Gameplay

All mixed up

Still, it doesn’t get dull, even though it stretches over at least 30 hours of play. This is in large part due to solid design that features a lot of varied quests and locales, and doesn’t get too heavy on any one core element of roleplaying. There’s a fair bit of combat, often against interesting new enemies like gnolls, slaads, basilisks, and medusae, but lengthy breaks between battles make sure that fighting never gets monotonous. There’s a fair bit of puzzle solving, but the puzzles aren’t particularly difficult and are in the tradition of roleplaying epics stretching back to riddles poised in the Gold Box D&D games. And there’s a fair bit of exposition, but it’s not drawn out to adventure-game lengths, nor is it as tedious as the conversations in the original Neverwinter Nights campaign.

Pulling a B&E

Friendly neighborhood blacksmith

Know anyone named Frodo?

Everything has been mixed up, mostly for the better. Combat is typically interrupted by conversation, which is in turn interrupted with choices to use character skills. Often, you can avoid a fight entirely by using your Persuade ability to convince a potential enemy to see things your way. You can intimidate others, lie, or simply try and weasel your way out of tough spots. This lends more importance to conversations, makes you tune in rather than zone out and click “Continue” until you can unsheath the broadsword again, and follow what seems to be an open-ended pathway through the game. Even the key encounters, including one with a White Dragon and another with an evil sorceress, can be successfully concluded without bloodshed if you do a good job navigating the conversation trees and pull off skill checks. Puzzles further remove you from hack’n’slash land. Quests generally feature aspects of all of the above, livening up even the usual Fed Ex fetch-and-grabs.

Snidely Whiplash summons a skeleton

Character development has also been boosted, both naturally with the inclusion of many situations designed to test your roleplaying abilities and alignment and artificially with rule tweaks and additions. The former refers to almost everything you do during play. Loot a crypt and your Paladin might emerge not so committed to Lawful Good. Fulfil a quest to save a child and your duty to Chaotic Evil will be tested. You can’t pick and choose, or try to accomplish everything that the game offers, as there are some objectives designed for good and some for evil. Best of all, you get the chance to play either extreme to the fullest, or come down safely in the middle, with a wide range of choices in each conversation tree. You can offer help to everyone you see, no questions asked, and even toss money to victims of hardship as a parting gift. You can demand reward money for even the slightest task and attack everyone you meet on the road (and it’s a lot of fun to go the evil route, since you get fantastic dialogue choices, including hilarious options like asking a babe in distress how “grateful” she’ll be for the life-saving). You can play it neutral and do a little of both.

Pulling a B&E

Friendly neighborhood blacksmith

Know anyone named Frodo?

Prestige classes are probably the gaudiest of the artificial features. They alter character development by giving you the option to branch into a new class once you reach a number of milestones. There are selections here for every character type. Elves and half-elves have the Arcane Archer, those with evil intentions have Assassin and Blackguard, and everyone else has Harper Scout and Shadowdancer. Each has real strengths—although the best in terms of sheer coolness factor have to be the undead-creating Blackguard (something of a Snidely Whiplash ne’er-do-well) and the death-dealing Assassin—and provides variety to the monotony of controlling just a single character, especially when you get bored with your chosen profession right about the time the new ones become available.