Larian of the future

 

As we roll up to the final update for Baldur's Gate 3, it's one year anniversary and the beginning of what I expect to be a long community drip-feed before whatever the company is working on next- I want to postulate briefly on what I consider to be the path forward for 'The Larian of the Future'. What will they do with their newfound reverence as the king of the Western RPG and what does the path they've already walked tell us about the roads they will tread next. Honestly I am fascinated by the image that Larian puts out as a community positive developer who champions everything you want to hear and casts healthy side eye at the pitfulls that have affected all others. Plus they're technically indie, which is an inspiration in of itself.

I first came upon Larian by hearing the vast praise their RPG 'Divinity: Original Sin' received for the way it played on a systematic level, although that wasn't the first time I saw one of their games in the spotlight. That would be the bizarre Divinity 2 which drummed up unfavourable comparisons to the Oblivion in it's style and deliver- as well as some unintentional moments of humour. It was the endless praise that Divinity Original Sin 2 received however (a game I never completed) which finally made me start playing their games. I by 'their games' I literally mean the beginning of the Divinity franchise 'Divine Divinity' which originally launched back in 2002. It is through that experience, then, that I can remark how genuinely special that little gem of an RPG is and stand fully aghast as to why it is not better loved. Honestly- Divine Divinity should be considered a classic.

The game is a gorgeous little isometric RPG that holds shimmers of the kind of uncompromising systematic robustness that would go on to colour nearly everyone of this studios greatest hits. Loving visuals, fun character personalities, a very permissive combat system- Divine Divinity really is the kind of RPG that old school lovers need to look out for. Beyond Divinity, however, can go do one. Comedy is something that Larian always tried to hit but were never quite kinds at, so the fact that Beyond leaned into that, as well as combat and ugly voxel models to ruin the visuals- kind of made Beyond ever bit the forgettable title that most assume Divine should be. As time would go by their humour improved, literally game by game, as did their voice for storytelling- (though I still wouldn't call it 'masterful'- Baldur's Gate 3 lacks in narrative ambition in places.) and, of course, the general wield of the budding technology.

Now I keep mentioning 'Systematic robustness' without explaining myself- and I think understanding where they'll go next is imperative on this point. Basically I'm talking about when Larian make a game with systems that can simulate consistently outside of the direct purview of design in order to fuel player creativity. Like how the elements combine together dynamically in Original Sin to create opportunities to exploit. Or how there exists literally no artificial rules upon special conditions and status effects in Divine Divinity- meaning I literally beat the final boss by casting him with a spell that created two identically powerful shadow clones of himself that turned around and beat him to death- because those were the tools that were provided by the team. They never lost that heart and Baldur's Gate 3 is a testament to that.

One thing we know about Baldur's Gate now is that they were actually considering the follow-up when they instead pivoted to moving on to their next project. Whether we're talking DLC or a whole new game- those details are in contention- Baldur's Gate 3 was, for a time, where the company saw keeping their talents, around the confines of the Table Top Roleplaying world and toolset. From that point a decision was made to leave that behind and go elsewhere- upwards Larian would argue, but we'll have to wait and see to be sure ourselves. But one thing is for certain- we're probably going to be moving away from table-top style gameplay- because I very much doubt it's simply the DnD ruleset that the team wanted a break from, but that style of game entirely. (Which if fair, considering they'd be doing exclusively that for over ten years at this point.)

Now we've seen something similar blossom in Bioware who spent a good many years veering away from the intricate RPG games of their yesteryear and now seem to have lost the very spirit of what makes a party-RPG fun and are instead looking towards action RPGs. Of course, in that pursuit they've managed to attack the old games, gaslight the concerned and make themselves look silly with every proceeding week seeing headlines like: "Dragon Age doesn't have playable companions because they don't think you can take the speed of it." (No one tell this team about Final Fantasy VII Remake- it'll really bum them out...) Maybe it's just wishful thinking but I'd like to think that Larian aren't going to completely abandon themselves in the near future in a vapid attempt to try and 'find themselves' or such trite.

Of the pillars that Larian has come to respect I think their next game is going to be both an RPG and a representative of everything they've achieved. Namely, in created robust and creativity stoking gameplay systems and, newly, in providing uncompromised cinematic presentation that belies the otherwise characteristic shortcomings of this genre. With those in mind I can only really see one avenue 'up' for the company in terms of scale, although it seems almost ridiculous to seriously consider it. The only RPG developers who occupy that similar space to Larian would be Bethesda, who specialise in giant open world-simulation style adventure RPGs. Would it be truly insane to believe that could be the next port of call for Larian? And what would be responsible expectations is it were?

Personally I believe we have enough failures pretending they can be Bethesda in this department; it's a hugely complicated space to try and fill and even with the biggest developers in gaming at your beck and call most don't get it right. Most open world RPGs just end up being at best Assassin's Creed bloatware. Could Larian break that curse and become genuine competition to Bethesda, a developer some assert have grown complacent on their throne? Before Baldur's Gate 3 I wouldn't have dared think so- now I'm fascinated to think what kind of twist Larian could bring to that world. Imagine the freedom of Skyrim tied to robust party based dynamics! The mind boggles and the heart flutters- and if that is indeed and accurate assumption of 'The Larian of the future' then sign me up! (Unless it's a 'Divinity' universe game. Those games have terrible world building.)

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?

I Hate: Disengagement attacks

 You're not going anywhere!

