My Review of Deadfire

[saltynoodles]

I'll start with dislikes, then move on to what I liked. 

DISLIKES:

At times, the writing felt like good fan fiction rather than a professional production. Especially during the storybook sections which were overdramatic. 

The flavor text felt insubstantial. I didn't care about Furrante's dimple, even though I liked him. What he says and the way he says it define him perfectly as a character.

The main story was OK. 

I'm a bit tired of the Eoran Gods. And the first new NPC you meet is religious-themed. It was a novel idea in the first game but feels played out.

The adult-themed content seemed awkward/forced. 

Romances are hard to do right in any game. Almost none do it well so I won't hold it against Deadfire. The best romantic moment in gaming for me is the "phone call" in Disco Elysium. Nothing in Deadfire is at that level, but there is a nice moment when you ask Eder how he feels.

Load times. SSD helps but not enough. I saw Josh Sawyer talk about optimization in his post-mortem talk and appreciate that they worked on it, but could still be better.

Stacking rules: why don't weapon modals stack? And others like Paladin aura? My preference is that everything should stack. Design around that rule.

Not in love with afflictions / inspirations. Wish at least they used terms like "Mild Perception Affliction" instead of the word names which are difficult to remember. Even after finishing the game, I couldn't recite every affliction / inspiration to you from memory. Though it's possible that my memory is worse than average. Thankfully there is an interface mod that adds color coding and suffixes.

Leveling up: I don't like that accuracy and defenses automatically increase by a set amount each level up. It removes an element of player choice. You should get stronger by the abilities/perks you pick, your gear, improved game knowledge. Even letting the player increase an attribute by one point each level would be better, because you get to choose how to improve.

Deadfire's level up system automatically makes a higher level character stronger than a lower level character, without taking into account the specific situation. It would be more fun, realistic, and allow for more player agency if a level 2 character could beat a level 10 character (say a level 2 fighter is dueling a level 10 diplomat who has invested in purely non-combat skills).

Difficulty: I played on POTD with "all" upscaling and felt that the game was hardest in the beginning and gradually got easier. Maybe the first few battles were almost a little too hard, but I can't complain as it's the hardest difficulty. But doesn't it make more sense for a game to start easier and get harder instead of the opposite?

The best way to increase difficulty is smarter AI. Something like SCS (Sword Coast Strategems) for BG and BG2. But I understand that may not be realistic for developers to implement as you'd have to bug-test multiple AI scripts, and it can tank performance.

The second-best way is by using different enemies. Deadfire does this somewhat by offering harder versions of enemies in some fights.

The third-best way is to increase the number of enemies. Deadfire does this a lot. 

The worst way is global bonuses like increased HP, armor, or dice roll bonuses. This is a staple of POTD, unfortunately. 

I haven't tried Magran's Fires. Discovered that recently by accidently clicking. The way it's hidden is genius. Some of the challenges seem interesting (keep Vela alive).

Item graphics in UI: the item icons are beautifully drawn and obviously done at higher resolutions than visible in game. Why are they shrunk down to tiny squares in the inventory? There is much wasted space in the inventory UI that could be used for larger icons. Perhaps this is inconsequential for some players but it's a big part of an RPG for me. I'll always remember seeing a new suit of armor in Diablo II or the inventory space of Arcanum. 

Visual zoom range: after learning that this could be modified by the SetZoomRange console command, I set it to the max (3.0) and also turned off the fog-of-war when in Nekatata. What an amazing sight to see a whole city district on screen, alive and bustling! The game is fully playable this way with less-than-expected performance hit.

My dream is that, in my lifetime, there will be the technology that allows zooming from character level to overworld map level smoothly, like Google Maps. That would be far more impressive than No Man Sky.

It's time for this type of game to follow Disco Elysium's lead and transition to a vertical text panel. 

Voiceovers: felt like I was hearing the same actors repeatedly with only slightly different accents/deliveries. Some, like Eder and Aloth, were quite good. I was surprised that they were both done by the same person, he is truly a talented actor. But other VO quality was uneven. The Italian accents in particular weren't great. I have to admit to disliking Xoti's VO initially but then having it grow on me.

Despite it being very expensive, I still think think full VO is best. I don't like when only the first line or two is spoken and the rest is quiet. I would prefer all or nothing.

Grimoires: don't like this at all. Just let me pick my spells. Although having unique spells hidden away in special grimoires was a fun surprise.

No AOE indicator for carnage: fixed by mod.

