballistics system, it spawned so many great stories and interesting experiences for me that it became my favorite game that year (and one of my favorites of all time). PUBG is drawing people into a genre many of them have never played before and it's resulting in lots of fun experiences and stories, too. For my money, that's what makes a game GOTY-worthy, even if it's unfinished.

Jarred: PUBG could've only happened on PC first. I know it's coming to consoles in the future, but most influential genre changes come from PC games. Anyway, I would vote for Star Citizen, just for Chris' stories on the subject, but that's for 2020.

James: PUBG is going to be one of the most influential games of the century, but is it actually the best game of the year? The physics are still in complete rebellion, performance is far from ideal, and in the end it’s still another game about people shooting each other. It’s a very good one and features 100 people, OK, but I’m not sure it’s the game I want to scream about from our collective mountaintop. Are we still drunk on Divinity: Original Sin 2? We’re big RPG people here, what with a nude RPG man as our unofficial mascot. 

Joe: Sort of echoing James, I’d say PUBG is my shout so far as influence and impact is concerned—but I think Divinity: Original Sin 2 deserves it, all told. Totally different games, but there’s just so much to D:OS 2, and everything it does it does so well. As Evan says, PUBG is still an Early Access game. I reckon there’s every chance it’ll top next year’s list, but I’m not so sure it deserves first place in 2017.

Jody: Games like D:OS 2 that come out later in the year and take like 60 hours to play are always going to suffer for it. I mean, my pick is Total War: Warhammer 2 but I know not everyone has time to play through even one campaign of that—let alone try out all four factions and, when the Mortal Empires update comes out, combine it with the first game to play again. That's a shame because everyone should have the chance to summon a swarm of angry rat dudes underneath a unit of archers or charge a dinosaur into some elves. 

Evan: [initiates Steam download]

Jody: Look, I think PUBG is going to top lists when it comes out of Early Access, and D:OS 2 and Warhammer 2 are probably going to make the lists of "Games of 2017 we didn't have time to play until 2018". Or in Warhammer 2's case, "Games that took all of 2018 to actually play."

Tyler: Wait, Original Sin 2 is supposed to take 60 hours? I've played 66 hours and I'm maybe halfway through. I've also put 32 hours into the Divinity Engine 2, learning how to make my own levels. They give you everything you need to mod the campaign or make your own, if you can bear the crashes. It's so good. It's my game of the year for sure. 

Jody: I looked it up on howlongtobeat.com and apparently a completionist playthrough averages 102 hours. Please talk me out of committing to that. Tell me some reasons I shouldn't spend more time in Original Sin 2 than Sunless Sea and Prey combined.

Tyler: I can't do that. I mean, it could probably be debugged forever, but most of Original Sin 2's problems stem from its commitment to freeform play. There are a lot of incongruities, like how my friends think necromancers are evil but never seem to mind when I raise a bloated corpse, but that's the price paid for how often it makes me say, "Wait, that worked?" Even if we don't all finish it, I hope everyone plays enough to have at least one or two experiences like that, where they accidently do a quest backwards and it all somehow works out amazingly.

Jody: Tyler, that is the opposite of what I asked for.

Tyler: Let me tell you about the time I got into a fight with a bunch of undead guys, and then realized a few turns in that I was carrying jars containing their souls in my backpack. I'd picked them up in a cave hours earlier and forgotten. So I defeated them by chucking their own souls at them. Perfect.

Steven: Listen, I would love nothing more than to take this moment to begin shouting madly about the virtues of Final Fantasy 14: Stormblood and how bonkers it is that an MMO expansion almost made me tear up at one point because the story is so emotionally captivating. But who are we kidding here? No one cares. And that’s fine, because Original Sin 2 is clearly our GOTY. The only way I’m changing my stance is if Jody agrees to go all in on Total War: Warhammer 2 with me (maybe after the mortal empires campaign is out?)

Wes: I'm still enamored with Divinity, but let's not forget about Nier: Automata, one of the most weird and creative games of the decade. Also, if Shaun was here, he'd remind us all that the Nazi sniping in the underappreciated Sniper Elite 4 is extremely good.

