"A unique experience with every playthrough"

[Serath]

Can anyone explain this key point in detail? The game is listed as having this as a feature on the store page, but exactly in what ways?

The closest explanation I could find is a review on the game that came out the day before the game released, @2:24

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HC1FiHwsZzM&t=2m24s

"The world is filled with dynamic quests. We heard this line before about "radiance," but this is really true, the world goes on without you. If you're not there to save someone, then that person probably will be killed by that creature.

Another really unique aspect is the way it plays out. You won't simply just be killed by some bandits. Maybe you'll actually waken up and be kidnapped by them. Maybe you'll be put out into the woods and have to go and find your belongings, or maybe you've been put into prison.

It really focuses on the what if and what happens instead of the standard go at and repeat."

The thing is, I'm not really finding that much "radiance" in this game, as the reviewer claims. NPCS do the exact same thing every day, nothing interesting happens unless I start a quest, and the world definitely seems to stay put until I do so. The only aspect of this I can find in the game is related to your character's "death," and even then, it's not so much radiant (at least in terms that Bethesda puts it) so much as it is just a well-fitting scenario.

Obviously quests are going to have multiple outcomes, depending on your actions or lack there of. (Case in point from the example just quoted, and a timed quest someone keeps mentioning in the forums here.) But regardless of all those outcomes it's still all pre-determined, there's no element of unexpectedness once you've seen them all.

Not that I'm expecting to see quests go a different way out of pure random, but I guess from reading "a unique experience every playthrough", I was expecting "smaller scale" scenarios (as in not full-blown hand crafted quests) that could happen anywhere and anytime, that while not too terribly exciting on their own, together make up their own "unique" experience as a whole:

- Maybe the innkeeper had a generic quest that I could do. (Yes, Skyrim style. Boring, but infinite. Eventually you're going to run out of quests.)

- Named NPC's in villages might show up on the road, (again, like Skyrim) or even a different town.

- Maybe a bandit walks up to you and you have a choice to give up your silver or fight him. Unlike other games it would actually make for a more interesting scenario since combat in this game isn't so straight forward, and giving them something actually might be the more wise decision.

- A villager runs to you and asks for your aid in rescuing someone down the road.

- Different types of enemies showing up anywhere, or at least in the same region but not the exact same two bandits next to the exact same hill, tree, or rock formation.

Basically making the whole game keep you on your toes.

Things like these.....are largely absent in this game, and the touted unique experience lead me to believe this game would have it. Perhaps it's because I'm only still near the beginning of the game, which is deciding which three factions to join and the game finally kicks off from there.
Perhaps the reviewer is using the wrong word, since "Radiance" is an obvious nod to Bethesda's "radiance" mechanic that drives all what I just described.

I know the game is meant to be played multiple times, but the open roads are so empty once you kill everything, you have no other quest to do, but yet you have to leave the entire region for several days to respawn things, something you might not want or are able to do at the moment, which is exactly where I am at this point.

This isn't at all to say that I was expecting the game to be "exactly" like Skyrim, but since a lot of games including Skyrim tries to incorporate many of these type of living world features, I was kind of expecting them here, considering the way the game advertises itself as you just being a normal person just trying to live your life. Well, I'm definitely living, but it's only in terms of not starving, becoming dehydrated or becoming sleep deprived, and that's it. The rest of it seems static.

[whit]

Yeah, I've been on the fence about buying it because of this point alone. The replayability, and from what I can tell, that really only comes from the faction quest lines. Everything else is very much statically in place and seems to play out the same way every time (if you arrive on time).

[TimidObserver]

Well, there are some things you can do to turn your playthrough into a complete dumpster fire. I wouldn't go as far as calling the game dynamic, but in my short time playing I've found some significant things that I can do differently that changes things a lot. Additionally, there is a legacy system, but I have no idea how it works.

[whit]

Originally posted by TimidObserver:

Well, there are some things you can do to turn your playthrough into a complete dumpster fire. I wouldn't go as far as calling the game dynamic, but in my short time playing I've found some significant things that I can do differently that changes things a lot. Additionally, there is a legacy system, but I have no idea how it works.

By significantly different you mean like...the guy on the beach is dead if you don't show up in time to get the tribe favor from him? Right? What about the next time you play, that's not even an option cause the guy never existed...anything significantly different like that? Or Is it all basically, " Well, you showed up on time/ Well, you didn't show up on time"?

[Power]

Originally posted by TimidObserver:

Well, there are some things you can do to turn your playthrough into a complete dumpster fire. I wouldn't go as far as calling the game dynamic, but in my short time playing I've found some significant things that I can do differently that changes things a lot. Additionally, there is a legacy system, but I have no idea how it works.

the legacy system is 4 chests in the game world, one in each city that allows you to pass one item on to a new character

[Serath]

Well, from playing a game in co-op, I have noticed a few things. With the exception of maybe the items you find lying around in the beginning town, loot does seem to be random. This includes chests, loot from corpses, and even items lying around on the ground.

For e.g., there' a spear that I was kicking ass with in my single player game that you can find in the cave you go into to search for the shield mushroom. My friend's game, it was in a different spot. Our coop game (in which I made a new character for) together? Wasn't there at all.

And enemy placement might be different, or I just wasn't being attentive enough. I already know 2 players makes the game scale the amount of enemies so that doesn't count, but I saw a new monster that I've seen before in our coop game in a spot where nothing was there in my single player game. There was also a group of bandits that my friend attracted, even though I thought we already fought them in an area I already knew we defeated them.

[FullAutoAttack]

I failed to pay my blood debt and got kicked out of my house. So now I live in a storage room.

[Keenfire]

There is a twitch streamer that is playing it right now called "CohhCarnage". He is playing this game as I type this. Watching him play will answer all of your questions. I was on the fence too, bought it because of watching his gameplay.

[NeverSleeper]

-The 3 factions each have their own side of the story

-Timed quests have multiple outcomes

-90 different defeat scenarios, you probably wont see them all in one go.

-Different character builds (you can only master 3 out of 8 skill trees per character)

-Multiple endings