I nearly absolutely loathe action "RPG"s, however I DID decide to pick up Divine Diviniyu seeing as it was available for c. $5 and had been described as "pretty good" for it being an ARPG.
The world is fairly largish and has plenty of areas to explore.
There is a fair amount of dialog, some of which is just used for "setting". e.g. you'll eventually run across a pair of merchants arguing over an accident, which you can trigger various movements forwards until it reaches the end of that particular side play. It was somewhat funny, and wholly unexpected.
The skill system appears and feels to be more complex than other ARPGs.
There is the usual amount of lots of actiony combat, but I found it to be surprisingly controllable so it wasn't so bad.
There are quite a few mainline quests, and a largish number of sidequests. It's been a while since I played, but I seem to recall that they weren't all fedex quests, or kill monster X quests, although both do put in an appearance.
There's a possibility to purchase a house in DD.
Some people have described it as being Baldur's Gatishlike or Ultima VII like. Personally, I found BG to be a complete bore added to which is the shitacular BW RT combat system endemic of all their games so I ended up never making it past around the halfway point of that game. Divine Divinity I found to be MUCH more fun to play than BG.
As to Ultima VII, yes I'd have to say of all the comparisons the Ultima VII comparison is closest to being true, although Divine Divinity isn't as good of a game as U7. It's not as interactive, and the story line isn't as good. DD has MUCH more combat and ph4t lewt to boot.
If the combat is too much for you there is a bug in the drop multiple items dialog which you could exploit to duplicate some items, e.g. potions w/o cheating overly much IMO. You shouldn't really need to do so though, as I mentioned the lewt is ph4t and your character should always have enough money. It's a surprising deep game for an ARPG.
[EDIT="oops forgot to address Beyond Divinity"]
Beyond Divinity has been universally panned as not being nearly as good as DD, so I've stayed away from it up to this point, but I WILL try it, if I can find a copy at a decent price. Currently, I haven't seen any budget releases of it in the $5-10 range, and the remnants of the original release are going for a little high of a price to be worth experimenting with, usually c. $20 unless you get lucky on ebay or another auction or trading site.
Other game opinions in a similar vein:
Diablo: meh
Diablo 2: meh
Nox: meh, but briefly fun online
Dungeon Siege 2: I still feel ripped off by this one
Titan Quest: Thought it was decent, then I played DD(got them the same day) and when I went back to TQ it felt pretty hollow. Better than the Diablos even though it played and looted almost exactly identically with an extremely linear(railed) quest line and world. i.e. Diablo on rails in the Heroic Age.
Sacred Gold: Pretty similar to my feelings with TQ, although the world seems to be more open and the quests a little better. In all other respects it feels like yet another Diablo clone.
DD crashing: haven't had a single crash. Patched to latest update and de-protected courtesy of one of the favorite outlets, GCW.
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