Game: Divinity: Dragon Commander
Developer: Larian Studios
Genre: Real-time strategy, Turn-based strategy, Third-Person shooter, Political Simulation
Releases: 2013 (PC)
I could start this article with the usual stuff: A small paragraph of how I found the game I am going to talk about in the lines to follow, some random banter regarding the development and problems rearing their ugly faces, or the impact the title had on the genre it belongs to. I am not going to do that this time; although I would very much like to point your attention to the genres I have listed for “Divinity: Dragon Commander”. In fact, I simply copied the four entries from the Wikipedia page since they describe the genre mix at hand far better than I would have managed to do. But how can a game be both in real-time and turn-based while also doing various other things at the side? Well, I now have the answer to that question but let me get this straight: While innovation is certainly a good thing sometimes you might have to ask yourself whether there is a reason for certain combinations not being found on the market in present times. Sure, it might be the next big thing; or it is doomed to fail since it simply does not work. Nonetheless, I aim to give you an overview that covers all the facets of “Divinity: Dragon Commander”, a title that I would award the honor of “most charming identity crisis I have played in 2022”. What better game to cover for the 15th day of Blaugust 2022, so let’s get into it.
In the beginning, as is so often the case, there is a story: Sigurd I. managed to build incredible machinery with the help of his two colleagues, Maxos the mage and a man called “The Architect”; and Sigurd formed an empire with the help of said technology. During times of peace, he brought forth many an heir, one child even coming from his relationship with the dragon Aurora. But the many children of Sigurd I. did not bother waiting until he shuffled off the mortal coil and instead literally stabbed him in the back to take control over the empire. The ensuing civil war tore the realm apart, but the wizard Maxos planned to bring peace by finding the one heir that did not betray his father: The half-dragon prince, and the character one is playing in the game. But Maxos did not come unprepared: With the airship called the “Raven” as the mobile base of the operation and a large number of people as staff, the “Dragon Commander” is ready to take the fight to the enemy and unite the empire once again. However, you are mistaken if you think that this is the classic “hero saves world”-affair, no no, you have an empire to manage. And this is where politics come into play.
Before any fighting happens, you need to govern instead of conquer. Apart from researching new technologies for the war you are about to fight (we will come to that), you also have to make various political decisions that are brought forth by the representatives of the five major races: The Undead, the Elves, the Dwarves, the Lizards, and the Imps. They can present various ideas that you alone have the power to decide over; you can listen to the opinions of the representatives but in the end it is your word that makes things happen or bars to way to certain policies. National healthcare, gay marriage, or conscription make subjects to discuss as much as allowing the imps to eat orc meat or giving them a thumbs up on turning deceased elves into gunpowder. Also, after about a week in-game, you are to marry; not because of love but rather to strengthen the political bond to one of the races. This adds the queen’s quarters to the hud where your wife will have political struggles of her own you have to assist her with. Lastly, you have four generals at your command that have their own fair share of problems themselves (or with one another), giving you ample opportunity to learn more about the world of Rivellon and its many inhabitants. If I had to point to one thing that I find Larian nailed in “Dragon Commander”, it is probably the take of being a political simulation. Sure, some of the ideas are way over the top but the concept is cool, all the meaningful characters are voiced with their voice actors doing a fine job, and the dialogue is very enjoyable. I mean, during my playthrough I allowed the lizard faction representative Prospera to effectively annul my position as emperor and gave the public the chance to vote for their own president with is unheard of in any game where the main character has to be the star of the show, no matter what. So, kudos for this part.
