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.
