Divine Divinity is a little-known 2002 role-playing game for the PC, developed by Belgian developer Larian Studios.Set in the cliche Standard Fantasy Setting of Rivellon, Divine Divinityfollows a very similiar gameplay style and graphical style to the popular Diablo, but mixes in Baldur's Gate-style dialog tree conversations with humorous, sometimes lampshade-hanging dialog. The game has a linear main plot, but exposes you to a well-sized Wide-Open Sandbox full of little side-quests and secrets to find in the wilderness.Divine Divinity was well-received at the time, but ultimately forgotten about, though two sequels were released - Beyond Divinity in 2004, and Divinity 2: The Dragon Knight Saga in 2010 for the PC and Xbox 360. Thanks to digital re-releases on GOG.com and Steam, the game and it's sequels have slowly gained more appreciation.Currently, a prequel, Divinity: Original Sin, and a spinoff, Dragon Commander are both in development with 2013 release dates expected.
A Real Man Is a Killer: The Orcs don't consider their young ones mature, until their first kill.
Awesome Yet Practical: The teleporter pyramid stones. Set one where you want, for example a bed, and carry the other around. You can teleport around whenever you want.
Brick Joke: Near the beginning in Aleroth, you open the catacombs by magically launching a sealing statue into the sky. Later, on several instances in other places people will remark about the "mysterious flying man". Finally, in the ending cutscene, it drops out of the sky. At this point you'll probably have forgotten about it and it comes as a complete surprise.
Contemptible Cover: The cover features a goddess that is seen ingame for all but 20 seconds in the intro. Intros often being skipped, many never see her.
Digital Piracy Is Evil: A loading screen will warn you to not pirate the game, or else it will blow up your system.
Executive Meddling: The title Divine Divinity was forced by their publisher CDV, as an attempt to ride on their success with Sudden Strike for having similar alliterative naming.
Gainax Ending: You kill Duke Janus (really an ancient resurrected demon) only moments after he has finished completing a ritual to embed the soul of an even more powerful ancient evil into a human baby. Rather than kill the baby, you're seen carrying the child out of the dungeon while some of your allies watch, and then a statue falls from the sky.
Fighter, Mage, Thief: Warrior Mage Survivor (a rogue/ranger hybrid). Notably, this only determined a character's looks and voice, as well as their (rather insignificant) initial stats and skills. Every character class could learn every skill in the game.
Actually, it also determined to what degree their stats affected their health, mana, damage, accuracy and evasion. Increasing the agility of a survivor grants a large boost to accuracy and agility, for example, while increasing strength only has a small effect on the melee damage of the mage.
Hero with Bad Publicity: Early in the game, you suffer a major reputation loss for failing to protect Duke Janus from orc assassins.
My Species Doth Protest Too Much: Just about every Orc in the game is hostile, with the exception their Council representative, Kroxy.
Same for the Lizard Folk; Goemoe is the only friendly one you'll encounter.
Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: At the end of the game, instead of killing the newly born Anti Christ while he's still a baby, the Hero instead adopts the kid and tries to raise him as a good guy. As the sequels show, that didn't exactly work out so well.
No Hero Discount: Averted. Heroic deeds improve your reputation plus you can give shop keepers more money so they like you more and give you even higher discounts. You can ALSO kill them just fine (it's possible the guards will try to stab you then, however).
Socketed Equipment: The Charm System is basically this with a different name. Also a GameBreaker when you only use the golden charms, which boost your stats through the stratosphere.
Shout Out: Several of these crop up in the game, including a tombstone in a graveyard that reads Polgara the Mage and a magic shop owner named Kistandatilus
The Chosen One: You are The Marked One, who is the only one who can stand up to the forces of evil. However, there are two other Marked Ones, and they are just as likely to be the ones to fight the battle. Until they're both killed off. Guess it's up to you after all. There is also The Divine One, an even more important title, which Duke Janus claims. No, that's you too.
The Law of Conservation of Detail: Througoughly averted. The game is littered with realistic junk and books about all sorts of topics. Also many, many NPC characters can be asked, helped or killed without much plot-relevance.
Useless Useful Spell: Averted with the Freeze spell, which works at pretty much any enemy except two or three types, and the final boss is not immune to it, either.
Polymorph. It's supposed to have a short duration, yet it doesn't run out. Ever. And on at least one boss, if you use it on them, they'll actually show up in a later cutscene, still polymorphed.
Warp Whistle: Two teleporter pyramid stones. You can drop one on the ground and carry another with you to enable instant recall to a location, or set down the second stone to make a two-way portal. Very, very useful.
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