Divinity: Fallen Heroes Previews

Back in March, Larian Studios announced Divinity: Fallen Heroes, a tactical spin-off to their popular Divinity series. We haven’t heard much about the game since then, but now, we can check out a couple of early hands-on previews. First, there’s IGN with a detailed look at Fallen Heroes that likens it to Larian’s earlier experimental Divinity game – Divinity: Dragon Commander. A few sample paragraphs:

But Fallen Heroes wouldn’t be a Divinity game if it were not also an RPG in some form. Story and choices unfold onboard the Lady Vengeance; a battle ship you and your team of heroes call home. Akin to how the story is told between battles in a Fire Emblem game, it is on the Lady Vengeance that you can discuss previous missions and future plans, unveil the story’s lore, and make decisions that Larian promise will have lasting, sometimes devastating impacts on the world of Rivellon.

With Original Sin 2 fresh in the memory, it seems a little odd that a Divinity game would wrench its components apart and create, to some degree, two separate entities; a turn-based tactics game and a visual novel-like RPG. But this delivery allows for a very different battle focus; rather than being encounters with enemies that you meet as part of a wider quest, each mission has to be a narrative experience in itself. Objectives chain together and demand specific outcomes, creating a very different form of challenge.

More than that, though, this two-component structure harks back to Larian’s most unusual title: the aforementioned oddity Dragon Commander. The story chapters set on Fallen Heroes’ Lady Vengeance are even identical in presentation to Dragon Commander, itself also set on a warship. Choices made in dialogue open up options for combat, but in Fallen Heroes that combat is the intricate systems of Original Sin 2, rather than Dragon Commander’s mess of unwieldy steampunk legions and jetpack dragons.

And then, there’s PCGamesN with a short preview that doubles as an interview with Larian’s producer Kieron Kelly. Have a look:

PCGN: What can we expect from Divinity: Fallen Heroes?

Kieron Kelly: Divinity: Fallen Heroes is a tactics game built out of the Original Sin 1 and 2 engine. It’s got the combat of Original Sin 2, so imagine a tactics game combined with all the strength and depth of an RPG like decision making, choice, and consequence.

Fallen Heroes makes you feel like you’ve got a really great narrative and roleplaying opportunity, but in a tactics game. So instead of the 80 hours of an RPG like Original Sin 2, this is more like a 20 to 25 hour experience.

Some people might be surprised that we went down the tactics route, only because we’re very much an RPG developer. And I dutifully express to the fans that we’re not abandoning our roots, we’re still making RPGs. It’s no secret that we are working on more than one project, so this is one of the projects we are working on.