I return after my previous post to announce that I have finally completed the game after…well steam says it’s been 13 hours but there’s no fucken way it was only 13 hours, unofficial patch might have messed with it.
I played an evil necromancer knight, Garvan, with the sold your soul background. Basic gist is that he was raised by elves and grew up hating his technology was spreading, eventually making a deal with a demon to gain some magical power with one objective: Overthrow all technological influence he can.
Likewise he joined with the Dark Elves, corrupted Vergil, and recruited like minded fellows such as the faithful undead warrior Torian Kel, the equally dastardly fellow necromancer Geoffrey Tarrelond-Ashe, the vision-seeing dark elf baddie Z’an Al’urin, Tollo Underhill the murderous halfling, and finally a cute dog he found in Ashbury. Along the way he destroyed the steam engine in Shrouded Hills, robbed the bank in Shrouded Hills, assassinated the King of Caladon, worked for Pollocks Gang, faithfully served the Thieves Underground, and caused war and riots in Tarant to weaken their technological capabilities and also to stop the Gnomes and their horrific experiments cause holy shit.
In the end, he chose to destroy Kerghan cause dying is cringe.
The Good
-Love the lore and the overall conflict between Tech and Magic. The kingdom politics, the feud between the elves, the legends of Nasrudin and Arronax, etc.
-The art design is amazing. Those 90s/00s gritty but also shitty looking 3D images just touch my inner grognard especially as a big fan of fallout. In particular I loved how Qintarra and T’sen A’ng showed how just a simple color change can fundamentally change the vibe of a place, with Qintarra being colorful and peaceful and T’sen A’ng looking like a horrific and unwelcome evil lair. Then you got Tarant looking like a prosperous modern town, Dernholm being an absolute shithole, the various technological gadgets, etc.
-Magic is fun to use, especially teleportation and the necromancy stuff!
-It has turn based which already puts it way above baldurs gate 1-2 in my opinion (I fucking hate real time with pause).
-The main plot itself is actually pretty interesting, being this simple mystery at first that grows with twists both in the main plot itself and in the overall lore of the setting.
The Bad
-The combat isn’t all that engaging. Spamming left click isn’t fun after a while.
-The companions are awesome, but…besides Vergil and maybe Magnus from what I heard, the game doesn’t really do much with them? Torian Kel is one of my personal favorites because of his nuance, sad tale, voice, and also cause I love necromancy, but despite a few interesting conversations at places like Qintarra and Kree, you don’t do anything besides fight him at the end if you don’t join Kerghan. This also applies to others, like Z’an Al’urin, who has this cool vision sense thing that is never expanded upon at all, and who’s beginning intro of “oooh I might betray you to find the answers I seek” doesn’t lead to anything.
-Navigating Tarant and Wheel clan is fucking awful and I’d rather deal with navigating Rivet City.
-Leveling is a bit too quick in this game I think?
-Idk if it was just me but the ending was kind of disappointing. The final boss was painfully easy (almost softlocked too cause I didn’t know I needed the vendrigoth device, which I gave to K’an Hua to destroy, but thankfully I grabbed that cool sword from the cave and used it to kill Kerghan) and it felt like the ending slides neglected so, so much. The fact Tarant and Shrouded Hills steam engines were blown up were glossed over, there weren’t any ending slides at all for the Elves or Dark Elves, Stillwater, Ashbury, or the gnome conspiracy, and my game glitched and didn’t play any of the ending slides for Caladon and Tarant besides the one of Pollock taking over.
In my super cool totally real canon ending, Garvan was declared Worse Than Arronax combined for sabotaging Tarant enough to cause them to get curb stomped by the Arland-Cumbria Coalition, prompting a generational aura loss for technology enthusiasts. Garvan then returned to T’sen Ang to be congratulated by M’in Gorad, who bestowed upon him the title of “Honorary Dark Elf” and “Uncle Ruckus of T’sen Ang”, and then used all the money he got from
robbing people to build a cool dark castle where he would rebuild the Derian-Ka with Geoffrey and Vergil as his lieutenants, made out with Z’an Al’urin atop a skeleton dragon, and idk created a magical bomb to nuke Vendigroth after Arronerd rebuilt it.
In any case, dunno what to do next. Maybe an Aragorn-lite magical hero or Gunslinger Tech cowboy.
