If you haven't read the first part then do so first, as it contains information you might need for this second part. In this second part I let you know how the playing session went that I had at the studio. I arrived on Saturday (as did Moriendor) and left on Sunday and would have played Sunday as well but I got sick from eating something (the joke is that I'm the first getting sick after seeing Divinity, but that's not true :-). Anyway here it is...

Arriving
After I traveled down to the studio, south of Gent I found myself in a deserted place. That's what you get from making sloppy appointments ;-). So I waited and after half an hour or so Swen "Lar" Vincke arrived and let me in, to find out that Arhu had just woken up (strange life this cat lives).

Lar put me behind a computer and started up the intro movie, which showed the black ring trying to kill the Divine creature they summoned. But instead of dying it splitted in three and entered the bodies of three marked-ones. After which the game begins, well it should have at least. The last build of the game Lar wanted to make me play had some unexpected test scripts running were I would quickly meet some 30 level orcs, which were a bit to heavy for me :-). So Lar took me to an older build to play that. So I did and selected to play a female warrior who looks really cool. I'm not sure if that's why I choose her. I just thought she is fun to play with ;-)

The story begins
The game begins with my character standing in the middle of a house. There is someone else there however, who gives me the information that brings me up to par on what happened to me after I was hit by the divine being. He also invites me to take whatever I want from his house, but basically the only thing of interest there is a knife. My very first weapon.

So I walked out of the house and the game took over control. An in-game animation was played between a wizard and his assistant. The wizard appears to be a nutcase and the assistant tries to calm him down and lead him into the house. However the wizard thinks the other one is the enemy and uses some magic turning the other one into ice. Then the wizard enters his house and leaves him alone, which also ends the animation and gives you the control back. These in-game animations will appear often in the game and are very smoothly done.
No doubt about it, this is my first quest, so I headed over to the assistant who was starting to feel cold, but not cold enough to not be able to talk to me anymore. So he asks to get the wizard back and convince him to turn him back to normal again as that's the only way to save him. The door is closed however, but there is an entry to the house via the well nearby, leading through a cellar.

The first quest
There I got into my first fight with some skeletons. In the beginning I was clicking as a madman until Lar told me that I only needed to click once. Strange, I knew that but forgot it somehow. I must have grown accustom to this continuous clicking somehow (played too much Baldur's Gate I guess).
Especially when you are facing multiple monsters then clicking only once on each monster is very much preferable over having to click like an idiot until it is down and then repeating this for all monsters in sight.

There are several items in the cellar, like rotten food (which can be toruned into poison if you have the right skill) and there are also several barrels. As I'm the explorer kind of guy I trashed or opened all of them. In some of them there are even some items to collect.
I did find one thing that I had some troubles with during all of this. As described in the first part of this preview, you can drag an item over you and then it's added to the inventory. For some reason I managed more than once to accidentally drag a broken barrel over me, resulting in it being added to my inventory. The problem with that is that it immediately makes me go over my weight limit, resulting in me not being able to run anymore. But besides that, what on earth should I be doing with a broken barrel. Now the problem is getting rid of it. As my strength is still very low, taking the barrel from the inventory and throwing it away is not so easy. There is only a small region to the left and the right of my character on screen that can be used for that.
It happened to me later in the game as well, although at that time I got the hang of it and it was easier to dump it again. I guess it must be me clicking too much :-).

Anyway, after scurrying through the small dungeon, I found a way up to the wizards house and talked him into releasing his assistant. Yeah! my first quest has been solved.

Click!
Like I said, I'm the explorer type and I want to open and click on everything (which is probably why I end up with too much stuff anyway). So I wanted to do any quest I could find. But first let me say something about the controls.
In order to walk somewhere you just left-click there with your mouse. You can keep the left mouse button pressed in order to keep on moving as long as you keep your mouse moving. If you click close by to your character, he or she walks to that point, clicking further away makes him or her run to it.
Clicking on objects containing something (like barrels and cupboards) will make you open them and pops up a screen with the objects in it. Clicking on items will add them to your inventory if they are objects you can actually use, otherwise nothing happens. Clicking on these items and dragging them will move them or will throw them, depending on how far you move your mouse away. Clicking on something like a barrel with your weapon drawn will make you destroy it. Clicking on a candle will turn it off when it was on and visa versa.
Clicking on a monster will make you fight it, clicking on an NPC will make you talk to him or her, if you are carrying a weapon and you click on an NPC then you get a different response from him as you are approaching with a weapon, but in general you do not attack him.
All of this clicking is done with the left mouse button. The engine decides what you want to do given the situation and I must say that there wasn't a single moment that the engine made the wrong decision. The time they must have spend into making it work like this is well worth it, I wish all games were as intuitive as Divinity when it comes to controls.

As a mouse has two buttons, the right button plays a role as well. With it you used the skill which is currently selected. At the beginning it is attached to your special move, so when I clicked it my warrior lady started to rotate and swing her sword.

Roaming the village
The village of Alleroth is big enough to occupy anyone for some time. But it is not essential. Quests do not need to be solved in any predetermined order. You can even decide to skip on the quests and walk out of the village immediately. However there are some mean orcs outside the village so you might want to try and level up a bit in order to stand a better chance against them.

On your walk through the village you see several animals walking, running and flying. Butterflies and birds fly through the sky, rabbits quietly go on with their own business as you walk along and frogs are happily jumping up and down to name a few. The world seems very alive and is a change from the somewhat static backgrounds like we know them from other games.

