Nerd Rage 2 - Revenge of the Roleplayer
I've found, over the course of the years, that I enjoy quite a diverse selection of activities. Some of these - let's say, reading - are obvious upon casual acquaintance, and considered socially acceptable pastimes. Others, however, are not. I'm afraid to speculate on whether I engage in the one more than the other. Regardless of that, in the second category I maintain a special, fond place for complaining.
I sometimes feel extraordinary blessed by the fact that so many aspects of the world cry out to be lambasted, lampooned, mocked and derided. A common riposte is to point out how much easier it is to complain about something than to create it in the first place. In reply, I prefer to point out how, for that reason, perfectly bizarre it is to spend vast amounts of time creating shit when such a comparably tiny amount of time is needed to see its flaws. Then again, creation does tend to go hand in hand with blindness.
Now, after getting the needlessly convoluted verbiage out of my system - you may think of it, if you will, like the literary equivalent of projectile vomiting - I think I can speak more plainly, and so I will. I enjoy complaining. Particularly when I feel cheated or just plain annoyed by a thing, mocking said thing can provide vast entertainment from inferior substances. So now at long last we're come to naming the beast. The current object of my ire is a CRPG called Neverwinter Nights 2.
Oh dear, I knew there was something I'd forgotten. Let's do this in style.
My review of Neverwinter Nights 2
or, 'high fantasy, as painted in fecal matter'
Right off the bat, I will acknowledge the idea that a thing can't be judged in isolation. Well, actually I could do that anyway, but this is a fine rhetorical device, so we'll pretend a game needs to be contrasted against other games of the same type. Therefore, in the interests of elucidation, we'll take Neverwinter Nights 2 and compare it to the gold standard of what's laughably termed "computer role playing games." That game's generally held to be Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn.
At first blush, the comparison seems grossly unfair. Baldur's Gate II was released six years before Neverwinter Nights 2, by which time its Infinity Engine was already considered dated at best. The game used prerendered 2d sprites on static backgrounds compared to the true 3D of NWN2, its lighting effects were basically just pretty lights superimposed on the background compared to the realtime 3d lighting, fog, shadow and particle effects of NWN2. But that only captures part of it. Between BGII and NWN2, a whole new edition of Dungeons & Dragons saw release; the new edition used by NWN2 has since been hailed as being practically the second coming of the D&D ruleset.
Given all these facts, I'm not sure I can blame the full horror that is Neverwinter Nights 2 on mere ineptitude or poor judgement. No, this was a premeditated act of malice. Someone or some
thing had discovered that joy remained in the world, and, in bottomless evil, worked to destroy it utterly. In vast and awful deliberation, they forged Neverwinter Nights 2, and built its cover from the bones of starved orphans. God help us all.
Now, I can on occasion be a patient, even merciful, soul. But there are instances when I'm disinclined to stay my hand, mostly when the subject matter doesn't deserve anything beyond raw contempt. NWN2 is such a game. It had everything going for it - the ruleset driving it had matured, the engine was a capable, matured product, and to top it off in style, it even had a
goddamn roadmap for how this type of game should be, one that delineated exactly how D&D computer rpgs had been done before to vast critical acclaim.
So what went wrong? Readers might be forgiven for charitably assuming that Obsidian's error lay in being too ambitious, that they wanted to inject new ideas into the tried-and-true mix, and screwed it up because of that. Sadly, that would be optimistic. By my reckoning, every single detail they "improved" involved switching a simple, workable, intuitive function with a pointlessly restrictive mess. More often than not, there's not a single apparent reason for it, beyond game designer inertia. Evidently, "they did this in lots of dated 3D shooters" is a design imperative at Obsidian, superseding any need for logic and utility.
