I’m not sure why I picked this game up after so long deliberately avoiding it. Somewhat unsurprisingly, it is indeed not very good. At the moment I’ve finished the Masquerade main quest and all of the side quests from before that point (except the Demon Doors), and the annoyances have begun to outweigh the fun parts.
The game’s first and foremost issue are the visual effects, which are badly implemented enough to cause motion sickness. To fix that you have set the Effects slider to ‘reasonable’ or lower, turn off VSync (forcing it via graphics card instead), kill the mouse smoothing and reduce its sensitivity to about a quarter or so, and then save and exit the game. After that, open up the VideoOptionsConfig.xml file in the main game directory and change all the Blur/AA/DepthOfField lines in the first section to 99, then save the file and set it to Read Only. After all that it becomes tolerable to play; though the FoV is still an issue there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to alter that.
Once you get past the technical issues, on come the gameplay and storyline issues: Combat is simplistic and gets old fast (particularly since there are tons of enemies in many encounters), the ‘side quest’ moral choices are set to extremes that I haven’t seen since Jade Empire (sign the petition or punch the petitioner; there is no middle ground), the main quest choices (when you get any choice) are ham-fisted, the quest progression in general is incredibly heavy handed and each and every one so far railroads you into a specific course of action, and of course there’s essentially nothing to spend the tons of infinite money you get from owning businesses on (there’s no armor and weapon augments are free; I currently have 10 million gold).
That’s a lot of negatives. So why have I played this long? Exploration and collectibles mostly, which is to say silver keys, gnomes, books, and different outfit parts. While the areas are comically oversize and don’t really have much of use to be found in them (most chest and dig spot contents appear to be somewhat random, which is a bit of an issue in some cases since they don’t respawn), running around them looking for hidden treasure is still fun… or rather it was, it’s since lost its appeal now that all the main continent locations have been explored. The quest dialogue is also sometimes amusing.
Not sure whether to keep pushing until the post-ruler portion of the game. Might instead go back to Dragon’s Dogma and finish the only unfinished quest (collect the last 2 Bitterblack armors), or perhaps start on Trails in the Sky‘s second chapter.