Played this for a bit now, too.
First impression: it's about on par with Nehrim from what I've seen till now, depending on the dungeon design I might judge it either better or slightly worse. Just went through my first real dungeon, and have done some coastal exploration before that, and I'm loving it. The explorefag factor is definitely there.
- Seconding
Anthedon about the performance, I get sudden spikes of stuttering in the wilderness occasionally, especially in grassland with lots of vegetation. It went better when I set grass and light distance lower, but it still happens
- I love how the game gives you shitloads of reasons to explore every nook and cranny, go through every dungeon, talk to every NPC:
* there are "wisdom" dialogue options that are basically questions about the game world's lore, you get XP for asking NPCs these questions (so be sure to exhaust the dialogue trees before finishing a conversation)
* you get XP for discovered locations
* there are "magic symbols" strewn around dungeons, usually in semi-hidden areas but still easy enough to find, there are 100 of those and finding them gives you XP
* there are, just as in Nehrim, plants that give you permanent boosts, like a mushroom that gives you a permanent carry weight bonus
* there are set items, which makes finding magical items even more fun ("fuck yeah, another item that belongs to this set!")
- Dungeon design is solid so far, not the straight line/loop shit of Skyrim
- There are boss enemies, and of course it's not a level scaled game, just like in Nehrim you can walk into an area that is too hard for you and get your ass stomped
- The beginning is too slow for my taste, lots of cutscenes and story setup shit before you get to the actual explorefag gameplay stuff. Getting to the first town is great though, it's a little way off from where you start and on the way you'll come across dungeons and shipwrecks and all kinds of shit
- There is no fast travel, just like in Nehrim. There are, however, teleport spells and scrolls and shit like that. Just found a "Teleport to [Cityname]" scroll in the first dungeon I explored.
Shit's good. I'm loving it. I'm exploring the area and finding dungeons and going in there and killing boss monsters and finding unique set items and generally having a blast. Exploration is just great in this game.
Oh, and it has an interesting mechanic: everything magical gives you some percentage points of magical contamination. It kinda works like radiation in Fallout 3, you go to a place with a strong magic source, you can get contaminated, you drink magic potions you get it too, and letting it get too high will give you mali. This adds to resource conservation: you don't wanna chug potions all the time and instead opt for eating food between fights in order to heal up.