Dragging on Divinity

 

Recently I was praising Larian on their fantastic work bringing Baldur's Gate 3 to it's final form with Patch 5, and I realised something- somehow I turned the blog into an anti-Divinity rag near the end. And there really needs to be some clarification on exactly where I stand with Larian's original franchise because it's not quite as simple as I perhaps made it out to be with my dismissive ravings. It is in that spirit I'm going to double back around on myself and mention a little bit of my history with Divinity to perhaps clear up my feelings on why I treat Larian's announced return to the Divinity franchise as a step backwards rather than leaping onwards to bigger and better things. Because I don't believe this development team are suddenly going to forget everything they've learned. I would suspect they might not go for something as achingly ambitious as Baldur's Gate 3 was, because that sort of momentum cannot be replicated project-after-project: but whatever they plan, in some way I already know I'll be disappointed.

I, unlike a lot of Larian fans out there, took my investigation into the company seriously when I decided to check in on Original Sin 2. I didn't start with Original Sin 2. I didn't even start with Original Sin 1. I started playing their games from the absolute beginning of the beginning. I started, with 2002's Divine Divinity. As retro as retro gets with an isometric, brush-stroked, classically by-the-books, chosen one by divine purpose- fantasy RPG game. With eye wateringly bad humour, which seems to equate 'funny' and 'screaming loudly'. (Larian's humour got a lot better over the years.) The idea was to see the origins of the franchise and see how the story evolved upon itself game to game in a manner similar to Elder Scrolls. But whereas Elder Scrolls went through various tweaks and refinements whilst still remaining decently recognisable from start to finish- Divinity went off the rails almost immediately. 2004's Beyond Divinity, the only game I honestly couldn't finish for how miserable it made me, jumps off the deep end with doubling down on humour, bringing the somewhat bad combat into the forefront and squashing the story down into a linear slog. 

Then comes along the game which I had quite some history with. Divinity 2, a game I played the demo for incessantly when I was a stupid kid who didn't know any better. Divinity 2 entirely rewrites the world at a fundamental level, throwing out practically all the major world building of the first two games in order to refocus the power of the world around 'Dragon Knights' and the new big bad evil man 'Damian' who is the least intimidating dark lord you can possibly imagine. He's just a bald guy. They would pull this total reconstruction again with 'Dragon Commander' and then again with 'Original Sin'- (but at least in those instances there was some slight narrative explanation as to why the world was so different. Even if it is the dumbest reason imaginable. "Everyone just agreed to throw away the steampunkian technological advancements of the Dragon War and jump back to the dark ages!" Yeah, right!) 

Do you know what perspective I got on the world of Divinity from all that history? That there is no world of Divinity. Any worldbuilding that Larian attempted to make was washed away with the next game, and even though Original Sin and it's total recontextualization of 'Sourcerers' seems significant today, it's hard not to visualise a world where they throw it all away in favour of a new threat tomorrow. There's little narrative through-line in Larian's signature world and it's started to grow to a point of poisoning their attempts at larger world building. As it is, I cannot possibly suspend my disbelief enough to believe that any of their worlds are at all bigger than the immediate play space you're operating in- which is a big problem when we're talking about the Fantasy Role Play genre which is all about getting lost in a world of imagination.

And they have tried. Take Jahar from Original Sin 1, he's a prince from a foreign land with a sad story about his fall he loves to regale you with. But listen to the actual story he tells you about his homeland. It's all 'golden spires' and 'thousands of towards' and just unimaginable luxury draped on unimaginable luxury. It doesn't sound real. It sounds like a fairy tale. And if it sounds like a fairy tale then I'm no longer picturing this place in my head and subconsciously integrating it's locales into my understanding of the world, I'm peering past the words and anticipating their, rather obvious, moral. And this is the same, albeit not quite as bad, with the Red Prince from Original Sin 2. He too, is a prince, and he too, comes from a life of indescribable luxury. The world building doesn't invite in the audience and thus loses the impact of actually building a world!

Compare Divinity with 'Pillars of Eternity', a game that sets you in a bog in the arse end of nowhere. But it does such a fantastic job fleshing out everywhere else in the world, giving you tastes of cultures and traditions and characters who's very mannerisms are inscribed with their homelands. Despite Pillars 1 providing what I argue to be the least appealing worldspace in RPG history- (The Dyrwood could burn down along with everyone in it for all I care) the wider richness of the world speaks wonders for itself. The Elder Scrolls tells a thousand stories about the world surrounding the one you're playing in. These are RPGs that understand the fundamentals of the craft, and I don't think Divinity's world was ever static long enough in order to follow suit. It reminds of Fable, in that way, only Fable leans more into it's incongruity. Divinity is burdened by it.

Baldur's Gate 3 greatly benefited from having an established world to set a narrative within, with confines that Larian couldn't greatly bend without causing havoc, forcing the team to rely on defined world spaces to flesh out the wider world of Baldur's Gate. From the Coast to the Hells you feel the weight of the locations you visit in a way that Divinity could never quite manage, and when you make an impact on the world you can't just weigh it up by the immediate people who are effected in front of you when you know there are a dozen more you'll never see suffering or benefitting from your acts. It's the difference between a puddle and an ocean, and it's the reason why Larian RPGs never scratch the same itch as Baldur's Gate did for me.

But all this is the Larian in the past that I'm talking about. Who's to say that the Larian of the future is going to make the same mistakes? Maybe with the influx of fame and talent that they are undoubtedly going to receive, Larian will start to examine their practices with a finer scope, see what made Baldurs Gate 3 just that extra bit special and take it to the products going forward. Maybe Original Sin 3, when they finally get around to that, will be their next big 'everything in' project that really shows everything they've learned and then some. And maybe if we beg hard enough we can get Larian to stop and give us a DLC before moving onto their next game. Maybe if we get down and beg and promise and cry then a DLC will be our reward. Dammit, I'm just not ready to let BG go, am I?