There is also a mod that makes every NPC say their "two cents" at certain points instead of the game randomly choosing one. Why wasn't this part of the base game?

Typos: there were some, but not many for a game of this size. Deadfire deserves credit for this.

Factions: Boring. Every game has them. They impart an artificial rigidity and predictability to the structure of a game.

Personality dispositions: not well done. The dispositions match poorly to dialogue options at times. Many of the dialogue options felt silly and forced.

Conversation trees: I didn't like the trees in this game. Oftentimes, the option that seemed most in-character was also the option that skipped to the end of a conversation. I found by reloading that much good content was missed, for seemingly no reason. I'm not saying that conversations should be "click every option from top to bottom", but the trees seemed somehow off here. There was some weird looping too.

Ship-to-ship combat: not fun.

Ship boarding: pretty good actually, I enjoyed this. Maybe allow a bit of conversation with the opposing Captain before battle to add flavor to each encounter.

NPCs: Not bad. Eder is cool. Xoti grew on me. Tekehu's character seems to mature through the game and is nicely tied into the story. Not everyone can be Kim Kitsuragi and that's OK. 

I would like to see more older/stronger/wiser NPCs in games like this. Thinking along the lines of a Keldorn. It would be neat to have someone clearly more powerful/more influential/smarter than your player character join your party. Such a character may choose to leave at a certain point in the story if it doesn't make sense for them to follow you around. I feel the trend is too many tag-along youthful NPCs (in age and personality). I didn't mind Pallegina's seriousness in that regard.

Ship: having your new equipment visually show up on the boat was neat. Take this a step further. Get rid of the other ship types and focus development resources on upgrading one ship. Make upgrades have more meaningful impact on gameplay. 

Open world: in Deadfire, the cost of freedom is less plot cohesion. It's not a worthwhile trade-off in my opinion. I would prefer a semi-open world.

Perhaps your ship, due to damage, is only capable of making short journeys at the beginning. So you're restricted to one corner of the map at first. Then as you upgrade your ship, you're able to take on longer journeys to distant ports.

I wouldn't mind a bigger overworld map to simulate long sea voyages. You should be able to buy a map late in the game that clears the black areas, to save the tedium of clearing every spot manually. (I know there's a Berath's Blessing that does this.)

Backer content: I understand the necessity, but it doesn't do much for immersion.

DLCs - well done, but would prefer one bigger package instead of three separate adventures.

Now, here's what I liked about the game.

 

LIKES:

Party of five is a good size. Four would be fine too. Rather the focus be on quality over quantity. Due to decreasing difficulty ramp on POTD, I restricted my party to four in the second half of the game.

Overall combat system: I enjoyed the depth and detail of the combat system. The many available classes and abilities are distinct from one another. Multiclassing is fun. 

Superlative implementation of real-time with pause. The ability to slow down or speed up combat is amazing. Playing the big battles in slow motion is incredibly, sensationally fun. I can't gush enough about Deadfire's RTWP.

Interrupt / Concentration mechanic is intuitive and works well.
Engagement is done well too.

Keywords are a good idea, though it doesn't seem they are always implemented consistently. 

I appreciate that there is a dodge animation.

I don't mind that some dungeons are small. It's OK to have that variety.

Nekataka captures that big city vibe from Athkatla. The names are similar and it must have been an inspiration. The different regions of the city are varied and fun to explore.

It'd be great to have the whole city be on one map, with seamless interior/exterior transitions. I wonder what the limiting factor to this is.. CPU? GPU? Development time? Engine? RAM? Hard drive? If Novigrad can exist, why can't a seamless Nekataka?

I like how the game tries to be transparent about its mechanics. "Hold shift to view details" is excellent. I want to see the numbers, and I'm glad Deadfire doesn't hold back most of the time. It does still resort to something like "Summoned weapons increase in accuracy, damage, and penetration" occasionally without providing further details.

And can more detail please be provided on the character creation screen? Evokers get "increased power level", but how many? I know they don't want to bombard new players with detail, but I'd imagine ambiguity like that is actually worse, even for a new player.

Numbers: I like that the numbers are kept fairly low. How annoying is it when you begin the game by doing 79-151 damage? I think the game could even go a bit further by using D20 instead of D100, but it's not the biggest deal. 

Getting your first 1D8+1 sword feels special. Smaller numbers are more impactful. 

Items: I generally like the items in Deadfire. They are memorable, and feel unique when you get them. There are maybe too many random exceptional items later in the game, but it could be worse. 

