izigame.me

This review will contain spoilers because, frankly, spoiling this for you is doing you a favour.
There is a short way to describe the game, and a long way.
The short way is: "Fatesworn is a Bad Fanfiction."
The long way is to say: Fatesworn is a Bad Fanfiction. They butcher the lore, ignore the plot and existing story, and lay waste to the established atmosphere. They accomplish this in many many ways, from the small and near inconsequential to the large and grotesquely in your face. In no particular order:
1) The first, and most notable plot hole, is the fact that some dude introduced as the head of the order of Fate Weavers knows and speaks of Tirnoch, when the end of the main storyline established that there is an organisation who's sole goal is to murder anyone who knows.
2) Stuffing alchemy ingredients in vast quantities everywhere, and in places they are normally never found. There's Essence of Fate plants out in the open, for Bast's sake. This is not a major thing, but it is emblematic of the change in design philosophy of the game.
3) The invention, whole cloth, of a new people (Mitharans) when there were any number of other mentioned races that could have appeared instead. These were chosen simply because they could be lazy and use regular human models for them rather than do actual work.
4) A character of the Warsworn is described as a "Pledgeshield" when they have been a member for a week by their own admission. They forgot that the Hireling rank existed when making this expansion. This is just one of many errors they made regarding factions.
5) Apparently Fomorous Hughes knew and approved of Necromantic crystals, despite his objection to necromancy in the base game and the fact he got Ventrinio sent to the gallows for it (Before Octienne stepped in and spirited him away).
6) Attributing Fate to the god of order (Mitharu) when there is an explicit goddess of Fate in the setting (Lyria) who is responsible for it.
7) Terrible voice actors for existing characters. If you can't get the VA for an existing character in the game, make a new character to replace them, don't just re-voice them for the new lines while leaving access to their old ones and their combat dialogue.
8) One quest involves meeting a person who claims to have been defeated in the House of Valour trying to regain their honour by killing giant monsters. The key problem with this proposition is that fights in the House of Valour are to the death, not surrender, and the person they claimed to have been defeated by was the antagonist of the House of Valour questline, a person with about as much mercy in his body as a politician has integrity (None).
9) You gain too much exp too fast. It is at least a 10x multiplier on experience meaning you level far faster than anywhere in the base game. Furthermore they did not think the consequences of raising the base game level cap to 40, and the level cap for Fatesworn to 50.
There are enough trainers in the base game and normal expansions that at level 40, if you use almost all of them, you can max out every single skill in the base game. They add a new skill to the expansion to try and eat the extra skill points, but the first point in that skill is given by a skillbook meaning that you will, at 50, have skill points left over if you were efficient in making use of trainers elsewhere in the game. This will leave the level up option visible on the menu forever.
10) Lack of fast travel locations. Fatesworn's new areas are vast. You spend a very large amount of time trekking from place to place and, if you need to return to town to sell things or brew more potions or whatever, you have to engage in much of that walking again. This quickly turns navigation tedious.
11) There is overuse of the time of day mechanic for quests which makes dealing with them a chore. You need to show up at a location at a specified time of day, the location only displayed at that time of day. There is one quest where they do not specify the relevant times, specifically the quest to kill a creature called the "Night Barghest". It spawns at 3am in the morning and is completely invincible until 5am, at which point it runs away and despawns. This is an incredibly frustrating quest and in the end I just drank a fate potion and dunked on it because anything else will result in it escaping.
12) People call you the "Fateless One" and know of you by that title. That is not a title or advertised fact about your character in the base game. In fact, no one knows about it besides a few highly perceptive entities and long time allies of the player character. The well known fact about your character is that they are the "Hero of Mel Senshir". The use of "Fateless One" is clearly derived from the fact that is the title given to the player character in external materials like the Amalur wiki, and has no foundation in the game and setting.
13) You can only access the DLC after beating the base game. This means that by the time you reach it you are well immersed in the lore if you have been paying attention, and you'll spot all the huge problems with the plot, most notably...
14) The antagonists goal is to break fate. Lets leave aside the fact that in the base game you sundered fate by killing Tirnoch, who was fated to destroy everyone. They have decided that that did not actually happen. The means the antagonist has chosen to use for breaking fate is to abduct and kill important people, somehow damaging fate by doing so.
There is, however, a big problem with this. It is well established in the setting that no one can defy fate. It's not a matter of choice, your every thought and action from birth to death was written in stone at the dawn of time. The single exception to this rule is the player character.
Thus the antagonist and his goons, who are inextricably bound by fate, are hunting down and killing important people who are inextricably bound by fate, to perform fates plan to kill them. And this, now, somehow damages fate when no amount of murder, genocide, war, or anything else in all of history has ever done so.
It is a nonsense from the start.
15) The villain is a complete idiot. They check off every dumb villain trope. The first encounter with them is when they engaged in a stupid plan to summon a Niskaru Horrinox to kill you, despite the fact that you've killed a dozen of the things, often with additional support, before now. And the fact that you've killed the Balor, a greater Niskaru the size of a fucking fortress that could break entire armies. Not to mention defeating Tirnoch. It's like an action movie villain declaring that, even though the elite super killer robot they sent against the hero was destroyed in a long drawn out battle, this time they have the perfect plan to slay them: A drunken hobo with a spatula.
16) The villain talks big about how they are going to kill you and then... they just don't do anything. You can't hurt them because of plot invincibility and they laugh and then just... leave. This is the number one biggest dumbest villain crap in the book.
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I have played further on and now I understand where they are coming from. It is worse than I had expected. Wheras the base game and the original DLC all have you defying fate and breaking the chains that would have lead the world to its doom, Fatesworn portrays defying fate as the action of fools, madmen, and incompetents. I have yet to reach the end of it but what I have seen suggests that you should be trying to undo the great triumph from the base game: The unmaking of fate itself. In the base game your breaking of fate is considered a good thing, as depicted most notably Agarths speech on the way to Mel Senshir. The DLC says no, this is very bad thing.
The core philosophy of the DLC is that people should know their place and never try to change it. Those that do are dangerous and must be suppressed or eliminated.