...but I'm getting ahead of myself. Enumerating the flaws of this sort of game is like taking a pickaxe to Mt Vesuvius. You need to cut up the problem into manageable chunks before you can annihilate it. Thus, I offer the following categories:
The controls
One of the things that made Baldur's Gate such an instant classic was something so unobtrusive, I didn't even consider it. Or rather, I didn't consider it in those virginal days, the days before I felt the sticky black excretions of NWN 2 upon my brain. In short, the excellence of its design began with the controls. Operating Baldur's Gate 2, once you learned how to play, was as simple an affair as breathing or walking. You wanted to see something, you scrolled the map over to that spot. You wanted to go somewhere, you simply moved your mouse over that spot, and right-clicked; a representation of your party's configuration would flash there, giving you the opportunity to configure their placement ahead of time. To operate something, you would click on that object. To talk to someone, click on the person. Simple, useful, solid control schemes.
As you may have expected by now, this struck the folks at Obsidian as the perfect rationale to toss away any vestiges of the old system. Instead of a fixed overhead view, you are treated to a moving camera. A camera whose execution is so awful, so mind-numbingly, soul-crushingly vile, that by rights it deserves its own category. However, as the camera issues form the unholy fundament of the control problems, detailing it here will have to be enough.
Simply put, the programmers of Neverwinter Nights 2 reasoned that a) they had a 3d engine, b) 3d engines allow for more than one viewpoint, and c) more views were better. Therefore, the inescapable conclusion went, in order to max out the awesome, they'd offer an infinite amount of views. That proved to be impossible, so they were forced to limit themselves to those views that didn't actually help the player in any way.
Or let's put it this way: you have three buttons in the lower part of the screen. These three buttons switch between cameras. One is a chase cam, the other is an "exploration view", whatever that means, and the last is a "strategy view" - again, the name baffles me, because "strategy" in D&D is a meaningless concept. "Strategy" is long-term planning; what occurs in round-to-round action is tactics. But then, reading comprehension is far down on the list of basic things Obsidian have fatally neglected. Anyway, these views all have their associated keys to move, roll, yaw, pitch, pirouette, zoom in, zoom out, yodel, the works. Not the same keys between the three views, of course; that would be logical, and thus anathema. Furthermore, each of the three views have a number of idiosyncracies that have to be learned in order to minimize their impact on the game. I say "minimize," because if you are to play the game, you will need to face the fact that they can't be done away with. The best you can do is learn to continually compensate for the engine's poor execution.
'Compensate.' Savour that word, dear reader. You'll be spending a lot of time together during the course of this review.
In order to illustrate just how unpleasant the mere act of moving your characters a short distance can be, I'll explain how it's done in Neverwinter Nights 2. First, you check that you're in a view mode that actually lets you navigate without a massive haemorrhage (the first-person view has a frog perspective, and a large chunk of screen is taken up by the characters because the camera points straight. At. Them; the exploration cam is fixed to your characters, meaning you can't really move more than a few steps because the zoom is shit unless you tilt the view and aim at the horizon; the strategy view, where you can zoom out and move the camera freely for a short distance until you run into a rubbery invisible boundary). Let me stress that there is no good method - there's either grueling, horrible or taxing, and you have to pick which one is you find least onerous. Moreover, in order to move the camera effectively, you need to
compensate by the use of both arrow keys and the numpad. The same could have been accomplished using only the mouse, but not, apparently, by anyone working at Obsidian.
With camera problems follow, inevitably perhaps, the issue of occlusion. Particularly in cities do you see this: your characters will encounter enemies among the streets, at which point the looming buildings block the camera in ways that make it impossible to see anything; once again, you are forced to compensate. The "Mask of the Betrayer" expansion campaign begins by having the character stand in such a way that all you see is a grey pillar covering the screen. Although this sort of thing happens frequently in the game, it almost feels intentional here, as if the designers were making a point. The very first action you will, after leveling up, is to
compensate for the engine. And so, I am left wondering if the developers ever noticed what inevitably happens at the start of every MoTB campaign, or (and I get the feeling this is far more likely) whether they simply didn't care one way or the other.
