Hey all, thank you for the thorough replies.

"Most of the videos that go around in youtube are from the 1st version of the game, recently a 1.2 patch was released that fixed animation speeds, increased the graphical quality, etc." -Adomingues

Adomingues, this seems to make the most sense. Perhaps what I saw was an earlier version of the game. I was hoping the animation speeds would be increased and so would graphical quality, and that sounds like that's exactly what they focused on. Good stuff.

"Not sure what you were referring to about the smoke. If you can post a link to the video in question, that would be great.
As for the animation for "barrel destruction" it was indeed very slow and unnatural before 1.02. With patch 1.02 this has been largely ramified. There are now faster and different looking animation for the destruction of "barrels." (vase, crates etc.)"

Lethial, this is actually great news. Sounds like 1.02 was a fix-all for a lot of stuff. Even if the animations were just sped up, I would be content with that. As far as a link showing the gameplay in question (for the smoke and lighting particles), I'd be happy to post it. I just hope no one views it unwittingly thinking that it contains NO spoilers. As far as I know, it doesn't contain any major plot points (there is a little dialogue, but it's in German, which I don't speak or understand). It's just a cool looking dungeon (but I believe a minor one). As I said in my previous post, the architecture and overall atmosphere is totally sweet, except for some odd particle effects.

link to the video example of what I've labeled the "green dungeon"(I guess watch it in "HD" to get a good look at what I'm talking about): -----> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH8G6em40Qw

Let me draw your attention, for a moment, to the little details like the motes of dust in the light and cool things like the creeping mists on the dungeon floor. Some serious thought was obviously put into making the architecture as foreboding as possible. Even the player character textures look fantastic. Then, to contrast this, look at the inferior texture quality of the tome/book "prop" on the stand in the main antechamber (which gets a close-up while the player character reads it), the destruction of several vases (what I'd label as the "poofing" effect), and examine the oddness of the green-flame rising from the pedestal at about 3:14. Further, take a gander at the orange-ish glowing light between the batwings of the statue at 3:36....that particle effect looks almost like forced software detail (something the game is making), as opposed to a graphics card. The slow-moving smoke animations can be seen throughout the rest of this chamber. Man, even the shadow effects look great...it's just this other stuff doesn't match up. I guess that was my point. But it sounds like 1.02 addresses some of this. I know the game is due sometime in December, but I would almost rather have it in February or March if Divinity 2 can be polished to a soft sheen. It looks to be a major RPG contender.

"not to bash you or anything, but I'd rather not have my games push high-end pc's all the way. It's costly enough keeping one's PC up to par to play all the recent PC games, I'd rather not see games come out that can only be played on less-than-a-year-old desktops."

swordscythe, I totally know what you're saying. Usually developers make PC games able to run on a variety of systems (thus capturing a larger audience/market), but also look great on high-tier systems. Since Divinity 2 will be released on Xbox 360 as well, I don't think you have anything to worry about. Remember, the X360 graphics infrastructure has been around since 2005 (or earlier), so it'll run on just about anything. Personally, I just want some aspects of this game (mainly particles) to match the artistic detail of the rest of it. The above video shows a sort of "patchwork" of graphical enhancement.

-Crumbling Pyramid

p.s. Watching these videos is just making me salivate even more for Divinity 2. It's quite heart-wrenching actually. =)