Kalirren

With Eye Leira's dialogue about the Krysanth after you give it to her, I was really expecting it to play a significant role in the end-game, or at least for her to make it through and keep working on it. Instead, she's assassinated and it gets incinerated (or implied to be, at least)? Suuuuuck. I went and got you the Necronomicon, lady, you could at least go interestingly insane using it. Well, maybe the assassins stole it. One can hope.

Cala, that's totally what I was expecting them to do. I was surprised when they didn't mess with me at all. (Maybe in future chapters we see their dark side?)

Thirding the regret for losing the explorable map in Geneforge, with its possibility of finding areas too early and getting yourself into trouble. And on the same note, adding the possibility of finding hidden passageways etc. without asking the right person -- maybe only if you have a tracker with you? -- would be nice. This way broke the suspension of disbelief for me, by requiring the use of metagame reasoning. The other thing that we were missing from Geneforge was the option for making charisma checks. Man, that was satisfying, when you could sweet talk someone from near-hostility into being helpful and giving you directions. Also, I was continually annoyed by the lack of a nonlethal damage option; I know this isn't new, but it was more significant in this game. Miranda and Redbeard are always telling you to bring people back alive for questioning, but not a single person in the entire game ever came quietly. OK, perhaps that's a testament to the fearsomeness of Avadon's "enhanced interrogation techniques". But why on earth is it impossible for someone on your team to knock someone out and tie them up? On the other hand, I did like the simplified skill system, and loved these huge maps for all the areas! ETA: also, the junk bag, which removes a huge amount of the annoying inventory management issues.

So we refused to go into the Honored Forge encampment and kill Harua when first offered the opportunity. Shima behaved as expected. However, we then decided to go back and do it after all; luckily we saved before doing this, because it appears to have glitched the system, so that when we returned to Avadon the dialogue option to tell Hand Callan what had happened was gone, and Shima's dialogue was back to what it had been before he ran off. I can't imagine it's supposed to do this!