Original Sin can do this because most of the XP you earn during the game comes from killing things during combat encounters, which is another marked departure from recent trends in more mainstream RPGs. Yes, you will run into people in towns and by the roadside who’ll give you breadcrumbs towards one quest or another, but these are mostly for guideline and theming purposes only, and they are not mechanical prerequisites. There’s almost no scripted spawning of encounters dependent on you tripping a bunch of narrative flags, with OS 2 preferring to set everything in the world up when it loads the map and then leave you to find those encounters organically by exploring that map.

They are unique amongst modern RPGs in that they practically invite the player to break quest sequencing where even a throwback like Pillars Of Eternity would have a strict progression through a questline - talk to the quest giver, go to a location, kill the monster, steal his treasure, go back to the quest giver, get reward, with all of these steps being required for completion of the quest - Original Sin instead lets you blunder into its questlines at pretty much any point. The core theme of the Original Sin games is freedom.

That I played Original Sin 2 all the way through to the end after ragequitting from Original Sin 1 because of increasingly unforgiving and unfun quest and encounter design indicates that Larian have made some significant improvements to their formula in the sequel.

There are “only” four acts, each taking place in a single area of the game, but the first tutorial act took me 8 hours to get through.

It took me sixty hours to get to the end, which should tell you two things.

Original Sin 2 is a huge, sprawling monster of an RPG, in a way I’ve not quite seen since… well, since the first Original Sin game, but before that it was Ultima VII, a game which the Original Sin series pays knowing homage to. God, this was not a good choice of game to get me back into the reviewing business.

Divinity 2 getting your own back