If this game does bring RPGs back, then it does them good, because lately they’ve fucking sucked. No comment on linearity but at least in the combat system they’re doing better already. Hey, it’s party-based real-time with pause. Hurray.

Good stories can be done with linearity too anyways. The Witcher might have had some choices to make but it was really pretty linear overall, side quests aside. And all of Bethesda’s games are stupidly linear in regards to the main quest, people are just dazzled by the generic randomness of the rest of the world and think they’re doing more than being led down a particular bath, or perhaps two as we see in recent Bioware games. If only Dragon Age redeems them. We shall see.

Until then, efforts like The Witcher and this one should be welcomed by anyone claiming to be an RPG fan, or at least realise Bethesda fan doesn’t mean RPG fan. I’m not saying buy it if it’s not fun, but seriously, judging an RPG on 30 mins of gameplay? Not a very smart thing to do, no RPG out there would show you its quality in that time frame. Did you want a world-saving or world-dooming choice right as you jump in the game world? What if the game let you attack that dude and then the whole village came against you with no choice but to kill you? Is that all the consequence you care about, killing people and having their friends come to their aid? Sheesh, what has Bethesda done to this world.

Rant over.

This sort of thing has never happened to me before, but now I think I can understand all of that anti-DRM rage better.

Maybe the story is ok, but when I came to the first city, I met some arrogant nobleman without manners on the bridge. I couldn’t attack that son of a bitch for insulting the honor of my Knight dude, and my only dialogue option was something along the lines of excuse me. That was when I decided I didn’t need to know whether the story was good, I’d know soon enough when Uwe Boll makes it into a film.

But maybe that’s not what you intended.

Don’t let the demo fool you into believing it will stay this slow-paced story-wise. The story doesn’t really kick in at all within the demo area. Only in the second area (the game’s hub-city) things start to get interesting.

The demo is more suitable for trying out the mechanics which are essentially similar to Baldur’s Gate’s, though based on a different p&p-system.
“Realtime with pause” is what its called, though a much more appropriate label (at least in this game’s case) would be “round-based with pseudo-realtime”.

The demo is also okay for getting a general feel for the atmosphere of the game, which is maybe a tad brighter, less serious and more cheerful when compared to most other contemporary RPGs.

I’ve tried out the English demo very briefly, and thought the translation was quite good (from what I can tell after maybe 5 minutes of playing).

Oh, sorry was it supposed to be a funny ending?