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Video Games: Dawn of Waaaaagh!


Werthead

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Finally finished ME:A on Friday. ~90 hours played to do pretty much everything. All the side quests I could find and 100% viability on each planet. With the exception of 5 quests in the Additional Tasks category, four of which bugged so I couldn't complete them and one I just couldn't fucking bother with because by the end of those 90 hours I was just ready to be done with the game. 

The few choices you actually get to make during the course of the game didn't seem to have any impact on the ending at all, although apparently certain characters can die if you didn't do certain missions before the endgame. But the missions involved are so important story-wise I can't imagine anyone skipping them. Still, with this game meant as the first in a series I guess that makes sense. I'd expect those choices to do something in Andromeda 2 if it still ends up getting made. 

My overall thoughts echo what Fez said, and I had a very similar conversation with my friends the other night, there is good stuff and fun to be had in Andromeda but it's few and far between and spaced out with so much bullshit and filler and poorly thought out quests/design decisions and hit or miss dialogue that it's impossible to actually recommend it to anyone. I'm not a fan of review scores generally but I think the 6/10s it was getting were pretty fair. 

Some highlights though: Fighting my first Architect on Voeld (although this is somewhat spoiled because killing the architects doesn't impact the story in any real way), discovering the secrets of the Ryder family, learning about Shepard & the Reapers from an outsider perspective, having an adorable romance with Vetra :wub:

---

Onward to, hopefully, more positive things. I started Persona 5 over the weekend. I like it so far. It's very anime (not that I didn't expect that) right down to some of the weirdly translated stuff. Every few lines of dialogue there's a moment of "nobody talks like that" but it's not too bad that I can't ignore it. Also, after 6 or 7 hours of playing I only just now feel like I'm out of the damn tutorial. I'm finally allowed to choose how I spend my time and how long to prepare before I go tackle the first dungeon properly. I have 14 game days to do it so my first instinct is don't rush and use as much time as possible to get better items and such, but I've never played Persona games before so I'm not sure how this works. Is there a downside to waiting? Do I get a longer deadline for the next goal if I finish this one earlier? :dunno: 

There's some other annoyances as well. Like the only female character in the party (so far anyway) gets a cleavage-displaying latex bondage suit and a whip as her battle gear because of course she does. There's some weirdly casual homophobic jokes tossed in every once in a while, particularly by the guy whose cafe you live in. He's very sure to let you know that he doesn't save men's numbers in his phones or allow men to ride in his car because he's very masculine and straight you know and very secure in his sexuality apparently. And why do I need to watch a weirdly long animation of my character jogging for some reason after every battle that persists even after I've skipped through the "here's how much money and exp you got" screen? I'm particularly sensitive to unskippable animations after Andromeda :P

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1 hour ago, Fez said:

Supposedly Bioware Edmonton was brought in over the last year to help out. But it's unclear what exactly that entailed or to what extent they were involved. So that may or may not say anything about them as well.

SWTOR is Bioware Austin, and that's all they do, but several of Bioware's best writers stilp with the company have been transferred there over thr years.

Yeah, SWTOR has earned a good bit of criticism for some missteps, but the writing and story presentation have always been superb and have made noticeable advancements the last couple of years.

A lot of travel for work lately so I'm only about halfway through ME:A (~50 hours). Definitely a lot of sameness with the feel of the different planets. All have basically the same stuff, the environments just look different. I'm still having fun but I can already tell this game won't have the replay value of the originals.

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11 hours ago, KiDisaster said:

 

Onward to, hopefully, more positive things. I started Persona 5 over the weekend. I like it so far. It's very anime (not that I didn't expect that) right down to some of the weirdly translated stuff. Every few lines of dialogue there's a moment of "nobody talks like that" but it's not too bad that I can't ignore it. Also, after 6 or 7 hours of playing I only just now feel like I'm out of the damn tutorial. I'm finally allowed to choose how I spend my time and how long to prepare before I go tackle the first dungeon properly. I have 14 game days to do it so my first instinct is don't rush and use as much time as possible to get better items and such, but I've never played Persona games before so I'm not sure how this works. Is there a downside to waiting? Do I get a longer deadline for the next goal if I finish this one earlier? :dunno: 

There's some oth

I'm new to the Persona series myself. But I'm around 65-70 hours in and have finished the third dungeon. (This game looks to be massive, btw. I estimate I'm a quarter to a third through the game. It's still earlyish in July).

But, from what I've read and started to experience - the only real downside of waiting  is your team-mates will be constantly pressing you to complete it and won't really want to be spending much time socialising. If you finish the dungeon ASAP, they will be continually asking you to hang out, giving you the opportunity to develop your relationship with them.

The first dungeon, I did the same as you and left it quite late. The second, I moved at a moderate pace - advancing it in chunks throughout the time limit. The third one, I followed the advice I'd read and completed the three necessary steps in 4 days. That gave me stacks of time afterwards to work on relationships and stats.

