Okay, 4th time through and some notable legacy issues have began to crop up. "Legacy issues are for games with several entries" you say. True, but this game apes heavily from typical open-world game design. So, let's talk about some of the things that the OTHER open world RPG has gotten raked over the coals about, yet are still present here.
- Omnipresent guards are back! Steal a muffin in a room with no guards and you're going to have to go to jail, pass a verbal skill check or slaughter the whole town the second you step outside. Your ability to steal is set at a percentage that goes up and isn't based on visibility. You can be in an empty room, break into a desk and suddenly, everybody knows you're a thief. Pretty disappointing, but I'm guessing they had to do it because of
- The town you stumble upon is utterly lifeless. This little villa is home to roughly 10 NPC and has a alchemy shop, a general goods shop and...well, that's about it. It's very, very "video gamey." There was no thought into making this a thought out world that exists in spite of the player. This is an issue that was apparent from the videos, and while there was some improvement, it's still not what you'd expect from an open world game.
- Character interactions. So far, every character exists solely as a info dump or fetch quest giver. Pretty cut and dry.
- Respawning NPCs. I don't know if this is a demo glitch, but there are NPCs that you can kill, turn around, and they're right back as if nothing had happened. Kind of weird.
- Combat is sort of Baby's God of War. You can air juggle, roll about, shoot lighting, grow your skills, but in the end, you're still able to kill everything way, way too easily. And I suck at those types of games. When I know I'll have to kick it up to hard to get any sort of challenge, you know your balance is way off.
- Graphics. First off, I'm REALLY EXCITED that they used color in the game. It's flippin' fantastic that they used the entire visible spectrum to design the world. Love it. However. To say that they were inspired by WoW would be like saying Batman: Arkham City was visually inspired by Batman: Arkham Asylum. One has better textures...but other than that, they're so damn similar as to take you out of the game somewhat. And I played WoW for the span of the 30 day free trial...so seasoned vets may be a bit annoyed here.
- Classes don't mean jack....so far. This is likely to change further into the game, but early game there is no difference between the classes, save for the visual look of some of the moves. A warrior swings a sword/hammer, a rogue some daggers, a mage a twirly magic stick. You can still picks locks just fine with the warrior, cast spells as the rogue, and slay stuff with a sword as a mage. Again, this is likely to change later on, but for the purposes of the demo the only difference between the three is how you want to look while attacking.
- Why do I care? The game starts off pretty interesting - which is should, considering it jacks the opening from Planescape: Torment - but then deposits you in a world with less direction than THAT OTHER GAME. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but outside of wanting to know what's around that next corner, there isn't a whole lot driving players forward. Maybe I had bad luck, but every quest I ran into was a fetch quest of some kind.
- Enemies. Again, this is likely to change, but one shotting sprites and boggarts got old in just 45 minutes. Hopefully there is some change up and some challenge down the road. If the game throws a bunch of filler enemies, that could get pretty obnoxious, pretty quickly. Especially since they respawn fairly quick.
Alright. Now, it may appear that I'm shitting on the game. I am not. I had a great time with the demo and fully plan to buy it day 1. However, I can't help but shake the feeling that the designers cared far more about the combat than any other part of the game. The demo shows that everything else is pretty damn good...but nothing pops out as great. It's a massive step forward for the open world RPG genre, however, to simply have a game with above average-to great combat.
I hope as you go deeper the RPG elements, the challenge and the world open up a little, but I can only base my opinion on the demo at hand so far.