Dan mentioned how arcane the economy of the game can be in the review, but didn't clarify whether he ever found answers to his questions later in the game. So, for the people who have played a lot of this game, help me out.

• Do rare marerials/enemies respawn?
• Is currency plentiful enough that I can comfortably craft gear as it unlocks at the blacksmith? What about the resource requirements?
• Is XP in abundance or do I have to worry which runs I upgrade?
• Is it worth holding on to resources until I get blue or higher gear or can I comfortably spend it on green gear?

The economy works in tiers. You have Hacksilver and the normal upgrade materials. These are pretty much infinite, and unless you go crazy you probably won't ever need to farm them (although farming them seems pretty slow if you end up having to do it). Then you have the story related upgrades, stuff like your main weapon materials and other specific items. I believe these are finite, but you'll get enough to make and upgrade the items in question. Finally you have the challenge materials. These are for the high tier armor. I dunno if they are finite or not, but you're not gonna have to worry about it while playing through the story at all.

I was fairly careless with my resources and while there was periods of time where I wished I had a bit more XP or silver I just needed to play a few hours and I'd be fine. After finishing the game I was sitting on a fair bit of surplus while having all the gear and skills I wanted. But ye, the main thing to take away is that saving your resources won't matter since the next tier armor is gonna need a different set of resources. Also, a little sidenote, if you find yourself lacking scale fragments, you probably have a bunch of scales you can break down.

@ares42: That helps, thanks! The differences between armour so far have been very minor so I didn't realise there would be tiers.

Watching a few different people playing the early hours of the game there seems to be a lot of heading off in the wrong direction just to collect a bit of hacksilver. It seems to happen every 5 minutes. Can I jisy progress and do okay? I normally don't mind hunting around for stuff but between the presentation of this game and how utterly pointless most of the detours seem to be (they seem to only exist to give you basic resources early on, and there's no motivation for Kratos to go there often becauze the path forward is already clearly somewhere else) I kind of disliked watching folks go get that stuff. If I want to bump up the difficulty, will i be able to just push forward for the most part and still get resources enough to do alright and have fun? How much of the xp and currency and such is in those nooks and crannys off the beaten path vs just fighting the baddies and making progress?

@opusofthemagnum: There is a point early on just after you get to the hub where the son asks Kratos about why he is taking detours if he doesn't care, and he says it's to gather resources. Which I thought was a nice touch. I wouldn't have nearly as much silver just progressing, but I'd still have most of the XP. You'd take a hit to stats not being able to afford gear but you would have a bunch of moves still.

@alistercat: Sure that makes sense, but it seems like 80-90% of the stuff I've seen was video game environment corridor with nothing but a chest in the forest. If it was like in a shack or something even I'd feel better about it, or if the game at least initially didn't look like a mad dash to get away from potential danger and more of an arduous journey without some looming threat behind the last bend.

I guess I can just play it how I want until I feel myself hitting a wall and then just go back and farm and seperate that fro. The experience if I need to.

@opusofthemagnum: I get what you mean. I played for about 4 hours the other night. Told BOY to show me he can hunt, then noticed the path had a few small branches with chests and hacksilver. At one point BOY says, "Umm, the deer is THIS way." I did consider how silly it was for me to run off during this time, both from a story perspective and from the perspective that there'd be anything this close to the house that Kratos hadn't already explored.

In the end, my desire to not want to backtrack won out over my desire to keep the narrative coherent. (Or maybe I just disappeared to see if BOY could figure out how to track the deer without me trailing right behind him!) The most important thing that you can miss if you follow the critical path in the earliest stage is one of the apples you need to upgrade your max health.

@bladeofcreation: You can return for all that stuff. And not long after that scene, Kratos justifies going off the critical path as looking for supplies. It's not his fault the only supplies he's finding are mostly hacksilver.

I've noticed the shop gains the ability to convert certain resources into others and eventually just straight up sells at least one of the lower tier ones for cash.

Hacksilver will intermittently be a concern; Solid [norse word] Steel will always be something you're looking for more of, especially if you're indecisive in your builds. The limited resources are essentially gatekeepers to the specific armor sets, in a way that can sometimes be annoying (for example, by the time I'd finished a certain level 3 armor set, I had a few level 4 options available) but as others have said in other threads about this game, the armor has nominal functions but mostly feels similarly to Bloodborne in that you can spec a certain way if you'd like, but it's mostly about the fashion if you're comfortable enough in the combat.

I'm a "do everything you tell me I can do and then do some story stuff" sort of guy unless the narrative clearly takes place over weeks or months like the GTA games do a good job of doing, especially after games like Witcher 3 would plain lock you out of quests if you didn't finish them quickly enough. So I can't really speak to the XP economy other than to say I'm roughly 30 hours into the game, have done just about every piece of side content I could get my hands on, feel like I'm roughly 2/3s of the way through the main story and I have every skill unlocked other than the two levels of skills I'm still gated from by story progress and I have 63,650 XP in the bank. In other words, unless those last few skills are otherworldly expensive, at this point I'm just earning XP because the game insists on giving it to me.