Me and a couple other goons picked this up and have been playing quite a bit the last couple days, mincing our way through the single player campaign.
Here are my impressions of it. I have seven hours into the game, according to steam, but a lot of that was dealing with glitches and whatnot so YMVV.
1. This is multiplayer in the same way that BG was multiplayer. Yes, you can let your friends join you, no, they have no bearing on anything except when you're fighting things. Any time there is a quest NPC, everyone gets teleported into the room so that the host can run the conversation. which is hilarious when you're trying desperately to do something else, and keep getting teleported to another area. Hilarious... for a while.
2. This goes along with #1: Any time anyone talks to an NPC, the game pauses and everyone gets to enjoy that conversation. Which is kind of meh until you get to Luskan and there are 15 shops and nobody gets anything done from that point on because every time somebody clicks on an NPC to check out their inventory, everyone has to stop whatever they're doing and wait for that conversation to be over. We looked for a way to turn this off, but I think that's just how their script works for NPCs. They didn't bother specifying WHICH player sees the conversation, they just said "show conversation." At least non-quest npcs don't teleport everyone or this would be unplayable.
3. There are quite a few little glitches. Not game breaking, and probably patched out in the next couple weeks, but there you are. The AI behaves strangely sometimes, and NPC follower pathfinding is pretty dreadful in dungeons. Hotbar abilities occasionally don't activate for no apparent reason, AOE spells sometimes don't aoe. We looked at the combat log trying to find out WHY that particular fireball didn't work, and there was no information to be found. It just didn't work. Sometimes I would click to open a chest (im the rogue) and the inventory of the chest would display on one of the other player's screens. I spent 20 minutes trying to figure out why the "Shade Elixir" in the guildhall in luskan wasn't showing up in my inventory only to find that every time i picked it up, it went into the host's inventory. He wasn't even in the same building as me. We just wrapped up the undead necromancer quest, and received his journal. This item grants a free ability point. It appeared in my inventory, I used it, it didn't do anything, so I clicked on it 10 or 12 times rapidly while sighing in frustration, only to suddenly get 12 ability points. Welp. Nobody else got the book, but I have a 24 Dex now so that's good.
4. The single player campaign is super bland. I'm not sure how anyone thought "From some of the guys that made Dragon Age: Origins" was some kind of glowing recommendation for story writing. If they used the editor though I can see why it has to be as bland as it is.
5. I have not played D&D next or whatever this is based on, but I'm guessing its LOOSELY based, because the equipment is goofy as all fuck. Lots of items with some minor magical effects and then at the bottom "Occasionally causes you to explode." That's an exaggeration, but only for the sake of driving the point home. I would say 80% of the crap we picked up had terrible downsides and weak bonuses, so it ended up being sold. Is the equipment randomly generated? If so, that's okay I guess. If not, then... well that's not how I would have done it. Lots of +1 Armor with no other stats other than "+1 leather." Leather what? What is the AC bonus of that armor? Is it just ac 1? No further information. I got a green "+1 leather" and a blue "+1 leather" and as far as I can tell they are identical. We thought for a while maybe you had to identify some stuff but after playing for 7 hours, im pretty sure its just broken.
6. I haven't messed with the editor yet, but if you can't create your own maps then this whole thing is just a waste of everyone's time. (I just went and messed around and as far as I can tell you cannot.)
7. The character creator is what you would get from a year 2000 MMO, face sliders and that's about it. Hope you like level locked skill trees because that's what you're getting. I wonder how much of this was done before they were able to get the D&D IP. The voices you can choose from for your character are about what you expect them to be by the time you get to that step during character creation.
8. One good point: We didn't experience any problems with lag or net drops or anything, though loading did occasionally take a very long time and once we got a black screen that didn't go away and we had to force close it and restart. Once we were in the game though, it ran fine.
Yeah, so this feels like a game shopped out to the lowest bidder who could get it done in the quickest time. It isn't terrible but it's shallow as fuck. I wouldn't recommend it. Multiplayer was bolted on...poorly. The editor seems to be useless, I would rather use the Aurora toolset any time. The whole thing is the epitome of "uninspired."
I give it 4 out of 10 penis shaped eggplant imojis.
