Decided to give it another go after dropping at the start of Reaper's Coast, now I'm at the start of Nameless Isle and thinking about dropping it again. While I'd struggle to call it *bad*, it's a game that constantly leaves me wanting; its are peaks memorable and noteworthy, yet they overlook a sea of apathy.
To start with where it peaks, the combat is great! An engaging and thoughtful combat system compounded by character-building that affords some really stupid combos and gives you so much freedom that I'm surprised I only dipped into *six* different skill types.* Combat being a seamless part of the world paves way for some interesting consequences; a fight with a group of gatekeepers could easily spiral into fighting the whole encampment if the fighting moves too close to them, or you could send a lone party member in to a group to initiate a combat, and give your others freer room to sneak around and get their own pre-emptive attacks in while the combat encounter hangs on your turn. And while most pre-fight setup wasn't all that exciting for me, I do have one particular fond memory of blocking off a ladder with a chest I was hauling around for the past 10 hours and huddling at the top of it, while all the melee enemies sat at the bottom and growled at me (until they remembered they could attack it).
But while I enjoyed the combat, I felt that just about every other aspect of the game fell flat. For one, I found that the world, its story and my place within it was just so incredibly bland, and I couldn't get invested in it in any real capacity past the escape of Fort Joy (the very first story beat!). The Magisters are bad in such a generic "evil guy" way that's as uninteresting as the actual 'cosmic evil' Void beings, and these two are near-exclusively the only antagonistic forces I've run into. And while there's been some intrigue offered by the idea of chasing Ascension (nothing more than intrigue yet, though I can live with that for now), I don't exactly feel compelled to save this world that's struggled to offer me much more than generic bad guy types. To illustrate my disappointment in the nuance of the world, I was quite looking forward to seeing Beast's story with Lohar unfold, this multifaceted story between, Lohar's anger towards the Dwarven Queen, the Queen's attacks on the Magisters, Beast's comtempt towards both, and my own interests in this whole conflict - but it was solved as soon as it actually started, as Lohar is actually on your side and the Queen's side also pretty unequivocally the baddies in the conflict. There do still exist secrets and quests entirely detached from the tedium of the standard generic evil guys, but you have to do a lot of exploring to find them...
...which leads me to my other major issue, the one that's more actively antagonistic, exploration. Or more aptly, searching; searching and scrounging the world for every drop of exp you can find, lest you risk hitting a difficulty spike that exacerbates this very problem to a point that makes progression far too frustrating - entering Reaper's Coast at level 7 and only hitting level 9 before every quest I had seemed impossible was the reason I quit the first time. I use the word 'searching' because 'exploration', to me, implies doing it for its own sake, where the process of discovery is more of a motivator than the discoveries themselves. Feeling forced to scour the map top-to-bottom or fall behind the level curve destroys the organic feeling of exploration as I already have an explicit reason to be doing it, one that's both extremely important and, to be honest, rather boring. It also makes the discoveries themselves - usually quests - less engaging by proxy; regardless of how interesting they may or may not be, I'm doing them primarily for the exp, and it's just much harder to get into a quest when I've been conditioned to see them as exp dispensers.
I think I get why people like this game, but I'm not entirely sure what makes people love it. It's a great combat system, but one that's embellished with an RPG world that I find wholly unsatisfying, and the combat alone can't pull me the whole way through a game like this.
* Post-note edit: I like the freedom a lot, but I felt that customisation was too 'wide' and not 'deep' enough - the game felt extremely coy about giving me new tools for my *preferred* spell types (when I checked the wiki for what I was missing at the start of act 3 when I quit, there was barely anything left!) meaning I struggled to fit into any class fantasy I really wanted. Great for making the actual combat more fun, though
To start with where it peaks, the combat is great! An engaging and thoughtful combat system compounded by character-building that affords some really stupid combos and gives you so much freedom that I'm surprised I only dipped into *six* different skill types.* Combat being a seamless part of the world paves way for some interesting consequences; a fight with a group of gatekeepers could easily spiral into fighting the whole encampment if the fighting moves too close to them, or you could send a lone party member in to a group to initiate a combat, and give your others freer room to sneak around and get their own pre-emptive attacks in while the combat encounter hangs on your turn. And while most pre-fight setup wasn't all that exciting for me, I do have one particular fond memory of blocking off a ladder with a chest I was hauling around for the past 10 hours and huddling at the top of it, while all the melee enemies sat at the bottom and growled at me (until they remembered they could attack it).
