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How do you all intend to tie in the events from D2, Beyond Divinity with OS2?

From this interview, it says that your group in OS2 is fleeing for the Black Ring which is now the lesser evil over the Divine Order.
http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=10045

In the Son of Chaos Novella, it says that Damian under the influence of Ygerna, joined the Black Ring after she was killed. Then he massacred the people of Rivellon.

So do massacres happen very often in the world of Rivellon? What would cause people to flee for the very enemy, especially when local propaganda and education has enlightened them of, the very wisdom of their Demigod? Maybe it's a point of "they're not killing us NOW" and "being dead is better than being sucked dry".

You writers have a very heavy job and that's to tie up everything. Even though the Divine One may or may not be around, we should be able to see traces of his influence everywhere. And would he approve of the Divine Order's acts? I've read that in DD, he didn't really like them. But after he became a DemiGod, maybe he started to see things differently?

I'd also like to think that: from the Divine One's influences(what he said, did, etc.), we can infer part of the relationship between father and son. :P

I thought D:OS 2 is taking place before DivDiv? I'm absolutely sure that at least D:OS takes place before it.

Nope, let me quote this from an interview with Swen and other Larian staff:

@DrunkenTofu

You have some good points. I'm also interested, what Lucian has to say about the terrible things the Order does in his name. Maybe he's still on his way back home, when Alexander and his henchmen are ravaging Rivellon? We will see^^.

Huh, I had missed that particular tidbit of information. I'd have to replay DivDiv to brush up on the lore then :p

I'd like to know where the lore hole named 'Arhu' sits in on this story. Since he was part of D:OS which happened thousands of years ago, and he's part of Divine Divinity, he's bound to be part of D:OS 2 as well. How did he make it from D:OS to D:OS 2? That's a long time (which obviously wasn't explained in Divine Divinity).

Magic, I guess? Zandalor is also a very old man and Maxos was even older, when he created the Dragon Knights, so I think we have an explanation for that.

I don't know what the age limit on wizards is, or if they even have one, but the most powerful ones seem to be able to live for over a thousand years easily. Maxos mentioned longing for the days when he was a "spring chicken of a mere 500 years old".

Playing D:OS, I wasn't acquainted with lore of Divinity. I've recently played Divine Divinity, And now try to understand lore.

In D:OS and D:OS 2 history about something called Source. I haven't seen something like Source in DD.
Could anyone explain me, Why in D:OS we chase "Sourcers", in DD no one mention about it, in D:OS 2 Source is a bad thing again?
Or maybe it is a problem of localization or I've missed something crucial?

Yesterday started to play BD. Will see.



In Divine Divinity, telling about Council of Seven, Zandalor says that previous one took place about 600 years ago (or something like that) to defeat the Lord of Chaos, and every council member gave his live. And Zandalor was very yong in those days.

In D:OS Zandalor is already a powerfull wizard.
It looks like D:OS take place after Council defeat the Lord of Chaos. So there is less then 600 years between D:OS and DD.

Literally one of the first quests in DD dealt with the Source. You had to choose which one of two people you'd want to heal with the stone from the Source fountain. If you were inquisitive and curious you could find a way to heal them both.

In Divine Divinity, 'source' had been used for healing, but the healers' access to it was cut off for some unknown reason (same for the healing fountain with the single healing gem left). There wasn't a lot of detail about it, simply because at the time there was no way to know how the lore would develop for future games.

The Divinity timeline was actually given in a D:OS Kickstarter update. There were 2 attempts by the Lord of Chaos to return to Rivellon (both described in the prequel novella included with the game), the first a hundred years after D:OS and the second (where the council sacrificed themselves) six hundred years after. Divine Divinity is set twelve hundred years after D:OS.

Yes, DD was very basic, but it has it's own charme because of the humor. New concepts like riftrunning and the Dragon Knights were newly created in each new games and sometimes Larian rewrote some stuff due to budgetcuts (that's why Elves are almost extinct and why the landscape changed. Personally I would just have written that the game takes place in another landscape, which was the case) and I think we can assume, that with D:OS2 we will finally have a definitive Lore for the world.