While you are walking around then you might notice that sometimes an entrance to a cellar is blocked by several crates. If you look careful enough then you'll see that there must be something underneath them. Moving them will reveal the entrance to the cellar and offers you the chance to some more items and experience. Sometimes there are also items behind barrels and crates. If you explore everything carefully then you are rewarded by the game for doing so.

And if you want to learn a bit more about the background of the story then you should read up on the many books that are in the game. They offer a lot of information and sometimes are essential to solve a specific quest. There is for example a magic mirror in one of the houses in Alleroth, the purpose of this mirror would be unknown to me if there was not a book hidden behind one of the crates in the same room. Moving the crate revealed the book and showed me what it was used for. Some books even show you how you can make honey or do something nifty with herbs.

I tried to do all the quests I could find and was occupied with that for almost four hours, after which Lar told me that I did not solve all of them yet. He told me about this one rather funny quest in which a zombie would appear and fight you. You kill it of course but the zombie will continuously reappear throughout the game wherever you go. If you however did not find this quest then all of this will not happen.

Leveling up
I did of course gain a lot of experience this way and was able to level up a few times. Every time I levelled up, it is possible to distribute 5 points to the four primary statistics, which are: strength, dexterity, intelligence and stamina. How they are distributed is your choice. You might want to try to max out on one statistic but that doesn't make sense as you then might not be able to learn all the skills you want. In general warriors need strength, wizards need intelligence and survivors need dexterity. But your dexterity also influences your defense capabilities, so these are useful for everyone and if you want to use magic spells as a warrior then you need some intelligence as well. And with a low strength you can not carry a lot, so even warriors and survivors should raise that stat.

The way you develop your character is up to you, by choosing your statistics to increase and the skills you want to learn. And when you learned all skills in a path then there is even an extra bonus on the effect of each skill (something in the order of 1.5x).

The dungeon
So after I did everything I could find it was time to go down into a dungeon below Alleroth. During the game it becomes clear how you can enter the hidden dungeon, but I wanted to play out the quests first before I entered it. The dungeon is huge. There are several levels and the levels are easily as big as the village itself. The dungeons are mostly filled with skeletons and zombies. The emphasis in this part lies on the hack&slash part of the game. There is one quest that you get from on Orc Chief, but in general it comes down to gaining a lot of experience points in killing everyone you can find. The AI of the monsters is very clever and they will 'call' their buddies when they see you, so you should be aware of that.

However as I did find some armor and levelled up quite a bit, my defence capabilities became too high for the monsters in the dungeon. Even though there were at some times several of them trying to cut a piece from me. I hardly got hurt by them. Needless to say that it was easy to get by them in this way and to kill everything on my path. Of course it was no challenge either so after a while it even got boring a bit.

The game is in beta of course and there are more leveling problems like this, however I'm convinced that they will solve things like these. Although I can imagine that it is a bit problematic as someone who goes for all the quests will have a far tougher character then one who doesn't go for all of these quests. The game should be playable for both types players.

A Break
I was almost constantly playing for 5 hours or so when Lar made us stop, which was about right as my game locked up due to some bug. He took us to his room where he showed us some other parts of Divinity. There are too many things to sum up, but some of them are still fresh in my mind. One of these places is the swam area where Lar's character was reflected perfectly in the water of the swamp. To cross the swamp he shapeshifted into some sort of firefly and flew over it until there was some solid ground again to walk on. He also shapeshifted once in a frog and as such was able to move much faster then he could have as a human.

And of course there were some really great animated skills being showed off by Lar. Like creating a wall of skeletons aiding you in the battle or some kind of electric wall, that you could create around your enemies killing them as they want to get through or a reflecting arrow skill, which would bounce of any arrow being shot at you and being redirected back to the one who shot it. So every time a monster shot one of his arrows it would reflect, turn around and hit the monster. There are too many things to name (or remember).

Conclusion
For those not knowing it yet, Divinity is one of the few upcoming RPGs that uses a 2D engine, with pre-rendered background and 2D animated figures. The spells are in 3D however to create some great effects and everywhere you go there will be sounds and music playing. I'm not going to debate 2D vs. 3D here. Personally I think it will be hard to find a 3D RPG that looks better than Divinity.

After playing the game I would like to play more. That's a good sign I guess :-). There are some balancing problems and there are some bugs left to solve. That's the main reason that the date of 14 September has been pushed backwards to the beginning of 2002. Personally I think that's a wise decision and I hope that they manage to get the game finished in time. It should be as there is already so much working smoothly.

Divinity seems to have everything one can expect from an RPG. It has great combat which allows you to play like in Diablo, but doesn't force you to do so. There are other ways without you getting into a fight, especially when you are using the survivor skills. Divinity has a vast amount of side quests to do as well, that can keep you occupied for a long, long period of time, especially as there are often several ways to solve them. But you don't have to do them if you don't want. You can finish the game without doing all of the quests that pop up.

The game is nonlinear and you can go everywhere you want in the world and do things in your own way. Although in the end you will have to fulfil your destiny, to complete the game and for that you will need to solve the main quests which are linked together by a compelling story accompanied by some great music, making sure that you will stay hooked on the game, wanting to finish it.

Then there is the name of course. Divine Divinity. A lot has already been said about it and in general nobody really likes it but let's just think of it in the (slightly changed) words of good ol' Frank Sinatra: "A game so nice they had to name it twice".
Besides that I believe that both the Hack&Slash and the true RPG players will find what they want in Divinity so it should be on every RPG players list. It sure as hell is on mine.