Azrael the cat
Arcane
Hekateras said:Black_Willow said:It's a very poor RPG, more of an interactive book.
"It's not the kind of RPG I'm used to playing" does not equal "It's a poor RPG". That's as asinine as saying that it's not a good RPG because you can't customise the characters. Kindly get a clue.
Mortmal said:I remember this game , it was very good and faithful to raymond E. feist first books, the plot is the same or almost. If you loved the story you cant possibly miss his books, in my opinion its very good fantasy in a believable world.Its keeps going on with the next generations and descendants of heroes.Theres truly material for more rpgs there, off course nothing of such will happen ever again.. ah the 90's..
FEIST DID NOT WRITE THE STORY OF THE GAME. Neal Hallford did.
Also, Feist kind of sucks, and I'm saying that as someone who grew up loving his books. The more I look back and investigate the backstory, the more I'm convinced that the stuff that was actually good about the series usually involved cribbing off of someone else - the original Friday Nighters (= the rest of his group of college buddies who, together, came up with the world and lore for Midkemia, and are thus presumably responsible for a lot of the awesome in the first trilogy), the various co-writers, and of course Neal Hallford. Unless you think it's a coincidence that what's widely considered the best books in the series (Honoured Enemy, Empire Trilogy, Magician) either had co-writers or input from the aforementioned Friday Nighters.
From what I can tell, the last few sagas in the series have been more fully original Feist flavour, which explains why he keeps jumping between trite plots without bothering to resolve them fully and the characters are bland copies of previous ones.
The novelisation of BaK mostly sucks as well, sadly. There's some great moments, but the characters really suffer from Feist's take on them. I mean, that scene where Gorath accidentally punches Owyn unconscious... Way to turn a great story into The Three Stooges, Ray. T_T
If you want a great story, freaking play the game, and try to be as completionist as you can. That's the only way you're going to get the awesome you should get from it. I cringe at the thought of people only knowing the characters and the story through the mess Feist made of them.
I had a similar experience with Feist - I loved him as a kid, but liked him less and less as I went through my latter teenage years. I think part of what I liked as a kid was that it was the first time I'd encountered such a well-planned world/culture (well, 2 worlds/cultures) - I didn't read LoTR until I was abut 13-14 - and the dual perspectives were neat. I think it was just that Feist was the first decent fantasy writer I read, more than finding him to be an excellent one - the series starts, at least, with two understandable sides rather than lawful-good v chaotic-evil, and that put it a long way ahead of the ultra-cliched stuff I'd read until then. As a kid you don't really see how cliched the characters are...although I think he did start out better on that point as well. I remember fondly the bit in the first book where you get the perspective of the invaders for the first time, and how shit-scared they are of war-dogs and horses due to not having the concept of trained animals.
The big turning point was - like 99% of people - reading LoTR, and then especially Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. Hard to go back to Feist from that point. Not knocking the guy though - most of the fantasy genre is fucking awful, completely relying on the fact that in that genre (more so than most) folks just swallow up the same plot/characters, and Feist is above that line. Being 'ok' as a fantasy author basically puts you in the top 1% of fantasy authors (not because the genre is inherently crap, but because of the sheer quantity of churned out shite compared to less popular genres - though these days I think vampire/gothic-romance novels have topped it for 'lowest proportion of readable books to shite').
And by game writing standards, he's a fucking genius.