The conversation system is dialog tree based, but has a nice feel to it. Anytime you go into dialog with an NPC you take on what I describe as a realtime cinematic feel. The camera locks in place and you get black bars at the top and bottom of your screen, with the NPC parts of the dialog being displayed at the bottom like close captioning. Your possible responses, one if which always seems to be "Goodbye" for a quick exit from the dialog, appear in the black space at the bottom of the screen and are numbered so you can quickly navigate the conversation via keyboard, or click on them if you're more mouse oriented.

The quest system is journal based, which won't surprise anyone who's been playing online games this decade. It is closely tied to the mapping system and I particularly liked being able to click on a quest goal on the map and make that my active quest. The journal has the usual bells and whistles, quests sorted by where the next step is to be completed and color coded by difficulty with an icon for group content next to the quest title. Overall about what is expected these days from a competitive game.

The combat system leans towards the twitchy side from what I saw. There are three melee attacks (attack left, attack right, attack center) that are the primary means of melee attacks. They correspond to the defense shields for the NPCs and other players. You can control your defenses, switching to defend left, right, center or some combination on the fly. This all leads to a fast paced combat interface. On top of that at level 2 you start learning combinations, feints, and special attacks that work in conjunction with the 3 base attacks to do more damage and provide special abilities (poisons, bleeds, deaggro, splash damage, etc). You also learn multiple stances, that can be used to enhance combat abilities and at level 10 you start earning points that are spent on feats which can also modify your combat abilities. Overall it is a very rich and complex melee system that definitely deserves more than 6 days of attention to do justice to.

By comparison, the spell system seems almost simple. Stand at a distance, choose your stance, hammer away on your high damage spells, get exp. The spell casters (Demonologist and necromancer anyhow) do get pets as they level up, which gives them something to do when not hitting their spell buttons, and honestly I don't play casters so there may be something I'm missing on that track.

Regardless of caster or melee, everyone gets a set of skills and some points to spend on them. Of course, you start out with more points than you can possibly use but quickly the scales tip the other way and you have more skills than points and have to start making compromises. For assassins it's the conflict between hide and perception over bandaging and fast healing with climbing always in the background. For casters do you max out concentration or mana recovery, or maybe stick with the bandaging that is so handy at low levels, again with climbing a constant temptation. A note on the climbing skill; throughout the game there are areas of the topography that are "climbable" if you have a high enough skill. When you get close enough to a climbable area, a text window will pop up saying "you can climb here" and when you try you'll get a message if your skill is too low. I found three quests that were only accomplishable by climbing and I'm sure that's only the tip of the iceberg (can you climb an iceberg? maybe it's only the base of Half Dome?).

The assassin class is truest to what I consider a rogue. Attacks that do extra damage from stealth, large opening damage, and low survivability in a slugfest. The class quest line that you enjoy for the first levels provides plenty of opportunities to accomplish your goals by stealth instead of force of arms and in some cases even insists on it. I would have liked poisons to be something more than a stance and an attack line that has poison in the name, but hey at least they put poison in the name.