Well, just about finished. I'd left the Gula, playhouse, asylum and House of Secrets sidelines until the end thinking they were all bigger diversions than they were: I guess they all seemed quite prominent but didn't take that long! Can't really complain, Aleroth is a well-realised city with lots of interesting nooks and crannies and plenty to do, and tbh it's probably about he right length: it's left me with the feeling that I really enjoyed it and I'll finish having wanted more rather than eventually running out of steam, feeling meh and not finishing the game, which often happens. Though that isn't an argument in favour of shorter games!
What I really wish was the case is that it didn't totally and permanently close off entire areas, both in terms of the game's built-in restrictions and storyline because sometimes I just like to unwind after the end of the MQ and mooch about in the places I came to know and love. Though I'm not generally a fan of random quests I think
some respawns and crappy fetch quests from a still accessible Broken Valley would've been really nice. I guess I'm still hoping for a Mended Valley at some point in the future.
I think I have stretched the game out a lot with my assorted pointless modding which is so inconvenient that even small alterations are time-consuming.
I've written a few utilities for modding stuff which make life a lot easier, including finishing Blender's NIF exporter (well, kinda: it's still quite tedious), my DDS-into-NIF repacker and a DV2 extractor. I'm currently working on expanding the latter to also create DV2 files and it's largely complete, though as I suspected it's unlikely to happen before I finish the game. I may attempt to finish the DV2 writer anyway as nothing immediately comes to mind in terms of what I can play next and I need something to fill my time! I kinda wish I'd done it earlier as the one I downloaded years ago is quite slow, though I dunno how much of that is the program vs Windows/NTFS: my extractor is very fast, but that might just be because FreeBSD with ZFS has much better file handling than Windows. But I digress as usual.
Unless I've forgotten something, I don't have much else to do with myself. I'm most of the way through the dungeon leading to, er, Berlin's prison (can't be bothered to look up the weird spelling of his name) and after that I think it's just the notorious Zeppelin escort mission and the final showdown with Ygerna.
