1) Not needed at all. You're naturally going to find your way there eventually, the lack of things to do in the immediate area is all the compulsion you need to move along.
It doesn't work so. Imagine yourself dropped somewhere in the middle of nowhere, without any idea of what is your mission. What will you do? You will search for water, roof and food. Imagine, that you don't need water, roof and food. What will you do? You will sit down and think. That's it. Same goes for a new player. I went playing DOS2 for checking the game, because I played DOS1 and it was great, so I had purpose. What if I didn't play DOS1 and started from part 2, because my friend told me the game was great. Well I will play 10 minutes, decide, that it is boring and go watch some series or play cs.
3) The wand is specifically a reward for defeating the turtle. Most enemies don't drop stuff you wouldn't find, so I don't mind an occasional exception. In real life, lots of inedible stuff can be found inside the bodies of sharks and other animals.
Replace the wand with some gem, that can be inserted in your wand and make it more powerful? Use turtleshell to improve your shield, or a part of the shell as a shield. Doesn't this sound better? A beast can have a ring in his stomac, for sure, but not wands, swords, shields etc.
4) The game is already dropping less loot and encouraging more shopping. As long as the items are normal quality and not magical, then I see no problem at all with getting some stuff. Especially with how expensive skill books are now.
I didn't get to the books. Will comment on this later. I still think that having so much items after minutes of gameplay isn't fine.
5) Nothing stops you from hiring a thief or a warrior to smash the chest open. You can even hire a temporary person you have no intention of keeping to unlock stuff, then kicking them out. Otherwise just accept that if you refuse to take Thievery on any character, there will be some locks you can't open.
You don't get the idea. I am a new player. I don't know that I can find a thief somewhere far away from here and I don't want to break my weapons while trying to open the chest. All I feel is dissapointment that the chest can't be open. But if I open it right now and hear something like "uhh that was hard. I am not sure if I can manage some more of these without learning thievery" from my main charecter, I know, that in future I may need a thief or points in thievery. The game should be newb-friendly.
Read above. Getting inside the fort must be checkpoint and save automatically.
If you're going to continue to reply to this thread, please increase the numbers instead of starting from 1 again, it makes it easier to reply and find the specific point which is being replied to instead of having to search for which "3)" is being referenced.
Will do.
