Reckoning Diary: The Annoying Lockpick and Dispelling Mini-Games

It took me a few locks just to realize that I could adjust the pick. Even with the instructions it came across that I had one shot at the locks. Also, in the demo I had no idea what the dispel was asking for, but I got it in the fell release...of course I'm not very far in the game, so I'm sure I'll hate it later.

For a game that pretends to "shatter" genres, these two mini-games are tired, boring, and very poorly done...You're absolutely right. There's no good reason to max these skills, but having a trainer level them up for you is helpful. I just don't see how they play-tested this portion and thought "yeah people will love this".

A gripe I have is how NPC death is handled...in that it isn't. Just like Skyrim, killing "important" NPCs just renders them unconscious for an absurdly small window of time. Then they hop back up and start slashing at you with full health. That's just stupid; for a game whose basic premise is that the main character can change fate, why can't I kill people? I get that main characters important to the primary plot shouldn't be killable, but this applies to "important" side characters, too...and why do they jump back up after a minute as if nothing happened? Can't they stay dead for at least 5 minutes? Why even give the ability to attack NPCs if many of them are completely immortal? What if I don't care about their quests and just want them dead? It seems completely arbitrary, which people I can kill, and which I can't. And there's really little or no consequence for massacring a whole town, anyway.

The boss fight with the Balor is horribly done and emulates an MMO in the worst way; the opening sequence shows you running from the creature's eye blast, but in the real fight, you have to know to run to your ally because the blast can't be dodged or blocked (unlike most everything in the game)...it isn't hard to figure out, but the lack of feedback and counter-intuitive instruction is just bad game development for a single player game...perhaps they wanted their boss fights to feel more like an MMO, but why not tell the player what they are supposed to do? Or at least give them hints, instead of thinking this "trial and error" sort of boss fight is fun.

Frankly, the side quests start to get very boring. Too many are lame rip-offs of MMO style-quests, such as delivering papers or the like, and though some are very well written, I find that I care about them less and less as the game goes on. Many just feel like chores. Instead of trying to emulate the "tons of quests" models from MMO games, I feel they should have dramatically reduced the amount of quests to improve their quality so I actually *want* to complete them.

Overall, this is a great game, but they copied a lot of concepts from others...and that's to the product's detriment.

I agree that the dispelling games is extremely annoying. I can't do it fast enough even on the easy difficulty. There should be a code to automatically dispell things for those of us who no longer have quick clicking reflexes.

I got used to the lockpicking mini game quite fast but after almost have completed the game I still got problems with the ward stuff. I just buy or make health potions and use them right after open a ward spell though

These two aspects of the game were totally frustrating. If I wanted mini-arcade games I would have bought them. I have yet to successfully open a locked chest or a magiked one by using the proper means. Total waste of time. Like you said, I prefer to add points to the character enhancing skills. So far, other than a handful of bugs, the game has been fun, although not as story driven as DragonAge.