The thing is it's not that good to make a non-linear game if there are only 1.5 places you can survive being at any given time. It's just freedom to die 3.5 ways or progress 1.5 ways. If level-ups happened less often, then more quests could be closer together in level. Or just allowing there to be grinding with diminishing returns on XP could allow players to take later areas "sooner" plotwise. Though I'd probably want to have grinding somehow separated from exploration, such as in a dungeon, so players won't accidentally grind just because they backtracked. It's not "freedom" if you have to collect side quests like Pokemon if you want to be a high enough level to take on the main quests. You still do all of the same quests if you play through again. If it were up to me, there might be more side quests, but there would be a system for accepting only so many at a time, and disabling the quests that you didn't pick as you go along completing your quests of choice.
The town is also oppressively large and takes too long to walk through, with not enough waypoints. Going from the North Gate to Aureus alone is too much too often. There should really be a sub-menu of waypoints in town, but not in the wilderness where you are much less likely to have to visit the same place multiple times. I'm still loving it, but the pedestrian backtracking isn't adding anything to gameplay for me. Running errands in town feels too much like a real-life commute to work. A merchant-bot at the end of time who deals with all the Cyseal merchants and has them in a menu would help a lot too.
