Beyond Divinity

The Good
Say this for the developers of Beyond Divinity (BD): They sure haven’t forgotten the classics. BD is a veritable trip down memory lane for anybody who played RPGs between 1990 and 2000. There are many elements here from a number of notable titles in the genre.

The graphics and sheer number of items in the game make BD major déjà vu for Ultima VII players. It’s paradise for anybody who likes a really finicky role-playing game, complete with tough combats, devious traps, lots of item management, branching skill trees, etc.

The perspective in BD is a little bit like Diablo and Diablo 2, but the actual gameplay bears little resemblance to those games. The only significant gameplay similarity is the presence of a randomly-generated-battle arena, tacked on for the sake of adding greater replayability. Baldur’s Gate is probably a better point of comparison overall, since BD has multiple player-characters, pausable combat sequences, and numerous dialogues.

The plot/characterization has lots of potential. It’s essentially a darkly humorous, medieval “buddy movie.” Our Beyond Divine Odd Couple—one good guy and one bad guy—is “soulforged” together, meaning they don’t like each other much, but they are going to have to cooperate through the plot to regain their freedom. Some of the dialogue is quite amusing, albeit a tad anachronistic. Some zany sideplots also make things more interesting. One particular quest in the starting dungeon—in which you have to persuade a skeptical ghost that he really is, in fact, dead—sets the tone early on.

Too bad the gameplay in BD isn’t better, or I might have wanted to play it through to the end.

The Bad
The graphics in Beyond Divinity are a mixed bag at best. The 2D backgrounds are fairly good, but the 3D character models are rough and look very out of place here. Character movement is especially jarring, producing a weird kind of “ice skating” effect that is very unnatural-looking.

While the musical soundtrack is pleasant and appropriate, the voiceover work ranges from mediocre to atrocious. You can simply turn it off, but it would be nice to have the option to listen to all of the dialogues as well as read them (replete with numerous typos).

The opening dungeon sequence is disappointing. This seems to be part of a larger trend that I call “Elder Scrolls Syndrome.” The player is dumped into a starting dungeon, without much context or feel for the game world, and told to start fighting right off the bat. Whatever happened to the notion of easing the player into these games gradually? Nobody likes a really slow start, but just throwing players in the deep end of the pool doesn’t seem like much of an improvement to me. (Bethesda has been pulling this stunt since Arena, so I blame them for this trend in modern RPGs.)

In theory, you can develop your two starting characters in any number of ways. But it’s so logical and helpful early on to designate your armored death knight as a self-buffing tank and your other character as a ranger-mage, why you wouldn’t do this is beyond me. Kind of undercuts the branching skill development system when you know where it needs to go right from the start, right?

BD’s inventory management system is truly horrible. There is no grid-based system or any other reasonably useful organization technique here. Items are just randomly pasted, often right on top of other items, in the inventory viewing area. There are a few filter buttons you can select to cut down on the clutter a bit, but that’s just putting a tiny bandage on a giant head wound.

You can’t avoid using the inventory, either, because as I mentioned above, this is a very finicky RPG that requires constant item management and tweaking at the margins. Most of this tweaking is, frankly, not much fun. The worst example is the endless repairing and replacing of worn out items. Weapons and items decay at a crazy-fast rate, so you constantly have to swap out this or that weapon for one that isn’t broken. This undercuts the whole portion of the game that’s about getting newer and better equipment. Why work so hard to get new stuff if everything is just going to break right after you've gotten it?

If the combat or story were anything truly special, then Beyond Divinity might be worth all of this effort. But they aren’t, so it isn’t.

The Bottom Line
Remember Ultima VII, Diablo, and Baldur’s Gate? Beyond Divinity does too—but it’s not nearly as good as any of those classics. It may hit your sweet spot if you are an RPG veteran, but proceed with caution. Download and play the whole demo before buying.