Special Feature - 26th of April What's in a character ?

Last time we looked at how the characters that populate the world of Divine Divinity interact with the player during his or her quests. In this third special feature we will look at what exactly defines a character in Divine Divinity. To illustrate what we mean, we will use a female assassin as an example.

First and foremost, before a character can exist in the game world, it needs a visualisation. The visualisation consists of a series of animations that correspond with certain actions the character can do. In addition to the animation, there are of course a lot of other parameters that define that action, but in order to communicate to you, the player, that something is happening, you need to see and hear it. Before looking at the animations that make up a character’s actions, we will first look at the vital statistics that make up a character. This will help explaining what happens when one of the actions is executed. The vital statistics are shown in the next screenshot :

Level: This is an indicator of how experienced your character is. The higher the level, the more experienced the character. A level 2 character for instance is un-experienced, whereas a level 30 character is very very experienced. Experience: This value shows how much experience points you have accumulated. You receive experience points for successfully doing things in Divine Divinity (solving quests, killing monsters, figuring something out etc…). Next level : In order for your character’s level to increase, you need to accumulate a certain amount of experience points. This value shows you when that will happen. It takes progressively more and more experience points in order to reach the next level. For the number freaks among you : The experience cost to reach a certain level is calculated by filling in level in the following formula Experience=(1000(level³-level))/3. Health : This value indicates how healthy you are. When it reaches 0, you are dead. The value on the left is your current health status, the value on the right is your maximum health. Your health value can go down for a variety of reasons, but the most common one is being hit by something sharp. Mana: This value indicates how much magic energy you have left. Magic energy is necessary to perform certain skills and magical spells. As with health the value on the left is your current magical energy, and the value on the right the maximum amount. Strength: The physical strength of your character depends on this value. The higher it is, the stronger your character is. Among other things, strength determines things like how much you can carry, how hard you can hit your enemy, how much injuries you can take, what type of weapons you can wield etc… Dexterity: How accurate and how handy you are, is determined by your dexterity value. A high dexterity value is necessary for people who prefer precision over power, and is therefore an important attribute for archers. Dexterity is also important when it comes to your defensive skills and it is definitely important when you decide you want to steal something from somebody while he is looking at you. Intelligence: The intelligence value indicates how smart your character is. The higher this value is, the more spells your character will be able to cast. An intelligent character is also capable of seeing things that are not so obvious, and he has a distinct advantage when it comes to wielding complex weaponry. Stamina: No matter what type of character you have, stamina is a very important factor. If you are out of breath, your strength, dexterity or intelligence will not help you a lot. Also, certain skills which you can learn require a great deal of stamina, and the higher this value is, the longer you will be able to maintain your focus. When you earn enough experience points and reach the next level, you get the option to increase one of the four above values with 5 points. By deciding how you will distribute your points, you focus the development of your character in a certain direction. Strength, dexterity, intelligence and stamina are the prime characteristics of a character. The offence and defence values depend on the skills you learn, the value of your prime characteristics and the type of weaponry and armour you are equipped with. They reflect how good you are at attacking, and how good you are at defending. The damage value indicates what the effect of a successful attack will be on the health points of your enemy. The first value is the minimum damage you will inflict, while the second value is the maximum amount of damage you can do. Note that the actual damage can still be lowered by the armour of your enemy, or some of his skills. When an enemy does damage to you with a conventional weapon, your armour value will be subtracted from the damage he does. This is not the case when the weapon has magical properties, which is where your resistances kick in. We will be talking about resistances in a next special feature, so we’ll skip it for now.

Having said all that, let’s look at the actions a typical character can do. The first three animations we’ll look at are the walk, the still and the run animations. The still animation is the animation that gets played when the character is standing still, and it doesn’t do anything. The walk and the run animation speak for themselves – they’re what gets shown when the character is moving. Notice that there is a second walk animation. This is the animation that gets shown when the female assassin draws her weapons. Running obviously moves the character around faster than walking does, but there’s one important restriction : While running, the stamina level of the character goes down. When there’s no stamina left, the character can’t run anymore, and it needs to recover. Recovering stamina is done by either drinking a stamina potion, standing still for some time, or walking around at a slower speed. There’s another caveat which you need to keep in mind when your stamina is low, but we’ll cover that in the next paragraph.

Next in line are the melee fight animations. In the case of the female assassin there are two such animations, indicating that she is capable of doing two moves during melee combat. When characters have more than one melee fight animation, it usually means the effect of the attack action is different depending on what the animation is. In the case of the female assassin, the knife attack does typical conventional weapon damage to the enemy, whereas the kick animation literally kicks the breath out of the enemy.

Our female assassin is not only capable of fighting in a melee situation, she can also handle herself pretty well when it comes to hitting enemies from a distance. This is where the throw animation is used. In most cases the accuracy with which projectiles hit enemies is decided by the dexterity value, though there are some skills that can increase the accuracy too.

It is very unlikely that an enemy will just let the female assassin kill him (or her or it), so when she’s in a combat situation she’s bound to occasionally get hit. That’s when the hit animation gets played.

And when she gets hit too much, she dies. (Which is a pity, because the female assassin is one of the potential love interests in Divine Divinity for the male characters).

She can be a love interest in the game, the female assassin got an extra kiss animation. Here you see her kissing the warrior player type.

And since she can be a love interest in the game, she can also disagree strongly with what her lover is saying. In which case we show this special animation.

This is by far not all that can be said about a character. We haven’t talked about the behaviours and the tactics for instance, but that subject is so elaborated that it’s been reserved for a future special feature.

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