Warning: several paragraphs are contained herein.
I'm really struggling to keep myself going in this game now & I'm a dedicated completionist. The game save files say I'm about 145 hours in & I've just finished off Lucillia Forest, all areas & have just completed the Hunter's edge area in what one assumes is the end-game forest map, with the rest of that map still in the fog of war. What's been consuming so much of my time? I don't know really, I'm just looking in every nook and cranny & performing the usual RPG routine of collecting goodies to sell or improve my characters, which takes a lot of time in this game as each section involves hoards of weird loot, lots of little side-questy bits and often a new section to explore at the end of time. As I have the talking to animals trait I'm also talking to all the animals in the game, which probably adds a bit, as does reading all the myriad of books. I've lost interest in crafting at this stage and haven't been using crafting time pretty much since I left Cyseal around 70 hours ago.
It's quite hard to describe why I'm losing the will to go on here & if I don't specify these feelings exactly then people will likely assume all kinds of reasons and assume the reason I'm struggling is the same reason they struggled. It might be, but it might not. I'm no stranger to long RPGs and I'm no stranger to losing the will to continue at the end of long RPGs, I have similar feelings towards the end of each Avernum, Baldur's Gates and etc etc, but I've never been this demotivated before, this game has foisted onto me an as yet unexperienced level of demotivation, hence the difficulty in trying to describe it.
I'm using walkthroughs more and more now as I really can't be bothered with the game's ever more obtuse puzzles at this stage. The last few have just been laughably dire. One was a pixel hunt, literally that was all the puzzle was. A large cluttered room with one tiny 4x4 pixel to find that would make even an obtuse Hidden Object Game blush with its obtuseness (press four buttons to open the way to the vial of blood). I'd even worked out that my problem was that I was missing a button before I looked at the walkthrough. After reading the walkthrough, which detailed the exact location of the button, I still couldn't find the button. By sheer chance something highlighted at one point and I could move on.
Then there's the Knight's Tomb, oh dear oh dear oh dear. Defeating the one-hit-kill statues was easy enough, but then, going up the stairs, there's an instant death ray. Uh-huh. I tried no end of ways to 'solve' this 'puzzle'. A fairly crucial puzzle as it leads to a Star Stone (and the amusing Watch vs Codex resolution). But no, nothing I did lead to anything but instant death for every character in my team. No levers, no buttons and, since the game doesn't operate by visible squares, no real way to gradually guess a safe path by trial and error. So, again, even with knowing probably what it is I need to do, the game simply isn't offering me any solution beyond absurdity. So off to the walkthrough I go & discover that all you need is Perception out the wazoo. None of my team have this prerequisite, but, thankfully, one person had discovered that summoned spiders do indeed have Perception out the wazoo. Well thank heavens for that, I can indeed summon spiders & I can now move on.
There's a whole raft of quests to do in Hunter's Edge, and had it been at the start of the game I would have put the effort in for them, but at this stage of the game I simply can't be arsed. Star crossed lovers? I really don't care. Rat extermination & the King Rat situation? Oh fuck off. Etc Etc. The first quest I did here was the Knight's Tomb & that sorted that area, now can I move on please. Oh, I was supposed to have found the hidden villagers first, then found the wizard next before doing the Knight's Tomb? Oh ffs, just get on with it for heaven's sake.
And now the rules seem to be changing and it's very difficult to know what the concept of the Star Stones even are. The Goblins have one that powers a sentient Totem? How the hell does that even work? And Grutilda the queen Orc uses one to turn her bodyguards into even more powerful bodyguards? What? And then when Grutilda's dead her Star Stone seems to have vanished completely. So I look on-line again for "where's Grutilda's Star Stone" and that doesn't even bring any coherent search results. Are we to assume that for some inexplicable reason her Star Stone just dematerialises after use? Why? And then, while looking at these on-line solutions you have to simply despair at people who've forgotten to hoard the 'useless' star stones, because, for some reason known only to Larian, the characters drop the stones after they use them as blood stones. For no known reason other than to troll? Lucky I'm a hoarder.
And on the topic of rules, I was suddenly greeted by a timed quest while back in Lucilla Forest. Some dying guy near the spider queen mentioned something about an imp. After completing most of that map I went to a walkthrough to find out how to do the Troll cave as I still hadn't found the doodad needed to do that part of the game. Turns out it related to this dying guy & you just happen to have needed to walk near a very specific spot in the game to trigger a trap door. *groan*. By this point in the game this guy was dead as a doornail, oh right, so you had to get back to him within... how much time exactly? Anyway, I did that dungeon & then came across the dying guy's imp. Because the guy was dead I told the imp to go back to it's slave master, I had no dialogue option to tell him his master was dead & it seemed logical to let the imp go see his dead master rather than continue cowering in the cave. Low and behold, a team member scolds me for suggesting the imp go back to his master. Lol, what? Upon exiting the cave one hears the imp lament the loss of his master but when you get down there he's supposedly run away. Run away from what?
So, anyway, this made me less interested in any further quests in Hunter's Edge, particularly any which had suggested time-related deadlines. Early on it became apparent that the game held firm to the idea that NPCs just stuck around until you'd done their quests. Good old suspended animation of "I URGENTLY require the antidote", "ok, no probs, I'll get it for you, just let me do a 100 hour adventure first, m'kay", but no, suddenly the game throws a "nah, nah, you took too long" at you from nowhere. Well, that's confusing & removes my trust in how I perform quests in the future. Now I have an increased sense of panic added to a format that demands extreme patience.
Also according to some spoilers I caught while looking for solutions to stupid things I caught that the final portal doesn't open at the end of time anyway. I had been somewhat confused how the Knight's Tomb Star Stone didn't even unlock anything new at the end of time, again breaking the game's own rules of routine. And now I don't know if I am supposed to stop adventuring and finish up at the end of time or if I'm supposed to do this final map or not & if I do one or the other before the other am I doing things out of order. Because, again, the game seems to be even more confused at this stage as to whether it wants to be a linear open-world or a freedom open-world. Ie: you can do things out of order if you want, it'll just fuck you over more than if you somehow guess correctly when to do everything, etc.
Even saying all this still doesn't really quantify properly my irritation with the game by this point & I've still left loads of annoyances out, such as the headache inducing squinting required to even see much of the game's ever darker content, the ever decreasing shit given about either the plot or any dialogues at all at this stage & etc etc etc, but I felt I needed to get at least some of this off of my chest. I'm determined to finish the game now, determination being the only real motivator left & when I looked at the remaining steam achievements left for the main plot I had to chuckle sarcastically as one of them read "Nearly there, lol" or some such troll, like, you know, even the devs seem to be aware that the end game is supposed to be some kind of deliberate punishment aimed at completionists?
