I think far too many Quests in this game are either "go here, kill x monsters" or "go here fetch x item" all while following someone in a dungeon. One standout quest in the game is the bell, book, and candle quest. You're approached by an elf that asks you to help him break a curse of the undead attacking him because he's part of the legendary family that governed that area ages ago. It's believable because this quest takes place in the 4th or 5th large area of the open world so I've been fighting these undead throughout the entire game. So you follow him into a castle to do a ritual. As you progress you start to notice that he's lying about some details. The undead isn't only attacking him and he slips up and tells you he wants to raise an army of undead if you pass a persuasion check. By the end, you meet his ancestor that started the curse and he says that the elf is a liar, and he wants to use the undead for an army while the ancestor wants to break the curse. The elf says he wants to use the army to protect the area.
You're now left with two choices, side with the ancestor, kill the elf, and break the curse. Side with the elf, kill the ancestor, and allow him to raise an army of the undead. Morally, both guys have done wrong, ancestor cursed his family while the elf is a liar, there's also no guarantee that the elf can truly control all of these undead.
My problem with this is that you have choices but few consequences outside of killing one of them, and never seeing the other for the rest of the game. The undead still spawns throughout the game if you side with the ancestor, and you'll never see the army or hear about them from anyone else in the world.
The game still has a good amount of reactivity. I was in the underground part of Rathir and I started combat with one of the citizens, and the rest of the citizens fled in fear because they were not fighters. If this was the surface, the guards and the rest of the citizenry would've attacked me back.
One thing they should've done is had recipes for the shards in sagecrafting as they do for alchemy. I can't remember all the shard combos to make the gems without testing all of them. A big oversight on their part.
There are a few other technical issues. One quest had to do with a dwarf in a cave, I suppose the dwarf was supposed to die but he doesn't and I can still talk to him but he won't move. The other dwarves outside all believe he died though.
There is stuttering every time you walk through the long hallways between zones and the loading times are terrible on the PS4 Pro.
Fae blades & daggers stealth kills: The game forces me out of crouch after the kill. It also doesn't have an animation for some of the kills which is weird. I don't like the context-sensitive assassinations because it is so easy to press the button and it instead counts as a regular attack because the button prompt didn't come on the screen. If a monster is moving while you press the assassination button, the attack doesn't hit the enemy and instead, you're forced out of stealth and exposed. WTF? You also can't assassinate enemies that are sitting in a chair.
Missing Keys is another quest that would've probably been decent if the game had some proper faction system that remembered choices. I did this quest after completing the traveler's faction questline. In doing so, their primary camp is raided by the gnome authorities, and their leader is imprisoned, but our PC is named a legend of the camp and the entire traveler's faction. The quest giver did not even know who I am, she mentions visiting the sun camp but is completely unaware that it is raided and destroyed by the gnome authority. She also comments on me being a poor fit for the travelers if I ever try joining because I gave her the stolen documents for free which are funny because she's completely oblivious to the fact that I am a member of the travelers. At least the game acknowledged the fact that I stole the document and read it before ever attempting the quest. However, it is funny that an elf downstairs is completely aware of what happened to the sun camp.
It's far too easy to be OP. Exploring and finding Lorestones and completing main and faction quests give the player permanent stat bonuses. By the end of the game, I had 50 permanent stat bonuses. On top of the OP random gear, I found that it was far too easy to 2 or 3-shot bosses and barely take any damage as the archmage, the most OP destiny in the game.
No real point in using money since NPC shops are instanced and will spawn items the first time you ever speak to them and will never update items to be better than that afterward. So I ended up with 8 million gold that I no longer used for anything else because I just sold gear and didn't need to create new equipment because randomized gear was good enough.
By mid-game pure damage matters more than everything else. All armor in the game has a meager stat investment necessary to wear them. For example, to max any of the three ability trees in the game: might, finesse, and sorcery, you need about 115 points. However, to wear the best armor in the game, you only need 35 points in any tree. Since most builds in the game involve finesse or might, it means your player character will already have enough stat investment to wear just about any armor for your specific build by the very early game. Finesse aka the rogue build is just as tough as the might build because finesse gear generally has about 70% of the armor rating of might armor. You will never be threatened by enemy attacks due to how ridiculously tough most builds will be in this game, and that's before you even bother socketing gems in rare armor or building your own gear.
On the flip side, the archmage build is the most powerful in the game. You can generally one-shot most groups of enemies and bosses with the meteor or tempest spells. These are the only two abilities in the entire game that are actually powerful, however, things become boring once these two spells are constantly spammed. There isn't even a cooldown for tempest once you've got upgraded it past its limit.