James: [Gives everyone voting for D:OS2 a wedgie] It’s Hollow Knight, nerds. But because your dragons and dungeons and wizards and whatever will always win, I’ll at least drop a few names before dipping out. What Remains of Edith Finch just about made me cry from chopping off fish heads. Cuphead looks incredible, but also contains some really intricate boss design and the best soundtrack of the year, easily. And Thimbleweed Park was one of the funniest games I played this year, and it’s a throwback point-and-clicker. I’m going to close by typing OIKOSPIEL in all caps here too, because it’s my actual GOTY. Describing it is futile. (Psst, dog opera.)

Tyler: Fine, I'll play Hollow Knight. But I'm not sure anything could pull my vote away from Original Sin 2 at this point. I did enjoy Absolver and Rising Storm 2 this year, but only enough to nominate them for awards in their genres. On that note, the shooter category is going to be a tough one. PUBG was already mentioned. I don't want to forget about Sniper Elite 4 from February—it was really good, though I don't think Evan believes me. I'm betting he'll pull for LawBreakers.

Steven: I’m sure that vote will be appreciated by the eight people still playing it.

Evan: PC gaming isn't a popularity contest, buddy. Anyway, I'd actually give my FPS vote to Quake Champions, even with its imperfect netcode. It's the second coming of the railgun and rocket launcher!

Tim: On the topic of second-comings, if you'd told me earlier this year I likely wouldn't be voting for Destiny 2 when GOTY rolls around I'd have assumed the explanation was that I had died. (RIP me.) But the truth is that although it offers a peerless alien-shooting experience, having sunk ~150 hours into the PS4 version I've been startled by how hollow the endgame feels. A huge part of that is due to the switch from random rolls on loot drops to static perks, which as I feared has all but completely sucked the grind for gear out of the game. It's far from the only issue too, and this video by Destiny YouTuber Datto sums up a lot of them neatly. I expect Bungie will gradually rectify the problems with patches and the December DLC, but it really is baffling how for every quality of life improvement the sequel makes, another system has been made demonstrably worse. Be warned I'll be writing quite a bit more about this towards the end of the month.

James: I’ve already put about 100 hours into Destiny 2 on PS4 because I couldn’t wait two goddamn months, but I’m ready to put hundreds more in on the PC in a few weeks. It’s going to really land with PC players, I think. Finally, we get to complain about a thing we begrudgingly love on the best platform there is. 

Tyler: Aside from Destiny 2, there's a lot still to come this year. Looking forward to anything?

Tim: Tom's piece on how the new Assassin's Creed is now a bona fide RPG has me interested in that series for the first time since Black Flag, particularly as Origins is being developed by the same team. Plus I'm a sucker for the Anubis-flavored setting, as Evan can confirm. 

Evan: Who doesn't love Anubis, wolf god of the afterlife? Anyway, speaking of canines, I think Wolfenstein 2 is probably going to be great, given that BJ will have Inspector Gadget-style extendable stilt-legs. And though we've played a bit of the multiplayer beta, Battlefront 2's Empire-focused campaign could be special.

James: Well, I’m glad we decided Hollow Knight is the winner so far. Great work, everyone. Until next year! 

Despite James' manipulative last-word, this is only the beginning of our GOTY discussions.

Larian Studios' Divinity: Original Sin 2 is a fantastic RPG that Fraser couldn't get enough of.  

I met the developer's founder Swen Vincke at this year's Gamescom and, with just two weeks to go before launch, he seemed calm. I caught up with him again last week, three weeks following Divinity: Original Sin 2's launch, to see how he feels the game is doing, what he wants from its flourishing mod scene, and what it's got planned into the future. 

PC Gamer: How are things at Larian Studios at the moment?

Swen Vincke: Quiet. Most people are on their holidays and [patch 3] is a big one. We're start working on patch four next and slowly people will start returning from their holidays and we're gearing up for our next things. 

I presume these were well-deserved holidays. 

Absolutely. They gave their everything to make the game as good as they could.  

When we met at Gamescom you seemed pretty chilled out for someone who was on the cusp of releasing a game. Were you as calm inside as you appeared outside?

