ministry86

I don't like to **** on a game that's already sold poorly, but in this case, I have to. There's a lot of nonsense cultural jargon you're supposed to read and actually care about. I'm happy to learn a game world's history and lingo if the journey I'm going on is interesting, but it's not. Don't mistake a Fampyr for a Vampire or Hel for Hell. They're different, but not really. Even reading the quest log is annoying. Obsidian's idea of interesting writing is to throw as many adjectives, nonsensical character names and long winded descriptions into every line of dialogue and scene description. Yet, in the end, very little of it is engaging, exciting or worthy of the time I'm putting into it. As I hear some of the dialogue being spoken, I frequently laugh because of how damn silly it all sounds. It just comes off as pretentious to me. This is one of the most cynical games you'll ever play. Every faction is made up of monsters and bigots. There are a lot of time wasting issues within the game. For instance, the load times in between each floor of a building and entering and exiting a building. To fast travel around the city you have to run to an exit, you can't just open the map up and fast travel that way. Why? The "running" speed is also ridiculously slow. Nobody besides the obese run nearly that slow in real life. Why does it cost copper to craft items? For example, it costs 300 gold to create a single scroll of "Garden of Life" and 200 gold to craft a "Potion of Ironskin". That's a lazy way to "balance" crafting. If you add up the cost of the ingredients and the copper cost, it probably costs just about as much as buying one. That's stupid. What, are my characters tossing the gold pieces into the potion as it's being brewed? Why does it cost 30k gold to enchant an item from 'superb' to 'legendary' if I already have the skill and items to do so?. I've heard the counter arguments and they don't hold up. "Balance". So many potions and spells are so situational that they are useless because you can't use items from your personal inventory in battle. You can only use "quick items" in battle. That's 4 slots. I'm not going to load up my 4 slots with potions that I will likely never need. It's so easy to make your crew happy that low morale is never an issue. With all the money you rake in selling dead enemy loot, due to unlimited stash, that you can afford all the good food and drink and never have to worry about anything. You can also share the gold from every enemy ship defeated and that raises morale drastically. 10 morale up to plus 40 morale easily. There is no challenge in the ship combat because you can just board their ship and can avoid the text based naval battles every time. Obsidian is scared of commitments. They design a system but make sure to leave you an out and to allow you to skip it entirely, making that entire system they spent a long time developing pointless. According to the Fig campaign having a ship crew was an actual stretch goal, yet Ydwin, one of the more interesting sidekicks was locked behind the 5 million dollar goalpost. The ship crew was little more than flavor text. There are storms on the world map that you can see when sailing. They're just big circles on the world map to easily sail around. If you go through them there are some text based options that can kill or wound crew if you get unlucky, but mostly, you just gain a little experience. There is no risk whatsoever of running into a storm unless you want to. I sail into them for the nearly free experience points. The entire ship portion of the game is of no consequence. If I had donated money to that Fig campaign, I would be pissed off about the half-assed implementation of the systems on their stretch goals. I didn't and I'm annoyed. There is a formula for nearly every place you find exploring the world. You land on an island of interest, there is a site you want to visit. You're greeted by someone with vague speech who makes an offer. You say yes or no. Fight if you said no. You go to the site in question. The little text book pops up as you enter. Inconsequential words. You enter. It's essentially the same map as every other island's mini "dungeon". It takes 5-15 minutes and you're done. I have a feeling the writers were too busy arguing over which companions were going to screw each other than writing quests with substance. As a straight male playing a male character, having two male party members trying to **** me is a bit much. Obsidian, hire somebody to write for you besides 20-35 year old Californian hipster liberals. Get a little diversity in there. You actually do need it. And make sure to keep Justin Bell as your composer no matter what happens. He's really great. The music is fantastic.