I started it up. The first walking section is a great return to things but after Fragile shows up and the game sends you to the first area I feel like I am just playing DS1 again as the game refamiliarises you and am not yet gripped. I think meeting the new characters will give me the crazy factor Iām lacking atm. I love the desert environments, especially since these were bizarrely absent from the west of the US. I am remembering how much I hate how similar the writing is for every NPC in the little bunkers. They just go through the same series of quest dialogue, thanking Sam without ever really introducing themselves and just beaming in via hologram. I donāt care about any of these people and will not be doing sidequests (which led to me missing the Higgs reveal in the first game). I guess the environments wouldnāt feel as eerie if you saw people physically hanging around near the entrances?
Accessibility is OK but thereās no way to hold things in your hands without holding R2 and/or L2. Guess Iām doing a backpack only run.
Just when I found myself wishing the game would do more new things, I got to the fire part.
And right after that, I got to the Chvrches animal shelter. I could take or leave the inclusion of famous people in these games, though I donāt recognize most of them anyway. That said, it was amusing to learn that the Engineer in the first game was Junji Ito and itās fun to see George Miller in this one.
Thatās funny because I was just thinking the opposite. I remember having to be careful in the first game when trying to get āLegend of Legend of Legendā for standard deliveries, but in this game Iām driving over rocks, etc. and the only one Iāve failed at so far was when I did something very careless when I wasnāt supposed to take any damage myself, nothing to do with packages.
But again, maybe itās because Iāve played SnowRunner for a ridiculous number of hours between the two games and just internalized much more careful handling than this game will ever require.
While I thought I was going to play the game through on Casual and switch to Brutal for only the standard deliveries, Iāve just been leaving it on Brutal most of the time now. Even the fights arenāt all that tough, and Iām not particularly good at this type of action game.
(I still donāt bother trying to sneak in the non-BT fighting parts at all. I just canāt do it except when a single enemy is standing still and facing away from me.)
itās been a few years now, but yeah it feels harder to keep my packages secure. maybe i play more recklessly and wasnāt punished for it as much in the first game, or maybe iām thinking of the lategame where you have more protections, but either way my packages are taking a lot of damage in DS2 and i have failed several standard delivery s-ranks for that reason haha
I think one difference for me is that for whatever reason I barely used the floating carriers in DS1. Iāve been using them a lot in this game and of course they help a lot.
One thing I havenāt been able to entirely make sense of is how the game decides how many points to award toward the five connection stars upon making a delivery. I remember reading somewhere (maybe earlier in this thread) that you get significantly more if you deliver your packages one or two at a time vs. in a large group, but either way itās sometimes surprising how much or how little it fills the star meter.
Last night, I reached the zipline phase of the game and so of course I dropped everything to start working on my network. Funny how the flooding starts to mess with my zipline posts just as Iām putting them up.
From my map coverage it seems I still have a lot of the game left to go, but I really have no idea.
The game tells me that I once ālikedā something of Parkerās and Parker once ālikedā something of mine but I donāt know what or where.
in the first one at least, people joining the chiral network and UCA are respectively gated behind reaching one and two stars, so those stars in turn are sometimes gated behind reading certain emails from the character. i think this like making a delivery to the person and the passage of time (maybe specifically resting in a room?) can trigger emails. like occasionally iād get one from the veteran porter immediately after i dropped something off to him, or iād get three emails at once when i woke up in a room
ETA: but the likes that were dammed up behind those gates still contribute to future stars once theyāre undammed! so thatās why you might spend hours trying to get the novelistās son to one star and then your partner plays the next day and gets two or three stars at once, for instance
