It’s because you can turn it off. And the game kinda expects you to fit later stuff.
The Witch Queen has an honest-to-god campaign level selector menu, a “legendary” difficulty, co-op enemy scaling, and encounter design I would play for intrinsic enjoyment alone. I’m not a reliable judge of D2 for non-D2 players but it is certainly the closest Destiny has ever been to shipping a solid Halo campaign.
e.g. whoever insisted on obscuring a list of levels to launch behind the ponderous map/cursor/node UI lost after seven years
For better or worse, at the end of the ~8 hour campaign you’re right back in D2 the live game with all of the UX polish of vanilla Monster Hunter World.
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Honestly if GT7 wasn’t releasing next week, they probably would have suckered me into playing D2 again.
It certainly helps that I have no idea what SKU I should be buying anyway.
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note: I don't think this is a *good* price structure, but in case it helps someone
it’s basically three tiers:
- $40 semi-annual expansion
- $80 semi-annual expansion plus the next year of DLC (“deluxe,” controversially includes two dungeons this year) (think of this as an annual subscription that comes out to $6.66/mo)
- $100 above with 30th anniversary pack bundled in (“grasp of avarice” dungeon and marathon/myth/halo cosmetics)
old expansions and the current season are available a la carte. seasons are $10 and the old expansions are rolled up into the “legacy collection” for probably too much money tbh
if you just want to play the campaign you only need the $40 expansion, nothing else
Is there no longer a big Everything bundle that gives you all expansions thus far? For uninteresting reasons, my DLC purchases are split between PS4/5 and Stadia.
Not including the current expansion. There’s a “Legacy Collection” that includes Forsaken, Shadowkeep, and Beyond Light, but no everything up-to-now bundle. The pricing on the Legacy Collection is just straight up bad unless you can get it from a key reseller.
I’m still playing Horizon Forbidden West and it’s honestly just getting worse. While the first game winds up weirdly skewering tech startups and military contractors this one is just insanely pro-army. A major quest line ends with basically an ad for the US army.
Aside from that, what I was hoping was tutorial VO to help you solve puzzles early on turns out to continue through the entire game and you can’t switch it off, so the game basically has a built-in walk through you can’t disable and it’s non-stop through the whole critical path.
The first game’s pretty well-organized equipment system has been trashed for an outrageous number of really samey weapons and outfits with slightly different stats, although few of them over the threshold you’d notice. Everything can be upgraded as well, which makes the game an absolute materials hell.
Honestly given how much I liked the first one and how good reviews this got I’m astonished how bad it is. Probably the most soulless and overtly corporate iteration of a genre basically famous for being soulless and corporate, lacking any of the charm or interesting setting of the first one and somehow like even more racist?
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Metal Gear Rising Revengeance is a lot funnier than I thought it would be. Raiden is an extremely goofy idiot. My favorite part has been Kevin carefully moving Courtney’s coffee cup away from the edge of her desk in two separate cutscenes.
It’s charming as hell.
Gameplay is so-so
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My partner was stuck for a couple of minutes on an early pseudo-puzzle where you have to spot a telescoped ladder on a high ledge and shoot it down. Literally every 10 seconds Aloy said “I should use my Focus”, and my partner complied with the suggestion, but then the instant she’d let go of the button to walk faster, Aloy said it again. Then after 3 minutes of this (so Aloy said this voice snippet like 15 times), finally we heard another voiceline:
- Friendly NPC: “How’s it’s going, are you finding anything?”
- Aloy: “Not yet. But I plan to use my Focus to turn something up”
and we both burst out laughing
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One thing I really wanted out of the first game was more varied environment shapes. Everything was wide open rolling hills, so you could rely on sideways dodges for every situation. I wanted more obstacles to force me to consider my positioning, and I wanted more un-even ground so I didn’t always have a straight line of sight no matter where I was standing. Is any of that improved at all in H2? I know there’s a grappling hook but does see any use in combat?
Also, the trailers sure made it look like the game was doubling down on melee combat and human combat, the two worst parts of that game and neither of which were selling points for the game’s concept. Does the game indeed double down on more melee combat and more human combat?
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Incredible haha
What really kills me is how for the entire game every time you need to use your Witcher Vision—I MEAN your Focus to follow tracks Aloy says “I can use my Focus to follow the tracks” but there’s like 60 variations of that line recorded, so it isn’t just insulting it’s both intentional and done at great expense. Even if you’ve done it 20 times the designers still don’t trust you to remember how and feel the need to just solve it for you
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So among the few high points of this absolutely miserable game with no ability to thematically commit to anything or even just let you play without constant verbal coaching is the combat is bonkers good—environments are super varied and there are like twice the enemy types so you need to get used to fighting in close quarters and at range in a variety of situations. The combo system is vastly improved with bonus mechanics for mixing both arrows and staff. The human fighting is definitely better but there’s easily as much machine fighting and they are bigger and more complex. It’s really probably the best thing about the game.
Honestly I find the amount of shit on the ground that is preventing me from rolling to be a little excessive at times, but it does force you to change up your tactics more for sure
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Oh no, I was expecting you to further turn me away from the game, not make me want to try to beeline the main story just for the combat.
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Haha exactly I had the same “oh no” reaction to BoB’s last post
I was just about resolved not to play any further and just replay Horizon 1 if I felt like it, but now your last post has scrambled things again. I loved the combat in the first game, but it did start to feel samey by the endgame, like Drem I eventually realized that the right handful of go-to tactics and weapons were enough to dominate every situation. That’s why I never even NG+ed the game
Wondering about playing Horizon 2 with voice volume turned to zero and skipping as many cutscenes/dialogue as possible now, is that even an option
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Haha sorry! Honestly it feels like an exaggeration of the AAA problem: the gameplay is very well tuned and clever, the art is intricate and brilliant, the sound design is insane, and yet the whole thing has been iterated into a uniform paste with a plot that’s just a series of events that has nothing to say, a lot of weird unintentional racism and boring tropes. Basically everything that can be bought from talented people using money is as good as it can be while everything that needs to be set by the leadership is garbage and on fire and spewing burning garbage fumes into your face the entire time.
You can maybe see why I’m still playing it even though I can’t say if I’m having fun or not in aggregate
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the xray scope was a mistake
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Sounds like the experience could be munged into something purely good with something like a randomizer speedrun mod. “just a series of events that has nothing to say” is the story of most roguelikes (except the S-tier ones that think really hard about emergent narrative design), and that’s fine and I love them anyway.
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The last time I did this was with Mirror’s Edge. Another game whose aesthetics are all great except the script/voice side which is awful and never stops. The rest of the sound design is chill electronic buzzing and the wind rushing in your ears
My modification of the experience was a total success: for me it was a serene, abstract, meditative game
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feels like a very particular problem of like, just the right kinds of people thinking that “games can say something” but then thinking that the way to get the game to say a thing is to harness hundreds of peoples’ time and energy into one unified narrative thread
of course some of that time and energy will go elsewhere and of course it’s going to be on the periphery because those people are sitting there and twiddling their thumbs waiting for the big boyz with big brainz to tell everyone what the expansive provocative story will be
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this fucking congestion on aether is killing me. there are no queues to log in , none of my low level gear is selling, mentor roulette queues are FUCKING LONG AS HELL BECAUSE NO ONES DOING ANYTHING FOR THE FIRST TIME ON MY ENTIRE DATACENTER and I can’t play with MULTIPLE people who decided to make characters during congestion. Ahhhh I hate it. EVIDENCE POINTS TO LACK OF CONGESTION so why isn’t it opening up?? it’s making me so stressed out for the 12th
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