Divinity: Original Sin 2’s first challenge is getting safely, or at least successfully, in and out of the Fort Joy prison camp. You may have noticed there are quite a few ways to crack that particular egg. Here’s every way to get in, and more importantly, back out of Fort Joy. You can mix and match to your heart’s content or pick up every quest along the way if you want. There are a few ways to escape without getting into a fight, but you’re going to have to handle some combat, one way or another, to get in.

To make it easy, we've described the set up and outcome of each relevant questline, so there are spoilers ahead for the early game.

Getting in

The Magister’s key

Magister Yarrow’s father is missing and if you can reunite the two you’ll be rewarded with Yarrow’s key to the fort. Either talk to Yarrow on the North wall of the fort to start the quest or find her father, Migo, on the Southeast beach. Migo is half out of his mind and eager to rip you in half when you find him. The only way to stay out of a fight is to talk to him armed with a Yarrow Flower. Fortunately, Yarrow flowers are all over the island (they're purple, and we found one near the man with the coffin). Give him one to remind him of his Yarrow Girl and he’ll give you his ring. Present the ring to Yarrow as proof her father still lives, follow her to the family reunion, and she’ll give you a key to help you escape before you turn into as sorry a sight as her father. The only problem is, the key goes to a door just south of the main fort gates on a catwalk whose ladder is propped up out of your reach. To put the Magister’s Key to use, you’ll need to teleport up to the catwalk with the Teleportation Gloves.

Lord Withermore

In the Strange Cave on the South beach is a small group of elves who’ve made a sort of hideaway from Griff and his bullies. The kids playing hide and seek off to the side can reveal a hidden passage if you talk to them. With high enough Wits, you can discover it yourself without their help. You'll need a shovel, and you can find one just outside the entrance to the Fort Joy slums (where you first approached from the beach), on top of a ruined wall where there's also a bedroll. Down the hatch is a long-undead Skeleton named Lord Withermore. If you agree to take on a quest for him in Fort Joy’s basement, he’ll reveal a hidden route into the dungeons. In the waypoint statue at the entrance of the camp is a switch revealing another secret door. If you climb inside, you’ll find yourself another waypoint and an entrance to the dungeons. A locked door blocks your way but if you look closely there is a lever nearby to open it.

From there, you'll find a locked door up some stairs. You'll either have to pick the lock, or get into a fight. Note that the key doesn't drop from one of the Magisters—it's sitting on a stool where you fight them.

The Teleportation Gloves

An enterprising human named Gawin who hangs out near the Northwest wall will tell you he has a teleportation scroll to help get out of the island. He needs an accomplice who also possesses the powers of teleportation. If you want to come along, you’ll have to find yourself the Teleportation Gloves. Don’t worry, Gawin informs you, they’re just in the stomach of a furious crocodilian. You’ll find them on the beach north of the boat where you first encounter Beast. Watch out, those crocs have a teleportation skill of their own. Why wouldn’t they, right? Once you pry the Teleportation Gloves out of their cold, dead jaws, you can go help Gawin with his scheme outside the North side of the fort walls. He claims that only one of you can come along but that isn’t entirely true. Gawin will double-cross you as soon as you send him across to the opposite ridge, leaving you in the dust. Send your party over after him with those gloves anyway. You’ll still be close enough to one another that you can send the gloves to the inventory of your party members on the opposite side. Teleport the last poor member of your crew over and get going. This path will lead you to the docks. If you’re alone and unable to follow Gawin, you can smash the trunk on the ridge to bits and fall down the hole to the beach. After that, a cave below the opposite ridge will take you into Fort Joy’s dungeons.

Freeing Amyro

The camp’s resident gang boss, Griff, has an elf named Amyro locked up in the kitchens. If you free Amyro, he’ll show clue you in on a secret passage into the fort. To free him, you’ll need to prove to Griff that the elf isn’t the one who stole a shipment of oranges. The real culprit, Stingtail, is on the Southwest beach. Be careful about approaching him because you can wind up putting a damper on two companion quests by accident. The Red Prince needs to speak to Stingtail and Sebille needs to kill him. Let them both do their thing, in that order, separately. Don’t worry about Stingtail winding up dead. You can grab the oranges out of a nearby crate and give them to Griff in exchange for Amyro’s freedom. The path Amyro shows you will eventually lead you to the dungeons, with some gags in between that I refuse to spoil. Suffice it to say, you’ll want to either bring a character with the Pet Pal perk or make sure to hug the east side walls and look for vines to climb to get through the passage safely.

