What are we thinking about this one KIA2?
After sometime with it. Regardless of if/if not you believe it's woke trash I will absolutely hand them credit for not having MTX and having a (mostly) complete game at launch.
Now on to the other shit...
Wokeness - Honestly? Sure there's a bit of it sprinkled on (Pronouns) but I can confidently say at this point that it never felt like it was forced down my throat or that woke topics were an inherently "positive" thing to witness. Even the flamboyant gay characters like Astarion seem to be there for comedic release and "playersexual" has been a thing since Dragon Age: Origins.
It appears to me that the dev's cared a little less about pushing a message and more of: "I'm going to just throw my hands up, do what you want!" All of the interactions in the game seem less set to follow "ThE MeSsAgE" and more to allow the player to "Have at it!". I mean hell, if I see some faggots or some niggers I can straight up delete em cause Paladin go brrrrrr.
All in all, I've been enjoying it. More than Armored Core and Starfield thus far.
(Armored Core VI fucking blows donkey dick also. Not a bad game, but sure as fuck isn't AC.)
Story: Starts fine and then becomes cringe. Even the fine part is debatable. Nothing feels immersive, why do the goblin just allow you to walk in their camp when you don't use the true soul authority? Why do the gyth do the same? The immigrants are kind of assholes that overstayed their welcome but I'm suppose to "feel for them" - I don't get any satisfactory way to deal with them in a game of choices.
In the second act, where I am now I just witness the most cringe "captain planet" type summoning by the 3 main villains. It was all over the top and stupid. Even small reactions from people don't feel real, sometime people need to be terrified but they are not, or angry but they are not. To their credit, this was also how DOS2 was. While I liked DOS2 and loved the builds and encounters that game had huge flaws in story and human interactions.
Dialogue is awful, is incredibly modern. You see terms like racist for instance, that is a modern term or Karlach using f**k a lot.
There is this lesbian couple that I told them to not be in the camp but they did anyway and my character is just ok with it, why even give you an option to say no?
By the end of second act the story is just boring. I see no great reveal, no intense action on act 3, I'm not even sure why I care about the march on Baldurs Gate.
There is a scene where the lesbian avatar of Selune is held by Myrkul but because Shadowheart drops her spear and lends a hand poof the spell is broken. This is incredibly bad writing, no matter the excuses it was bad and it was only a lesbian power fantasy made by incompetent writers.
Gameplay: I tend to like the DOS2 turn based style but I do not like 5'th edition rules, give me back 3.5. Encounter design is well thought, I like how much work was put in to having nice challenging fights and they seem to have learned a bit from DOS2. All my critiques to gameplay are from 5'th edition.
Woke stuff:
** Lots of gay NPCs
*** My character feels forced, there is an instance where my character starts looking seductive to Gale. Why have that? I don't want to romance Gale, I never made any attempt at it. I can understand to some extent having Gale be gay??? despite talking about women but why is my character behaving gay?
**** Pronouns.
***** Haven't seen it yet but I understand there is a drag queen as well.
****** Forcing you to make "correct choices". I took Karlach before Wyll so Wyll shows up in camp trying to kill her. I told him to f**k off, he just tried to kill a companion. You had multiple companions telling you to take him on as a companion, the guy literally tried to murder on of them and all they could say was to complain on why did I not offer him to be a companion. Karlach tells me that several times -- why was this even on the table.
This is not a medieval fantasy setting, this is a modern day progressive western ideal with magic and swords.
Progression: At level 3-4 you kill a hag, ogre magi, beholder, drow, minotaurs, gyth and duegars. At 8-9 I defeat an avatar of Myrkul with the help of the avatar of feminist frequency but then I'm suppose to fight normal people and are even more difficult?
Fun, engaging fights. We get Jahiera and I understand Misc later on - I do like memberberries. Shadowheart is surprisingly nice and her backstory is cool. Gale could have been nice but now he just seems gay and lame. Astarion reminds me of Milo but got old fast.
My thoughts exactly. My friend got me this game for "free" and tried for a while.
I liked Neverwinter Nights better. The gameplay felt more fun and immersive for me personally because I don't like turn-based combat games.
Would you recommend a playthrough of Neverwinter? I missed it but now wonder if it would be too jank.
I like Neverwinter Nights. It's got that old school D&D vibe, and if you actually play through all the expansions, it feels like your character going from lvl 1 killing rats in the sewer to god-like capabilities.
The only thing that might give you pause is the old graphics and interface, but c'mon, it's not any worse than than Diablo and it's ilk. And the Neverwinter Nights interface is loads better than NWN2. Something about that game's interface made me dump it before finishing the tutorial.
NWN is jank. I love the game but if you plan single player you will have a hard time getting in to it. Try NWN2, it has little with NWN and it is polished. The main game is fine but NWN2 MOTB expansion is just something else, one of my favorite games of all time. I still return to play it every now and then.
Still old so don't expect graphics like in BG3.
Single player is meh, many active mp servers still. Can recommend some if interested.