Deadfire avoids committing the worst itemization sins. There could have been randomly generated item stats. Items could have, god forbid, "item levels" or "level requirements". Oh no, my level 17 sword with 4 randomly generated buffs is now irrelevant, because I'm level 19. I've got to farm for more loot!

I appreciate that the yellow-background items in Deadfire have stories behind them. I like that some of the items are truly powerful and have unique abilities. 

Remember when you picked up Carsomyr +5, or the Staff of the Magi? It was a special moment. They may have been overpowered, but I'd much rather risk that than have a perfectly balanced game with no memorable items. 

Not a big fan of the enchantment system, but I've complained about enough today, and this is the LIKES section.

Beastiary is neat, but oddly hidden away. You should get the entry after just 1 kill (mod fixes this). Also, it seems some of the stats in the beastiary scale by difficulty level, but not all. It'd be nice if they all did.

Music: Very good. There is not enough variety, especially at nighttime, where the POE1 theme plays on repeat. But each individual track is top-notch.

I've saved the best for last:

Graphics: just sublime. The character models look terrific. I was pleasantly surprised how every piece of armor looked different on the different models. The animations are detailed and varied. The art style is not too cartoony but alternately joyful and macabre when appropriate. Pre-rendered backgrounds are done in that slightly-oil painted look that is stylized but not too abstract (though sometimes a bit pixelated).

The effects are great. The flora outdoors looks alive and moves in the wind. There is a momentum to the projectile spells that makes them feel wonderful to cast. Trudging around in knee deep water looks awesome. The lighting is superb. Xoti's lantern casts foreboding demonic silhouettes on dungeon walls. Even the parallax isn't so bad.

Deadfire is one of the best looking games I've played. To me, it looks as good as modded GTA 5, or Witcher 3 with high resolution texture pack, or Control with RTX, or maxed-out PC Red Dead 2. How many isometric RPGs can you say that about?

Deadfire looks the way that I dreamed games would one day look as a teenager playing Baldur's Gate twenty years ago. I remember playing Neverwinter Nights for the first time and feeling utter disappointment at what 3D could look like. I felt the same disappointment about games like Warcraft 3, and even today about Divinity Original Sin 2. 

But Deadfire absolutely nails it visually.

OVERALL SCORE: 9 / 10

When I read a review, I'm usually curious to what that reviewer thought of other games, as a point of comparison, and to see if their preferences align with mine. So here's what I would score the other games I've played this year:

AC Odyssey: 5/10
Control: 7/10
Disco Elysium: 9/10
Divinity Original Sin 2: 4/10
Hollow Knight: 9/10
Nier Automata: 3/10
What Remains of Edith Finch: 8/10

CONCLUSION

I thoroughly enjoyed the 80 hours or so spent in the world of Deadfire. I hope they make POE3, although from what I read it doesn't seem super likely at the moment. Maybe in a decade when the nostalgia reawakens.

I'm skeptical about Avowed, but will at least watch some YT videos of it.

I'm bummed about Baldur's Gate 3. Truly bummed.

But enough complaining for one day. Thanks for reading!

Edited September 1, 2020 by saltynoodles

[xzar_monty]

Hey, that was good reading!

One of your most pertinent points was this: "Difficulty: I played on POTD with 'all' upscaling and felt that the game was hardest in the beginning and gradually got easier. Maybe the first few battles were almost a little too hard, but I can't complain as it's the hardest difficulty. But doesn't it make more sense for a game to start easier and get harder instead of the opposite?"

Yeah, this is a strange one. Gorecci Street and the Engwithian Digsite are (for many) the hardest fights in the game, and they're right at the start. It does feel very odd.

But, in the end, I would also rank Deadfire up there with the best of them, ever so slightly below BG2 and Disco Elysium.

(BTW, we apparently share the exact same disappointment with Neverwinter Nights and D:OS2. Boy oh boy, they both seemed to promise so much, but...)

