Divine Divinity

Last Christmas, I paid GOG.com three dollars, that's three bones to you archaic slang lovers, for the privilege of experiencing a game called Divine Divinty, on the surface a Diablo-esque sort of Pavlovian piñata-bursting experience in which loot explodes from the corpses of my vanquished enemies while underneath a writhing mass of narrative and detail a la Morrowind lies waiting to be discovered.  Yes, yes, it's a stupid name.  I've heard all the jokes and read all the worst-10 lists.  But it was a good game.  Well, it was good until the rewards got too long in between and I'd been tired of being dumped in the pool.  I'm getting ahead of myself, though.  Let's start at the beginning.

I woke up with amnesia (snooze) to discover that I was in a small village of healers the leader of whom appeared to be going crazy.  After a lot of one dimensional conversations, I learned of a rare but valuable set of dual pyramid-shaped paperweights that would let me teleport myself between them at will.  I only possessed one of the set though.  I had to find the other.  And it was in some labyrinthine cellar that sat atop an ancient, evil cavern of evil.  I couldn't access the evil cavern of evil though because locked doors barred my exit from the cellar.  I knew treasure was down there and I wanted it bad but I couldn't find the right key to get in.  But wait, someone told me that if I tried to use the teleporting stone I already carried right away, I could find the other immediately.  So I did and I got walloped by an angry mob of sword-wielding skeletons.  Repeatedly.

Start over.

I found the lever the next time.  Between the designers uncanny ability to make levers that open necessary-to-unlock doors blend so seamlessly in with the same brownish/green palette hues of the wet dungeon walls and the fact that I was trying to look at this game through the modern resolution of 1680x1050, I simply couldn't see it.  Anytime there's a locked door in a dark dungeon, I was going to have to go pixel hunting for levers.  Brilliant.  But the pixel hunting at unintended resolutions wasn't the only frustration I encountered.

Both the brilliance and major weakness of Divine Divinity both lie in it's simple gameplay/deep narrative coupling.  The simple gameplay evolves naturally and in non-linear fashion.  You can attempt to do any quest you can find although that does not usually mean you'd be able to complete it.  But that only made for some utterly ridiculous conversations.  For instance, after grinding through the game killing every outdoor monster I could find in all the main areas, I decided to continue on the main quest which took me to a castle ruled by a bratty teen-aged Duke who thinks he's God.  During the conversation, the young Duke mentions the growing Orc army to the south exactly seventeen times and how dangerous they are and how we'd need a whole army of soldiers to rid the land of their presence.  Of course, in my wanderings, I'd already slaughtered the entire Orc army including the commander single-handedly.

Still, in addition to some of those niggling problems, my major disappointment with Divine Divinity is that it seems to expect the player to want to figure out what to do next but I encountered lots of side quests and even got to a point in the main quest branch where I didn't know what to do next.  The journal offered no clues.  The map offered no clues.  All I had was an NPC telling me to do something and not giving me enough details about it.  After that happened a few times, I gave up.  That's one thing that most modern games are starting to get right.  Some might complain that they're too easy, that they're not hardcore enough.  Eff that, I say.  If I'm not having fun, constantly moving forward like a shark, I'm going to die of boredom .  I don't want to have to spend time guessing what I should be doing next.

I'm not sure if I'll go back and play Divine Divinity to completion.  I had probably reached the 30-40 hour mark and the game just didn't seem fun anymore, like the only reason I wanted to finish it was to hear the rest of the story.  But the story is hardly worth it.  We all know the player is supposed to be the holy one or the divine one or whatever so at this point, who really cares?  It's the same reason I don't see the point in playing Mario or Zelda games for the narrative.  We all know what happens.  Princess disappears or gets kidnapped. Mario/Link navigate puzzles and jumping traps to rescue her.

Ok, so I probably won't finish it.  But I totally loved the character skills that were available. None of the skills were confined to a particular tree or class.  You really could choose any skill, mage-, warrior-, or theif-related, at any time.  The game really does give you unlimited choices about how you could evolve and grow your character.   And I loved the score.  The music was great and seeing as you get the full soundtrack with the game through GOG, you really can't go wrong.   Is it worth the $6 when the game isn't on sale?  Absolutely.