Baldurs Gate Three

Ah, um. Ok, sorry.

Never Winter Nights

1. I bought this game. You will buy this game. This game is one of those landmark games like doom. You will own a copy or you will not understand what is so damn good about quake. (Quake one, obviously)
2. This game cost me, all told, two hundred and forty four pounds. That's a little over $300.
3. Yes, ok, so I have a shiny new graphics card too. That'll be the subject of another review. Maybe.

Neverwinter nights. The promise of all things good and great in crpg's. Let's not split hairs over this - the game has many many horrible problems, and in a spirit of schaudenfreude I am going to go on and on about them until your eyes drop out. Then, when I get home, I'm gonna boot that sucker up and start playing again. I think that tells you everything you need to know about the game - and more than you ever wanted to know about me. Stop reading. Go home.

Dammit! What do I have to do to get rid of you guys? Gah... maybe if I write huge amounts of drivel you'll just skip straight to the end?

Single Player

Ok, let me, to start, remind everyone that single player is not where it is at. The campaign was tacked on at the last minute. Allegedly it gets better in chapter two. It certainly won't get any worse.

The narrator has been stolen from diablo two, the plot has been stolen from willow and the whole thing revolves around combat.

In fact, I think that's where the second biggest grudge I have starts. Let's give it a whole subheading to itself, shall we?

Combat

First you have to get the camera to actually bring the enemies in view. Then you click on the enemy. Then you and your companion run around a bit, dither some, move back and forth, and finally start exchanging blows. Some incomprehensible babble spring up in the chat window - explaining whether you hit or not. You can SEE whether you hit or not, little blue numbers evaporate from the top of their head. What you can't see is why it is saying '** SNEAK ATTACK! **' every other second. Or 'ATTACK OF OPPORTUNITY'. I know what the game says they mean - but as far as I can see, in actual play, it just makes it up as it goes along.

And the idea, clearly, is that you shouldn't care. Combat looks so damn pretty one on one - you swing, he blocks, he thrusts, you jump aside... wonderful. Wish I had something to do with it.

Nope. Let me stress this. Combat in this game is identical to combat in warcraft two. Click who you want to attack, and hope that you manage to navigate around the trees and that your numbers are bigger than theirs.

Any time that you find yourself wanting to do something different, you find that the thing causing you to want to do something different is also preventing it.

All of this hate is helped along by the wonderfully demented user interface. I'm sure things improve later on in the game when you actually have some more options in combat beyond 'run up and try to hit it' - but with only one henchman and no direct control of him you lose even the 'try to flank them' level of tactics that baldurs gate had.

Lights, Camera Action! - Argh! Who Forgot the Second Comma?

I. Hate. The. Camera.

It never does what you want it to. In the only view that lets you see a decent distance ahead, the camera keeps the back of your avatars head firmly riveted in the centre 80% of your screen. In the other views you get to see about three paces ahead of yourself.

Actually, I think I'll rant about the whole UI here. The radial menus are huge, and blend nicely in to whatever is going on behind them, making the otions impossible to distinguish. Explain to me why I have to click three things to bring up the *only* combat option I have available? Yes, ok, I should use the quickbar. The quickbar is wonderful. Back to ranting, the character portraits and small menus close to useless (though the keyboard shortcuts are fine)

You have to click on things to interact with them. Your character will then attempt to path to them. Pathing appears to be: If you have no direct route, get trapped on a table. If you have a direct route, walk over a trap. Again, I feel the shades of warcraft two.

Right clicking stuff to get a menu is nifty, although I dislike the huge radial menus (I was expecting the whole menu to be about the size of four icons) and everything has examine text, which is nice.

The gumps are inconsistent. The game doesn't seem to like you rearranging them (the map window is particularly badly placed) and it will automatically shuffle them and arbitarily close some of them when something happens (such as a conversation or shop)

To give it its dues - shops are good and simple.

Story

Ok, so I'm to be the lone saviour of the human race and have 'long had potential' - blah blah blah. Ooh, jailbreak with subtle hint that puts the brain-gobbler-thingy there. Nice. I'll go there then. Twenty mooks to fight. Blegh. About fifteen blatant hints that the brain gobbler is there. [Insight] I GET IT ALREADY!

Ok, inside. This should be... HOW many mooks? Ok, I could just about stand a fight with a brain gobbler, since I have help - maybe I can find more help in here? No, the guards just want to go home. Great. And now a... hang on. Why am I fighting all this crap? Where is the plot here? This is like space invaders but with experience points. No, hang on, in space invaders at least you had to sometimes move left and right.

I don't believe it. This is a carefully handcrafted game - and it's even more of a pointless timesink than the worst 'random encounter system' games?

