Needs more stuffing in the chicken and I have heavy reservations about the game design pulling me into my sweaty tendencies when I am not playing with my friends, and I haven't had that side of me touched for half a decade. I feel like most of it is because the developers haven't found the center they want to stake just yet, but some of the things they've said about their design philosophies after the infamous Railgun nerf (which was warranted fwiw) hints at some dissonance about what fulfilling a "fantasy" actually means. Theres one thing to cling onto "You can't please everybody" - the most nothingburger thing you can say on game design - and making your mechanics contradict your intentional designs anyway. Heavy armor being nullified by headshot damage, for example, does not make me feel like I'm a slow moving, damage soaking juggernaut, it makes me feel like an idiot for not picking light armor.

Beyond creature and objective interactions (the weakest links in the game so far) they've done a fine job in maintaining a balance within stratagems and weapon loadouts and I'm overall pleased with the direction the game is going. Massive reservations, but I'm not interested in holding it against them beyond specifics when figuring out what you want to do with your game years down the line is a hard line to cross; I bid them good luck. And as much as Im not interested in defending microtransactions as they're bad for us in general, this is also one of the very few games where racking up the MT currency is not an exercise in manipulation via hard limiting currency drops - you play matches, you get 20-40-100+ SC. And considering that they could remove some well known exploits to take advantage of SC accumulation, but havent yet, I do believe that Arrowhead are on the right head in terms of appeasing their ends (justified or no) and not making it a sore point for the game. If they decide to deprecate the SC value of packs over time, than they gain my respect. But only until than. All to say that this game is not "p2w", because your game knowledge and teamwork is going to do more for you than having stun grenades. Though yeah, some goodies in the SC packs are pretty damn good to have.

Shocking to me that someone would make a roguelike card game whilst having played no roguelikes, and yet its still better than a decent chunk of the genre. Conventional wisdom continuing to mean (mostly) nothing

With that said, theres something missing from the equation here that just puts it just out of bounds from the greats, and I think the fact that only 0.2% of people winning the hardest difficulty on every deck (as of March 2024) speaks to that and my own personal experience; its fun, but the reel of frustration that comes with every inevitable game over never really dissipates and only keeps stacking up. It's <difficult> to win past the 3rd/4th stake difficulty and when you do, it feels like you only ever did because of pure luck, or through the concentrated power of one or two overpowered cards that trivialized the rest of the run.

Its still a very fun and compelling deck-builder though! It just needs some more tuning before its there.

Impressive of Bethesda to make a game where their gameplay staples are worse in almost every way to Fallout 4

The thing that gets me the most is that the Settlements system is so bogged by skill tree gating (the skill tree in this game is god awful, like jesus christ) and the abundance of different materials, which need to be crafted into other materials, which need to be crafted into other materials, which needs habitable planets with animals/flora in order to collect them, of which there aren't many. Add on to the fact that you either have an outpost limit or a supply link limit AND that theres no in-game benefits, theres no real incentive to do any of it at all. Genuinely madman stuff. It'd all be great if it had even an ounce of the complexity of a dedicated logistics game, but its just the FO4 system with ten times the bloat.

Also MAN do the companions need to shut up. All of them speak some incessant line if you dare do anything basic like pick up an item. It's so awful that the thought of having anyone on my crew, as a companion, was terrifying.

There is so much more to this like the weapons lacking variety - I guess they thought the rarity system would compensate for it? - but also not feeling great to handle? Like seriously, genuinely struggling to find any positive for this game here. I came at this with the lowest expectations, its not like I was intending to get disappointed by it. Just wanted
the comfy gameplay loop of FO4 except a bit more refined, but they dont even come close.

The four-class deck system leaves a lot to be desired but when it comes to the game's overall construction, it was delightful. Especially love the depth they've put into map navigation and generation; every event/combat node is static, but has a rarity system where better events - which can be multi-act quest chains that guarantee good rewards - replace certain nodes. Add an item system and character-unique dialogue choices in the mix, and you've got gold. Im not too "in" on deckbuilders admittedly, but its a huge step up from the pseudo-random path generation system that appears to be the norm in the genrespace. Worth playing this game for this system alone.

I do think the decks in this game leave a lot to be desired though. The sore point is how rigid both card draw and energy is. The only way for a character to draw more than 5 cards on turn start is mostly 0-cost situational cards that you put on a character. And every card that draws cards within a turn are all the same: draw 2, put 2 on top, or draw 3, put one on top, with rare exceptions. Energy generation is almost completely dictated by the mage class and some repeatable, boring cards otherwise. And without them, you are stuck generating 3 energy per turn - there are barely any items that help with this.

The end result is that deck building feels like an exercise in exhausting many cards to reduce the deck down to a controllable level that can work within 3 energy, and it feels like a waste of potential depth and especially fun. Im no card game design guy, and I can vaguely understand why they didn't go further, but the end result is too suffocating. By extension, I do wish the decks were more individualistic ala Slay the Spire, rather than this weird class heirarchy system that barely works as a heirarchy when you remove certain cards. Remove the energy gen cards on a mage and you've functionally got an elemental rogue, for example. Its things like that, including the gargantuan hours you need to sink to fully level up character ranks to unlock their full potential, that put me on the fence about going back into this game.