The arena of Fort Joy

The fighting ring beneath the kitchens is another tough fight. If you plan to take this one on, I recommend starting each of the other quests to get the experience first. Not only that, but if you do choose to play for a win in the arena, your reward will be having your collar removed, which the Magisters will promptly throw you in the dungeon for. This will force you to exit the fort by fighting your way out of the dungeons, so wrap any other matters of interest up first.

Getting out

If you took an entry route that leads to the dungeons, prepare to fight your way out. When you do, you’ll exit from a staircase that takes you to the main floor of the Fort. Otherwise, you’ll have found yourself on the main or second floor of the fort with all of the following escape routes:

The drawbridge

The drawbridge at the back of the fort can simply be lowered with a lever nearby. To reach it, you may have to fight a few Magisters on the north side walls. You can reach this area either by walking up the outer stairs within the fort’s courtyard or by entering the second floor and walking out the North door where Paladin Cork is already confronting them. Alternatively, you can sneak out the back door of the same room, lower the drawbridge unnoticed, and get gone fast.

The broken ladder

On the second floor, East of the Hall of Penitence where High Judge Orivand is lecturing some poor prisoner, there’s a small, circular room that looks like a guard tower. There are some barrels blocking your exit onto a wooden catwalk. Simply move the barrels out of your way and you’re home-free. At the end of the platform is a broken ladder. You’ll land on your rear, but that isn’t so bad as far as escape attempts go.

The docks

If you painstakingly teleported your party across the cliffs where Gawin so thoughtlessly abandoned you, the docks will be your escape route. When you arrive, Gawin is getting what he had coming at the hands of the Magisters on the docks. You can either take out this group yourself and simply walk out or do some sneaking. It is possible to sneak behind the main dock area and teleport your party one-by-one onto the beach below. It takes time, but was worth it for a coward like me.

Han the Ferryboy 

If you got onto the second-story catwalk of the fort but don’t have the Magister’s Key, you can climb down the ladder inside the courtyard while sneaking and enter the main fort doors. Conveniently, those aren’t locked. Once inside, head immediately to your right to confront two Magisters harassing a young boy named Han. The kid was sent in to rescue someone else who, if you explored the dungeons, you can tell him won’t be making it. After taking out the Magisters, Han will help you escape in his boat.

Sewer grate

Also on the main floor of the fort is a torture area. Instead of heading for the docks where Han is waiting, take a left and make your way back. You can fight Kniles the Flenser if you really want to, but be warned that the Silent Monks in the room, who are passive elsewhere, will join him. Instead, you can sneak around the left side of his room and out an unlocked gate leading to the sewer drainage pipe. Freedom!

Update 2: After further review, Larian has decided that this is in fact a bug, and plans to remove it "ASAP." 

Update: Divinity: Original Sin 2 producer David Walgrave tells me that Larian doesn't plan to patch out this technique because it's "part of the system." 

"It appears that it is not a never-ending loop and you're not doing anything else while you're doing it," wrote Walgrave. "It's not like you're damaging anything for free without spending action points. If I understand this trick, it's still within the purposeful synergies of our skills and usually these are accounted for."

That's true: you can't do anything while the loop runs its course. Though, based on the video, which shows a troll losing 6048 HP like it's nothing, it's obviously quite a loop, technically 'never-ending' or not, and I've asked for further clarification. For now, rather than 'fix' the combo, Walgrave says they "applaud" it. Examples of techniques that would be patched out include anything that "breaks the fun" or is actually a bug. "If this would tick in realtime, it would be a bug," wrote Walgrave. "And if this does not cost AP/skills and/or is not blocked by cooldown/consuming a scroll/... then we look into it."

Otherwise, "If you glitch the system, congratulations," concludes Walgrave. So there you have it, feel free to combo trolls to hell all you want. The original story and explanation of the trick follows.

