Merchant of the Six Kingdoms Reviews

Takes quite a while to get the gist of the game. Hard- no, almost impossible to figure out the actual price of items are, with the characters having their own preferences and how it affects the price their willing to buy certain products. Overall, when you find out how stuff works, all you'll be worrying about is lowering the frequency of you selling your products at too low a price. This game could be a bit more intuitive, but the complexity of its haggling and negotiating is part of its charm.

I actually would recommend this game for heavy merchanting enthusiasts, but not for normal players. Credit where credit is due, I've never played another merchanting game where currency itself is part of the bartering process. Usually, money is synonymous with value and it's just an abstract number on the screen. Vendors/towns may have a limited supply of money, but that's about it. So that was cool. Also, the sheer amount of stuff people barter with in the course of normal gameplay was fun as well. However, the game feels badly made and somewhat incomplete. First of all, the UI design is awful. There should permanently be a button for "make me an offer for my stuff", a button for "make me an offer for your stuff", and a button for "let's trade". Not one button which changes function depending on what's in the trade windows. So many times, I accidentally offer a trade that's really bad because when you spend hours clicking away at the game, sometimes you slip up and fail to completely clear absolutely everything from a trade window. Which leads to my next point - the countless ways the game is clunky and would be greatly improved with simple quality of life updates. A button for "clear all" to remove everything from a trade window. An "offer all" button when trading or transferring stuff in/out of warehouses. Also some icon-based buttons to show only items of a certain category. When you have dozens of constantly changing items in your inventory, it's annoying to have to scan constantly. Also, you should be able to access your warehouse at night when you figure out how much Silver you need for a journey. You should also be able to edit your Myth deck at night, not have to play a game during the day in order to construct it. Not having a gallery of "collected" items, nor a profile book of everyone you've met, was a massive missed opportunity, especially when the journal explicitly tracks how many you've seen/missed. The world also feels very static. Nothing ever happens, and I mean that unironicly. It's not so much a sandbox as it is a concrete box painted a sandy colour. Your actions have zero impact on the world and its people, even when you complete quests like "Aid the Resistance". You can have made 10000 trades with someone, and they'll treat you exactly the same as when you trade them the first time. There are also barely any economic fluctuations at the local level. In other merchanting games which involve travelling around, you're strongly incentivized to because once you buy all the cheap goods in an area, they'll take a while to regenerate, so you take your buying-and-selling someplace else for a while. In MotSK, you can clear someone out and they'll return the next day with a small stack of gold coins. Farmer, blacksmiths, etc all refresh their stock overnight. Maybe not completely, but enough to the point where a new player could just sit in the starting village and wheel and deal for months of in-game time and not feel anything wrong. Everyday, there will be a long line of customers waiting to trade. The developers were either too lazy to code in a gradual recovery mechanic for the customers (who should either have depleted stocks to trade with or just not show up at all), or they didn't do it on purpose because they were worried about new players getting softstuck in an area if they didn't have enough money to travel to a new location. And that could have been solved any number of ways, such as travelling cost waivers for players below a certain amount of freight and under certain conditions/requirements or something. There's also no progression beside establishing warehouses in different cities and just making your convoy bigger, until you reach the point where it's not profitable to keep increasing its size. There are no new mechanics or systems to unlock. As another reviewer pointed out, the bartering system may be a cool mechanic, but it's also the ONLY mechanic. (Aside from the Myth minigame). You don't have to gather special gear to deal with bandits or a hostile environment, you don't have to gather certain resources for intermittently generated tasks/challenges, and you don't have to gather resources or reputation to unlock new functions. Aside from warehouses. That's it. You could be hours and hours into the game and you'll be doing the exact same thing as when you first started, except you now have more capital, horses, and maybe some warehouses to store your stuff. Game was fun, but also frustrating.