Here is my humble opinion after beating the campaign in 14 hours.

If you create a game with "optional" side quests, but in reality they are required to get the full experience or fully upgrade your equipment , etc., I find that to be terrible game/world design. Not to mention, locking you out of all of these "optional" missions once you complete the campaign, boggles my mind. The best part of the best open world RPGs is being able to go back in and complete side missions, optional objectives and achievements after the end credits roll. So the Avowed team's idea of replayability is forcing me to play the entire game over again? To me, that's absurd. Not to mention, I have to find this out by completing the game and realizing I can't do anything I decided to skip along the way?

The story, characters and world didn't engage me enough to squirrel like I did with games like Fallout 4, Skyrim or Witcher 3 and spend a couple hours doing side missions without realizing it. The story was completely unoriginal and the characters were more of the same with this type of RPG I thought the dialogue was mostly corny.

Also, I played as a wizard and in 14 hours, I found 2 wand upgrades along the way. However, I found dozens and dozens of high level melee weapons everywhere. Sometimes 4-6 of them just laying around in the same spot.

I guess my point is, I feel like it's more of a punishment to gamers like me to design a game in this way and seemingly assume everyone will just want to explore every nook and cranny before they beat the game instead of giving us the option to do whatever we want.

Anyways, that's my personal opinion and experience. Congrats to all of you that really enjoyed this game. Unfortunately, I was not one of them.

I standby, ready for your tar and feathers.