The Videogame Corner: Divinity II

Game: Divinity II
Developer: Larian Studios
Genre: Action Role-Playing Game
Releases: 2009 (PC, Xbox 360)

By releasing multiple games in a series, certain titles are bound to become more popular than others. A good example for that is the subject of this week’s article, “Divinity II”. Googling for “Divinity II” will often (read: almost exclusively) lead to results being about “Divinity: Original Sin II”, which does have all the words you googled for but is not the right result. No, “Divinity II” is a solid game on its own, and as the name suggests is the third entry in the “Divinity” series, because counting is difficult. After the more pixelated “Divine Divinity” and “Beyond Divinity” that came before it, this 3D action role-playing game is quite a change from the formular the series was going with before. Nonetheless, while both “Divinity II: Ego Draconis” as the base game, and the major expansion “Flames of Vengeance” are misfits in the series, they shall be our topic today. And let me tell you right from the start, with the ups and downs this game had to offer, it sure felt like a rollercoaster at times; which seemed to be the perfect hit for Blaugust day 11.

The game starts … in an unusual way. We see a bald man standing on a structure above the clouds, looking at his amulet, fade to black, we see a man with glowing eyes sprinting through the forest to come to a hold near a fallen tree, waiting for his opportunity to attack the wyvern in the clearing, the wyvern notices that something is wrong, starts its ascend and the man running towards the fleeing creature can only look after it soaring away, fade to black. And welcome to character creation. Look, cutscenes without dialog or even unclear purpose are not immediately a bad thing but after a minute into the game I do not even know what the hell I have in front of me; which is even weirder if you just do a cut and then throw me into the character creation without any warning. Character creation itself was also quite interesting since the only hair colors available are brown and blonde, with something as normal as black hair not being available. I can understand that game developers opt to give little options during character creation if the character you are playing is constantly hid under armor anyway, but if I have the choice between so little options why even bother?

You pick your character, watch an in-game cutscene of a flying ship docking somewhere in a forested area, and the game begins. Rhode, the commander of the Dragon Slayers, gives you your orders outside the small village of Farglow. Your days in the academy were fruitful, and you now need to enter the village and find out what to do there in order to become a full-fledged Dragon Slayer; she does not give any further details, as she says that the task at hand will become clear once you access the small settlement. So, you enter the village, find out about a magician named Morgana, lose all your experience for the power of the Dragon Slayers, which includes handy abilities like seeing the dead or being able to read the minds of others, and are basically on your way again. Before you leave this tutorial area, you have to pick one class to follow at least for the start of the game, with the usual options in form of Warrior, Ranger, and Magician being available. Regardless of what you choose, the return to the airship is inevitable and upon arriving there you are told that the last Dragon Knight was sighted; which unfortunately postpones your initiation process due to the hunt taking priority.

The world of “Divinity II” is full of colorful characters, from interesting and unique personalities to cliche magician like Zandalor up here.

The next destination on your journey is therefore Broken Valley; and it is also the first area in which you are allowed to roam freely. Rhode does not want to risk sending you into battle against the Dragon Knight in your weakened state, so instead you are meant to gather information. However, she does not seem to mind you doing some other quests at the side. Whether it is collecting Goblin hearts as signs of confirmed kills, reuniting a farmer with his beloved pig (in more ways than one, as you will find out over the course of the game), or staging the escape of a convict in order to find a bandit’s hideout, there is lots to do. And since encounters with enemies are unavoidable, you also get to know the combat system: Battles are mostly fluid, with your character reacting to button presses by automatically chaining a standard combo together depending on the weapon you wield. One-handed, two-handed, dual wield, one-handed with shield, and unarmed are the options for melee and they all work quite well with choice normally coming down to whether you like the speed vs damage of whatever tool of killing you use. For ranged attacks, you can either use a bow or fling magic at the opponent, and even summoning your own minions to battle for you is in the realm of possibility; and provides additional damage as well as giving you more breathing room in hectic fights due to them drawing some of the attention.