But since Larian played with a lot of concepts (Steampunk, Dragon Knights, talking objects) the world will be at least very colourful and full of possibilities, compared to the standard fantasy - setting at the beginning of the series. So yeah, every bad thing has always a bright side .

You mean the reason why the Elves or Dwarves disappeared? They could've fled to somewhere else in Rivellon or even into another Rift.

@DrunkenTofu

My thoughts excactly . Since I believe that "Divinity 3" will be "Divinity: Original Sin 3", we can assume this explanation, so we still can play the other races. Don't think that would be bad, it even could be part of the storyline .

I seriously hope not.

I'd prefer Divinity 3 to be a PURE SINGLE-PLAYER, NO MULTIPLAYER AT ALL game, and I would not mind a return to real-time or third-person. Original Sin 1 was great, but I'd like something more from Larian than to just try and clone D:OS again and again.

D:OS was their best game by far, though. It still has possibilities for growth, exploration and expansion. Now with MCA working with the team, at least some of the writing will flash brilliance if they don't cut out most of his work *cough PoE *cough*. Well-made TB RPGs are also very rare. They shouldn't *clone* D:OS, but take the mistakes it did to heart and make it better in every possible way (Baldur's Gate 2, MotB, System Shock 2, Fallout 2 etc.)

You're not the first one to dismiss MP games even if it is an option, and I absolutely don't get it - why should that change anything ? Maybe because it would imply a bit more testing and developpement ? DOS is proving that a game developped with Coop in mind from the start can also make a perfectly viable SP game too.
I prefer playing my games in coop when done right, because I can. One of the reasons I have a hard time playing PoE is because, despite being developped with the Baldur's Gate engine, they didn't authorize coop. ( well and since the game isn't that good either. I played some crappy games that were lots of fun in coop so PoE may have gained something there ).
I'd swear there is a strong anti-coop/MP vibe coming from a lot of gamers, maybe because of the rise of competitive esport and MP-only based game, streamed to death on every channels of the earth. Call of Duty, Starcraft, League of Legends / DotA, etc etc... Sadly there also is a strong anti-SP vibe coming from multi-players, like "nobody cares about the SP campaign in CoD or Starcraft2 lol noob". Which is stupid too, really.

I perfectly understand realtime vs turn-based though. One isn't better than the other, but it just offers a nice refreshing change going from one style to the other.

I remember the last game in the soulreaver saga, SR: Defiance, essentially being both SR3 and Legacy of Kain 3 - it was fun they were able to conclude both stories with one game.

It was Unity, not the Infinity Engine. Though PoE is aggressively mediocre, so so much for that.

Some players are against MP because it reminds them of console games. That's it. D:OS didn't lose anything by including MP and it wasn't cynically produced with only MP in mind.

My bad, I thought so. They really got out of their way to make it look like the old thing

And yes, maybe. There are so much "wars" going on out there... Console vs console, Console vs PC, SP vs MP, title X vs title Y... Human race needs wars. *shrug*

And I didn't say DOS1 was produced with only MP in mind, but it was clearly produced and heavily advertised upon the coop feature. If the coop works, it's not a big deal to make it work solo, especially in that kind of turn-based game. I'd wager it's slightly more difficult to make a proper SP mode in a Tomb Raider : Guardian of Light as it demands reactivity from both players at the same time, so you'd have to put some kind of IA in your game.
Just to clarify

I didn't say you were :p I said that it wasn't produced only with MP with mind, so the detractors don't have grounds to debate on.

The console thing is kinda convoluted. The cRPG crowd (especially over at the RPGCodex) are really jaded towards consoles, because of consolitis and the dumbing down of games for the "casual crowd". They do have their reasons, though, I'll be the first to admit that. Though, like I said, D:OS worked great as both a SP and MP game and it wasn't developed for consoles, so there is no ground for debate here.