Beyond Divinity

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.

While Divine Divinity was a really fun experience but not without flaws, Beyond Divinity is one of those games that I can't really recommend that easily. STORY sounds cool on paper but is very slow for a long time and then right at the end picks up way too fast and then the game is over. The voice acting is pretty bad and some of the dialog feels a little subpar compared to the first game. Also the death knight pretty much participating in every conversations felt really forced sometimes and made wish he would just shut up instead of saying useless things. GAMEPLAY is quite finicky as you have to control 2 characters at the same time and the AI is going to be active on the character you do not control so you're always stuck with an idiot basically. Sometimes the controls were irresponsive when I was switching character and used my shortcut for a potion and it would do it on the one I wasn't using, it kind of led to a lot furstration in fights that were tight. SKILLS are numerous but given how little skill points you get it leads to heavy filtering of what will actually be useful and what isn't. You can refund your skill points at any time with gold so at least there is that. Also you have to pay trainers to unlock skills to be able to put points into them so that was a bit annoying given the distribution of trainers. You also get summoning dolls which sound cool but they are bad and you will just waste a lot of skills points for nothing. WORLD is by acts (there are 4) so you better wrap your quests up or they will stay unresolved when you reach the end of an act, most side-quests weren't that great but I did them for the extra exp but I hardly remember any of them now that I think about it. I know I wrote a lot of negative things about that game but it's not terrible it's simple that I feel like it could've been better, so pick it up if you really like Divinity otherwise you can easily skip to the next one and check online for what happened.

If you compare this to Divine Divinity, you will be disappointed by Beyond Divinity immediately. It's less open-world adventure and more of a linear dungeon crawl with few places to explore. You control two people now: a Death Knight and your Hero character, which is okay since you can move together and fight together. Both of you are trying to escape out of a prison and you want to get back to Rivellon. But the game world is weird and confusing, as are the quests. The game world is a dark, burned out place most of the time (or a prison, or cave), yet if you find "battle keys" you get to warp at will to the "battlefields" with merchants and underground dungeons. The "worlds" are disappointing and tedious after awhile. You will just hack and slash your way through dungeons for gold and weapons in the battlefields, but in the end, you accumulate so many goodies that your merchants can't afford to trade you for all of them, nor is their gear that good to trade (and they only carry a few thousand in gold at a time). You play the game in acts, and you can't go back and fix a quest you didn't finish before you finish the act, so that part I really disliked. Many quests are actually very hard to complete because you don't know where to look and sometimes need special items that aren't obvious, and by the time you find what you need, you don't know where to return the item that X character wanted. I messed up a quest and made it unsolvable by using a cream/potion I found that I was supposed to use to tame a spider. I had to refer to walkthroughs MANY times to solve several quests. These are the annoying quirks that you will discover in this game. This game is a pale shadow compared to the fun and expansiveness of Divine Divinity. Beyond Divinity is dull much of the time. Tip: If you do decide to play, DO NOT make your Death Knight a warrior if you are a warrior. You will desperately need a mage early on.

I came into this game a huge fan of the Divine Divinity franchise but this offering so annoying I've given up on it. Pros: Same nice art, decent dialogue, nice music. Cons: fiddly UI, often sent careening off map as I try to target the tiny portraits in order to open up the potion panel. no hot keys , have to click a small icon by the portrait of each member, then each has their own potions, by then you are dead. Constantly having to reorder teammates to follow as just taking a potion or looking into their inventory loses that function. Extremely annoying skill tree with obscure skills and procedure in order to 'unlock' just to be able to train one day. Every skill is broken down into subsets and each requires its own unlock and then skill point. Want to wield a sword? put a point into piercing, crushing or slashing or a myriad other subset for that one skill. Want to use a shield too? well guess what, a whole lot of other subsets and slashing damage etc to each skill out. I pity poor archers who have to unlock and then train for each type of arrow. Obscure skill sets with no explanation or tool tip to guide. same with charms, potions and so on. but by far the worst part of the game is that its BORING. Ive cleared out the 1st battle dungeon and I can say that it was by far the most unchallenging, boring, repetitive, unrewarding action ive done in a game. i honestly cant be bothered to finish the game. Will skip it and go on to DOS. dont know what they were thinking about.

Sadly, I just couldn't finish this game. I don't have much time to play games these days and I just wasn't enjoying Beyond Divinity anymore. I will try to tell why. I just played DD a while ago (had this game sitting in my collection for a very long time) and I had a blast. There were some things really bad about DD (like the trading window), but I was able to get past that, since everything else was amazing. I was hoping they would improve these bad things, but instead, they keep as it were (even made something worse, like the voice acting. Yes, did you thought DD had bad voice acting? guess what, BD has WAY, I mean, WAY bad voice acting). The idea of controlling 2 chars sounds good, but coupled with idiotic AI, it's simply a pain to controlling them. You can only set behaviors to "Pacific" and "Agressive" and you must always have both selected to move around, since there's no such thing as follow command. The skill system could be really nice, if you earn more than one point per level (2 for level 5, 10, 15 etc.), because most skills require heavy investment, one point per level, you couldn't try new things. I just reach act II and I couldn't play anymore. Between not even remembering what the f*** I was doing and crashes now and then, I just was getting frustrated. A pity really.