Divinity: Original Sin getting Hardcore mode, plus slew of extra stuff

As we mentioned yesterday, Divinity: Original Sin developers Larian are working on two new, as yet unrevealed RPGs, using the Divinity: OS engine as their base. But that doesn't mean they're done with Divinity—there's the little matter of that 'Hardcore' mode that promises to make pretty major changes to the underlying game. As revealed about three minutes into the above Kickstarter update video, for Hardcore mode Larian are going back and making changes to every encounter in the game, giving baddies new skills and new strategies so that your old tactics will no longer be quite so effective. It's taking a little longer than expected, so there's no date yet, but I'll eat my Santa hat if it doesn't arrive sometime next year. (My Santa hat is made of chocolate, by the way.)

Hard cores aside, we can expect to see changes made to Divinity's economy, to its story and companions (including added banter)—there's also a high likelihood of added controller support, given that a couple of devs are filmed playing around with such a thing in the video. Added together, it's clear that an extraordinary amount of work is being done on Divinity post-release, so if you've already finished it, another playthrough may be in order towards the tail end of 2015, when I imagine most or all of these additions will have been patched in.

Before then, we can expect another patch in January focused on bug fixes and the like. Here's a bit from the latest Kickstarter update on that:

"Rest assured that these accolades don't make us want to kick back and rest on our laurels: quite on the contrary! We realise all too well that Original Sin is a good, but not a flawless game and a lot of effort has gone into upgrading a multitude of the game's aspects like combat, pacing, UI and main story narration. And yes, work on the hardcore mode still continues and yes, same goes for the Linux version!

"It will take us some time to implement all these changes and features, but in the meantime a patch with a whole host of other fixes should be ready for you somewhere in January."

Thanks, RPG Codex.

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.