octavius said:
I can't even imagine playing it real time, but the RTwP certainly grew on me after my initial dislike of it.
This. My initial reaction when I played my first (and so far, the only one I completed) Infinity Engine game (Icewind Dale) was "what the hell is this?" Especially after hearing how much these games were talked up, it was a real disappointment. The fights were clunky, chaotic, and didn't seem interesting at all. A lot of this changed when I actually understood that the system works by going through turns, so character actions other than movement aren't instantaneous, and the battle animations don't really show you what's happening in the game (I think), but are there to "look cool".
After a while I got used to it, and the combat engine is pretty decent, though not great. I remember having a lot of fun in IWD. The combat in BG so far isn't as fun, but part of that is fighting tons of trash mobs in the wilderness, and part of that is that I don't have any true wizards, just Garrick and Jaheira so far (pure fighter tactics are somewhat...boring). Really can't wait to duel Imoen or find a pure Wizard.
LoPan said:
It was between the neutral couple from the Friendly Arm (Khalid and whatever her name was, Jaheira?) and the two evil fellows (Montaron and Xzar). The evil fellows were butchered and I felt I was more than in a that point.
Hah, I missed those two completely, and only realized that by looking at GameFaqs. That didn't really bother me, but one thing that did was that I also found out that there were several nondescript houses in Beregost that I had overlooked, because their doors weren't viewable as a result of the angle (meaning, you couldn't see the doors at all, but if you placed the mouse cursor over the roof, it gave you the symbol showing one was there). I wouldn't have minded this if these two houses were just filler, but one was for a recruitable NPC (OK, I didn't keep him, but still), and the other would let me finish a quest. That's bad design right there.
This is compounded by the fact that so many houses are filler houses, with nothing really interesting inside. So, going through towns (well, at least Beregost) has been pretty annoying. I might just check out maps for each one.
Still, enjoying it a little more now. It took me a little while to switch gears from the urgency of the beginning to the "wander around moving stuff for people" part (well, OK, the beginning had that too). And I wish they tied the monsters to the game world a bit more so they felt like they had more of a purpose, rather than just lots of random things to kill (what the hell is a gibberling and why is it trying to kill me? what the hell are any of these?). We'll see how it goes.