But the enjoyable dialogue is not where this game ends since there are some more genres in the list that we have to go through. If you dealt with all the people on the ship vying for your attention, it is time to go to war. Go to the bridge, click the glowing map orb in the middle of it, and you are transported to a “Risk” board of Rivellion. This is the turn-based strategy game part: Every player has a capital and once it was taken by the enemy and held for one turn, they are eliminated and the player who has taken the capital gains all their territory and remaining units. To conquer countries on the map, you need to create military units and move them into enemy territories. If there is no opposition in form of enemy military, the region automatically falls into your hands, but if any opposing unit is in the province you trigger a real-time strategy battle; which I will come to in a minute. The mode certainly works, but I would be lying if I called it fun. During my playthrough, I simply mass-produced the cheapest foot-soldier available in great numbers, left one behind in every bit of territory I owned to trigger battles should the opponent try to get behind my back, and then moved the bulk of them through the enemy lands and took whatever I found. This is the first time where research becomes important since your war factories can only build units that you discovered via research; but like I said, the war on land is winnable with great numbers of cheap units. Later on, you will have to build ships like the “Ironclad” for both naval combat and as anti-air units while flying units allow you to be more flexible with attacks, but the game certainly allows you to take various approaches to army composition. Be aware of one fact though: You can only be present at one battle per turn, so attacking six provinces in one turn might turn out disasterous since you can only go into the RTS-part once and then have to rely on luck due to auto-battles taking place.
If you look at some other reviews for “Divinity: Dragon Commander” online, you might find that they list a genre that I did not feature above; but let us talk about it nonetheless. The genre in question would be “card-game battler” or something similar, which is giving the “card game” aspect of “Divinity: Dragon Commander” way more credit than it deserves. During the turn-based strategy part of the game, you can gain cards to play that either provide bonuses to a province, hamper an opposing country, or give you more units to fight with. You gain those cards every three rounds after placing certain buildings in your territories but I found some cards way more useful than others. Mercenary cards can allow even the most incompetent general to win battles by stacking more units in your favor, but the cards that disallow one specific unit type to move from one province into another is pretty bad. Sure, using multiple of those will allow you to stop reinforcements to conquer a region more easily, but firstly the opponent will probably already have troops there so you have to fight regardless and when one province has six different unit types (not unlikely in Act III) only stopping one from moving has little effect. So, the cards are nothing but rectangular buffs and debuffs you can distribute on the map, which disqualifies them for the addition of another genre to the list. You cannot build a deck because all cards at your disposal are simply on a pile to be used at your command, and you cannot control what cards you gain either since the distribution is random. I would not say that “Age of Empires III” had enough of a card game component to gain an additional genre, but in that game I could at least decide what cards to use and marry them into my strategy; in “Divinity: Dragon Commander”, you simply take what you get and ignore most of the rubbish the game deals to you in card form.
Finally, we reach the real-time strategy part, which is triggered if you decide to fight the battle with the dragon commander as the general. Both players start with one base while lots of neutral bases are strewn across the map. The way to conquer these neutral bases is by simply moving units into the territory, which will fill the meter on the building panels until they are completely colorized in your team color. The goal is to take so much of the map from the opponent that they have no way to rebuild at which point the game starts a three-second countdown and automatically hands you the win. “Divinity: Dragon Commander” is at its worst in this very mode because it tries to stream-line the complicated business of real-time strategy while still trying to give the player stuff to strategize with. Building units are completely missing since you do not need to build anything, you simply click the building panel in your color and choose what should be built on it. A normal-sized building panel on land can be made into any of three unit-producing buildings, a panel at the waterfront either becomes the unit-producing building for ships or flying units, and the small tower panels are for turrets. Since so much of the map is neutral, and therefore easily conquerable, I normally send out single units to all ends of the map to rapidly increase my sphere of influence, with a special focus on the last building that I have not mentioned yet: Recruitment citadels. I already mentioned that they wanted to streamline the RTS part and one important factor in any game of the genre is resource management; so Larian threw that concept straight out of the window and made both players gain resources over time. The single resource is called recruits, you can buy anything with said resource, and you will gain more for each recruitment citadel you own which is why you want to have as many as possible.
