Divinity: Original Sin Kickstarter Update #8, $370,203 and Counting
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Party-based
You start the game with two avatars in your party. Let's call them Roderick and Scarlett for now. Obviously when starting the game you can name and customize them. And yes, you can also play this game with two men or two women, it doesn't always have to be man/woman.
Roderick and Scarlett are the true heroes of this tale, and they'll always be in your party, but should you feel the need for reinforcements, you can recruit two extra party members.
Split up
Except in a few special circumstances, your party doesn't need to stay together. Sometimes the game will ask you to gather your party first, usually only when going from zone to zone, but our zones are very big (think Divine Divinity big).
But in one zone, including its houses, cellars, and dungeons, it means that you can control Scarlett to explore an underground cave while Roderick buys some fresh fish on the market. (Each hero's henchman will follow his master.)
For example
Because Divinity: Original Sin features a turn-based combat system, this can lead to pretty interesting situations.
For instance: you switch to Scarlett, and in the cave, she encounters a friendly community of unfortunate ghosts, and has lengthy conversations with them, trying to understand why their souls aren't floating towards the Hall Of Echoes.
You switch to Roderick and, shopping around, realize he doesn't have enough gold to pay for his fish. So you try your hand at stealing. Lacking the necessary skills and talents for conducting successful theft, another shopper catches Roderick in the act and calls for the guards. Roderick is a bit short of temper and he's also on a mission to save Rivellon: there's no way he's going to put up with such foolery as going to jail, so he resists arrest and draws his sword.
Turn-based combat starts on the market, and several guards, as well as some market-goers that feel up to it, join the fight. Roderick has a high initiative, and in your first turn, you manage to conjure an earth elemental to even the odds a bit before any of the guards can even make their move. But there are a lot of guards...
Oops. Now what?
At this moment, you could decide that Roderick needs help from Scarlett, and switch to Scarlett. You could guide her out of the black cove, accross the beach, over the hills and into Cyseal. Then when she would get close enough to the fight, she would automatically become part of combat.Or, you could switch to Scarlett to continue exploring the cave.
While you switch to Scarlett and control her, Roderick and his combat will still be "paused in his turn", awaiting your commands.
Let's keep Roderick stuck in time for a while, and just keep on exploring. As Scarlett ventures deeper into the cave, she stumbles upon a whole bunch of angry undead who attack you on sight. (Why are the ghosts friendly? Why are these guys unfriendly? If only you had talked to more ghosts...)
1.21 Gigawatts if you think about it
This means that now we have a situation in which both Roderick and Scarlett are in different turn-based combat situations at different locations in the world. You can do these fights one after the other, or you can jump from fight to fight by just clicking on their avatar icons (or using shortcut keys).
And should you ever manage to get the enemies from both fights close enough to one another, then the two combats would merge into one big combat.
