I've never played Ultima VII, but I know about its reputation. The truly simulationist RPG, predating games like Deus Ex, where the protagonist could get into hidden places by stacking up boxes by the sides of houses and climbing on them, bake bread, have infinite storage space by picking up the cargo door for a ship's hold, paint a self-portrait, rob the bank blind, earn infinite money through rigged gambling, or bake bread using blood to bind the flour together. These were the kind of interactions that Divinity: Original Sin promised in its kickstarter video, but with more modern design, applied to a turn-based combat engine, and with multiplayer. Moving barrels around to solve puzzles? Getting enemies wet and zapping them with lightning? Doing all of that together with schoolpsychnerd? All of that sounded like a lot of fun!

I was going to say that this was the third game I kickstarted, after Wasteland II and Pillars of Eternity, but it turns out that's not true. There were a few other games in there like Shadowrun Returns and Sealark, but this is the third big game I kickstarted, and one of the ones I was most excited for.

Well, it took us almost two years to finish it, so that may provide insight into what I thought about the game.


First off, the good points--the combat is fantastic. There are eight main schools of skills available, with melee combat, sneaky rogue combat, ranged combat, four elemental magics and "witchcraft" represented, and a lot of thought was given to how these skills can combine and interact. In our game, my character was a wizard specializing in water and earth magic and schoolpsychnerd's character was a warrior with a huge sword. We'd often start battle with my wizard freezing big chunks of the ground or covering it in oil, slowing the enemy's movement or causing them to trip, while schoolpsychnerd would use the warrior's Charge skill to immediately reach the enemy's side without risk. Sometimes I would lay down an oil slick and have my archer companion set it on fire with flaming arrows, and then schoolpsychnerd would stand near it and attack enemies as they ran out of the fire. Her rogue companion had a skill called Winged Feet that let him ignore ground-based hazards, so he could run straight over my wizard's poison or ice and stab the enemy in the back.

Of course, everyone else can also do this to you, so battles are an intricate dance of using skills to force the enemy to react while also reacting to their own actions. Summoning monsters to take their attention off my wizard. Laying an ice field so an archer trips when it tries to run from schoolpsychnerd's rogue. Sometimes the enemy would lay down a pool of poison, and while I could immunize schoolpsychnerd's warrior against it, maybe it's better to use a fire arrow from my archer to blow it up. In addition to the explosion, that turns it into a cloud of smoke that blocks vision, which can be good if the enemy has a lot of spellcasters or ranged attackers. The enemy just set half the battlefield on fire, so I'd use a rain spell to make everything wet, which would also make the enemy vulnerable to the lightning spell that my wizard had in his staff.

There were no trash mobs we could fight without thinking. Even in random battles against crazed animals, they might have some surprises up their sleeves, and schoolpsychnerd and I spent a lot of time discussing tactics while we were fighting. Who to attack next, what my wizard should do to try to control the battlefield, or how her rogue could pick off stragglers while avoiding the giant AoE attacks. It was incredibly fun and lived up to every bit of hype I felt from the kickstarter video.


That said, there were two small problems that grew more and more annoying as the game went on. The first is that there was no in-game way to designate targets or point out area, so there was a lot of confusion as I said, "Charge the one in the back and then whirlwind" and then schoolpsychnerd would say, "The skeleton?" and I'd say, "No the zombie on the left" and she'd say, "Which left?" and so on, sometimes until I'd get up and we'd clarify which target we were talking about while looking at the same screen. Some in-game way to point that out would have prevented this.

The worse problem is movement. Out of combat, movement is free-form, and this basic structure is maintained in combat within the limits of the AP system. However, without a grid, movement is variable. At the cost of 1 AP, a character can move anywhere from 0.1 meters to 2.2 meters, so clicking multiple times to get around an obstacle can take far more movement than just trying to move further and letting the AI determine the pathfinding. But letting the AI determine the pathfinder means risking a run through fire or ice or right next to an enemy, so there were times when I'd have to meticulously move the mouse to find the exact point of maximum movement that only cost 1 AP, move, then do again until I reached my destination. Some kind of waypoint system so I could have just set movement point-by-point and seen the total cost would have saved me a bunch of time.

There were also a couple times I accidentally clicked on the terrain with my archer and ran up next to the enemy rather than attacked then, but there is a mechanism to address that; holding control changes the cursor to attack-only mode. It's not the game's fault if I forgot to use it.


The interactivity and emergent consequences still exist outside of combat, but not to the same degree. There's one quest early on where I used a rain spell to put out a burning ship, but after that a lot of the manipulation involved stupid teleporting tricks or moving barrels around. The designers seem obsessed with traps and pressure plates, and there are dozens of puzzles that consist of something damaging on the floor unless a barrel is moved onto a pressure plate or a field of traps that can be triggered with spells. Or simply ignored, since after the beginning of the game they don't do that much damage, except for lava which cannot be quenched with water or ice and instantly kills anyone who steps on it.

