Sense of location, time, and people

[pacovf]

I currently have some trouble immersing myself in the world, and getting a sense of who is where, and even what time it is. I just get sent to random places to deal with random people, until it's the end of the day and there's a non-random fight I understand. Let me explain.

- Location: the only place you can always go to is the Grog. The only place you repeatedly go to is the night market, and the Spree/Admiralty HQ, depending on who you side with. Quest givers don't bother telling you where to go, you just get a random spot on the map revealed after you accept the quest. These locations seem handcrafted, and remain the same from playthrough to playthrough. Why not name them? Why not make them part of the quest description too? Am I collecting debts from Nod at Emellowen's Emporium, or at the Admiralty barracks? This could be specified, and hovering over the name of the place would bring up a tooltip showing who owns the place (foreman/bartender/vendor) and who are the guards. Being able to revisit certain locations even if you don't have a quest there would be nice too (bars/shops). Maybe I want to share a drink with someone I just beat up to improve relations, but now I can't do it unless they happen to be somewhere I can actually go to.

- People: aside from Fssh, Ooloo, Nadan and the 3 night vendors, I don't really know who anyone is. I recognize a few raiders and clerks, but don't know where they stand. Because of that, I am not sure I like the randomizing of roles that happens each playthrough. The randomization of quest givers / objectives / places seems to be enough variation for me, without also changing who the people are. About the only place where I think it makes sense is the Grog's bouncer and the night 1 boss. Right now, when the quest blurb says I have to beat up Kuga for Lasquo, I don't care at all about who those two people are. I would care more if I knew from repeated playthroughs that, say, Kuga was an enforcer for Nadan, and Lasquo was the clerk at the docks. I don't think whatever "replayability" is added by the randomization of roles is worth the dissociation this causes. 

- Time: this is somewhat less important, but it still bothers me. Some days you get to do two quests before it's night, sometimes only one. Why? Similarly with "bonus" events, it's not clear when or why they happen. You can also keep moving between locations as much as you want (to, say, check up the shops), as long as you don't accept a quest. None of this is gamebreaking, far from it, but I would personally prefer a system where you have X hours per day to do stuff, each quest takes Y hours (specified before accepting the quest), and so you have to choose which places you want to visit. But this might just be me.

 

Other stuff, that I may add to as I can remember it:

- I've had a character just called "Raider" appear multiple times, especially at the spree HQ. I assume they are making up for a different character that I've killed, even though I rarely ever kill people. The spree roster could be deepened a bit to make this a less common occurrence. But my real issue was that I had some guy ask me to collect a debt from "Raider". This instantly took me out of the game. Could replacement characters not be involved in quests this way?

- Character strength seems to scale up a bit too fast for my taste, which also tends to take me out of the game. Why does a thug that has lived in the Feud their whole life get significantly more competent over the course of 4 days? I am ok with people you've already defeated getting stronger (Shadow of Mordor style), representing that they've learnt your fighting style and now they fight better against you, specifically. But otherwise, I would prefer if, say, thiefs were consistently one or two stars, thugs were two or three, raiders were three or four, and similarly for the other factions. Disregard this if it's already the case, it just didn't seem that way to me over 6 playthroughs.

- I can't hover over the names in a quest blurb over a location, because the blurb disappears when I don't hover over the location anymore. This is annoying.