One interesting aspect of combat is that if you are fighting sentient beings rather than monsters, you must be very deliberate in order to actually cause a death. After winning a battle with an Orc or a human, your opponent will be renderedunconscious.
To actually complete the kill, you must execute a finishing move, complete with special animation. The reason for this extra step is that, because of the open-ended allegience system, you'll always want to be sure that you want the reputation that comes along with killing whoever it is you're killing. Offing another human in front of some Orcs is likely to have no more effect than the Orcs having a laugh at the other human's expense, but killing an Orc leader is liable to put your life in serious danger. Of course, if you're trying to aid the human resistance, killing that same human slave won't help either. Causing death can be very useful, depending on who you want to impress, but it can also be very dangerous, so the game's designers want to make sure you've committed to the ramifications before following through.
The world of Myrtanna is quite large, which befits this sort of game. Piranha Bytes pegs it at about 7.5 square miles overall, which consists of a range of environments including deserts, forests, plains, snow-capped mountains, and more. "It's not quite Oblivion," admits Duncan in reference to the total area of the game world, but he also pointed out that the independent studio operates with only about twenty developers--the biggest it's ever been. At a certain point, the player will learn a teleportation spell in order to actually traverse the world in a reasonable amount of time, a necessary amenity given the game's lack of mounts. Aspyr promises that there will be no loading times anywhere in the game, with the likely exception of when the program is launched.