>>518419001one of the first game things that has stuck with me is on a 6th or 7th playthrough riding manually to skalitz for a gear farming run I willingly engaged a roadside ambush by 3 fully kitted robber knights and ended up fighting them for 7 solid minutes after taking a lucky head hit while trying to whittle them down with my longinus sword. I had full tournament prize gear, high stats, and plenty of game experience but some combination of factors (their heavy armor and weapon loadout, the terrain of a road with bushes and a stream culvert) made it an very dragout fight regardless. ended up swapping from poking them with a sword until their armor gave out to using a ravens beak and bonking the final 2 in a fierce fight with hammers and shields as the tourney guy would say. For my avarice I limped back to sasau with my gear chewed up to 60-75% durability (a 2k repair even with kits, gear was a functioning money sink to fights), about half health, but still several full sets of plate to sell for my trouble to make it a profitable adventure. Whole thing was minutes of white knuckling blocks and master strikes and cuts as we landed hits to little effect on each others endgame plate as the player camera jostled around from within the helmet visor overlay.
>was great From doing buhurt IRL that really captured the feel of an actual fight in a way never before seen in a videogame
Not a single thing that rewarding of your stats, equipment and preparedness + skill exist in the sequel. I doubt a balance pass would be able to fix that, the 2 maps thing and gear/progression curve is just fundamentally different and not built around travel being true danger to a player at any level.
