@rorie: So I played this at PAX East.
Seems decent, I don't think it's anywhere near as grand as Divinity: Original Sin 2 though and it doesn't appear to be trying to be. I think basically what they wanted to do is get another game out quickly on this engine, without having to make a ton of new assets or story content. Most of the assets look reused, or only altered slightly.
What they seem to have done is take Original Sin 2's combat and tried to fit it more into Divinity: Dragon Commander's gameplay loop framework. The loop seems to be you go to main base (in this case the Lady Vengeance) consult with your commanders and make a narrative choice that results in a tactics mission. Go do the mission, and then back to the ship for another choice. So a much higher % of time in combat, basically zero exploration, no side quests and dialogue choices. There might be shopping and gear, but that wasn't viewable in the demo. Your choices lock you out missions and other paths. So while there maybe 70ish missions (I believe that's what the dev said) in the game, you might only have access to say... ~30 in a given playthrough due to your choices. Definitely meant to offer some replay-ability.
Mechanically the fights seem little different from OS2 save for one major change. Each Side goes all at once. So no more turn order. They really need to overhaul the UI as it's very unclear what units have gone and which ones haven't in the demo build. Also each fights seems to have objectives that are more important to the win condition that are different than just "kill everything". For example the mission I ran involved saving hostages spread across the map before enemy units killed them, with enemy reinforcements being summoned every "X" turns.
Also it's pretty tough. I cleared OS2 on the second highest difficulty with minimal problems and I failed this demo. I got further than everybody else who was in my row of PCs, but there were some surprises in the fight that I frankly was ill prepared for despite crushing the initial objective. It might be a game where you have to play fights multiple times just due to the unpredictability of some of the scripted events, resulting in trial and error.
Narratively it seems... odd. All the playable protagonists (Lohse, Fane, Ifan, Beast, Red Prince, Sebille etc) are back from OS2 and it seems to be a quasi-sequel (the staff was coy when I asked about this)to a version of the events of Original Sin 2 that we seemingly didn't play. The player character is not viewable and is some standin for a create a character. The Player character appears to be canonical "godwoken", or at least is treated like he/she is. The other characters seem to just call you "commander" though.
Seems like Malady and Lucian will be the focal point characters of the plot, with an emphasis on Malady's past and her motivations.
I think I'm going to enjoy this game, but I also think it's a far less ambitious game than D:OS2 and will probably be received as such by players.
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