When you start out, it's decent. There's a tiny little intro where you learn how to equip items and basic combat. You learn how to pick up items and about your inventory. And then someone decided to hell with tutorials, we'll just leave everything else vague.
For example, you will level rather early on, as is common in these games. However, upon leveling, there's no tutorial popup on what you should do. I tried "C" for my character screen and yes, it does pop up what look to be my levelup stats...but there's a lot of unexplained skills there. Not that it matters, because I can't do anything to any of them.
Soon afterward you encounter an NPC who claims he'll lead you where you want. Now, the dialogue implies that you're choosing sides here - either the rebels or some sort of shadowy government-type dealio, or you can stay neutral. However, if you want to be a mage which I did), you have to go to the town. So I asked him to lead me there and he sent me on to a farm, where I'd have to complete a few quests to get led the right way.
Here's where things break down. The quests are just text with no area markers as to where you might want to go. If you open a chest in someone else's house, that's bad. They come and beat you down. That's fine...except there's no warning, so if you accidentally click, you're screwed. They won't talk to you afterwards at all. You don't get told until much later (and by a random NPC you may never talk to) how to fix that.
Once you complete the quests you can get led to the town, where you have to pay 100g to get in. Presumeably. You can dismiss the NPC before you get there, and I did by accident (again, no warning as to what might happen), so maybe if he's there it's cheaper, but it's entirely possible not to have 100g. I don't mind choices like this, but in a game I want to make them with full cognizance. Don't punish me for not being prescient.
I still wanted to try playing a mage, but good luck on that. You're told that somewhere, there's an NPC that can train you to be a mage. And that's it. Town full of NPCs, no direction, no way to ask questions. I ran across a lot of side quests (and two non-mage trainers), but why would I want to do them with my starting skillset, that I can't level up?
And another thing. Alchemy. Lots of games now seem to have plants and whatnot in the world that you can collect for alchemy. But you can start doing this very early on, with no way to know how alchemy works, when you'll be able to dispose of these components, what their relative worth is, or what the worth of alchemy in the game is. Oblivion did it quite well, by introducing it very early, but everyone else doesn't seem to catch the hint.
Anyhow, I'll try and continue playing it but wandering around a town empty-handed and directionless is not my idea of fun.
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