Divinity: Original Sin Preview

A quick summarization of Larian Studios’ recently Kickstarted Divinity: Original Sin awaits you over at Strategy Informer, where they’re sharing a brief preview of the co-op-focused RPG.  If this one isn’t yet on your radar, it should be:

Still, the whole philosophy behind Original Sin was a real ‘˜old school’ RPG, and that definitely comes through here. Throw in some nice little twists and changes like the interactive dialogues between the characters, and the fact that you can roam the lands independently of each other, add a great extra shine to everything. Original Sin’s biggest triumph (or biggest point of contention, depending on what kind of gamer you are, I guess) is the fact that there’s very little prompting in the world. I’m a bit of an explorer myself when it comes to games always poking through people’s stuff, clicking on anything just to see what happens… but as the years go on, I find that in most modern games, that stuff is basically sign-posted for you. There’s very little point to poking around because you’re unlikely to find anything. In Original Sin though, the thinking is different: while the Quest Log hasn’t been fully implemented in this build, it will serve as your only point of reference for what you’ve done so far. You have to actively seek out people, talk to them, click on things, poke around, to find the content of the game. You can find quests and missions in all kinds of places, but you won’t get to experience them if you don’t look around. The main quest and some of the bigger side-quests may be sign-posted slightly, but by and large the game and the game world- doesn’t tell you what you have to do.

Along with exploring the world, we also got a chance to engage in combat. As has already been reported, combat is turn-based (incidentally, the engine is good enough so that turn-based combat can go on in a localised area, while the real-world still runs and exists around it), and it follows the usual conventions you’d expect from turn-based systems. Every character has an order they go in, depending on stats. You have a certain amount of action points (moving, attacking and using abilities all cost action points), and you have to carefully plan your movements and positioning. If you die, your partner can still fight on, but if you both die you respawn back at your nearest ‘˜home’ point. Even though you only ever have two main characters in your party (or two-people co-oping), you can also hire mercenaries that can accompany you, who you can equip and who also can level up and learn skills. One of the Kickstarter stretch goals was to make these mercenaries into more ‘˜companion’ like characters, with backstory, quests etc… Also worth reiterating is that the world doesn’t scale to your level if you enter an area you’re not good enough for, then face the consequences.