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Divine Divinity Preview, part 1
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"
Since many, many years ago
The Divine and The Damned have been in constant battle with
each other. Each trying to destroy the other with their great
magical powers. But to no success
"
"
In more recent times a council of seven existed,
with representatives from the six races and headed by a mage.
There was peace at that time
"
"
Now after all these years and the breaking of
the council the races are on the verge of war. There are dark
forces feeding the hatred between them. Wizards and witches
are constant battling each other. Orcs are on the march, and
they're singing war songs, killing everything that's on their
path. Pestilence and terror plague the world. A world that
is bound to fall in the hands of the Dark Ring
"
"
There is an ancient prophecy from ages ago telling
about the coming of The Divine, the saviour. The Dark Ring
wants to stop The Divine and summons it and tries to kill
it with a ceremonial sword. But The Divine being splits in
three instead of being killed and whirls away. The earth shakes
and accompanied by thunder and lightning three bolts of energy
surge through three innocent persons, known after that as
the Marked Ones
"
These could have been parts from a book, yet they are parts
of the background information from Divine Divinity. The game
starts with you waking up, without really knowing what happened.
You soon find out that you are in a small village named Alleroth.
There is a long way to go until you reach your final destiny
and free the world of the Dark Ring as you are one of the
Marked Ones.
Walk this way!
But before you even get to the waking up part you first need
to select one of the 6 possible characters to play with, of
which 3 are male and 3 are female. In Divinity you can turn
your character into anything you want as it uses a skill based
system rather then a system based on character classes. As
such there are 3 main ways your character can develop itself
into. These are: The Way of the Wizard, The Way of the Warrior
and The Way of the Survivor.
You select a character from one of these 3 ways, which will
influence your starting character stats, your appearance and
gives you a special move that is unique to each of the ways.
The warrior can extend his sword and rotate very quickly,
doing a lot of damage when he is closed in by several enemies.
The wizard can exchange places with an opponent, making it
possible to trick the enemy in a fight and the survivor has
the ability to sneak around, making it possible to pass enemies
undetected and thus avoiding a fight.
![Display full image](gallery/9/Screenshots/tn_crypt.jpg) |
As said before the other thing that is different, besides
your appearance, is that your beginning character statistics
slightly differ. A warrior will start out with a higher strength,
but a wizard will start out with a higher intelligence. Also
selecting a woman or a man will make a difference. Woman are
not as strong as man but they have a higher dexterity and
a better charisma (as you can see every game has to deviate
from real life at some point ;-).
But during the game you can turn your character into whatever
you want. Every time you reached enough experience points
to level up you get 5 skill points you can divide over your
primary stats, which are strength, dexterity, intelligence
and stamina. Balancing things is important however as even
a wizard needs to fight and fighting without strength and
stamina is a real painful experience.
I'll walk any path I want
Each of the ways in divinity has 4 different paths and each
path has 8 different skills. As an example let's take the
paths in the way of the wizard, which are:
the powers of matter, the powers of summoning, the elemental
powers and the powers of body and spirit. The path of the
powers of summoning for example, contains skills to summon
all kind of creatures, but also to summon a dimensional port
which allows you to teleport yourself and the resurrection
skill to name a few.
Besides the different skills, each skill also has five different
levels. What is possible on each level of a skill depends
on the type of skill. But rest assured that they get better
at each level.
Some calculations should teach you that with 3 ways and 4
paths with 8 skills each per way adds up to 96 different skills.
Multiply that with the 5 levels per skill and we come to a
total of 480. Needless to say that it is practically impossible
to learn all of them in the game. If you are lucky you might
get to 40 skills or so (although at different levels).
![Display full image](gallery/9/Screenshots/tn_divine08.jpg) |
![Display full image](gallery/9/Screenshots/tn_divine09.jpg) |
You learn skills by selecting one of them from the skill
menu and while you are gathering experience points you learn
that skill. Each skill needs a certain amount of points before
you have learned it. Besides that each skill also requires
some prerequisites, like a certain level of strength or a
certain level of intelligence. If you have not met these conditions
then you can not learn the skill. Once the required amount
of experience points has been gathered you can call the skill
yours and start using it.
