Divinity: Original Sin Review

Seven grants abundance 

The end of the Journey

'Divinity: Original Sin 2' was a game that pretty much tore up the scene when it was first dropped upon the unsuspecting masses of the RPG world all the way back in the bygone year of 2017. It won multiple award shows, topped many people's 'best Modern RPG' list and remained there, catapulted the slowly rising Larian Studios into the stratosphere, got ported to just about everything with a hard drive and even won its developer the highly sought-after contract for Baldur's Gate 3. That last one is the stickler, because it seems as though the entire CRPG genre had been vying to make their own version of Baldur's Gate for years now for want of a third title that was assumed to be forever lost. No one really ever expected that game to be made, but Larian had it dangled in front of their faces and they jumped at the opportunity so hard that they had to literally drop a project mid marketing cycle in order to focus fully on BG3. (RIP 'Divinity: Fallen Heroes'. We'll never know thee.)

So with all of this fame and adoration, I really wanted to see what all the fuss was about for myself. Join in on the Original Sin 2 fun and all that, but there was one problem; I'd never played a Divinity game in my life. Now if you're a normal person this isn't really a problem at all, because you'll just throw yourself into the game and expect to pick up the relevant context and world as you go along, but I've never worked like that. I need to know context, I thirst for context, and if your series has a rich backlog of games and stories that led up to this one, it feels like my duty to familiarise myself so that I can fully appreciate the journey this franchise has gone through. It was the same loop of 'buy the entire series and work my way up' that I went through when I got a passing interest in 'Splinter Cell: Blacklist' a while back, and I simply loved that summer of Stealth military action experiences. (Apart from Double Agent. Screw Double Agent.) I figured I'd just do that again. I put that plan into action about three years ago.

Turns out that there's quite a lot of Divinity Games, don't you know, and they go back a very long way. In fact, this was a very long laid out series of Role Playing games (mostly) leading all the way back to 2002, and I would be catching up on all of that history as quickly as possible, whilst taking the time to appreciate the games as I went, of course. So what was my journey like? Well these aren't full blown reviews or anything but it went something like this; Divine Divinity (2002) was a beautiful little old-school RPG gem that surprised me at how fun it was even in the modern age. Beyond Divinity (2004) was an ugly and garish follow-up which focused on all the wrong aspects of the series and turned me off so much that I actually quit playing after Act 1. Divinity 2 (2009) was a deeply average, through charming, jump to third person action adventure RPG; fun enough to play through once but lacking depth and story quality. 'Flames of Vengeance' (2010) was the second part of Divinity 2 and was a surprisingly marked improvement in every way despite only being a year's work; it wasn't enough to make that game amazing, but the series' signature jokes were at least landing the majority of the time now. (Beyond Divinity's 'humour' was gut-wrenchingly bad) And Divinity Dragon Commander (2013) is a real-time tactics game and I really don't feel comfortable enough in that genre to give a full assessment. I will say that I liked the game, and all the 'kingdom management' and 'personal relationships' stuff you're asked to do between fights was great. (The fights themselves just got frustrating by the end.)

Which brings me to 'Divinity: Original Sin', the topic of this blog and end of my Journey to Divinity Original Sin 2. I honestly didn't know what to expect, apart from that this had some how spawned a sequel which many people lauded as a modern classic, so I couldn't have been a total disaster, right? What I ended up discovering just before starting to try and play it was the world of CRPGs which sort of drew me down a rabbit hole and away from the Divinity Series for a bit. I played and loved Tyranny and Pillars of Eternity, grew an eye for games that took classic sensibilities with a modern eye for storytelling, and only with that experience came back around for Original Sin 1. But now I've finally come full circle and Original Sin is behind me. It feels like the zenith of a great entertainment journey as I've watched Larian grow in size and talent throughout the years, all to reach their greatest triumph. (You know, before Baldur's Gate 3 which is shaping up to be the gold-standard for CRPGs going forward)

