Divinity: Original Sin 2 will include undead as a playable race when it launches thanks to the passing of the game’s fourth stretch goal in its Kickstarter campaign.
Having raised $1.2 million dollars on the crowd-funding platform Kickstarter, developer Larian Studios will now be adding undead to the list of playable races in Divinity: Original Sin 2. Undead will join the ranks of humans, wood elves, and imperial dwarves in the roster of playable races when the game is finished.
In an update video announcing the undead as a playable race, lead writer spoke on the lore of the undead.
“For the undead, the idea is that, in the world of Rivellon, when you die you go to this place called the Hall of Echoes. People may remember the Hall of Echoes from Divinity 2, actually, but we’ve been working on expanding the lore.”
He continued: “The idea for the undead is actually that these are people that resist the natural pull towards the Hall of Echoes where normal people go when they die. The first in this category are called ‘The Feint’ and these people feel like they have some kind of unfinished business left in the world, which is why they resist the pull to the Hall of Echoes. The problem is that because they resist the pull they start to wither and their personality is slowly taken away from them and that is why they are called The Feint.
“The second category is called ‘The Razed’ and these are basically the necromantic undead. They are raised by necromancers to be dominated by them and how do they do this? They do this by getting them addicted to giving them little bits of ‘source,’ which they instinctively crave and that’s why they are completely and utterly obedient to the necromancer and will do the vilest things in [the necromancer’s] name.
“And then there is the third category and those are ‘The Chosen Ones’ – we call them The Chosen Ones for now – and this is actually a civilization of undead. They are very special because they are also able to resist the pull to the Hallo of Echoes, but because of a big secret, which we won’t reveal yet, unlike The Feint, they remain conscious on this world. They live on a remote island that is enshrouded by a ‘death fog’ and they are completely secret society. No other society, no other civilization knows of their existence.”
The rest of the update video and post go into further detail about the undead and how they will be incorporated into the game.
Larian Studios will be hosting a livestream for Divinity: Original Sin 2 on Sept. 9 at 3 p.m. ET on their Twitch channel.
Divinity: Original Sin 2’s Kickstarter campaign was launched last week and in mere hours it successfully made it to its $500,000 goal. Shortly thereafter, Larian Studios announced their stretch goals have managed to hit four out of six of them. As of this writing, the Kickstarter campaign has raised a total of $1,217,103 with 25 days to go. The final stretch goal is $1.5 million.