But ultimately, I "did" play it for days on end and really, really enjoyed my time with it. And Im definitely keeping an eye on this developer's future projects based on the systems they've made here, something I do not say very often. On that note alone, I recommend giving this a go!

I said on the last log that I wasn't feeling keen on the odds of me finishing this game and turns out yeah, I didn't. One part of me is curious to see how it holds up top to bottom but on the other hand, its inability to meld the Open World formula into something resembling the "Hogwarts" experience is so fatal that I simply do not think I need to.

It puzzles me that for a non-negligible amount of people and critics, the ability to openly explore Hogwarts and a decent, fulfilling combat system is enough to ignore that it doesn't even try to enforce you into the rules and the world of Hogwarts. Dress codes? Nah. A day-to-day schedule that tries, even vaguely, to simulate what is expected of a Hogwarts student????? Hello???? No half-way measures whatsoever. It should, in my eyes, be insulting to fans that they were so afraid that any attempt to genuinely immerse you in the >>fantasy of a wizarding school<< would be too tedious and boring. But give someone a broom, a wand and landmass to fly around and forgiveness shall be received.

So much praise and love for a game that had no faith in anyone it was trying to appeal to. At least "middling AAA games" like Assassin's Creed Valhalla try to simulate the experience of being a raiding viking. If Hogwarts Legacy can't even do that, than can it be called a middling AAA open world game? Not to mention the alchemy system, ripped straight out of money farmer mobile games with reckless abandon. Almost everything Ive said about the game's cowardice of not meeting the standards of the setting extends to a lot of the experience. Like, they infest Hogwarts with bandit camps??? Thats what they name them. Bandit Camps. Straight up.

Like come on man, this game has an 89% approval on Opencritic. Are we really lacking so much aspiration that this game's flaws are acceptable as a baseline?

A lot to appreciate in terms of the designing around movement & micromanagement and despite the fact that Hideo and his translation team's broken English really bogs it down, the world is genuinely fantastic enough to give it a pass. Even if you're a Kojima skeptic its really hard not to respect the craftsmanship here, more games within Sci-Fi should be more like this. Easily one of the best open worlds I've played so far especially when it comes to really getting the most out of the Open World itself.

Love its sense of wonder and creature designs but the game is completely bogged by its progression and its systems to the point where you can't enjoy the actual process of tactical play. Learning curves are inevitable, but the fact that party members require foresight planning due to later recruited members not having any AP levels (which governs the unlocking of new abilities) pre-allocated even though you can recruit them up to your current level is a huge mistake. And I can't say I have patience for a game that won't let me try to understand its nuances because it keeps pushing me away. Don't hate it, just detrimentally archaic.

If theres anything that perfectly encapsulates "This is why we can't have nice things" it's Minecraft. Used to absolutely hate this game's guts before I played Vintage Story because it was barebones enough to show how brilliant most of the design in Minecraft is. The enemies, the atmosphere, things like the nether and redstone (though took me a bit to warm up to it and still wish it had practical uses and easy to understand blocks.) Gotta give Notch and company involved credit, their ideas and implementations were super sharp.

Such a shame that at the end of the day its not worth playing unless you're a Creative player or the type of freak who enjoys building houses that can't truly be lived in, or a software engineer that pines to make a GBA with redstone. The fault mostly lies with the Great Drought period making it age disgracefully and games like Terraria and others showing how glaringly shoddy the progression is. I'm the kinda guy who loves games that, through incentives and clever design, make every aspect of its gameplay enjoyable and worth doing as a Default and MC doesn't come close to passing grade to such a degree that I find even the fluffiest additions to be faults. And with the current ethos of the current devteam and stupid things like barring easily made content off with polls and adding fluff content that doesnt address core weaknesses of the game, I can't imagine Ill ever feel keen on giving it another chance even with the cliffs content and beyond. Its probably an issue of bureaucracy in the end, which is why we can't have nice things; we will never get the Minecraft that we all deserve to get.

Like most open world games it has its fair share of issues pertaining to the open world: there isn't much point revisiting most dungeons/caves post first playthrough, the musics overworld and dungeon themes are incredibly lacking, late game spells weren't practical and, though I have mixed thoughts on this, I would've liked to have seen lower leveled areas scale a bit to your own level even if the execution was messy, Oh, and New Game+ is just Boss Rush mode which is a huge sore point to me

Beyond that though this is easily my favourite world and artistic endeavour Miyazaki has made alongside Sekiro. It's also made Dark Souls 3 100% redundant to me despite it being my comfort food Soulsborne beforehand. Just completely dead to me. Like yeah, I gotta ride torrent from point to point and that can be a drag compared to linearly progressing through linear levels, but build variety and availability has never been better and interesting. Also helps that its not trying to relive a past glory when ultimately Miyazaki's output is at its best when he makes Soulsbornes how Nintendo makes Zelda's: similar in feel, but completely separate from each other.

Also just love how Miyazaki fiddled around GRR Martin's brain and was like "okay im turning your story and ideas into a fucked up dark souls ruined world now" and frankly I hope he keeps luring famous authors and continues the slaughter