And the game is going even further. Whether you clear all the side missions first or go directly further into the valley disregarding the orders of Rhode, you will meet the actual last Dragon Knight that your peers are currently trying to hunt down. Apparently, they managed to give her quite a beating before she was able to flee, meaning she does not put up a fight anymore when encountering you. However, the Dragon Knight is not going to let you win quite that easily and plants a vision into your mind of the things to come, a greater evil being at the works that can only be stopped by said Dragon Knights. After that vision, the transfer of her powers makes you effectively the last Dragon Knight in existence, which after a while means that you can change into the form of a dragon at will. The dragon form comes with the abilities you would expect, with a fire breath to torch enemies and structures alike, the ability to fly, and various other perks like being able to summon lesser wvyerns, shooting homing fireballs, healing/shielding yourself using dragon magic, and at the end of the game even the pendant of the nuclear option for dragons.

Goblins in “Divinity II” find themselves rather often at the end of your blade, but not all of them are opposed to you; and some are even helpful.

I went into “Divinity II” without any expectations, but I have to say that the game is quite nice. The world-building is solid with most characters in the first village having a few lines to say, but more importantly most of them having real names (unless you are the poor sod that is named “Drill Instructor”) which is a nice touch. This is not one of the stories in which you start as a nobody, instead being praised at every corner and asked for help constantly due to your might. You do not just talk to humans either: While the interesting looking goblins in “Divinity II” are introduced as enemies, you get to know them better over the course of the game, which goes as far as doing quests for them in “Flames of Vengeance” since some of them actively want to preserve the majorly human society they have become part of. The way the battles are handled in “Divinity II” reminded me of the “Gothic” series, since you should never charge into a group of enemies willy-nilly. Instead, the much smarter option, and reason for my comparison with “Gothic”, is aggroing single enemies and killing groups one by one that way. You can get somewhat creative with most encounters in Broken Valley, slowly testing out aggro ranges with melee characters, using ranged options to damage and pull them, letting them run into a summoned zombie that will soak up lots of damage, or using crowd control spells to disable enemies for a short while. I gained levels, killed enemies, collected loot, and had a good time in the role-playing scenario put in front of me.

Damian and the Slayer having a casual conversation. I like the fact that the protagonist looks like saying “Yo man, that’s harsh.” due to Damian’s insult.

However, the game sadly has its fair share of stupidity aswell. For example, the Temple of Doom is a pretty awful level in my opinion. You walk into the first room, fighting the various skeletons there as normal, only to realise that you are quickly dying to poison damage from no discernable source. The poison damage stops very briefly in some areas, but unless you understand what keeps you safe you will not make it back to the entrance and die. To stay healthy during that entire maneuver, you have to follow the path of the corpses on the ground. That’s right: In order to not die in a room full with poisonous gas, you need to stay close to places where people died from the poisonous gas. What crude logic is at work here is anyone’s guess, but I would not have dreamed of a solution that stupid and could hardly believe it when I looked it up online. And that is not the only time my patience was tested: In a side quest up in High Hill, you have to fight a demon that demands a sacrifice from the locals at the beginning of each new season. Smacking all the demonic lackeys was quite easy, but then I arrived at the boss of the dungeon, which I had to fight in dragon form while getting shot at by the boss and various other flying creatures spawning from the nests in the rather small cave. I turned on god mode to have a fighting chance against the small army of monster firing projectiles in my direction, but that did not protect me against the cacophony of colors and noises I found myself in. Oh, and anyone who played the game can probably tell you about the quest in which you need to protect Zandalor from demon attacks since he restarts the countdown when hit. That is particularly fun when the timer is one minute and there are three portals the enemies can spawn from, which all seem to run straight for Zandalor to knock him over the head.

This game also made me question whether I should ever criticize games giving me quest markers ever again, because some of the things that the game wants me to find and do are ludicrous without the help of the internet. The aforementioned bandit camp has two lovebirds that want to escape their old life to bring up their child in a non-bandit way. Simply leaving the camp won’t do though, since the guard at the gate will not let them leave due to not trusting them enough and expecting that they will tell the guards of the bandit camp’s location. You have to mindread the guard in order to even get an idea what could persuade him, which turns out to be a bottle of rum. So, I went to find rum: The village at the start has a bar, but browsing the barkeep’s inventory was leading to no results. I checked every trader I knew of, thinking that the developers could not have placed this random quest object somewhere on the map; but that is exactly what they did. To find the rum, you have to climb onto a gate in the middle of the bandit camp, go past the location of another quest giver, and find the bottle behind some shrubbery. I will be honest, I would have never found that bottle without googling for the solution to that quest; and while this might be bias speaking here, I do not think that the blame is entirely on me for that.