[Laughs] Not really. I actually wasn't planning on being at Gamescom and then a couple of things happened that got me to be there. And then I was there for a day and a half. The madness was at its peak at this point and at that particular time we were focused on bug fixing. Given how large the game is we were trying to get as many players through it as possible. 

According to SteamSpy, you sold somewhere in the region of 700,000 sales in less than three weeks. 

I think we're over 700,000 now.

That's not bad going. 

No, it's not. We could definitely do worse. I mean, we had the early access players before that too. Lifetime total units: 748,000 on Steam, and then you have to add the pre-release ones on there. Wow, that's higher than I thought, that's really good. 

Ahead of launch you must have had forecasts. Where were you expecting to be at this stage, or before Christmas—I guess you've surpassed those numbers now?

Yeah, we have. I was hoping for 500k before Christmas, so we're way above that right now which is really good. 

Did you have any forecasts in the  first month?

No, not really. I figured that if we hit the 500k before Christmas then we were going to be okay. This has been a nice bonus. 

Is there ever a point during the development and testing of such a big game where you realise: Hang on, this is really good, this might do better than we expect?

I think any developer will tell you that, first of all, you fall in love with your game. But then the relationship lasts so long that you start focussing on all the negatives. A very classic phenomena means that by the time you're ready to release, the only thing that you're aware of is everything that's still wrong with it. 

Then somebody reminds you of how much good stuff is in there. We're busy focusing on: We need to fix this, we need to fix that, this is not good, man we need time to sort this, we need more resources to do that', and that basically dominated the conversation over the course of the last six months. But then there are moments where you're playing and you forget you're hunting for bugs and realise: Actually, this is a lot of fun. 

With Divinity: Original Sin 2, this was particularly true. I don't know how many times we redid the beginning of this game. Every time we presented it it was different, and every single time I enjoyed myself. Luckily for us, this seems to have rubbed off on the general gaming audience.   

If you had to pinpoint one specific thing over the course of development—what would you say the most challenging thing about making Divinity: Original Sin 2?

Making sure that everything we were doing with the Origin stories meant you could play as both an avatar and a companion, and you still had the main story that all made sense. We had to make sure everything worked together, where all the different permutations made sense to the player. That was very, very hard. 

That was the biggest ambition of this one. The previous game was criticised on the story front, rightfully so I think. But part of that was because it was so bloody hard to tell the story in the way that we're doing it—giving the player the freedom that they have, and the ability to kill every single person that you encounter. It's a very hard game to make when you say: Okay, here's a protagonist, oops! You killed him. We still have to tell the story. 

One of the game's greatest achievements is its vast amount of voiced dialogue. You said at Gamescom implementing this was a result of shifting its launch date—tell me more about that.  

Yeah, it was because the launch date was pushed back and we saw the opportunity to do the voice recordings. It was very clear that people wanted us to voice everything, despite a number of people writing on the community forums that they didn't care about voiceovers. We looked for opportunities to do so, but there was so much voicing to be done that initially it was not going to possible had we stuck to our original release date. 

But then when we pushed it back to the end of the summer we thought that it would be possible, providing we could find someone who could be creative enough to do it for us… We did and it was very late in the process, it took a whole lot of effort, but I'm really happy that we did it. 

An interesting tidbit of information is that we actually redid the voices at one point. We started recording and eventually realised that the way that we were doing it was not going to work. We were well into recording at this stage and knew that we didn't have too much time. But we knew we had to redo it. The staff deserves every single mention that they get—they did a really awesome job. 

Through your Kickstarter and Early Access phase you've had a pretty open development cycle—would be players got regular feedback throughout. With the first Divinity being received so well, did this make dealing with expectation easier or harder? 

That's a really good question. Because it puts a lot of pressure on you, that's for sure. But you also can't make diamonds without pressure, right? I think that it's both. It is harder because the moment that the community figures out that they want it and you've said you're going to do it, it's very hard to change course—even if you later discover what you're doing won't work. We did actually change course a few times, but if you explain exactly why you're doing it, most people will listen. You're always going to have some people who don't, but that's just the way it is. 

