I played through the entire game once as a tiefling dragon sorcerer on Balanced. Took around 80 ish hours at most. I really enjoyed the game overall on my first playthrough, though. I had many bugs and a lot of the interactivity (companions, previous characters) felt super weak in Act 3. I also noticed a lot of issues with illusion of choice in those areas. In reality there are lots of minor options you can take that effect almost nothing, and a few major options that don’t feel like they change as much as they should.

I started a new playthrough today just to mess around with being more evil. And man, it feels TERRIBLE. This game feels very based around you making a good character first because evil choices feel questionable at best, completely nonsensical at worst and lock you out of a TON of content, nearly 1/2 of the companions, and just don’t make much sense no matter how you roleplay it. It felt really terrible going back through and realizing I should have just made another mildly good character to explore other options, because there is very much not a smart evil route in this at all without just picking the good guy options.

I won’t speak too many spoilers here but this lack of variability really killed most of my interest in replaying the game (I played 125 hours of early access with friends and was very excited for the game). There is very little in this game that makes me go “what if?” As many of the best CRPGs and choice-based RPGs of the past did. That kind of feeling is what gets you to replay the game, and it’s a feeling I felt with Wrath of the Righteous recently, but I don’t feel it at all with this game. The most satisfying part of replay would honestly be playing new classes, since magic items are good and combat is fun.

Personally I really want to like it more, having just finished it at 80 hours. But from what I can tell, it just doesn’t have much that makes me want to replay it and endgame is very buggy. I have a whole host of issues but after starting very unsatisfying re-run through today (I played 125 with different people in early access a year or 2 ago) I looked up some stuff and realized how few of the choices felt like they actually mattered, or were straight up broken/cut content. Very disappointed. LOVED the first playthrough, though.