RPG Talk: Divinity: Original Sin

In which I talk (write) about RPGs from a storytelling perspective...

Platform: PC (though it's also on PS4 and XB1)
Release: 2014 (classic), 2015 (enhanced edition)

This week was supposed to finish up my series on Final Fantasy XV, but seeing as I'm still struggling with the last of my DLC, I'll resume the series in a couple weeks after the World Fantasy Convention. In the meantime, I realized that I never actually posted my RPG Talk for Divinity: Original Sin, which I had finished earlier this year. So here it is now.

I do play western RPGs, though my article list suggests otherwise. It's just the ones I do are so few and far in between that the last one I played, Dragon Age: Inquisition, was released before I started blogging regularly. For a while, the Dragon Age series alone was enough to scratch my itch, but in the void of waiting for a fourth game I've found I needed to look elsewhere.

There were lots of candidates for that old school computer RPG feel; Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny, Wasteland 2, but I settled on Divinity: Original Sin. I found out about the series through articles on Kotaku, and it sounded like people were having fun, setting their characters up with shenanigans involving status effect spells, terrain effects, and general creativity such as walling off a room from enemies by putting down paintings. You could steal just about everything from everyone and looting was a valid source of income.

(Having primarily grown up with JRPGs, where it's intended that the player can take everything that's not nailed down, I've had difficulty abandoning the habit in western RPGs. If it's there, it's meant to be taken, and I am very sad that the town guards don't see it the same way.)

I decided to start with the first Original Sin game since it was heavily discounted during a summer Steam sale, and played the Enhanced Edition. My first impression of it was not that great though. It took a while for me to settle into the game world and get a feel for its cities, factions, and gods. The lore doesn't pop in the same way that it does for Dragon Age and I suppose that's because when I read a lore book I feel more like I'm reading someone's world building notes rather a treatise that is part of the world itself. But there are some things that the game does extremely well, especially if you're willing to do a little role-playing.

Since Original Sin can be multiplayer, there are two main characters and in multiplayer mode the players each control one. Whenever a questionable conversation comes up, one that the player might want to weigh in on, the two protagonists can choose separate answers. In multiplayer it must be a lot like role-playing in a table-top game when different characters might have different opinions on how to do something. But this option is kept in single player.

And it works really well as a storytelling device if the two protagonists disagree even if they're controlled by the same player. My two agreed perhaps 70-80% of the time, but the 20-30% they didn't was enough to mold them into different personalities working towards the same goal, and it allowed them to snipe at each other in unprompted conversations that felt perfectly in character. It was an experience I'd never had before with player created party members.

Another thing I liked is that early in the game it becomes apparent that there is something special about our two protagonist Source Hunters, and that they may be the reincarnations of previous heroes. At the first whiff of such foreshadowing in an RPG, it's a given to assume that it's true, and I was afraid the game would beat around the bush about confirming it. Though it does take a while for the characters to really consider it (and to be fair, from their perspective it's not obvious), the game gets it out of the way early in Act II, which is pretty good. That's before the halfway point, and allows exploration of their predecessors' doings while knowing these actions were at one point their own.

Much of the lore fun is learning about their pasts, what went wrong all those years ago, and how that ties into the present day. Also the more powerful, inhuman NPCs will acknowledge who the protagonists have been in their past lives, or be amused by the fact they would rather "pretend" to be a mundane Source Hunter when they are clearly demigods.

Divinity: Original Sin also subverts things in unexpected ways. We learn early on that there's a cult, but surprisingly, when we confront their leader, we learn that she doesn't believe in her goddess or any of her religious teachings. Her organization is a cult because it was the most effective way for her to lead a bunch of devoted followers and get what she wants.

The game is also populated with a number of distinct female characters. Half the recruitable party members are female, including an older woman who is on the verge of retirement. Madora gives an air of been there, done that, came back with the t-shirt, and serves as the group's cranky veteran, which is amazing. She's also a front line fighter with a two-handed sword. Since my party was mostly ranged, we were all hiding behind the bulwark that was Madora.

This makes it a shame that the primary villain, Leandra, only seems to have gone bad because she was on the losing end of a love triangle. She began as an otherwise interesting villain (what I mentioned about leading a cult when she doesn't believe in the goddess she preaches about) and I was disappointed when I found out that she and her sister Inara only started to have problems because there was a man they both liked and he chose Inara.

There's more to it than that, but because that's when Leandra leaves her it makes it look like that was the pivotal moment, and a petty one at that. Even when we learn more, we never truly see what happened to cause her fall, which prevents us from properly reframing her transformation into a villain.

I really enjoyed the first act of Original Sin, because it's different from the standard fantasy RPG. It opens with the Source Hunters being dispatched to Cyseal to investigate a murder that was potentially done with Sourcery (the game's punny way of making a Source Hunter a hunter of sorcerers). While there is some of the usual orc and undead bashing around the outskirts of the city, most of the act is spent inside Cyseal itself hunting down clues as to what actually happened the night of the murder.