...but I digress. The point of this spiel is that without a natural control system (by which I that its operation, once learned, becomes virtually instinctual), you're no longer playing the game. At most, you're attempting to compensate, to harness it to your will. NWN 2 is a classic example of that sort of syndrome - unpredictable, capricious, and hell-bent on actively obstructing your efforts. Some may find that sort of thing enjoyable; I do not. For every time the characters died because camera issues made targeting the enemy impossible, for every moment the screen twitched just as the mouse was clicked, for all the occasions where the game switched control from the party to the single character, where it became clear just how futile it was to click on maps or set waypoints... for every time something like that happens and forced me to
fucking compensate, NWN 2 has and will continue to deserve my unmitigated scorn.
The character design
The campaign itself is next on the menu, and boy if it isn't a choice selection of writhing horrors. First up is the design of the characters, as I think we can all agree on that characters drive the story. It may be superficial to say so, but what the actors look like will influence any play.
The first thing that will strike you as you play the game is that you begin as a "harborman." We're told very little concrete facts about what that means, until we're given the choice of how our characters will look. I read a review earlier that complained about having to "choose which character model is the least objectionable." In my estimation, whoever said that was overly kind. Perhaps it is fitting that the campaign begins in an area coterminous with a Lousiana bayou, as you will leave character creation looking like the bastard banjo-playing lovechild of Otis and the neighbour's prize pig. Better use those Charisma points for something else, then - your character, no matter the choice, will be constipated, so you'll just have to live with it.
For the moment mercifully rid of having to stare at your own creation, you're next treated to an in-game cutscene. I will delve into the deeper problems with the cinematics later; for now, let's just focus on the character we see, Daeghun. A stooped little gnome with a lizardlike bearing and vacant black eyes, whose every motion and word evoke the impression of being an automaton. Quite impressive. This is the character they chose to set the tone of the campaign? Why not just go the whole way and invite the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion? They could have a tea party.
But alas, that would require fine motor skills these creatures, whatever they are, would be hard-pressed to equal. For you see, these are not beings of flesh and blood, nor even a reasonable facsimile thereof. Every living thing you encounter in NWN2, perhaps excluding the scaled and/or larger demonic beings, look like death warmed over. It is as if prior to launch the cast of NWN2 were herded into a container. There, they were dosed with lethal poison, dipped in wax to slow the rot and lend their flesh a clammy sheen; finally they were fitted with wires and forced to perform in some demented puppet theatre. They move like the dead, like manikins carved in meat. When a necromancer started animating corpses in one cutscene, I thought they were just waking up from a nap until I realized, "wait, red glow. They must be
shambling."
In a more aesthetic sense, the choices of clothing that you get are often abominable. I know this is D&D, and that you're forced to portray a hillbilly retard trundling through that thar big-city life in a state of mild bewilderment, but please - is it too much to ask for to be able to wear a suit of clothing, armor, and accoutrements that don't look like they were nicked from a thrift store for disabled people?
Much of this stems from a more overarching problem: the textures. They simply don't hold up to closer inspection, which is why, of course, the camera hovers close in each and every cutscene, apparently in an ill-advised effort at providing pathos or mood. Both these things, however, tend to be absent, as you instead find yourself wondering how it is that Hanna-Barbera managed better quality and attention to detail back in the 80s.
The dialogue
I hear that Neverwinter Nights 2 actually had a budget, but am at a loss on what they spent it on. It could hardly have been the writers; once the game begins, we're treated with characters whose voices, well, aren't. In those few instances when they're not generic, they're the most shallow stereotypes imaginable. Thankfully, this dismal situation brightens after a while, but it still rankles that you have to sit through stuff that plainly not even managed to rouse the voice actors from their lethargy.
