How Divine

The recently released Divine Divinity: Original Sin is a game that intrigues me - chiefly because it is an RPG that actually accommodates for two players.

As any RPG connoisseur will tell you, RPGs are strictly a one player genre - it's hard to incorporate a second player when it is one player who builds a character and takes them all the way through the game, killing dudes and making vital decisions. How do you fit in a second player? Granted there have some attempts that have a second player but they are just confined to going along with whatever the first player does. And whilst that may work in some places it is dull in others. It may work from a narrative perspective (Final Fantasy X anyone?) but it must fell restrictive to play an RPG, a genre known for making decisions count, and not have a say in how things go.

Original Sin solves this problem in a clever way: It would seem that the narrative is shared between two players - when they have to make a decision the players are allowed to argue about it before coming to a conclusion through a minigame. That's actually really clever and proof that an RPG can work for two. Throw in the usual RPG conventions of killing monsters for loot and experience - only this time with someone else to back you up - and you have proof that an RPG can work for two. So much so, you wonder why no one's tried it before.

Now if only I had a cool forty bucks lying around....