At the same time, things become easier because you instantly know what's wrong. You put it out there and you don't even have to wait a day, you know right away what's wrong. This type of feedback can be very hard to get, unless you have a large community playing. Another thing that's easier with a large community is that there's a large amount of them and can in turn let statistics speak for you. 

You may have a very vocal minority screaming how badly something is done, but then you have 95 percent actually enjoy what you've done, so you say: Well, we can certainly say that that feature is okay because so many players are having fun with it. If you didn't do that, and that vocal minority were represented by, say, a couple of developers inside your company, you may wind up going in the completely wrong direction. That's where and why I really like the early access model.  

I spent hours in Fort Joy. Someone beat the entire game just under 38 minutes. How is that even possible? 

Well, there's a bug [now removed via the game's latest patch]. Other than that we actually put a couple of shortcuts in there for speedrunners. But they can only do it once they've completed the game in the first place. As a side note, because you can kill everybody in the game, we always have to have fallback solutions. This is a spoiler, I guess…

[Warning: slight story spoilers ahead.]  

… Okay, I'll tell you anyway and you can decide whether or not you use it. I'll put the responsibility in your hands. There's a city at the end of the game, and the guy there uses Death Fog, which you find at the beginning of the game. Skeletons are immune to Death Fog, which we were well aware of, and it's perfectly possible to kill everyone in that city. If you do so, you can still finish the game because you can talk to all their ghosts. It's one of those fallback solutions. 

Having a creature in the game that can bypass the major blockers—such as Death Fog—automatically means that you have a whole bunch of shortcuts, and if you know the fallbacks, you just have to go from fallback to fallback—which is essentially what the [38-minute speedrunner] is doing. Our design approach is going to give you that kind of flexibility. Speedruns aren't good to look at, it spoils the game for you, but it's good to know that it's possible. 

Do you do speedruns of your game?I do all the time. 

And could you beat 40 minutes?No. Absolutely not. We do speedruns all the time when we want to test that all the critical paths are working in the game. But 40 minutes? I don't think anybody should want to do that. We're not that concerned about racing through the game, we're more interested in the classic narrative experience. 

This level of engagement underscores community interest. I checked the game's Steam Workshop page ahead of this interview and found there to be 600+ mods out there already [there are now over 700]. Are you looking forward to seeing what people come up with?

We invited several modders into the office during development so that we could tweak the modding tool together with them. They are the guys that released the soccer mod, and they devised a number of more expansive mods which launched pretty much at release because they had the modding tools. It was really cool to see what they could make in one week. One of the things that we're doing now is to start a whole bunch of tutorial videos and we're expanding all of the tutorials. Hopefully we're going to see some cool shit coming out of that. 

For sure you can do a lot of stuff with the engine and they have pretty much everything that we had in our hands when we were making the game. But it takes effort, it's an RPG system so you can't do it too quickly. I'm very curious to see what else they're going to come up with. 

Is there anything that didn't make it into the base game that you secretly hope modders add?

What I really hope is that we're going to see adventures appear. Somebody made the noisy crypt, that was one of the guys that came here, he made a 40-minute adventure. I hope we're going to see more and more of those come up because I really want adventures that we can play in co-op where I actually don't know what the story is. That would please me tremendously. But again there's already loads of really cool stuff in there. 

What have you enjoyed seeing players messing around with most? Fane's face-ripping is great fun, for example. 

For sure, there's a streamer called CohhCarnage who's one of the bigger Twitchers, he played the entire game for 12 or 13 days or so, eight hours a day. And it was amazing to see—how they were figuring things out, things that they were trying to do, the things they were talking about in the chat, it was pretty much on everybody's screens over here. 

That's very rewarding, which I think is the cool thing about Twitch whereby people watching can help contribute to how the streamer is playing.

You've mentioned the patch, however what does Larian have planned in the long run for Divinity: Original Sin 2?

We have a couple of things that are in the works but we'll only announce them when we're ready. There's stuff coming, for sure. 

To that end: It's early days yet, but I assume the success of number two means we're in line for a Divinity: Original Sin 3, 4 and 5? 

[Laughs] We have a couple of surprises planned. But we're going to work on the patch just now, then we're going to work in silence for a little bit so that we can get our shit together and then… yeah, I'm pretty sure there will be at least one big surprise in there. 

