Highvale Outskirts bait and switch

So first, before Berek's finger gets all twichy, let me state that Highvale Outskirts is one of, if not the, best built scenes in the entire game. It has a solid core quest, some easy to find side quests, some harder to find quests and some secrets. I visited it at far to high a level to get much challenge, but on the whole it felt like it was designed like an area from RPGs like Fallout 1 & 2 and Baldur's Gate where every map has things to find and quests to do.

Sure, it isn't perfect, the writing is much longer than it needs to be, the chest you get for beating the boss is/can be empty and despite "finishing" the quest nothing really changes in the scene. Still, if every scene were built like the outskirts, 75% of the complaints about poor questing and lack of SP content would disappear.

And that's my biggest concern, this scene has 2 or 3 times more content than the most content rich normal scenes. You have new players coming in, hitting that nice tasty content in the outskirts scenes (I'm assuming the other two are similar), and then turning them loose on the barren, by comparison, landscape of the rest of the game. Maybe you could get away with a work in progress banner when the game was pre-release, but now it feels like a bait and switch, the first 2-3 hours of the game are nothing like the rest.

 

Time for the Advanced User Experience (AUE) enhancement works to be focused. The upcoming uncloned adventure scenes or those mines might be good places to look into.

 

I couldn't agree more with this statement. Great work again @Puuk!

I really hope we get more content like this as we move forward because as you stated it is amazing ,with TONS of stuff to do!