Edited September 1, 2020 by xzar_monty

[thelee]

17 hours ago, saltynoodles said:

Difficulty: I played on POTD with "all" upscaling and felt that the game was hardest in the beginning and gradually got easier. Maybe the first few battles were almost a little too hard, but I can't complain as it's the hardest difficulty. But doesn't it make more sense for a game to start easier and get harder instead of the opposite?

this appears to be a perennial problem with difficulty balancing. they did do a balancing run on PotD with someone on their team who likes to min-max, but I think the problem is that at mid-high levels you just have so many options that it becomes harder for the designers to know exactly where the player is at gear/stat/level-wise in order to good balance. at early levels you have so little options that they are really able to optimize the difficulty to be at a sweet spot of punishing (everyone talks about gorecci st and the digsite).

that being said, I think combined with the DLC deadfire does almost best-in-class difficulty scaling - SSS, FS can be quite hard even at close-to-max or max level and on potd+upscaling+challenges can start filtering out suboptimal builds and it does so in a relatively "fair" manner. (megabosses are also extremely hard, but i consider them a little less fair because they're so technical).

 

17 hours ago, saltynoodles said:

Not everyone can be Kim Kitsuragi and that's OK. 

<meme>Ah, I see you are a man of culture as well</meme>

 

17 hours ago, saltynoodles said:

Superlative implementation of real-time with pause. The ability to slow down or speed up combat is amazing. Playing the big battles in slow motion is incredibly, sensationally fun. I can't gush enough about Deadfire's RTWP.

yeah, it makes me sad that Deadfire underperformed sales because the polish on the RTwP is just so exceedingly great. I mean I already thought it was pretty good, but it took playing some other games to truly appreciate all the nice details--mechanically and even from just a UI/UX perspective--that went into Deadfire.

 

17 hours ago, saltynoodles said:

Music: Very good. There is not enough variety, especially at nighttime, where the POE1 theme plays on repeat

A long time ago there was no special night-time music, and then a patch added it in. I was probably one of like a handful of people who hated the change (it sounds wildly different from the rest of Deadfire music to my ears) and how repetitive it was. We lost that battle, alas.

 

17 hours ago, saltynoodles said:

Divinity Original Sin 2: 4/10

I'd be curious to know why. I've never played it, but I have friends who love that game. Is it because it's turn-based vs RtWP? Or other factors?

[xzar_monty]

30 minutes ago, thelee said:

I'd be curious to know why. I've never played it, but I have friends who love that game. Is it because it's turn-based vs RtWP? Or other factors?

You didn't ask me this, but I'll answer you anyway. The dialogue system appears really poor, i.e. the manner in which your possible answers are presented differs from the way they are generally given in games like this, and the way it's done just doesn't look good(*). This was a huge downer for me, especially because the writing didn't appear particularly good. The game has no Tab key that highlights stuff in your neighborhood, which, again, was just a bad call in my view. The graphics, although good, are nowhere near as gorgeous and interesting as in Deadfire. But of course the main clincher is the world and the story, and both of them were ordinary enough for me to go "ho hum" in approximately two hours. This was in huge contrast to PoE, whose start was superb, even better than the start of BG2, which is really saying something.

(*) You can do a youtube search for "divinity original sin dialogue" and you'll instantly see what I mean.

[kanisatha]

20 hours ago, saltynoodles said:

Superlative implementation of real-time with pause. The ability to slow down or speed up combat is amazing. Playing the big battles in slow motion is incredibly, sensationally fun. I can't gush enough about Deadfire's RTWP.

This is the greatest tragedy of PoE2. You are absolutely correct about its RTwP implementation. It is superb. And as such the tragedy is Obsidian (and perhaps other cRPG studios as well such as Owlcat) learning some sort of false lesson here that RTwP = poor sales and abandoning their excellent RTwP sytem.

[Theonlygarby]

5 hours ago, xzar_monty said:

You didn't ask me this, but I'll answer you anyway. The dialogue system appears really poor, i.e. the manner in which your possible answers are presented differs from the way they are generally given in games like this, and the way it's done just doesn't look good(*). This was a huge downer for me, especially because the writing didn't appear particularly good. The game has no Tab key that highlights stuff in your neighborhood, which, again, was just a bad call in my view. The graphics, although good, are nowhere near as gorgeous and interesting as in Deadfire. But of course the main clincher is the world and the story, and both of them were ordinary enough for me to go "ho hum" in approximately two hours. This was in huge contrast to PoE, whose start was superb, even better than the start of BG2, which is really saying something.

(*) You can do a youtube search for "divinity original sin dialogue" and you'll instantly see what I mean.

I agree with everything... Except the tab to highlight.  It does actually have a highlight button... I believe it's left alt?

 

Took me a while to find it... And I'd constantly hit tab instead and either enter combat or sneak... Forget which it is

Edited September 1, 2020 by Theonlygarby

[saltynoodles]

11 hours ago, thelee said:

I'd be curious to know why. I've never played it, but I have friends who love that game. Is it because it's turn-based vs RtWP? Or other factors?

