My Thoughts on Marchengast
(THIS WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS FOR THE QUESTLINE)
I've had a couple days to simmer over the Marchengast questline, and here are my overall thoughts:
The overall design of the area is really cool, it's clear that the devs put a lot of work into making the castle and the Hamlet feel like two separate locations within the same place. The sound design is especially on point. The soundtracks are appropriately melancholy and mystical to convey the feelings of a land ravaged by war and disease.
I love the moth motifs of the Saltus witches, it's really cool aesthetically.
It's been cool to see the game take concepts that were introduced with the medieval area and build upon them, like the jousting mechanic.
Rather than increase the number of daily quests that can be done each day to gain reputation, I wish they could have cycled through the options and given us a couple to do each day, instead of doing what eventually became twelve quests every day to raise rep. It became really repetitive at the end and I'm struggling to keep up with the grind for the sake of the Blighted Warrior set, which is only going to get harder when the Trailblazer ends and another incentive is lost.
Moving on to story/writing now, and I'm really sorry but I don't have a lot of positive things to say about it:
The whole concept is kind of messed up from the ground up. I'm the wrong person to write an essay on the topic, but it feels kind of tone deaf of them to write a "both sides are bad/wrong" plotline between indigenous and colonial groups where there is a clear aggressor?? Like sorry the Witches were too mean about being upset about the Nobles encroaching on their land?? Am I reading too much into it?? Does Margarete's white guilt mitigate the issue? The whole thing didn't sit right with me, so I'm curious to hear other more qualified thoughts on the topic.
Why didn't we get the Soul Riders involved? If the Blight is something that could still threaten Jorvik, we should have our sisterhood at our backs!! Linda could have had more resources for research into the Blight, Lisa could have looked into using the Star Circle to heal the land, Anne could have related to Margarete about going against parents' wishes, and Alex could have related to Abigail about having a complicated relationship with a distant mother! Granted that would mean locking Marchengast from lower level players which in my opinion would have been the correct move.
Why did we never meet Margarete's father? He was really built up as a possible major antagonist to the girls' efforts to unite the factions but we've now ended the storyline with nary a peep from him. Did none of the nobles who came to help with the ritual fear retaliation from him? Did he try to stop any of them? Was he hiding things from Margarete out of his own guilt for being complicit in the Nobles' war crimes? He never showed up to explain himself, so...
What the heck was that ending? The ritual didn't solve the problem, it only pushed it farther down the road to make it someone else's problem when the Veil inevitably weakens again. I'm glad it was able to bring the Nobles and Witches closer together, and I thought this was setting up something like "the real cure to the Blight was the friends we made along the way," though with point number 1 above that could still be...eh. Or again, we could have gotten the Sisterhood involved to see if we could reunite the Lonely Beacon with the other Life Wardens across the island to empower it to dispel the Blight!!
I desperately hope this isn't The End, but the devs have a shaky track record when it comes to finishing or updating anything once they've gotten bored of a project and moved on. If Marchengast does see a new chapter, it will likely be a year or longer before we see it.
Apologies for the novel lol, but a lot of this was stewing in my brain while I was playing through the quests and I wanted to see where everyone else's heads were at.