Finished - 16/08/04 11:36 AM
Well I finished the game this past weekend. I have to say I am glad it is over. I know most of my thoughts will not set well here, but I have to be honest. Just remember these are my opinions about a game I had thought would be at least as awesome as Divine Divinity was.
The Good:
Very nice voices (when they worked).
The music was good enough that I did not see a real need to use alternate music.
Nice Graphics.
Great backgrounds.
Loved the story, but quickly became bored do to ease which killed most of the story for me.
Nice quests (except the battlefields).
I loved the way they worked the puzzles into the game.
After game battlefields. I would never play them, but I can see them as being good for many people.
The Bad:
Playing at its default level (normal or whatever word they used) this was an incredibly easy game with only one challenging fight in the entire game. For those interested it was the first fight with multiple skeleton mages.
The real game was way to short. Had I not played the in game battlefields I would have finished it in a few days.
The in game battlefields. They have nothing to do with the game other then masking the shortness of the real game.
Instant kill traps. No one likes these so why do some game makers insist on adding them?
Battlefield quests were very bad to say the least. Actually they could have been dealt with differently and then made the good column (see sugestions).
The Ugly:
Battlefield exits. Random is of course going to be blamed for this, but there is nothing random about the dungeon layouts. The game is picking from x number of predetermined layouts. Maybe the exits could be predetermined to be somewhere we could find?
Voice problems. Many times part way through a conversation the voices would die and I would have to start reading. Since part of the conversation was voice I know it was not one of those I should have had to read.
Picklock. It does not work. Need I say more?
Massive game ending bugs. Many people do not even get to finish these game do to its bugs. I know one person having these problems, and even tech support has not solved her problems. After dealing with this for a couple of weeks she gave up, and will never bother again.
Suggestions:
In my humble opinion I believe the following could have made this a great game.
Remove the ingame battlefields, or at least scale the difficulty of the game based on the assumption that people will play them.
It would be to obvious to say fix the bugs, but...... Fix the bugs.
Use set battlefield dungeons vs. quests. By that I mean if you have to have 4 battlefield merchants, and they all have quests. Then make each one always give a quest for dungeon number x. That way every dungeon has a quest at the end every time. So five merchants means 5 dungeons every act, and every after game battlefield.
Add more acts whether the battlefields exist or not. The story is way to short, and expecting players to play the battlefields is not fair.
Anyway I think that sums up my thoughts for the good, the bad, or the ugly.
The Good:
Very nice voices (when they worked).
The music was good enough that I did not see a real need to use alternate music.
Nice Graphics.
Great backgrounds.
Loved the story, but quickly became bored do to ease which killed most of the story for me.
Nice quests (except the battlefields).
I loved the way they worked the puzzles into the game.
After game battlefields. I would never play them, but I can see them as being good for many people.
The Bad:
Playing at its default level (normal or whatever word they used) this was an incredibly easy game with only one challenging fight in the entire game. For those interested it was the first fight with multiple skeleton mages.
The real game was way to short. Had I not played the in game battlefields I would have finished it in a few days.
The in game battlefields. They have nothing to do with the game other then masking the shortness of the real game.
Instant kill traps. No one likes these so why do some game makers insist on adding them?
Battlefield quests were very bad to say the least. Actually they could have been dealt with differently and then made the good column (see sugestions).
The Ugly:
Battlefield exits. Random is of course going to be blamed for this, but there is nothing random about the dungeon layouts. The game is picking from x number of predetermined layouts. Maybe the exits could be predetermined to be somewhere we could find?
Voice problems. Many times part way through a conversation the voices would die and I would have to start reading. Since part of the conversation was voice I know it was not one of those I should have had to read.
Picklock. It does not work. Need I say more?
Massive game ending bugs. Many people do not even get to finish these game do to its bugs. I know one person having these problems, and even tech support has not solved her problems. After dealing with this for a couple of weeks she gave up, and will never bother again.
Suggestions:
In my humble opinion I believe the following could have made this a great game.
Remove the ingame battlefields, or at least scale the difficulty of the game based on the assumption that people will play them.
It would be to obvious to say fix the bugs, but...... Fix the bugs.
Use set battlefield dungeons vs. quests. By that I mean if you have to have 4 battlefield merchants, and they all have quests. Then make each one always give a quest for dungeon number x. That way every dungeon has a quest at the end every time. So five merchants means 5 dungeons every act, and every after game battlefield.
Add more acts whether the battlefields exist or not. The story is way to short, and expecting players to play the battlefields is not fair.
Anyway I think that sums up my thoughts for the good, the bad, or the ugly.