Or when Karlach hit me with the “I thought we really had something there, but I guess not.” At the start of act 3 that made me save scum, fix it, and put an indefinite hold on playing.
You advance relationships during long rests, but I wasn’t taking them. Because I never reached the next relationship milestone before the next act, I instead had a cutscene where the character, Karlach, laments the lost connection despite the fact I was very much into them.
Can happen just the same with Astarion. He’s perfectly fine being in a relationship with you if you never turn him down, but
[SPOILER paragraph because the tag won’t work]:
whether he means a damn thing he says is completely dependent on one single camp scene. If you rest enough with a sufficiently progressed relationship, he’ll confess that he meant to use you as a shield and accidentally fell in love. If you progress to Act 3 without the confession, you get a cruel speech about how easy it was, and he doesn’t know why you’re so shocked (“It’s what I DO.”)
…end spoiler. Someone needs to explain the hieroglyphics of that tag to me.
It’s a pitfall of theirs, and as intrusive as it would have been to keep the exhaustion meter they originally had, removing the mechanic entirely is too destructive. It makes hoarding camp supplies laughably easy and results in too much missed content.
Maybe a notification marker of some sort reminding the player would be enough. Maybe it wouldn’t, because “Boy am I tired” is just something my party members say sometimes and it was easy enough to ignore without any clear punishment for doing so.
But they really need to reinstate something.
This game is such trash and everyone puts it in a pedestal. Everyone acts like it is a perfect thing beyond criticism.