Larian Studios' Divinity: Original Sin 2 is a wonderful fantasy role-player that is fast becoming my own game of the year. A huge patch landed last week, and, at the time of writing, its Steam Workshop page boats upwards of 700 mods—adding extra mileage to an already massive game. 

Studio founder Swen Vincke reckons D:OS 2 will grow further still in the coming months, with promise of "at least one big surprise" into the future.   

"What I really hope is that we're going to see adventures appear," says Vincke when asked what he'd like to see from the game's thriving modding community. Pre-release, Larian invited a number of prevalent modders of the previous game into its office to craft new mods for its latest. They were given a week, so says Vincke, and came up with some pretty neat creations.  

"Somebody made the Noisy Crypt, that was one of the guys that came here, he made a 40-minute adventure," Vincke continues. "I hope we're going to see more and more of those come up because I really want adventures that we can play in co-op where I actually don't know what the story is. That would please me tremendously. But again there's already loads of really cool stuff in there. We have a couple of things that are in the works but we'll only announce them when we're ready. There's stuff coming, for sure."

Given the success Divinity: Original Sin 2 has enjoyed so far, I ask Vincke what's next for the series. It's early days yet, but might we expect a Divinity: Original Sin 3, 4, or 5? 

"[Laughs] We have a couple of surprises planned," replies Vincke. "But we're going to work on the patch just now, then we're going to work in silence for a little bit so that we can get our shit together and then… yeah, I'm pretty sure there will be at least one big surprise in there."

Check out Fraser's review of Divinity: Original Sin 2 in this direction. 

The third patch for Larian's hit RPG Divinity: Original Sin 2 is now live on Steam, and it's a big one. "But big is good because this update should address the most important issues you’ve been flagging," Larian wrote. "In addition to the obligatory bug fixes and balancing changes, this patch contains a number of content changes that should make your journal clearer and your journey through Arx smoother." 

A few highlights, chosen solely because I find them amusing out of context: Spider legs will now properly prevent players from being webbed; Voidwoken chicken should not be able to absorb Source points; fixed a crash "if you choose to sleep again with lizard after you put on all equipment and the thieves were already killed" (what?); reduced the Chicken form running distance to six meters; and "made Siwan bleed because dialog says Siwan is bleeding." 

Hey, if the dialog says Siwan is bleeding, then Siwan's gotta bleed. The full patch notes are below.

Improvements and changes:

• Improved and added several quest status updates in the Journal
• Fixed several quests not closing properly or when expected
• Spider legs now correctly prevent player from getting Webbed
• Tweaked frequency of certain automated dialogs
• Fleeing from combat now pops up the waypoint menu instead of moving you to nearest waypoint
• Added several improvements and hints in Arx that tie people together,  and that introduce places and characters (e.g. added a thief  corpse/ghost in the death-fog storage room)
• Save/load screen has been reskinned
• Removed camera shake from poison damage over time 
• Smoke now blocks Attack Of Opportunity
• Lowered Persuasion difficulty in Arx
• Pressing the right mouse button now stops all characters’ movement chained to the current character 
• Reskinned lobby and serverlist
• Improved Taunting in favour of the Taunter
• Optimised performance on certain AI actions
• Filter states on inventory are now saved
• Made the surfaces created by intersection temporary, but long-lived, instead of infinite (also fixes some surface puzzles)
• Reactive Shot now uses equipped weapon stats to calculate damage
• Reduced survivability and base damage of Bone Widow
• Reduced Chicken form running distance to 6 meters
• Small reduction in XP gain in Reaper’s Coast and Council of Seven areas
• Fixed melee and rogue archetypes ignoring characters with Stench talent
• Fixed Windego’s skills if you meet her in Council of Seven
• Made several changes to Captive Deep-dweller in the third round of the Arena in Reaper’s Coast
• The puzzle to get to Reimond now has a perception check on the hidden wall, and the wall supports lockpicking
• Voidwoken chicken should not be able to absorb source points
• Updated stats, skills, loot and archetype of Zaleskar
• Lobby browser now shows map names alphabetically
• Controller UI shows button hint in dialog windows when you can scroll
• Controller type can be auto detected and button hints are shown accordingly
• There is now a button to immediately go to the Recipe window (H by default)
• In the rune screen, you can now see all runes in all your party members’ inventories

