Lords of Xulima II - About the Sequel

Originally Posted by you
I didn't have to 'go back' to level up but the progression path is linear. They expect you to go to certain areas in a certain order and if you go down the wrong path death is swift. For my play there was a point in the game will all the 'obvious' paths meant certain death and there was only one path available that allow progression of the story (lower south east). Unfortunately when I had gone down there earlier in the game I thought I reached a dead end and it took a while to realize that there was actually a large missed area. The point is that the other 3 directions available at the time were not remotely possible and it took a small amount of trial and error to find the developer's expect path.

I understand why the game was structured in this fashion (it allowed for control progression of difficulty vs party strength; i.e, tight balance) but it also means that there will occasionally be instant death felt by the party and it takes a bit of trial and error to determine if instant death is due to your error or the logical progression of the game (I can't remember my difficulty level - it was one of the harder levels but not the hardest). I only play the full game once as after the first 20 hours or so it became a grind (the 'wow' moments of the story were pretty dense at the start but very sparse later on).

Here's the thing, though. The game expects the player to use "RPG Common Sense" in some ways. For example, I never had an insta-death in the areas I explored. Why? For one, you can see how difficult the enemies are before you fight them. Even the random encounters show you the encounter strength. So there really is no trial and error there, because if you see "Impossible" or "Titanic", you really don't have a chance there. There are also landmarks and things to alert you to danger. The giant lake of lava in the middle of the map that has a demon flying around it on the map? Yeah, probably should stay away from that. The ice glacier area that consumes 8 times the normal amount of Food and has a sign posted that literally no one has ever returned if they went past this point, might want to go somewhere warmer. The game has a lot of cues like this in the environment.

Now, there is one instance of a possible insta-death without knowing about it, and that is the castle in Nagira where the Prince there does something if you move too far into his realm. He does give you a warning, though, and the townspeople in the snowy town give you a warning as well. That could have possibly been a little bit better shown somehow since it's a bit easier to miss. But everywhere else? Never really hit an insta-death at all by not knowing what to expect in the area. That's also part of the reason why Camouflage exists.

Finding the developer's path in the game is like a puzzle element to me. Not a huge puzzle, but it's rewarding to figure out where you can go next. I actually find that "guided" approach more rewarding than an open-world in many ways. Anyone who has played Gothic 1, Gothic 2 or Risen knows what I mean. If you're exploring and you see an Ogre on the road with an Impossible tag on it, you know to go somewhere else. They could have made the progression path a bit easier in the beginning because I can see why some gamers who are not familiar with that sort of world design could get lost and confused. It happened quite a bit according to the devs. That is why I'm in favor of optional things like quest markers and what not. Or a hint button. As long as they remain an option and not on by default, of course.