When I bought Divinity: Original Sin (2014) I’ve received free copies of Divine Divinity (2002) and Beyond Divinity (2004). I’ve never heard of this series before D:OS and being curious about its origins I’ve decided to play the first game.
After a silly intro animation you find yourself in the village of healers who tell you that they can’t do their jobs because they’ve “lost connection to the Source”. Then the next conversation option is “Can you heal me?”. I click on it and get response “Yes, for 150 gold”. So can healers heal or not? With contradictions like this one my brain shuts down and I stop seriously caring about the game.
You are the chosen one and your goal is to collect member of each race so that you can power-up and stop the main bad from summoning Lord Chaos and consequently save the world. You’re being assisted by a wizard in white robe with a beard. It’s fairly trite. Game lore has some bits about wealth inequality or how coming of the Divine will change society but this is never explored and remains as fluff which is a shame.
I find pixel art rather impressive but the colour palette is just green everywhere and it’s boring to look at.
I like interface customization. You can play the game with a bunch of resizeable windows opened.
In conversations you tend to have two options: to play along or to be a prick. I have no idea why would I ever choose the second. What would be the benefit in alienating everyone?
Combat is the meat of the game and I was bored by it. There is a mass of wandering monsters and I found myself vacuum-cleaning the land by walking up to each one and mindlessly clicking the left mouse button until they all disappear into my XP bar.
After a while you become obscenely rich, buy every health potion and tank all the damage from enemies (which is made easier by the ability to pause combat).
In one of the quests you look for a legendary item of power. I was rather disappointed where the weapon turned out to be much weaker than my randomly found sword.
There are special items that allow you to transform into a cat, frog or spider. I thought I would get smart with it and trespass into areas that I’m not supposed to go or bypass a bunch of enemies but apparently they all hate frogs and want to murder you immediately. What’s the point of shape shifting?
At one point you get captured and lose your equipment. Then the game keeps obnoxiously hinting at you to get your stuff back which I found insulting. You recover your items quickly which made me wonder what was the point of it. Stripping player of his toys creates an interesting opportunity to have him rely solely on his wit but in this game this chance was wasted.
Bosses keep saying dull lines like “I shall slay you” or “You think you can kill me?”. They don’t notice the progress that you’ve made and how you’ve wiped out every single bloody monster in the land and how you carry an entire warehouse of potions.
Overall I was struck by how many story and gameplay elements are similar to D:OS (including the sequel). Basically they’ve been perfecting the formula for a decade and in my view they’ve succeeded with D:OS.
The major difference between these games is that in the old one combat is done in real-time instead of being turn based. Divine Divinity is pretty much a Diablo clone even though the manual swears it’s not a “standard hack & slash”. Even the outro is reminiscent of Diablo 1 ending.
If the gameplay concept is so similar why does D:OS succeeds while Divine Divinity doesn’t? The former has more interesting encounters where there isn’t a horde of monsters randomly wandering around but sparse groups of enemies tied to one place. Combat is much more engaging where you can combine lots of interesting effects (while DD has one special attack) and being turn-based gives you plenty of time to think about strategy. And you can’t just spam potions.
D:OS is streamlined when it comes to difficulty. It has a linear path laid out for the player starting from the weakest enemies to the strongest. In Divine Divinity I was bumping from one impossible challenge to another. Often times after a brief conversation dozens of monster appear out of nowhere and rip me to pieces. It’s unfair and frustrating. After you level up most of the fights become too easy so there’s only a short window of optimal challenge. Giving players freedom to go where they want sounds good but in practice they’ll be ping-ponging from the hardest to the easiest challenges.
D:OS also has the same “save the world” plot but there’s a bit more going on. There is a mystery about your past to reveal. I get to make choices about the plot. I interact with party members and learn their backstories (which was entertaining). Divine Divinity has none of that.
In conclusion I did not have fun with Divine Divinity and I would not recommend it.