Bitter Praise
I should begin by congratulating Larian Studios for assembling such professional work teams.
The sound effects are perfect and the narrations are very well done.
On the other hand, I find the ambient sounds good enough but could be better.
Generally speaking the sound and music creation team did a very good job.
Then I should emphasize the praise for the graphics team who did an overdone job, and in fact the background and the characters including the animation of each character are superb.
I may not blame the graphics department for producing countless objects that are confusing tiresome and unnecessary because it is a GAME DESINE mistake.
The programming seems to be successful to handle code and data in the range of 2.6 G bytes!
The performance on my fast laptop is quite satisfactory and I can live with the systematic and predictable crash of the system. Devine Divinity is such a memory-hungry game that crashing after playing for eight continuous hours should be quite forgivable.
The bitter part of criticism goes to the amateurish and very poor story line in combination with the bad game design.
To explain to you my reasoning behind my technical verdict I shall make a clear list.
1- In combat, the enemy characters drop weapons and money implying that the hero should collect objects and items to use in the game and build a fortune. Now this concept is agreeable for a survival thief but absolutely intolerable for a divine mage or a divine warrior with ethics who would not even think of lock picking or investigating inside a house without permission. Yet we find that the story line forces the main character to join the thieves’ guild to get the holy dagger from Rob’s book!
2- The randomisation of the charm quality and the extra abilities associated with item-identification is a very bad feature because I ended up with a sword of chaos that was much better than the holy sword called the Nobleman’s sword.
3- It is quite illogical to build a character of a divine thief that seeks a holy grail and saves people from evil.
4- There is no good reason for separating the mage from the warrior because the mage must fight and the warrior must cast spells, thus the sole option should have been the choice between male or female battle- mage while the thief character could have been a companion of the divine one.
5- If it was decided for the game to build the quality of the divine one from scratch, then the design strategy should have divided the game several stages in which the main character begins with a specific weapon and armour set while seeking a specific better set to be able to advance to the higher stage while gaining experience.
6- Solving riddles should automatically increase intelligence not only experience points and eating food should increase strength. The mileage the character walks should increase stamina accordingly and proportionally while running and combat increases the value of agility.
7- Smashing skeletons with a hammer is quite imaginable but killing a skeleton with a dagger is ridiculous.
8- Weapons could have been set up to be appropriate to each stage. In Aleroth dungeons a war hammer is most agreeable while an axe is perfect for killing Orcs.
9- Dragons and flying enemies are best hunted with a bow of special qualities and I could never put my hand on an Elvin magical bow; even the Bow of Hilfin was not classified as an Elvin bow and it does not get the special damage enhancements that melee weapons get!
10- Imps are best hunted by a ranged weapon with high destructive enhancements such as poison and fire or explosives but the holy weapon is restricted to being a sword or a dagger!
11- The magic spell of hell-spikes is a must use with some characters because targeted attack is impossible!
12- Many quests are unfounded and corrupt the story line.
13- Levers and keys are quite randomly distributed and no clever hints are given to look for them in logically placed locations or information related quests.
14- The Larian armour is a cute idea but very amateurish and spoils the quality of the game.
15- The story should have been about the building of a character or developing a divine knight in shining armour. Thus, the main character could have started out as an apprentice of alchemy as a boy or girl, then develop that character by a critical even that forces it to work as a helper in repairing weapons and during such a time listen and learn the tongue of traders. A key event later in the story forces the hero to behave as a defender that is being watched by the gods who decide to mark the hero for divinity service. Next the training of using melee weapons should begin under the guidance of a tutor with alternative training and testing by missions. When the missions are complete, the hero ends up with better armour and weapons for a higher stage. An Elvin companion could be the ranged weapon tutor at such a stage, and when the initiation is complete a senior mage comes in the story to set the hero for the greater quests.
16- The armour of the dragon is the most fabulous idea in the game while the treasure hunt is quite unfounded. The armour of the dragon should be preset with the highest armour value and it should be a must before facing the Lord of Lies.
17- The hero was forced to cheat his Elvin beloved by forging a copy of the amulet rather than finding the real one and the forged amulet does not look anything like the picture given!
18- The transportation pyramids are some kind of cure to the very bad story line because the hero is forced to occupy a house by force and use it as a store for stolen items and dropped money as well as a place to sleep to restore health and manna.
19- The cumbersome and unfounded travelling between cities, forests and towns is not a fabulous feature at all. From his home town to the farmlands to Verdisitis then to the black forest and finally to the mountains might have been a much better stage development in the game story.
20- The Stormfist castle episode is the most humiliating and ridiculous task that could fall on a hero forcedly. That particular part of the story is the worst part of all.
21- A bad design point was forcing the hero to report back the completion of the quest to another character to append the diary! Occasionally, the text choices do not contain the ability to report the completion for unknown reasons.
22- This is a “Dungeons And Dragons” strategy game that should be designed on riddles and combat and keeping it simple as a line that escalates in difficulty but this was not a successful accomplishment within Devine Divinity game. Adventure gamers should be tested for reflexes in combat and wit in solving riddles, and that is how the customer enjoys the game. The hero should never be forcedly humiliated because the gamer is psychologically identified with that hero.
In General, Larian Studios proved to have a very professional technical teem capable of producing great software. All Larian Studios need now is a good story and a better game design or designer. Game design is not the task of the programmer or the story writer; it is the profession of a system analyst in the arena of role playing adventure games. The missing task is similar to that of a movie director-scenarist who can please the gamers with a professional sequence of locations, camera angles and scenario. In Devine Divinity, this was quite satisfactory between the healing of Mardaneous to the quests of Captain Mitox. After that the game ran havoc. The healers were acting like handicaps while the hero is supposed to find a cave after talking to a farmer and never before! The hero is forced to pick the lock of the quarantine backdoor even if the hero was not a thief! Finding the three empty flasks was insignificant in the story and finding two cures rather than one for all is rather silly. The hero is forced to have a thousand coins to pay it to the engineer or face death! Why? As I said the game was devastated by Chaos by suggesting the visit to the Castle as early as looking for Zandalor the mage in the dwarves bread inn and succeeding in poisoning the Orcs well.
A very special praise goes to the designers of the imps and their animation. In fact the waste land episode was very good. Unfortunately, the final five mazes, although thoroughly designed, were a riddle failure because they were based on trial and error as well as intuition rather than clever riddles.
Finally, Iona was able to capture and transfer the hero after the castle episode but was helpless at the game end! Another lord of evil froze the hero in the city while rescuing the lizard that was morphed into a snake but was rather crippled in the final battle! Too many design contradictions are beyond enumeration so take those as examples please.
I apologise for my bitter praise but as a technology consultant and a fan of your game I could not but post it as bitter as it is for a better future game.
Kindest regards.
Technology Consultant
EL Sharony Hemet.
