izigame.me

This is one of those occasions where I am willing to give a recommendation for a game that I haven't finished. I might finish it at some point, but not anytime soon. Let me explain.
Wartales' core gameplay loop is right up my alley: you can create your own characters (and develop a bond with them), you can roam around an interesting semi-open world with nooks and crannies everywhere to explore, complete main or side quests, level up your characters, craft or find new items and weapons, meet more-or-less interesting NPCs with a story and generally decent voice acting, fight interesting combat encounters (more on that later) and generally feel like a whole world is open for you to explore -- because it literally is. The first few hours were a magical experience back in December and I spent about two weeks playing the game every single day, many hours at a time. It was really that fun for me.
From the six or seven regions (however you want to count them), I finished five. At level 10-11, I am in region six now and gradually seem to have lost interest. While the core gameplay loop is still there and can be as fun as ever, two of the downsides have become more and more prevalant:
1. While the voice acting is still decent, I noticed that I am not really interested in whatever the story is. That is actually quite rare for me, as I play games for their story first most of the time -- but apparently not Wartales. In region six there is a murder mystery spanning basically the whole main questline for that region and you have to talk to a lot of people and remember a lot of names. Or so it seems. Maybe. Look, I haven't finished it, okay? I couldn't be bothered to remember all the names and how they relate to each other and frankly, after seeing how the other five regions' questlines were resolved, I didn't feel the need to read (or listen) with more than one or two braincells. It is going to end up in a huge battle anyway.
2. Speaking of combat, here is the deal. The game was perfectly balanced with a small troupe of my humble mercenaries. The game has the unfortunate mechanic that the number of enemies is dependent on the number of fighters in your party (including animals). Since I wanted to have ten people for every job in the party, had one fighting horse (dear old Chesterfield, God rest his soul.. in the middle of a busy square, ahem..) and at one point got hold of a bear. So that's 12 fighters, meaning the game throws between 12 and 20 or so enemies at you. In. Every. Single. Encounter. It just drags at some point, at least it did for me. After playing every day for a few weeks, it slowly devolved into once or twice per week, then ultimately not for many weeks. Just today I started it up after three weeks of not playing (as I had been busy killing Dark Elves in Total Warhammer, but nevermind the reason), because I was feeling guilty that the game was sitting there in the category "Active" in my backlog. I played for about two hours, had fun with the gameplay loop again, but after encounter 4 that was promising to take another 15-20 minutes due to the sheer amount of fighters in my party and the enemy, I just lost interest. I can't do this anymore. It's not that the fights are hard, I understand how to keep my party alive (mostly) and whom to attack when with what, it's just not interesting anymore. It's been five levels since any of my characters learned a new fun trait to try out, since then it's just spamming the same stuff over and over again because it is effective and the enemies have so much health that trying anything else is suicide. It is a grind now.
So, two whole paragraphs of two major negatives (for me), but I still give this a thumbs up. Why? Because of that early to mid game magic. I got my money's worth sitting at 69 hours of play (nice!) and that's more than I can ask for. No, I didn't finish the game, but since the story is not the driving factor and lost me many, many hours ago anyway, do I really lose all that much by not finishing the game?
Overall, I want games like this to be made and be successful. With a little tweaking here and there, a sequel could be a contender for sleeper hit of the year or even better. I also want people that are interested in tactical combat and open world RPGs to give this game a chance. While it did get tedious in the end, it did so a hell of a lot slower than many AAA games I tried playing in the last couple of years.