Original Sin

'Divinity: Original Sin' is a prequel to the entire franchise- (Wait, so I didn't need to play all of those lead-up games? Son of a bi- why did no one tell me this! That took a year! Gah-) anyway. Taking place before all of the lore of the previous games and thus disregarding all those events, (with the exception of Dragon Commander which technically predates Original Sin but invalidates itself through one of the most stupid self-imposed retcons in history. Also the greatest, I love that they did that.) Divinity recontextualises a lot of what we would come to know from later (earlier) entries through information that ultimately doesn't really have all that much of a baring and doesn't change the overall narrative. Yeah, that's sort of the problem with the Divinity Series in my eyes; the series seems to redefine itself so often that there doesn't really feel like there's a consistent universe being adhered to here. One day Source is the route of all healing, then it's evil sourcery something juice; one day undead and Orcs are your stereotypical badguys, the next Orcs are almost thrown to the back burner and Undead are one of the major races of the realm. (What? How does that even make sense?) One day all the races are laid out before you, and they next they throw in an entire species of aristocratic lizard people as though they've always been there and we just never paid attention to them. I think if aristocrat lizards had existed in Divine Divinity's day, they'd have factored in somehow!

Now this does sort of make sense for a series that's almost 20 years old now, because the game has to evolve in order to fit the evolving industry, I understand that. But Divinity almost feels identityless a lot of the time because the rules of the universe just seem to change so drastically with little to no explanation a lot of the time. Elder Scrolls, by comparison, has bent over backwards (from Daggerfall onwards) to ensure that the world feels like the same one you experienced from the classic games so that there's a sense of progression and consequence for the journeys that you go on and the time you spend in Tamriel. When TES turned around and made a prequel MMO, that meant something because it was exploring a world we knew so well and would expose it in a light we'd never seen before. Original Sin's prequel prospect just seems by the numbers. "Sure, okay. Not really sure what Rivellon even looks like on a map to be honest, let alone care about it's history. Fine, whatever." I mean, Original Sin throws in an incredibly important goddess to the plot whom I've fairly certain had never been mentioned before in any of the 'preceding' games. How am I supposed to take any of this seriously?

But if I put that relatively unaffecting personal gripe aside, I can say that on an individual level the worlds that the Divinity games build is entirely serviceable, if lacking the tangibility of some of it's contemporaries. If there's consistency at least in the Original Sin series, then I can live with that at least. Call these games a 'soft reboot' if you will. (Although Original Sin 1 does, inexplicably, cut out every single race apart from Humans, Wizards, Orcs and Imps for some reason. Not sure what Elves, dwarves and Lizardmen did to upset you guys so much. Maybe there's some forty minute catch-up video I need to watch to bring me up to speed.) So with that put to rest, what exactly is this game about?

Divinity puts us in the world as an duo of 'Source Hunters', an elite order of knights tasked with purging the world of the toxic influence of 'Source'; a corrupted (and undefined) magic which has a history of plunging the world into chaos and destruction in the past before being mostly put down by the original Source Hunters. Now you're tasked with smothering out any Source embers before they can grow into something world threatening again, and are on the search of just those rumours when you stumble upon the small water-port of Cyseal and the story starts from there. Of course, there's pretty clear parallels between this set-up and the Grey Wardens from Dragon's Age, so if you like that sort of 'specialised group of  heroes devoted towards a single goal', then you're in luck because that's exactly where Original Sin lies.

Playing with fire

 

One of the big selling points of the Original Sin games is that they are actually mutliplayer affairs, allowing for yourself and one friend to trek through a turn based RPG in it's entirety together, settling differences through 'Rock/paper/scissors' style showdowns. (JANKEN!) I don't personally have the social circle to be able to say how it works out in multiplayer, but I have seen accounts from others who have and say it's a really cool and unique experience. As a singular player you still get to enjoy the game just as much, although it's just like controlling two main characters where every now and then one will decide to object to your quest decision for the most inane reasons. (Thankfully you can just force them to stand outside the room to relieve yourself of these forced conflicts.

