i have to be real with you, this was my entire life for like a year, give or take. there's just very little in the game i haven't done, and then i got into modding and oh, the shit you would see back in the day when you were into bg2 modding
well! anyway!
the early section of this is incredibly strong. straight out of the gate, if you're importing your character from bg1, you're stripped of all your d&d toys and directly transported from the fun swashbuckling adventure to the horror nightmare zone.
even if irenicus ends up being kind of a whatever villain when all's said and done, the game does a really great job of building him up as a huge, threatening adversary -- and his VA job is out of this world. there's a relatively massive amount of exceptional voice acting here in general, and it adds a lot of life and charm to characters that... aren't otherwise always written all that well.
you start at around level 9 or so, which means being decisively out of low level d&d hell and in the stretch where you actually get to use a good array of spells and abilities. this also makes many of this game's combat encounters fairly interesting and challenging until you figure out some of the many ways to completely break the mechanics, which is its own kind of fun.
athkatla is big, cool, beautifully rendered and fun to explore, and you really get swamped with sidequests since early on, creating the impression of a bustling metropolis. it kind of isn't all that bustling once you're used to it, and it can end up feeling like the world exists for the convenience of you, the main character -- but that's something that can happen in a tabletop campaign as well, and if you're sufficiently engrossed you may not even notice.
it doesn't really have big ideas or very deep characters, and these days i don't have a lot of patience for that. but it's definitely more atmospheric and interesting than bg1 and icewind dale, and it's a huge nostalgia game for me.
well! anyway!
the early section of this is incredibly strong. straight out of the gate, if you're importing your character from bg1, you're stripped of all your d&d toys and directly transported from the fun swashbuckling adventure to the horror nightmare zone.
even if irenicus ends up being kind of a whatever villain when all's said and done, the game does a really great job of building him up as a huge, threatening adversary -- and his VA job is out of this world. there's a relatively massive amount of exceptional voice acting here in general, and it adds a lot of life and charm to characters that... aren't otherwise always written all that well.
you start at around level 9 or so, which means being decisively out of low level d&d hell and in the stretch where you actually get to use a good array of spells and abilities. this also makes many of this game's combat encounters fairly interesting and challenging until you figure out some of the many ways to completely break the mechanics, which is its own kind of fun.
athkatla is big, cool, beautifully rendered and fun to explore, and you really get swamped with sidequests since early on, creating the impression of a bustling metropolis. it kind of isn't all that bustling once you're used to it, and it can end up feeling like the world exists for the convenience of you, the main character -- but that's something that can happen in a tabletop campaign as well, and if you're sufficiently engrossed you may not even notice.
it doesn't really have big ideas or very deep characters, and these days i don't have a lot of patience for that. but it's definitely more atmospheric and interesting than bg1 and icewind dale, and it's a huge nostalgia game for me.