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed crash that could happen when putting parent containers into child containers  
• Fixed crash when you accept a party invitation from a client that has left the game 
• Fixed crash when attacking ground with a projectile strike type of skill (via script or modding)  
• Fixed a crash that could happen when loading game or returning to main menu (destroying AiGrid)  
• Fixed crash if you choose to sleep again with lizard after you put on all equipment and the thieves were already killed  
• Fixed a Story Patching issue. This prevented certain previous storyline fixes to not be applied correctly.  
• Fixed a blocking issue in the Hall of Echoes: not having the cloud appear after completing the third part of the ritual and talking to a God  
• Fixed a blocking issue with characters playing dead during the Kraken combat  
• Fixed a blocking issue when selecting the option “pick up” when talking to the Parrotplant in Arx  
• Fixed a blocking issue when saving during Braccus’ dialogue in the endgame scene 
• Fixed a blocking issue that could happen in a dialogue with Dallis in the endgame scene  
• Fixed a blocking issue where characters would still be considered in  combat in the endgame scene, and nothing would be clickable  
• Fixed blocking issues caused by story scripting setting items offstage   
• Fixed a blocking issue with the Pilgrim Door not opening in Arx  
• Fixed a blocking issue with the crypt puzzle where blocks would rotate  45 degrees instead of 90 degrees in multiplayer or in savegames  
• Fixed a blocking issue that could happen when being teleported while in the middle of casting a skill  
• Fixed issue where Gwydian could end up being non-interactable (kill magisters without triggered Gwydian and voidwoken)  
• Fixed an issue where some companions would not be recruitable after the attack on the Lady Vengeance  
• Fixed magic mirror portrait rendering  
• Fixed magic mirror showing encumbered icon  
• Fixed scrolls not scaling with primary attribute  
• Fixed desync when using Enrage which could cause lack of crits  
• Fixed a bug where instakill surfaces would make it impossible to resurrect a character inside them  
• Fixed several instances where Reactive Shot would not trigger correctly  
• Fixed Reactive Shot being triggered by invisible characters  
• Fixed Dome of Protection ignoring vision blockers  
• Fixed melee attackers sometimes being able to still attack enemies on a higher ledge  
• Fixed issues with statuses not being set during dialogues which could cause other issues in turn  
• Fixed some quest markers not showing up for all party members  
• Fixed a bug with the cat following the last of the players, not the first one  
• Fixed an issue with Malady having the wrong alignment  
• Can no longer unassign all characters from a player  
• Fixed clicking through NPCs, picking up items (often by accident)  
• Fixed certain limbs not triggering the correct dialogs in Council of Seven  
• Fixed jump skill issue that allowed players to end up in unintended locations  
• Fixed combat turn order being broken after character could no longer get a turn  
• Fixed Magister Julian sending the player East instead of West  
• Fixed several minor dialog text issues   
• Fixed several dialog flag issues   
• Fixed certain waypoints not being activated correctly  
• Fixed several issues with nodes in dialogs not playing voice file  
• Fixed several issues with Lovrik encounter  
• Fixed issue with spirit vision sometimes not working after save/load  
• Fixed incorrect gender in certain cutscenes  
• Fixed being able to teleport into the Magic Mirror room  
• Fixed bartering screen where “Balance offer” would show incorrect gold amount after something was changed in offer  
• Controller mode: fixed summons not being able to delay their turn  
• Fixed not getting up after being knocked down or teleported after using Play Dead skill  
• Fixed issue where disarming a knocked down character would cause character to stand up straight  
• Fixed issue where certain origin moments were queued one after the other  
• Fixed issue with story call ItemTemplateRemoveFrom not searching  recursively through all inventories inside of the parent inventory  
• Fixed wrong vision cones (shift) when player has points in Sneaking ability  
