Beyond Divinity

This game has a bad rep. I almost didn't play it. It's actually better than the first in basically every way. Divine Divinity has a big premise, but in reality you are mostly a divine errand boy. Toward the end, when you finally get the crew together and the actual story can get started, you are ripped away, cut off from the open world and quests, and the game is declared essentially over. This irritated me so much I didn't touch the game again for several months. Beyond Divinity starts with a small simple premise, escape, and builds from there towards the satisfying conclusion of a story that you don't even know you are a part of at first. Each act improves upon the last, as the locations and characters become more interesting and relevant to the overall story. I finished the game in a week flat as I really wanted to continue exploring the world it presents. The voice acting is better than the first. Not a high bar, but it isn't a total comedy routine this time. Some of the voices are even... actually good. One imp near the end in particular had me smiling every time he spoke. Gameplay is better. I played as mage in DD and mage/warrior in this. DD was 90% dropping burning walls and baiting enemies into it to minimize mana use. This game was a lot of yakety saxing the two characters around, but also actually altering tactics (melee/ranged, damage vs disable magic, even sneaking) depending on the enemy. I had to leave this review as this game doesn't deserve the flak it gets. Give it a chance. - It may have been very buggy in the past, but isn't so bad now. Still, make proper saves often. - Don't find the amulet for the merchant near the end - The battlegrounds are entirely optional, feel free to use them only for trading - Stock up on potions, chug them like it's going out of fashion - Pause in combat - Read the novella - Not actually a 5 star game, this and DD are both poorly designed mediocrity, but if you liked the first play this

Well, I first bought Divine Divinity from Gog and found it awesome. I played it day and night until it decided to start crashing to the point where I literally couldn't get past a certain point in the story. So, I figured I'd try this gem, Beyond Divinity. Ho-hum. Having more than one character to control turns out to be more or less impossible and poorly streamlined. Worst part, the freedom of the first game is completely lost, at least as far as I got. It's all narrow corridors and samey encounters. Perhaps it gets better later in the game, but I'm unlikely to ever play that far. The final word? Get DD instead and keep a liberal amount of backup saves. =)

The sequel of Divine Divinity. While this game improves the graphics and adds a companion it still is not as good as it's prequel. Firstly the setting called Nemesis is not as interesting as Rivellon. Nemesis is just lava, rocks, and mushrooms which gets really boring. With your companion the Death Knight, if he or you die then it is game over! Why have a companion if their death will kill you as well? The game is also very buggy. I made it to the final battle only for the game to crash and to corrupt my save file. Thank goodness I made multiple saves or I would have been screwed. The story is also less interesting with the only highlight being the ending twist. I can not recommend this game.

Firstly, I love Divine Divinity, Icewind Dale, Baulders Gate, Fallout and all of the new RPGs/cRPGs.. So overall I love the old and new versions of the genre. However, BD because a struggle to play. It seemed like a chore and had very little immersion. Granted, I've not played very long, which just goes to show how quickly this opinion turned me off. I'm just about to have another go to see if I can finish the game this time. I'd only recommend this for completionists or those who've finished every other cRPG/RPG

I bought and played Divine Divnity (DD) and Beyond Divinity (BD) together so I will be making some comparisons. I found DD to be an excellent five-star game. I had my share of fun with it so I was curious to see how will BD improve upon a very successful first game... The idea of controlling two characters may seem innovative, but for me it was more of a nuisance than an improvement. Controllig both at the same time feels very clunky and unintuitive. The voice-acting is atrocious, it sounds very amateurish, on many ocasions different characters will pronounce a name differently and first time I have heard it pronounced palAdins... The sountrack is very limited, only a few boring tracks. DD had a very good soundtrack, the track at the Elven Village comes to mind immediately. There is almost no variations of the envinroments, and you can not backtrack after you complete an act, it is not an open world game like the first one. The "BattleFields" is one of the worst new additions - a boring timesink with repeteable levels where you are doing quest, that you do not care about, for npcs that you do not care about. The story is very weak, I found the novella in the digital extras to be much more interesting than the plot of the entire game. The skills system is much worse, archers and melee fighters basicaly only have passive bonuses and no skills to cast. The game is also very buggy. Some bugs include enemies spawned outside the terrain so to be unreachable, loot stuck in walls and one very annoying bug if you have an archer, sometimes his arrows will vanish midflight with no apparent reason thus not hitting anything. Game crashes frequenlty and some times would not start at all. Again no such problems with the first one. I pushed through the game hoping that it will somehow get better, or that I will find some redeeming qualities. I did not. I honestly can't recomment that game, especially if you liked DD. You are better off playing some Diablo or Dungeon Siege.