Part 120: Epilogue - Behind the Scenes

Epilogue - Behind the Scenes




(Fun game: Spot both Babylon 5 references in the final canon update.)

What's fake in the final update?

•  Obviously, all Jenna stuff. It was tricky figuring out how to make a door, because only the entrances to the fortresses have a door. Making the hug was even harder then that. 
•  In canon, the Divine One does NOT kill the baby. I actually altered the video to darken the end of it, and I added in a squelching sound effect from Dark Messiah. Sleep well, readers. 

VIDEO: The Full, unedited end cutscene










Thank you all. I actually wrote a lot of dialogue in previous chapters KNOWING that I would be calling back to it here. The thread title was always referring to this point (although at first it wasn't going to be the last line).


There was never an instance, ever, in any previous draft of the story, where the main character did NOT kill the baby.

Of course, killing the baby is NOT canon. But as I have repeatedly said throughout the thread, this story is not canon. At the time, I implied that was because the canon hero is a male warrior called Lucian. But in reality, this is the reason why I don't consider this story canon.

I replayed the game before starting my run as Jeremiah to see if I properly remembered the cutscene at the end, where the hero raises the knife and the baby's cries chillingly echo. Once I confirmed it, I decided that's how I'd end the story. (It worked even better once I  altered the video .)

Having your hero being forced to murder a baby to save the world is already shocking enough, but I wanted an extra twist to make it even harder, so making the baby related to Jeremiah was what did it for me. Being able to catch even those who already played the game completely off-guard was just a nice bonus.


The worst part is that  as later games unflinchingly prove , murdering the infant probably IS the best thing to do. In the canon story "Child of Chaos", prequel to Beyond Divinity, Zandalor explicitly tells Lucian (the canon name of the Divine) that if the child, Damian, shows signs of evil, he must be killed.

I specifically mentioned Zandalor as giving Jeremiah the dagger, to make it clear that it wasn't something Jeremiah just found, and killing the baby is actually the thing which releases the Chaos God, because it isn't. I bet no one noticed that the description of the dagger was copied word-for-word from the April 1st update where Zandalor tries to use it on Sword-possessed Jeremiah. That description was in turn from the screenshots at the end of the game.

I did decide about a third or halfway through the LP that Jenna should ultimately live. If I killed both her and her baby off, it would have been a bit TOO much of a downer ending. It also works because it's one thing to murder your nephew if his mother is dead, and you're all alone with no one to see. It's a very different and worse thing to have to explain to your sister why you had to murder her baby.


BONUS VIDEO: The Demon of Lies Humiliation Station





I put together a few other ways to easily kill the final boss effortlessly.

Number 1 - Lowering his resistances with Curse and Withering Curse, and then blasting him with Elemental Strike.

Number 2 - Using the unpatched v1.34 Death Scorpion Traps.

Number 3 - Using Aura of Command to steal his own summons from him.

Number 4 - Polymorphing him into a Rabbit.

I'll probably do Divinity 2, but in a slightly different style, much more straightforward with less narrative elements, because that game has a better pace at the start. I chose the narrative style for this LP largely because there wasn't a really great way to handle the terribly slow start with the main quest not even starting for 10 levels/3 hours of gameplay, nor could I have skipped over it. I also blundered by doing each level of the first dungeon as an individual update, instead of trying to rush through as fast as possible.

I probably also shouldn't have tried for 100% completion, because this game is really long anyway.

I always knew that putting this together would be a lot of work, but I never imagined at the start how far I'd go. But by the end I knew how to use Photoshop much better than I had before. The game is really great, but if I had the chance to do this over again, I might not, because I really underestimated how much work it would be. I certainly didn't think that embedding Youtube clips in each update would force me to have to edit each individual update when archiving this!

It took a lot of preparation ahead of time before even starting, and 10 months from first update to last. It's been quite a journey. I hope you enjoyed reading this.

Credits:

I'd like to thank all my readers, and the developers and publishers of the game of course, but I'd like to give special thanks to some others:

seroin - he helped me proof-read a lot of the early chapters and gave a lot of helpful advice for constructing a narrative
Jerusalem and Shadow Catboy - More proof-reading and advice.
a dog - photoshopped a logo out of one of the game's wallpapers so I could use it.
Lynn (of Larian Studios) - She stickied a link to my thread on the Larian forums and also mentioned it on the Divine Divinity facebook page.
Raze and Alrik Fassbauer (of the Larian forums) - They found a translation of the German book from the secret dev area for me.
Glazius - For just generally being a good supporter of the LP forum in general, and for some of his comments inadvertently reminding me to add more details to some areas.
wdarkk - For morale support.
The posters in the Tech Support Thread - The things they helped with made the LP better. Because of their advice, I was able to add music to boss fights which lacked it, I was able to make the video which only had music after the first part, and I was able to make the special video for the finale.
The Authors of the backstory documents to the game: Damon Wilson for the original backstory to Divine Divinity, Darren Evans and Gillian Pearce for the re-written and re-edited version of Divine Divinity's backstory, and Rhianna Pratchet for her prequel novella to Beyond Divinity. All that material was helpful for crafting a full and vibrant world.