![]() Difficulty is then determined on whether you are able to do enough damage, and do it quickly enough, for the enemy to fall down first. With most modern RPGs there is the expectation that each attack will land and do damage. There’s a chance you can actually miss attacks, for a start. What might take people longer to get used to is the challenge of Divinity, because it is of a kind that console players will not be familiar with. ![]() Considering how many menus are in this game, navigating around them could have been a nightmare, but through use of triggers and radial menu, the UI becomes smooth and familiar soon enough. The game handles amazingly well on console, the controller working as though the game was natively designed for them. I remember when the PS4 and Xbox One were first being introduced, there was talk about how much easier it would be to bring a title from one platform to another, and it sure looks as though it is true. Like other titles that we might never have expected to see on console in previous generations, such as Nobunaga’s Ambition, or Tropico 5, with Divinity it really feels as though developers have figured out how to do a proper port from PC to console. ![]() And this is another instance where the interface has also been streamlined and improved to make the process faster. Crafting, which was already good in the original, now has even more options. More significantly, there are new features in combat such as dual wielding, which add strategic depth to character development, and there are also new additions around skills, loot and even new enemies. More than that, the voice acting is almost always good to excellent. Instead of just key characters having a voice to accompany their lines, everyone does now. Some of these are smaller, such as some changes to the UI to make reading and navigating it easier, while others include adding a boatload of voice acting to the mix. Let that sink in for a moment – the original game was fantastic, but they found thousands of ways to improve upon it. Here though we are talking about literally thousands of changes. So often, when a developer hypes up an Enhanced Edition, all they are really just talking about some graphical touch-ups, or, if you’re lucky, the DLC being thrown in for free. People often forget just how good the narrative of classic RPGs are, but were this game released back when the Dungeons & Dragons license was at its peak, Divinity would be remembered right up with the likes of Planescape: Torment. ![]() There are even shades of nihilism and existentialism thrown in there as the game presents various thought bubbles around the value of time to life. It wastes no time in telling you what the threat is (and the stakes are exceedingly high this time around – time itself is facing destruction), but after that figuring out how to fix time, much less why time is under threat, is an enthralling little narrative. There’s nothing wrong with this narrative approach, but one of the reasons that I think The Witcher 3 is so effective is that it doesn’t present anything but mysteries up front.ĭivinity is in that similar style. The Reapers of the three Mass Effect titles (though to be fair the first Mass Effect is very much in the “old school” mould). The horde of demon-orcs in Dragon Age: Origins. The modern RPG is much more about giving you an immediate threat and then tasking you with spending the rest of the time to counter its many incarnations. There was always a mystery to be solved (by travelling through village and wilderness, and beating up things along the way), and whether it was discovering why beings of supreme power were hunting you down and killing those dear to you ( Baldur’s Gate), or uncovering a vast, intergalactic conspiracy (Knights of the Old Republic), the better older RPGs had a habit of dragging you by the nose for a couple of dozen hours before you started to get answers. What we tend to think of as cliche now was, back in the day, an excuse for high adventure. There is a distinct quality about the classic approach to RPG narratives. ![]()
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