14 DAY TRIAL // Divinity: Original Sin is an upcoming role-playing game that features turn-based combat and has its roots firmly planted in the era of old-school PC RPG’s, while growing toward the engaging gameplay and intricate mechanics of a modern-era title.
The game is currently in development at Larian Studios, makers of previous Divinity titles, after having been successfully crowd-funded in April this year. It has also very recently entered its backer-only alpha phase, which the developers warned is a very barebones experience.
When the game was first unveiled, the studio stated that they had made considerable compromises and were creatively constrained in the past, and that they want to take their time with Divinity: Original Sin and offer a truly genre-breaking experience.
The complexity they described is truly an ambitious undertaking, and if they manage to deliver on most, not all but most of their promises, you won’t even know how to play the game, it will take some getting used to to properly experience.
It promises a level of interaction that allows you to do incredibly many things just because you can, not because you have to, which would be a refreshing element in a day and age when travelling off the beaten path usually ends up with an arrow pointing you in the direction you were “supposed” to go.
The promised level of interaction is hinted at in the alpha, in the options afforded to you by the extensive dialogue trees, as well as the option to navigate an issue such as getting inside a house in several different ways, from lockpicking to sweet-talking to murder.
The dialogue trees also allow you to flesh out your two main heroes, during their interactions with the outside world and between themselves, always having a binary attitude choice that ends up modifying your character sheet.
For instance, upon noticing someone stealing from an unaware merchant, you can approach and confront them or let them get away with it, being sympathetic toward a hungry sod or doing what is morally right.
And after that, when the guards come, suspecting foul play, you have another option, turn in the thief or lie to the guards, which shows how you behave in front of authority.
Each choice has an impact in defining who your character is, and is reflected in opposing personality traits such as rational/romantic, obedient/independent, that each give a bonus in one area and a penalty in another one, affecting your future interactions by making you more likely to convince someone with an appeal to reason or by charming them, or bestowing your leadership aura on your party members in combat, or being able to better get by unnoticed while sneaking.
The rest of the character sheet looks good, following the very nice Fallout model, your primary stats are (more or less) set in stone and have a strong influence on the general way you approach the game.
Every time you level up you get both skills points (depending on your intelligence) that you invest in class-specific skills, as well as a unique perk that allows you to carry a greater weight before being encumbered, or gives you extra action points, or better NPC reactions etc.
The skill trees are pretty generic for now, nothing crazy, but it seems like you have the option to become either highly specialized either a generalist in each class, and it also seems like multiclassing will be an option, which is always very nice.
The specializations are intriguing for now, the mage for instance can invest skill points into the control of each magical element, or can choose to evolve the more general offensive/defensive/summoning categories, and it will be very interesting to see how this plays out in a more finished version.
Speaking of elements, the alpha showcased some very innovative interactions. While other games have also implemented some sort of “elemental combos”, like freezing enemies with a character will make them more vulnerable to another character’s fire based attack, this game sets out to play in a whole new league.
As stated before, it looks like the kind of game you won’t be able to properly play from the get-go, simply because you’re not used to being able to do so much inside a game. If a door is locked when you click it, okay, you either lockpick or find a key. You don’t usually imagine teleporting inside or bashing the door down.
The same way you’re not used to doing the rain dance so that your enemies become vulnerable to electricity. And then freezing the resulting puddles so that they slip and fall. Or throwing a fireball to evaporate that puddle before the enemy freezes it so you won’t slip when you give chase. Or making a frost path over a river instead of looking for a bridge.
If Larian Studios manage to put all of this in the final product with the level of freedom they promised, it’s truly going to be a remarkable feat. Because there are scenarios that could change dramatically depending on how they are approached.
The alpha does not yet feature the AI that lets NPCs behave like they are unique and beautiful snowflakes, but in the final version you might see the following scenario.
Just as you step outside the city gates, you wander into a pack of nasty orcs that makes rather quick work of your adventuring dreams. Because that happens, you can get into trouble with higher level mobs just like that.
When the NPC complexity layer will be implemented, you could theoretically make it rain and freeze the puddle and then have the dim-witted orcs perpetually fall down while they rush for you, while a smarter character could choose to go around the frozen patch.
You can also level some more and take the orcs down later, when you can properly duke it out with them, in good-old-fashioned turn-based aggression. Combat seems to work fine, you have gap closers, crowd control and there’s friendly fire so positioning is also a tactical factor.
More unusual moves are also allowed, you can use telekinesis to drop characters into the scenery or simply remove brawlers from the vicinity of your mage, and it certainly looks like combat will play solid and keep things interesting.
There’s weird stuff going down also, you just wander around town going about your normal business (and there’s a lot of wandering to be done) when all of a sudden an imp teleports you into space and starts talking nonsense about the fabric of time.
He goes on about you being a mystery not present on said fabric and thus being able to restore it. Who doesn’t like being a mystery? Who doesn’t like saving the universe? But first, you can learn how to talk to animals and do a quest for Mr Kitty over there.
The game seems really engaging from the point of view of what can be done within the game-world, there is a lot of exploration to be done, a lot of side-quests, your choices can impact the game world in a visible manner.
You can evolve the main characters through their actions and words and there are also some unique interactions like being able to move objects around and do other stuff that you don’t get to normally do in games.
And the graphics are also very good, good color palettes, rich detail, a lot of work has gone into making the world look beautiful and alive. Even though graphics are not the main concern of RPG players, Larian Studios have shown that they're committed to delivering a visually stunning product from the early days of alpha.
This isn’t really the place to talk about issues such as the Escape key not closing opened interface menus or having to start all over again once your saved games decide not to work anymore, because the game is in alpha. Pre-alpha, if you take the developer’s word to heart.
The game certainly shows promise, it shows the budding implementation of the fundamental gameplay elements that got everyone’s attention when the game was only concept art and design documents, showing that it’s on the right track.
It’s probably not going to make its intended release date, but it shows tangible hope for a very solid game, to put it mildly, and builds high expectations for the beta version.
