Divine Divinity

Divine Divinity is an action role-playing game with a top-down camera angle and controlled primarily through the mouse. Its gameplay is focused on hack and slash combat and has significant similarities to Diablo, with features such as random equipment generation and a wide set of skills organized into archetypes.

Unlike Diablo, Divine Divinity also features a significant amount of traditional computer role-playing game elements such as branching conversation trees, non-combat skills like lockpicking, pickpocketing, and bartering, and a reputation and disposition system to track how NPCs will react to the player.

Two thousand years before the game begins, those who sat on the Council of Seven in the land of Rivellon sacrificed themselves in the fight against a group of treacherous magicians, who had passed over to the dark side of magic. To remember the Council of Seven, the "Divine Order" was founded to pass on the knowledge of the wise men to the next generations.

At the beginning of the game, the player wakes up in a house in Aleroth, a town of healers. It is revealed that Mardaneus, leader of the town, has gone crazy, and the player is asked to help by traveling into the catacombs beneath the town to stop the undead mage Thelyron, who is driving Mardaneus mad. Once Thelyron is put to rest, Mardaneus appears to bring the player back to the surface.

An early version of the isometric game engine was used by Larian Studios for its very first project, Unless: The Treachery of Death, in 1996. Larian Studios was about to sign a publishing deal with Atari, but it didn't come to be as Atari announced its departure from the PC platform. Soon after Attic Entertainment Software joined Larian and Unless was turned into The Lady, the Mage and the Knight, a game set in the universe of The Dark Eye. Due to financial problems between the two development studios and its publisher, Infogrames, The Lady, the Mage and the Knight was canceled in July 1999.

Divine Divinity development started in early 1999 codenamed Project C and later Divinity: The Sword of Lies. The publisher forced Larian to change the name to Divine Divinity from Divinity: The Sword of Lies.

The game received "generally favorable reviews" according to the review aggregation website Metacritic. GameSpot opined that there is "much more to Divine Divinity than its impressive graphics and music and its combination of hack-and-slash action and pure role-playing, and that says a lot for the game."

IGN declared, in summary, that "Divine Divinity is a very easy game to get into and enjoy. It lacks anything memorable, like the party NPCs with minds and dialog of their own in Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn, but it has atmosphere, tons of quests, and a great deal of variety to offer. Above all, it's plain fun to play, to develop your character and find ever-better weapons and armor, to face the foe around the next corner. And who knows...?