SureAI

You know it's not so bad that it's long, but the problem is you can't even SKIP the dialogue! You have to wait for him to finish his sentences like holy fucking shit atleast make it possible to read forward and skip goddamn it's abnormal that you have to wait through an hour of dialogue.

I know I'm late to the party and what I have to say has probably said before, but I have a LOT to say about the story and some about the overall experience and gameplay.
To start, I really loved the overall game at how much love and care went into the world, the characters, the story and level of detail in Enderal. The voice acting was superb, which was especially impressive considering that Nehrim was all German. It blows my mind how something that is free can come so close to the quality of the base game.
At first I didn't really like the change to the levelling system, since the Skyrim system was already so good that I had to wonder - why change it at all? The memories were also just the levelling screen placed in an alternate reality room, so that wasn't really any different in practice. Though I do admit that it kept me strapped for cash especially toward the end game which I was grateful for in the end.
The story, until the very end, was wonderful. The more active companions in which what you said to them mattered was great and better than anything Vanilla Skyrim could pull off. I was literally in shock and heartbroken at the outcome of what I experienced when I finished the quest with Ryneus - something the vanilla game could never do.
Unfortunately, the ending completely fails at giving me the same level of emotional investment. In fact, it takes everything I had ever had any sort of investment in during the game and tosses it out the window. The only real choice I have in the end is whether everyone dies on a continent or whether everyone dies in the entire world.
Either choice is an atrocity to me, but given the way the story goes, suffice it to say there's no way to prevent the Cleansing. But if something so fundamentally disgusting and against my principles HAS to happen, I have to know WHY. But I don't. I never find out anything about the cleansing as to WHY it happens. This is what the story is missing - justifying its ending even if its overly depressing and negative.
Another huge problem with the ending is something so basic it frustrates me to no end - SHOW don't TELL. I don't want to hear in my ending that Qyra may have constructed their beacon and may have banished the high ones in a few sentences. I want to see the effects of my sacrifice, to see the effect the Cleansing had on Enderal but with the hope of rebuilding in the aftermath. I want to see Calia lamenting my death, not saying that she will. Instead of the cutscene with the Guardian, the effort there should have gone into a cutscene showing the aftermath regarding everything (or as much as possible) that I had gotten invested in.
And even then - why should these two endings be the only endings? Throughout much of the endgame a goal to stop the cleansing is simple: stop Tealor. It would have been simple to implement a way to reach the temple before he activates it, and then emotional investment might have actually had an impact: being forced to kill Tealor in front of the entire order to save them. Since you're given a teleport scroll when Calia/Jespar comes to the Guardian and finds you, whether or not you could reach Tealor in time to stop the Beacon could have been tied to your relationship values, since Calia/Jespar might not come to give you the scroll if you're relationship values weren't high enough. The fact that the game itself teases this solution for the length it does makes me think either that they didn't have enough time to implement it or that the writers wanted to force their depressing ending on the player.
(sigh) While the ending in terms of companions was far better than Nehrim's, overall the main story suffered terribly from these shortcomings. Apart from Kim, the Nehrim main story had a much more solid ending overall. Next time SureAI, make sure both the character and main story endings both come together in a way that a satisfying ending should at least be POSSIBLE.

Once upon a time, RPGs and action/adventure games had only "happy" endings. You save the world, period. Then, we started seeing some games where there were multiple endings, some "good" and some "bad." We also have seen a bit of a trend where the ending is more like "to be continued" such as Witcher 1 & 2. While waiting for Forgotten Stories to come out, I've spent a few hundred hours playing what is now one of my favorite PB games, Elex, to get all 3 endings. Whether they are good or bad depends on your perspective, but since PB is working on Elex 2, as with other PB games, the ending is not the end of the story.

Likewise I spent 101 hours on the PC version of Exiled Kingdoms just to get 1 ending, but it has 2 others as well (1 good, 2 bad). [If you want to play a game where you want to throw your phone at the screen and scream obscenities, try the Sewer of Horrors in Exiled Kingdoms.] But in the case of Enderal, since there will be a new secret ending in Forgotten Stories, perhaps it will be what some would consider to be a "good" or "happy" ending; we'll have to wait and see. I hope it will be more uplifting than, as you put it, everyone dies on the continent or in the world. But I have a feeling we're still going to have to listen to 40 minutes of the Black Guardian rambling on and on.

Oh goodie. I still don't know what he/it was rambling on about. But I think the weakness is mostly mine = even though I played several of these types of games, I simply do not get into lore, nor do I care to. Listening to the Guardian was like being force to read one of those really long books found in a dungeon, which to me if they aren't glowing, then they are ignored.

Having said that, the fact that the writers and storytellers of Enderal did bring me into their world and made me care about the characters and my actions was nothing short of brilliance, and that's on top of the most immersive world I had ever played in.

I do agree with SoulFire that a cutscene showing the consequences of either choices would have been great, better than that enigmatic final scene back at Daddy's home (which I still don't understand what the point of that was).

I wholeheartedly disagree. Firstly, with the ending failing to give you the same level of emotional investment, this is of course personal, but I found the fact that this is a story where "the bad guys win" to be refreshing, and the doing all that hard work, and still failing, made me feel worse than a "happy" ending would have made me feel good. Obviously this is a "bad" feeling, not a "good" one, but that is still worth experiencing.

The second point isn't up for debate though, it's just wrong. "suffice it to say there's no way to prevent the Cleansing". There is. If you haven't played through the story a second time, I highly recommend it, almost every main story conversation either foreshadows, or spoils the ending. Your refusal to accept this is not the games fault! Think of the scene in the castle, with Firespark. The soul of the Pyrean knows exactly what's going on, it tells Firespark, who tells you that the only way to stop the cleansing is for you to die... and that's it. You can stop the cleansing, by dying (i.e. stop playing). It's the players own hubris which results in the cleansing, so many signs are given to the player, so many clear messages on how to stop it. Not once does any player (me included) take note of these, and follow their advice. If they did, the cleansing wouldn't happen.