Posted February 07, 2020
wesp5: The shortness could be improved upon by starting the endgame only when all the sidequests are finished...
shmerl: Indeed, it felt like things were pressured and there was no time to finish side quests which were interesting. I'd be OK with that, if at least choices mattered and endings would change, but as it is, limiting time just serves no useful purpose in the game. It was kind of cool that a certain event featured the people who you had done all the missions for, helping you out. But that event plays out 100% identically (with the exception of their names, and maybe a paragraph or two dialogue for each) - and then you don't see them again for the rest of the game! (And "the rest of the game" isn't much at that point either).
As far as I can tell, apart from changing the flavour text within a sub-plot, "choices" don't appear to do much else at all in this game. Except perhaps using powers and feeding draining and regaining your blood levels respectively, which SOMETIMES has an impact - but it's never an important impact. At best, it's like "you used lots of powers and didn't feed for a while, so in this instance your beast takes charge and you kill someone sloppily" - but in the end that has absolutely no impact whatsoever on anything (with the possible exception of a one-liner by someone at some point, and then never mentioned again).
Which is a shame, since the game APPEARS to give you a lot of options - but for the most part they don't make much difference.
And while I liked the idea of a being time-limited as to who you can bring into your coterie (this is definitely a better approach than actually arbitrarily limiting the number of coterie members directly, or limiting the number of "major sub-plots" you can go on before something triggers - it was refreshing to see some kind of (albeit limited) time management aspect here) - only being able to "complete" around 30-40% of the sub-plots felt a bit weak. And it would have helped if who you had gotten on-side made a difference in the end (even if it doesn't change the ending as such, it should at least enable different options to get there).