Larian Studios Visit: Beyond Divinity, part 4
The Visit Report, part 2

Myrthos, 2003-12-24

We were invited by the friendly folks at Larian Studios a few weeks ago to pay them a visit and have a chance to ask questions and play Beyond Divinity (which was at that time still named Riftrunner). Last week we gave you the first part of our visit report and the two weeks before that there were two Q&A sessions. In this last part we will conclude the series of visit reports of which you can find the first three parts here: part1, part2, part3.

Combat
Combat is both the same and different as it was in Divinity. It uses the same point-and-click style as we know from Divinity. You click the target you want to attack and your character fights it until one of the two is dead. You add strategy to it by using your combo of skills and weapons in order to defeat the harder targets.
This has not changed in that sense, but what has changed is that there is a minimum of two who can do the fighting. The Deathknight excels in being a warrior and is a great teammate when it comes to close combat. Although you can change the Deathknight into whatever class/style you want it will take some time to gather enough stats points to give him the appropriate stats when you want to turn him into a survivor or mage type.
If you like being a mage or a ranger type yourself then the Deathknight is the perfect character for you. Send him forward to do the close combat so that you have some room to cast spells or hit them with your arrows. The Deathknight is very capable to block your opponents long enough to give you enough time to do a lot of damage this way.

Having a party really adds a lot more strategy to the game. Knowing that, the Larians balanced this and made the opponents harder to kill. The game now offers less Hack & Slash but when it does, the fighting is harder at times.
What adds to that is that the enemies have a better AI. What we saw is that when their hitpoints drop below a certain percentage they start running away. If you follow them you most likely will be running into other enemies and have to fight them also. But this can be overcome by strategically placing you and the Deathknight so that running away is no longer an option. The short time we played we didn't see any other AI improvements, but apparently there are more. If so then we will report about them later.

Summoning Dolls
Besides you and the Deathknight there can be summoning dolls in your party. You will find different types of summoning dolls along the way. We didn't encounter any, but Swen showed us some. The summoning dolls allow you to summon a certain type of creature, which will fight side by side with you. The summoning dolls do not level up and do not receive any experience points and thus also no skill points. If you want to have the summoning doll to acquire a skill then you will have to give the summoning doll one or more of your skill points so that it can do that. You can take either yours or the Deathknights points for this and form the summoning doll into what you like best. Of course you have to be careful that the summoning doll doesn't die. If it does then there is a penalty (which still needs to be determined) for resurrecting the summoning doll again.
Having different summoning dolls allows you to summon creature that is best for the situation at hand and thus allows you to add more strategy to your party.

Interface
The interface of Beyond Divinity has been cleaned up. The panels for the inventory, equipment, stats and skills are now available in a single screen. You can have one such a screen open for each member in your party, but due to the size of the panel you can not have them next to each other. The panel has a button to switch between party members however.
Like in Divinity, the inventory management is divided into parts, so that you only see a subset of what you are carrying. When such a selection is active then it doesn't look cluttered (like it was at times in Divinity). However there is also a selection to have everything you are carrying displayed and that one did look cluttered as it placed items and object on top of each other. I assume they will fix that before the release.

The stats part has not changed a lot, besides the addition of a number of stats it remains basically the same. Once you acquired stats points you can add them to one of your primary stats just like in Divinity.

The equipment part is also not changed much with respect to Divinity, with the exception of course that as everything is in one screen it's a lot easier to see what you have in your inventory and what you are wearing and switch items between the two of them. Additionally they also added arrow slots.

One other interface that was slightly changed is the trading interface. Trading is possible with NPC and traders. It consists now of 2 pretty large main inventories; you can see 3 rows of your items at one glance, instead of having to scroll a lot like in Divine Divinity. The trading counters are in the middle - the balance scales, repair, identify are close together on one side - so you can't overlook them anymore.

Skills
And then there are skills. Forget how skills were acquired in Divinity, the way it is now in Beyond Divinity is way different and in my opinion way better too.
You can now have an influence on what the skill will do and what not. First of all you have to select one of the 3 skill groups, warrior, mage or survivor. From there a new menu will open from which you select a category of skills and from there another menu opens up showing a sub category and then several options are displayed to which you can add your skill points. Like with stats you can increase/improve certain or all parts of a skill, you can add a different type of damage/effect it does or increase the damage/effect. The number of menus you have to go through and the options that are given vary not only on the type of skill you are going for but also on what level of that skill you have learned or if you have learned that skill at all. Certain paths won't show until you have been educated by a teacher or you found a book explaining it to you.
So if you are very fond of a certain spell and think it would be even better if it does not only fire damage but spiritual damage as well then you can make that happen now. In this way you can make skills do what you want them to do as long as the options are available to you. The number of possibilities this gives you as a player is big and will make sure that it will take you a whole lot of time to try them all out.

Wrapping it up
Those who played Divinity will feel right at home when playing Beyond Divinity. It has the same feeling and atmosphere and it promises to fix several of the ‘issues' that plagued Divinity, like the unbalanced skills. What remains to be seen is if they are able to have a reasonable bug-free game compared to Divinity. There are several indications that they do. One being that they have more control over the release date now and that there is no publisher who decides to prematurely release the game. The other is that the game is more linear and thus reduces the complexity.
The developers at Larian Studios can't be denied having a big enthusiasm for the RPG genre in general and Beyond Divinity in particular. If they succeed in releasing a fairly bug-free game and the rest is just as good as the part we played then Beyond Divinity is a game that really goes beyond Divinity.