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Mark Meer is great, and definitely worth playing thru to experience. Not quite at the same level as Jennifer Hale’s performance, but it was still absolutely brilliant.
Still, I hear this every time I hear Shepard talk to Dr. Chakwas.
and the story takes a while to get started.
That’s the problem the game has always had, though.
I played for a bit right as Endwalker came out. I went in blind, played consistently for two months, and by then, I had just finished the first third of Shadowbringers. In contrast, it took me a month-and-a-half to level my first WoW toon back during Wrath of the Lich King.
People may praise the story, but while there was a lot of great stuff, it just takes so loooooong to get there. They really do need to go through and prune the filler quests or boost experience gains.
In DA2’s defence, the game went from concept to release in 16 months. With a development cycle that fast, it’s a miracle it was even playable; I wouldn’t call its rampant copy-pasting “lazy”. I’d call it many bad things, because that game had tons of problems, but that’s what happens when the beancounters have an unexpected success and want to capitalize on it yesterday.
instead of just playing the game as intended.
I feel like you just unwittingly hit on the problem many series veterans have been having.
People are approaching bosses in Elden Ring like they’re Dark Souls bosses, and in my thousands of hours across the series, the only bosses I summon help for is Sister Friede and the Demon Twins. Everyone else I was eventually able to defeat on my own, because that’s how they were balanced.
But in Elden Ring, you have the open world to grind in and Spirit Ashes and crazy weapon arts that are far beyond any that were in Dark Souls 3, and the bosses are balanced around these things. It’s harder to make a good guess at how powerful a player is at any given time in Elden Ring, so in order to counter the player’s bullshit, the bosses need bullshit of their own.
This, naturally, throws a wrench into the plans of veterans who are used to bosses that are tough but fair and approaching them in that manner. They then promptly get their shit pushed in because they aren’t using the things the encounters are balanced around having simply because they didn’t used to need them.
It makes the bosses binary. Either you get your ass kicked, or you summon help, use a Mimic Tear, and run a train on them. They’re either frustrating or boring, and fights that are frustrating or boring just aren’t fun. I’m not having fun getting comboed to death or just pelting the boss with spells while my goons beat them up.
The magic is gone. Bosses used to be the highlight of Souls games, and now I just want them to be over.
The only time it was challenging was back when AI factions had a hate boner for the player and ONLY the player. Like how they would leave their settlements undefended to march halfway across the map, through territory belonging to a faction they were at war with just to sack the player’s settlements.
Mages are really nerfed despite the story saying they’re super powerful and dangerous.
This is kinda selling mages in the setting short.
Magic in this setting is basically the same as it is in Warhammer 40k: mages get their power from an alternate dream dimension that is also where demons reside, they can spontaneously explode and/or summon demons if they’re not careful, and they’re heavily regulated/repressed. Rogue mages are hunted down and killed by Templars, and everyone else is mostly confined to wizard towers that double as prison camps.
It never comes across in gameplay, but mages and how they’re treated are major plot points in all three games.
Let’s not forget how blatantly the bosses read your inputs. FROM bosses have always done this, but it’s never been so obvious; it kinda breaks the “tough but fair” illusion.
My take is that since players have gotten so powerful, bosses had to adapt…but the only ways to make them stronger have upset the balance between “tough” and “fair”. Hit boxes for attacks have gotten larger, which hurts readability; attacks that you used to be able to dodge now land, even though it didn’t look like it. Bosses hit harder, combo their attacks, and they can even cancel into different combos now.
All of this happened because bosses are balanced around Spirit Ashes and the new insane weapon arts. It’s harder than ever to SL1 the game, because if you don’t have a good Ash summon or a crazy weapon art or didn’t grind for upgrade materials, main quest bosses are stupidly hard. If you did do all of those things, they’re almost trivial.
It’s weird. The bosses used to be the highlight of Soulsborne games, and now they’re the worst part because they’re just not fun anymore. Dragonlord Placidusax is my favorite fight, and it’s not even close. I either trivialize my way through the rest, or just wanted them to be over. The satisfaction of fighting a worthy opponent is gone, because it’s almost always just unfair for the player, or unfair for the boss.
I hated X because I found most of the characters sans Auron and Lulu to be incredibly obnoxious.
X-2 just made those problems worse by largely getting rid of the few characters I could tolerate, and somehow making Rikku even more annoying.
It says something about how good the combat was in those games that I managed to power my way thru X and a fair chunk of X-2 before it just got to be too much for me.
It’s not nearly as fast-paced or mobile as Warframe, and Helldivers is much more about the chaos you cause with your buddies than grinding for gear and materials. You don’t have to worry about mods or damage types (dealing with armored enemies and fortifications is the most you’ll have to worry about), just shoot bugs/Terminators and call in an airstrike or orbital bombardment on anything guns won’t kill. I’d say it’s closer to Left4Dead than anything else.
You can drop by yourself if you want, but it is an always-online, live-service game, and the focus is on co-op.
In other words, things that are normal about game development, especially for games that are still getting updates. Of course an update will break mods, of course there’s going to be some miscommunication, of course there’s going to be bugs in a game this complex and fixing them takes time.
I’m just glad Larian recognizes that most of us knows how this sort of thing works and to call out that handful who have nothing better to do than to spew their hate on the internet.
I’m one of those who doesn’t get the praise.
It’s probably just me, but I’ve always felt like if you’re not going to hold the player’s hand, then it’s important to be intuitive. DOS2…is anything BUT intuitive; not only is the game open-ended, the way forward isn’t always clear. Some early fights are difficult enough that you might assume it’s a beef gate, when it’s actually required to proceed and you just need to cheese it.
For me, it might be because the RPG mechanics aren’t familiar to me. I picked up Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous and fuckin’ loved both of those games, but Pathfinder is a game system I’m familiar with. Maybe since Baldur’s Gate 3 uses a variant of 5th edition D&D, it’ll click for me.
Shadowrun (the arena shooter) probably would’ve been better received if it were named basically anything else.