I just finished going through the game for the first time and I've made some observations. 1) Annorax is a sissy little hippy elf. Worse than all that, he is a pus. Two hits from a bludgeoner and off came his arm as he lie in a pool of his own blood. I told him to walk it off and to his credit, he didn't whine about it. But he is still a pus. (He was at full health previous and even had a ring for DA and AC) 2) Kerghan is also a pus. Ohhhh... big scary lizard form... real scary when I shove my sword up your lizard ass. Big let down there. He hit me once. He called one Lords Slave and it hit me once before I turned it into a blood spot as well. 3) The ending sucked. A damn slide show??? Come on. I'm here to play a game, not watch Grandma's vacation. If you are going to do a cinematic, you number 1) Render it decently and number 2) you animate it. The opening animation was good. The Nasrudin vs Annorax animation was good. The faces where a bit unrealistic and they probably shouldn't have texture mapped the surface, but it was still good animation (skeletal wise) and really good particle effects. BUT FOR AN ENDING????? I realize it might have set production back a bit to have done the extra animations, but IT WOULD HAVE BEEN WORTH IT!! Why? Do a sequal and everyone would rememebered how they played the game through so many times just so they could see all the different ending animations. 4) I really did like the way they did the ending with your choices effecting it and all. I'm not bitching about that. That was really clever. More games should do that. Gave it sort of a fairy tale story book ending. 5) With most things, the innovator sucks at it. In this case, the innovation was with the magick/tech mix. They really could have done a better job. Finding schematics is cool. Finding spells would have been really cool. Perhaps a spell creator like in the The Elder Scrolls series. Also a schematic creation engine. That would have put more life span on the game as well. Well, that's all my bitching for now. I'm going to go learn how to use the Crystal Sphere game engine and single handedly outdo Troika using an open source 3d engine, Blender, an open source modeling program and perl... a language that neither was designed to work with but I'm going to do so cause perl kicks ass and I'm too stuborn not to.
I was also disappointed with Arronax. He has way too many un-invested skill points, that could at least make him as much a challenge as Joachim is. Even bigger problem, he doesn't seem to be able to wear armor or use weapons. Well, Kerghan is indeed weaker than one would expect the Big Bad Guy to be. I still think the game makers got confused between Kerghan and Stringy Pete about who should be the hardest one to kill. They could at least provide him with a bunch of Bludgeoner bodyguards. Want a real challenge? Try taking Stringy Pete's boat by force. Oh come on. What did you expect, cinematics in style of Final Fantasy? I think an old-fashioned slide show with a voice over was in place, considering the overall "retro" style of the game. The magick/tech thing was a fairly big innovation. Of course it wasn't perfect- but its the first time it is done at all. Nothing ever goes 100% right at first try. Personally, I loved the way Troyka handled it.
Suth up A** hole, if you didn't like the game, you can go eat your brain. EDIT- And btw, how come you guys killed Arronax?
Not innovative you think? and how do you think they should've done it just ranting about how much a part of a game sucks isn't constructive critics is it? About the part of a spell creator; I've never played Elder Scrolls but I think the attempt of troika was to make a new game not copy them from other games, a thing I'm not sure about; when was elder scrolls published anyway? To the rest you say I agree with most.
Actually, I have one critic too. But not sumthin like: "the game haven't got cinematics like w3 and that's why is worthless." One thing pissed me of. It is another prove of unbalanced good/evil. I played game to the end with several good characters. Hmmm, good ending: the cinematic opening gate and fallout like slideshow. When I played for the evil character, I knew that slideshow is unlogical in this situation. BUT at least I expected some cinematic. I imagined my karakter and Kerg. passing the gate... But there was only ONE fucked picture! The same picture as that displayed after my death in Void! THIS IS UNFAIR!