It has been so very long since I've added another entry to this oft-ignored little series of mine, and that has come from a merciful lack of mechanics and routines from the world of gaming that I can blanket say that I hate. Which is a good thing. There's also the shade in all of this that I don't exactly like thinking of the negative when there's so much of it already mixed in with the positive, and so I usually go out of my way to talk about positive things that I like. That being said, sometime things can't be avoided and I end up coming back around here anyway, talking about another thing that I cannot stand with every screaming fibre in this decaying body. Disengagement attacks. And saying that right now, I'm betting that the most common reaction is: what the heck even is that? So unfortunately this has to come with an explanation too.

During my exploration into Classic RPGs over the course of this year, I've become very familiar with the ins and outs of the heart of role playing games, and seen the techniques that have come to define this genre and the differences between it's subcategories. And trust me when I say, those modern RPGs that Bioware put out every blue moon, which are copied by some other developers here and there, have nothing on the absolute brain melting insanity of the CRPGs. Learning the benefits of turn-based RPGs and real time action is just the beginning, and picking a preference becomes muddy when you happen upon games like Pathfinder and Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire; which offers both. (I typically go for real time for those games, for no other reason then the fact these games were built for huge ungainly encounters that would take actual hours in turnbased.) And that is how I've learned of things like Disengagement attacks.

This is a mechanic which exists more in real time then in turn based games, but that's because they have a very similar but slightly different mechanic known as 'attack of opportunity'. If you think about the way how in X-Com, to use a popular example, uses a mechanic known as 'overwatch' to put your character on alert so that they can take an automatic, low accuracy, shot on a target the second that they move on their turn, we're essentially looking at a mechanic like that. For turn based games you get an attack of opportunity every time an enemy walks past your engagement range and it mirrors a mechanic present in DnD tabletop. But to explain exactly what 'disengagement' is, I'm afraid I have to dig a little deeper into how live action games treat this thing called 'engagement'.

So 'Engagement' is the solution to the problem of 'how do you deal with who's attacking who when you're dealing with huge fights'? Live action combat typically has most of the team on the player's end operated by AI, simply because the player doesn't really have the desire to micromanage everything until the later stages of the games in question where that becomes absolutely necessary. And so Engagement pairs up attackers with defenders in the way that let's the AI know "This is who I'm attacking, so this is where my attention needs to be." From this it should be pretty clear what Disengagement attacks are. When someone who is paired up moves out of the range of attack, the attacker is granted a free attack upon them when their back is turned. Striking in the back like a coward would. Although some games, like Pathfinder, take that a little further and have disengagement hit on anyone who moves out of range, even if that person was positioned behind the reactor and moved whilst they were busy. (Those are some straight supernatural reflexes) 

Okay, is everyone caught up, we all know what today's lesson is about? Good. Now I hate disengagement attacks, and I'm talking with a burning fiery world ending passion do I hate these goddamn disengagement attacks. And this is a very weird one for me, because in a battered, twisted little way I squint my eyes and actually kind of see the rough justification for why this mechanic has to exist and the role they have to fulfil in the overall grand scheme of CRPGs, but I can't come around to liking them. Or even begrudgingly accepting them. They are the devil to me and my gorges froths at the very idea of co-existing in this plane of existence with them. Each and everytime I see that crimson red disengagement number stat number pop up I wince at the cheap shot, and a large part of that comes from the very real fact that I only ever see the attack used against me, and that establishes the 'unfair treatment' complex right there.

Because you see, disengagement is something that only ever hit you if the the victim moves away of their own accord, which funnily enough is something that the AI never does. Sure you can use some powerful magic to knock them out of range, but that won't trigger it, meaning it really is a rule for thee but not for me. Even when you charge ranged archers in these games, something which makes them practically unable to hit you unless they're fitted with somesort of point-blank perk, (Which practically no one ever takes because Archers aren't supposed to be in Melee range most of the time anyeway) they'll rather spend their last moments desperately trying to bring down one of your companions in the back row as you chop them to pieces rather than try to save themselves by retreating. I have never seen a disengagement hit against an AI opponent, and why would it when most AI have the job of 'Swarm the arse and that's our entire plan'.  

The idea is that with this mechanic, the player won't run circles around the enemy in a way they feasible could do without these systems. So it's basically a balancing tool to make sure you play fair, but when you're dealing with a game and spongey human DM logic gives away to the cold, hard, unthinking iron of machine decision making, it can't help but feel as though these are systems designed to box you in. Imagine you're a delicate rouge doing stealth damage to a giant Treant Owlbear whilst your much hardier team members, and several ranks of summons, distract the thing. A Human DM might think the giant mindless monster would attack the horde in front of it, but the AI says "Well, the easiest to kill opponent is the thief behind me so I'm just going to do a three sixty on the spot and get to town." You see the turn, but what can you do about it? If you try to move your rouge he'll get a full-power blow on you anyway, so you're just sort of incentivised to stand there and get pummelled because RNG says this isn't in the cards for you today.

It's a bizarre issue, and one that I don't think can be adequately explained unless you're familiar with these sorts of games and the way that they play for yourself. I mean I could moan about things like how Pathfinder has a feat specifically for escaping engagement safely, but because you only have limited feat options in a playthrough you'd have to be insane to take it over actual class benefiting choices; but would that really mean anything to a non CRPG player? And again, I feel bad for being incensed at all, given the fact that a lot of these games have systems in place for disengagement play, such as spells for combat movement and feats for sneaking out of engagement, but they seem like bandaids on a searing wound of a badly made system to me. Only turn based RPGs handle attacks of opportunity with any class, because encounters need to be designed to consider such systems and the way the player handles them. But given as how I'm almost definitely in the minority of this little grip of mine, I know that the next time I see an enemy one shot me with it's back turned, whilst attacking someone else, because of engagement, I'm going to be only one in the world huffing and rolling my eyes.

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)