I cannot stress enough why this is an awful take. In any “Age of Empires”, the option of sneaking some units through the fog of war into the opponent’s camp where villagers are farming and gathering is insanely powerful. Starving the opponent of resources in “Starcraft” by raiding can be vital to winning the game. And here we have a title that not only skips the usage of building units and disallows the player to place buildings whereever they want, but also automates the resource gathering of one single resource. That leaves combat as the only thing to do during the real-time strategy sections; and it is not terribly good either. The various units may unlock different abilities, but while I never really felt to need of using those against the AI it is certainly going to be absolute mayhem in a multiplayer battle to see a much-needed squad of units becoming harmless giant ladybugs for almost a minute. But in the end, it really comes down to a war of attrition. Without resource lines to defend, no sneaky base-building due to fixed building placement and no fog of war to use for sneaky manuevers that the opponent cannot be possibly aware of, all you do is produce units, send them into the meat-grinder, and hope that the opponent’s stream of units trickles down before yours does.
And that could still be a challenge, to use your units in the most effective way or learn about counters and then create an army composition that you can work with. However, all of that is made completely irrelevant by the auto-win button the game itself is giving me: A dragon. If you are tired of your troops not getting the job done you can simply pay 20 recruits, which is basically the cost of a building, and spawn on the map as a dragon. This is where the last genre, the third-person shooter part, comes into play. I went into a map with only a 2% chance of winning via auto-battle due to the opponent having so many units stacked against me; but his sorry ass did not account for the game design sin in form of a jetpack-powered flying killing machine with three different breath weapons, a mini atom bomb fireball attack and boosts to armor, movement speed, health regeneration, life steal upon killing opponents, a large buff aura for all allies and a same-size debuff aura against opposing units. If you are ever pushed into a corner during “Divinity: Dragon Commander”, chances are that the answer to the problem is “dragon”. Sure, the dragon has a healthbar that the opponent can bring to zero; but the cooldown to use that beast again is only six seconds which is why I sometimes dove into certain death on purpose to get back up fully healed at a completely different part of the map. The opponent can try to attack on two fronts, but the jetpack gives that silly scaley such a drastic boost in speed that you can tear apart one part of the army and then fly to the other side of the map in about four seconds. And yes, the breath weapon does have a long cooldown if you use it too much which is supposed to counterbalance the fact that you can steer this flying monstrosity straight into the opposing base and blast the anti-air turrets positioned there before they become dangerous; but switching the breath weapon nullifies the cooldown, as does dying which is helpful if the respawn timer is lower than the cooldown. During the single player campaign, no opponent stands a chance against this abomination and since even the last battle during the campaign has no dragon to counter your dragon with, you pretty much reign supreme.
All those things together are “Divinity: Dragon Commander”. The game is very different compared to … well, anything really; but not in a good way. With most of the game’s modes feeling unpolished, I can only wonder what the developer was thinking. But, unlike with many other games, we actually do know the developer side of things: Sven Vincke did clarify the state of “Divinity: Dragon Commander”, one of the sources being listed below:
“But Larian fell in love with the RPG, and decided not to release it until it was completely finished. In Vincke’s words, Larian “murdered” Dragon Commander—releasing it before it was really done—to focus on Original Sin and pull in some badly needed funds.”
– https://www.pcgamer.com/how-divinity-original-sin-almost-bankrupted-larian-studios/
The story kind of reminded me of Bethesda back in the day: After a lot of problems, they decided to go all in with one title and tried to make it the best they could, else risk bankruptcy. That title was “The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind”, one of the prime examples for videogame nostalgia but also still a superb title after all these years even with all its flaws. Larian decided to go all in with “Divinity: Original Sin”; and therefore siphoned finances from “Divinity: Dragon Commander” which in turn was left in an unfinished and faulty state. One might wonder what would have happened if they had decided to give “Divinity: Original Sin” the boot and polished “Divinity: Dragon Commander” instead; but since the “Original Sin” games are very good I think they made a solid choice. At the end of the day, “Divinity: Dragon Commander” is the unloved bastard child that Larian dropped so the other game could shine. The title is playable and functions without any hiccups in form of crashes, studders or other technical maladies, but it would have needed a little bit longer in the oven to make it a game to remember. And this is just my take of things: There are plenty of media outlets that praised the game for its many features, so you might find it more enjoyable than I did. If you are interested, the game is available on Steam; but for the love of god, do not pay the 39.99€ it asks for as the regular price and take the 90% price reduction during sales instead.
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