Original story: One of the magical things about Divinity: Original Sin and now its sequel, Original Sin 2, is how complex and liberal their combat systems are. Whether by design or by accident, the glut of spell and physics interactions sometimes lets you get away with ridiculously OP moves. In the first game, for instance, players leveled up telekinesis, made absurdly heavy objects by stacking containers, and then dropped them on enemies for unreasonable amounts of damage. Original Sin 2 now has its own trick, courtesy of Ashandis on Reddit (and others), except this one appears to deal unlimited damage to a single enemy.

You can see the trick in action in the video above. How it works relies on several complimentary spells, as well as a quirk particular to undead characters: they take damage from healing spells. 

So here's the trick. You have one party member cast Soul Mate on an undead party member. This spell will cause the undead character to receive half of any healing the caster receives, which will actually damage them. But that's OK, because you've already had the undead character cast Living on the Edge, which will prevent them from dying for two turns, no matter how much damage they take. 

The caster of Soul Mate must have a passive ability called Life Leech, which will heal them every time they deal damage. And that's how you get the loop. Say I'm the original caster of Soul Mate: I now cast a healing spell on myself, the undead character takes half that healing as damage (Soul Mate), I receive more healing because I damaged the undead character (Life Leech), they receive more damage because I was healed again, and on and on it goes. 

Of course, that doesn't help you, as you're just dealing unending damage to one of your party members. So there's another ingredient: the undead party member uses Shackles of Pain to deal all the damage they take to an enemy. 

According to Ashandis, the loop doesn't prevent you from taking turns, so it can be ended by letting Soul Mate wear off. I'm not at a place where I can try it myself, but the abilities are all real, and the methodology makes sense.

There's no word on whether Larian intends to patch out the loop, or if it even considers it an exploit—there are lots of ways to 'break' Divinity's systems, and some are intentional, as Fraser discusses in our glowing review. This one may be a bit too OP to keep around, but you never know. I've reached out to Larian for comment.

Thanks, Kotaku.

The first big patch for Divinity: Original Sin 2 released earlier today, promising reams of fixes and changes. If you want to avoid any hints about quests to come, you may want to avoid reading the patch notes, which reference late game characters and fights—though not having gotten very far myself yet, most don't have any meaning to me. 

And with all of Original Sin 2's complexity and weirdness, this first patch has some amazing entries, some of which I think are worthy of our strangest patch notes list. Here are a few of my favorites:

• Fixed an issue where players could be eternally Wet
• Fixed Cloisterwood Waypoint possibly killing party members due to lava placement
• Fixed blood puzzle getting stuck if you start the flow of blood before Blessing it
• Fixed eating Alexandar’s head triggering an incorrect achievement

Hours ago, Fraser awarded Divinity: Original Sin 2 a 92% in our review, calling it "one of the best RPGs ever made." I haven't played nearly as long as Fraser, but so far I'm inclined to agree. 

The rest of the world seems to agree, too: As of a few days ago, Original Sin 2 had already sold nearly 500,000 copies . "Lots of players means lots of support issues coming in and we're trying to service them as fast as we can," said Larian boss Swen Vincke at that time. "After that, it'll be a long, well-deserved break for the team and then we'll boot up our machines again to work on the next things."

I haven't personally encountered any bugs yet, but I'll let you know if I ever stay eternally Wet even after this patch.

Update: Another patch has just released, adding "enhanced German, French and Russian translations." It also updates the ending movies, fixes the reward panel in Gamemaster mode, and rolls back a runeslot change that was "released too soon" in the earlier patch.

Playing Divinity: Original Sin 2 is uncannily like playing a tabletop RPG. The way that Larian’s sequel embraces player creativity immediately conjures up memories of days spent sitting around a table, asking the Dungeon Master if I can attempt the last stupid idea that floated into my head. And like a good DM, Original Sin 2 usually answers that question with “Yes, you can attempt it.” 

My plans don’t always succeed, of course, but embarrassing failures, like the time I froze my entire party during a fight with some demons, can be just as entertaining. That freedom to experiment and to make mistakes is present right from the get-go, when you make your would-be hero. Or villain.   

You can play everything from an undead Dwarf who loves nothing more than swinging his two-handed axe and throwing rocks to a sneaky Elven wizard who can talk to animals and get visions by chowing on corpses. There are pre-made classes and characters with rich backgrounds and personal quests, but it’s also possible to create something that’s entirely your own, constructing a persona and custom class out of a series of origin tags, attributes and skills. 