However there is an other way to acquire a skill, which is
by means of a skill book. In the game there are books to be
found which will immediately teach you the skill, without
the need to gather experience points. Learning from books
or at certain temples is also the right way to increase the
level of your skills.
As said before you can learn any skill from any of the ways.
But there is an extra bonus in sticking to your way and trying
to learn all the skills from that way. When you've learned
all skills in a way you can become a true master, which will
make you even more powerful than you already are. The bonus
appears to be worth it, but on the other hand you will miss
out on all those other great skills of course. The selection
of the skills will build your character the way you want.
If you want Hack&Slash then the warrior skills should
be your choice. If you want to be the great wizard, then you
should focus more on the wizard skills and if you would like
to avoid fighting and use your wits to get through the game
then the survivor skills are your cup of tea.
Let me take this thing here
Once you've selected the guy or gal you want to play with
it's time to wake up in Alleroth. As you don't have the faintest
idea what you are doing there or even why, it's time to do
some exploring as all good adventurers do.
In your explorations you will find a lot of objects lying around.
And anything in the game that is not fixed to something can
be moved, thrown or get broken by the player. You can open barrels
and you can break them. But you could also lift the barrel and
throw it on one of your opponents (if you are strong enough),
or you could block the doorway with the barrel, or even better
with several barrels. This would then hold back anyone trying
to get to you through the door. On the other hand it would mean
you can't pass through it either.
There is a lot of stuff lying around in Divinity. If you would have to carry
all of that, then your weight limit would be reached very
fast. So to make it a bit easier on the player, the engine
differentiates between important and less-important items.
When you click on an important item it is added to your inventory,
when you click on a non-important item it is not added. If
you want to have it anyway then you just pick it up and drag
it over your character and it's added to your inventory.
Items can be combined also. You can throw some poison over
a sword to make it do some poisonous damage. You can also
make poison yourself, but to do that you need to have learned
the proper skill. Once you've done that you only need to have
an empty bottle and fill it with some rotten food to create
the poison. On the other hand you can also create some healing
potions by putting the correct herbs into the empty bottle.
And if you have the proper skills you could even destroy a
wooden crate and make a bow from the remains. So it is very
important to know what you want to be, so that you can select
the skills you want and use them the way you want as you can
not learn all skills during the course of a game.
Hey! You want this?
Now with all these items in your inventory you will get tired
soon, so you might want to decide selling some stuff in the
nearest shop. Buying and selling items is based on bartering.
Not only can you influence the price, also the circumstances
influence them. During a time of war, items are more expensive
than when it is peace time.
If you have went through the game putting your grubby hands
on everything you can find you might be in for a surprise. If
the items are unique and belong to a certain person (or in other
words you stole them), whoever is buying it from you might know
that person and the item and know you've stole it. He might
then even refuse to do any business with you and throws nasty
words at you like 'thief' and such. This is especially true
when you try to sell the hot goods in the same village as where
you uh... found them.
Questing all the way
Every RPG needs quests and Divinity is full of those. The
huge world of Rivellon has been compared to having 20.000
screens of 640x480, that would also be 7812 screens of 1024x786,
or a single screen of 30000x20500 (hmmm
I'm drifting
away here). Anyway it's big and fortunately it's not filled
with empty space. It's filled with all kinds of critters (over
a 100 different species)
and it's full with quests. You are very likely to miss one of
those quests, but if you are the adventurous type and want to
find every little quest out there then be prepared for some
long, long evenings behind your PC. You do not need to go for
every quest. it's ok to just do the main ones. But you will
miss out on a lot of experience points and also those extra
skills you can not learn due to the lack of experience. Additionally
the game gets harder, because you were not able to level up
fast enough. But with some careful strategies you should still
be able to finish the game in your own way.
On your paths through the world you will go through dark
forests to meet the elves, dangerous swamps and through the
mountains filled with stubborn dwarves. There are also towns
and villages, a castle and a small gloomy village plagued
by the plague and even a desert. All your travels lead to
the fulfilment of your destiny, which you can not change but
which is unknown to you yet.
What's next?
We also had a chance to play Divinity for a while, so before
we pour our conclusion over you we will first tell you a bit
about our own experience with the game. But as this story
gets to big we decided to split it up into two parts of which
we decided this one would be the first part. Come back soon
for the following part which we will call part 2 :-)
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