Turn-based is a factor, but mostly it was the overall vibe. The art style isn't compatible with me. There's a plasticky/MMORPG/mobile-game quality to it. The use of color is horrid. I didn't care for the itemization, combat mechanics, NPCs, or writing. The main story was dull. Some side quests were good. I find that I prefer, for this type of game, a fixed camera without rotation or close-up zoom, so as to leave some things to the imagination.

 

10 hours ago, xzar_monty said:

This was in huge contrast to PoE, whose start was superb, even better than the start of BG2, which is really saying something.

I went into BG2 blind without having played BG1, having bought the game discs from my friend who told me the whole game was in a dungeon. Was hooked already by the second floor, but then you walk out the shaft into the daylight of the Promenade, and the music starts swaying, and there's a whole exotic city to explore. I don't think anything will ever beat that for me.

Edited September 2, 2020 by saltynoodles

[xzar_monty]

11 hours ago, saltynoodles said:

Turn-based is a factor, but mostly it was the overall vibe. The art style isn't compatible with me. There's a plasticky/MMORPG/mobile-game quality to it. The use of color is horrid. I didn't care for the itemization, combat mechanics, NPCs, or writing. The main story was dull. Some side quests were good. I find that I prefer, for this type of game, a fixed camera without rotation or close-up zoom, so as to leave some things to the imagination.

 

I went into BG2 blind without having played BG1, having bought the game discs from my friend who told me the whole game was in a dungeon. Was hooked already by the second floor, but then you walk out the shaft into the daylight of the Promenade, and the music starts swaying, and there's a whole exotic city to explore. I don't think anything will ever beat that for me.

 

Plasticky! That's an excellent choice of word. Couldn't agree more with that. I also agree with pretty much everything else you say about D:OS2. It's not a good game, I wouldn't recommend it.

 

As for BG2, I completely understand what you're talking about, because pretty much the same happened to me as well (although I do think that the beginning of PoE is just a little bit better; the biawac is a brilliant device right at the start, absolutely brilliant). The feeling you get when you enter the Promenade and the game world opens up was magnificent. I also went into the game blind, and after finishing ToB I decided to go all the way back to BG1, and I must say I was mightily disappointed. Was barely able to finish the game. Obviously I didn't know it at the time, but BG2 benefited from the fact that most of the dross in BG1 had been cleared away -- one particularly notable example being the monotony of walking around all those maps that were mostly empty and on which essentially nothing worthwhile ever happened. (ToB was way too railroaded, by the way, so it's BG2: Shadows of Amn that is the true masterpiece. Man oh man it's good.)

Edited September 2, 2020 by xzar_monty

[saltynoodles]

2 hours ago, xzar_monty said:

As for BG2, I completely understand what you're talking about, because pretty much the same happened to me as well (although I do think that the beginning of PoE is just a little bit better; the biawac is a brilliant device right at the start, absolutely brilliant). The feeling you get when you enter the Promenade and the game world opens up was magnificent. I also went into the game blind, and after finishing ToB I decided to go all the way back to BG1, and I must say I was mightily disappointed. Was barely able to finish the game. Obviously I didn't know it at the time, but BG2 benefited from the fact that most of the dross in BG1 had been cleared away -- one particularly notable example being the monotony of walking around all those maps that were mostly empty and on which essentially nothing worthwhile ever happened. (ToB was way too railroaded, by the way, so it's BG2: Shadows of Amn that is the true masterpiece. Man oh man it's good.)

Yes BG1 is not quite the same after BG2, though I did enjoy seeing the backstory of Imoen, Minsc, Jaheira, Sarevok. The city of Baldur's Gate was a little disappointing. Would rather BG3 be set in Athkatla than Baldur's Gate.

TOB doesn't reach the heights of SOA. But it serves a strange comfort - I sometimes lose interest as I'm getting to the end of a game, but TOB makes the excellent finale of SOA into a middle chapter and allows me to fully enjoy it on each repeat playthrough. After I started playing for the combat on subsequent runs, TOB worked well as a collection of megabosses. Ascension and SCS mods were essential in this regard. Never tried the Enhanced Edition, curious about it. But why did they change the font! And they used the BG1 paper doll. Don't like the UI changes at all.

