The environments are gorgeous but the sense of progression and reward in this game is terrible, there's so little of it. I can barely survive a fight with an overgrown porcupine and often suffer an ignominious death if I take one wrong step out of the camp and walk into a pack of boars, wolves or giant turkeys. I can't progress any further in the quests in the camp, in order to do so I need better gear (500 gold for workers clothes, do they even provide a decent stat boost?) and skills, in order to gain betters skills and gear I need to fight critters for loot drops and I need to dirt farm resources, none of which net me any serious reward. It's like an escher drawing where each staircase leads me to sadness.
I grinded to learn how to skin animals to increase loot drops and then grinded hunting animals just to purchase skinning/carving tools so I could hopefully gain even more drops from carving, no dice. And the one increased item drop I gain from carving some animals is of little to no reward. Go hunting for half an hour and walk away with 35 gold. So I'll only have to hunt for roughly five hours to gain the next level of sword mastery. Awesome.
I grind so I can learn how to pick locks. The few chests I've picked yield items of little to no value. I haven't even gained back the money I spent learning the skill.
I've been playing for six hours and the best gear I have is a wooden shield that covers me 3+ points of various melee damage and a sword that inflict 15 damage per slash. I've got a few basic stats for strength and sword fighting and an abundance of skill points I can't use because trainers are prohibitively expensive to learn from and money is so hard to come by. Which makes the fact that everything is a damage sponge all the more frustrating. Parrying and dodging seem to be dreadfully important but then the combat system isn't exactly polished, it's kind of laggy. I've given up on fighting mobs in the wilderness. I just agro the mob, lead it back to the bandit camp, let the bandits do most of the damage, try to land the last hit so I net the experience points and loot whatever corpses there are. Playing the pied piper is time consuming, and nets little reward, but I at least survive, generally unscathed.
Never thought I would be playing an rpg and pining for the opportunity to buy some basic leathers or rusty chainmail. Something, anything so I don't look like the medieval equivalent of hobo with a shotgun.
I think I'm going to shelve this for the time being. Maybe I'll dust it off and give it another go a few months down the road, or perhaps it will languish and molder in my Steam backlog. Either way buying Darkspore this Tuesday just got a whole lot easier.
