The Lady Vengeance can serve as your artillery.There's a new 'surface' type called sulfurium, and any kinetic force applied to it will trigger the surface, flinging characters or objects away and dealing damage.If you and your co-op partner are making different decisions, your followers will side with whoever's decisions they like more.Lose their trust and bad things will happen. Even though this isn't a full-on RPG, your decisions will impact the story, and especially how the characters respond to you.You'll be able to control up to six troops in battle.Here are some other things I learned about Fallen Heroes from about an hour of playing: She would've been dead meat if I didn't have Fane escape that turn. I also made a classic Divinity mistake of putting one pyramid right next to a ladder, blocking one of my other troops from teleporting, too. In Fane's case, I used one of the two artefacts I was able to take with me on the mission-powerful, global items that anyone in your party can use-to set up a pair of teleporter pyramids and jump him halfway across the map to the extraction point. But it did push me to think creatively instead of trying to kill every enemy. Vincke said they won't overuse that mechanic, and I hope that proves to be the case, because it was a bit of a grind having new waves of enemies pressing in on me every three turns. In both missions reinforcements kept spawning in, forcing me to accomplish my objectives before I was overwhelmed. In the first mission I had to destroy some ballistas that were pummeling the Lady Vengeance before she sank, and in the second I had to guide Fane to several points on the map to hunt for his research, then get him to an extraction point. Combat encounters are being designed similarly to the ones in Larian's RPGs, which means the win conditions are going to be a bit more story-driven than you'd expect from the typical tactics game.

Vincke told me a large number of Original Sin 2's skills have been reworked and rebalanced for the new game, and there will be new skills to learn, too. In the meantime, you'll probably want to save often, or accept that your troops are going to die a lot. Larian's Swen Vincke says you will be able to resurrect your troops later in the game, but that ability won't come quickly or easily-it'll be a big deal. It was not a great start, but it reminded me of just how quickly everything can go to hell in Divinity when the enemies I'm up against have access to all the same skills I do. There are also unique recruitable characters called 'veterans' who can die permanently as well, and I lost two of them trying to help Fane get his research and escape to the Lady Vengeance as we were ambushed by the Black Ring. When my cleric died in my mission to rescue Fane, he was permanently dead, but in the next mission I could recruit another generic cleric with the same suite of abilities. As you progress through Fallen Heroes you'll unlock more skills for your heroes and your basic soldiers in each class, which is an important distinction from games like XCOM.

And my demo was early in the game, with only a small handful of skills for each class. I spent whole minutes clicking between the members of my team, thinking about their skills and what order I should use them in.

But if I used those abilities now, I'd end up hurting my own soldier, too. Then I realized I could have attacked with my archer first, coating the enemy in oil and then lighting them on fire. For example, in one fight I brought my heavy-hitting polymorph in close to deliver a melee hit on an enemy, dropping them down to low health. You need to consider all of the abilities of your entire team and in what order you should use them. This means that the number of tactical decisions you can make at any one time explodes enormously.

Divinity original sin 2 malody