Saark
Arcane
- Joined
- Jun 16, 2010
- Messages
- 2,268
I felt the same way, but once you reach Battahl the magic stopped for me and the desire to explore every nook and cranny kind of went away. Or rather, I just wanted to make my way to the big city in it, and then unlock the remaining vocations. Problem is, the capital is on the opposite end of the area, so you basically go through half of it already before you get there. By the time I arrived, I set out to unlock the remaining vocations, and once I did that, I was already on the second to last quest of the main-story. At that point, the desire to finish and check out post-game beat the desire to being a completionist running around a barren desert looking for caves.It is insane to me that @Saark beat the game in that amount of time. I'm 15 hours in and feel like I'm just scraping the surface.
My exploration statistics, for what its worth. It doesn't help that Battahl is a lot more barren, not just in a visual sense, but in a location sense as well. Which makes sense, of course, a deserted wasteland of a country is less likely to have interesting vistas and lots of dungeons, but I surely was disappointed traveling across a vast amount of mountain sides and roads without finding a single cave on my way there. Volcanic Island is even worse, as it makes up about a fourth of the world map yet most of it is inaccessible. There's no tracker for completed quests sadly, it might give a bigger and better picture of how much I skipped.
Vast amounts of the map are empty and unaccessible, unfortunately.
Volcanic Island (the island in the bottom right) was a massive letdown. It's basically 2 escort quests, a giant lava river, and 2 towns with one of them (the one you start the game in) having zero content. The slave-driver didn't even recognize me or have anything to say about me returning. Here's to hoping I simply missed a lot in my first playthrough.
But, again I wish I could just go back to reload my old save to discover more, but once you finish the last quest, your experience is on railroads. There's no "point of no return" warning either, it's just one NPC telling you "you should rest at an inn", which I already did of course. Little did I know the game would no longer allow me to load from that save.
Never hired a pawn above my level, and I used 13 Ox carts total. I used 3 ferry-stones in all of the main quest. It's just not nearly as big a game as I initially thought, and that's totally fine. I think your ~70hour estimate is pretty spot-on if you set out to explore a lot more, I just didn't feel that desire.People finishing it in 40 hours or less are using a lot of fast travel and hiring high level pawns.
All of that being said, I'm already playing again to check out what I missed, this time playing the game on Hardmode (Archer) instead of Games Journalism difficulty (Sorcerer). The game is very good, don't let anybody's criticisms (including my own) sour your experience.
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