Sundry
I spent a long time judging a book by it’s cover, so-to-speak. Divine Divinity has what could easily be considered the worst title for a CRPG ever conceived. It could be a translation issue to as it is a European import and the title might have sounded cooler in its native language. All that said, Divine Divinity is everything Diablo II should have been and more.
Gameplay
The character building at the start is simple. There are three character classes for each gender; wizard, warrior and survivor. Each has a special ability and each derives vitality (hit points) and mana (spell points) slightly differently. I went with survivor as I wanted to play a martial and magical character.
All skills are available to any of the three classes, there are a lot of them so it looks daunting. So if you want a wizard who can fight or a warrior who can cast spells, no problem. Each skill has five levels and each level of the skill has a threshold for the character to be before being able to learn it. Some skills are better than others, however. About half the skills are passive and are simply tacked onto your attacks or applied behind the scenes. Other skills are ones which must be actively used like spells or picking locks. There are also eight skills that are only available to the character after a certain point in the game’s story arch, which represent a bunch of very powerful abilities.
A knock in the skills is that some even when developed to the higher levels turn out to be a waste of skill points. For example a skill that allows you to regenerate your vitality is painfully slow even at its highest level. Another example is a chain lightning type spell that does look really cool, but its mana to damage ratio is such that the lowly meteor strike in more efficient at laying waste to enemies one at a time.
Otherwise the skills work great. There are many ways to tweak you character’s combat abilities: explosive arrows, arrows that split into three, weapon specializations, additional damage, elemental damage, etc. Skills also have a nifty mechanic in that low levels might not effect its target. For example if a character has a pick pockets of 1, they can only pick the pocket of an NPC of level 5 or lower. Most other skills that go against an NPC or monster work similarly as they have differing levels and resistances.
Combat is nifty. Divine Dininity is not a click fest. There are 12 programmable hotkeys (especially handy for quaffing potions). Once you select an enemy the game does the rest. The only knock on this is the character does not respond to enemies. Once you dispatch an enemy you have to click on another…or if you do not pause the game and step away a critter can much away at you character.
Experience is nifty. The designers did a good job of scaling the value of encounters with the leveling of characters. Only towards the end part of Divine Divinity is where I saw any pause. At every level the character gets one experience point, two on every fifth level. It seemed disappointing at first, but given a character is always advancing at a good pace I could eventually have a skill point or two in reserve. As each skill level has thresholds for each rank, it is a good idea to save because it seemed with my character choices there would be some levels where I would have three skills open up for advancement. Lastly in regards to experience there are NPC’s that will (randomly) give an experience point bomb which is a decent multiplier for that creature’s XP value.
Divine Divinity is a single character and single player game. Neither is my preference for CRPG’s, but it wound up being just right. That does not mean you are alone. NPC’s will dive into a fight to help you, if what you are fighting is hostile to them. Conversely if you are fighting a creature and it has buddies nearby they will come after you. Luckily the digpiling seem in the Diablo games is not as extreme, but also two critters can be in the same place on the screen which can be deadly/consfusing. With a ranged weapon you can pull creatures to a degree, but many will not follow you forever either.
Unlike Diablo II which had a very limited number of quests, Divine Divinity has literally dozens. There is a linear quest for the main part of the game, but inside of that there are many little quests that build it up. There are also many side quests that have nothing to do with the story arch. However all the side quests are moot in the last third of the game, but I will not tell you why. So if you are playing keep that in mind.
Divine Divinities game world is huge! I played through the entire game and I did not get around to seeing every single area (which is a shame I could have used a couple more levels). It is so huge in fact that teleportation platforms are sprinkles through out the games major hubs and you r character also carries a point to point teleportation items; set one down, go off somewhere, drop and use the other one and you can move between the points and change them. Which is needed as you collect a lot of loot to sell.
The loot in Divine Divinity is a combination of random stuff and placed items. There is also a lot of mundane items, like food. Each type of food can have different effects (improve sight, vitality, mana, etc). Weapons are a nice mix, though as you go along you might only be able to small amount of them. This is because as you buy weapon specializations it makes weapons you have no skill in (though can still use) less appealing as you do less bonus damage and they are slower. Also always carry a weapon with freeze as an ability, it is literally freeze opponents for a short time which is bad…for them. The armor is cool and there are a number of slots to equip. The only knock to all the loot is it will take some time before your character comes across a place to sell it off. There are a coupe of good merchants but I was about a third through the game before I came across them.
Nuts and Bolts
Divine Divinity’s graphics are almost on par with Diablo II, but not quite. It is a isometric game with some 3D elements. Some of the effects are cheesy and frankly look bad. The animation is pixilated (lightning bolt) or just goofy looking (energy cage). The character modeling is generally good, save when a character is walking or running the animation is a little stiff. The paper dolling of the character is really quit good as the equipment they are wearing or carrying is represented very well on your character. The NPC’s and monsters is the game are all very nicely done and differentiated even among variants of a creature type (like skeleton verses burning skeleton).
Divine Divinity had a few more crashes than what I would like. My hunch is the patch from Larian Studios did not fix everything and that what I ran into was a memory leak in the application. So long as you save often, it is okay. There are manual saves and two quick save slots which can be used at any time in the game. This really came in handy as I had a hard drive crash in the middle of playing and while my quicksaves were corrupted, my manual saves held out. The game is enjoyable though and I would not have been heartbroken to start over and try out a wizard.
The interface is much better than what Diablo II offered and is very slick. Potions, skills, inventory and such all expand into small windows or icons to be selected. Skills are triggered off of the right mouse button and can be swapped around very quickly through the interface or via hotkeys.
Divine Divinity is a huge game. It installs off of three cd’s and will easily chew up about a gig on you hard drive. Lastly this is a translated game (my hunch is German) and sometimes the dialog is goofy or simple grammatically incorrect. If you are a grammar queen, this will drive you nuts. For everyone else it is not a big deal and does not distract from the game.
Synopsis
Divine Divinity is a great game with a bad name. The game’s title is explained and refereed to, so it is not an arbitrary title…just silly. The game moves at a good pace and is challenging: I never once got bored. It plays more like Diablo II, but has a depth to plot and game play like Baldur’s Gate. If you like CRPG’s or action oriented ones, this sleeper is worth picking up. There is something for both types and more.
