Excellent exploration / tactics RPG game. The game immerses you in an atmosphere of a medieval era where you're a nomadic mercenary group taking on morally grey tasks near and far.
I played on Extreme difficulty in 2 game clears, and am in the middle of an Ironman Extreme difficulty.
What I like:
- The profession system where crafting is rather simple / straight forward (could even be expanded upon) and facilitates a certain type of build.
- The combat is punishing, yet fun. It teaches you to be very confident in your moves. There's also a skill AoE / damage prediction tool that is useful and easily understood.
- The valor points system is great as a resource to use combat skills where your party shares a pool of points. You can regain temporary points by doing certain actions to let your greedy high-impact builds spend them later.
- You can respec your class so long as you save gold to do so, so nothing's really too permanent in that regard.
- You have "Talent trees" essentially that facilitate types of gameplay. For example, if you wanna commit tons of crime via theft and stealing from merchants, this gives you points towards a Talent tree that facilitates that. You wanna trade a lot? same deal. Fight a lot? Sure! Explore and craft? Got you covered.
- Random events in camp that lead to attribute point awarding for one of your members, or random encounters with wolves, as well as intuitive trait unlocks randomly based on what you do with a member - gives it a sort of "anything can happen today" kind of vibe.
- Dungeons can be explored and you can find legendary equipment doing so.
- Fight in Arenas for legendary equipment too.
- Expansions have decent content, like being a pirate steering a boat, creating a tavern to try to grow it as a business (that you can later funnel funds from to your troop :), or even fit in some grisly pits (I haven't done this yet!). Pretty gnarly.
- You eventually get the ability to remove headpiece passives as "stamps" that can be placed on any new headpiece, so the build facilitating passive skill you had on there can be passed on to the new headpiece without worry.
Things I don't like:
- The tavern menus can get encumbering, and sometimes it's hard to see the forecast of what specialties your employee has in some tabs (Like the staffing menu for Kitchen or Cellar employees making food or drink, respectively. Hard to choose which to keep on shift, send out to do dirty missions, or to fire, because you can't tell if it's the guy that has the "Versatility" specialty, which is super good)
- Some overglaring bugs happen like the trader by your built trading grounds. He (used to) softlock the game if you spoke to him and picked a certain message. These bugs get fixed though, but some are still present. A softer bug is sometimes you can't pick up a resource, or use one of your pitons, because the terrain is weird, but it looks like you can just simply access it.
- No information about how a unit scales, or a preview of what an upgraded skill will look like until you learn the first level of it.
- Rare item gives stats like Willpower, or critical hit chance, but the Legendary variants are simply plain Armor stats, even though they have higher values. Makes for less interesting build choices. I hope this changes in the future somehow.
I'll edit if I can think of more. It's a very fun game. Try it!
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