I played for a couple more hours tonight and I'm getting close to putting this one back on the shelf for awhile. Maybe a long while.
The #1 thing that is annoying me right now is the game gives you no room to experiment and try new things, which is very important for RPGs especially in the beginning. There is no manual and the in-game documentation is poor, so you don't have good information up front to guide decision making. And the game only has one persistent save per character, so you can't just try something to see how it works and then reload.
For example, here's a screenshot from one of the vendors.
What does the "Pulse of Health" rune do, you may be wondering? Good question. Unfortunately, the game is not interested in telling you. I was able to suss out that runes can be slotted into weapons to give them the special abilities that are powered by focus. But as far as this specific rune's ability? You just have to buy it and find out, most likely wasting your money in the process.
Of course given that the loot respawns, you can always go out and grind for more cash, which brings me to my #2 complaint: the crafting and basebuilding elements, usually safely skippable in most RPGs, seem to be so deeply embedded into this game's DNA that they are almost mandatory. That's because you don't really find that many good items out in the wild, and vendors have very little to sell unless you grind resources to upgrade them. To clue you in on how horrible this actually is, look at this.
This is the list of upgradeable buildings so far. Each of the 5 shops, plus the inn and the gallows, requires 10 wood and 5 copper to upgrade. Harvesting a resource node gives you -- wait for it -- 1 material. ONE. So if you want to upgrade all of this shit, you need to gather 105 nodes (with each taking no less than 6 button presses to collect). Even if I had explored every corner of the first few areas and harvested all I could find, I wouldn't even have half of that.
Keep in mind this is just for the first upgrade. I upgraded the smithy already and it's clearly just the first of what I will suspect be at least two upgrades, possibly more. Once you're done grinding for pine, there's spruce... copper is replaced by iron... you get the point. Grind, grind, grind.
It's funny too, because the narrative behind this also makes no sense. Some random NPC called a "Maker" comes up to you and is like "well clearly you love our city here, how's about we go about rebuilding it together?" Like bitch, I am a visitor who just arrived here, presumably to fight the
darkspawn er pestilence since I am a
Grey Warden uh I mean Cerim. I have no reason to give a fuck about any of you people, this is just where my mission is. And yet it's clear that the politics of this world are going to be front and center to the story -- which quite frankly I can already tell is on a very cliche and current year (TM) trajectory -- and none of the quests I've picked up since getting to the city have anything to do with fighting the evil monsters.
Finally, and I will admit this is purely personal and a pet peeve of mine, but the game is a textbook case of what I call "Cyseal syndrome". Named after the most annoying location in the history of video games, it means you spend a ton of time running back and forth across a giant fucking town, while a bunch of flamboyant asshole NPCs shout the same repeated barks at you over and over and OVER AND FUCKING OVER again. After a few hours of this you are exhausted at the sight and sound of this place, and would love to never see it again. But the game is centered around it for a long stretch and you have no choice but to keep slogging through it in order to progress.
Anyway, I guess that's enough bitching for now. Suffice to say I should not have D1P'd this, and I wouldn't recommend anyone else buy it right now either. Maybe it will eventually be a good game, but today, it's really not. I do think there is still potential here, especially with the multiplayer aspect, but there are so many frustrating and glaring design issues here that it leads me to believe the developers don't have a good handle on RPGs and what makes them fun to play.
