Well I commented sometime ago about the backer rewards and that was why I voted dissatisfied.
Since then I had some time to play around with the game (close to 30 hours) and now I would like to list the thing I find dissastifying about the gameplay:
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The world … or closer the wildlife. In 1403 there exsisted apparently only 4 types of wild animals in Bohemia. Hares, deer, boars and invisable birds. Nothing that could acctualy make a stroll to the woods dangerous or exciting, like bears, wolves, lynx or even foxes.
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The people. Everyone has perfect teeth, clean clothes, and appart from the occaisonal mustache or full beard a perfect clean shave (even beggars and refugees living in makeshift tents). So far I have been able to spot a whole 2 fat people (Sir Hanush and a butcher lady, I think in Sassau, though that one might have been a glitch since she looked more inflated than fat)
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Choices don’t matter. I treated this as a “realistic” experiance, as it was advertised, so when I was told to leave Talmberg against explicit order from my Lord and his ally and the game went “hey optional: you can steal a horse!” I thought “I better not steal a horse, they will be mad as hell with me as is, better not make it worse for myself”…
So I went on foot … and when Henry later told the story of how he got out of Talmberg he mentioned that he stole a horse to do so! not only that, but no one cared that I went against the order to stay put, and entrusted important tasks and quests to me.
On another occaison I was told to try and resolve a situation without bloodshed… well things don’t always work out the way we plan … so it ended up very bloddy, but when I informed the questgiver what had happened he replied “Well thats good! Nice to see things working out for once!” and he wasn’t sarcastic about it…
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The AI or lack there off. I was quickly able to learn, that the AI can not handle the fact that you are using the horse! And will gladly trundle along behind like wooden ducks on a string. That broke 99% of the combat, since everything that doesn’t lock you in a space where you can’t use your horse, you are free to gain distance, turn around, stab one or two enemies to death, gain distance, rinse and repeat, I was easily able to clean out a certain “stronghold” with around 25 heavily armed bandits all by myself. The AI does not wait and try to ambush you, let the archers take formation and try to shot you as you come back and even when there are horses around that the AI could use to make it an even fight they don’t use them.
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Imersion braking shifts from 1st to 3rd person. During one scene I was escorting a certain lady to a tavern. Where I ended up getting into a brawl after which said lady was treating the scratches on my faces for me. After that cutscene ended we were shown walking back to her home … and the scratches on my face were already completely healed! Henry might be related to Wolverine. Things like these could have been avoided by sticking to first person, we could have still seen her treating us, and us walking back to her home. And the effect would have been the same if not better.
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The savesystem. When bugs cause you to lose 45 minutes of gameplay since most side quests don’t create an autosave and you don’t see a game breaking bug coming (for example “bird in the hand” quest locking you in an unending conversation) so you can’t even use the manual save (which is annoying since it requires an item) to avoid it. Not to mention that you can not just quit out of the game without thinking (which handycaps people with jobs and/or family)
I could go on, adding some more things, some bigger some smaller. But those should do for now.
