So... what gives? Why the homogeneity? It makes Rivellon a far less interesting world to explore, IMHO.
Two words: budget constraints.
No, that's not true seeing as you do encounter several races in the game.
Maybe there's something amazing coming my way in the last 20% of Original Sin, but so far--even though I've been loving the game--it just doesn't feel like a Divinity game to me.
What made Divine Divinity an appealing setting to me was that it basically took this idea of the "Seven races" and went with it, without shoehorning any one race into a "inherently evil" role. And I just loved the Lizards and Imps--and always wanted to see more of both than the tiny windows we saw in DD.
But then came Divinity II and it was All Humans, And Only Humans.
And now Original Sin looks to be making the same error. There are only two imps in the game so far--what Orcs are in the game are uniformly hostile. There are zero Lizards. There are zero Elves. There are zero Dwarves.
So... what gives? Why the homogeneity? It makes Rivellon a far less interesting world to explore, IMHO.
There are actually several alive Imps in the game. The rest you encounter are dead in Hiberheim and you see a few corpses of Imps also in the Lucella academy for Immaculates.
There are plenty of orcs and just like in Divine Divinity, most are hostile towards you. Original Sin actually has more friendly orcs (I think there's around three you can actually talk to) whereas DD only had two.
The goblins are back again and there is an elf you can encounter. The only races missing are the lizardmen and dwarves but I believe Divine Divinity made it clear that these three later races were already dwindling at that point. Most of the elves you meet in DD are in secluded places and there were only a few lizardmen to meet. By Divinity 2 (which is only a few centuries later), you can find a book in a cave near the starting village which explains how there were some elves who used that particular cave as their last refuge and that no one has ever seen an elf since, so much so, that the world now believes them extinct (although cut content from Divinity 2 would have featured them in some forest so based on that, it's likely that they've gone into hiding more which is why no human has seen them for centuries)
Even if the dwarves weren't dwindling, they lived in the mountains as shown in DD and you encountered very few in the human towns so not encountering them in Original Sin or Divinity 2 could easily be explained from a lore perceptive.
I highly doubt any of this is due to budget constraints seeing as Larian has made so many enemy variety. I guess they just didn't see fit to throw in an entire town dedicated to dwarves or elves just for the sake of it. These places had meaning to them in the first game.
Dragon Commander featured all the seven races though.