The greatest problem of the dialogue isn't that it's bad most of the time. It's that it's generic, and, which is far worse, it seldom recognizes your character or the choices you've made. I played the game as a wizard, yet, aside from a handful of situations, you couldn't tell it from anything either I or the game's inhabitants had to say. Ludicrously, when being browbeaten about the true nature of magic by the airhead sorceress, I, as a wizard capable of outperforming her by some margin... meekly said nothing. There wasn't any option to tell her she was full of shit, or even offer an opinion at all on the matter save the clearly generic two paths, both of which were fairly sycophantic.
Dialogue leads us to the next annoyance - influence. Influence, in both KOTOR 2 and now this game, doesn't imply what you would think, i.e. it doesn't mean how close you've grown to a character in terms of actual friendship. No, it means sucking up; in other words, how good you are at mirroring their opinions. It was a terrible system in KOTOR 2, disliked even by the fans, which is probably why Obsidian decided it should go into NWN 2 two years later. In all fairness, there were two or three spots in the game where the system was actually utilized in clever ways, but that would fall under the heading of "too little, too late." The influence system primarily seems to exists in order to force the Player Character to scrupulously brown-nose the respective party members or risk having them abscond with all your stuff.
But I've saved the most sadistic bit for last. You see, some people play NWN 2 in strange, odd ways. Instead of making their main character a "tank," in the parlance of MMORPGers, they brazenly attempt to have their PC be a... well, a wizard, a rogue, something that doesn't stand in the front row and take massive amounts of damage without flinching. For this kind of deviant, Obsidian opted to devise a special, never-ending punishment.
The mechanism is deceptively simple. Whenever you enter the dialogue screen, it is always your character who speaks. Should another member of your party be the one to initiate dialogue, it switches places with your character, so that your character now stands where the other stood before. And it also happens when another character initiates dialogue with your party.
This all sounds pretty innocuous, doesn't it? Let's explore what it means, then.
Typical situation: my wizard, Lyra, enters the room of a dungeon, ready to lay waste to the enemy. Three quite powerful monsters stand in the centre of the room, just waiting for the party. After looking for the marker (which you learn to spot by hard-won experience) that indicates there's a scripted dialogue before you can even hurt the fuckers, you decide not to waste a spell, opting instead to move forward the bruiser of the group, because you want to tie up whatever melee fighters the others have.
Suddenly, you're in a conversation. The bad guys gloat a bit, you get something inane to say in reply. Conversation ends. You, the wizard, are suddenly standing in place of the warrior. Meaning the warrior is positioned uselessly at the back. Meaning, furthermore, that all the enemy ranged combat experts, spellcasters, and fast strikers are converging on your player character. Meaning, not to put too fine a point to it, that you're dead. Constantly. Unless your first action is panicked flight. Some hero, huh?
Pre-empting your question, no, this is not an uncommon occurrence. It happens constantly, and is particularly annoying when you find out that the rest of the party is languishing outside a door, blocking your character's exit. And the teleport effect also serves to undermine any attempt at using specialists for something lengthy, as there will be the inevitable dialogue or even interaction with an object (which the dialogue system handles) where you'll be instantly switched again. I particularly loved that when I sent Neeshka the thief to case a building, thereby causing my main character to be trapped two stories up and needing to be rescued. A Garrett-worthy operation, that was not.
...but maybe I'm not playing the game right. I mean, surely it's my own fault for wanting to play a non-fighter?
The AI
The AI and pathfinding for the characters is deplorable. I suppose I could have sugar-coated it, or presented it in some humorously roundabout fashion, but there's really no way around it. Perhaps the kindest one can say about it is that apparently, there are mods around that can fix some of its issues, also known as the Bethesda Softworks style of game making. In essence, that method entails releasing a game which lacks half the features, instead relying on the userbase to retroactively fix issues you couldn't be bothered playtesting. And I say this as someone who loved Morrowind. Anyway, the pathfinding. It is almost completely useless; a corridor is nearly always obstructed by accident, at which time the rest of the party will consider the path blocked and seek an alternative method of suicide route. Tell your party to pass through a door and take up positions on the other side, and most of them will instead pivot and enthusiastically skip down the nearest trap-filled, monster-infested side corridor.
