As many of you already know, Divine Divinity is a 'Dark Horse'... an RPG with plenty of potential and one that should not be taken lightly. Playing the game for the first time and seeing it in action is a revelation. Those attending ECTS this year will be in for a treat so keep those appointment books free, it will be worthwhile. For the unfortunate who cant make it to ECTS ...... be patient, a playable demo is scheduled for release soon :)

To kick things off we spoke to Swen (Producer) and Dirk De Boeck (Lead Story Programmer) again for more information into the Making of Divinity.

CAN YOU TELL US MORE ABOUT DIVINE DIVINITY'S STORYLINE AND THE INFLUENCES BEHIND IT?

It's quite a long story, you know, and we really don't want to give away too much, as it'd spoil your fun. I can however, tell you that the storyline is heavily influenced by Tolkien, Raymond E. Feist and Robin Hobb and the storyline will unfold very much in their writing and imagery style. Let me give you a teaser on the intro instead.

In the intro scene you see two plot-lines interweaved with each other.
The first involves a dark cult trying to summon a Divine being. Once they succeed in summoning her, they immediately try to kill her. The second scene shows you, the player, wandering around in some forest. Suddenly you get ambushed by a bunch of orcs. You manage to kill the first one, but when you see more of their ugly heads popping up, you decide to do the wise thing and run away. One of the orcs carries a bow however, and he expertly shoots you in the leg.
Back to the first scene. The Divine creature gets hit by a ceremonial sword but instead of dying, she splits into three parts and vanishes, not exactly what the members of the dark cult had planned.
In the second scene you then see an orc about to cleave you in two pieces, and at that point all kinds of things happen. Flashes, booms, thunder, lightning, and some earthquakes to top it of. It all ends with a massive bolt of energy hitting your body and the orcs running away in total panic.

Then the scene fades away to some time later. You see yourself lying in the grass, seemingly unconscious. A little white cat with very intelligent eyes strolls up towards you, and sniffs at your face. Your muscles twitch, the cat looks up in surprise, then runs away

...Fade to black...

you wake up in a small village called Aleroth. There is a certain man named Joram who wants to talk to you. Your adventure begins.

TELL US MORE ABOUT THE CONTROLS AND INTERFACE FOR DIVINE DIVINITY, HOW DO THEY COMPARE WITH OTHER RPGS?

We think Divinity should have the same intuitive feel as the interface that Diablo had, as that one rocked.
However, in the Divinity world there are tons of things could do that Diablo cannot.
World interaction is for instance something almost non-existant in Diablo, whereas in Divinity you can go so far as extracting poison from plants and then apply the poison it to your weapons. Having gone through the incredibly painful development process of getting the interface right, it's easy to see why a lot of other RPG's offer you tons of menus,keyboard commands and rather unorthodox menu interfaces.Believe me, we were tempted ;)
Nonetheless, the painful effort seems to have paid of. Apart from some glitches, we haven't had a tester so far who needed to be explained how to do things, and it never took them more than a few minutes to figure out the controls. That is probably a good indication that things are more or less ok.

CAN YOU TELL US MORE ABOUT ANIMATION IN DIVINE DIVINITY THE CHARACTER MOVEMENTS ARE VERY DETAILED, HOW WAS THIS ACHIEVED?

With lots of work. Every player character is made up of around 160000 frames of animation which are all combined with each other at run time.
The reason why we had to do that, is that in Divinity the appearance of your player character changes whenever you pick up a different piece of equipment. Since there's quite a lot of equipment, that's quite a lot of renderings.
To make matters worse, there's six player characters, so in total you're looking at 160000x6 frames.
Kurt, the artist who created the player characters, spent almost two years on creating/rendering these frames, and he's actually just finished it last week. The word "player character" has become a very sensitive subject for him.

THANKS GUYS, UNFORTUNATELY THIS CONCLUDES THE MAKING OF DIVINE DIVINITY, THERE IS SO MUCH MORE BUT IT WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE TO DESCRIBE ALL THE INTRICATE DETAILS AND DEPTH."