Having two protagonists does mean, however, that you get to create 2 heroes in the customizer, and it's here where Divinity actually disappointed me. Of the CRPGs that I've played, some of my favourite parts is creating a character for the sheer amount of game-changing variety involved in the process as you choose races and classes that transform the abilities available to you throughout your playthrough. Original Sin airs towards a more accessible iteration of character customisation, and in that pursuit losses a lot of the potential depth. The plus side is that new players will never find themselves married to a build that they just absolutely hate and don't want to stick with, because you can retrain into just about anything with enough effort. The down side is that none of the starting classes feel utterly distinct from one another. Also, Original Sin 1 has no playable races other than human. That seems reductive as heck, what's wrong with racial bonuses? I can't even figure out a narrative reason why this would be the case, I can only assume it was a feature they just never got around to adding before they wrapped up 1 and started development on 2. All and all, I'd call Original Sin's character customisation one of the weaker of the CRPGs that I've enjoyed recently.

And yet, even with that misstart, I must say that I absolutely adore the meat of the Original Sin gameplay. Built as a turned-based RPG, (my favourite type) Original Sin's combat is all about positioning, ability points and hit percentages. (like a fantasy X-Com, if you will.) Each fight will choose an initiative order based on your stat sheets and you'll have a certain pool of AP points each round to do a certain number of actions, whether that be attack, move, cast a spell, drink a potion, read a scroll, equip some armour, or (rarely) interact with some environmental tool. I prefer this to the whole 'move and then do an action' set-up because it allows you to build some really agile and high damage dealing characters really at the discretion of how you want to handle levelling up. It's a robust system with a lot of room to excel and Original Sin does a great job of achieving that potential.

If there's one element in particular I feel I have to single out as the single biggest combat triumph, it's the encounter design. That's because Larian did a simply fantastic job in designing every single fight so that there's some sort of substance there. Typically games like this will be littered with a lot of 'inbetween fodder' where you roll through low level enemies for EXP or just to feel powerful, but Original Sin cuts down on this as much as possible. I remember having to seriously consider skills for almost every fight and it gets to the point where you really start to look forward to the mental challenge of 'solving' another fight scenario using the tools available to you. Even at it's most challenging and frustrating, there's something deeply satisfying about figuring the tactic that works for you, or pulling things back from the brink because you've really taken that step back to analyse each moment to the most minute detail. I simply loved D:OS combat.

I think that love comes from a certain 'robustness' imbued in the game design wherein game rules are established and are upheld unerringly to decently creative results. In particular I'm applauding the element system here, because many of my favourite fight moments has been playing with that. How things work is that elements are designed to imbue consistent relevant effects universally, and then the player is given access to a bunch of utility-esque opportunities that allow for exploitations of those elements that feel natural. For example, coming into contact with water imbues the 'wet' status for a limited amount of time, obviously. Well, 'wet' isn't just a cosmetic effect; being 'wet' allows for a small resistance to fire attacks, a negation of the 'burning' status effect, an increased chance to be stunned and even a synergy with the 'chilled' status effect to cause the 'frozen' debuff. Mechanically, this means that if you get ahold of something like the rain spell (which summons a cloud of rain over a large area for a decent number of turns) you can use that to put out companions on fire, set-up an electric stun or air freeze attempt or just weaken enemies for an elemental follow-up. That's just one example and the game is built to maintain a lot of them, it's one of the most dynamic systems of it's kind that I've seen and it truly opens up the combat to be this more puzzle-like affair. (and anyone who has read my Hitman blogs knows how much I love a pseudo puzzle game.)