Ok. What little of the story there actually is at this point is nice - well written dialogue, good voice acting. Slightly odd wording in the speech to get around it not being able to handle the character name... but never mind. But if you're going to have such annoying conversation trees, why not just dump all the information in the players lap and get straight to the single question that actually has some effect on the game.

Ok ok. So what about multiplayer?

I'll say straight up that I have zero interest in playing online with catasses. Playing the single player campaign in a group adds some tactics and a bit of fun - but the lack of voicecomms and the hectic pace of the few seconds of combat that actually matter makes it all but impossible to co-ordinate. And it's probably someone else who drives the 'story' bit, thus removing all enjoyment (except for the llame joy of getting your party members killed by pretending to go link dead, then going link dead)

Right. Ahem. Back to the true part of multiplayer, creating and adminning a game.

Forget it. Cannot be done. The toolkit is immensly powerful, but it is slow. You can create wonderful modules for later play - you cannot create and control on the fly. Let me put it this way. Your players suddenly decide that they want to burn down the city. Fine. You can handle that. You just need to create a new map, and populate it with burnt out houses, and change every line of every NPCs dialogue, and... It CAN be done - but not interactively.

Here is how a sample game goes.

Player: I would like to {whatever}

GM: Thanks. Come back for next week sessions, and it will be done.

I'm serious. NOTHING can be done quickly in this system. Oh, except for one thing. You can drop 'encounters' on your players. Yup, monsters. It'll even go so far as to handle creating them at an apppropriate level to make it challenging, automatically generate treasure and so forth.

Wow. Joy. Hackmaster. Just what I wanted from a tool.

If your players are a bit more willing to suspend disbelief, and only talk to one NPC at a time and pretend that it's not just you with a fake beard - then yes, it's possible to play. When it doesn't crash. Sorry, once again, irc is a more complete solution.

I will try again. Many of the problems with the tools simply spring from a lack of wizards (and the scripting language is VERY complete, so expect to see a lot of 'drop one of these, set its parameters, and let it create stuff for you' tools springing up soon) and from a lack of resources. (No horse? Wha? You have a model for a stable, but no HORSE?) The community will soon rectify this (they already did with the horse) but.

The terrain painter is annoyingly 'almost'. You can start slapping down terrain, and making it look lovely - and then you meet odd restrictions. It won't let me put a road there? Why not? I can't run a stream under a wall? What gives? This wouldn't be so bad if the reasons for the prevention were explained, so that you could design around them - but all you get is a red box indicating that you can't place there.

There are also places in which the tools lack intuition. How do I put a cow in a field that is facing a different way? (Rotate the map, then place) Heck, how do I make my cows WANDER AROUND? More, and better labelled, AI scripts would be nice here - preferably applied from a toolkit firsat, and edited by hand only when desired.

Graphics

Ok, ok, you got me here. This is my first use of my shiny new graphics card - and these graphics look lovely. But this game is a 'first release' and shows it, even in this category.

There is one option, somewhere, on the graphics page that my card doesn't like. I think it's creature environment shadowing. If I turn everything up to max, the game looks wonderful - but crawls and judders. (And I *know* it's a client-server app, but when running in single player mode, dammit - HALT THE QUEUE. You should NEVER die to lag in a single player game, enemies should NOT appear to teleport across to you) There just needs to be a bit better autodetection or which settings are good for which gfx cards. Again, the community will soon have FAQs up explaining which settings are good and why.

Sound

Sound is actually pretty good - except for the 3dness of it. It seems that distance to camera matters, and the volume of hench-speak is pretty erratic. Music is also a bit 'on again - off again' - most of it is very nice, but the combat theme is getting on my nerves already. Plus, as always, environmental audio affects line-in too. It really really shouldn't.

Gameplay

I'm going to be fair. Character customisation is very complete. Loading of new resources is easy. Keyboard control is decently fast and you have a lot of ways to attack any problem that the game gives you. Also, consumables are cheap enough to ignore. (I'll have a hundred arrows. 1Gp please. Thank you) These are things that if they were wrong would grate horribly - but because they are right, they fade into non-existence. Unlike, for example, the multitabbed backpack - which seems like a neat idea until you try dropping a collection of things from one tab to another.

Conclusions

This is a horrible game, and you should all buy it right now.

No, sensibly. I don't know. I think a lot of this anger is due to overblown expectations - and a lot more is rosetinted glasses about other games (ie. I never actually liked PLAYING baldurs, I just liked to watch it)

It shows a lot of promise to the genre, and I think that perhaps, a few years down the line, it will be a very good toolkit for online playing. But right now, to actually run a campaign, I would choose irc.

I'll probably post another, more in-depth, review after I have owned the game for longer. But right now... I think I prefer geneforge.

Edited by Vitenka at 2002-07-01 15:06:17
Fix0red!