Good news for those who enjoyed Larian Studios’ excellent, if occasionally incomprehensible fantasy RPG Divinity: Original Sin - the game’s getting an Enhanced Edition for consoles later this year, and owners of the PC version will find their copy upgraded to the new edition for free.
There is a caveat. Because this new version is a markedly different experience, it will be a completely separate game. Any saves you have won’t transfer over.
As for what’s new, Larian promises ”controller support, local co-op with split screen, fully voiced characters, a totally reworked story (with a brand new ending) and more”. There will also be new quests, characters, build options, and remastered visuals and sound effects.
Larian founder and CEO discusses the reasoning behind the new edition in detail over on his blog. And when I say in detail, I mean in DETAIL. In a hefty post, he lists several reasons why the studio has decided to come back to Original Sin. There are a lot of technical benefits to making full use of DirectX 11 of course, but what I’m most interested in is Larian’s work on the story and writing; I enjoyed the game a lot, but found the quest design and overall story-telling fairly baffling. After spending thirty hours or so in it’s fantasy world, I was apparently nowhere near the end of the main story, but felt no real pull to continue. From the sound of it I wasn’t the only one.
”Other than the small but not unimportant detail that it’s coming to PS4 and Xbox One, our Enhanced Edition features reworked dialogs all voiced by AAA actors, a story & world that has been drastically improved with hours of new content, not only during the game but also at the ending (that part that gets played by 5% of players), a truckload of new features & improvements and game modes that play incredibly different to the normal mode because we replaced pretty much every encounter,” Vincke writes.
Maybe I’ll finally complete the game when the Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition launches later this year. According to a post on the game’s Kickstarter page, the new version will be demonstrated at E32015 this June. I would imagine we’ll probably get a release date confirmation around then.
