Posted on: September 27, 2012
wierdlizard
Possesseur vérifiéJeux: 47 Avis: 2
Greatly Disappointing
The Good: The concept of the game is awesome and included two elements that I wanted to see in RPGs. First having two characters to build together in a RPG with the ability to control either at any time and second a highly customizable skill system including the ability to create spells with different damage types. The Bad: The defining experience of this game was menu disaster. There were also plenty of bugs, a non-plot battleground system that was obtrusive, a terrible inventory system, and some other annoyances. The details: So when I got the game I was excited to play the follow up to Divine Divinity, I was hoping to see the unique advantages of DD become more refined and combined with the two characters. Instead Beyond Divinity kept the worst aspects of its predecessor and felt unnecessarily complicated on top of that. The games primary downfall is menus. Leading off, potions have to be accessed through a menu the menus themselves aren’t all confusing, but force you to pause the game, which greatly detracts from the feel of a hack-n-slash RPG.. Skills are one of the few things that can be altered via hotkeys, but I found I rarely wanted to change skills negating the advantage. The skill system was unique allowing players to put points into the creation of skills – for example creating a ranged magic attack that does fire damage with two points and water damage with three points that would do more water than fire damage. The skill menus were another place, where menus felt unusually cumbersome. The worst menus, however, were the inventory. In addition to having both characters with separate inventories, each character’s inventory was divided into a number of categories (weapons, armor, potions, special, etc.) an unfortunate carry over from Divine Divinity. Those features aren’t so bad and I adjusted after a couple hours playing. The merchant inventories were a bigger problem that never improved. To both buy and sell, you must scroll through inventories no longer sorted by type nor by character, so if you plan ahead for who has what items your time becomes wasted once you go to sell anything. The game’s regular plot was bland, a holy paladin and a demonic deathknight are forced to seek out a witch to break the curse that binds them together while battling the forces of an even bigger demon. The plot was enough to move the game forward, except for the additional battlegrounds. As an extra feature, players can find battleground keys teleporting them to a “random” generated where there are extra “quests”. Completely unconnected to the rest of the plot, the battlegrounds are a simple yet annoying dungeon crawl that help advance your experience. Ultimately the battlegrounds feel more like an interruption to the regular game with pointless quests rather than a reward for finding the battleground key. And while optional, at the start of the game the first few battlegrounds feel necessary to gain experience. Beyond Divinity also suffers from a few basic system flaws. The first is the deathknight equipment, while the paladin character can equip any item, the deathknight can’t equip certain item types such as body armor, leg armor, etc. This is compensated by the deathknight gaining armor with his level, but this means if you find really good armor with a high strength requirement and built a weak paladin the armor becomes useless. This tends to be mostly annoying, but really detracted from the defining characteristic of having two playable characters. The skill system as previously described allowed for great customization of skills and from the beginning had me excited. This system is potentially really useful; however, the skills became insanely mana expensive the more they are customized. Another problem with the skill system is that I found the best method was having simple skills and not utilizing the greater possibilities thus it felt un-developed. The neutral critters were another annoyance, because if you damage one (of a species) all of them then become hostile. This meant I would accidently kill a critter and was then forced to kill that species for the rest of the game. There were various bugs that added nuisance to the game, but the only worth mentioning is a bug that prevents proper equipping of items – the fix was to restart and hope it doesn’t happen again. Summary: Beyond Divinity was a fight between my desire to see the game live up to my expectations and the aggravating menus and bugs. This game needed a good polish on just about everything from skills, to the battleground system, and especially the control mechanics.
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