And then there are the casters. Oh yes. The tendency for spellcasters to lob around area-effect destruction in cheerful disregard of their comrades is bad enough as it is, but it is unsurprisingly compounded by the asinine control system, which merely announces (if you pay attention to it) that the AI-guided party member has just attempted to cast a spell; if you try to stop them, it's possible with only a bit of annoyance, but any alternative strategy you advise it will helpfully ignore a round or so later. The spellcasters will also cast the most useless buffs, most of these centered on themselves - particularly galling when your main tanks are getting hammered and really, you know, could have bloody used those buffs for themselves. Yet again, you're forced to
compensate.
Just for the record, let me state that these flaws are in no way revolutionary. Alone, they would be manageable; like the rest of NWN2's many, many, many flaws, it is the total package will send the player screaming into catatonia.
The cutscenes
The Aurora engine is said to do some things better than others. Whatever Bioware would like to think, not even they could fool themselves into believing cutscenes were among the engine's fortés. All cinematics are rendered on the fly, and the result looks... well, to be kind, I'll just say "mechanical."
You'll have a scene - say, a room. In it, two or more characters will be standing. They will be completely unmoving, unless they are called upon to walk somewhere or execute a canned animation, during which, most of the time, nothing else will move. Their postures will be stiff, their bearing constantly the same. They won't even have expressions beyond a single, fixed one. There are frequent closeups, and, as mentioned before, the textures just don't stand up to that level of scrutiny.
But that's not enough, of course. The camera will constantly jump about to signal a scene shift, switching between pre-chosen camera angles. Yet these angles are quite often poorly chosen and randomly picked when each change occurs. There are no dramatic closeups (because all you see is a stiff, clearly lifeless, poorly textured blob), and the jerky timing of the pre-scripted events never fails to be obvious, soul-crushingly so. The end result is a narrative from which any drama has been forcibly leeched.
The story (main plot)
As mentioned before, the beginning of the game is bollocks. It seems to be a pastiche of the classic origin story, only it's set in West Harbor, so everybody's sitting on their porches in rocking chairs with a straw hanging from their mouth, listlessly waiting for their gumbo to finish boilin', yessum. That's right - if you thought Candlekeep was a cool and spectacular choice for your fledgling career as a hero in Baldur's Gate, wait til you get to try competing in the Harvest Fair, where you get to pummel three yokels with sticks and solve the mystery of the Overly Large Prize Pig. You can't handle the pathos!
Of course, sarcasm set momentarily aside, there's precious little pathos in the entirety of NWN 2. There's no real reason or motivation for you to care about much of anyone. With the possible exception of Neeshka and Khelgar and, oddly enough, Sand, few of the characters give you any particular reason to prefer them alive over dead. As for the emotional impact of the story, it's noticeably absent. Oh, we're told a great Doom is about to Befall the Land, etc. etc., but the reality seems to be more along the lines of "things have fucked up, so could you please go unfuck them for us? We seem to be feckless in the extreme. Oh, and don't expect a thank you, either." In being utterly drab and lusterless except for that nifty dated-looking HDR bloom, the game seems to think it's being "edgy" or even - gasp - "realistic." Which is a laugh, as it merely accentuates the forcedness of the plot and setpieces.
I said "precious little," however, and not "none." As alluded to before, there are moments when the fog lifts, and NWN 2 does manage to get the tone working. It's almost like magic. Suddenly, the blustering old geezer you've chased after for a Chapter or two becomes an ominous warlock worth listening to, or the peevishly annoying Shandra becomes a worthwhile companion. And then, just as suddenly, that moment is gone. All that is left is a faint image of what could have been, but, through ineptitude, never will be.