I do recommend picking a pre-made origin character, though. You can still customise their appearance and skills, but it’s their quests that are important. Each is blessed with a long mission that runs parallel to the main quest, fleshing it out and making the stakes all the more personal. They also tend to get the best lines, especially the undead Eternal, Fane, whose biting sarcasm keeps me warm at night. The origin characters you don’t pick, however, become companions that you can recruit, letting you still experience their stories. 

With so many different potential paths, it’s handy to have a party that covers all the bases. Conveniently, companions—you can bring three along with you—can be customised the moment you meet them, and any mistakes made can be undone by respeccing via a mirror you’ll get access to around 15 to 20 hours in. Given the broad range of skills and multitude of opportunities to mess up, it’s a major boon.   

When there are limitations, they’re always hidden well, and Larian has done a phenomenal job at anticipating what players might want to do, even how they might try to break the game. Take the teleport skill. You can get your hands on this early on, and it essentially provides a shortcut through a lot of obstacles and quests. It almost feels like cheating, using it, but not only does Original Sin 2 support it, it offers up the idea in the first place. 

These neat tricks don’t mean the quests are simple. Larian loves its headscratchers, populating Rivellon with riddles, moral conundrums and ancient mysteries. They’re great, fat with unexpected turns and rewarding character moments, but keeping track of them is hard work. The journal quickly becomes impossible to parse, and directions from NPCs can be vague, but it’s another otherwise welcome feature that really complicates things: the connected nature of the world.  

Many of the NPCs you’ll meet have relationships and allegiances that affect more than one quest, and seemingly unrelated events can collide, cutting adventures short. These ripples of consequence result in a world that feels alive, and even give NPCs agency, but they also inspire hesitation when decisiveness is required out of the fear that one or more of these choices will kill another quest. It’s daunting, but it’s also a fair price to pay for the weight it gives to decisions.

One of the first places I hit up in any new RPG village is the local watering hole, so when I arrived in Driftwood during the game’s third chapter, I immediately headed to the Black Bull. Its owner was an affable, chatty woman and proud mother. As she gushed about her son, it dawned on me, I knew this guy. He was a monster of a man I’d met hours ago. I’d killed him. And there was his mother, boasting about how good he is, how clever he is, and how much she loves him. I never told her, though I could have, and nothing came of the conversation, but it did matter, making the fight retroactively more memorable. And there are more of these moments than I could reasonably count.

Original Sin 2’s main quest calls to mind Baldur’s Gate II: Throne of Bhaal, both being races to godhood. The world’s a mess, you see, with monstrous beasties rampaging wherever there’s source magic. And you just so happen you be a sourcerer with a divine calling, born with the ability to wield this powerful magic, talk to the dead and feast on souls. So of course you’ve been hauled off to jail by the corrupt Magisters—the game’s fanatical villains—ostensibly to stop you from ruining the world. What starts off as mission to escape prison spirals into an quest involving gods competing for survival and an evil poised to swallow up the world. 

What could have been your typical, high-stakes fantasy quest is elevated by strong writing and voice acting that effortlessly jumps between whimsical and brutally grim. It can be surprisingly touching, too. As tempting as it can be to play the evil arsehole in a game that offers this much freedom, there are a lot of heartfelt moments that you’ll only see if you’re not an arse. That’s why I keep Lohse around. Out of my three companions, she’s the good cop, talking to people like a thoughtful human being instead of an evil undead necromancer. 

Larian has also subverted the party dynamic quite a bit. Companions not only assist you while undertaking their own personal quests, they are ultimately your competition, each the chosen hero for their respective divine sponsor. This has an even greater impact in co-op, with each player capable of screwing over their three allies. While you’re shopping or fighting, they might be growing in power, waiting to betray you.

In my own co-op campaign, I’ve been mostly content with blowing everything up. Literally and figuratively. My pal wants to chat to an NPC? I throw a massive boulder at them. He wants to avoid what will clearly be a fatal fight with some teleporting crocodiles? I run up to them and set them on fire. Obviously you should never play with me, but I’m having a blast.

