What were the technical problems, the creative problems, or just, in your opinion, bad calls?
Let's keep this fairly constructive, no "THIS GAME TOTALLY SUX I WILL NEVER BUY ANOTHER BIOWARE PRODUCT ANYONE SAYING ANYTHING GOOD ABOUT THIS GAME IS A BIOWARE HOMER DONT BUY THIS GAME" please. Maybe someone of literary bent can write up a distillation for Bioware.
Ok!
1. NPCs
Overall - Henchmen vs party. IMO, bad call that led to creative and technical deficiencies in the game. I know some people think they're more realistic and like them, but I actually felt it diminished the realism. The AI wasn't there. And how realistic is it to find this really great weapon or suit of armor and get rid of it rather than equip your henchmen? You're going to go out and take on hordes of enemies and not coordinate on tactics? ("Ummm, Sharwyn, these are just a few orcs, save your buffing spells for the battles we might conceivably lose, okay?") This led to a lot of problems.
X-Ray vision and fearlessness: bad combination, which led the indomitable Tomi to die several times in his zeal to disarm the trap in the next room. Also caused him to oscillate uncontrollably between the locked door you'd like him to pick and the as-yet-unseen trap on the other side.
Eagle eyes: Standard procedure after killing a bunch of escaped prisoners - stop, catch your breath, get your bearings, start to pick up the loot, go haring after Tomi who has just dashed off to challenge enemies you can't even see. Can clear half the map before Tomi is corralled. Occasionally, Tomi becomes repentant and decides for the next battle to stand a few feet away watching as you get your head handed to you.
"Oh I can open that up easy""Oh I can open that up easy""Oh I can open that..." "THEN DO IT, YOU FREAKING MORON!"
Sub-optimal spellcasting choices, as mentioned
Inability to give your henchmen boots of speed (for instance) so they can keep up with you. If you rely on your henchman for disarming traps, this one's really annoying.
2. The game engine
The pathfinding was really disappointing. After playing Dungeon Siege and Morrowind, I expected a little better from this game. "Unable to reach target". For crying out loud, you're out in the open and he's two feet away! You can't walk around your henchman? Also disappointing, having to carefully guide your PC around every chest and corpse and wall because, again, he/she can't manage to walk around something. (On the plus side, we didn't see Morrowind's sticky environment in this game.)
The spinning room - every once in a while, the slightest motion of the mouse would cause the camera to spin wildly. Seemed to occur after zoomed up in a corner of a map. Saving the game restored the camera.
3. Bugs
Some people have had zero problems. Some people, like myself, have been dismayed at the number of bugs they've encountered. Yes, I have programmed. Yes, I know how difficult it is to turn out a flawless piece of software. I don't EXPECT a flawless piece of software. But there is a limit beyond which a game can be officially classified as "buggy". Was this game that much bigger in scope than BGII? The single player campaign surely wasn't.
I got to the top of the Host Tower and preceded to the gate where everyone was standing. Nothing. Walked around. Left my computer and came back. Nothing. It's a problem several people on the Bioware forums have had, and the proposed solutions involve the DM client or the toolset. Since this was the end of the chapter, I couldn't go on until I had searched online for a solution, got out the toolset, and "fixed" the game module. I ended up missing an important plot scene, but at least I could go on.
There were many other bugs, ranging from the inability to finish a quest because that dialogue option caused the game (not computer) to freeze, to the annoying or humorous, like Tomi wielding Sharwyn's bow or Aarin referring to a male character as "a charming woman".
Maybe it was just the law of averages, but I had a lot more problems in this game than I did in Bioware's other products.
4. The singleplayer story.
The story was very, very shallow compared to it's predecessors. The characters for the most part lacked the personality we've come to expect (kudos to Bioware on Linu, though). This is a complaint that the Bioware apologists really get steamed up about. "They weren't trying to make a singleplayer game! It's the toolset and the multiplayer aspects!" Well, perhaps, but that's the problem. The singleplayer looked as though it was a demonstration, albeit good one, of what could be done with the toolset. The thing is, many people worried about this before the game came out, that the singleplayer would take a backseat to the DM client and toolset. Bioware realized this and repeatedly stated that the singleplayer campaign would feature a story at least as engaging as BGII. Not even close.
Also, the game was too easy, at least for fighters (still working on cleric). It lacked challenges. I am not a hardcore gamer. I am challenged by most games on normal or easy, and never play games on hard or nightmare. I played this game on hardcore, and still found it easy. There was no good enemy spellcasting. I believe this goes back to the single henchman aspect, in that the game had to be balanced for all combinations of class and single henchman. Bad call, imho.
Sooo....what would you change in the game?
Bioware, are you listening?
