izigame.me

While I do love the original game, I sadly can not in any way recommend this DLC. Fatesworn does not seem to respect the game it attempts to add to. In many aspects it feels like a mod, the kind you might download for Skyrim when you've grown bored of everything else
The story is bland and colourless, like a work of fanfiction written without the heart or the charm of the original story. It takes the basic concept of Oblivion or even ESO, in that there are portals appearing around the land and you have to close them from inside. The ending is very lacklustre, it congratulates the player for all that they have done and then sends them to live in exile for the rest of their life, saying how great of a reward it is.
The world and level design of Mithros, where the DLC takes place, is annoying to navigate and very linear, unlike nearly all the other areas in the game. Though the art and design of objects are very pretty and look very nice, it feels a bit out of place. There are some few enemies that can be found in Mithros, that lorewise, have no business being there. A few lorestones in the DLC are messages left to the player, by Alyn Shir, an important NPC from the main story. Why or how she recorded these, knowing the player would find and listen to them, goes beyond sense.
The visual design in Fatesworn is odd. Awkward lighting in many areas, distracting and ugly bloom, poor draw distance and LOD. The unrendered backgrounds are very noticeable from close distances.
The enemy placement and balance is very different from the rest of the game. In the main game and original DLCs, a standard group of enemies involves 4 people with normal attack speeds and maybe one or two capable of stunning or staggering the player for a moment. In Fatesworn, there are several groups of bandits as large as 15 or 20, ensuring that you WILL be stagger locked for most of the fight. Then there are the smaller groups of enemies of about 5 or 6, again, an attempt to overwhelm the player with enemies but in a different way. These are ones who attack very quickly, again, leaving the player stagger locked, while they themselves are resistant to staggering attacks from the player.
Being forced to wait for a small window to attack wouldn't be so bad, if these smaller groups who attack very quickly, could be whittled down using abilities. Chaos enemies have a sort of overshield, this makes them IMMUNE to any kind of damage except for damage from chaos weapons. Once this shield is gone, they can be damaged normally. However, the chaos weapons are noticeably inferior to weapons the player might have crafted or found and enchanted (socketed gems into) making combat move even more slowly.
Because of all of these issues, I found myself doing things in this DLC I rarely did in any other part of the game: simply running past enemies. The Chaos portals have an overabundance of enemies with annoying tactics. and as such, I sprinted through them as quickly as possible to destroy the necessary object and close the portal.
This DLC frankly, is a dissapointment. I'm unhappy with how the devs have created this story that pays little attention or care to what was written so many years ago when KoA was new. A land that is annoying to traverse, with enemies that are annoying to fight, with visual issues that are annoying to look at, with an attempt at mechanics that are annoying to use lead me to label this DLC as simply, annoying. I suggest avoiding this DLC, it has tainted a game I have loved for many, many years.