Beyond the co-op, there’s a Game Master mode, letting you use the game’s assets (or your own) to craft tabletop-style adventures. The tools are simple enough to use, but flexible enough so that you can create brief 20 minute campaigns or massive roleplaying romps that will take your group days to finish. Unfortunately I’m still yet to make something as impressive as Larian CEO Swen Vincke’s recreation of the start of UItima 7.

When you want to blow off some steam, there’s also the Arena mode, pitting players against each other in structured PvP. What might have been a simple diversion is instead a really great reason to keep playing once you’re finished the campaign. The deep and often chaotic tactical combat is a high point, and the opportunity to get into more scraps is very welcome. 

Rivellon is a violent world, and while many of the turn-based fights can be avoided, you’re still going to spend a lot of time brawling. These battles consistently take place in tactically interesting places, filled with choke points, explosive barrels and multiple levels, which is especially impressive considering you can start a fight with any NPC. But like the rest of the game, it’s the vast number of choices you can make in each encounter that make them so compelling.

A classless system means that you can create a mind-boggling array of weird heroes, from warriors who can sprout wings, horns and spider legs, to preternaturally gifted archers who can command the weather. Some skills confer flight. Others make enemies bleed fire. Battlefields are really laboratories primed for madcap experiments, where magical and martial skills can be combined with the environment to create anything from a wall of fire that heals to demonic imps made out of pools of blood.

They’re tough, though. Fights are brutal and the broad range of skills makes it hard to create plans until after you’ve already lost once. They’re puzzles that you need to keep working at, attempting to come at them from different angles, learning enemy patterns, pinpointing the major threats. You can lose yourself in these burning, bloodsoaked arenas. It’s easily one of the best RPG combat systems, but there’s no denying that it requires more patience and practice than most.

That’s true of the game in general. Its scope can be intimidating, but not overwhelming, and there’s usually a way to fix a mistake. If you murder someone you need to talk to for a quest, for instance, there’s a good chance that looting their corpse will send you in the right direction. So it can be punishing, certainly, but never cruel.

And it’s that intimidating, ambitious scope, that dedication to player freedom, that makes Divinity: Original Sin 2 so impressive. There isn’t another RPG that lets you do so much. Larian promised a lot, and it has absolutely followed through, crafting a singular game that juggles a bounty of complex, immersive systems, and never drops them.

Despite an unlucky launch day, Larian's latest RPG Divinity: Original Sin 2 came roaring out of the gate last week, enjoying both critical acclaim and remarkably strong sales for what is, let's be honest here, a pretty niche genre. Yesterday it broke the 75,000 concurrent user mark on Steam, today it's even higher—a little over 85,000, according to Steam Spy—and even more impressive than that, Larian boss Swen Vincke told Eurogamer that it has already sold nearly a half-million copies.   

"It is fantastic, but it is also way beyond what we expected. We're close to hitting 500,000 units sold which is a number I believe it took us two or three months with Divinity: Original Sin 1," Vincke said. That's actually pretty close to the mark: The original Original Sin came out on June 30, 2014, and Vincke said in a mid-September blog post that it had achieved a half-million sales somewhere prior to that. 

That success presumably makes a console release of Divinity: Original Sin 2 very likely, but Larian's priority right now is the PC release. "We're now focused on delivering our first patch for the PC version, something that is scheduled for this week," Vincke said. "Lots of players means lots of support issues coming in and we're trying to service them as fast as we can. After that, it'll be a long, well-deserved break for the team and then we'll boot up our machines again to work on the next things."   

Larian rolled out a hotfix yesterday that should take care of problems that players have encountered when saving games, and Vincke said that the studio is also working on issues with its servers, which have apparently struggled under the unexpected load. But the problems clearly aren't putting off RPG fans: Original Sin 2 remains atop the Steam Top Sellers chart and holds fourth place on the Game Stats list, behind only PUBG, CS:GO, and Dota 2. 

We're still working on our full Divinity: Original Sin 2 review—while you wait, here's a good list of ten things you should know about the game before you get started on your adventures. 

Despite a rocky launch involving a power outage, Divinity: Original Sin 2 quickly claimed the top spot on Steam. Yesterday, another milestone was reached. Last night it boasted the fourth highest number of concurrent players on Steam, with only PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2 having more at the time. 

