Well, yesterday one shop had the game just in. The guy smugly informed me that he usually releases games 2 or 3 days before the official release date. He gets them through a sub distributor so isn't bound to official release dates. Dodgy story, but what the heck, I got bioshock and total war kingdoms early as well. So I ain't complaining.
The collectors edition looked rather cool and it was only 20 euro extra, so I bought it. It's a nice big black box with the soundtrack, a map, a making of dvd and a real cool artbook. My girlfriend laughed her ass off at the erotica section, but overall the book is great and a good reason to get the collectors edition. The box also has a cool slogan. "There is no good and evil. Only choices and consequences" It brought a smile to my face.
The game starts out with a long and great looking intro. It's one of the short stories from the books that they recreated. It really sets the mood and is easily as good as Blizzards stuff. After that you start with a prologue that allready offers a fun choice. You can decide to help a fight with a big bad monster or help to protect a labarotory. The prologue was for me quite a lot of fun to play through. Plenty of action, great looking area and short enough not to be annoying.
Graphics look great, really great. I'm amazed what they did with the aurora engine. Music is at least in the prologue area quite good. A bit better than the standard fantasy fare. Sound effects are nice. The hacking and slashing looks and sounds rather meaty. Dialogues are okayish. Not as bad as I expected, but sometimes a bit stilted. There has been said enough about the combat system. It plays rather good, though I can imagine it getting a bit boring after awhile. Combat itself looks great, with nasty finishing moves and cool looking combo's.
The alchemy system looks like fun and actually usefull. With potions giving effects for severall game hours and also increasing a poison stat. Take too many potions and you get negative traits (stat decreases and the like) od on them and you die. Magic is easy to use, and through the character system you can upgrade the different signs (spells) you have. I like it.
The character system looks rather more involving than I expected. There are plenty of traits and stats to increase. It's fun to learn new moves and abilities. The screen is rather cluttered though, and I still haven't figured it all out. Not the easiest to pick up, but plenty of options to tinker around with.
The inventory has some nice touches. The different weapon and grenade slots on the armour are a cool idea and it looks neat. For me it's something I always wanted to see in a game. The inventory items in the satchel are quite small though. You have to hover over an item to be able to know what it is.
Overall it's a bit too early to have a defenite opinion. But what I've seen so far has been pretty good. I'm pretty stoked about the fact that there seem to be plenty of meaningfull choices. The gameplay has been cool as well, and the combat so far has been rather refreshing and fun. I'm not far enough in the game to see how well the game proceeds and what quests there will be. So far I'm enjoying myself immensely though. Even more than with NWN 2 MOTB, but that's probably because the controlls and camera are much better and intuitive. Wether it will be a better rpg remains to be seen, but it's been a long time ago that I had any positive feelings about the rpg genre.
Sorry for the horrible english and rambling sentences. I'm hungover as hell.
), so not much time for playing games. 
