The lack thereof is becoming increasingly galling. Just to be able to see all the cool stuff further on, for the motivation necessary to continue flagellating myself trying to get there legitimately.
I've never been there but I'm sure appropriate places exist later in the game. So why have no saves? Why not at least put a save point where you've got the key and are about to unlock the 1st door there on level 1? And perhaps other similar places further on. Start the game, make it to the end of the dungeon, the end. But Exanima isn't Sui Generis with a whole world and a complex story, it's just a dungeon crawl. I get the no saving thing for Sui Generis, where a lot of the story revolves around the character's ability to come back from the dead. I'm sure there are many out there who feel as I do, and there's a simple solution to this problem: a more forgiving save system. I hear rumors that there's all kinds of cool stuff further along but from my POV it might as well be vaporware. It's the same damn handful of rooms and corridors, the same damn zombies, the same crappy starter gear over and over. Exanima is giving me the exact opposite of that. But seriously, how much time is a mere dungeon crawl supposed to take? Most full-blown RPGs are proud if they have even 50 hours of gameplay, so that by the time you're halfway through that, you've seen and done a lot of different things, you feel like you're actually making some progress. I've only been here a couple months and have only 23 hours of playtime. Now, Exanima and SG have been in work for years, and many of those currently in this forum have been with it from the get-go, or at least as long as contributions were open. When either happens, it's back to the beginning again. It just takes 1 mistake to ruin your game, and even if you do everything right you can still get screwed by chance events. It's just that it's so prone to random variation and so unforgiving when you're on the short end of that. After all, I do reasonably well in the arena and can take down zombies with fair success. It's not that I think Exanima's combat system is all that hard in and of itself. I'll keep trying, but the desire to do so is fading fast due to endless, will-sapping repeats of stuff I've done already dozens of times, and the sheer frustration of having to repeat (AGAIN!) so much stuff to even have a chance at seeing something new. From where I sit, I'll never, ever see any of the new content. To which I think, "Whoop-dee-doo", because I can't even get respectably far into the 1st level.
EXANIMA MAP 2ND LVL UPDATE
Seriously, I hear the next update adds all kinds of wonderful stuff after the end of the current 3rd level. Repeat ad nauseum, and it's the ad nauseum part that's getting me down.
Then there's nothing for it but to repeat all the stuff that gets you the key again. So you do all that (maybe-it's never a sure thing) and open the locked doors, and the hostility factor steps up a couple notches. Then retrace all you steps back through it which can be, depending on luck of the totally random draw on wandering zombie placement, even harder than getting the key to begin with.
EXANIMA MAP 2ND LVL PLUS
To open the locked doors on level 1, you have to sneak/fight/think your way through a fairly large amount of dungeon to get the key, plus whatever fixed items/lore/random chest contents/known zombie equipment you consider worth risking your life for. Which by now I'm finding intensely frustrating. I have yet to get more than a room or 2 beyond the main locked doors on the 1st level. If I didn't really like the game, I wouldn't have put in this amount of time for what is merely practice for the actual game, which is the dungeon. I routinely beat the novice arena now and sometimes the expert arena. I'd say that's probably split about 60%-40% arena to dungeon.
Still a noob, yes, but I've been here in the forums a while and Steam says I've played Exanima 23 hours. OK, I think I've been around here long enough now not to be dismissed as a completely uninformed noob. I'm not hating on the game, I'm giving what I consider is probably a fairly common opinion of Exanima, FWIW to the devs. But repect the right of folks to have opinions different from yours. You opinion is almost certainly different, which is cool.
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