Solaris said:
Sounds fuckin great. Thanks for those first impressions. Can't wait til friday.
So the gameplay sounds great, but as above- how does the game stand up from a technical point of view?....bugs and performance issues (on what was a mid- high end rig) pretty much wrecked NWN2 OC for me til they patched things up somewhat....I guess its improved or you guys would have said, but want to make sure....once bitten twice shy, as they say.
Also, I take it this is more text based dialogue than the sometimes cutscene heavy voiceover stuff of the OC/MotB? , apart from the bit on the boat at the beginning.
Technical: I'm not that knowledgeable technical-wise, but here's my 2cents. I'm playing on my laptop (3GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 9500 M GS, Dual Core 2.1GHz processors) It seems like there was a lot actually invested in QA & Testing this time. The graphics look great, sound is beautiful, and I've encountered almost no graphics lag. The only graphics bug I've noticed is, on occasion there will be a "graphics chug" on the overworld map. Example: I move my character North and the graphics will "skip," showing my character there, and then will go back to where he was and show the animation of him walking north. It happens very rarely, but it does happen. Otherwise, everything looks great, works fine and makes the game enjoyable. As of now, I have not encountered one CTD or any other type of game-destroying errors.
The only major in-game bugs I've noticed so far have to do with my party leader's familiar (who for whatever reason, won't follow when you put him on follow mode). In addition, though I haven't had much time to confirm this fully yet, the hp bonus from the beetle familiar appears to affect the entire party (my party leader was a wizard), not just the master as it should.
Dialogue: You are correct, in that there are very few cutscenes; most of the dialogue is text-based. However, the dialogue is very good, and most major characters (even the merchants) have their opening lines voiced. The most important npcs have almost
all their lines voiced. This allows the player to take full advantage of the party-chat system, which is implemented well. The small checks you can make in npc conversations (via bluff, diplomacy, etc.) actually do change the tone of the dialogue. So far, the outcomes have been more or less the same (unless you deliberately try and provoke combat) but that hasn't hurt my perception of the game thus far.
Overall, I'm very happy that I purchased SoZ the second Direct2Drive put it up online. I've been enjoying it ever since...to the detriment of the end-of-term paper that I have to write
