Did anyone else watch the Divinity three trailer? If so i’m sorry. That trailer was good. But it was terrifying. But in ways it reminded me of “The Lottery” Shirley Jackson. Anyway What do you guys think?
Wayyyy too gory and graphic for me. Bit surprised to see it in the middle of the Game Awards!
Nice. I didn’t watch the game awards. Though I did watch a recap, then the D3 trailer.
Wait, is the Divinity of Divinity Original Sin? I played parts of the first two games, and it wasn’t horror or gore at all, was it?
Yes, that Divinity.
I’d say Original Sin II gets plenty dark story-/lore-wise, but that gets sort of hidden under a coat of cartoony graphics and whimsical animations.
Yes! Although I’m not sure I can honestly say I “watched” it. Had to look away at parts! ![]()
I’m a huge fan of Divinity: Original Sin 2, and I do see thematic continuity in this trailer from that game. DOS2 had plenty of violence and some intense body horror themes (the “shriekers," silent watchers, mind maggots, corpse explosion skills, Bloodmoon Island, cannibalistic elves, etc). But it was balanced by other fantasy adventure elements. And with its comparatively limited production values, nothing in DOS2 comes anywhere near approaching the vivid cinematic visuals of the trailer for the new game.
I’ve been really excited to play whatever Larian releases on the heels of BG3. Crossing my fingers the finished game doesn’t revolve so much around gore and that they were relying on shock value to build up some buzz.
That’s fair. TBH I hadn’t heard of divinity until the trailer’s premier. A personal theory of mine is that the prayer the mother gives the burning thing as she hands up her daughter’s doll is what lead to the finale.
Nitpick, but it’s not really Divinity 3, is it? The games in the series are Divine Divinity, Beyond Divinity, Divinity 2, Divinity: Dragon Commander, and Divinity: Original Sin 1 and 2, and the mainline games were action RPGs à la Diablo, while this one is turn-based from what I’ve seen.
This convoluted and obfuscated approach to game names is at least consistent with the storytelling in OS2
I enjoyed the combat and there were isolated bits of good writing, but good lord the overall narrative was put together in an incredibly clumsy way. Good amount of gore and horror-adjacent stuff as I recall, but the isometric view makes it less impactful I suppose.
I never played the others. I heard a plot more convoluted than Assassin’s Creed and turned right at the crossroads.
I was mainly interested in the Resident Evil IX trailer, another horror flavored offering.
Also a good game. I played RE2 and 4RE but not any others
Original Sin 1 and 2 were turn-based.
Yup, but those are a decade-later subseries that spun off from the original “trilogy” of Divine Divinity, Beyond Divinity, and Divinity 2, which were all kinda Diablo-y in their mechanics (though the Ultima-style modeling of the world was present back then too). Like I said, it’s confusing!
And to expand on my point about OS:2, it’s not so much that the plot is confusing – it’s basically all standard epic-fantasy tropes – as it is that the choices of how to tell that story are bizarre. It starts off in medias res with only desultory efforts to situate you in your characters’ shoes (which is especially odd since if you played OS:1, you’ll be especially disoriented since there’s been a thousandish year time-jump and also the baddies from that game now appear to be the goodies), plus if you pick one of the set NPCs as your player character, your particular backstory gets minimal explication since most of it can only come out in PC/NPC dialogue. About 3/4 of the way through the game suddenly there are demons, but no one ever gives you a basic rundown of who they are or how, if it all, they’re related to the PCs’ source of power, which is also labeled demonic. And the final bad guy comes out of nowhere at the end with minimal build-up, except that if you played OS:1 you might remember him as the main boss at the end of the first chapter. And that’s just the stuff I remember off the top of my head from having played it like five years ago!
I’m not big into lore for the sake of lore – and I did think the core gameplay was fun – but incredibly basic information about the world and characters that would enable the player to get invested and understand the context of what they’re doing is routinely either withheld or just dribbled out with no real intentionality behind it; given the lavish production values and the fact that some of the sentence-to-sentence writing is actually not bad, I’m really curious what happened in the development process to mess things up so badly (I haven’t played BG3, but from what I understand they hired a bunch of new writers and it holds together significantly better, FWIW).