I just finished my first playthrough of Divine Divinity. Upon exiting from the first town my character woke up in and venturing into the world, my initial reaction was that Divine Divinity is an excellent game and after finishing it I finally understood some of the elements that kept it from being considered alongside games such as Baldur's Gate and Diablo series as one of the marquee RPG franchises.
In a lot of ways it is fitting that I mentioned Baldur's Gate and Diablo, as Divine Divinity is sometimes considered as a game that effectively bridges the gap between those two games. Divine Divinity does do this well, but the end result, while mostly good, isn't necessarily without flaws.
First of all, Divine Divinity is a large open world game, brimming with tons of quests, places to discover, and people to talk with. In these ways, it reminded me of the Elder Scrolls franchise. Even if you just spend time roaming the countryside, you will find all sorts of unique places to keep you entertained.
However, in Divine Divinity, you need to be prepared for what might be waiting for you. Even in some locations just of the main trail near the beginning of the game you will find enemies that will give a much higher level character difficulty. This is a good and bad thing about the game. It's incredibly challenging at moments and doesn't always cater to adventurous players. Saving often is a necessity because of how unexpectedly the difficulty can scale up. A couple moments during my playthrough I got my character killed simply by being unprepared for a difficult encounter while I was traversing the countryside, only to realize I had been running around uncovering the map and killing orcs for a good hour. It can be discouraging to know that all the work is going to have to be done again. On the other hand, it's also very satisfying to gain a few levels, go back to that powerful enemy you encountered earlier and cut him down in just a few blows while hardly taking a scratch.
Another great element of the game is all of the various skills that you can learn as you gain levels. In Divine Divinity you select a character class, but are free to develop your character however you want after that point. Your starting point will have an effect on your total life and mana throughout the game, but if you want to be a mage who wields giant axes and takes his enemies on toe to toe you can allocate a large portion of points to strength and build your warrior skills. On the flip side, if you want to be a barbarian who casts magic, you can give you character intelligence and build up the spell skills you like. Divine Divinity provides you with a plethora of skills to choose from and each seem to be useful. In my playthrough as a battle mage, I only really scratched the service of what I could have done.
The game world itself has a pretty standard setting. It's populated by humans, mages, orcs, imps, dwarves, elves, demons, and other creatures you might expect. All the different races behave about how you would expect towards each other. While most of the setting is generic, the story is quite engrossing. The dialog is all well-written, sometimes very humorous, and contains very little errors, which is somewhat surprising considering it was all translated to English from its original language. One thing I did find odd is consistency among spoken lines. While most of the dialog must be read, some lines are spoken, though sometimes all of your character's lines are spoken while the person he or she is speaking with doesn't have their lines voiced, and sometimes it's vice versa. At times throughout the adventure (mostly earlier) it felt random.
The game also sports some pretty sharp looking visuals for a game with an isometric perspective. There's no zooming in or out like in Sacred, but the resolution seems to be quite sharper than Diablo 2.
I mentioned before that the game world is incredibly large and heavily populated, well this is also true for some of the dungeons in the game - namely the first dungeon you enter, and the last one you face. For a game that's so heavy on story, I found these dungeons to be a little burdensome. I wanted to find out what was going to happen next, unfortunately this meant a lot of grinding out dungeons - at least in those two situations I mentioned. In a game like Diablo this works because it is light on story. I had to summon some rather inhuman patience to make it through the first dungeon. For some people this dungeon is going to turn them off to the game because it's difficult and incredibly massive. That's a real shame, because the game offers so much that any type of video game fan would like. At the end of Divine Divinity, I didn't really have the desire to slog through the several dungeons before facing the antagonist because I wasn't necessarily looking for any new gear or loot, I just wanted to see what was going to happen next. Ultimately, I was a little underwhelmed by what felt like a little sudden ending. It would have been nice to be able to revisit the world as well. The first 3/4ths of the game is spent in a world that I spent time building relationships and then couldn't go back to. Luckily I have a save before this point that will let me go back and complete the side quests I still had left open.
In summation, what Divine Divinity does well, it does really well - however, it's not a perfectly fulfilling game - but what game is? Despite my rather slight complaints, I would recommend this to any fan of the RPG genre. At the price on GOG, you are getting an incredible amount of depth and game length, with the potential for a ton of replayability. If you're still trying to decide on whether or not it's worth it, well it is - just summon the strength to make it through the first dungeon and you'll likely be hooked.