• Fixed issue with White Magister ship not always moving correctly  
• Fixed pipe exit to escape Fort Joy being easily destructible  
• Fixed a repeating issue in Beast’s recruitment dialog  
• Fixed pathfinding issues on Lady Vengeance  
• Fixed issue with poison surface not spawning correctly under undead party members  
• Fixed evidence chest not having a tooltip  
• Fixed several issues related to stealing  
• Fixed previews of Attack Of Opportunity not always reflecting execution  
• Fixed AI endlessly complaining about doors being stuck (they will only nag once, e.g. in Arena’s treasure room)  
• Fixed issue where character could be stuck in combat mode and could never sheathe their weapon (desync issue)  
• Fixed queueing actions not always picking up item by default   
• Fixed an issue with skills disappearing from Skillbars or being un-memorised when dragging them around in the skillbar  
• Fixed make war issues near Gods in Hall of Echoes  
• Fixed not having anymore source if you want to bless each God in the Hall of Echoes  
• Fixed notification being sent about un-memorising skills even if character was not under control of the player  
• Fixed issue when attacking Gareth as he is carrying Jonathan  
• Fixed possible endgame combat blocker (combat would not start automatically)  
• Fixed recipe categories  
• Fixed dead characters getting stuck in Arx Arena combat due to horror sleep status  
• Fixed turn order issue in the fight for the Lady Vengeance  
• Fixed a bug where mask of the shapeshifter could shift you back to original shape  
• Fixed Dream Undone and All-Father, Life-Shaper achievements triggering incorrectly  
• Fixed several issues with Lohse’s shapeshifted form  
• Fixed volatile voidlings having incorrect level in Reaper’s Coast  
• Fixed Arx Death room having puppets that endlessly spawn and die instantly during combat  
• In multiplayer, use client language setting for showing origin names  
• Fixed mirror image of a hero character sometimes being wrong  
• Disabled trading with Kemm when he arrives at Arhu’s  
• Fixed being moved to a different region altogether after teleporting into Windego’s cell  
• Fixed Tarquin not telling you about Godslayer and not showing up at the Graveyard  
• When Malady mentions Tarquin, now set map marker on Tarquin instead of Graveyard cause Tarquin could be at 3 spots  
• Fixed bug where clearing a keybinding would not be saved  
• Fixed “glass weapons” not breaking when using with a skill  
• Fixed issue with Arx pipes puzzle: blessed blood would not propagate correctly  
• Fixed resurrecting sometimes not adding you to combat  
• Fixed not being able to receive skill from an item if you already memorised it but don't meet requirements anymore  
• Fixed a bug where dismissing henchmen seemed to give them a free talent point after you spent it already  
• Fixed being able to use projectile strike skills on items or characters that were out of sight range  
• Fixed characters teleporting automatically   
• Fixed being able to cast Swap Ground out of sight  
• Fixed not being able to talk to Gwydian Rince under certain conditions  
• Fixed being able to use fast targeting to find invisible characters  
• Fixed leaking PPGammaCorrection shader  
• Prevented party management tutorials from playing inside split screen character creation  
• Prevent flee tutorial if no waypoints available  
• Fixed creating water on top of electrified cursed blood: now leaves electrified water  
• In controller mode, fixed talking to ghost when ghost was on top of his corpse  
• Fixed visual effects (e.g. camera shake) playing eternally for second player if he joins game in the middle of the effect  
• Fixed issue with the camera not going correctly to the origin presentation camera in controller mode  
• Fixed AI still using taunt when near death or when no allies left  
• Smoke cloud after using laser ray is now blocking vision  
• Fixed source lich alignment issues and repeating dialogs  
• Made Siwan bleed because dialog says Siwan is bleeding  
• Fixed Almira trade table sometimes generating items of wrong quality  
• Fixed a bug where Illusionist dungeon objects could become invisible after save-load  
• Fixed Qanna fighting and talking while petrified  
• When memorial dig sites are unlocked on map, difficulty check now turns to trivial so you can find them  

