How? When I tried to dodge that conflict, Todd was right-click-unzipping packs of fighting soldiers onto me. It felt like a meme interpretation of "If you aren't interested in politics, politics are gonna start to be interested in you".

It's so incredibly shallow, from a series already suffering from such.

yeah, the magic system was gone and magic wasn't viable, then they downgraded every form of alchemy enchanting and so on. smithing was a nice feature, but it's kinda badly designed as you just end up crafting an excess of arrows, bolts, or daggers until you max it out. it's just a much more hollow game in the end. they didn't need to simply any system that far, it's not like people who aren't interested in custom spells are gonna be mad spellmaking exists. they just won't do it.