Divine Divinity

It has been said that Divine Divinity is like Diablo. Of course, what people really mean is that it is like Diablo II, for no game has ever been quite like Diablo, not even Diablo II, but never mind. And really, if you have played Diablo II, and then play Divine Divinity, you will come across a lot of familiar things:

• Of course, the combat system. You fight monsters by clicking on them. But the Infinity Engine had that, too. The system has been improved here: you need to click on a monster only once, and your character will bash away at it till it's dead.
• The stats and level-up system, right down to the red and blue life and mana meters.
• Teleporters that are very much like the waypoints in Diablo II. An added twist is that each teleporter belongs to one of the seven races in this game and requires the scroll of this race to be activated.
• Teleporter Stones that are a bit like the town portal, but more flexible.
• Many of the spells and skills are very similar to Diablo, too.

But then there are lots of aspects where Divine Divinity is very different from Diablo II and reminds me a lot of the Fallout universe:

• Extensive dialog trees, where your choices can influence the attitude of the NPC you are speaking to.
• A reputation system that is rather similar to the karma system of the first Fallout game. Solving quests can raise your reputation, picking unnecessary fights or getting caught stealing will lower it.
• You can trade with nearly everyone, and trading works just like in Fallout.
• You can store items anywhere, they will never vanish.
• You can pick pockets and locks.
• Adult themes like drugs and prostitution.
• There's lots of junk lying around.

Then there were some things that reminded me of Daggerfall:

• Guilds you can join, though in this game, it isn't really your choice.
• You can buy a house.
• You can pick pockets and locks (yes, I mentioned this already).

Finally, the class system (there are three classes, but skills are not class-specific, so you can practically change your character over during the game) reminded me a lot of Siege of Avalon.

Diablo II, Fallout, Daggerfall, Siege of Avalon—games I liked, the lot of them. Did I like Divine Divinity?

You bet I did.

Interactivity

It's really the magic word in RPG development, has been for more than a decade. It started, I guess, with Ultima VI:

A fully interactive world where everything has a purpose—bells ring, clocks tell time, cannons fire; IF YOU CAN TOUCH IT, YOU CAN USE IT!

But I've never really played it, so I can't say much. For me, Betrayal at Krondor is the first game where containers work both ways: you can take things out, and put them back in again. But you'd better not leave things in unlocked containers near the road, they would get stolen.

This was about the interactivity level that remained throughout the 90s, and beyond. You could open doors, close doors, open chests, take things out, put things in, close them again. You could drop things and they would remain so you could pick them up later. In Fallout, enemies might pick them up in combat. Sometimes you could turn lights on and off. Usually interaction was limited to things that actually had a function in the game.

Divine Divinity goes one step farther. In Divine Divinity, you can move and pick up nearly everything you could move or pick up in real life: chairs, barrels, chests, even boulders. An annoying exceptions are tables, no matter how small they are, and candlesticks. Since you can turn all the lights on and off, you cannot move them as well. With the tables, I think the designers just shrank away from the idea of having you move an object on top of which there are other objects. What happens to the things on the table if you move the table? Do they move with it? Do they fall to the floor? What happens if you put the table into your inventory?

The game makes a nice distinction: Equipment and potions you can pick up simply by clicking on them, things of no apparent use you have to drag into your inventory.

Home, Sweet Home

Traditionally, RPG heroes have led a nomadic lifes. Often they embarked on journeys of no return, at least within the game. In Final Fantasy, for example, each boss you beat unlocks a new part of the map, and there is rarely ever a reason to go back.

Again, things started to change during the 90s. Final Fantasy VI has the airship, though it is mainly for rearranging your party; Crono has a house with a bed, where he can rest, though for long stretches of the game he won't be able to go there. Ark can buy an apartment late in the game, and he can even furnish it, depending what you put in, it will be a place to rest and to save. In Daggerfall, you can buy a house, though it is kind of pointless. You can rest, all right, and you can pile your stuff on the floor, and the game won't forget it, but the piles just have random graphics with no relation to their content, you can't display trophies (though I guess the developers originally intended for you to do). It may be useful, but it never feels like home. Most players rather bought a ship anyway.

Obviously the concept of home is popular with players. Even the stash in Diablo II, nothing but a chest that follows you through the acts, was celebrated as such. And I guess I was not the only Fallout player who used some house cleared from baddies as an HQ and wished he could do something more than just store his stuff, maybe clear out the junk, drag in some nicer furniture and maybe hang a picture on the wall.

In Divine Divinity, thanks to the enhanced interactivity mentioned above, you can do exactly that (well, not the picture). Look at the picture above. It's the house in Verdistis that you can by, as it looks when you get it. Now look at the picture at the right. That's how the same house looked after living there for a while. The barrels have been replaced by vases and gold jars from various dungeons, which of course serve as containers. There is a chest from Stormfist castle. The book and the goblet on the table are quest souvenirs. The plate and jug are from a dungeon as well. The chairs around the other table (on which the candle in the right bottom corner sits) have been replaced by more comfortable ones. And while this is the only house you can buy in the game, it is not the only house my character called a home during her travels through the dukedom of Ferol.

Disappointments

Of course, there were a few. I already mentioned the inability to move even the smallest table, but that's a minor one.

The first real disappointment was Stormfist Castle. The game really builds up a tension for this location. You can't get in. You know you have to get in. You try to get in as soon as possible. Once you get in, you find it's little more than a long cut scene. Yes, there are some quests, you can loot a bit, maybe you advance the story a bit. But now you're in you can't get out again, and once you get kicked out, you have lost five points of reputation, one of your precious teleporter stones (it will be a long time till you get it back), and now you can't get back in again. You can't evade the Stormfist Castle episode, but it's better to do it as late as possible, but you don't know that in the beginning.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment was the second part of the game. Once you have finished all your quests, killed all the roving monsters (there are no spawning monsters in the game, at some point you've simply killed them all) it's time to sound the gong in the Council of Seven. After a very, very long cut scene you wind up in the Wasteland. It's a one-way journey, but again, the game does not tell you in advance. Furthermore, it now degrades to mere hack-n-slash. There are one or two interesting items to find, but no quests to speak of, just a huge desert with imps and nearly impossible to beat dragon riders, though you can simply sneak by. But after a while, I simply lost interest, I don't think I'll ever play it till the end.

But I'll probably roam the dukedom of Ferol with a few more characters yet.

Links

Though Larian studio even offer a fanpage kit for download, there is not very much about the game on the web.

• Official Website
• GameBanshee has probably the best resource for Divine Divinity, with a thorough and accurate walkthrough and an overview what at least some of the items do.

Reviews

• Lots of great loot, hordes of enemies, and an interesting storyline to boot, Brian Green raves:

  I like adjusting stats and getting loot. I like optimizing my character and getting big bonuses to my stats. That's not to say that I don't enjoy a bit of fast action. But there's something about exploring a large world and growing in power that's just a lot of fun for me. Divine Divinity was made for people who enjoy these types of gameplay.

• Divine Divinity surpasses the hype in some aspects, and falls short in others, Patrick Paik thinks:

  Blizzard will need to do an exemplary job with Diablo III’s single-player aspect to surpass the deep, gothic world Divine Divinity presents. The lush backdrops and cinematic soundtrack coupled with traditional RPG elements are more than seductive enough to draw in most RPG’ers willing to test the waters. It will truly be a shame if Divine Divinity is passed up, given how RPGs are beginning to stress multi-player far more heavily than single-player.