Posted October 26, 2018
I have about 100 hours in the game and got to house at the edge of time and then i stopped with "why bother".
The basic RPG game is pretty forward and while there were few game stopping bugs, they were fixed with patches in such manner that i was able to continue.
The kingdom side of the game was and is a mess. The mechanics are not told in any reasonable fashion during the game and you have to guess lot of things.
The timetable on the kingdom side is so strict, that the badly made project/event feature messes things up. Some projects take immediate time from you, while others don't. Those that take time will go forward even if your kingdom burns to cinders while it is happening. The retarded event rule "this expires at the start of next month regardless of when the event came up" multiplied with those projects leading to time warp makes end of the months pretty much useless in terms of projects that take time unless you choose to save/reload a lot. And often you will have to.
As kingdom can lead you losing the game, your adventuring side is restricted by the kingdom. I probably missed some 20% of the areas because i had no time searching areas because you gotta keep the kingdom advisors bonuses up so the kingdom doesn't get fucked up. And even when i did that, i got lots of events that had DCs that required nat 20 to succeed as DC was a lot higher than 20 + advisor ability.
On the kingdom side of things, war with Pitax was especially shitty event, as there were events that dropped your kingdom values 20-40 at a time. Then as you get enough events with problems that fail, your kingdom will get in worse shape that drops advisor ability 1-4 points, making even normal events difficult to win. Again, lots of save/reload. You can buy happiness to your kingdom with 1000BP which is pretty much something that you need to do many times unless you are lucky with problems. I probably used something like 500 000 gold to buying BPs because of events regarding pitax.
The final nail in the coffin came with the final chapter. I got the information about the event and didn't have even time to explore thousand voices area. Now it could have been possible to do that but i used the time to get my kingdom back on its' feet after the pitax fiasco and the final chapter event is such that it will kill your kingdom unless you react immediately. So hurry to ending.
The ending is one big area called house at the edge of time, and it is just plain stupid. The level of opposition is such that there are ACs from 55-70 in there. The whole area has regenerating enemies(which can be dealt with thou) and those wild hunt types that create automatic paralyze that makes freedom of movement something that has to be on all the time instead of sometimes. If you don't have packload of those ready, sucks to be you. Furthermore the area starts so that you lose all your companions and you might get them back or they might die depending on quest statuses and story. I had done the quests so i didn't lose that many characters, but as i lost Tristian, i didn't get healer in the beginning at all. And its pretty easy to think how fun that is.
In the end i played the house to a certain point and then just burned out to this game. The last area felt more like doing boring job than fun / challenging game. I don't know how they playtested the area or if they playtested it at all, but if they did, all their tester must have been some serious min/maxers. With normal lvl 16 party, it was simply put boring drag until you didn't want to play anymore.
I think the game has great potential, but it would have needed a year or more development time to remove the bugs and playtest the game in professional manner. Many novel features of game like the kingdom became things that made it boring effort instead of fun game. The unbalanced areas did exactly the same thing. I could have finished the final chapter but it was clear at that point that it would be lots of save/reload with rests all the time. That's just not fun, i rather enjoy my games instead of play soviet gulag RPG.
Luckily, Red dead redemption 2 was released today, so i can look forward to enjoyable gaming this weekend.
The basic RPG game is pretty forward and while there were few game stopping bugs, they were fixed with patches in such manner that i was able to continue.
The kingdom side of the game was and is a mess. The mechanics are not told in any reasonable fashion during the game and you have to guess lot of things.
The timetable on the kingdom side is so strict, that the badly made project/event feature messes things up. Some projects take immediate time from you, while others don't. Those that take time will go forward even if your kingdom burns to cinders while it is happening. The retarded event rule "this expires at the start of next month regardless of when the event came up" multiplied with those projects leading to time warp makes end of the months pretty much useless in terms of projects that take time unless you choose to save/reload a lot. And often you will have to.
As kingdom can lead you losing the game, your adventuring side is restricted by the kingdom. I probably missed some 20% of the areas because i had no time searching areas because you gotta keep the kingdom advisors bonuses up so the kingdom doesn't get fucked up. And even when i did that, i got lots of events that had DCs that required nat 20 to succeed as DC was a lot higher than 20 + advisor ability.
On the kingdom side of things, war with Pitax was especially shitty event, as there were events that dropped your kingdom values 20-40 at a time. Then as you get enough events with problems that fail, your kingdom will get in worse shape that drops advisor ability 1-4 points, making even normal events difficult to win. Again, lots of save/reload. You can buy happiness to your kingdom with 1000BP which is pretty much something that you need to do many times unless you are lucky with problems. I probably used something like 500 000 gold to buying BPs because of events regarding pitax.
The final nail in the coffin came with the final chapter. I got the information about the event and didn't have even time to explore thousand voices area. Now it could have been possible to do that but i used the time to get my kingdom back on its' feet after the pitax fiasco and the final chapter event is such that it will kill your kingdom unless you react immediately. So hurry to ending.
The ending is one big area called house at the edge of time, and it is just plain stupid. The level of opposition is such that there are ACs from 55-70 in there. The whole area has regenerating enemies(which can be dealt with thou) and those wild hunt types that create automatic paralyze that makes freedom of movement something that has to be on all the time instead of sometimes. If you don't have packload of those ready, sucks to be you. Furthermore the area starts so that you lose all your companions and you might get them back or they might die depending on quest statuses and story. I had done the quests so i didn't lose that many characters, but as i lost Tristian, i didn't get healer in the beginning at all. And its pretty easy to think how fun that is.
In the end i played the house to a certain point and then just burned out to this game. The last area felt more like doing boring job than fun / challenging game. I don't know how they playtested the area or if they playtested it at all, but if they did, all their tester must have been some serious min/maxers. With normal lvl 16 party, it was simply put boring drag until you didn't want to play anymore.
I think the game has great potential, but it would have needed a year or more development time to remove the bugs and playtest the game in professional manner. Many novel features of game like the kingdom became things that made it boring effort instead of fun game. The unbalanced areas did exactly the same thing. I could have finished the final chapter but it was clear at that point that it would be lots of save/reload with rests all the time. That's just not fun, i rather enjoy my games instead of play soviet gulag RPG.
Luckily, Red dead redemption 2 was released today, so i can look forward to enjoyable gaming this weekend.