Good ideas, Gregorovitch. I especially want to comment on your #1.
Drama and Comedy can mix, but a lot of the time, Original Sin goes pretty far in one direction or another. A lot of the time Original Sin is just zany and wacky, and then you come upon human sacrifices and massacred villages.
The tragedy has no impact at all. None.
Spoilers for if you haven't beaten the game:
That's because the first time you arrive there, there's a zany, friendly skeleton picking through the corpses looking for good bits and making jokes.
Divine Divinity somehow worked better by showing less, by having the world and the characters feel more like real people than Original Sin's bantering buffoons. Madora is supposed to be our human link to this tragedy, but she hasn't said much outside of the time when she finally tells her story.
Frankly, Madora's story is also jarring in that it seems to come out of nowhere. She seemed to be a zany, overly paranoid character whose paranoia was meant to be amusing. I mean, cats purring as a form of mind control? There is no sign that she's actually supposed to be badly traumatized, and after her revelation, there doesn't seem to be too much development of that facet afterwards, either (although I haven't yet finished Hunter's Edge), just her wanting to get vengeance on her torturer.
That's all well and good, but it misses the mark, because that's all about what happened to HER, and the fact that the village was massacred seems irrelevant.
Divinity 2's use of tragedy and disaster also worked better because the world, while still having a sense of humour, was not super-zany. The characters still felt real.
