Hi. Apologies for speaking English, and thanks for mentioning me before.
I have been monitoring this thread today, and I feel like there are some things that have to be said, specifically about Guilds, which not enough people have been mentioning.
A little background: I am now in the middle of my third playthrough of Guilds. The first time I played Necromancer and beat almost the entire game (until it bugged in Chapter 9 and I couldn't progress anymore), which took me 99 hours. The second time I played for a little bit, then quit maybe after 10 hours. I am now playing melee Necromancer (Meliton staves) and am about 30 hours in.
I am somewhat enjoying Guilds as a whole, but some of the mechanics in the mod range from "questionable" to "completely anti-fun and anti-player".
First of all, while Guilds is not nearly as good on a mechanical level as New Balance (e.g. free aim, much cleaner combat, better animations, hotkeys, and much more), I don't think this is inherently bad for Guilds. I do believe that mods being more "vanilla-like" can also be interesting, however, Guilds in particular is bloated with mechanics that overshadow the "good" things about the mod. And that sucks.
Let me quickly go over the positive things I have noted about the mod, as well as more deeply about the negatives.
THE GOOD THINGS:
+++ QUESTS IN OLD LOCATIONS
+++ NPC DESIGN MAKES MUCH SENSE
+++ FILLING A LOT OF PLOT/STORY/QUEST HOLES
+++ PICKPOCKETING SYSTEM (best I've seen in any mod)
++ FOOD AND BONUSES IN GENERAL
++ CHARACTER PROGRESSION
+ DAILY QUESTS
+ MOUNTS (awesome, funny feature!)
+ EXPLORATION IN OLD LOCATIONS (Khorinis, Jarkendar), not so much in other places
+ COMEDY ELEMENTS (eg. Nadja cutscene)
THE BAD THINGS:
--------------------------------------------- DICE. Holy shit. The fact that I am encouraged (if not forced, considering the absurd amount of money and LP I am getting from gambling) to spend my time standing in front of every bandit, every pirate, every paladin on Etlu, and every bad guy in general, instead of playing the game, is absurd to me. In my opinion, this mechanic automatically prevents the mod from being regarded as "good" or "cool" by people outside of the long-time players. This is disgusting. I want to play the game, not spend dozens of hours save-scumming so I have enough money to learn the skills I need (with later magic circle costing over 20k gold as well).
On a related note - the new MINIGAMES (Coragon, Jaden, Pepe, Martin, Joe, ...). This idea is absurd, and funny at first, but... I would rather be playing the game. I would rather kill a boss, do a quest, or help an NPC, and get bonus stats as a reward, instead of spending my time transporting NPCs to the other side of the river or measuring an exact amount of wine using some buckets.
------------------------------- MONSTER REGENERATION. This is not the right way to increase the difficulty of the content. This system is completely anti-player. It would be much healthier to increase monster HP or improve the difficulty in a different way (just see how NB does it on Nightmare/Hard Nightmare for example), instead of relying on a mechanic that you MIGHT out damage if you're lucky, and if not, then that Shadowbeast with 1000 HP turns into a 6000 HP enemy. Completely unfun.
------------------------------- FARTING TROLLS. Okay, so to kill a Troll, I don't only need to have enough damage to get through its thick skin, but also enough HP to tank an attack that I cannot prevent in any way? When I played my mage-Necromancer the first time, the earliest I was able to kill a Troll was Chapter 7. Is this how it should be? If so, this is yet another unfun, anti-player mechanic that is just absurd to me.
--- NEW LOCATIONS. While some of the locations were cool (especially Hidenval) and some were not, there is a bigger problem. The locations are copied exactly 1:1 from the original mods, with little to no change. After finishing Hidenval for the first time, I was SHOCKED to see that the quests, NPCs, dialogues, orders, everything was EXACTLY the same as in the original mod. If I enjoyed that mod, does it mean that I should spend my time playing the mod "Das Wappen" instead of Guilds? Also, some locations (especially Far Valley) felt very much forced, and having to go there for a main quest so late into the game wasn't very fun to me, despite the location itself being of nice quality.
-- UNEXPLAINED MECHANICS. A lot of things are not explained in the game, and it's easy to brick yourself or even prevent yourself from progressing at all. As mentioned before, the soft lock of Hidenval (which needs level 16 to finish) was something that, if I didn't know about it, would cause me to restart my run. Another example would be the curse after killing Hoshkar "BELIAR WASN'T HAPPY AND HE CURSED YOU". Okay, what happened exactly? The idea that you WALKING consumes stamina after Chapter 1 is also completely unfun, unexpected, and unexplained anywhere.
-- POISONS. I got used to it over time, but still, I don't find this very interactive or fun to deal with at all.
- LOCKPICKING. Terrible, but just use Union HackChest, easy clap.
- UNKILLABLE MONSTERS. "Your weapon is not effective" - this is the message that I got on my Necromancer trying to attack an Ice Golem with my spells in Chapter 9. You can imagine it wasn't much fun being unable to kill an enemy, even by only dealing some damage to it, literally at the end of the game.
- EACH CHAPTER IS INCREASINGLY MORE PAINFUL.
Conclusion: Guilds 1.5 is possibly the best mod ever made. Until you enter Chapter 2. Then the experience gradually decreases, with each chapter being more painful than the previous one. I do appreciate the fact that Guilds is still being updated, but I don't feel like the updates make the mod any better. Comparing Guilds to NB, I don't think it's even a question. NB is a cozy, player-friendly mod with a lot of quality-of-life improvements and just very fun gameplay overall (of course it's not ideal and has some issues as well), while Guilds insists on hitting you with these absurd mechanics instead of letting you play the game. I don't hate that mod, but I wish some of these things I mentioned were improved because they are unacceptable in the current state and in the year 2023.
