I've put in about 70 hours now on the game. Some of that was working on mods and bug fixes. But not too much of it. I've been pretty exhaustive in working through every bit of the content, and I still haven't finished my first play through.
And... it feels like a grind. I don't FEEL like i've gotten very far, because I've only completely, thematically, 5 areas: One viking, one Human, One PIrate/Orc, One Elf, One Demon (And the Elf and Demon ones were very short compared to the others).
I've been trying to put my finger on the real core problem I've been having with the game compared to its predecessors. Yeah, it has bugs, but nothing game stopping for me. Sure the tooltips are off and the dialogue is weird... but that's just a mild aesthetic, and has been true in the past.
The issue? The real issue?
Pacing. 100 times this. You spend far too much of the game repeating roughly the same play pattern. The rewards are not paticularly well distributed over the play experience, and so some areas are a deluge of knew things, while others are completely monotonous and repetitive. At one point, I checked my awards, and I had 250 No loss fights, and 150 Undead armies slain. Considering 99% of my fights were no loss, this means about 40% of the game at that point had been versus Undead armies!
The difficulty range between Greenwort, merlessar, and the Isles of Freedom was very small, but the total experience gained takes you from like level 20ish to level 45! The only reason you do all that content is to be high enough level to do some of the huge Demon fights in Demonis/Hades. So you grind through a bunch of super easy fights, using them just to level up your medals/self/rage skills.
Further more, we've removed 2 entire races of units. Just to hit home the 'there is not enough unit selection woes', the lizardmen and undead are basically not playable. And wanderer scrolls are super rare.
The idea of making the Winged Horse appear early was terrible. I know this feels like "Give them their candy early", but in reality in trivializes so much of the layout of the levels. You have two pirate, three human, and one elf area to explore. If you are just scouring them for goodies, you could, if you wanted, spend HOURS doing nothing but picking up things via flight. Armored Princess introduced this only very late in the game, and after the point you could have investigated most islands. You should be using flight as a big bonus that lets you clean up the last few islands easier, not as a status quo that makes you wonder why they bothered making 'paths' for units.
Ugh. I'm not sure what happened, and I still wish 1C and Katauri the best... but something went really wrong with this game. It needs more Tender Love and Care before being truly palatable by the masses, and has all the earmarks of something rushed out the door before it is ready.
Release a game 3 months late, and it's late for 3 months.
Release a game 3 months early, and it's bad, forevermore.
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