Overall, this was a long game. Took 122 hours to complete everything. I didn't play the fatesworn DLC, because I wasn't going to buy it since they recently released this remaster but wanted to charge for DLC separately. All in all, there was a lot of potential for this title to be one of those big open-world franchises. Wouldn't mind a new installment in the future.
You're now left with two choices, side with the ancestor, kill the elf, and break the curse. Side with the elf, kill the ancestor, and allow him to raise an army of the undead. Morally, both guys have done wrong, ancestor cursed his family while the elf is a liar, there's also no guarantee that the elf can truly control all of these undead.
My problem with this is that you have choices but few consequences outside of killing one of them, and never seeing the other for the rest of the game. The undead still spawns throughout the game if you side with the ancestor, and you'll never see the army or hear about them from anyone else in the world.
The game still has a good amount of reactivity. I was in the underground part of Rathir and I started combat with one of the citizens, and the rest of the citizens fled in fear because they were not fighters. If this was the surface, the guards and the rest of the citizenry would've attacked me back.
One thing they should've done is had recipes for the shards in sagecrafting as they do for alchemy. I can't remember all the shard combos to make the gems without testing all of them. A big oversight on their part.
There are a few other technical issues. One quest had to do with a dwarf in a cave, I suppose the dwarf was supposed to die but he doesn't and I can still talk to him but he won't move. The other dwarves outside all believe he died though.
There is stuttering every time you walk through the long hallways between zones and the loading times are terrible on the PS4 Pro.
Fae blades & daggers stealth kills: The game forces me out of crouch after the kill. It also doesn't have an animation for some of the kills which is weird. I don't like the context-sensitive assassinations because it is so easy to press the button and it instead counts as a regular attack because the button prompt didn't come on the screen. If a monster is moving while you press the assassination button, the attack doesn't hit the enemy and instead, you're forced out of stealth and exposed. WTF? You also can't assassinate enemies that are sitting in a chair.
Missing Keys is another quest that would've probably been decent if the game had some proper faction system that remembered choices. I did this quest after completing the traveler's faction questline. In doing so, their primary camp is raided by the gnome authorities, and their leader is imprisoned, but our PC is named a legend of the camp and the entire traveler's faction. The quest giver did not even know who I am, she mentions visiting the sun camp but is completely unaware that it is raided and destroyed by the gnome authority. She also comments on me being a poor fit for the travelers if I ever try joining because I gave her the stolen documents for free which are funny because she's completely oblivious to the fact that I am a member of the travelers. At least the game acknowledged the fact that I stole the document and read it before ever attempting the quest. However, it is funny that an elf downstairs is completely aware of what happened to the sun camp.
It's far too easy to be OP. Exploring and finding Lorestones and completing main and faction quests give the player permanent stat bonuses. By the end of the game, I had 50 permanent stat bonuses. On top of the OP random gear, I found that it was far too easy to 2 or 3-shot bosses and barely take any damage as the archmage, the most OP destiny in the game.
No real point in using money since NPC shops are instanced and will spawn items the first time you ever speak to them and will never update items to be better than that afterward. So I ended up with 8 million gold that I no longer used for anything else because I just sold gear and didn't need to create new equipment because randomized gear was good enough.
By mid-game pure damage matters more than everything else. All armor in the game has a meager stat investment necessary to wear them. For example, to max any of the three ability trees in the game: might, finesse, and sorcery, you need about 115 points. However, to wear the best armor in the game, you only need 35 points in any tree. Since most builds in the game involve finesse or might, it means your player character will already have enough stat investment to wear just about any armor for your specific build by the very early game. Finesse aka the rogue build is just as tough as the might build because finesse gear generally has about 70% of the armor rating of might armor. You will never be threatened by enemy attacks due to how ridiculously tough most builds will be in this game, and that's before you even bother socketing gems in rare armor or building your own gear.
On the flip side, the archmage build is the most powerful in the game. You can generally one-shot most groups of enemies and bosses with the meteor or tempest spells. These are the only two abilities in the entire game that are actually powerful, however, things become boring once these two spells are constantly spammed. There isn't even a cooldown for tempest once you've got upgraded it past its limit.
Overall, this was a long game. Took 122 hours to complete everything. I didn't play the fatesworn DLC, because I wasn't going to buy it since they recently released this remaster but wanted to charge for DLC separately. All in all, there was a lot of potential for this title to be one of those big open-world franchises. Wouldn't mind a new installment in the future.