UI Fixes:

• Fixed journal map camera clamping   
• Fixed controller journal marking read quests as new when changing tabs  
• Fix Take All button sometimes missing on containers  
• Fix context menu displacement in splitscreen controller UI when opening inventory  
• Fixed text cutoff issues in some UIs  
• Fixed AP bar sometimes disappearing in controller mode when switching characters  
• Controller mode: now show HP bars of characters while it’s not your turn  
• Controller mode: “invite to party” no longer bypasses the diplomacy manager  
• Fixed bug where icon of dismissed character would still be shown in party manager  
• Scrolling through more than four characters in the character-sheet UI now looks good and understandable  
• Selecting a stack in the crafting UI now shows item splitter  
• In controller mode, the Skillbar can now be used in combat when it’s not your turn (for browsing, previewing)  
• Fixed issue when in controller mode player would teleport character or  use waypoint while in selector mode, camera would not follow character  but would still be locked on selector  
• Fixed item tooltip still showing after opening a book, blocking the view of the book 
• Overhead damage numbers displays are now offset, reducing overlap  
• Fixed missing strings for loca in Roll UI  
• Fixed text cut offs and button positioning in Inventory and Character Sheet  
• Fixed scrollbar in inventory sometimes not showing  
• Fixed message boxes with really long text  
• Fixed adding to wares sometimes moving wrong item when shift clicking item in inventory  
• Fixed up/down key assignment confusion on keyboard hotbar UI  
• Fixed close buttons in controls options not showing warning if there are unsaved changes  
• Fixed width of statuses in examine UI  
• Made longer enemy names fit enemy health bars  
• Fixed max gold amount not fitting in icon slot  
• Fixed some cooldowns in skillbar showing zero when it should be one  
• Fixed how main menu and some UIs in GM would handle the Escape button  
• Fixed dialog cutoffs in split screen when players are in different dialogs  
• Can now copy paste in direct connect message box  
• Fixed magic mirror throwing an invalid error message about tags  
• Fixed “mute sound” option in controller mode menu  
• Voice label in character creation was sometimes showing wrong name when choosing origin character  
• Updated backgrounds in the credits screen  

 GM Mode:

• Fixed issue that dragging items to inventory went directly into equipment slot  
• Fixed issue with loading a savegame while having new active mods  
• Fixed a crash related to equipment  
• Fixed broken stats for spawned equipment  
• Fixed names and labels of several building blocks  
• Fixed crafting being interrupted by global pause  
• Fixed Music Assets in mood panel  
• Fixed several issues on level binding screen  
• Removed some items from GM menus that shouldn’t have been available  
• Fixed an issue that could happen where a GM couldn’t seem to place an  item or character in a certain spot when not using drag and drop  
• Fixed issue with adding physical and magical armour to characters  
• Fixed roll dice UI not showing up on top of some other windows  
• Fixed copied GM Campaign not showing in the list of My Campaigns until player launches GM Campaign Manager screen  
• When GM possesses creature, fixed UI showing tags instead of custom stats  
• Fixed duplication and saving of a shapeshifted character   
• Fixed issue when GM possessed a creature and could use the party management screen (invite/make war)  
• Character sheet in GM now uses shortest possible names for stats  
• Fixed Vignette half showing after spamming show/hide  
• Fixed being unable to make choice on vignette screen if skill bar is active in controller mode  
• Fixed player slots drawn outside of the border in the connectivity UI   
• Fixed ambiance not being saved in GM level  
• “New vignette” string can now be localised  
• Fixed "delete" button of exported monsters and items  
• Fixed groups update after exporting any monster or item  
• Fixed dragging newly created monsters to encounter pane  
• Fixed magnifying glass not opening sticky UI when expected  
• Fixed MoodPanel sometimes breaking after loading  

Sound:

• Closing inventory / stats now makes sound  
• Fixed some drop item sounds  
• Fixed drop sound when splitting items  
• Trying to equip item without meeting the requirements makes sound now  
• Fixed music changing to wrong state when switching party members  
• Fixed voice of black ring reaver ghost in RC  

Modding:

• Fixed: not being able to publish campaign after user sets dependency add-on for GM  
• Added extra osiris call CharacterResurrectAndResetXPReward() which resets the resurrected flag of the resurrected character.  
• Fixed having to create stats twice before it would be committed  
• Notify user of mods without valid story

Congratulations on making it all the way to the end—as a reward, here's information on how to set up Divinity: Origin Sin 2's mod tools, which can make the already excellent GM Mode even better.