20th August 2004, 1:13 PM
As I said, the things I mentioned are mostly things that people without experience in INterplay-style PC RPGs would never notice, and some of them are also PC-specific... but for most of them you either have to have a lot of experience with previous Bioware/Black Isle RPGs or really look for the issues. :)
I will expand on one thing that is probably in the X-Box version too. Combat movement and targetting. So, you are running around (in an open area, not one with lots of doors -- that is different). You sight an enemy around the corner. The game auto-pauses. Now, your first instinct would be to target the enemy, right? Then to press the button or click the portrait and switch to your next character and do the same for them. But a lot of the time in this game it doesn't work that way. The other two people might fall a bit behind and instead you'd have to switch to them, unpause (because you can't order movement-to-point commands while paused like you can in Infinity games), move the other (two) people into position (as quickly as you can, so that your main character doesn't get hurt much -- unless you unpaused and turned and ran with your main character to regroup, which also certainly is an option), and then give them their commands. Or let the CPU do it all for them but I consider that a unacceptable option. This isn't a huge problem, it's just a bit annoying and slows down the game. But I don't see how this could be fully avoided from this perspective -- in a 3d game you can't be giving people attack commands on enemies they can't see, after all, like you can in a topdown one!
If you play the game you should see what I mean. Though without a game to compare it to, like BGII, it's probably a lot harder to really get what I mean...
I will expand on one thing that is probably in the X-Box version too. Combat movement and targetting. So, you are running around (in an open area, not one with lots of doors -- that is different). You sight an enemy around the corner. The game auto-pauses. Now, your first instinct would be to target the enemy, right? Then to press the button or click the portrait and switch to your next character and do the same for them. But a lot of the time in this game it doesn't work that way. The other two people might fall a bit behind and instead you'd have to switch to them, unpause (because you can't order movement-to-point commands while paused like you can in Infinity games), move the other (two) people into position (as quickly as you can, so that your main character doesn't get hurt much -- unless you unpaused and turned and ran with your main character to regroup, which also certainly is an option), and then give them their commands. Or let the CPU do it all for them but I consider that a unacceptable option. This isn't a huge problem, it's just a bit annoying and slows down the game. But I don't see how this could be fully avoided from this perspective -- in a 3d game you can't be giving people attack commands on enemies they can't see, after all, like you can in a topdown one!
If you play the game you should see what I mean. Though without a game to compare it to, like BGII, it's probably a lot harder to really get what I mean...