I wanted to give my final impressions of this mod since I've played most of it and have come to some new and not so nearly rosey conclusions.
Don't bother with it.
At first, as I mentioned in my earlier post ITT, one gets a pretty warm-and-fuzzy from KotB. Quality seemed to be fairly high for a community-designed mod, there were some interesting and original adventure areas, and I was really looking forward to seeing the infamous Caves of Chaos for the first time in a computer adaptation. I've always been a sucker for that kind of thing. But shortly after experiencing the relative high from these positives, so many more negatives came into play. For example, while the courtyard and most of the areas of the Keep itself were drawn with relative care, the fortress portion is comedically bad. It looks almost as if a child drew the art for it, and it even looks incomplete in areas. Other areas in the wilderness one starts to uncover are almost as bad. Not only are their visuals quite uncertain but their design is sometimes equally baffling. One location in particular where some bandits are supposed to be hiding out tries to make some clever use of your new rope and climbing skills but instead devolves into a frustrating exercise in "where in the fuck am I suppose to click to climb?" You can't progress on the map at all until you locate the magic zones that allow your rope-trained character and his party to *poof!* somehow use the rope to teleport a few feet away. Dumb.
It gets worse. The writing continues on its one-way collision course with some kind of horrid teenage fanfic, the completely out-of-place references to modern concepts and phrases continually pummeling your precious D&D mood. There are also some severe balancing issues in the mod as well. One NPC the party can convince to join up possesses two matching bastard swords that she conveniently dual-wields with ease at merely 2nd level (!) and each is enchanted with a +4 dweomer. Wow. She can be a deadly Ginsu killing machine if one chooses to enter the goblin caves and turn her loose on the 40+ juicy little buggers in there like I did. She already somehow has Cleave, Exotic Weapon Proficiency (Bastard Sword), Power Attack, Two-Weapon Fighting, Two-Weapon Defense and Combat Reflexes, again, all of this at 2nd level. Wonder how they managed that.
Speaking of the Caves, they're disappointing as well. First of all, they're not actually complete (yet). The orc portions of them are as of now completely empty. Not as in the orcs are out hunting or just all gone to a rave somewhere downtown -- they're just devoid of content apparently by design until such time as Co8 decides to continue writing (poorly) more and fills them in. I'm sorry, but I'm pretty sure the orcs play a fairly important role in the original module and to leave their areas unpopulated while still calling this the Keep on the Borderlands is pretty shitty. We are not amused. The artwork here is also fairly poor and looks like it was just plain rushed. Co8 obviously blew their wad(s) on the beginning areas of the game then apparently just ran out of steam toward the end. Seven years for this, guys?
So while I am not regretful for downloading this and putting some time into it, I won't be finishing it. Lots and lots of bugs still (although a new patch has just been released that fixes a few of them but requires a completely fresh start of the game), major quality inconsistencies, extraordinarily immature and often just goofy writing style and the ultimate sin of not actually delivering on the goods of what should have been the money shot with the Caves themselves all force me to abort at this point. I suppose if all the artwork were gone over by someone who knew their way around a Wacom tablet a little more than how to turn it on and off and if the dialog were all emptied into the Recycle Bin then emptied again then emptied a third time just to be sure and then redone by someone who actually has an appreciation for what standards Greyhawk should represent then I might consider giving this another try some day.
Until then I wash my mind of its memories and replace them with the good ones from when I was a kid and wondered what it would actually have been like to play Keep on the Borderlands rather than just read it for the 100th time. I guess some things are better off just staying that way.
