“We spend a lot of work making sure you feel the things you did had an impact on the world,” says Vincke. “That goes quite far, actually, especially when you get to the endings. Nothing in DOS2 fits in a nice tree. It’s all nodes linked and mashed into to each other so it becomes very hard to get a singular view of all the options you had. And that’s because of the way we make it. It’s deeply embedded in our design methodology. It’s cool, but that can be frustrating if you’re the type of player who wants to see everything. The best thing to do for them is to read through our design docs, but that’s not necessarily the most – ” he laughs “ – fun literature in the world.”

The second problem is the sheer number of ways that DOS2’s systems can potentially break the storyline. But DOS2 stands as evidence that this one is not intractable. On one hand, it makes it clear when you’re choosing to break things, such as by letting Sebille kill Stingtail and therefore end the Red Prince’s dream of regaining his throne.

On the other hand, it pulls various tricks to keep things ticking over. Plot-important characters can be killed off because their story payloads can be offloaded to you in other ways. The old but crude way of dealing with this is to have a diary or journal hanging around for you to find if its owner isn’t around to tell you. DOS2 isn’t above using such fallbacks, but it’s more creative, too. You can, for example, talk to their ghosts once you’ve learned a specific skill during the main quest. Or you can eat corpses. This is an innate skill of elf characters: eat a body part and they’ll remember its owner’s memories. And what’s more, Fane can use his Mask of the Shapeshifter to wear an elf’s face to become an elf and use elven abilities.

“They add extra solutions to players so they could find narrative they may have missed because they, for instance, they blew up an entire city, which is possible,” says Vincke. “We can safely say that there’s never a moment that the game completely blocks you out just because you exploited the freedom it offers.”

Divinity Original Sin 2 Wiki

I have to say, once you start eating corpses it’s hard to stop, because it’s the source of even more little details and richness about this world and the people within it. And here lies the real strength behind DOS2’s blend of story and freedom: “We know if we give a tapestry that’s sufficiently dense and sufficiently broad, players will be able to pick up their own storyline, which is the most fun in an RPG anyway.” The result is choice at every turn, which is exactly what a multiplayer RPG requires. It’s rather wonderful to see that necessity benefitting singleplayer so profoundly, too.