Can anyone give some pointers how interesting this game is, compared to Sacred 1?

The graphic styles are somewhat similar judging from screenshots and it got me thinking. I have Sacred 1 (and 2...), and played it quite a bit, but in the end I couldn't take the "fast-food game" style and stupid jokes/character comments anymore. The item system became really bizarre, buggy and unrewarding later, too. Sacred isn't a totally bad game, but would you guys recommend Divine Divinity to someone who didn't thoroughly love Sacred?

Divine Divinity is much heavier on questing, dialogue and solving problems in ways other than "fetch this" or "kill this." Quests have multiple parts, requiring you to refer to your journal, remember names and places, and not just look for quest markers on the map or glowing icons above quest characters' heads.

You can interact with almost everything in the game world. In Sacred, the only things you interact with in houses are chests. In Divinity, cups, plates, cabinets, food, drink, scrolls, books, candles, barrels, beds etc. etc.

But the combat is still good action RPG style similar to Sacred or Diablo. Lots of skills and loot. Loot is partly random but some of it is predetermined or quest related. There are character classes but all skills can be taken by any class, so you can make a mage/thief/warrior hybrid of any dozens of combinations.

It has a big open map, you can go almost anywhere right away, like Sacred. But enemies don't scale to your level like in Sacred, making some places much more dangerous. So you have to be careful and save often.

There is some humor but it is part of the story and characters and not so much easter eggs or "meta" humor in the way that Sacred has.

It's better than Sacred, unless you really just have that mindless action itch (which I have often, heck I play Sacred 2 endlessly). But Divinity is a much richer world with actual memorable characters and a story.

Thanks a lot, great answer. I'll give DD a try.
And indeed, Sacred 2 is one of those games that you just play and play, without a particularly big inspiration. It just works at some levels I guess. :D

Is it a fixed map like Sacred, or procedurally generated like the Diablos and Torchlight?

I'm pretty sure it's a fixed map. At least, out of the two times I've played through it (not all the way, I've never finished it), it looked exactly the same. Though, I think there are actually at least two maps, maybe more. I know that the first map is pretty large, and then at one point you have to go north and through a load screen that takes you to another map. But even then, I think all the maps are fixed.

Awesome, thanks. Between the fixed map and the permadead enemies, this sounds like a pretty perfect ARPG for me.

Okay, I tested it and here are my first impressions, for what they're worth.

The good: You need to figure stuff out, not just run through quests and problems. The house interiors etc. are very searchable, there's usually something to find in houses if you're careful. The game isn't too easy; enemies seem to be tough and will kill you if you're not supposed to be fighting them yet. The music is GREAT. I like the dialogue too, it has a certain expressive, non-cliché edge to it. The text doesn't feel "overproduced".

The bad: The controls are unpolished. You get stuck on obstacles often. I don't know if the controls are tile-based or not, but they feel dated after the fluidness of Diablo 2 - especially turning and rotating your character while running. The interface involves quite a bit of pixel-sniping, fonts and graphics in general are very small.

I hope I'll stick with this game. I think if one takes it more like "Fallout 2 meets Icewind Dale" than Diablo 2, it may set you in the right mindframe to disregard the clunky bits.

The composer Kirill Pokrovsky has the DD soundtrack (and more) on his website in mp3 format. There is a program to extract the individual songs from the game's music file (in ogg format), but it was made for the disk version of the game, so you would have to temporarily move the sound file to where the program expects it to be (relative to the Divine Divinity folder) - see DD music.


I never had a problem getting stuck on obstacles. You can either click on the ground to have your character move to that location, or click and hold the mouse button down to move in the direction of the cursor.

You can hit the alt button to highlight items on the ground, or doors partly or (in a couple cases, completely) obscured by walls or roofs. Holding the ctrl key will have your character target the opponent closest to the mouse cursor (makes it much easier to clear groups of opponents).