It's a lot of fun, with red herrings and suspects right under your nose. You get tons of experience running around town and leveling up by doing your investigation, which makes for a brainy way to progress through the game. And due to the layout of the map with the city in the center, going out into the city surroundings felt like side trips, keeping the city the main hub of all activity.

The second act loses a lot of this and comes off much more directionless, even a bit forced. Though the Source Hunters supposedly have the option to call it a day once they find out the reason for the councilman's murder (that he was part of the cult and the person who killed him is trying to stop the cult), the game railroads them into chasing down his murderer and investigating what the cult is really trying to do.

Though stopping the cult is a good idea, the Source Hunters' motivation for doing so feels rather weak, probably because the protagonists are allowed to debate over whether it's part of their organization's business. I think if the game had made it more clearly an extension of their original mission this would have come off better.

Aside from that, Act II just felt too large, with too many quests spread across the map (including a mammoth side area) without a clear grouping or order in which to tackle them. I even had one quest break on me because I happened to have an item in inventory that an NPC wanted to me to get, but I already had (since there are several Blood Stones throughout the game, not just the one he specifically asks to be retrieved).

It didn't help that the Source Hunters' personal story ended up slowing to a crawl, though that will not be everyone's personal experience, which I'll get to shortly.

Fortunately, once the player gets to the Phantom Forest and the third act of the game, the story pulls itself tighter again like it was back in Cyseal. Hunter's Edge has a lot of interconnected quests, so there's a lot to do in a small area that feeds into itself. The Phantom Forest map also sees the resolution of multiple companion subplots and builds itself on the bones of the backstory laid out in previous acts.

By this time the player will have stopped the undead in Cyseal, learned about soul-forging, freed Icara, and learned of Leandra's plans to unleash the Void Dragon that is basically eating all of creation starting from the future going back.

There was just one tiny problem, and it turned out to be a pacing issue that I didn't know existed until I found myself unable to proceed in the game. I'd found a door, but it wouldn't open, and it turns out I wasn't the only person looking up the solution online.

As I mentioned, we gradually find out the stories of our Source Hunters' previous lives as heroes who were eventually elevated to immortals. There's a decent chunk in Act I. Each time the player discovers a Star Stone, a new chamber opens in Homestead, the player's home base at the end of time, and in each room we get a letter, journal, or the like detailing the actions and thoughts of two ancient generals.

We also know that Leandra is corrupting Star Stones into Blood Stones, and the player will find several across their journey, but Blood Stones are not mandatory to use and heal the party to full on top of removing all status effects, so I tended to save them unless required for a side quest. (After all, such things would be better used in a truly difficult boss fight.)

Using up a Blood Stone also counts for purposes of discovering a Star Stone, which means that by saving mine up, I delayed learning the backstory for my heroes, and it's only after the Source Hunters know everything about their past that they can get through the door near the end of the game. This means that I got multiple chamber/backstory unlocks in a row in the second half of Act III rather than being more evenly parceled out over the course of Acts II and III.

I feel like having the backstory unwind naturally through the discovery of stones (Star or Blood), rather than making up any Star Stone deficit by using Blood Stones, would have improved the pacing a lot. I would have learned more backstory while my interest in the game was flagging (I actually took a break of several months in the middle) and then I wouldn't have gotten stuck at a door for the obtuse reason that the game wanted to make sure my protagonists knew everything before proceeding.

What I did like about the Source Hunters' past lives though, is that it turns out that they weren't great people. In a way, they were massive failures. Though they were hailed as heroes for defeating the Void Dragon in the distant past, we can see from their writings that they flamed out spectacularly afterwards, with one becoming a bloodthirsty warmonger and the other withdrawing from the world entirely. When the gods finished sealing the Void Dragon in the Godbox and wanted it guarded by immortal Guardians, the two only volunteered out of guilt. They knew they had messed up, not only after the battle, but during it as well. They only won because a third general had died had rallying them when they were too terrified to fight.

When the Void Dragon eventually escaped, the two Guardians chickened out (not believing they could beat it without their third), and left the goddess Astarte to fight the dragon by herself. Unable to handle their latest failure, they tore themselves out of time so history would no longer remember them and they would no longer remember themselves. And eventually, who knows how many years later, they were reborn as the two protagonist Source Hunters, who are still very much their own people, if you choose to play them that way. And I like that the two Source Hunters can be completely disappointed in their prior selves (though they can also be sympathetic if you want).

The story beats are fairly predictable aside from the Guardians themselves. Once everything is in order, the two protagonists go off to pop the Void Dragon and reseal it, thus redeeming themselves and saving existence. There is a nice moment at the end though where they go report in to headquarters and their boss asks about Councillor Jake, and by that time it's been so long it was a little funny to see how this all started by investigating a councillor's murder.

I think with some pruning and a little more depth to the side characters this could have been a really good story, but instead it falls a bit short.