Anyone's interested/has bought this baby?
So... I gave in, bought the game yesterday, and installed.
You know what? I haven't played a decent RPG for a long, long time, digging up old things not counting. NWN? Yikes. Dungeon Siege? Don't get me started. ToEE? Nice for the first few hours when the combat was still fresh, but in the end, a bugfest, cold turkey. Despite the applause KotOR has been receiving, I'm therefore quite leery.
I'm very pleasantly surprised.
The graphics are lovely, and there is a real atmosphere; "immersive" would be the best description. Despite the fact that my graphic card is a not-so-good GeForce 5200 FX, the game runs like a dream with high quality texture and graphical options (anti-aliasing, etc) set to 2X. Things like shadows and grass stay on. Unfortunately, turning it all the way up (8X) causes a mild lag. Eh, I can live with it. The melee combat animations make for the height of cool.
Most of the dialogue -- if not all -- is voice-acted, and the voice-actors are doing a fair job. There are tones, and the dialogue itself, while not yet awe-inspiring, is reasonably well-written. After the literary travesty in ToEE, well, almost anything is better. Save for, perhaps, See Spot Run or The English Roses. The characters -- even the most minor, nameless NPCs -- are given life, as opposed to just being another cardboard model with all the emotional and character depth of a very small, very shallow puddle.
The controls are a bit jerky. My characters sometimes bump into each other and, as another player's put it, "charge into walls." Right-click menus are absent. XBox transition is fairly obvious, but it's still nothing to tar and feather. I'm getting used to it. Gameplay -- well, it's using d20 rules, an adapted version of D&D, so the learning curve isn't too bad for me.
I'm exploring the first planet, and having a lot of fun. I'll report further progress; I have quite high hopes, and with luck, this won't turn out to be like Lionheart (whose first half is divine, but the second... not so good).
What do you think?
