The notion that “going through the motions” is an acceptable form of a gameplay is just sad to me. The beauty of Conan, for me, was the exploration and discovery of things. You can never quite recapture the magic of stepping foot into any game world for the first time again, and I fear that the journey steps strip away some of that magic for new players. Additionally, a lot of the discovery of the game has been reduced to a formulaic approach, step-by-step with little room for freedom to find things out and made worse by the requirement to repeat steps in multiple different categories.
Journeys were imagined as a kind of tutorial, according to the dev stream. But putting certain things in multiple journey categories (I go back to grinding bone) assumes the player…forgot how to grind bone? If it’s required for multiple things, acknowledge if the player has already completed it in a different category if it exists in both. I’d even be fine with not popping up as “Complete” for a journey that’s not highlighted, but it auto-completes once that journey has been toggled on.
So no, my argument is neither option you’ve presented. I think the new system CAN be good with some tweaks. It can still be rewarding, still break different things into categories, but do so in a way that acknowledges each player’s unique experience as they play, rather than giving them a chore list to check off step-by-specific-step with no room for variation.
I’d actually highly recommend reading this post because I think it’s a really well thought out discussion regarding the new system.