I've finally completed this. It's great. Yes, the round-robin initiative system is annoying at first, but it stops being a big deal after the first area. Didn't mind the armor system or item treadmill at all. Some powergamers suggest going all-in on either physical or magic damage, but I rolled with a hybrid party and made it through just fine.
Boris may not be a Kiril clone, but he made some fine tracks. I heavily suspect The Kid LAORI's guitarist was inspired by
Lohse's theme when he wrote the melody for
Without You. I never got tired of the heroic leitmotif that would kick in on the cello (the best instrument choice) whenever I killed the first enemy in a battle.
As for the writing, I didn't dislike it. Sure, Fort Joy lacks verisimilitude, but it has a lot of quality role playing. The companions I rolled with (Lohse, Ifan, Beast) were all entertaining, though I don't see the appeal of ever using The Red Prince and Ifan except to explore their content (fortunately they don't even try to impose themselves on you). It was an interesting decision to make the "good" factions just as evil as the "bad" factions; I ultimately went with giving everyone Sauce because Lucian and Dhallis's lack of remorse over their actions disgusted me.
I spent over 130 hours on it and feel that it had a similar pacing problem that Pillars of Eternity did; when I was ready for the plot to wrap up, it dumped another big city with a bunch of stuff to do on me. The content there wasn't bad, but it was exhausting, and I was amused to see that the Definitive Edition added another eight battles to that area (apparently enough people's problem with it is that it didn't have *enough* content????). I thought it was reasonably demanding from start to finish playing on Classic.
With the benefit of hindsight, I noticed that the final conversation with Tarquin hinted at Baldur's Gate 3
With my bandwidth problems resolved I should be able to get around to that much sooner than it took me to get around to playing this, though not until it's been thoroughly patched of course. I'm expecting another high quality role-playing game.
Is there gay propaganda in every game now? Ifan just tried to boink me in the ass without me ever hinting that I wanted his crossbow shoved deep in my turd factory.
So what gives you belgian cock suckers,you want everyone to smoke the pipe:selfhate:
Revisiting this, I didn't get any dialogue like this at all, but I didn't choose obviously gay dialogue options like *give Ifan a drink of water from your pack* like seriously man.