Finished the mod today. Total playtime: 92 hours + about 15-20 hours spent on secret hunting and reloading. Secrets found: 310. Final levels of my party were:
83 (lizardman fighter), 61 (lizardman barbarian), 89 (ratling alchemist), 52 (human wizard). I went for double lizardmen because of high natural elemental resistances, since i had no clue about the itemization in this mod, and whether any permanent buffs to resists existed there. After having played Final Adventure on Hard difficulty, i learned to love capped resists.
After finishing the mod, I ended up writing a few helper functions for console, e.g. a function reveals the entire map, another function that lists all the missed items on the ground for the level i'm in, and i can repeatedly call another function to teleport through all secrets in the current level, so i do know where all the remaining secrets are, i guess.
Overall thoughts:
extremely high enjoyment factor, i genuinely had lots of fun all the way through. This is probably my 2nd favorite mod for LOG2 (only bested by Guardians, which is my favorite by far). I especially appreciate the level design and boss fights in this one, - those were interesting, varied, and mostly challenging. Visuals are amazing also, e.g. cities do feel like actual cities, huge and breathing with life; jungle does feel like a jungle, -overgrown and confusing. Pretty much every area looks and plays well, following the theme both via visuals and gameplay (my favorite examples are the ARC, Zo Temple, Malan Tael, Pirate Bastion, and especially Obanyon). The plot and characters are quite generic and feel like a complete mess but i was hooked enough to want to know what happens next
"Sidequests" like the Tannhauser's Tomb, and Jean Bart's treasure were also epic, i was happy every time i made progress in those. To reiterate again, i loved the experience and will replay it some day. Thank you so much for making this, it's going into my memory bank for years as a joyful and immersive playthrough. I've even recorded my entire playthrough to be able to rewatch and relive it later.
Some negatives to mention:
1. Poor English sometimes makes it hard to understand what's being conveyed, and other times turns a serious scene into farce. I would suggest to give more attention to that. You can even use ChatGPT or other AI tools to make your texts properly stylized and grammatically correct. It does have its own downsides, but that would remove 90% of the problems with text in the mod within about ~2-3 hours of work, and would make it easier to fix the remaining mistakes by asking the testers and the community.
2. Good art requires not only creating and implementing ideas, but also knowing when to stop, and what to cut out. Good example of that in terms of LOG is the aforementioned Guardians, - there's no bloat in it, the ideas are conveyed in a minimal but rich fashion. In Call of House Hardabar i'm pretty sure if you cut out a significant chunk, no value would be lost. For example, i doubt that many people would miss the Skycity Prison level if you delete it in its entirety. Darntkhang and its dungeon is fun but you can skip it with 1 dialogue option, so it feels pointless gameplay-wise. Imo it'd be more tight if you incorporated parts of it into, say, Underground tomb, and/or some other area, without going overboard. Same can be said about several other areas. I'm not even sure whether even the ARC should be as big, - i would actually love to play an entire mod themed in this
kind of theme, - it was amazing. But as it is now, it was like i finished the mod and suddenly started playing a completely different game when i arrived there. And it lasted a while too!
3. There are many secrets that simply require the player to pixel-hunt for a button nearby, and, even according to this forum thread, it seems like some people resorted to using clicker scripts to do that, since you never know which kinds of buttons exist in this or that tileset. I also did that a couple of times.
4. Permanent lock-outs are not fun. Missing a red wheel because you chose a wrong dialogue option, or permanently missing a secret because you didn't choose to kill a character (that you've just met for the first time) is not enjoyable.
I hope to see more of your stuff in the future, and thank you again, i dread to imagine how much work has gone into it.