Ok, so I’ve been playing it and I enjoy the crap out of it!
My party of Warlock (my character), Barbarian (greatsword), Druid (sling and heals), and Rogue (shortbow) is clearing through combat without any trouble on supar hard mode. I also picked up the ranger cohort, who is specced in Two Weapon Fighting, which gives me some extra frontline muscle.
The exploration is fantastic. I’ve found lots of little items, and several small dungeon-y things full of a reasonable number of mobs. My druid is my primary outside person, with the rogue serving as the emergency hiding guy and the others getting swapped in when I want to check over a location a little further.
I’ve also found some hidden stuff with skills I didn’t expect to, like Appraise, Tumble, and Spellcraft. So that was cool. It definitely helps to specialize, rather than trying to use your PC as the jack of all trades, and whatever you do, don’t have multiple characters with the same skills! Redundancy is a bad thing in this game. If I were going to remake my party again, I’d make a rogue with Able Learner and give him ridiculously high intelligence, max as many skills as possible, and use him to explore.
The conversation system is great, but I wish they had more immediate feedback on what conversation options characters that aren’t currently selected. There’s just a little conversation bubble to tell you if they have more things to say than just the default.
I’m uncertain how I feel about the main campaign. I’m only at about level 8 or so right now, so I haven’t gotten all that far in, but it feels really downplayed. It’s not anything like as story driven as MOTB was, and I kind of prefer that. There are lots of subtle and not so subtle shout outs to the previous games, so if you haven’t played them you’ll miss out on some of the side material. It’s neat, but nothing story critical.
I’m mostly exploring and haven’t really gotten down and dirty with the trade system. I was impressed by the wagon screen (where your resources and trade goods are held) and I also like that you can trade with cities without having to actually go inside. Very convenient.
The resting system is neat and provides some additional difficulty. I can’t imagine you’ll have a good time if you’re planning to use arcane firepower as your primary damage source, as you’ll end up getting ambushed while trying to rest outside. Resting in a town costs 50g, and you can do it without entering.
Mobs that are lower level seem to be easier to avoid, but I can’t find an auto-resolve option, which makes me worried that this will end up being almost as irksome as the JRPGs it resembles. I’m not looking forward to the inevitable load into fights that I can win in four auto-attacks.
Anyway, I like it a lot. Hope this helps people out.
