Wouldn’t that mean the reviewers were starved for fast travel, and would have thus complained about it? That seems to be the narrative a lot of people are suggesting - that the DLC makes the game playable.
Unless I’m misunderstanding and reviewers got infinite fast travel.
From what I understand, fast travel isn’t locked behind microtransactions, despite some claims I’ve seen. You can buy an item that you can place that lets you teleport back to that point, kind of like fast traveling to a map marker. These items are available in game along with fixed fast travel points between major cities. So the reviewers would have had access to fast travel they just wouldn’t have been able to use real money buy them whenever they needed them.
Feels a bit like if they had DLC for ammo in a Resident Evil game. The design of those games is very clearly intended to be around partial ammo starvation, to get you to aim better, choose varying weapons, and sometimes run away. But, I can imagine a small team of publishers deciding “People want ammo? Let’s let them buy it!” It’d be very easy for players to presume the base game has been made worse as a whole, and that opinion will become hard to quantify - unless very nuanced reviewers can just pretend the DLC doesn’t exist.
Not only isn’t it locked behind DLC, it’s incredibly cheap, and unlike a lot of titles will take you to places you haven’t even been yet. I’m talking about the ox carts, of course. Not only that, ferrystones are available for only 10k (money is relatively easy to come by). What exactly does the store have in it that is required, or even kinda necessary for convenience?
