Beyond Divinity

You know something is wrong when you are happy the game only crashed to desktop this time instead of having to reboot your whole computer again (and again and again). I have fond memories of Divine Divinity and wondered why I didn't play all the rest in the series then I loaded Beyond Divinity. It all come flooding back to me I had this game on disk and it was not worth playing because of the bugs. Now almost 20 years later I download the GOG version and its still a buggy mess. I noticed the stat the average GOG player time was less than 4 hours and it was soon evident why. There is a good game buried under all the bugs sometimes I could go a couple hours without a crash, lockup, falling out of the game area and being unable to interact with anything, etc. I even enjoyed the character banter and a lot of the gameplay. The ability to jump to battlegrounds to sell your loot was great escaping the prison (after making sure I killed every guard for revenge) hanging in the imp village, talking spiders, being summoned like a common demon (how rude) was all good gameplay/story.............But life is short and there are so many other good games out there that I will never find out how this one ends as this last crash was one too many for me.

With already playing Divine Divinity, Beyond Divinity was a game I had to lay my hands on. As DD was one of the best games I've ever played on PC, the expectations were very high. Once again Larian studios offered us a BIG game. Elder scrolls Oblivion was big, but I could say that this one is EVEN BIGGER. With hundreds of quests and vast worlds, BD has one of the BIGGEST worlds in gaming kingdom ! You get to play with your companion right away and can tune him nicely. Also, you can later summon four more companions and then BD looks like a decent RPG. The only flaw is that the skills of characters are horrific. There are too many skills on the menu for every character, but 70% of the skills are useless ! This is not the way you should develop a good RPG. Refer to Diablo 2 : Couple of skills, choose this or that and everybody's happy. That's the recipe to success. Larian tried to get BD very deep in every term and got lost in the half way. However, with good story, many non PC's and vast world, we got ourselves a great RPG. With good graphics and decent sound, everybody can play it if they have a good amount of time. On the other hand, technical issues are over the edge. I don't remember that I have ever played a game with some many bugs ! The more you play, the more bugs get along the way. I even couldn't finish the game entirely because of that but I'll give it 4 stars eventually.

Never was a Diablo clone so without inspiration than this one. The interface is even more terrible than in Divine Divinity. You still must seek every notch with your mouse because the hotkey won't show you chests. You transfer items between your characters and they are automatic equipped (even if they suck). Bugs like characters stuck in the background, crashes are common. The skill system is nearly useless. Items are created randomly so it may happens that you find the ultimate weapon in the first hour...takes out the fun of looting.

but i still liked it a lot, you have to be very tactical at times, and yes it sometimes was a bit buggy, but things like the voice acting, don't even remember it..the exhilarating moments, oauzing commanding switching pauzing taking a breath ;) that i do..under-appreciated game in divinity series

It can be a good and fun game, but if you're playing this right after Divine Divinity, it's gonna feel pretty meh. Gameplay-wise it takes a bit to get used to it since you now control 2 characters instead of one, but it's serviceable. The world is interesting at first, but it can get bland fast - at least compared to how Rivellon felt in the first game. To be honest, I would have liked to see more of it instead of Nemesis. The Ranaar are an interesting race, but if you're looking to see more of the Dwarves, Elves, Orcs, and Lizardmen, that's not really gonna happen. Well, at least there are Humans and Imps. The story is interesting enough to keep you going, and there's a nice bamboozle at the end, but the ending is a bit lacking, and it feels like there was supposed to be more to it. Oh, and be ready for some bugs, and really, really bad voice acting - to the point where it's hard to get immersed in the game because of it. I mean randomly hearing game show host-like voices is funny but takes away from the atmosphere. The Death Knight has a pretty good voice actor most of the time, but there are moments when it's obvious they used lines from a completely different voice actor. All in all, the game feels like it was rushed during development, but it's worth playing it if you want to see more of the Divine Divinity universe.