Things to know that will help you in the experience of this game:

1. Be cheesy, this is a game that welcomes cheese, it is not only Diablo with the power of save scumming but they literally give you early on after the prologue a teleportation triangle that you can use to teleport to your home and just sleep to get all of your mana and HP back in the middle of a battle, at the brink of death? Teleport, go to sleep, teleport back. Dont forget your teleporter triangle in the field though, remember to pick it up after use.
2. Physics!!! This took me a while to even notice but this game has some sort of physics engine going on where you can drag and drop boxes, this might help you find keys or like secret item locations, its a really cool feature honestly, you can even throw boxes at enemies.
3. Every now and then eat 2 pieces of meat, you will be over abundant in meat if you are not eating your meat every second you dont have health.

Much like Diablo, picking a mage is CHEATING, it just is, it is the best class you could ever use, it has 0 miss chance, all of the magic attacks are overpowered as hell, and it is extremely easy to just put all of your points into intelligence, if this is your first time playing the game, don't make my mistake, play as a Mage, because it is extremely difficult to mess up a mage build in this game, there are very few wrong answers in that department.

What is the penalty of this game if you mess up your build? Well, you start dragging your character to catch up, and there's no grinding in this game (to it's strength and weakness) because all enemies spawn only once, once they die, that's it, there are points in the game where you will be scrapping the barrel just for a drop of XP, so build your character wisely or else you will be in a scenario where you'll use all of your mana going up against an enemy and, teleporting to your house, and sleeping.

Which is what almost made me stop playing this game entirely if you need to know, it might not seem like it, but before its too late, you might get stuck in a ridiculous difficult scaling, this is a game that wishes you use make use of all of the enemies in a location non-linearly before you can progress. There will be a point where you go "Oh I should have put a lot more into this skill point" because you'll get stuck, and this is a game that drags on, it`ll keep you hooked on the first 100 hours for sure but then later on, the enemies keep feeling like the same, the combat becomes repetitive and they really just send you enemies that have more HP and do more damage.

There is a lot of backtracking in this game, a few fast travels and you run fast enough that large plains isn't the worst but they add some things that make the backtracking more tolerable, such as events that have a sense of continuing as you visit them later, every now and then when you cross the a path, there will be a continuation of an cutscene event like there's these 2 merchants that talk to each other and have a cutscene every 10 in game days.

If there is any thing i would complain of Devine Divinity (besides the scaling of how experienced is gained) is that it is an OCD's nightmare, it is literally preying on my completionism addictions, and I won't lie that I do wanna see what happens in this huge overly bloated open world diablo, because the dialog is actually really funny! It's not just a generic fantasy game, there is some real charm behind it that would motivate you to go on in this repetitive hack 'n slash.

Either way, despite all of it's interesting facets, it is hard to remove this game from it's shadow which is: YOU GOTTA BE REALLY DESPERATE FOR DIABLO TO PLAY THIS ONE, some people cannot stand the way it's designed, but I find it just bearable enough that you can enjoy a Diablo clone, and boy is it shameless about it. I wonder if there is someone out there who played Diablo after and was like "Oh man, this game is like Divine Divinity! But well designed!", with that said open world diablo does have it's perks such as being able to do whatever the hell you want, it's diablo but you are the devil.

Also, in order to play this on modern computers as of now, you gotta get a patch that fixes the loading issues, if your game is not loading fast or if you are getting stuck on a black screen, than chances are you gotta get a patch for that.

Divine Divinity is a glorious game. In the core, it is your standard RPG, you level up, collect loot, gather gold and experience and improve your skills. What makes this game unique however, is the really advanced mechanics and interaction with the world around you. This makes it stand out from any other RPG of that era.

The Divinity series are known for its strong story and plot and, of course, it all started here. Evil spreads across the land and the Black Ring tries to destroy the Dive Council of Seven. You are “Marked” and evil will not stop hunting you forever. You need to gather the Council and become Divine in order to destroy the evil that plagues the land. Meanwhile a big ass war is going on between every race in the kingdom, like the Elves, Dwarves and the Orcs. It’s the short version but it is solid.

You start in a quiet village of healers called Aleroth, in the land of Rivellon. From here, you begin your journey to become the Divine and join the Divine Council of Seven. On your journey, you travel to towns, villages and big cities, where everyone has problems and if you want, you could help them out for some extra gear or experience.

And that is the key sentence here: “If you want.” This game lets you do whatever you want, whenever you want. You are completely free to go wherever you want and can choose in which order you complete the game. This has however, some downsides. If you kill a certain NPC (which you totally can do), it might lock/destroy a quest you can do later on. If you travel to that small cave on the left bottom side of the map, you might get your ass handed to you by twenty hungry trolls, while you are not prepared for this.

The graphics in Divinity are stunning. More specifically, the environments and the attention to detail to the flora, fauna, buildings, caves and farmlands. The fight animations and spell casting are beautiful and even today, they are just fine to look at.

The music is glorious. It does not have adrenaline pumping fight tracks but rather calm, medieval themed ambient music that will change according to your current location. This music is perfectly fitting for this game and it enhances the feeling of playing a fantasy themed RPG. The music is greatly improved in the later installments of the Divinity series.

What makes this game unique for me, is the way you can interact with everyone and everything, like I mentioned. You can pick up a piece of trash, keep it in your inventory or place it somewhere else. You can light a candle, which serves no purpose, but you can do it. You can murder everyone you see, although this has consequences in the game later on. You really need to be tactful, think ahead and analyse the risks when performing certain tasks or making certain decisions in Divine Divinity. This makes the game so great.

But the mechanics do not stop there. You can lock pick doors, make potions from mushrooms and flowers you find out in the wild, you can repair your own gear if you have the skill for this, and the list goes on. You can develop your character however you want and add the specialties of your choice to it. Want to be a warrior who can brew potions and lock pick doors? No problem. Want to be a mage with heavy Armor and mad blacksmithing skills? You got it.

The controls and interface can be a little confusing and take some time to get used to. It is not your straight forward Diablo interface.

The only issue I had with Divine Divinity, was its cryptic nature. Yes, this adds to the experience of the game and let you explore freely and figure it out for your own, but sometimes the information is so vague for a quest, that you really have no clue where to start looking. To make matters worse, sometimes you murdered someone that was suppose to help you complete that quest or was a key element in it, and you blew your shot. A lot in this game is connected one way or another so you need to be very careful when performing a certain action. But when you make notes and write down some of the hints and tips given to you by the quest giver, (but did not appear in your quest log) you should be fine most of the time.

In the end, Divine Divinity is one of those games that got my deepest respect and I really enjoyed playing it. It might even be in my top 10 best games ever played.