Finished Bloodmoon's main questline.
It's kind of cool, but there are some serious design issues. Like, they took what was annoying about the base game and doubled down on it.
So Solstheim. It's a big flat island with a bunch of trees and some hills, and everything looks the same. I think Skyrim's version is actually better because there's just more going on.
Anyway, since every thing looks the same it's very hard to get your bearings, and it doesn't help that some of the barrows don't look like barrows but hills with a hole in them, in an area full of hills. In Vvardenfell you don't really have this problem because tombs and mine entrances are very distinctive and hard to miss when you do find them, but it's very easy to overlook a barrow entrance, because they're either a hole in a hill or a grey door near some grey rocks.
To make matters worse, since there's few discernible landmarks a lot of the directions you get are of the vague cardinal type, which was the worse part of the base game's direction system.
I didn't think they would top cliff racers in terms of annoyance, but they did. There are enemies everywhere, they have huge aggro range and since the map is mostly flat you can't really lose them and there's a good chance you'll stumble across a bear, a berserker, and a few wolves just standing around, and then 20 seconds later you'll run into them again. Oh, and they respawn stupidly fast. Like, after 30 seconds.
There are now respawning human enemies. Which I guess is fine, but sometimes to complete a quest you have to find a NPC in the woods which looks like the human enemies in the wood. There's a similar issue where you have to find a friendly bear in a large map full of hostile bears. I had to run up to each bear I could find and see if it would attack me. I did this for about an hour before finally getting annoyed enough to open the wiki. It's shit like that that makes me appreciate quest markers.
There's a massive damage spike during Hircine's hunt too. Like, the werewolves you fight at first aren't too bad, but I guess Hircine gave them 20 bottles of skooma each because during the hunt they deal more damage, they knock you down and they take a lot of hits to kill if you're using a short blade build.
I guess late game the devs really want you to use long blade or spear, because you get fucking nothing in terms of short blades.
I liked the Raven Rock questline though. Seeing Raven Rock being built was kind of cool and I suspect you're meant to do that first because it's a lot easier than doing the main Bloodmoon quest.
I also liked Bloodmoon's version of Draug; they are a lot more menacing and dangerous, as opposed to Skyrim's Draug which are just fodder.
