I thought I would give my First Impressions on FOV. I enjoyed Ego Draconis a lot, my only wish was that it had more than it did. Regardless, I immediately jumped into FOV and a few things caught my attention that I thought I would mention for the developers if they read these threads so they might consider them on their next game.
1) I thought that the start of FOV was simply too overwhelming. I'm not referring to the story. You leave your imprisonment, and talk to the General. From there, you immediately hit about 30 things you can do, right then. The first thing I did was go to my right, and run into a guy saying his house had Assassins in it, and I had really no idea what was going on. Although the beginning of ED had a bunch of quests, it wasn't nearly as overwhelming, and most were not forced on you or so obvious right when you start. Eventually I did gain my bearings, however at first I seemed very overwhelmed to the point of stopping for a long period simply because it seemed like a lot of things were happening at once and I couldn't keep a grasp on everything. Maybe it's just me.
2) I'm fine with the lowered amount of combat, HOWEVER, I feel that if you're going to do this, don't also make Mindreading cost such an OUTRAGEOUS amount of Experience. Before I started my first actual Dungeon, I was in a debt of over THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND Experience. That's right, over 300,000. I have Level 10 Mindreading. The Hall of Echoes monsters cost 1-2k, and the regular guys in town cost over 6? How does that make any sense? I've gone through three dungeons and finished several quests and I'm still in a debt of over 150k. I think this is a HUGE deterrent. I don't want to save before I talk to EVERY NPC, and meanwhile, half of them cost a ton of Experience and seem to give absolutely no information what so ever. And if they do? Oh boy, be prepared to lose even more.
3) Since you cannot go back, I cannot go back to old NPCs and sell things, yet the Shopkeepers I've run into have things for 30-40k Gold, and yet they have 0-10k actually on them, preventing me from selling the garbage equip I've stocked up overtime and actually selling them so I can buy what I want to buy. It took me about 6 NPCs of selling to actually make the money to buy one Piece of Armor, only to snag that Gold back from him with more of my garbage equipment. Yeah, maybe I should have sold that crap while I was in ED, but meanwhile I wanted to make sure I wouldn't need it before I threw it away.
4) I keep hearing that monsters respawn, yet I don't know what the criteria is for this. I want to get rid of my insane EXP debt, but I cannot figure out how to get monsters to respawn. Since the system changed from static monsters (As in, not respawning), to respawning monsters, I think there should be information in-game that explains this somewhere. If there is, where can I find it? Just as a note, I tend not to read manuals (Since most modern games have manuals that are useless, can you blame me?)
5) Once again, I do like the voice acting, good job on that. The different voices I've noticed seems to be a good amount, or maybe I just have bad ears and can't notice the same guy with a slightly different tone. Regardless, I like it.
6) When you're in a gigantic town like Aleroth is, I would think that there should be a better map marker system. Yeah, I can tell what warps go where, but do I know if there's a quest there? I have at least 10 quests, and let's say all of them added markers. I have let's say 30 markers. Which matter? Which don't? Constantly checking between map and quest log over and over to determine a good route is very bothersome over time.
With those things said, I do have to say that I am still enjoying the game a lot. I just had a few things in specifically FoV that have been bothering me since I started it. Great job on this expansion regardless Larian, it does look beautiful.