And that is not the only case in which this “needle in the haystack”-search has occured. I accepted the task of bringing draconic artifacts to the priest in the village, which I gave up upon even after looking up the solution. There is a man with a split personality standing in the middle of nowhere, who you cannot heal of this predicament if you did not visit the second floor of the bar and talked to the quack with a strange bronze helmet that blocks mindreading, while also getting the idea that that idiot might be the “doctor” needed for that case. A soldier in the Orobas Fjords wants some airship parts, which are strewn across the entire area; there seem to be nine parts to find but I gave up after four. And when I was confronted with the puzzle in the “Prancing Seahorse” and wasted tons of experience to mindread the doors without any real benefit, I simply looked up the solution to the number code and cleared the entire area that way. Sure, you could call all that looking up cheating and if it takes away from your gaming experience feel free to search every clue for hours, but I do not enjoy the game so much that I will go out of my way to make menial tasks with only one solution being even more drawn-out.

The “Dragon Terror Patrol”, Rivellon’s answer to the Power Rangers.

The game, as is often the case with role-playing games, also uses various media from popular culture for quest and world design; but while I like the small “aha”-moments you gain from understanding those little winks, I found them rather dull in “Divinity II”. Of course, I will give examples: On Sentinel Island stands a ghost with a fishing rod, who wants to catch a whale that seems to be his nemesis and has stolen an item from him. Now, some readers will immediately pick up on the relation to “Moby Dick”, which becomes even more clear as soon as the demon whale in question is revealed to be “Mocha Dick”. The name of the fisherman is Jonah, like the one in the biblical story that got swallowed by a whale, and the name of the quest, “The Old Ghost and the Sea”, is a wink to Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea”, in which the old man Santiago struggles to catch a giant fish for most of the book. Like I said, finding inspiration in popular culture is cool with me, but at some point the references are so blatant and dull that I can only sigh at the thought of it. And as you can see in the picture above, this is not the only case in which some sillyness with pop culture has found it’s way into the game.

There are also certain things I simply cannot understand from a gameplay standpoint. The idea of thievery does not seem to exist in the lands of Rivellon, since no one ever stops you from looting houses and sticking any item that you can pick up into your pockets. The house you are currently in might belong to an improverished farmer, but the chest at the end of the room still has gold, jewelry, gems, and scrolls to plunder. However, in order to open chests in “Divinity II”, you need to put levels into the lockpicking skill. There are five skill levels and each chest in the game seems to have a certain value of level that is necessary to unlock the box. So far, so good. However, there are tons of chests and doors in the game that you cannot unlock, even with maximum level lockpicking, since those doors require a special key to be opened. Such a special key is normally called “key”, which makes it highly inconvenient to find out what locks in the world left-over keys in your inventory are meant for. One would assume that maximum level lockpicking would allow you to pick any door but that you can get around leveling the skill by simply following the quest in that area and obtaining the necessary key, but making it flatout impossible for half the locks in the game to be opened via lockpicking makes the skill pretty silly. And do not get me started about the maximum skill cap of lockpicking not be raiseable and “Flames of Vengeance” still starting to ask for a higher skill rank which would mean having bonus-giving equipment available.

So, I can curse up to level 13, in a 10-meter radius, for -20% on a number of stats. Do you honestly believe that any of that helps in a game without a range indicator or level info of enemies?

Skills in general are solved somewhat weirdly, to be honest. Evade, which gives you a 10% chance of dodging a melee attack at the first level only improves by 2% per skill level after the first. Summon Mastery increases the stats of summoned creatures by 10% for the first level, but halves to 5% per level after that. Two-Handed Weapon Expertise starts with only 1% more damage, but then increases by 3% per level. Encumberance increases your carry capacity by twenty items per level, so it does not have any fall-off, but is utterly pointless after unlocking the Battle Tower since you have a four-hundred slot chest there to which you can send items at any point. And some skills leave room for interpretation: Does Bleed, which starts with a 10% chance to inflict 10% of the damage for 10 seconds, do said damage per second, amounting to another free attack in damage after 10 seconds, or just do 1% damage per second which is hardly worth my time? When the Summon Demon skill says that the summoned creature “taunts” the enemy, does that mean it draws the aggro of every monster nearby, and if yes, how often does that check or is it permanent? I have summoned a demon in “Divinity II” before but I could not make out that every living thing attacked it on sight. Again, those are just minor details, but stuff like that is interesting when the game constantly gives me the tip of not spending skill points “willy-nilly”.