Edited September 2, 2020 by saltynoodles

[thelee]

On 9/2/2020 at 8:49 AM, xzar_monty said:

As for BG2, I completely understand what you're talking about, because pretty much the same happened to me as well (although I do think that the beginning of PoE is just a little bit better; the biawac is a brilliant device right at the start, absolutely brilliant).

ditto

i had perma-restartitis with BG1 and never finished the game. BG2's opening was so compelling it was the first IE game I actually finished without constantly restarting, just immediately tosses you into the mix, and unlike BG didn't keep you away from the main draw (the big city) for like 4 chapters. It was only after thoroughly smashing apart BG2 that I went back and finished BG and IWD. Bioware+Black Isle just really got into their element then.

[xzar_monty]

20 hours ago, thelee said:

It was only after thoroughly smashing apart BG2 that I went back and finished BG and IWD. Bioware+Black Isle just really got into their element then.

They did, that's true. After all that, I had such high expectations for NWN, but it turned out to be fairly poor. I also couldn't get into IWD2, because the lack of party interaction started to wear me down after the wonderful experience of BG2.

Ha, at that point I thought that games like these would be coming out much of the time, but in the end it took a heck of a long time before any did. Meaning PoE, that is.

[Helz]

On 8/31/2020 at 5:35 PM, saltynoodles said:

OVERALL SCORE: 9 / 10

I'm bummed about Baldur's Gate 3. Truly bummed.

But enough complaining for one day. Thanks for reading!

This is a pretty good review, I share a lot of the same gaming tastes and experiences. I'll start with how I disagree. I appreciate the quality of the writing in Deadfire, both the exposition and the dialogue. I vastly prefer a little voiceover to all voiceover. All voiceover severely limits the writers' abilities to add content throughout development.

Also, I think the ship to ship combat is fantastic. It was cool that knowing my port from my starboard actually helped, and that moment when I thought, "Hey, I wonder if I can do a 180 (jibe) like in 'Master and Commander' and fire from the other side", and it worked was so good! The one thing that would seriously improve ship combat would be the ability to circle the other ship. Still, its so much fun to disable the enemy's ship, injure the entire crew, and THEN board and capture everything on board.

I've found a kindred spirit regarding the visuals. PoE2 is the most beautiful game. The wholesale migration to 3D was such an ugly design decision. I know that people loved NWN for the MP and the custom content, but as a vanilla, SP game it was just horrid.

I'm not optimistic about BG3. The full length trailer they released didn't help, it all seemed so brainless (and I don't mean the mindflayer victims). But I'll wait and see.

Thanks for sharing!

Edited September 4, 2020 by Helz

[xzar_monty]

58 minutes ago, Helz said:

I've found a kindred spirit regarding the visuals. PoE2 is the most beautiful game. The wholesale migration to 3D was such an ugly design decision. I know that people loved NWN for the MP and the custom content, but as a vanilla, SP game it was just horrid.

PoE2 is gorgeous, my gosh it looks good. It is wonderful indeed.

The problem with 3D visuals and NWN in particular was that no matter how interesting your tileset is, at the start, it is going to get very repetitive very quickly. Just play NWN for ten minutes and you'll see. Whereas in Deadfire, every place looks decidedly different and there is a unique tone to just about everything.

I haven't seen anything that would even suggest that this inherent problem in 3D graphics could be solved.

[Helz]

2 minutes ago, xzar_monty said:

PoE2 is gorgeous, my gosh it looks good. It is wonderful indeed.

The problem with 3D visuals and NWN in particular was that no matter how interesting your tileset is, at the start, it is going to get very repetitive very quickly. Just play NWN for ten minutes and you'll see. Whereas in Deadfire, every place looks decidedly different and there is a unique tone to just about everything.

I haven't seen anything that would even suggest that this inherent problem in 3D graphics could be solved.

Yeah, the repetitive tilesets have a lot to do with it. It made everything so drab. But also to go from the hay day of 2d video game art, when it was really being mastered, to the eye sore that was early 3d was jarring. I sort of feel bad for dog piling on NWN; it wasn't any one game, it was the whole industry. But to go from BG2 to that? I was so disappointed

[xzar_monty]

Precisely. And yes, good point: it's a bit unfair to put so much blame on NWN. It was the whole change that was the problem, not that one game.

[uuuhhii]

really liked the affliction and inspiration system

certainly much better then memorize every buff and debuff some rpg system force player to do

since every one of them give + or - 5 to a attribute it is very easy to remember each of them also + or - 10 to will fortitude and reflex

ar pen system might be the worst part of core combat mechanic

but still a functional one