Can’t say I’m all that impressed. (small spoilers)
Cons:
You can’t create a character from scratch.
Expert mode doesn’t give you that much choice in creating a character.
Barrels and barrels galore. More barrels than a NWN game. Filled with regular crap. I hate that, and whoever it was that said barrels are rare and filled with useless stuff not worth breaking them played a different game.
Combat is way too easy, non-tactical, non-strategic, boring. Not nearly of the level of NWN 1 or 2 retardedness, but a shame and a sham compared to RoA. You gain health, stam, and magic at a ridiculously fast pace. Wounds are a joke, being poisoned is a joke, etc. All the goodness of RoA was sucked out of this games dungeon crawling. Why would I want to waste time on Alchemy for pots when I don’t need them? RoA and Darklands were the only games to get Alchemy and potion use correct and this game shat all over RoA.
I have barely spent any of my exp points because 1) I don’t have to because combat is so easy; 2) those cocksuckers stole a character of mine upon reaching the city. My party make-up sucks. I know I get the thief back with the brewery quest, but don’t take my characters. The Amazon is the only character I could have specialize in the outside crap like survival, plant lore, and animal lore, and her stats suck for this (besides survival). I don’t want to waste points on the charlatan’s lock picking, etc. This game is a min-maxer’s nightmare and it makes me want to stab people in the face with uncontrollable rage. And party members gain experience even if they aren’t partied with you al la Kotor.
This game was made for Ironman. The herb picking, animal gathering skills, pick-pocketing, everything screams for ironman. It might even be considered a good game if it had ironman and combat was at least 3x harder. Characters don’t die so it wouldn’t actually be bad. It has the stupid Kotor knock-out, can only die if everyone dies system. It would be almost as good as RoA if it had ironman, 3x harder combat, full character creation, and I got to create all five characters myself so I could do it sensibly.
So far this is a kotor/nwn clone without a bio story. So far there have been no meaningful choices. So they managed to totally fail at the actual game part, like Bio, but without a decent story or party interaction all the kids love in today’s “rpgs.”
This game is not just a slap in the face of the people who put RoA on a pedestal, it’s not even a equal to a little butt-rape. This is full blown Jeffery Dahmer style kidnap-rape-murder-eat-you-up. But it’s still better than all the trash out their besides Spiderweb, and the only big-budget game that is actually worthy of being called a game (even though very unworthy when compared to its older but much better predecessors).
I can see why when it comes to a lot of crap, but ruining min-maxing for me is too much to take. I can’t believe I anticipated this game so much.
Oh, by the way. How the rolls work for talents for those who don’t know. The three (or two) stats that govern the check each are rolled with a d20. You have to roll under your stat. Your talent in the skill is used as points to bring rolled amounts down to help pass tests. Harder tests subtract from your talent point pool total, and can even bring it negative. Easy tasks can give you bonus points. If you are wondering why the Amazon sucks so bad at picking herbs it’s because she has a about a 50% chance to fail each roll due to attributes, not counting the talent pool or other factors. But why would you raise those attributes of hers when it would make far more sense not to, and have a character with some synergy between attributes and skills? It’s silly.