Whatsmore, these rules work outside of combat and in the open world, which works great for moments of solving world puzzles that the developers have laid out. For example, you may come across a floor covered in poison which is impassable. Well, fighting with poison might have revealed to you how it's liquid and gas forms are flammable, (making for some great, and some terrible, dynamic combat moments) so you know that you just fire a fire-enchanted arrow into the pool of poison to set it ablaze and then summon rain down upon the blaze to put it out. It's this sort of utility to spells that I think is deeply routed in the Dungeons and Dragons influence for the game and executed wonderfully. And don't worry, the developers devised the lava surface for the puzzles they don't want you to find a clever work around to so that there's no way to entirely trivialise the puzzle solving process.

Guardian Hunters

In narrative is unfortunately where I think Divinity Original Sin is at it's weakest, although considering how highly I rate the rest of the game that actually still leaves the story as rather decent. As I've already detailed, this is a series that trips up on world building between entries and that makes it hard to really come to care about core elements of this world, and as such every narrative feels like it has to start from scratch. Yet even with those road bumps to overcome I found myself decently invested in the story of the Source Hunters and the way that it evolved, only really furrowing my brow and rolling my eyes at the minutiae which bordered on 'get the Mcguffin of the week!' for some parts.

As the name of the series implies, it doesn't take long for the story of the game to became embroiled with the realms of the gods, which is fine and all even if I think the pantheons of this particular universe are criminally underexplored for some reason. There's also a constant question as to what exactly constitutes a 'god' in Divinity, because none of them seem to posses a particularly creation-ism vibe, all seem actually killable for some reason and in this game it's even explicitly stated that the gods aren't even omnipresent and that there are some entities older than them. What can be older than a god? What even is a god at that point? (How can you kill a god? What a grand and intoxicating innocence.) Are we just talking really powerful people with glow eyes, because in Divine Divinity that was literally all it was.

Ultimately, however, I was disappointed with the direction the narrative went; although that's because of what I perceive to be falsely promised potential. This game's hubworld is literally called 'The End of Time' and appears to be some fallen version of the world torn about by some evil entity that you've got to stop. I perceived this as some Dark Souls 3 situation where you're literally moving through time each time you go back to the Hub and seeing the results of what happens to the world if you fail. (Except, of course, in Dark Souls 3 there is no 'this can be prevented'. Because everything always dies in the end.) Whatsmore, there's some playing around with the heroes and their role in 'The End of Time' that really made it seem like we'd be going through the journey of discovering how the world was destroyed like this and working to prevent that.

Or so I assumed. In reality, and this both took me a while to figure out and disappointed me greatly once I did, 'The End of Time' isn't actually related to time at all. Yeah, despite it's name 'The End of Time' is actually just some metaphysical realm who's state of disrepair has no bearing on the wider world and there's no 'learning the world you'll soon experience' here to speak of. In a choice-based (somewhat) game it would have been simply wild to show off a glimpse of what will happen and show the way your bad choices led to it, before given you the context to change fate. (You know, like Dragon's Age Inquisition did to great success!) I think that would have actually made for a much stronger and more imperative-driven plot over what we ultimately received. Which to be clear was still good, but it could have been great. (severe missed opportunity that was literally staring the team in the face, in my eyes.)

Going out with a bang?

The endgame of CRPGs like this is where they really sink or swim in my eyes, as these are the sorts of games that are built upon the promise of what you'll become at the end of the adventure, so once you reach that end you need the space to be as cool as you've be working towards being. In this vein, the combat scenarios for Original Sin ramp up and as they do the combat just becomes ever the more exhilarating for me. Playing on the hardest difficulty, I did get the impression that there was a little bit of a scaling drop-off towards the end of the game, to the point where I was breezing through some encounters just a bit easier then I can tell the fights were being set-up as, but that could just be because I was a stickler for completing most quests before the end and thus was practically max levelled.