And then there is the last two hours of “Flames of Vengeance”, which honestly left me pretty unimpressed. Having to clear the entire Champion’s Academy again due to that blasted building being the only thing in the game that seems to constantly respawn enemies was bad enough, but having to wear a helmet that not only provides no bonuses whatsoever and therefore would leave me weaker in the case of a battle, the bloody thing as presents one of the worst ideas I have seen so far when it comes to changing the player’s view. The color changing and image blurring effect was soon causing me headaches, and since I googled the solution to the major puzzle for that area, I can tell you that I am not the only one with that complaint. You need to find five orbs, for which you need to do puzzle sections, only to then understand the engravings on the items you found in the quest line before in order to determine what a “Violet Blast” orb could stand for that is not an energy drink. Following that is a slog through loads of skeletons, a non-sensical placement of Rhode who actually wanted to kill you after the dragon transformation but now is unable to see that being brought to an end because she is turned to stone, and the release of the major force you are working with that of course turns out to be evil but still gives you the item you were asking for in return, and therefore handing you the solution to his demise. The boss fight at the end does not even feature the main big bad Damian we had so much contact with before, and the ending is devoid of anything interesting whatsoever. Truely a sorry end for a game that started so promising.

This blurry effect is not because I made the screenshot at the wrong time, but is Larian’s idea of giving the players literal headaches while they have to solve stupid puzzles.

However, some of the things I mentioned that left bad impressions on me might not be that important in your playthrough; in fact, it even manages to unique in some positive aspects. An absolute plus point goes to the “Battle Tower”: Around the middle of “Ego Draconis”, you will have to fight for the control of the so-called Battle Tower, a huge spire that is at that point controlled by the necromancer Laiken. We need to get control over that building to progress the story, and upon doing so it becomes a vital and highly helpful base of operations for the Dragon Knight. I am not kidding, that building changes so much in the game. For control over the Battle Tower, you gain the following perks and benefits:

• A skill trainer that can the skill cap for your skills and therefore allow you to make them much more powerful while also offering you to reset your skill distribution.
• The Necromancer’s Circle, which allows you to build your own creature to summon in battle via an item with unlimited uses.
• A master enchanter, which is either proficient in weapon or armor crafting.
• An alchemist to make potions whenever it is required.
• Scouts that you can send out to fetch whatever material is required. When fully upgraded, they return instantly after you leaving and re-entering the tower, which means that you can technically farm money without doing anything.
• A merchant with solid items and a lot of money.
• The ability to teleport to and from your tower at will, giving you the chance to prepare for any fight right before it happens if necessary.

That is an awesome base right there. Apart from some bonuses like a musician and a dancer performing for you in front of your throne if you so desire, the building drastically improves your character. Being able to teleport at any point is super helpful since I can get rid of loot without needing to leave the dungeon in search of a merchant, while the services allow me to fetch potions or even distribute my skill points differently in order to clear a particularly difficult encounter. The idea of becoming a dragon without the use of a limited resource wherever I want is also really cool and had a noticeable effect on how the developers needed to make the levels in order to make the dragon useful and yet not too overpowered. Enemies that you would need to fight while on firm ground simply disappear and only reappear when you change back again; but the dragon form still has other enemies to fight since plenty of flying adversaries will come into view to be shot down.

At the end of the day, “Divinity II” has plenty of pro and contra points accumulated for itself. The idea of a really solid base to work with, the dragon transformation without any stamina or other resource upkeep, the solid battles in the first half of the game, and some genuinely good quest design are all good reasons to give “Divinity II” a go. That is, unless you cannot get past the sometimes non-sensical story, the terrible ending, the vague skill system, the game crashing when tapping out without pressing Esc first, and the gauntlets (read: slogs) that are many battles on the Flying Fortresses. The game costs 19.99€ on Steam, which some opinions I read felt is a fair price for what is delivered. However, if you are interested in the game and can wait with purchase, do yourself a favor and wait for a Steam Sale to buy the “Divinity Anthology” instead. Since “Divinity: Original Sin 2” is all the rage when it comes to the “Divinity” franchise, the earlier games are thrown out the window at bottom-level prices, which for me meant that I got “Divine Divinity”, “Beyond Divinity”, and “Divinity II” together for 2.99€; and for that amount, the game is definitely worth a try.