Posted October 28, 2012
Just finished this game after putting in about five or six weekends of play. Since there's not much info in these forums, thought I'd share a few thoughts, in no particular order.
1 - I've never played an RPG that made such a poor initial impression. Even a hardcore completionist will have his/her work cut out suffering through the first ten hours or so of this game. The control scheme, camera, movement speed, hair-pullingly slow animations, lack of a map, ridiculously low draw-distance, etc makes for a really awful introduction, and it's a looong introduction. However, about a third of the way through the game, you finally get access to the game's form of quick-travel (hexes), a compass that doesn't "stick", and the ability to dump loot into a sort of intra-dimnesional storage locker so you don't have to worry about weight-limits anymore, and things get a lot less frustrating.
2 - The controls aren't configurable, and the default layout makes no sense - crucial keys are all the way on the right side of the keyboard, even though other crucial keys are on the left side. Since one hand will be on the mouse at all times, and this game is hard enough to control as it is, having to dart from the "del" key to, e.g., the "q" key with the same hand is just ridiculous, and I don't know what the devs were smoking. I very quickly wrote up an Autohotkey script to remap the keys so that everything was on the left hand side of the keyboard. HUGELY increased the playability of the game.
3 - Did I mention there's no map, and you can only see about three feet around your character on all sides? Yes, that means that even though each "grid" is pretty small, you might be strolling practically right next to a cave entrance, some dropped loot, or some other landmark and just not see it.
4 - This is not a spoiler (I don't think) but be warned: eventually you'll reach Lord Crux's manor house. The game will make you think you need to infiltrate the manor, overhear some intelligence, and sneak out to report to someone. In fact, if you do this, you will be unable to enter the manor house again, and there's some semi-crucial loot and experience to be had in there, as well as a key to another area of the world which you can only get by killing said Lord. In the end, the missed experience and the inability to enter said other area of the world won't count for much, but I found this incredibly frustrating anyway, because I'm an idiot completionist. In short, don't leave this house until you've overheard everything there is to overhear, searched every nook and cranny, and killed everything that moves.
5 - Overall, this game was just -barely- worth the effort. I'd rank it just a smidge above Beyond Divinity in my category of RPGs that I've finished even though for every twenty minutes of fun, I experienced ten minutes of agony. If you're a completionist like me, do yourself a favor: use autohotkey to set the keyboard controls to something sane, don't leave Crux's manor until everything possible to do in there is done, and maybe consider playing only while lightly buzzed.
1 - I've never played an RPG that made such a poor initial impression. Even a hardcore completionist will have his/her work cut out suffering through the first ten hours or so of this game. The control scheme, camera, movement speed, hair-pullingly slow animations, lack of a map, ridiculously low draw-distance, etc makes for a really awful introduction, and it's a looong introduction. However, about a third of the way through the game, you finally get access to the game's form of quick-travel (hexes), a compass that doesn't "stick", and the ability to dump loot into a sort of intra-dimnesional storage locker so you don't have to worry about weight-limits anymore, and things get a lot less frustrating.
2 - The controls aren't configurable, and the default layout makes no sense - crucial keys are all the way on the right side of the keyboard, even though other crucial keys are on the left side. Since one hand will be on the mouse at all times, and this game is hard enough to control as it is, having to dart from the "del" key to, e.g., the "q" key with the same hand is just ridiculous, and I don't know what the devs were smoking. I very quickly wrote up an Autohotkey script to remap the keys so that everything was on the left hand side of the keyboard. HUGELY increased the playability of the game.
3 - Did I mention there's no map, and you can only see about three feet around your character on all sides? Yes, that means that even though each "grid" is pretty small, you might be strolling practically right next to a cave entrance, some dropped loot, or some other landmark and just not see it.
4 - This is not a spoiler (I don't think) but be warned: eventually you'll reach Lord Crux's manor house. The game will make you think you need to infiltrate the manor, overhear some intelligence, and sneak out to report to someone. In fact, if you do this, you will be unable to enter the manor house again, and there's some semi-crucial loot and experience to be had in there, as well as a key to another area of the world which you can only get by killing said Lord. In the end, the missed experience and the inability to enter said other area of the world won't count for much, but I found this incredibly frustrating anyway, because I'm an idiot completionist. In short, don't leave this house until you've overheard everything there is to overhear, searched every nook and cranny, and killed everything that moves.
5 - Overall, this game was just -barely- worth the effort. I'd rank it just a smidge above Beyond Divinity in my category of RPGs that I've finished even though for every twenty minutes of fun, I experienced ten minutes of agony. If you're a completionist like me, do yourself a favor: use autohotkey to set the keyboard controls to something sane, don't leave Crux's manor until everything possible to do in there is done, and maybe consider playing only while lightly buzzed.
