Hi!
I've been playing DOS1 and 2 and tried to search for answers and that's all i know in the topic.
So the concept of Source is pretty obvious in general but i don't understand why everyone makes such a big deal of it.
In DOS1 source magic seemed to be more like school of magic that is evil for some reason (like necromancy is usually portrayed in fantasy), pretty much like "witches got powers from satan so are automatically evil".
However in DOS2 source magic is absolutely random, widely known and optional. It's the world of non-magical skills that work like magic (teleportation is magic, but "cloak and dagger" works in the same manner but is just a skill of dexterity, not magic), the regular magic and that extremely narrow type of magic that is spread across every single class in game and gives 1 or 2 skills that are a little bit better than regular ones (e.g my warrior can hit for 3k with 3 AP or for 5k with 4 ap and 3 source points). So the whole story is about how objectively dangerous (randomly spawns hostile monsters) is that very specific set of skills and how can it be used to fight against the void. The only skill that has no substitutes is Bless but it's more of a bad design than a lore problem, lore-wise if you cannot curse, you don't need to bless.
It raises a lot of questions about the story, e.g. why people who are sourcerers use this dangerous skills in skirmishes against fantasy-nazis instead of using safe types of skills (if you can use a granade that does 1000 dmg and is safe or granade that does 2000 dmg but have a chance of 50% to instakill you, would you use the latter?) but let's skip it.
What really interests me is why the big picture of the story is built like soap opera. There are only 2 good endings here that actually make any sense: bring back eternals (fix history) or use the source to fix the veil and be done with this several skills you won't be able to use anymore. Lore-wise it's not a big sacrifice, it's like snapping your fingers to destroy every MP5 gun in the world and in exchange prevent alien invasion that would destroy our world (even MP5 enthusiasts should agree that it's quite good deal). So why does it take a zero-to-hero character to kill the gods, gain some power and fix veil while it could've been done easily by the gods in the first place? The whole story is built on several layers of incompetence and bad will of everyone involved.
I can understand that Lucian built nazi-army for his evil reasons and all the stuff involving him doesn't make sense just because he's crazy so obviously does crazy stuff. Just killing him should pretty much save the world and resolve all conflicts (if sourcerers are not murdered they got no reason for revenge and the spiral of violence is stopped and without this civil war voidwoken do not appear) but let's skip it too.
So in the end if you take power of the source you gain nothing (Lucian was divine when i slain him and i've seen no difference other than he's spectacular glow), if you do nothing then it's suicide, if you give power to the people you gain nothing (they have bigger arsenal but still can't beat eternals), if you fix veil you prevent alien invasion at no cost and if you are Fane and bring eternals back you make the only choice that actually matters and is not sabotage. So the whole point of source is to be building material for veil and it doesn't have any other practical use (it's as if blueberries could heal cancer- you can use them to save millions of lives or eat all of them because they're yummy).
So finally my question is whether this story is so shallow and inconsistent on purpose because it was just an excuse to make epic fights (like hero dropping he's gun so he can fistfight the villain who murdered hero's family in 80s movies) or am i missing some very important lore that makes it actually a good story?
Also, is God-King powerful enough to restore eaten souls or just creates clones of enemies i've consumed (e.g. Windego and Kemm shows up in final fight after i've consumed their souls)?
Also if God-King is such powrful being then why doesn't he just descend into the world instead of sending minions? I'm just a regular guy who can lock him behind the veil but he, who also uses source, cannot tear the hole again? It's like locking rabbit in the cage made of carrots.
