Hive of scum and villainy and old school RPG-focused website RPG Codex is offering a preview for Larian’s two upcoming titles Divinity: Original Sin and Divinity: Dragon Commander. Here’s a snip on Original Sin:
The six primary stats should again remind you of many past CRPGs, recent and old, but they also have non-combat properties. Strength governs the physical damage you deal, but also the amount of loot you can carry, the distance at which you can throw items, the ability to lift heavy items and your Intimidate dialog skill. Dexterity influences your damage with ranged weapons, but also lockpicking and your ability to not break items inside a container if you force it. Intelligence is the primary stat for magic users, but also determines the information you can see about creatures (such as their level and resistances) and your Reasoning dialog skill. In the case of creatures it affects their AI level, thus making it possible to curse an enemy into being stupid enough that it’d walk into a pool of poison you just created in front of it. Constitution affects your hit points, as well as your ability to charm others because, you know, you look better. Speed determines your initiative during combat, the number of action points you receive each turn, and your defense and chance to evade. And lastly, Perception determines your sight distance, and also the amount of information on the minimap and how much loot is highlighted when you press the ALT key the kind of stuff you get by default in other games. Each stat caps at 20 and a character is awarded only one point per level-up to assign to any stat, but there are many extra points to find or receive during the course of the game. It is nice to see that Larian is trying to do more with the stat system than increase your damage output. The interaction between the stats sounds especially interesting, like how someone with high dexterity could attempt to pick a locked container, but someone with high strength could simply force it open and then use his dexterity to prevent items from breaking. Linking stats together like this could potentially mean that no matter how a character is built, there will be no obvious dump stat.
After a quick demo of the spells and combo system, which I’ll cover later, I was shown the ability to manipulate the objects in the world. Just like in Divine Divinity, pretty much everything can be picked up or thrown by simple drag and drop actions. This brought back some fond memories that I shared with Swen, like how I loved being able to pick up the locked chests I’d encounter in a dungeon to drop them in town until the moment I’d have a reliable way to open them. Try to name a game released in the past 10 years that lets you do that! “You’ll find a much higher level of interactivity here than in Divinity 1, or at least that’s what we’re trying to do,” he replied. That was great news. The first Divinity game was rightly praised for its high level of interactivity with the world, something that was sadly missing from Divinity 2, so having it return here was one of the first hints that Larian was returning to its roots. I took the opportunity to mention the bugged bed that you can put in your inventory and carry everywhere with you in the game, making it quite valuable. He chuckled, “Ah, so you found it! It is something that was never intentional but that we intentionally never patched.” The bugged bed and Larian’s attitude towards it is the kind of little detail that helps the game develop an identity, and it is also something that so many other developers lack – that sense of playfulness and the desire to open possibilities, intended or not, to the player.
The ability to manipulate items also extends to the possibility of combining them. This is easily done by dragging and dropping one item onto another in your inventory window. One example I was shown was to combine a bunch of nails that I had stolen from a merchant with a somewhat useless branch we found earlier, thus creating a mace dealing decent crushing damage which proved very useful against skeletons we encountered later. Swen on the other hand decided to use a knife on a pumpkin to create a Halloween pumpkin that he used as a helmet certainly a more fashionable choice than my bucket. This is actually the game’s crafting system, which I was told will be very extensive. There’s no menu or special screen involved – just go to your inventory and combine items together. This might sound simplistic but I also find merit in that approach. After all using the inventory to manipulate items sounds very intuitive. There is no need to find a special workbench and go through a long list of possible actions – I remember times when I opened a crafting menu only to feel thoroughly confused as to how I was supposed to use it, such as in Neverwinter Nights 2.
And one for Dragon Commander:
The idea is that the first couple of missions are railroaded but after that you are free to conduct your campaign the way you want to. Along the way you pick up various people, including generals to command your armies and diplomats of the various races inhabiting your empire to act as your advisors. At the point where we started the game, everyone was already present on board and Maxos informed us that now was the time to get married. This was to be a political marriage: every race would bring their princess on the ship next turn so we could pick one of them, and of course refusing was not an option. Since this would only happen next turn, we still had time to explore the rest of the ship and take care of other political business.
Your advisors will often come to you with sensitive issues, and as the emperor it is your role to make a decision on them. The nice thing about the political problems presented to you is that they are grounded in reality. Your empire is populated by real people who have down-to-earth concerns, which in turns makes it easier for them to resonate with you, the player. One of the main problems with fantasy is the excessive focus on the setting to the detriment of the characters, something I blame Tolkien’s influence for. After all, it is the characters who carry the story and who we can identify with. Farhang shares this feeling, and he told me that was exactly why he had spent a few months going through the news and election programs in various parts of the world to single out some of the most sensitive subjects and integrate them into the game with the intent to leave no player completely indifferent to the in-game choices.
Your council consists of five advisors, each representing his or her race, with their particular needs, preferences and beliefs. While the game itself makes no judgement and simply presents different choices and asks you to make a decision, your advisors, on the contrary, are often pretty vocal about how they perceive your actions. Every decision you make changes the way they see you, and you might end up with one or more races disliking you if you repeatedly go against their wishes. This opens up nice situations where you might make a decision based on your preferences (or those of the character you decided to role-play) but would have to back down on your decision further down the road, lest you lose the support of some of your allies. Since every race brings you various bonuses and advantages based on how much they like you, this is something you have to seriously consider.
As far as the races go, the undead are religious fundamentalists with a very rigid way of thinking, but because of their beliefs they do not shun forced labour, which translates into a discount on production costs during the RTS phase. The elves are the fantasy equivalent of liberal democrats, open-minded and wary of violence, supporting your army with magic powers and defensive abilities. The dwarves (with their councilor reminding me of Winston Churchill) are the capitalists of the game, always after profit and caring little about anything else, although their society is rather conservative and puts a special emphasis on family values. The lizards are libertarians and believe that anyone’s actions are his own business as long as he is accountable for them; self-awareness and responsibility are what counts. And then you have the imps. Quite frankly, the imps are crazy and care about nothing but technology and science; their loose sense of ethics means that, to them, there is almost no boundary between right and wrong science and progress are all that matters. As expected, they are your technicians and researchers.
