I think many players felt first area too much like only a big town with some small surrounding.
I agree this area had benefit of Early Access feedback and certainly required quite more time and cost. The Luculla Forest is much more about exploration with just two small towns not really towns.
If there's a problem it comes from some design elements relative to exploration and not working well.
In exploration one big element is the "spot stuff" gameplay, it includes find something behind the corner, detect stuff midly hidden, quote a cisual hint the clue there's something to find. The problem is most of the "spot stuff" gaemplay is a failure, stuff too much hidden and unclear, items almost impossible to quote because of the amount of details and the iso view from afar, bad use of graphics shared between items to pick and items you can't pick, some more flaws.
The result is a lot of time spend in exploration design get lost and doesn't work. It's like if the designers believed the players would really play with close view and look behind any rock. The Sourcerer book hint about that bad design. It' s because it's not fun to do it. A great "spot stuff" gameplay is only based on vision and character location not on mouse cursor and checking any pixel.
So the result of this is to make look many part of Luculla Forest as more or less empty, because the initial exploration gameplay is here and fail to work. Also animals talk was a good trick but it's sometimes abused, ie it's used to help fill better the exploration but it doesn't fill fully that role, as would do a NPC with some real dialogs and interactions.
If the game was 4 cyseal like areas it would be very weird, with half of play inside towns.
And the 4th town has also a lot of stuff to dig, it's clearly not as big than Cyseal but it still has a lot of stuff and the mage house is a part of it as some underground.
Last edited by Fend; 27/09/14 12:15 PM.
