I think I burned myself out on the first game. I REALLY liked it for a long time. Played 29 hours in the last week or so.
But it has its problems. The biggest are as follows:
1. The experience curve is terribly out of whack. Just clearing each screen as I come across it and I have almost completely outleveled almost everything in the game. It's the point where I no longer get experience for 90% of the things I kill, the ones that do still give me some exp I only get 5, and I very rarely come across something I get 40 exp for. I know that obviously leveling should slow down as you get higher, and I'm 20 which is probably pretty close to the end, but I think ahving you get less experience with each kill just demotivates the player. Instead he should have had each level require more exp to cross, that way you feel like you're working torwards something. This has really killed my desire to keep playing because I feel like I'm not advancing.
2. The scripting is way too rigid for the flexible nature of the game. I keep coming across NPCs and named monsters who I am pretty sure supposed to give me a quest, but won't, or just say "You've already done this, don't talk to me". Obviously, by giving the player the chance to kill pretty much anyone they can't account for anything. But I've been playing as a typical gamer - I never kill anyone without talking to them, I talk to everyone, etc. I think a lot of them are broken just because I go to the wrong place first. The best example is a character named Heustess. I won't spoil anything, in fact I can't spoil anything because I have no idea what he does, but someone how I broke his quest by coming from the west instead of the south east, and it seems like he's got a cool story to tell.
It's a great game though. If I hadn't binged on it I would probably finish it. I'm going to back up my save, maybe I'll come back to it, it's a shame because I'm pretty sure I'm almost done with it but going back to it such a chore now. I definitely will be moving on to Geneforge 2 some day, will probably just have to google the ending which is too bad. The story is great, it's my biggest regret because I really want to see how it ends.
In fact, maybe I'll just look for a let's play. It's a pretty indie game so there probably aren't a lot out there, but I know there is one, just not sure if he finished it.
Edit:
Well, I ended up beating it. I just beelined for the end and pretty much ignored everything else. I never was able to join a sect. All my criticisms of the original stand, but it's still a wonderful game. The most astonishing thing to me is how much more interesting I found the world/story even though it's just presented in text boxes vs the vast majority of games released with all the fancy tech of the modern era and yet they all have the most generic and boring of worlds and stories. The ending was pretty satisfying.
I wish I had turned up the difficulty much earlier though, the default difficulty is super easy, at least for shapers. Also, I think it's really important you pick a "sect path" so to speak early on and stick with it, otherwise you won't be able to join any sects because you've sent mixed signals, which is what happened to me.
