I agree. It's obvious that what took 4 years was finding a publisher... not finishing the game.

It has so much potential and yet the simplest and stupidest events occur to make you think "did they even test this game?!".

The interface is a pain in the ass too. I mean every 10 minutes I go: left-click cleric, F2, hit scroll arrows, hold CTRL, right click cleric to cast Spirit eye, left click Map, left click Whiska. That's just bloody crazy. Half the interface annoyances could be solved by adding a "scroll" hotkey and an "esc" hotkey. What drives me nuts is there are no hotkeys to select the characters. What's up with that?

I tried to like this game... there seems to be a decent story buried within, but I am finally stuck. It was annoying that I could not load the game while outside the city. It was annoying that the save screen stayed up after I saved the game. It was annoying that the ESC did not back out of screens/options. It was annoying that turn based mode did not start when you spot a monster (yes, archery is damn near worthless). But through all of this I managed to get through the crypt and several of the guild/accession quests in Valeia. Although, repeating the same FedEx quest for characters that switch classes is also darn annoying... (you know, one potion for the original Cleric, later one for the Paladin, and later yet another for the Warlock).

Where am I stuck? Toad village. Yep, that same watery passage that is blocked by a toad. My problem seems slightly different though. When I descend there are two toads in that watery area. One is stopped and the other appears to be trying to get around him. Once I approach, the moving one tells me to "get out of way" and from that point on, he follows me everywhere. This makes it rather difficult to kill the one that is actually stuck in the water, as he invariably summons the guards on the rest of the level.

I simply can not believe this product took four years to make... they must have restarted or something, because they obviously did not test even the basic, starting area stuff. Even a modest beta would have pointed out most of the annoying interface problems I have mentioned. I hope they kick out a patch pretty quick... I guess for now this gets shelved and I go replay Baldur's Gate 2. "Live role playing in a box"... that's laughable... maybe he meant the multi player version.