I bought it... Lots of good, lots of bad.
So I'll tell anyone hoping it might be as good as Hordes of the Underdark that it isn't even that good so far. It's slightly better than NWN's orriginal campaign. There's some interplay between the characters (yay) but nowhere near the level there was in Baldur's Gate II. A lot is better from NWN -a lot of stupid rules issues like why characters don't use a weapon two-handed when they have nothing in their off hand, and the like, have been fixed. They have been replaced with a lot of niggling interface bugs, like the horrible GUI and the confusing inventory (although I've never seen this done right -BGII you had a tiny assortment of little square that let you have two dozen daggers or two dozen plate armours... Eh? Fallout/2 had a big long scroll thingy with no sense of physical size at all and your stuff could get lost in all that mess, NWN had several pages of "inventory tetris" that was, like being ten feet tall, good for some things and bad for others. Now we have the BGII formula times about a million. I have more little tiny squares than I know what to do with, and a million little amorphous icons supposed to represent my gear...
The area design is poor in places, in others it's good. In all of Highcliff, I couldn't find a single building I could actually enter. What's up with that? At least in NWN I could go in people's houses and even if there was nothing in there it broke the sense that I was wondering around a cardboard town built to fuck up satelite surveilance. Hell- some modder for NWN did OK in a module where if you tried to enter someone's house they just said "Get ye away from my door" and didn't let you in. You got the feel that there was someone in there because you could interact with it. It sucks pressing the (inexplicably changed) highlight all key and haveing nothing show up but my party...
The radial menus are gone, replaced with a mix of keyboard commands, clunky GUI, and very, very, clunky mouse+keyboard commands (Shift-click is a bad idea... I wonder if I can map an extra mouse button to shift...).
NPC behavior is different, it's more like BG where you can control people directly, but because the camera tracks them it's very difficult to tell them where to go, and they often make like Marcus and go haring off into battles they cannot overcome. This is annoying -I don't like having to shepard my NPCs around and when the interface is hindering me it's all the more frustrating. However it's still a step forward, just one that NEEDS to be improved upon. There are more issues, but this is a good rundown. It's no Fallout, that's for sure -but if your box can handle it it's playable and decently written. I won't say good, but it's not awful either. At least as far as I've gotten, it still plays like a pickup game of D&D, although not so glaringly as NWN's orriginal campaign.
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