Artist's Project Description: "Picture a modern version of a world not unlike that of Ultima VII
, that can be explored either alone or with a friend, that sees you engage adversaries in tactical turn-based combat reminiscent of the great turn-based RPGs of the past. A world that is filled to the brim with choice and consequence situations, reactive NPCs, and a considerable amount of surprises. A world that captures the feeling of playing pen and paper RPGs with our friends. Then add the new stuff..." - Vision statement for
Divinity: Original Sin
When making large-scale epic RPGs it often helps to summarise what you are trying to make in a couple of lines, just to ensure you don't lose focus during development. You can spend a lot of time trying to come up with these vision statements, but when we started making
Divinity: Original Sin, it didn't take us long to come up with the one above. It's simply what we've always wanted to do. The only reason we haven't made this game before was that the following list never made it past the marketing departments of many a known publisher. Now that we are self-funding and self-publishing, we can get away with features like the following.
- Divinity: Original Sin is an Isometric cRPG.
- You can play in single player mode but also in cooperative multiplayer mode.
- It's a real epic CRPG so even in multiplayer, you're engaging in much more than just combat and item fever. A nifty cooperative dialog system, a highly reactive world, a deep character development system and plenty of choice and consequence situations see to that.
- You can create your own RPG adventures with our powerful RPG editor and share or play them with friends.
- Combat is very tactical. It is turn-based and features things like skill and spell combos, attacks of opportunity, action points and much more.
- Exploration is greatly rewarded.
- You can develop your character(s) to fit your playstyle using our classless skill and stats system.
- There are countless item interactions and item combinations waiting to be discovered.
- No Divinity game is complete without music composed by the brilliant Kirill Pokrovsky.
At the end of 2010, in no small part thanks to the success of the
previous Divinity games, we finally earned sufficient money to start working on our brainchild on our own, and we decided to become a self-publishing studio.
Fast-forward two years (big RPGs take time to make). Today we are nearing the end of our development cycle and when we look at what we've created so far, we think that we have in our hands the best RPG Larian Studios has ever created. But, we also have the feeling that our job isn't done yet. The game systems we put in place have a lot of potential and because it took us quite some time to create them, we haven't been able to use them to their fullest yet.
That's why we're looking to increase the size of our development team. And because our budget is finite, we decided to come to Kickstarter to ask for your help.
John says: Divine Divinity is a hidden CRPG gem. You could lose yourself in the game's depth like no game since the glory days of the
Ultima series. A couple of follow-ups failed to recapture the original game's magic. Now
Larian Studios returns to their original world, and this one looks
very promising - much more so than the previous entries in the series.
While
Divinity: Original Sin functions just fine as a single-player CRPG, it really shines as a co-op game designed for two. I'm particularly intrigued with the conversation system. Both players participate in an ongoing interaction, given that they're close enough to each other to hear the dialog and intervene. So rather than taking the party leader's final word, both members of the group get to weigh in on the outcome. If one don't agree with the other, the game looks at each character's persuasive abilities. The decision that wins is based on stats, the particular situation, and the the approach taken to persuade the party. The game remembers the nature of your decisions as personal traits, and this in turn affects the relation between the party members.
Very innovative!
Sticking together with your partner is optional, so you can feel free to run off and explore on your own, make decisions on your own, keep loot for yourself, and deal with people how you see fit. In the event you hear your friend crying for help because he is being torn apart, turn by turn, you have the option to join him in turn-based combat. Indeed, it is possible for either player to be in turn-based combat while the other is exploring in real-time, and it is equally possible for both players to have their own turn-based fights at the same time. Surviving such a thing however, is a different story.
Divinity: Original Sin will also be shipping with a powerful editor that will allow you to not only create environments but easily script scenes and scenarios, and link them together to create grand adventures for you and your friends to play. The RPG editor features a world building tool, an item and equipment editor, a character editor, a dialog editor, and a very advanced (yet simple to use) story scripting tool. You can preview your changes immediately in the game, and import artwork as well as audio. There is even support to work with multiple people on the same story. The editor will be integrated with Steam Workshop to facilitate sharing your adventures with other players online, but you'll also be able to share your mods in other ways.
For your consideration: Given that
Divinity: Original Sin is very much designed for two, and assuming you have interest in backing the project, may I suggest that members consider posting their interest here
before backing the game on Kickstarter? By doing so, you can save yourself a few bucks. See, while the minimum pledge to get a copy of the game is $25, there is a $40 tier that gives you two copies of the game. By pairing together, you and a friend can get the game for $5 off. Not a bad deal if you were planning to go in anyway! And I must say, the game does look to be worth backing. Check out that Rock, Paper, Shotgun preview if you haven't already, and bask in those pretty screenshots. It's nice to see a Kickstarter project with something to show for itself!