Finished the game a few hours ago. 106 hours of playtime in one walkthrough. One hundred and fucking six hours. What a ride! I don't remember when did I play more than a hundred hours with one game. And this game deserved this 106 hours, because it is truly one of the best RPGs in the last decade, even if it has some problems. Final thoughts, this being the Codex, lets start with cons:
- ridiculously stupid rock-paper-sciccors minigame in the conversations, which is based on pure luck, and actually can lock you out of quests. Contender for worst feature ever in a videogame award
- loot system. In the second half of the game, you get trash loot after trash loot after trash loot, until finally you find a good weapon/armor.
- broken economy, you can sell all of that trash loot, and walk around with more than 100K gold, which you can't spend. Sometimes you find a merchant who sells decent equipment or secret maps, where you can spend money, but you will still have no money problems. A few hours in the game, and you are already rich.
- some badly designed puzzles, where you a) have to look for miniature switches b) the solution is entirely unintuitive, mainly trial and error c) the puzzles are random, which can lead to frustration, boredeom (I'm looking at you, final Bellegar puzzle, with the cat/dog/rat)
- overly long animations, which are a chore to watch for the n-th time in fights
- annoyence over not being able to select my guys in a regular way (think the IE games), but had to use this stupid chain system. Do you want to move your heroes seperately? Unchain tham one by one. Oh, now you want to mover as a team? Chain the fuckers together!
- lack of crafting menu, this drag and drop system, with the lack of a decent recipe list is so amateur
- large sways in idle animations of enemies, which can cause you to misclick and move your hero instead of attack
These might sound much, but overall just minor annoyance, because:
- the game has a very well done turn based combat system, lots of tactical options, you can use the elements to your adventage, you can flank, knock down, cripple, etc, so lots of status effect to play with. The character system is also quite good.
- the AI is fairly competent, with some minor hicups
- unique musical score, although some music didn't fit the situation/location
- great magical effects, although the visuals overall are nice, they are nothing special. But the magical effects are very well done. You can feel the " weight"of a fireball, it is nice to see how the magican conjures this raw power and lets it fly.
- long playtime on different locations, it doesn't get boring even after 100 hours
Finally, some issues which I was meh, about (not good, but not bad either)
- story, I wasn't interested in it, just another "Choosen one saves the world" flare, but I think the writing was OK in its sometimes silly way
- NPCs are nothing special
- some UI issues,
- difficulty is nonexistent in the last part of the game, this might be a huge negative for some people, but I felt I earned it in the game, I had some very though fights in the first half of DOS. Also I liked that I could try out a lots of tactics and skills, because I wasn't in a big danger.
- there were quite a few abilites which became useless fairly quickly
- I favour hexes in TB games, instead of this free form movement system in battles. This gave my some annoying moments, when I couldn't line up my rogue for backstab, because it was hard to pinpoint the exact location where I have to move. Hexes are much more cleaner. Think Blackguards. Also, it is frustrating to see that the target is 0,1m too far for you to target it. But if you move 0,1m, sometimes it is enough to lose an action point, and you can't attack. Fuck this.
So that's that, Larian's best work to date, which they can be damn proud of.
