by Divine Divinity will be the first game ever that I have put on the Tier 1 list, that not only am I not going to finish, but I am going to drop down to Tier 3. This is done with a heavy heart, as I’ve invested 16 hours into the game but I can only conclude that it simply isn’t worth anyone’s time, in spite of it possessing what feels like should be great merit.
DD is the bastard child of Baldur’s Gate and Diablo but plays to the strengths of neither. Baldur’s Gate has a great story, decent role-playing options and solid AD&D mechanics. Diablo has fast-paced hack & slash gratification with a relatively in-depth inventory and skill system. DD has none of those things, but pretends to have them all and pretends very, very well. It pretends so well that I had to force myself to stop playing, in spite of pangs of “but what if it gets better? What if I miss something really good? What if it needs just a little more time?” In the end, I simply had to admit that my first impression of the game was just wrong.
The writing is unprofessional and is the most painful when selecting dialogue to respond to NPCs. Responses range from portraying your character as a rather mundane individual to a wildly guffawing buffoon to a sarcastic childish simpleton. One might confuse these as attempts in providing the player role-playing options, but they aren’t; oftentimes they are necessary choices in order to transition dialogue from one required set to another. Are you interested in that quest? Well, if you want to accept it, you have to choose the dialogue where you start speaking like a discount Shakespearean knight. Do you want more information about the town? Well, you have to insult this character first and then ask for more information, since that is your only “tell me more” option. At best it feels like random sections of the dialogue were written by people with vastly different agendas. At worst, it feels like the writer had sudden bouts of inspiration in which he tried to breath personality into a nameless character. Then, burdened by his work, quickly forgot these plucky quirks and settled instead for practicality in the next three dialogue sets.
The skills in this game are a complete mess, and this only becomes apparent after several hours. What at first seems like a free and expanding set of abilities quickly becomes ridiculous, messy and non-linear. Basically, there are 3 sets of skills for the classic Fighter, Thief and Mage trees. However, regardless of what class you choose at the beginning of the game, you can raise any stat you want and choose any skill when you level up, effectively making class pointless–not bad on its own, but just wait. Some skills are hilariously useless. Heaven knows why I try to play a summoner in any game I play, but summons are horribly underpowered when matched with spells of a similar “level.” Many of the thief skills are almost necessary to obtain (identification being a primary example) unless you want large portions of the game locked off from you. A level one healing spell was all I needed throughout the entire 16 hours of play (they go up to 5). None of the offensive spells felt meaningfully different but instead lent themselves to be largely graded on merit of damage and ease of use. But worst, worst of all was the comparison between the sight-increasing passives.
Tell me, my friend, what is greater–one… or two? My theories suggest that it is two but… I have heard tales spun that one may be in fact greater. I shudder to think if perhaps… perhaps my understanding of the mathematical world around me has been a lie this whole time? Or not. There are two passives. Ranger Sight in the thief section gives +1 to sight. Elven Sight in the warrior tree gives +2 to sight. They both can be taken 5 times. They both do the exact same thing–but with Elven Sight you get 2 for the price of 1. There’s no secrets here–I even looked it up. There’s absolutely no reason to take Ranger Sight ever.
I can’t speak for other classes, but combat for someone choosing the Mage skills is atrocious. By and large, you cast spells as fast as you can click the right-mouse button in DD. Enemies flinch when they take damage. This means that if there is one enemy and you have enough MP to cast your current spell enough times to deal that one enemy’s HP in damage, you win, assuming you’re madly clicking away. That’s it. At first I thought I was doing something wrong, that in fact there was a more clever way of fighting or perhaps the stronger spells would become more sophisticated, but no, not really. Click anything that moves enough times and it dies, regardless of what it is.
Hand-in-hand comes the MP though, which presents one of the most frustrating cases of game design I have ever encountered. It’s lazy, it’s insulting and it adds absolutely nothing to the game other than wasting very large portions of the player’s time. In order to cast spells, you’ll need MP–per the norm. Due to the aforementioned spell-spam tactic, you’ll burn through MP very quickly to kill things. With some enemies, three spells is more than enough. I’m not kidding though, when I say that other enemies will consume your entire MP bar. MP does not regenerate on its own, and there isn’t a single ability, piece of gear or achievement that will grant it to you. The only way to get MP back is by using a potion, or by sleeping.
Sleeping can only be done in an unoccupied bed. There is no way to tell if a bed is unoccupied until you try to sleep in it, and there is no pattern to what is occupied and not. At each and every step, you will swim through a sea of enemies–even doing something as simple as traveling down a path from one rural town to another will see you slaughtering dozens of orcs, boars, trolls and giant spiders (to say nothing of the monster density in dungeons). It takes about fifteen to thirty seconds to drain out your entire MP bar, even if you put every single stat point into Intelligence (which I did). It takes about thirty seconds (round trip) to run from the bed, to a place with monsters, and then back to the bed. This creates a frustrating case of grinding if I ever did see one, but it gets even worse. For some reason, the developers put a 5-minute limit on when your character is willing to sleep. A limit preventing you from playing the game the way they designed it to be played. This means that after fifteen seconds of running, thirty seconds of casting and fifteen more seconds of running back, you have to wait four minutes to begin playing the game again. You will do this hundreds of times throughout the course of the game barring use of two transporting pyramids, crafting a hay bed in your inventory and using it (something that was likely less a feature and more a bug) or carrying an entire full-size bed with you (of which there is only one bed in the entire game in which you can do this with–also a bug). What’s horrible is that using any of these three techniques only saves you the time of having to run back and forth–but you still have to wait the full duration of the five minutes before you can sleep!
But maybe potions will save us? MP potions restore a base amount of MP, regardless of your level or alchemy skill. After a few levels of pumping intelligence, the smallest (and most common) ones are useless, as it would take five or more to refill your MP, and they aren’t terribly common. There is also no way to indefinitely purchase them–stores have a limited stock that almost never reaches the tens digits and crafting supplies in the wild are finite. What enrages me is that regardless of whether your alchemy skill is level 2 or level 5 the “best” potions in the game are a combination of the level 1 and level 2 health and mana potions. Combining two level 1’s will give you a restoration potion that restores health and mana by 50% while combining two level 2’s will do the same by 100%. This means that largely, alchemy levels beyond two are absolutely wasted, as combining two level 3 potions and so on will result in no added benefit whatsoever. This is assuming of course, that you learn all this information at all and don’t play the game blind like I did for the first 10 hours.
After confirming thrice over that the game’s combat mechanics and player statistics were a sack of dung, I royally abused a duplication trick to have infinite restoration potions and meaninglessly clicked my way to victory through a dozen more areas in a pittance of time. My “strategy” nor the “gameplay” didn’t change at all–I just simply cut out the four-and-a-half minute wait in between the thirty seconds of action, if I could even call it that. What’s worse is that while enemy item drops were plentiful, they were meaningless to me as a wizard. My spells drew none of their damage stats from my equipment–and since no enemy ever made it close enough to me to deal damage, I had no need of protection.
The game really is just littered with this kind of design. It’s clear that no thought was put into how this game was actually going to be played. The designers had plenty of ideas and those ideas are present within the game, but their execution lacks any kind of quality control whatsoever. I struggle to even imagine that this was a good game back in 2002 when it came out, considering Baldur’s Gate came out in 1998 and Diablo II came out in 2000. Broken down, I’m not interacting with this game in any meaningful way beyond discovering its broken mechanics and exploiting known bugs. I wouldn’t recommend this game to anyone.