Black said:
Fake choices? Oh yeah, solving Westharbor problems clearly doesn't have consequences, right?
Jaime said they were fake. He didn't play the game and judging from his questions he doesn't know much about it. That obviously means he is right in his assesment and knows what he is talking about.
Same goes for Volly who didn't even play half-way through but judges the combat to be horribly easy.
Ah well, this is the internet. Everyone knows best.
I finished the game yesterday and must say:
The story (or lack thereof) would have been fine for an exploration/economic game. Unfortunately the economic side was not well implemented at all. Exploration suffered from far to many monster-spawns. While I was able to evade 99% of them, every single caravan was waylaid and that amount of monsters seems to be far too much for a rather civilized part of the realms. Especially stuff like random elementals didn't make much sense. Less encounters over all, a higher percentage of logical encounters (bandits and normal wild life), more diverse encounters (all bandits were EL 9) with some spell casters strewn in and a higher chance of encounters spotting you (or take the average of the party skills in hiding and sneaking and not just the selected character's). For the overland map and skills uses on it they should have take some cues from Mount&Blade.
Back to the story: In the end they tried to shoe-horn the story into an epic "you must save the world" (or at least part of it) thingy which ruined the whole non-epic goodness it had before. Now you have the fans of epic story-lines mad, as well as people like me. They should have instead focussed on end-game merchant related stuff and made the yuan-ti threaten your merchant empire and your life. I would have liked to make some region affecting decisions after my company became powerful. Some taste of powers that only vast amounts of money bring with it.
Having to rely on buggy fan-patches to keep buffs during overland travel wasn't the best feature either.
The whole party thing would have worked much better too, if one could have changed the party leader. My character for overland travel was my second character. While that wasn't a problem in most of Samarach it became a pain on the Sword Coast. If you stay in the module the selected character for overland travel after area changes remains the same. If the area change means a change of module which happens often on the SC but seldom in Samarach the game switches to the party leader when changin to the overland map. Since all areas are loaded 1-2 seconds before you can take any action the 3-4 mobs that I evaded while coming to the town/location suddenly see my party leader and I have to go into the whole "load for 10 seconds, fight for 30 seconds, load for 10 seconds" routine. And that up to 4 times... Of course the whole problem only became apparent after I had already played through a significant portion of the game (read: after I entered the SC).
Combat: Most random encounters are easy if the enemies EL isn't more than 2-4 levels over your party's (especially if you mod it to keep your buffs. Something that even IE games hat...). Could have used more magic using enemies. Bandits seemed to be the only ones with wizards. Map-locations/dungeons:
Very few had any merit in dungeon crawling but quite a few provided challenging fights. The last 3 locations were difficult and a few of the early ones if you stumbled upon the too soon. The mid game has the fewest tough locations but that probably depends on when you encounter them. My cohort usually commented on the location if he deemed them dangerous.
Otherwise it is still the atrocious NWN(2) combat, made barely acceptable by the inclusion of Tony_K's companionai mod(SoZ included some of the mod but left out significant parts so I had to include the full mod again). An auto-pause feature would have gone a long way to push the gameplay to at leas acceptable levels.
The game thoroughly polished would get a 73/100. The game on an engine that combined the strengths of ToEE and M&B would get an 82/100. The game polished with better story and better engine would get at least 92/100 from me.
But as it is it'd get a 62/100 (slightly better than FO3) and thus a solid "meh".
PS: @Annie: Is the end-fight bugged? Only one out of ten spells or hits actually hit the herald. And the dialogue box didn't mention "spell resisted" or "damage reduction absorbed all damage". Or was there simply too much stuff happening at the same time and I missed the relevant messages? Had to fight on easy after reloading several times because no matter what I did, I couldn't get the herald past "severely wounded" with half my party dead and mostly out of spells...
Would have been fun in a TB game, though.
