It's alright a few hours in, but I can already tell its not really going to give me what I want either. I just don't care about the setting in the same way, which is always the pitfall of BG FR spiritual successors for me.
They certainly have a much stronger class list going though, that's for sure. The amount of time it took me just to create a generic dry run fighter was almost comical. (I'd like to dry run a rogue instead, but the cloak and hood clips constantly whenever the avatar moves, and I couldn't find a way to turn off the hooded appearance. If one even exists?)
Pathfinder and D&D generally front load so many character design decisions, that I really wish they could figure out an entertaining way to introduce these games in a module from lvl 0-lvl 1 pre-class that was actually entertaining.
I feel like these games always suck at teaching someone how to play dungeons and dragons on a very basic mechanical level, before they just starting throwing a gang of consequential choices at people. Like I know what to do, cause I've been playing these games for decades now, but I can easily see how someone new to a D&D crpg might struggle, even if they are not necessarily new to RPGs.
I guess I'm glad it exists, something to do, but I still prefer the Realms. I wish this one had some of the basic stuff that Pathfinder provides though. WotR feels a lot more like the old BG games in how it's structured overall, even if I'm not totally satisfied there either, obviously lol
I will say I was definitely impressed with the portrait spread. There are just shy of 30 new ones and about 50 old ones, so altogether like 80 2d portraits with the base game. That's pretty solid and on a level with IWD. I think some of the character portrait designs are rather too specific, especially the large size full portrait. Most have a very prominent weapon, or class specific thing going on, like with a musical instrument etc that makes the large portraits rather less adaptable for different characters than the small size headshots. I almost wish they didn't even include a full size char portrait in that menu, but just kept things tight on the head/bust, so the portrait wouldn't overshadow the char build too much. But it's cool to just see a game with a 2d spread pushing 80 portrait concepts these days. In a fairly consistent style too. There were quite a few portraits in there that I definitely liked, more than I expected anyway. So tip of the hat there
Choice of major and minor colors initially was well handled. I liked how they approached the color swatch palettes there. The UI element I mean, making it look like a watercolor wash or something, that was a nice touch. I couldn't access it afterwards from the char sheet, but maybe I just wasn't looking hard enough?
The paperdoll avatar in the char creator looks pretty thick to me. Like the boxing in place figure that appears during char creation that you're stuck looking at until you advance half way through the process. Maybe I missed a phenotype field or something? I wish they'd put the look first, and the class and background stuff later lol. It's really more in the class outfit styles than the figures themselves. I guess there aren't many times where you see the character in that view, but since it's the first thing up I wish it looked a little cooler. Probably the avatar shouldn't appear until you get to the point where you are customizing the look. I like that it feels structured in a sequence, just not sure I like the exact sequence they chose haha.