But the language used in the dialogue and the flavour text? In general, it's just bad, by which I mean poorly crafted from an artistic standpoint. It's imprecise, sloppy, and just generally fails to tell the story in an economic and compelling fashion. It doesn't help that the story is no more original than when last time Robert Jordan mixed orcs and Warhammer Beastmen together and hoped no-one would notice. When clichés are used by informed writers, they can produce magic. When used by rote by the ignorant, they merely elicit an eyeroll.
The Performance
If characters and plot don't matter to you, how about performance? Will you even be able to play the game? Well, I didn't. Had a computer capable of running Mass Effect at a decent clip, but not, apparently, Neverwinter Nights 2. That was after the patching. Oh dear Lord in pyjamas, the patching.
Immediately after installing, you are made aware, as this is an Obsidian game, of the preponderance of bugs. Helpfully, you're asked to use the patcher system to download updates. Now, I have a rather quick line - it usually goes at 500 KBit or above. The multiple patches, however, took more than one and a half hour, and comprised several hundred megs of content. And the size of the patches are understandable - whenever a level is loaded, it takes half a minute, as close to a gigabyte of information is loaded into the buffer. It can't possibly be necessary, but I guess Obsidian figured that as long as you have space in your computer, you might as well use it for nothing.
This is not good programming. In fact, this is the very
opposite of good programming.
Of course, it still doesn't prevent the game from crashing whenever it feels like it; in fact, NWN 2 is one of the few games that have actually forced a cold start from the system. This is a novelty to me, but not one I'd care to repeat very often. Add to that another little bug that actually corrupts save games permanently in ways you can't detect until later (if you find that suddenly, you can't access an area without the game crashing, tough shit - you'll just have to start over from an earlier save), and simply playing the game was a toil of blood and tears.
The story (the characters)
Finally, we come to the characters. And in a way, it is fitting that they be the end of this account. Not only because it's grown a bit long in the tooth, but because characters are the linchpins of stories. Without them, stories would not exist; it is they around which the tale must ultimately revolve.
This also means that if the characters do not work, the story will have a fundamental problem. And predictably, this is another problem inherent to Neverwinter Nights 2.
- Aldanon - A sage. An absent-minded sage. This is the sum total of his traits. He knows stuff, and is befuddled. Haw haw haw.
- Bevil - "The perfect fighter," Roy Greenhilt's father would have called this fellow. Dumb as a stump and only slightly more animated, Bevil is your training puppet, a meat shield sent in to help you learn the ropes. He lacks any sort of personality beyond a vague dislike for a few other characters, which is, I suppose, also good training for the future.
- Amie - Aimee's last name is Fern, which I hope is a parody. Her function is to be a harborman, like yourself, and then die, demonstrating that although they do not have refrigerators in the Forgotten Realms, they still have to find some way to try to evoke sympathy by killing ze voman. This would have worked better if Amie had possessed an actual, likable character.
- Grobnar - Possibly the most irritating character in any video game. Picture Jan from Baldur's Gate... no, scratch that. Picture Nebbers (i.e. a character purposefully put there to annoy the shit out of you constantly), then kick it up a notch. Every attempt at making him seem comedic just fails. He makes Neelix from Star Trek:Voyager look like Clint bloody Eastwood - it's that bad.
- Zhjaeve - Vacuous. This character represents a trope much in demand amongst hack writers - the oracle who speaks in metaphor and obscure riddles, yet never has any need to withhold said information beyond the author's need to keep things "mysterious" and "suspenseful." Zhjaeve has a grating way of overusing certain words that seem to hark back to Planescape:Torment and the character Dak'kon - while I've never played that game, I hear it's good, and so I must assume they made a better character of Dak'kon than Obsidian did with Zhjaeve.
- Elanee - You know what I always wanted? A nagging holier-than-thou militant vegan hounding my every step, alternately whining and berating me while secretly (assuming I'm male) lusting after me. Drab in every way imaginable, Elanee is a riddle indeed. There's simply no rationale for allowing her to follow the group at all, save the constraints of the plot. It's no wonder she can control animals; after the first ten "accidental" plummets into snake pits, bear caves and scorpion nests, she must have learned it in order to survive.