But while I enjoyed the combat, I felt that just about every other aspect of the game fell flat. For one, I found that the world, its story and my place within it was just so incredibly bland, and I couldn't get invested in it in any real capacity past the escape of Fort Joy (the very first story beat!). The Magisters are bad in such a generic "evil guy" way that's as uninteresting as the actual 'cosmic evil' Void beings, and these two are near-exclusively the only antagonistic forces I've run into. And while there's been some intrigue offered by the idea of chasing Ascension (nothing more than intrigue yet, though I can live with that for now), I don't exactly feel compelled to save this world that's struggled to offer me much more than generic bad guy types. To illustrate my disappointment in the nuance of the world, I was quite looking forward to seeing Beast's story with Lohar unfold, this multifaceted story between, Lohar's anger towards the Dwarven Queen, the Queen's attacks on the Magisters, Beast's comtempt towards both, and my own interests in this whole conflict - but it was solved as soon as it actually started, as Lohar is actually on your side and the Queen's side also pretty unequivocally the baddies in the conflict. There do still exist secrets and quests entirely detached from the tedium of the standard generic evil guys, but you have to do a lot of exploring to find them...
...which leads me to my other major issue, the one that's more actively antagonistic, exploration. Or more aptly, searching; searching and scrounging the world for every drop of exp you can find, lest you risk hitting a difficulty spike that exacerbates this very problem to a point that makes progression far too frustrating - entering Reaper's Coast at level 7 and only hitting level 9 before every quest I had seemed impossible was the reason I quit the first time. I use the word 'searching' because 'exploration', to me, implies doing it for its own sake, where the process of discovery is more of a motivator than the discoveries themselves. Feeling forced to scour the map top-to-bottom or fall behind the level curve destroys the organic feeling of exploration as I already have an explicit reason to be doing it, one that's both extremely important and, to be honest, rather boring. It also makes the discoveries themselves - usually quests - less engaging by proxy; regardless of how interesting they may or may not be, I'm doing them primarily for the exp, and it's just much harder to get into a quest when I've been conditioned to see them as exp dispensers.
I think I get why people like this game, but I'm not entirely sure what makes people love it. It's a great combat system, but one that's embellished with an RPG world that I find wholly unsatisfying, and the combat alone can't pull me the whole way through a game like this.
* Post-note edit: I like the freedom a lot, but I felt that customisation was too 'wide' and not 'deep' enough - the game felt extremely coy about giving me new tools for my *preferred* spell types (when I checked the wiki for what I was missing at the start of act 3 when I quit, there was barely anything left!) meaning I struggled to fit into any class fantasy I really wanted. Great for making the actual combat more fun, though
5 Comments
@weatherby animals in this game seem incredibly suicidal so i dont doubt that at all lol. i keep watching my animal followers run headfirst into fields of acid and explode (one time i even got exp for it because the animal had a quest) and a friend of mine said that she lost a combat encounter in a similar way from an animal running in and dying and causing a chain reaction somehow
Speaking of chain reactions, I had the game soft lock at one point because a bunch of explosions triggered and the game entered into a loop where they kept rapidly re-exploding over and over again. For some reason this also caused damage to infinitely stack, causing numbers to fly out rapidly from the characters stuck in there. Never seen anything like it, wish I had the sense to record it.
@Weatherby I think what happened was you were near those bulbs that constantly explode and reform, the stacked damage coming from the constant poison.
Bro, you freakin nailed it with the unmarked level-gating. It's so annoying to start a quest only to end up in a fight you're massively underleveled for.
Weatherby
11 months ago
Also remember a fight with some exploding enemy where a dog just ran in our of nowhere and bit it, blowing it and me up.