That number continued to rise until it peaked at 75,429 concurrent players yesterday evening. While that still puts it far off the astronomical player numbers of the top three, it’s comparable to other huge games like Grand Theft Auto 5 and Team Fortress 2. 

As PGamesN point out, this makes it one of the strongest launches for a CRPG, beating both the first Original Sin and Obsidian’s Pillars of Eternity. They boasted a concurrent player peak of 22k and 42k, respectively. The actual number will undoubtedly be higher, as well, since this is just taking into account users on Steam, and not those playing through GOG’s platform. 

The success is well-deserved. I’m busy working my way through the game for my review, but so far I’ve been incredibly impressed. It’s a ridiculously liberating game, fat with ways to experiment and absolutely laden with with brilliant fights and strong writing. Last night I took co-op for a spin for the first time, and I pickpocketed my buddy while he was chatting to a quest giver, then forced us to get in several fights we were unprepared for. We fell battling teleporting crocodiles. We died the way we lived. 

If you’re thinking of playing, or maybe you’ve just started, why not check out my Divinity: Original Sin 2 beginner’s guide?

Divinity: Original Sin 2's complexity can be daunting at first, and not everything is explained in detail. The good news is that a lot of early decisions can be taken back—you'll have a chance to respec later in the game—but just getting through the first few fights can be rough, even on Classic mode. To settle your nerves, we've compiled a few tips to help ensure you're set to adventure by the time you leave Fort Joy. (Speaking of, here's our walkthrough of all the ways in and out of Fort Joy, if you need extra guidance.)

Minor spoilers ahead for the first several hours, of course. These tips were last updated on September 29.

Pick an origin character

Original Sin 2’s robust character creator lets you cook up all manner of heroes and weirdos, but for the richest experience you’ll absolutely want to choose one of the origin characters. They are just as customisable as any other character you might make, but come with an origin story, extra voice acting and their own personal quests. The ones you don’t choose then become companions who can join you.

That said, don't fret too much if you prefer to play as a character of your own. You can initiate dialogue with non-party NPCs using any of your party members, meaning you'll have chances to experience some of their unique dialogue options if you want. It isn't quite the same, but you'll be able to follow their stories either way, and you'll pick up new character tags throughout your adventures that give your custom character a bit of unique personality.

Get a healer in your party

When you recruit new party members, you have the option to assign them different class presets than their defaults. If your character doesn't have any healing abilities, it's a good idea to request that one of them take the role of Cleric. Money is tight in the early game, so relying on potions to heal will make it tough to afford new armor and weapons.

Original Sin 2's class system is very flexible, so don't worry if you'd prefer your chosen healer be something else down the line. As a Cleric they'll get points in Hydrosophist and Necromancer, both of which support lots of cool, non-healing related spells. And you can completely change their specialization down the line and, say, build them into a rogue if you want.

How to earn money and gear up

First of all, click on everything. You never know who or what is important in Original Sin 2 at first glance. Every NPC could be a potential quest-giver, holder of important knowledge, or maybe they just have some hilarious jokes they’re waiting to rattle off. And a random piece of tat you find on the beach or in an otherwise empty barrel could be the key to solving a mystery, or maybe it’s just worth a few quid to the right buyer (but think carefully before selling items that might be quest-related). If it isn't red, you can snag it without being attacked for stealing. Essentially, you’ll want to treat it like an adventure game.

Also, remember to complete your quests. Even a simple thing, like talking down a few thugs, can result in earning experience, gold, and items—but you have to go talk to the quest giver to get your reward. Check your journal to see if you have any outstanding quests to complete.

All that said, money is going to be tight for a while. Quality armor and weapons are hard to come by in the early game. To help a little, check to see who in your party has the highest Bartering level, and make sure they cozy up to traders and get on their good side—even saving 20 gold here and there is worth it.

You can trade with many NPCs even if they don't offer

If an NPC is marked as a 'trader,' you won't always be able to get to the trade screen through dialogue. Even if you're on good terms and you've spent gold with them before, they'll sometimes get stuck repeating one line of dialogue, or just stop offering, which can be frustrating if you haven't yet noticed the easy-to-miss button on the upper left side of the dialogue box (see the screenshot above). Click it to open the trade screen.

