So I finally decided to try this game as it has a lot of fixes and is on sale but all I am feeling is frustration. I made my first charcter a cleric I didn't immediately go to the bandit camp but followed my rival. The journal made it sound like I missed an oppurtyunity to deal with the bandits so I didnt' fully explore the area well enough. Once I did find them several days where lost just wandering around trying to figure things out. I finally figured out how to disperse the fog but it is seeming to take forver to dissipate. I am down to 26 days but I still can't travel south without hitting the fog although it seems to slowly be fading out. This mechanic is very annoying to me you gave me a time limit to get somewhere with obstructions I must over come then once I do figure it out I have to wait for the game to decide to remove what is blocking me. This is a very old way fo thinking that I felt always retrected from the fun of a game.

At the moment all I want to do is play something else I will probably come back to this as I am liking a lot of the mechanics and the story is serviceable. But it just seems they are very harsh with the use of timeframes, reading some posts on the forums isn't giving me much hope it will get better until you are far into the game. It is cool to try and make it take effort to achieve power but if you go to far with it you will lose my interest which is unfortunate as I can tell a lot of effort went into the game.

Felt the same when I first played. I used the gamerguides walkthrough for the first chapter (its honestly the hardest chapter since you're so weak and under time pressure) to help me gain my bearings. I beat the game by myself afterwards.

The fog won't clear on it's own.

At the bandit's location you wind directions to an abandoned hut (or something like that) go there and find clues to the location of a temple. then clear that area. now the fog will have cleared enough for you to go to the stag lord's fortress.

I did all that and it is slowly clearing but still mostly blocked when I try to travel south. I guess I could start over wtih a walk though as I am thinking to much time will have been lost to achieve the end state for the required task which if I understand correctly makes you lose the game on that build. Honestly though that mechanic has just really demotivated me to play which really bums me out. So I will probably put it on the back burner for the moment then revisit it at some other time. I also might look around on Nexus to see what mods are available to adjust gameplay but giving it a rest at least for a bit.

Yes, this game campaign is badly done. Devs have still to work on it.

Think it's useful to keep in mind that this fog limitation of the world map is ultimately about helping the player. You have 3 months to deal with the Stag Lord, which is pretty hard to mess up given the relatively small area you can travel around in. If it was possible to go to the very east or west right off the bat, I'm sure people would do that and then get angry when the game failed because you hadn't dealt with the main quest within those 3 months. So Owlcat did this to help people focus.

As long as you travel around where you can and pay attention to conversation and the journal, there should be enough clues about where to go and what to do.

A tangent, but in my first time with the game, when I played without any guides or wikis or the sort, I ended up trying to travel to Brevoy after dealing with the Stag Lord. That just bumped me back, then I traveled around the map for at least a month, going anywhere to see if I had missed an important quest or something, that would push the story forward.

Well... turned out I had forgot a conversation option with Oleg, which basically was "Wait, I got more to do first", probably at the end of a session (hence why I forgot about it). Still, despite wasting at least 30 days doing nothing at all but traveling and resting, there was ample time to make the 90 day deadline. So just travel around where you can, and follow up on leads.

Or they could of just dropped the arbitrary time frame and allowed people to do as they wanted and travel where tehy where able to. I don't think I missed any conversation options but I haven't spoken to every companion so maybe that is what was missing. The only pending tassk is finding the berries that are suppose to be near Kobolds, I can't imagine that having anything to do wtih the fog though.