One of the most bitter sweet gaming experiences I’ve ever had

When I started with this game I was jaded. I had already heard all of the controversy about the performance and the microtransactions, so when I was heading home from work to play I wasn’t necessarily excited.

Then I took a break from the main quest right after getting to bakhbattal to explore, and the game just swallowed me whole. I learned to appreciate the combat through the thief vocation, leading me to appreciate even the slower more methodical aspects. I started experimenting with every class, fighter, archer, I even circled back to mage. I burnt so many hours just trying out combat on the many hordes of goblins.

When I was finally ready to start REALLY main questing I had already fallen in love with the feel of the game, and while I had slowly been increasing in strength due to how lucrative fighting monsters is exp wise, I still felt the game had a decent amount of difficulty. Though to be fair this is likely in part due to my lack of upgrading my gear. I do this thing in games where I explore and build up resources to make myself OP but I don’t use them until the very end of the grinding session, just to experience the satisfaction of the fruits of my labor all at once

I had explored and side quested for so long I had convinced myself I barely scratched the surface of the game because I had stop doing the main quest

When I started focusing on questing and not exploration I gained a few new gripes after moving further in the story, mainly with how hollow it felt and how the world didn’t seem to take the story into account. For example, even though I was supposedly being impersonated for the majority of the story, everyone still seemed to know I was the arisen from the first hour in.

Once I started actually upgrading my gear I definitely felt the difficulty of the game collapse into almost nothing, and after experiencing the disappointment that was the warfarer class I was a tad bit more jaded with the combat. Not to mention the lack of enemy variety, at some point combat becomes trivial because you can one shot goblins, harpies, wolves, and saurians. Should a boss appear he’s only a minute from death .

I know that I could impose restrictions on myself to artificially raise the difficulty, like using worse gear, not using pawns, using no resources, etc. But that’s not fun, a big portion of the appeal of this game is gaining power, upgrading your gear and improving your tactics. Restricting myself to ignore half the game mechanics would be harder, but it would be an incomplete experience.

But I didn’t have long to think about all of this, because getting to bakbattahl wasn’t “scratching the surface” as I had thought. It turns out that’s basically the last major zone in the game.

The bones of this game are so powerful and I was enraptured by its world before it was cut so short.

They could have crafted a powerful story about attempting to assume power as the arisen, but it didn’t even feel like they wanted to tell a story. It feels like the main quest was put together begrudgingly almost, as if they were doing it to satisfy a gaming standard rather than doing it because they had a story to tell.

Fine, that means the games focus is the pawns and strategic combat + resource management. Thats perfectly fine with me. But if this were the real focus of the game, they would have put more effort into game difficulty scaling, skills/ combat loop of certain vocations, and most of all, enemy variety.

The game doesn’t feel as good with just 4 skills, it makes your options feel so restrictive especially with warfarer. But it’s hard to argue that there should be more, why? Because the game is already so easy with 4 skills. It’s hard to argue that I should have more skills to approach enemies with a larger variety of strategies when goblins and saurians really only require smacking them until death.

My pawn even said something like “No need for strategy, we will be victorious no matter what”. That made me feel as if I was playing the game wrong, but why would I feel the need to approach combat with an adaptive mindset and strategy when there is nothing to adapt to? It would just be playing with my food at that point, no need to pretend that I had to use strategy to take down an enemy.

The lack of enemy variety basically makes it so the recipe to defeat every enemy is the same, which is smack it until it’s dead.

Reviewers talked about the game like there would be combat situations where you would absolutely have to build your party meticulously to counter situations like being unable to hit a ranged enemy or not having enough brute force to damage an enemy. In reality, there will always be at least one up close attacker and one ranged attacker in your group, and that trivializes every enemy.

It’s just frustrating because this game feels like it was maybe another year in the oven from being a generation defining release.

If I had to describe the experience of this game, i would say it’s like realizing limgrave is a small sliver of Elden rings map but in reverse.