Save money on lockpicks, get a skeleton

If you’re not going to play as Fane, the Undead origin character, then you should at least bring him as a companion. He’s excellent company, being the source of a lot of biting sarcasm and camp, pantomime menace, and his boney digits are unexpectedly handy. Fane, and indeed any Undead character, is a walking skeleton key, able to use their fingers to unlock doors and chests, as long as they have the appropriate skill level.

Get the Pet Pal talent

If you’ve got the Pet Pal talent (or someone in your party does) you can talk to animals, and it’s not just for laughs—animals frequently offer advice, spill secrets and occasionally give out quests. These conversations are also the source of many great character moments. Anyone can get the Pet Pal talent, and you can also choose it during character creation. If you recruit The Red Prince, he has it by default.

Protect the black cat 

Speaking of animals, early on you’ll find yourself followed by a black cat. He can’t be harmed in combat, but if you walk past the guards in front of the gate to Fort Joy Prison, east of the camp, one of the archers will murder the innocent kitty. Keep him alive, however, and when you escape the camp, he’ll join the party as a summon, allowing you to switch places with him in battle.

Make liberal use of quicksave

Divinity: Original Sin 2 is hard. Even on the default Classic Mode, battles are brutal, and in the first act you’ll often find your squishy party a bit underprepared. Resurrection scrolls are also incredibly pricey, though you can occasionally loot them. This isn’t helped by an autosave feature that kicks in when a battle begins, not before, so you won’t be able to prepare any better. So whenever you think you’re about to duke it out, hit that quicksave button.

It's also a good idea to quicksave before entering a new area, or initiating any major quest dialogue. Unless you're going for a one life, no take-backsies game (in which case we salute you), you'll find that what you say and do can have big consequences that you may want to take back.

Retreating is fine

Alternatively, and especially if you're avoiding save scumming, you can always flee. Once a character is out of range of the enemy, you can click flee, and they’ll respawn at the nearest waypoint. In the middle of a battle, it can be tricky to get far enough away from foes, so it’s worth investing in tricks that make escape easier. Teleportation, flight and the Tactical Retreat ability are all boons when you just need to get the hell out of there.

Environmental effects are handy and deadly 

Fights are often won by the group best able to manipulate the environment with magic and elemental weapons. Cast rain on a group of enemies, and then a spell that applies chill, and you might end up with frozen enemies and slippery surfaces. These environmental effects make great traps—and also obstacles—but they can help you as well as hindering enemies. A Necromancer, for instance, can make it rain blood and then cast a healing spell that soaks up all of the puddles to increase their vitality.

And don't forget: undead characters heal from poison. Be careful not to accidentally do them any favors (unless it's Fane) by leaving poison puddles around. You can use healing abilities on them to do damage, too.

Grab a bedroll as soon as possible

While healing potions and spells are important when you’re in a fight, the best way to heal outside of battle is by taking a quick nap. That’s only possible if there’s a bed nearby, however, and you won’t find many of them out in the wilderness. That’s why it’s so important to pick up the first bedroll you encounter. You’ll be able to take it with you everywhere, and clicking on it heals every character almost instantly. You'll find one in the first beach area near the entrance to Fort Joy, on top of a ruined wall. There's a shovel there, too. You should grab the shovel.

Don’t forget to rotate the camera

It seems so obvious, but it’s easy to forget that you can rotate the camera to get a clearer picture of the area you’re marching through. Often, the angle can hide entrances, caves, chests and secret paths that become clear when you change your perspective. I spent about 30 minutes looking for a cave, only to discover that I’d passed it a dozen times, but until I changed the camera, I only saw the hill behind it. It's not a bad idea to have a character with high Wits, either, as they'll call out secrets when they see them.

Divinity: Original Sin 2 is so expansive and elaborate that even with this list, there’s going to be a lot for you to learn, but the most important lesson is just to experiment. That might mean using the teleportation spell creatively to loot corpses that are out of reach, for instance. If it seems like you can do something, there's a good chance you can, so you may as well try.

