Well, I played it for a few hours now, and it seems like a decent game. I am playing a noble human male fighter. The origin story was decent.
SPOILER: However, I did not like the fact that the mother abandons her children to be with her dying husband. Of course, I guess having mom hang around might undermine the adventure, but that was just stupid. I thought the way the character was taken into the order was acceptable; he had nowhere else to go.
The biggest problem with this game is the freaking controls. Many things, such as movement, attacking characters, selecting character portraits, selecting dialogue lines, navigating menus, etc. can be accomplished with one click. Instead of using the primary mouse button for all of this, Bioware decided to arbitrarily split the responsibilities between the primary and secondary mouse buttons. So I select characters, navigate menus, etc. with the primary mouse button, and I move and attack with the secondary mouse button. Of course the two are used interchangeably so much that I often click the wrong one. The entire thing is stupid and frustrating. What the fuck were they thinking! I have not had to fight the camera very much, so that is nice. Of course, the game never seems to preserve the camera angle between saves, so that can be infuriating. Furthermore, the characters do not always do what I tell them to, and that can really piss me off!
The combat is better than in NWN but not as good as the IE games. I actually thought the intro fights were a bit harder than those in Baldur's Gate.
