Tendo City

Yeah, I picked it up. As the latest Interplay-style (Bioware/Obsidian) RPG it was one of the top games on my list to get for my new PC, and I have it now. :)

Initial impressions, positive and negative:

+:
-Fantastic graphics (it looks really nice, and there's great art direction too...)

-Great writing, I can already tell. I'd expect this, coming from Obsidian. They've got some of the best writers in the industry...

-Plot with real choices (good/neutral/evil, mostly)
-party-based with full control over all party members (unlike NWN1)

-Pausable real-time with full control while paused (so unlike KotOR you can give movement orders and stuff while paused, as you could in any decent D&D RPG)
-Despite some simplified elements like the automation, it IS a D&D PC RPG, so there is no stupid attack queue (which requires you to either leave it to the automation or spend all of your time queueing up power attacks and stuff, so annoying)

-:
-High technical requirements... this requires a pretty powerful computer to look good.

-Annoying camera -- you have to keep moving it around and it never just feels "right" like the 2d isometric BG camera did

-No auto-pause options that I can find -- a major omission! It's part of the current theme in games... dumb them down, make them easy for average person to play without thinking, don't put in all of the features that the hardcore users want, and it's really too bad... so no auto-pausing that I can find.

-By default a wide variety of automation features are on so your party will pretty much fight all on their own... you need to disable a whole list of stuff in each character before you actually get control of them (it's not just hitting a "party AI off" button like Baldur's Gate, and the automation options are more extensive -- it can even automate spell use now). It's like they spent their time on that instead of the autopause options, unless I missed something... (the same goes for character creation, where you can use premade characters or templates to mostly avoid character creation, which is one of the most important and interesting parts of any PC RPG -- and they have a great, extensive system here!) anyway, it's not something I want to ever use.
-You can't go into all of the houses in the first town! What the heck? This is a BG-style PC RPG, right? Why can't I go into all of the houses? At least say "the door is locked and you don't have enough lockpicking skill yet" or something. But no, they didn't even do that. That's so stupid... :bummed:

-No Quicksave! What the heck? That's an extremely important function... and I don't see an autosave either... ah, I hope I'm just missing something.

-And last, but most importantly, I REALLY HATE POINT-BUY! I don't know why anyone ever thought that it was a good idea, but I hate it so, so much... point buy stinks. Awful system. I want to use good old dice rolls to set my character stats! Point buy gives you far less points... I mean, base of 8 plus 32, and getting more points takes more? It stinks. That's eight points short of where Aerie fell in BGII, and she was one of the worse characters in the team stats-wise... I know there are some items that can help there, but still. Point buy is horrible and being forced to use it is really annoying.

It's really quite good. The problems are more in the "annoyances" category than the "actual major problem" category...

I have to say I've never liked dice rolls to determine initial stats. The whole thing just seemed like I had a lack of control right from the start. I don't want to randomly get the sucky guy. Yeah, I know you can "reroll" over and over again until you get some sort of max, but seriously, if you are going to do that, why not just GIVE yourself that max, since you know you aren't going to give up until you get that roll anyway? It's just tedious busy work one way, and it's randomly screw you over the other way. No thanks. A fixed starting point "pool" you apply to your stats is nothing but an improvement if you ask me. Maybe they could adjust the pool higher or lower (in this case you seem to be saying it's too low) but seriously, randomness being the determinging factor never sat well with me.

I suppose giving you the OPTION couldn't hurt, in single player.

A Black Falcon Wrote:-And last, but most importantly, I REALLY HATE POINT-BUY! I don't know why anyone ever thought that it was a good idea, but I hate it so, so much... point buy stinks. Awful system. I want to use good old dice rolls to set my character stats! Point buy gives you far less points... I mean, base of 8 plus 32, and getting more points takes more? It stinks. That's eight points short of where Aerie fell in BGII, and she was one of the worse characters in the team stats-wise... I know there are some items that can help there, but still. Point buy is horrible and being forced to use it is really annoying.

You can't really fault NWN2 for this though. Blame D&D 3rd Edition. Also, I like point buy. Saves me time that I would of spent re-rolling over and over.

Well, the one time I actually played real D&D (year before last, if I remember right) we did D&D 3.5 (just like this game) and used standard die rolls for character generation because we all agreed that we didn't like point buy much, but whatever... if the rules technically say that you cannot do that, I guess that they didn't have a choice, sadly... :(

Quote:Also, I like point buy. Saves me time that I would of spent re-rolling over and over.

But you get so many fewer points than any decent die-roll will!

So... you're a powergamer? ;)

No, I don't think I'm too good at that... I'd rather have the option open if I could figure out how to do it though... :D