Originally Posted by
GoblinRockThrower
Some spoilers ahead:
I like the idea of a new area and quest-line, and I'm really excited about all the new stuff, but I am not a fan of getting locked out of content. In my opinion it doesn't encourage you to play spoiler-free.
I played one character to realize killing Hotzenplotz angered a new npc that I never even saw on my route to Hotzenplotz, thus locking me out of the new content. Then I made a new char, reached the dwarf fortress just to find out that the one dwarf I had on my kill list prevented me from advancing. I don't think any of these requirements are that hard to meet, and very reasonable to figure out on your own, but I think the not killing dwarves thing is just nasty, because you only realize it after you already thought you had succeeded. By the time you finally make it to the fortress, you've obviously already spent a lot of time and effort to solve the clues and to find all the map fragments, and you're probably really excited that you actually made it and found the place.
And then to have all that thwarted by the realization that you've just been locked out forever because of a seemingly unrelated and trivial action you did way back halfway around the world is extremely disheartening.
Now I've resorted to fully spoiling myself on this matter because I'm tired of getting new chars through half the game just to realize I have to restart if I want to access the new content.
I suppose it's ok, because this is not required to finish the game, and a sort of a bonus area... I'm just pissed about wasting two characters and lots of time.
The only other major content I can think of that you can lock yourself easily out of is ultra ending and the associated quests (get crowned too early, not saving khelly...etc),
but ultra is much more cryptic anyways, so you're likely not to even find out about it let alone succeed without spoilers. The dwarf-killing thing is not really solving a clue, it's the game pretty clearly telling you "hey, dwarves are cats now...shouldn't have killed that random hostile dwarf at D5...", and just feels cheap at that point.