Encounter design is terrible.
It's as good as it could be for the flawed RTwP system. Could be better, but could be much worse.
Kingdom management is a tedious and joyless experience. The option to play with it disabled doesn't work. There are many cases where you can lose the game by "misplaying" this mechanic, without explanation.
True. Mods make it more tolerable, but it was a pretty poor implementation all-around.
Maps are reused 4-5 times in places.
Just about every RPG out there does this to some extent. Not even worth mentioning as a negative unless it's extremely in your face, but it's not. Doubt most people even notice.
Very slow party travel across maps, with no ability to change walk speed.
It takes like 20 seconds at the most in the few cases you're going from one end of the map to the other. Not even worth mentioning unless you demand bullshit teleport-everywhere game design kids with no attention span love so much.
Choices have consequences, which would be great if you were given a clue what they were.
Fuckin' lol. Do you just read the last few pages of every book you pick up and call it good? Probably don't even read if the concept of events setting up future events is a flawed concept you have trouble with.
Alignment based dialogue is poorly thought out and forces the player to 'roleplay' according to Owlcat's definition of alignment, which is often wrong.
"My opinion is right, everyone else's is wrong. Only my concept of Lawful-Neutral matters, and Owlcat made a shit game because they have their own view of it. How dare artists create art from their own visions."
Enforced encumberance forces you to leave valuable loot behind.
"WTF, I can't have a backpack full over 300 shovels and cabbages. Shit gaem."
+5 weapons, worth thousands of GP, can be found in barrels and crates in towns during the end game.
Yeah that's kinda lame.
Annoying toy chow dogs barking, and NPCs coughing and grumbling at every other rest location. Are these quaint and relaxing sounds in Russia?
They're crowded inns with thin walls full of drunk people, dafuq you expect?
Heavy, expensive, and limited 'camping provisions' are required to rest in dungeons.
"I can't blow my load of abilities every single battle and then rest with no consequences between every fight and I have to actually interact with the attrition battle system that is a hallmark design of like 70% of games ever made. Shit gaem."
No ability to craft + poor itemization and very limited vendor selection.
"My wizard isn't also a legendary blacksmith and alchemist and cook and carpenter that can put every artisan in the world to shame that makes artifacts worthy of gods, even without training or a stocked location. I have to have experts in my kingdom help do it! Shit gaem."
Every game needing crafting is modern popamole decline.
Random encounters offer almost no XP, and a bunch of loot you can't carry.
"I can't get half a level and the wealth of nations from killing 3 goblins, I have to actually go dungeon diving and fight more difficult encounters. Shit gaem."
Failure to resolve quests before deadlines results in losing the game.
The time limits are so generous they may as well not even be there. If you actually hit them, it means you tried to hit it, and tried hard.
Tedious unsatisfying puzzles.
Sure. But there are also barely any puzzles.
Custom quests are poorly described, requiring unintuitive actions from the player (like using torches to kill swarms).
There's
literally a tutorial pop-up in the quest saying to use a torch, a line in your quest log about using a torch, the item description for the torch mentions it. You have to be blind or illiterate to not notice you need to use a torch. If that was too much trouble for you, I'm not surprised the rest of the game felt unintuitive.
"How was I suppose to know my wizard used spells and not heavy armor and two handed weapons? I gave him high strength! Unintuitive."
If your character isn't charisma (CHA) focused you'll miss out on an entire level of party XP because you can't make the throne room event skill checks.
A leader of an entire nation, one of the main elements of the game that was part of the game's description and an entire selling point and feature, is improved by a charismatic character? Say it ain't so! Of course having a low charisma is going to be a challenge run in a game where you're a nation's leader. That's player choice and consequence, not shit design. Shit design would be making your charisma not matter.
Unbearable load times. Frequent required trips back to your throne room to solve kingdom management issues makes this especially painful.
Agreed. Even on my ssd the load times were pretty crazy, and it was annoying having to go back every few days.
XP is doled out at certain times and locations only, like a bad CYOA novel. You cannot farm meaningful amounts of XP to level your party using random encounters.
"I have to actually progress through the game and deal with encounters at the level intended and can't spend 3 days grinding goblins so as to remove any effort and challenge from the rest of the game. I don't want to move the difficulty slider down, I want to _immersively_ lower the difficulty!"
The game ends abruptly before you can maximize your character's level.
You mean the main meat of the game occurs through the whole thing and isn't just training for "end game" like modern popamole mmo's have trained us? How dare they make the full game engaging with a sense of progression through the entire thing and not just a bunch of shit that doesn't matter, and then "end game/post game."
Inumerable bugs, many of which are game breaking.
Maybe at launch, not now, and not when this OP was posted.
This OP post was bait, and I'm disappointed in myself for even taking the time to rebutt this. You had like 3 main points, and the rest only make sense if you're a 13 year old that's only played Battle for Azeroth as his first RPG and is disappointed other RPG's aren't matching up.
