I am really confused as to where I should put my score. Sometimes the game is great other times it is awful. The writing is the greatest example of this, sometimes you will have deep meaningful writing that could be considered an interesting commentary of corporatism and extremism. But mostly it will be either shallow, boring or schizophrenic. Sometimes characters will be interesting multifaceted characters with understandable motives, occansionally they will be caricatures that add to the story and tells you about the world. Mostly they will be caricatures that rip you out of the experience or less multifaceted and more incoherent psychopaths. The combat is uninspired on lower difficulties but passable. The loot system is more meh than anything, I never found any good reason to not just go highest DPS and armor then plow my way through. Maybe that is better in higher difficulties, I played on normal and never needed to use more than you standard quick health potion/inhaler. The world is beautiful in my opinion a bit over saturated but it gives it a really unique look and feeling, even if that means it might be grating on your eyes occasionally.
First off, the black dots up there are lying to you. There are no ethical dilemmas in the game, the corpses are a resource to be used. There are no consequences of eating the flesh of the dead or grinding their bones and cutting out fat to make candles. In fact there is no other source of fat or meat, that you can collect. And draining blood and removing fat improves the corpses burial stat which is necesary to maintain a pretty graveyard. Secondly, stone is limited, later on stone is your most precious resource you need it for half of the work stations and unless you feel like getting fleeced by town vendors you better save that shit. Thirdly, go carpentry, then smithing, then masonry i had to restart my first game because i ran out of whetstone to sharpen my tool and a new one was 10 silver, which is a ridiculous price in the beggining. The game is fun despite the horrid grind, I had more fun with it after I began cheating in some basic items (like stone), and there is so much potential. The art is beautiful the music is pleasant and the world is well made and interesting. Now if they finish "The Town" which is different from the village you can visit, and add some extra QoL stuff the game will be completely worth it. As it is now I can't recommend it wholeheartedly.
The world is interesting the advisors are amazing and I wanted to keep on playing to learn more and discover he effects of your decisions. The entire world around the central game is amazing. Unfortunately the central game is terrible. I dreaded having to play each battle, to spend another 10-20 minutes to play one of the most dumbed down version of a traditional RTS i have ever played.
Now this games isn't worth a five star review but is is well about the one's and two's it's been getting. Now this is an expansion in the same way as Throne of Bhall. It is liniar and controlled telling you a story and it is a story that solid and has moments that really drew me in. It manages to present you with some actual consequenses of your heritage and make it feel like an actual thing that you are a child of Bhaal in the sidequests as well as in the mainquest which i didn't feel at all in the sidequests of BG:I and II. That doesn't mean it is better, there is some taint of someone in BeamDog trying to give their specific political spice. Just don't speak to the npc cleric about their name and the rest of the characters are actually quite ok. The story ties in ok with the rest of the BG story but there are no consequences of your choices in the later games and your choices from the previous doesn't matter either which sucks. It has made me look forward what they can do with Fearûn in future titles when they aren't tied to a story they didn't make themselves.
