Divinity: Original Sin 2 claims top spot on Steam despite a very unlucky launch day

Two years after Larian's fantasy-RPG Divinity: Original Sin 2 quadrupled its Kickstarter goal, the game is now out of early access and in full release. It's doing very well for itself, too, muscling past both Playerunknown's Battlegrounds and Dishonored: Death of the Outsider to claim the top spot on the Steam charts. But despite all the time and planning that went into it, the release definitely wasn't the smoothest ever. 

In a spectacular case of bad timing, a power outage—apparently caused by a fire—knocked out the electricity to roughly a quarter of the city of Ghent, Belgium, including Larian's home studio. So on the day the team should have been working on last-minute fixes and dealing with issues that inevitably follow a release, they were instead forced to wait patiently for the lights to come back on. There was some doubt about whether the launch would happen at all, especially when the Steam uploader refused to boot after the team moved it to a location with power: "It's really going well today," studio boss Swen Vincke says in the video. 

Ultimately, though, Original Sin 2 did make it out the door more or less on time. Vincke said in the video that the non-English translations would be delayed by about a week to accommodate some last-minute changes in the script, but following requests from players in Germany, France, and Russia, the decision was made to release the localized versions as-is, and then update them next week. Modding support is also rolling out, and the first hotfix is on the way today as well. 

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We'll have a full Divinity: Original Sin 2 review up for you soon. For now, you can get a feel for what it's all about in the "Feature Trailer" below. 

Andy Chalk

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.