"…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.

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).

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 :-)