Divinity 2: Ego Draconis is a bit of a monstrous game, like the dragons that supposedly burst from its world. A third person European RPG, it is like its recent comrade, Risen, in derivation alone. While every second in Risen is a dark, dangerous, desperate fight for survival, Divinity 2 is a long hard slog, for the most part. Surprisingly, it feels quite unique in most ways. It takes familiar settings, plots, characters, and gameplay and turns them just a bit, so that you can see a different side of everything. Similarly, the developers at Larian have managed to twist all of these tired fantasy and gameplay tropes to their own will, making for a game just different enough to stand out from the rest.
Larian has quite a history on the PC. Their breakout title, Divine Divinity, was a game that most took for another Diablo clone. It was, in fact, much more akin to one of the more complicated Ultima games, and featured strange, troubling, and sometimes brilliant design decisions and idiosyncrasies. While the game’s sequel, called Beyond Divinity, was less popular, both games shared the same peculiar sense of humor and an interesting view on what was “good” gameplay. These were the kind of games that featured surprisingly intelligent writing, a healthy dose of irony, and incredibly detailed and interactive environments.
Divinity 2, then, looks like somewhat of a departure for the studio behind such quirky, anything-but-mainstream entertainment. While it might seem like just another Tolkien-aping third person fantasy epic from a distance, taken as a whole it is an interesting and surprising game. Divinity 2 takes place in a land where Dragons, Dragon Knights, and Dragon once battled each other for supremacy. Now there is but one Dragon Knight remaining, and you, as a newly minted Dragon Slayer, must destroy that Knight.
The plot sounds like it shouldn’t matter, and it often doesn’t. Still, learning more and more about dangerous Dragons and the villains that once populated both the ranks of the Knights and the Slayers (of course, both sides claim to be pure) has its charms. Think of it as a medieval fantasy version of the betrayal plot from Deus Ex. You know that almost everyone out there is a lying scumbag, and everyone else is most likely just a plain liar.
The bits of Divinity 2 that surprised me were the smaller, less obvious things. Enemies are pretty standard: ghosts, goblins, trolls, knights, giant lizards, and more. Larain takes every one of those familiar things and changes it. The goblins, while tribal (of course) each sport a single, giant red eye, and hold the secrets to lost languages. Skeletons mass in great numbers, but you’ll also encounter sentient walking corpses that you can argue out of existence. Traders, monks, wizards, guards, maids and more all appear, acting out the parts you’d expect them to. Yet at the same time, all of these characters have their own peculiarities and quirks. One is a murderer, another loves his sows more than his wife, while another longs to run away from her farmer husband.
All of this is packaged in a wry, self-aware tone. Every line of dialogue is in on the joke: this is a fantasy game! Nods to prominent fantasy franchises (and Larian’s back catalog) abound, and every new encounter can house subtle barbs aimed at the fantasy mainstream, and fantasy video games in particular.
All of this whimsy would count for only so much if the game itself, and the leveling and skill systems that back that game up, were less than stellar. Here, Divinity 2 falters. Individually, the gameplay isn’t that impressive. Your character moves in a stilted, abrupt manner, the controls are very nearly completely unresponsive, and combat is one bad target lock away from being completely incomprehensible. I can only imagine what trials Simon went through in his 360 review of this game. Even on the PC, where the mouse salves some hurts, and a wealth of hotkeys lies at my fingertips, out of every ten deaths, 7 or so were due to bad controls. Worse, the game is horribly optimized. I spent two hours after the install finished just trying to tweak my settings so the game would start properly. Then, I spent another hour trying to get it to not stutter every 5 seconds, despite the fact that my computer easily bests its recommended requirements.
Thankfully, the skill system (classless!) is an easily understandable, ultimately powerful thing. There are no skill trees, thus high level skills can be activated without their thematic predecessors. I love playing as my warrior: I can have almost every point in combat abilities and still max out lockpicking, high level healing, and mana draining. This is how games should work. They should give me a vast field of skills, and let me pick my way through each. Choosing for me, no matter how “natural” or “immersive” your system, is unpleasant and destructive to my experience.
While the game is wretched to control on the ground, as a Dragon, winging over enemies and mountains, the controls feel just about right. Even better, later stages throw ground and air enemies at you in waves. Switching between Dragon and human form feels great. It’s amazing to think that years ago we put up with Drakan’s awful controls and puny dragon combat. If anything is the real deal, Dragon-wise, this is it.
This brings us to Divinity 2’s most annoying, obvious failing: it goes nowhere fast, and when it eventually finds its way somewhere, you’ll have to work hard to care. The first 15 hours or so are boring and dull. You’ll kill untold numbers of skeletons, and after that, you’ll kill the same number of skeletons who are now a level higher than you. Every encounter (unless you carefully, hideously grind) is an unpleasant, forced encounter with near-death or death. Enemies just powerful enough to kill my hero would swamp me, again and again, necessitating a thankless, boring retreat and snipe strategy.
Even after respeccing (which the game lets you do at the halfway point), combat can be annoying. The fact that it takes 15 boring hours to turn into a dragon is truly unpleasant. I played through all of that awful mashing and dying to become a damn dragon, and every time I thought I’d made it, I had to kill another skeleton horde, or another crew of mercenaries. I thought it would never end, and when it did, I didn’t care anymore.
I’ve no doubt that the game is superior on the PC. Playing with this already badly designed interface would be hell on a console. Still, as a PC title, it’s buggy and unstable. A game that takes pride in its high level abilities and powers shouldn’t make the journey to those abilities so unpleasant. Dvinity 2 engenders a lot of good will: it’s just different enough from most games to make you stop and pay attention. Then, after it’s grabbed your attention, it makes you kill identical goblins and skeletons for 15 hours. It fails completely, and even when it gets better and delivers on all of its draconic promises, you won’t easily forget the suffering it so lightly doled out. After finishing the game, I looked back on it fondly, and I'm not sure why: it did more than enough to make me hate it. Even so, I can't compare it to much else, not meaningfully, and for all its faults, the things it does well endear it to me immensely. It is unique, even in this day of action RPG's. I'd recommend it over almost every other fantasy RPG out there, if only because it truly feels different from all of them.
Playthrough: Played through main campaign twice, about 40-50 hours in total. Retail disc provided by Larian.
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