Also it came to my mind, what someone else said: that it makes no fucking sense, that the required keys to open the passage to the forest village and similar important places are "hidden" in the forest. Come on, give me a break!
Ehhh. You're not wrong, but I find your expectation of verisimilitude a bit silly.
Yes and no, it just adds to other silly things like... various paths in the forest which run almost parallel and are only 2 steps away from each other, only grass in between, but blocked because of invisible walls (and of course can only be accessed by solving puzzles). Really? Really? Such level design is plain dumb! Nowadays I expect better than that.
Which brings me to the next point... the map: some paths connect with each other in this maze of a forest (Inshriach), some paths not. The map however does not really show which paths do and which don't. Also sometimes is just a pile of debris or a stone which end a path. So you often get confused which path you must take to get somewhere, run in circles, end up lost. I also noticed these issues in Lower Skara Brae... you walk into one direction because the map shows an open path, and then there is a pile of debris blocking your way. The map shows nothing. Instead you must go some path around 3 times the length. Hugely annoying.
This section (Forest of Inshtriach) almost made me sick. What a coincidence that one of the quests in the forest is to free it from a "sickness". And when you have done this section, the forest recovers. So did I recover as a player, because I was almost through all these annoying and confusing things. I mean...huh? It's almost as if the game events apply to the player experience as well. Almost funny. Almost.
So the good news is: it probably can't get worse than this forest (also having looked at the maps in the gameguide). If you have finished this, a milestone is completed.
Currently I am also totally annoyed by that "You shall return to the Adventurer's Guild to unlock the next Tier". I knew this whole idea of "you must prove being worthy at the Adventurers Guild" was a shit idea all along.
Yeah. This is another "legacy" feature from the original games we could have done without, a bone thrown to grognards who wanted this to be as much like the originals as possible. There sure as hell
was plenty of pointless backtracking in the originals.
Ok, after having kicked my ass from Mangar multiple times at Sulphur Springs I decided to go back. Fortunately backtracking was not as bad as expected. Actually quite fast with the various portals (Skyhenge, Stonerings), and crossing the Baedish Lowlands was quick as I could easily fight through the broad path instead of going through the maze section (this is actually positive, as it shows they wanted to make backtracking quicker).
Which brings me to the next point... why I lost against Mangar with a party of six: I think I chose skills for my characters which are rather useless when you have to deal with boss fights. What you need in boss fights are characters which need to be able to make huge damage in short time. Actually I believe that at least 1/3 of all skills are useless and just there as fillers (so the skilltree doesn't look empty). So the skilltree is basically a puzzle too, where you need to sort out the wheat from the chaff. It's exhausting... really.
Which brings me to the next point... every combat round Mangar "babbles" some shit (taking up to half a minute or more), before actually taking an action, and therefore puts the whole combat on hold. And this happens despite having deactivated "Enemy babbling" in the game options. Whose stupid idea was to force the player to listen to this crap? Especially when it's expected that people will have to do this fight multiple times. This is just utter crap!
I could write book about dumb design decisions in the game... I honestly can't remember the last time where I faced so many dumb and annoying things in a game.
Eventually I also noticed some positive things:
- Once back at the Adventurer's Guild I was pleasantly surprised by the new song played by Rabbi (I think he changes his songs when you reach certain milestones). I really enjoyed that tune. Much better than the one he played before. Sooo much better.
- While my characters were wrongly skilled, the Adventurer's Guild unlocked the last Skilltier and offered me to change the skilltree from every single character from ground up (each for a token though).
- You can hire the "A-Team": yes, I found that idea of a preconfigured party dumb at first - but ironically it makes sense now: because chances are high that you misskill your characters completely. And instead of trying to figure out what exactly was misskilled, you can just scrap it and buy that preconfigured team. All of them are fully equipped and at your current level... and probably well chosen skills (not sure about that though.... but it should be).
- Sooooooooooooo glad that Save Anywhere is there
