Tabulated Rasa

I've spent 4-5 hours on this game now, though I haven't really started the main quest. These are my first impressions in roughly the order that I came across them. The graphics are quite good. I particularly enjoy the view distance, as it allows you to sit on a ridge line and see distant castles and mountains. It's much better than the fog out of which everything appeared in Morrowind, even if details are lost in the distance. I'm using an Athlon 3000+ with 1GB of RAM and a GEForce 6200, with many of the visual options reduced, but the game still looks far superior to Morrowind, in my opinion. The framerates are good enough for me at 800x600. The options for creating the visual appearance of your character's face are detailed, almost to the point of absurdity. I'm certain that there must be over a hundred slider bars and options in cusomizing the appearance of your character. It's certainly a far cry from Morrowind's ugly faces. The options for character creation are a slightly simplified version of the system used by Morrowind. There are fewer skills, and their progress is lumped into "apprentice 0-25," "journeyman 25-50" and the like (yes, my exact skill point values are probably off, for the extremely nitpicky folks among you). Other than that, it's almost identical. The dialog system is much improved from Morrowind in that it went back to Baldur's Gate-style canned responses. There is a persuasion mini-game as well, which; though I appreciate Bethesda's effort in attempting to make dialog more entertaining, fun, and realistic; frankly sucks. The gameplay itself is almost identical to that of Morrowind. That means that the combat is relatively boring and leaves little to strategy. Sneaking and stealing are more exciting and fun in both Morrowind and Oblivion than is fighting. Innovations include the ability to cast spells without having to raise one's hands in advance and the ability to manually block using the right mouse button to raise a shield or put a weapon in defensive position. The innovations are a marginal improvement, but it's still basically the same as Morrowind in the basic gameplay. Quests seem to be more slightly more creative or more cleverly disguised fed-exers. SPOILER -- In one quest, I was sent by invisible people to find an invisible wizard, get the reversal spell and cast it in the center of town. There was some fun dialog and the added challenge of having to track down the invisible man to fetch something and bring it back to other invisible men. -- All in all, my first impression is that it is Morrowind with better graphics, better dialog (except for that insipid speechcraft mini-game), and better quests. If you liked Morrowind, you'll probably love this game. If you hated Morrowind, you will probably not like this game. If you thought Morrowind was alright, but dialog or boring quests were the primary things that kept you from enjoying the game, then I would certainly recommend giving this one a try. If you haven't played Morrowind, but you like other RPGs, I'd recommend giving this a try, based on what I've seen thus far.

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The game was actually significantly more polished than I would have expected a new game company with such a short development cycle to be able to accomplish. If I recall correctly, three of Obsidian's ex-Black Isle founders (Feargus Urquhart, Chris Parker, Darren Monahan) are producer-types, however, so I expect them to stick to their project management guns to allow time for QA and produce a Neverwinter 2 that is significantly more stout than their initial foray into the gaming market.

I played it a bit in the first game to see whether it led to any interesting interacations, and to earn some extra dough. However, it didn't really lead to any interesting interactions, and I really didn't need the extra dough, so I really didn't have the patience for it in the second. As long as it's optional, I don't care if it's in a future game. I just likely won't play it if it is.

Now, I've always thought highly of Chris Avellone's work in Planescape: Torment, Knights of the Old Republic 2, in the Targos area of Icewind Dale 2, etc. I also suspect that I may be missing some backstory behind his relationship with NMA that would help put some of his responses to them in context. However, I simply find it ironic that just a few months after threatening to close its board due to negativity, an Obsidian founder makes a public response to an interview that would likely have resulted in censor and censure had it been posted by a fan on his own company's boards.