Well, I heard so many good things about this game that I decided I should try it... I was, what shall I say, rather underwhelmed. The story involves your character, The Nameless One, searching Sigil and some (very limited) areas in other planes in order to discover why he just can't seem to die for good... When I first read through the concept, I thought it had a lot of potential -- the game seems to be built around making a game that addresses a lot of things that people hate about crpgs: first, since you are immortal, there's never any reason to save and reload -- if you die, you just come back to life in a point close to where you died. Second, rather than being commited to one class a-la classical Dungeons and Dragons, you can change your class any time you want, assuming that you have someone in your party who can train you in the other class. And, fourth, you can almost always avoid combat in favor in "talking," and the game is more story based than most games.
But, as soon as I started playing, a lot of the fun went out of it. First of all, the interface was very unwieldy. Any time you want to take an aciton you have to right click to bring up an annoying circular menu, and then click on tiny buttons to choose what your action is. You can hot-key most anything, which made things easier, but still somewhat distracting. Second, and I've talked about this before so I won't dwell on it, I think 3rd person view is a big mistake in crpgs. I know that Rick would argue that it makes combat more "realistic," but for me its at the cost of making the game world far less realistic. It makes the game feel like a strategy game, rather than actually bringing the player into the world. This "distance" between the character and the player really takes out a lot of the role-playing.
The big claim was that this was a "story-based" crpg, rather than just hack and slash -- but the trouble is that the story is not told visually but through endless pages of text. At times it really felt more like an interactive novel than a computer game -- I think that presenting a crpg story through text really takes away from a lot of the dynamic power of the computer game, which is bascially a visual medium. Conversation is also just a whole bunch of dialogue trees, and it really ended up being little more than hunting through the various trees for information or the XP that was embedded in certain "correct" responses. I hate conversation trees -- they never end up having the option that matches the way I want to play the character, and so I always feel like i've been forced to follow a path, rather than having control over the character.
Another huge problem for me was the scope of the game -- it was tiny. The entire game takes place in one rather small city (sigiL) and then a few jaunts to some other planes, which were represented usually by only one or two screens of actual play area. There was no epic feel, everything was claustrophobic and rather limited in scope. I just ended up not caring about the world, becaue I felt like i never really got to see much of it.
The alignment system also really pissed me off. Rather than choosing your alignment, the game would automatically change your alignment based on certain actions. To me, this just doesn't work in a role playing game -- how is the computer to know the "reason" for my actions... maybe me being nice is really just a facade I put up to trick people whereas deep down I'm this really evil guy... This turns out to be not so much a system of alignment as of morality, and there's no place for that in entertainment. It also takes away my freedom to role-play by imposing on my character the designers (rather limiting) view of right and wrong.
The NPCs that could joing your party were all pretty interesting, but I would have much preffered to have an entire party of my own making. There were also a very limited number of NPCs that could join you. I ended up playing much of the game solo.
Finally, and perhaps most minor but it really annoyed me, all the pseudo-philosophy really pissed me off. Your character would end up entering these silly "philosophical" coversations with everyone he met -- and the designers/writers clearly had only a very superficial understaning of the debates they were staging. I'm not saying that crpgs need to have deep philosophical underpinning, only that if you do try to throw in some of that into your game -- get it right. My character would never misquote Hegel like I was forced to during one of the conversation trees... 
Let me role-play my own philosophical understanding, I guarantee i can do it better than the dime store philosophy that was forced down my throat.
All in all, a good concept that was hampered by a lot of bad design decisions that served more to take control away from the player, and thus to make the game itself feel very flat and lack any kind of involvement.
OE
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oooh, that would get me! You just can't do that, for a number of reasons (that aren't pertinent to this discussion).
hinder our enjoyment of some of the rest of life.