The first time I clicked on a dog in Pillars of Eternity II, I was delighted. He went right into my inventory. Then I equipped him to my character, and he followed me around, wagging his tail and boosting my stats. What a good boy! So I clicked him again to give him the pets he so richly deserved. Nothing happened.

Role-playing game: “A rolling vista full of danger and secrets lies ahead. Adventure awaits. Which party members will you bring along?” Me: “Uhhhhh, can I get back to you in a few minutes or weeks or years?”

Divinity: Original Sin 2 is coming to consoles via publisher Bandai Namco. You’ll be able to play one of the best role-playing games ever made on PS4 and Xbox One this August. No word on a Switch version, sadly.

After several recommendations from friends and co-workers, I finally checked out Divinity: Original Sin 2. They all said that I’d fall in love with this cleverly written and complex RPG, and they were right. That’s all great, but let me tell you about the dogs.

Divinity: Original Sin 2 is the kind of in-depth, detailed RPG where the developers had to nerf the chickens. Steam users are loving it.

Today on Kotaku Splitscreen we’re talking to the director of Divinity: Original Sin 2, one of the best role-playing games we’ve ever played.

One Saturday a couple of weeks ago, I woke up around 8:30am excited for what I knew would be a productive day. I’d get some errands done, do laundry, and maybe even start outlining my next book. But first, I thought, I’ll play some Divinity: Original Sin 2. At 4pm, I knew I had made a mistake. At 11pm, I realized that…

I want to play Assassin’s Creed Origins, I really do. The other day, Kotaku’s own Luke Plunkett told me that it takes inspiration from The Witcher 3, which is pretty much all you have to say to make me buy something and tear off the wrapping with my teeth. But then the other shoe dropped.

Divinity: Original Sin 2 is one of those games that’s filled with objects. Each cottage, fortress, tavern, and dungeon you come across is loaded with things that you can pick up, move around, equip, or sell. Sometimes those things tell a story. Sometimes those stories do not immediately make sense.

Divinity: Original Sin 2 is one of the best RPGs I’ve ever played. It’s massive, complex, and beautiful, but its many layers are riddled with kinks and bugs. Fortunately, the game’s modding community has dedicated itself to smoothing things out.

Partway through the second act of Divinity: Original Sin 2, you visit an area called the Blackpits. While you’re there, you get into a fight. It is not an easy fight.

It is the future. A young man, arms strong from competing with 100 other shoppers every day to be the only person to buy groceries at Target, eyes his grandmother expectantly. Her features betray exhaustion from years of delivering raw, unfiltered internet to those the three mega-providers deem unworthy, but there is…

Often, video games are about making decisions, and you won’t always make the right one. Sometimes, there is no right answer. Sometimes, you’ve got to live with what you did.

It was back when I was playing World of Warcraft in high school that I first realized I had a problem. My bags were always full, laden with old gear and miscellaneous baubles I just couldn’t bear to part with, even if that just meant putting them in storage for a bit.

They say that pride goes before a fall. One Divinity: Original Sin 2 player decided to interpret the saying literally, killing jerk boss Bishop Alexander by having a plethora of paintings of himself—the surest sign of hubris—fall on his head until he died.

It’s quite an achievement that Divinity: Original Sin 2 launched mostly functional despite how massive it is. That said, the experience had a few patches of pimples. Some quests were unclear or busted, it was too hard to talk your way through act 4, and most glaringly, chickens were way overpowered. Today, a big…

Physical contact has always been fairly limited in video games. In many games, your character can hit others with their hands, feet, or arm that’s also a sword, if you have one of those. In some, your character can flirt or have sex with other characters. In a handful, you can hold hands. I can hardly think of any,…

It took 81 hours crammed into a week-and-a-half for me to finish Divinity: Original Sin 2's main story. It is, then, hard to not feel conflicted when I tell you that somebody just beat the game in a little over 30 minutes.

Where some RPGs are a little bit fiddly, Divinity: Original Sin 2 is downright daunting. It’s got systems inside of systems inside of paradox barrels, and it gleefully throws you into the deep end with a minimal amount of explanation. If ever a game begged for tips, it’s this one. We’ve got you covered.

In games as in life, you can’t solve all your problems with violence. In Divinity: Original Sin 2, however, you can always teleport a boss from across the map to fight a different boss, thereby solving your problems with somebody else’s violence.