There is a font enlargement patch if you don't want to lower the resolution. Bengeddes posted a couple comparison screenshots in a recent topic here

@ShreddingDragon: I found generally that clicking once to move (as in the old Bioware and Troika games) is preferable to clicking and holding the mouse button.

@Raze: the nice thing about getting DD from GOG is that you get the soundtrack as a bonus download.

Thanks Raze and bengeddes. Investigations continue!

I still haven't played VERY extensively, but after finding a more powerful weapon the gameplay got a bit more interesting. Still, I must say I'm put off by a lot of bad design and I wonder why any online reviews never mention any of these. If anyone has solutions to these, I'm listening!

The controls are awkward. When I point to certain directions, the character runs at least twice as fast as compared to some other directions. I hate to exploit that, but it is just that much faster to travel. This added to the fact that it is easy to get stuck into obstacles (tree groups, bushes etc make your character stop, or bump backwards) give a really amateurish feel to the gameplay.

The interface is awkward. Text (other than dialogue) is way too small, there's no excuse. Who the heck designed the barter windows? All your items are in one column, all the vendor's items in another, and no way of telling which items you're currently wearing (Equipment screen won't open while in barter)... Fallout 1 and 2 are awesome old games, but they didn't need to copy THIS.
And if you click on the vendor's gold stack, the default value is maximum. Why isn't it defaulting to the value that you're offering? Wouldn't that be a bit more useful in most cases?

There should be a "Repair All" button. The mouse wheel should scroll the menus. The Fog of War is all over your face - I wish they'd forgotten the related skills and just pushed it a LITTLE further away. This game is not "easy to get into" or "just plain fun" - it takes a lot patience for the wrong reasons. The combat is not "fun" exactly, it just looks and feels weightless. At least the loot can be exciting, that's one good thing.

Technicalities aside, the characters feel quite caricatyric, and you know, when every second NPC's name ends with "-lor", you start to feel like you're in a nerd-sitcom yourself.

With all this though, I can sort of feel that there is probably quite a bit of interesting stuff somewhere deep in the game, but my patience may run out before overcoming the technical idiotics. There's so much good and bad design... I don't understand how almost all reviewers only talk about the nice open world and big amount of details inside houses etc.

What you said was true though - this is a lot more intelligence-oriented game than Sacred 1, and for that I'll always be grateful :D

The character does run a little faster diagonally than other directions (presumably a difference in the animation, or how the game draws the background, or something), but at least on my system it is nowhere near twice as fast. I hit R to enable always run mode, so the distance the mouse cursor is from the character doesn't matter.
If you want a fast travel method, get your hands on a frog statuette (loot, purchase or one is available during the Nericon garden quest).

There is a font enlargement patch (for the download version of the game the file needs to be extracted to the '..\Divine Divinity\fonts' folder, rather than '..\Divine Divinity\run\fonts' as in the disk version instructions).

The value of equipped items in the trade window is shown in a different colour.

Click on the balance icon by the character/NPC portrait if you want to add/remove gold to equal the value of goods on the opposite side (up to the available amount of gold).

Once you start getting equipment that isn't crappy, you will not need to repair anything frequently enough that a 'repair all' button would make much of a difference. An exception would be repairing collected loot before selling, but if you are trying to get the most value out of loot, you'd be better off repairing it yourself.

There are 2 skills to increase your sight range (Elven Sight being much better than Ranger Sight), and sight bonuses on equipment will also add up. I found the fog of war handy to help keep track of where I had explored, and eventually started avoiding equipment upgrades with larger sight bonuses, so my sight range would not get too much larger than the screen size.

I found the game both 'easy to get into' and 'just plain fun'.

first of all sacred was a great game that i enjoyed to the last level. i finished it and got started on the expansion.

having said that, i havn't played much of divine divinity at all, but my impressions are that divine is more of a diablo meets ultima 7, whereas sacred is flat out diablo clone down to the last drop.