- Kistrel - Kistrel is a giant, intelligent spider you find on your travels and, if you play things right, it becomes your friend. One of the characters that don't annoy, Kistrel kind of grows on you by being earnest, harmless, and just plain neat.
- Casavir - Colourless and disgustingly virtuous, Casavir is the sort of man who would demand proper table manners from a bear about to devour him. While there is little worthy of note beyond the cardboard exterior, the horror begins when you play as a female character - you can actually romance this idiot. What's more, it's the only viable romance.
"Time constraints." Yeah. Must be.
- Khelgar - Affable and murderous, Khelgar is a sterotype, but not an overly annoying one. His banter with Neeshka is sometimes amusing, and at least, it feels as if the writers didn't overreach themselves fatally with him, as they did with the majority of the other characters.
- Neeshka - Tiefling thiefling. I don't know why I like Neeshka, but I do. Maybe because she's so obviously a basic stereotype, but still doesn't feel forced. Neeshka's high-pitched voice has been described as "grating"; personally I can see it, but it doesn't bother me. Her design and writing does have elements of eye candy to it, but them's the breaks. At least that's a level of writing the NWN 2 crew seems to be able to handle consistently.
- Shandra - A scattered mess of a character, but a bold attempt. Perhaps I'm being overly harsh, however. The core of Shandra works; she's a normal person who has her life torn down around her, and then joins the player on his/her quest by refusing to be a victim and instead taking up arms. The transformation sorta works; it's not exactly smooth or particularly competent writing, but it does the job in depicting her as a reluctant hero.
- Sand - Now this is a good character, perhaps the best that NWN 2 has to offer. Sand himself is a sly, sardonic wizard with ties to Luskan, the enemies of Neverwinter, for whom he harbors great hatred. Sand gets in several good lines, and the voice actor always manages to transform them into small masterpieces of snark.
- Qara - Into every life, a little rain must fall. In this case, it's Qara, a spoiled, poorly written, weakly acted, and ultimately inexplicably awful character. Nothing Qara does in the game is laudable or even consistent; she whinges, offers insults on the level of a grade schooler, and sulks. The option to tie this character inside a sack and drop her in a lake would have raised it immensely in my estimation, but I probably wouldn't have done it. Burlap sacks also have feelings.
- Bishop - Not bad, really. He's a ranger who's mostly an unrepentant arsehole. The question why he hangs with the rest is one difficult to answer, given that his later betrayal is one of the greatest "duh" moments in gaming, but I think I can hazard a guess. Some powerful geas effect would explain not only why Bishop wasn't kicked out at the first sign of trouble, but why most of the others wouldn't get their throats cut in their sleep before that point.
- Ammon Jerro - I've saved the best for last. Well, if by "best" you really mean "grievous disappointment." Ammon Jerro is the sort of character thirteen year olds love; a devil-worshipping antihero with a scowl, day-glow accoutrements and tattoos, and a bald head. Visually, he looks like a member of a Norwegian Black Metal band who's painted himself with fluorescent paint; mentally, he's that minus the paint. Despite flashes of depth given grudgingly, mostly Ammon Jerro is a case of What You See Is What You Get: a gravel-voiced buffoon constantly whining about the ends justifying the means, summoning his edgy, infernal-based magic in one hand while waving his flaming, saw-toothed sword with the other. Scandalous!
Conclusion
So, there it is. A review. A review of feces, yes, but feces in which a few nuggets of gold may be found, if you sift it assiduously enough. It's taken some time to write, and there are those of you that may wonder, "why? You're not going to change anyone's opinion with this, and it's just wasting your effort." To that I say, "why not?" Occasionally, it amuses me to point a finger and call a thing for what it is.
That, I should think, is an end unto itself.
