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| | Gameplay
Sound
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| | Genre: Adventure & RPG | | | Min OS X: 10.6 |
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While you're traipsing around the vast landscapes on your quests you'll be acquiring armor, weapons, enhancing gems and charms, magical tools, various herbal and animal components, and money. You do so by looting bodies, robbing houses and treasure chests (you'll definitely want to invest some points in lockpicking), picking pockets, gambling, and even occasionally by good old honest trading. But this is not a loot-addict game along the lines of Diablo 2 or Borderlands. While some of the quest rewards are unique items, for the most part you are accumulating a lot of raw materials that you will craft into better weapons, armor, potions and spells for yourself. Pumping points into crafting skills allows you to take stock items and improve them to a degree very unusual in this type of game. As someone who is perpetually frustrated by my inability to find unique and rare items in other RPGs, I found it very liberating to know that if I just hung in there I could upgrade my weapons into massive damage-dealers, up to 20 levels higher than their base specs, once I had enough raw materials. You can combine plants, animal and monster body parts and other items into custom potions with often surprising results, and save your recipes as well!
This brings us to the skills paths you can pursue. Character development follows the typical leveling-up modus, but there are some refreshing and frustrating deviations from the norm. Almost all of the skills you can acquire are available to you right away; there's hardly any of the impetus to hoard your skill points for higher levels found in other games. You can dabble in the various skill trees in the beginning (A little in fighting, a little in assassination, a little in sorcery) but you will find that specialization will be rewarded over time. If you feel you've botched your character build there are a few intriguing opportunities to respec offered by characters called "Soulpatchers." A Soulpatcher will strip points away from skills and attributes you haven't used, freeing up a reservoir of points you can reassign. You don't have a choice in how the Soulpatcher does his job but I found that the few times I used this system it did a very good job of predicting my wishes. This intriguing, occasionally frustrating type of semi-autonomy is found in other aspects of the combat system. For example, the hotkeys for special attack skills are assigned by the game, not by you. Whatever weapon you're using has two modes. In the case of melee weapons, there's attack mode and block mode. In attack mode, there will be three hotkeyed skills available, and in block mode there are three other skills, ditto with bows, sorcerous staves and so on. I found this frustrating until after a while I realized that the designers had provided just enough options to fit each situation. They've rigged the combat system so the seeming limitations actually make a lot of sense. You may invest a lot of points in a sword-specific special attack but it's not going to be available as a hotkey unless you're actually wielding a sword. I should also note here that the game is very much set up for at least a two-button mouse. If you're a slavish adherent of the Jobsian one-button-for-everything manifesto you're going to be deeply frustrated by this game.
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