There's a whole crafting and forging system, but almost all the time I spent with it was wasted. Maybe on a higher difficulty it would have been necessary to mix up a bunch of resistance potions or worry about cooking food, but the only reason I ever did was to clear my inventory of the ingredients I kept hoovering up. The main use I got out of my investment was making more arrows for my archer and grenades for schoolpsychnerd's rogue, and I might have been better off just spending those points on fire magic. I still ended the game with an inventory full of magic arrows.

And despite schoolpsychnerd's rogue having a lockpick skill, huge numbers of doors can't be picked. Not much use in picking locks if it's mostly on treasure chests containing vendor trash.


Another of the features touted in the kickstarter was inter-party conversations, with disagreements possible between party members that social skills are necessary to overcome. This exists as advertised, but it fell completely flat for me. Some of this is because the social system is just a series of rock-paper-scissors games, with a character's skill just indicating how far along the track they move after they win and ten ticks necessary to win. Some of it is because schoolpsychnerd and I rarely disagreed on what to do next, so I think we only had to engage in social combat together once.

But the real reason is that the phrasing of the arguments was so silly. None of them have any nuance, instead taking the most extreme possible positions no matter the subject of the argument. It'd be like if the game had a quest about an orphanage that needed money and offered up the following responses:

1) Money? Why, look at all our magical gear. Our shining weapons! If we sold them all, I'm sure we could raise the money!
2) Orphans? Bah! What economic value do they provide? If they cannot support themselves, then let them starve!

It's hard to get into a character's mindset when they are constantly committing to contradictory ideals. Any attempt to portray my wizard as a prudent, cautious man was dashed on the rocks of every negative response being extreme disgust, cowardice, or fear. And the voice acting didn't help either, being a lot of ridiculous one-liners like "BEHOLD THE POWER OF MAGES!" when my wizard would use a staff attack on someone for 5% of their total health or schoolpsychnerd's warrior screaming "BATTERING RAM!" when she charged.


That jokey, dumb humor presentation hamstrung the whole game for me. The story is standard fantasy stuff, with the two protagonists sent to the city of Cyseal to hunt a sourcerer, a wielder of a kind of magic called Source that is innately corrupting. Once they arrive, they find that Cyseal itself is suffering from a plague of undead that have left its citizens cowering inside the walls, as well as a group of orcs who've shown up seeking plunder. It escalates in infiltrating a cult, visiting the lands of Faery, and discovering that the protagonists have a special destiny and its up to them to save the entire world. Pretty standard stuff, really.

But the constant writing-to-extremes and joking meant that I couldn't engage with the story, and that is ultimately the reason why it took so long to finish. We'd load it up and do a bit, play one or two of those fantastic battles, and put it aside. And when I thought about the game, I didn't think about the tactical element, I thought about a protagonist that I viewed only as a chess piece on a board and how the game was unable to treat any element of its plotting seriously. It's just goofy. Like finding the body of a man who jumped off a cliff and one of the protagonists remarking that sometimes one has to take a leap of faith, or the magic wishing well that constantly speaks in alliterative W words, or the bridge troll dutifully instructing his son on the proper way to yell "Troll toll!" at travellers approaching the bridge, or the infamous "Not in the mood for cheese? That excuse has more holes than this slice of fine Gorgombert!"

The whole game is like that. If the plot is so stereotypical and can't even treat itself with any seriousness, why should I do so? It's possible to have a story full of humor that nonetheless deals with serious issues in a mature manner and has an important point to convey about life, since Sir Terry Pratchett did so for dozens of books in a row. But Larian are no Pratchett, and that showed with every cringe-worthy joke and immersion-breaking combat bark. Imagine an amateur theatre troupe who are uncomfortable with anything serious and are far too enthusiastic about trying to break the tension and you'll be close to the mark.


What I really want is a roguelike with Divinity: Original Sin's interactivity and combat systems. The story here is just an excuse to go from one combat to another, so dispense with it entirely. Put me in the dungeon and say that I have to descend to the bottom and find the Amulet of Yendor, fill the dungeon with combat encounters and traps with themed levels and merchant rooms, and I'd love it.

I do not love Divinity: Original Sin as it is. That combat system, wrapped up with a more interesting story and a less clownish presentation, could have been amazing. And I've heard that Divinity: Original Sin II greatly reduces the cheesy dialogue, so maybe I would like it. But after forcing myself through dozens of hours of this game only to find out that it was mediocre, it'll be a long time, if ever, before I get to it.