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Review:

19th September 2002:
Divine Divinity
It may offer a godly amount of freedom, but will this traditional RPG attract newcomers to the genre?
Posted by Marc Hull - PC - UK and Europe

Role playing games have often strived to make you feel part of a living, breathing world, where daily life continues around you, and each of your decisions and actions has consequences that determine how the story unfolds. Unfortunately, many fail in this task, since the more freedom a player has, the more outcomes that have to be taken into account, and the more likely it is for the game's development times to burst out of its tight schedule. Often developers have tried to find a compromise, that often consists of one main quest that players are constantly channelled down, and while speaking to characters in different ways will yield different responses from them, they usually forget whatever you've said right after you've said it. However, Divine Divinity is one of the few games where this is not the case. The people who you speak to in the game will not only remember how you've spoken to them, but can also withhold information from you that would be helpful for your quest. The decisions aren't always clear-cut, either, since sometimes by choosing to help out one person you've got to be nasty to another, so there's not always an obvious right and wrong response.

Divine Divinity is made in the traditional RPG style of a 2D isometric view, with a choice of different characters to begin with, each of whom have expertise as a warrior, wizard or survivor. As you progress through the game, you gain experience points by killing enemies, and these improve your abilities in areas such as strength, agility, intelligence and constitution. The game also has a massive number of weapons that can be acquired, either through robbing people's houses or through trade, although like most RPGs not all of these can be equipped until your character has reached a certain level of expertise in one or more ability. However, the game does offer more control over the distribution of new skills, with a certain number of 'bonus points' given to your character when you increase your experience level, and it's up to you to select into which areas these points go. So, if you've got a particularly good weapon that you want to equip, but it requires more strength and agility than your character currently has, you can put all your future bonus points into those two categories until they've improved enough for you to equip it.

Skills provide another aspect to the game, since they allow your character to cast powerful magic attacks, or heal yourself when you're injured. While initially you may only have access to a couple of different spells, you are granted two extra ones every time your level increases, and you get to choose which ones from the 96 available in the game. However, not all are open to you initially; instead they are split into the three paths of the game, and also into four categories, where choosing a skill will open up the next one in that particular category.

The main area of innovation, though, is in the freedom you have in the game's world. Each house contains hoards of objects that can be examined and moved around, with a lot of the game's secrets requiring certain objects to be moved to certain positions to unlock a previously unknown area. Cupboards and drawers can be searched through, and looted, but unlike most other RPGs the occupant will actually complain if you do this without their permission. The world contains hundreds of non-playable characters to interact with, and most can be talked to, with the game offering you a range of different things to say. Usually, each item of dialog you can select will have a slightly different tone, with ones being aggressive, polite, humorous and so on. Often, the type of tone you use would depend on the situation and the person you're talking to, but you can have loads of fun experimenting, by seeing how different people react to some of your more fragrant comments. However, be warned, Divine Divinity responds much more to these things than most other games. While in other titles you can get away with treating friends like dirt, in this game they're most likely to attack you. If you start stealing things, or killing precious livestock, then you'll quickly find that your reputation plummets, and soon no-one will give you any help. This is one game where you really can carve out an attitude for your character, and it'll stick with you to the end.

However, too much freedom isn't necessarily a good thing, and Divine Divinity has its fair share of problems. Firstly, the sheer number of objects to examine, manuscripts to read through and people to talk to seems very daunting, and quite often it's difficult to separate the important information from the extreme amounts of detail the developers have put into all the dialogue and text. Fortunately, your character's diary will highlight the major items, but even this can get packed full of different quests that you've started but not yet finished. The next problem is the game's difficulty, which even right at the start is set very high. While initially you'll want to jump into the game's main quest to progress the story, you'll soon find that many little sub-quests must first be completed before you have enough experience to go up against the monsters that the main one throws at you. Even the sub-quests can also be very taxing, with the quick-save option soon becoming an essential feature every time you wander into a new area.

Graphically, Divine Divinity doesn't try its hand at 3D like recent games such as Dungeon Siege, but instead sticks to the tried and tested 2D formula. However, that doesn't stop it from offering a lush and incredibly detailed environment, with plenty of nice effects such as shadows and reflections in water giving it a great atmosphere. The sound is also fairly good, but sometimes there seem to be long sections with no background music. Although the main dialogue in the game is spoken, with some pretty good voice acting used throughout, there's obviously too much text to have speech for everything, so most of the conversations are text-only.

Gameplay is where the title most suffers, though, with not only the previously mentioned difficulty problem putting it out of reach for most RPG newcomers, but also some control problems meaning that action-packed parts of the game can be very frustrating. Like most other role players, you don't control your character directly, but instead click the mouse in the general direction you want him to move in. However, interacting with objects, talking to characters and attacking enemies is also done by clicking the same button. This means that sometimes you can click an object on the wall of a house, and instead of examining it, your character will find the nearest door, walk out of the house, and stand behind the wall you just clicked on. While this is only a minor annoyance most of the time, since once your character starts moving you can stop him and try again, during battle sequences the problem becomes a lot worse. If you're in a room in a dungeon that contains both books and enemies, sometimes you'll try clicking on an enemy and miss, clicking the book instead, and then find that your character starts reading the book while being mercilessly slaughtered.

However, one area in which this game simply cannot be criticised is its length. With an absolutely massive game world spanning three CDs, hundreds of characters to encounter, nearly a hundred skills to learn and five levels to reach on each, this game will keep even RPG fanatics engrossed for ages. Aside from the game's main quest, there are also loads of secret areas to be found, ingenious puzzles to be solved, and you can even play through the game again, taking a different attitude in conversations, and see how the game responds differently.

Overall, Divine Divinity will offer hardcore RPG fans loads of challenges, and an epic storyline, but the high difficulty level and control issues will frustrate newcomers to the genre. With such a long and in-depth game, it's a shame that the initial difficulty isn't lower to ease you into it more, and coupled with other problems such as long loading times and minor graphical glitches, this ends up as only an above-average RPG, when it could have been a must-buy.

Marc Hull

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Review Summary:

Although not venturing into the realm of 3D like recent RPGs have done, Divine Divinity's 2D graphics are accomplished, and the game's sound is also good. The storyline is not only very long, but also has many interesting sub-quests and offers a huge degree of freedom. However, the initial difficulty level is high, and keeps going up from then on, putting this out of reach for all but hardcore RPG players.

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