Long List of Problems
Plays great on the 360. Picking up items is one click. Hell, Witcher has a far more complicated item pickup system. Heck, the item float and the game makes it very obvious. Gold is auto-pickup. Demo is the tutorial of the game. I'd love to go back to the release of Baldur's Gate and see people review Candlekeep as the totality of BG. What a joke. Andthe sad thing is, you guys are serious! Your only real complaint is the controls(which can easily be fixed/patched) yet bawww is all I hear. I loved how you can check bodies and notes on the ground for flavour text. Who does flavour text anymore? I'm sure once you hit the game proper, the optional content will kick in. And the graphics are pretty nice.
I shall now list a large list of problems along with a few good points.
You have hit E to open a chest, then wait for the item to fall to ground, then hit E again over the item, often requiring you to reposition your character to be close enough to it. Tedious. Just let me pick it up directly from the chest!
Also, no stats preview before pickup, so you have to go into the menu each time you pick up an item to see if it’s better. They should have included a stats comparison window and ability to instantly equip it if better. See the recent Hunted: Demon’s Forge as an example.
Gold is hard to spot and requires you to precisely move over it to pick up. Tedious. Just give me the gold automatically…it adds nothing to my enjoyment to have to pace back and forth to pick up all the gold.
You can’t pick what enemy you target, so often your character flails about and wasted his/her power attack on a single enemy instead of the group. This is the single largest game-breaking element. Combat is just cumbersome and imprecise with the current auto-target/lock-on system.
Your character moves slowly and can’t run but rather leisurely jogs even in great danger. Tedious. At least in Diablo 2 we had stamina for running and a fast movement speed by default.
The funny German/Russian accents for characters. Mostly just funny, but not very fitting for a fantasy game. Sounds like the hired the Alpha Protocol actors.
Forcing us to use “Esc” and “Enter” in the menus. Simply making right-click close the menu would make life so much easier. At least they let F or X or C close each respective menu, so that’s some good news.
“Plays great on the 360.” Yeah, and it plays like rubbish on the PC. Forcing me to use a controller to have an ok experience is not ok.
The huge floating yellow exclamation marks over quest givers. Am I playing some MMO? Is it too much to ask for something actually immersive, like him calling for help as I walk by?
Holding down block makes you immune to all damage. I understand why they did this since the AI are quite cheap…but the solution would be to make proper AI and combat. Combat just doesn’t feel right, hard to explain but easy to feel for most of us.
Um, where’s my map screen? Maybe I missed this? And where’s my North marker on my compass/map?
Poor story telling: Anjali or whatever her name is becomes trapped in that wooden cage…then the designers remembered she’s this flame archon who can burn things at will, how do we explain this? I know…the wooden cage has unspecified, invisible magic protecting it. Wow, that was the best they could do? How about just putting her in a special metal cage, and even having her say she burned through the first wooden one, much to the surprise of her captors. Man, I’m such a genius.
Another story issue: when your Legion friend gets “wounded” right before entering the keep… He sure didn’t appear to have gotten wounded…in fact he and I totally murdered that boss guy. But again, his “wound” was only so you’d have to adventure by yourself. Why not just have him stay at the keep to help guard it? Don’t give me this fake “wounded” stuff, or actually show a cutscene with him being gravely wounded. I mean shoot, I got “wounded” a lot but the green orbs of unwounding fixed me up real good!
The graphics are great, at least the world graphics. The menu UI graphics are an artistic nightmare, large and rainbow colored icons, very jarring compared to the quite stylized and “dark” world art.
The talking scenes are pretty good. Although only being able to hear dialogue lines once is very annoying. Note how Mass Effect nearly always allowed repeating the info dialogues in case you missed some of it the first time…
The extra “lore” bits from books is nice…although the text is too small and quite often is inconsequential info like “Looks like he died…” (at least in the demo). Plus most annoyingly, they FORCE me to hit “Close” when I read this stuff. Just let me WALK AWAY or right-click, or hit any key. Don’t force me to move my mouse to center screen to hit “Close”. Again, this is a consolitis issue.
And FYI, Candlekeep is a fine representation of the gameplay mechanics of BG. If I played Candlekeep and hated it, I’d also hate the rest of the game! I remember playing Candlekeep and being anxious to go explore the rest of the world! Likewise, the DS3 demo is a fine representation of how low-quality and ill-though-out DS3 is.
…But I’ll grant you they could fix all the main issues with a gigantic patch…sort of like the “Enhanced Edition” of Witcher. However, no way that will ever happen. Obsidian barely patches their games, except for New Vegas, which Bethesda helped/forced to patch.
