One of my games of the year.
It has some issues but its out-weighed by the good.
The good:
Great voice acting, humour and a fair story well told. Lovely art and presentation.
So much variety that everytime you load up you can be doing something different (more so than Oblivion for example). I'm in the process of buying up all of the property which has a nice empire cheevment attached to it. Then its the gargoyles and demon doors and games and families and crucible records and on and on as well as the main quest.
Love the Temple of Shadows and the guards hhhwhat try to talk posh.
The combat is ok. Not as strategic as I hoped it would be but its a lot less clumsy than Oblivion and its all done with a great flourish.
The bad:
The bad are the things that were hyped.
The moral and relationship systems seem great at first but become repetitive and pointless after a few hours play. They need a lot more work and detail added.
There are one or two big decisions to make that mould your character. Some stuff in the Spire for example really had me in a moral quandry which is unusual. These are few and far between though and most of it is just pointless fluff.
Getting married was interesting for 5 minutes. The process to get there of standing around emoting to villages full of people to get your fancy to fall in love with you is not fun. I still don't understand why chatting up someone within earshot of others also makes them fall for you.
The dog also seems pointless. I don't get it tbh. It follows you around, contributes little apart from stopping to dig every now and again and is pretty forgetable. Maybe if it had more of a part in the main plot like saving your life at some point? As it is its characterless.
There are menu issues and the map is also pretty useless.
So for me the games fails in all of the areas that seemed to have people excited but is a great, well presented adventure with so much to do.
