A Swing, and a Miss... Sometimes those big gambles loose you a lot.
While I liked the concept of running around and being able to fight baddies on the map, or to find a cave to explore. In execution, it became a tedious, irritating excercise. Especially my first couple of hours, as I got ambushed by, sub par spawns of monsters. Nuff said about that.
The trading system, well, it was boring. I mean, honestly is that really what we want to do. I can understand if It was an MMO and we were all tied into the same economy. In that case, yeah it could be fun. A bunch of people hitting the trade caravans and costing us money, us paying to upgrade the soldiers to protect them. Yeah, that would be fun, and a challange. As it stands. Get x ammount of gold, get x ammount of this resource/trade good. Bam, you have a trading post. Now spend some more gold and there ya go, your trading. Honestly, not the exciting experience I was looking for. Slightly more exciting than the John Deer farming game experience.
The voice acting, was below sub par. I mean, really below it. I could honestly voice act better. It sounded like, someone was speaking from a script, oh wait. Even though every one is speaking from some sort of script, they at least portray emotion. It just seemed so forced, also, the mics and or format they were using, just seemed not so good.
Overall, a wasted few hours. Just keep playing the OC and MotB while you wait for the Q4 release of Neverwinter. See you there.