And yet I really did come to get frustrated as I got closer to the end because of the increase in puzzles that were thrown towards the player out of nowhere too. Now I remember what I said about the versatility and dynamism of these puzzles, but that was in the early game. By the late game Larian start using exclusively lava-puzzles so that you have to solve them in the uber-specific fashion that they've laid out, and this saps a lot of the freedom out of these parts of the game and thus they start to feel like tedious time sinks nearer to the credits. It doesn't help that some of these puzzle solutions are simply just about trying to discover a lever or button that's hidden on the wall textures, which doesn't even make sense in the lore of the world. If I were in the eyes of my player and looking, I'd have clearly seen that button on the wall, but from this isometric distance it's more of a struggle, so why did this dungeon designer build a secret switch that was hidden only from omnipotent sky gods? In fact, why did this designer build a trap with an off-switch on the infiltrator's side anyway? Who does that keep out? See what happens when you over expose this nonsense, Larian? Questions get asked and then the entire fabric of the world begins to unravel!

Finally, and spoilers for these two paragraphs alone, I want to talk about the final boss and the big choice that was made here. So as far final enemies go, conceptually the Void Dragon was a good choice. Classically Dragons make for good final enemies as they were originally constructed as literal devices to represent the apex of things, most famously in Beowulf as a personification (or 'Dragonification' if you will) of all the troubles of life; something we battle with all that can, but something we can never ultimately utterly overcome, and who only dies with us. (Although modern sensibilities might question the folly of a philosophy which dictates that all problems die with you; Kiryu Kazama would certainly label that as 'childish') That was me justifying the Void Dragon, did it work? Now let me tell you why I didn't like the Void Dragon. Icara was the main enemy we'd be fighting the entire game. Yes, she wanted to use the Void Dragon to destroy existence; (which seems like a bit of an overaction to losing against your sister in a love triangle, but I'm not going there today) but that makes the Void Dragon just a means to an end then. Although he was there for entire narrative technically, the dragon didn't feel personally invested in the stakes of the plot and so I didn't feel so invested to stop him as I did for, say, Thaos in Pillars of Eternity. (Although POE had it's own problems with it's main villain and character motivation, let's not forget.)

But that's just the narrative issues with the final boss, how about the fight itself? Who in their right mind thought it was smart to have the final fight be an escort mission? Having to kill the Dragon whilst protecting Astarte came right out of left field and was just plain annoying. It's like the way in which the game immediately ends if both heroes die; why would that be the case when there's others still fighting? Why should Astarte losing her health points instantly end the fight? It's never been that way in any other fights for the game. And to play devil's advocate I get the desire to provide a unique challenge for the final boss, but typically fans want that achieved through clever boss design rather than implementation of a game design trope that's largely considered one of the worst in the industry. At the very least, for the final version of the game they stopped Astarte being able to move because apparently that was a thing she did in the original version. (Charging right at the Void Dragon and getting mauled to death? Thank god they ended that.) Aside from the whiplash of the set-up, however, the final fight was alright. (The AI was kind of dumb on both sides)

In Conclusion

Divinity Original Sin was a game I didn't expect the world from, because I assumed Divinity 2 would be the one to knock it out of the park. However, Original Sin managed to really stand up on it's own legs and prove itself a solid entry more then I expected. Even as a lover of turn based combat, I was blown away with how simply ingenious Original Sin's gameplay setup was and I think that if anyone going forward is looking to make a CRPG they need to look at what Larian did and either copy or improve upon that formula. That's a level of dynamism it's hard to come back from. The narrative was a letdown, however, and that is a shame when you have so much space to tell a story with a text-heavy genre like CRPGs. (Then again, I suppose that is the rope which hung them in many ways.) With all factors taken into account then, I'd have to give Divinity Original Sin a grade solid B, neither plus nor minus. It was an above average title with shades of genuine greatness to it, sullied by other parts of the package. Yet I can definitively say that this was the best Divinity game I'd played so far, so I'm practically giddy to see what awaits me for Divinity Original Sin II. Larian have come a long way in their development history, and following them along the ride has made it abundantly clear how deserving they are of the success in their hands right now, making them the rare modern game studio I have no qualms in supporting. Now if everything goes to plan that's a view I'm going to retain on the other end of Original Sin 2. (Que my drastically unpopular opinion blog 3 months from now)