Just completed this about an hour ago. Overall I thought the game was really good, I think the 90% metacritic score it got was about right, there was a few things that irked me though.
The good.
- Really nice blend of 2d/3d graphics, overall the look of the game is very nice, varied scenery and locations, kept the look of the infinity engine games but managed to keep the quality high enough to look good by todays standards.
- Music and sounds, really good, great fight music, great ambient music.
- Voice acting was pretty good for the most part
- Lore is in depth and varied, you can really enjoy reading what feels like an endless amount of text or skip a lot of it, which is nice.
- Choices and branches feel varied, there's a wide array of responses to a lot of dialogue and situations but sadly it doesn't often make much difference.
- The ending is done fallout style where you get a look into the future of how your actions affected the world based on your actions and what quests you did and didn't do, how well you did them, that's really satisfying.
- No major game breaking bugs for me, in fact no noticeable bugs at all.
- Story plot was good, some good moments as it zig zags about and keeps you interested.
- Good party mechanics, good backstory on characters.
- The keep was really cool
The Bad
- The departure from D&D rules wasn't a positive thing. Too many damage types and defense types left me largely ignoring this, I mainly focused on positional tactics, CC to win most fights and didn't feel the whole stats system mattered that much, you generally take a quite balanced party who all have different dmg attacks anyway so when you average it out, it really doesn't matter that much. I played one easy though, it might be required on >normal but I could see that being a chore.
- Combat on easy was pretty easy for the entire game but the last boss was unreasonably difficult which left me just angry and frustrated re-doing it over and over utterly eradicating any sense of immersion, I thought that lent itself heavily to ruin the feeling of victory when you win the game - don't know why devs do this, it's just a pointless waste of time for everyone.
- Not getting XP from creature kills is annoying especially if you want to do a lot of Caed Nua at once, despite slaying 100's of baddies you have to go and do some fetch quests in order to get your level up before you can go back and finish it. Also randomly giving things like lockpicking give you XP was random and silly.
- Few annoying little things like combat doesn't end until ability cool down finishes, so you have this 2-3 second wait at the end of every fight which is more irritating than anything else. Also the fact that the cursor wont change to loot a corpse until you move it off the corpse and back over again after combat, these little things were just really annoying after some time.
- Loading times. ER HELLO? I have 16Gb of RAM and 4GB of vRAM FFS, stuff the damn game files into RAM where possible and load from there, loads of quests have you move back and forth through the same areas and loading is just irritating despite having good specs.
- I found it hard to really get good endings for a lot of my party quests, I followed them to the end and tried my hardest to explore them but they just kinda flatlined for a lot of them.
Ultimately the negatives only deduct very slightly from an otherwise really good game, good story
Second, whats up with all the pets? I am starting to get quite a few, is there any purpose for them? I just keep them in my chars inventory, thinking they might come up in conversations but they never do.
No purpose that I'm aware of, just a companion, I found quite a few throughout the game, ended up keeping a piglet, awesome. They come up in idle conversation normally after the loading screens, your party members will sometimes make quick observations.
So is there anything quest related involving the Black Hound from the inn?
Not that I found sadly, I had him equipped for about the first 1/3 of the game too.