How's It For You?

So it's been out for over a day now. Three new reviews hit yesterday -- two were very positive, the third not so much.

RPG Watch awarded the game four out of five stars, and had the following to say:

In terms of writing, you will find something interesting at every turn. The main plot is interesting and full of twists and turns, some of which are fairly predictable and others are surprising. The characters you encounter are fully drawn and provide both insight and color into the world around you. There are sixteen side quests aside from all of the quests associated with completing the main story. Some of these quests are pretty straightforward, but others will stay with you for much of the game, at times making you wonder if they will tie into the main quest. There is a great mix of humor and pathos, of witty party banter and more serious over-arching exposition.

Sorcerer's Place dished out an 8/10 rating, with the comments as follows:

The plot itself is derivative of several well established cinematic genres. This reflects a deliberate effort to steer away from truly high fantasy, and instead achieve a remarkably successful realism in the setting. You won’t find any Mary Sues and Marty Stus in Westgate. Indeed, more than one criminal faction is vying for power, while agents of good-aligned deities have an apparent interest in containing the chaos, or even benefiting from it. Everybody in this town is looking out for number one, even the ones who are ostensibly on the side of law and good. The degrees and specifics by which everyone’s self-interest finds expression is what sets them apart from each other. In a sense, this pervasive sense on literally being on your own against a hard-bitten world made me compare some of the story arcs to classic crime dramas like Heat, the French Connection, and The Corruptor.

Alas, GameBanshee weren't so hot on MoW and awarded the game a score of 6.8. Here's a snippet:

The campaign structure in Mysteries of Westgate is disappointingly similar to the campaign structure of Storm of Zehir. That is, there isn’t much going on with the main storyline (you don’t really learn anything about the cursed mask until the very end of the game); you just need to complete a bunch of side quests on your way to the parade of final boss battles. The side quests are fun enough, and they involve vampires, pirates, spiders, and of course hamsters, but they’re all short, and they only rarely have anything to do with the main storyline or your companions. They just felt like random filler to me, which is sort of sad coming from a developer who likes to mention Baldur’s Gate, which linked together characters, quests and plot as well as any game ever.

You can't please everyone. My impression is that the reviewer, Steven Carter, simply prefers an RPG with more -- perhaps an exclusive -- focus on story, a paradigm more akin to MotB than SoZ. As it happens, I think MoW more or less sits between both games; an observation made by Michael J. Anderson in his review for RPG Watch. Alas, limited companions are a restriction imposed by a budget tiny in comparison to either expansion and infinitesimal compared with a full release. That VO budget only goes so far. As for unconnected sidequests, well, that was pretty much a requisite for the kind of city-based adventure Ossian wanted to create. You can have a city-based game with an overarching plot -- say, war, famine or plague -- providing a unifying thematic resonance, but our goal was for players to explore the story of Westgate as much as the story in Westgate. The comments about the game's gloominess I found strange and haven't seen repeated anywhere else.

There's a few points I agreed with, though, and the rule of any creative work is that someone won't like it. As long as the negative -- or in this case, neutral -- opinion is the exception rather than the rule, all's well.