Two years after Larian's fantasy-RPG Divinity: Original Sin 2 quadrupled its Kickstarter goal, the game is now out of early access and in full release. It's doing very well for itself, too, muscling past both Playerunknown's Battlegrounds and Dishonored: Death of the Outsider to claim the top spot on the Steam charts. But despite all the time and planning that went into it, the release definitely wasn't the smoothest ever. 

In a spectacular case of bad timing, a power outage—apparently caused by a fire—knocked out the electricity to roughly a quarter of the city of Ghent, Belgium, including Larian's home studio. So on the day the team should have been working on last-minute fixes and dealing with issues that inevitably follow a release, they were instead forced to wait patiently for the lights to come back on. There was some doubt about whether the launch would happen at all, especially when the Steam uploader refused to boot after the team moved it to a location with power: "It's really going well today," studio boss Swen Vincke says in the video. 

Ultimately, though, Original Sin 2 did make it out the door more or less on time. Vincke said in the video that the non-English translations would be delayed by about a week to accommodate some last-minute changes in the script, but following requests from players in Germany, France, and Russia, the decision was made to release the localized versions as-is, and then update them next week. Modding support is also rolling out, and the first hotfix is on the way today as well. 

We'll have a full Divinity: Original Sin 2 review up for you soon. For now, you can get a feel for what it's all about in the "Feature Trailer" below. 

Earlier this week, Larian Studios released a lovely new trailer for Divinity: Original Sin 2 that, among other things, suggested that the game's final playable race would be the Undead. In a developer update video released today, the studio made it official, revealing the Undead race, a new origin character named Fane, and the very impressive-looking Collector's Edition box. 

Undead characters feature some "fundamentally different gameplay mechanics" than the other races in Divinity: Original Sin 2—they're healed with poison, for instance (regular healing potions damage them) and can pick locks with their fingers—and while any race (Human, Elf, Dwarf, or Lizard) can be played as Undead, they'll have unique undead abilities and traits, rather than those of their former life. They must also disguise their true form in order to keep NPCs from fleeing or attacking them, either with helmets and clothing, or more effectively with a magical item called Mask of the Shapeshifter.   

The device creates masks that enable Undead characters to assume the appearance and racial abilities of any race in the game—a Dwarf can get better prices from a Dwarf merchant, for instance—and multiple masks can be created, and even used by characters who are still living. But there's a catch: To create a mask, you'll have to literally rip the faces off of fresh corpses. The potential complications involved in that process are, I would think, readily self-evident. 

Fane, the new Undead origin character, was a scholar who was entombed centuries ago by his elders for pursuing forbidden knowledge. The character and his origin story were created in collaboration with Chris Avellone, whose participation in the game was announced as a sort of unofficial stretch goal in 2015.

Fane also features prominently in the Divinity: Original Sin 2 Collector's Edition announced today, as a ten-inch-tall statue with a swappable Shapeshifter Mask and skull. The CE also features a big lore book, an equally large art book, instruction manual, a cloth map, and a commemorative metal plate for Kickstarter backers. Only 1000 are available, and as you might expect, they're not cheap: They go for $169 plus shipping at divinity.game. Divinity: Original Sin 2 will be out on September 14.

Larian's isometric fantasy RPG Divinity: Original Sin 2 is set to come out on September 14, which is now less than three weeks away. With the big day looming, the studio has released a new trailer that shows off combat, conversations, and an impressive array of multiplayer features. 

The trailer boasts "final art and character designs for the game," and also a skeleton, which wouldn't be all that remarkable in an RPG except that he appears in the character creation screen. Is that confirmation that the final playable race in Original Sin 2 will be the Undead? I'm going to go with "yes," especially since the trailer announcement specifically brought the point up, but the official word on the matter won't be dropped until Thursday. 

The basic gameplay doesn't appear to be all that terribly changed from the original Original Sin—spells and elements combine to impressive, sometimes dangerous effect, so best pay attention to where you're standing when you're slinging around the magic. But it looks fantastic, and the four-way drop-in, drop-out multiplayer sounds very promising for those of you who get along well with others. And in case you're wondering, we described Divinity: Original Sin 2 as "an impressive sequel to an already impressive game" in our August 2016 preview of the game's first hour.   

Larian also recently announced that, despite its previous insistence that it simply would not be possible to do, Divinity: Original Sin 2 will be fully voice acted after all.