[Mr Sleep]

Just a quick note, yes it is good and yes it is buggy, I have a few crashes to desktop and quicksave corruption. I will add more later.

(added later) Basically the game is great, the freedom it allows you after the first dungeon is great, there aren't that many quests but the quests one finds are very large can span hours of work, rather than the "take A to B come back for reward" one often finds there is actual skill and ingenuity needed.

The choices between characters are also diverse, the mage has many interesting spells, the thief is also quite handy and the warrior is as expected. However one isn't set down a certain path, a warrior can dabble in magic and visa versa. This freedom of choice is quite refreshing and owes quite a lot to Morrowind I feel.

As one progresses the influences are quite obvious, there is a bit of NwN here, a bit of BG there and a bit of Morrowind over there. Definately not a problem but it is interesting to notice how the genre is progressing and tipping its cap to the past masters.

The major problems I have are the same as with all CRPG's which is immediacy, there is only one quest on the game which was time specific (iirc) you can wander around for many hours and still come back and complete a quest that was "gravely important"...just seems shallow to me.

Another problem is stability and although I wasn't dogged to badly it has crashed to desktop a few times and I have also lost my quicksave and half an hours work about 10 times. Plus there is no autosave feature.

The story is slightly cliche however it is focused from a different angle for a long time so that is pleasing.

(and now for something completely different) Apparently there is in fact a Hot Fix patch released which corrects the problems I have been having quicksaving. It now writes the save games to temp and then overwrites the save game file. Very smart. On the subject of Save Games, they are quite big, I think the average on e is 10 MB, Just a word of warning since it can easily eat up your hard disk. Also apparently the slow down problems I spoke of before have been corrected in a patch. Good to see a company working quickly on the problems.