But no - there is zero impact on subsequent events/time limits, from what I can see. it seems the game lasts 365 days and is very regimented as to what happens when. And you can do literally nothing to change that in anyway. You can even check your calendar months in advance to see when school exams are scheduled etc. And the blank areas in between are clearly where dungeon infiltrations will slot into.

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14 hours ago, Fez said:

So after 80 hours (some of which was MP), I'm feeling pretty burned out on ME:A myself. There's good stuff in there, but its spread too thin. And there's definitely some not good stuff; I finally got to Liam's loyalty mission and the writing was just awful. Also, I don't know if it was the new patch or bad luck, but I've had the game freeze several times on me recently. I'm going to take a break and try to get back to it later.

I'm not ready to say all of Bioware is having problems though. From what I've heard, SW:TOR still has top-notch writing and storylines; you just have to be in the mood for an MMO.

 

I need to try SWTOR, I'm a huge Star Wars fan and I've heard great things about that game. 

I've had a lot of glitching errors in MEA too lately. I'm only about 8 hours in though. It hangs up on loading quite a bit--and I have a pretty solid rig. I ran Witcher 3 on ultra, and I just upgraded my graphics card since, so I'm not sure why my loads are so long or freezing. Anyway, I hate Ryder. He won't take a damn thing seriously, and I think you need a guy who takes things a little seriously sometimes--or at least give us the option? Maybe it's the voice actor. I wonder if the female option would have been better.

I like Drack (Wrex). But I'm bored by most of the conversations still. Like last night, Suvi was getting all religious on me, and I told her there was no God, and she said yes there is, then my response was supposed to be "you're wrong" but instead Ryder just said "hey, it's cool, we need all kinds of faith on this ship! LOL!" Not what I chose, but whatever. We literally said three things about it, then I walked away from her, SAM said "hey bro, you got an email." I checked, and it was from Suvi, and she was all like "hey, I hope I didn't come off too strong when we talked earlier!" Two seconds ago? "Sometimes I'm just so passionate or whatevs. I appreciate vigorous debate! Later!" Vigorous debate? It was like three lines of dialogue. 

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14 hours ago, Inigima said:

I thought this was known, but ME:A was not developed by the team that made the first three ME games. BioWare Montreal hasn't made much that's entirely their own; their previous contribution to the ME series was basically the ME3 multiplayer. This game was never going to live up to the rest of the series.

 

I knew that, but still, the name Bioware is on it, so sometimes you think "oh, quality."

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On 13/04/2017 at 8:39 AM, Corvinus said:

Drive in the Nomad for a time, and keep switching squadmates. I find their conversation quite funny. There are also a lot of extra responses, like on Eos I jumped on the Tempest, and Kallo said "Really Ryder" with a small sigh. There is plenty of fun dialogue in the game.

Some of my most enjoyable moments in the game were stepping out of the story and embracing adventure in the tone that my Ryder would have. I was just driving around on the low grav planet for a while, and one point I managed to set up a huge jump and had Vetra yell out basically "yee-ha!". Nothing from Kallo when I landed on the Tempest though lol.

23 hours ago, Simon Steele said:

I think there are a lot of us--but a lot of apologists too. I read an article the other day where the interviewer was telling one of the Bioware guys that basically "complainers" were ruining the game due to "some bad animations." The game has so many more problems than its animations. And, oh, by the way, those animations are pretty awful. I don't see Bioware turning it around (this is unfortunate--I want them to turn it around, I loved Mass Effect 1 and 2 and some of 3). They seem like they outright refuse to hear criticism. 

I'm happy to accept there are a lot of flaws there, and I wish the game had been more polished. What I insist on is that I still enjoyed the game a ton, and I really really hope this game doesn't tank the series as there is a lot of story left I want to see play out. Not all characters work for everyone, personally I found Cora annoying as fuck but in a way that still felt real. Her puppy worship of the Asari is believable to me, and it does go somewhere. The change in tone from it being a military operation in Shepard to the Pathfinder having a lot more freedom is a tonal shift that it took me a while to adapt to but also makes more sense of a cavalier attitude imo. And that's another valid thing if it doesn't work for you, but it did for me despite all the flaws.

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MEA definitely has flaws. Not sure they're bigger than some of Bioware's earlier outings, even in the ME series. One thing Bioware as a company has been pretty consistent about is that they don't just put the same game out time and again but try to mix things up. This inevitably leads to stuff that doesn't work, which then leads to course corrections etc.

I really like that they went back to the type of game they were trying to make with the first in the series and put it in a setting where that playstyle makes more sense. It does give the game a massively different feel from the linear corridor shooters that were ME2 and 3, and after 2 games of that I was totally fine with a change.

That change did come with some serious pacing and editing issues, though, and really there's not enough substance to justify the game's sheer size. I hope and expect that will change in the future, I think the game's setting and style have a lot of potential.

 

What I really don't get is complaints that the writing is a noticeable step down from previous ME games. I feel it's on a similar level, and while there are some clunky lines and ill-conceived (or at least badly executed) smaller stories, the same was true for all installments in the series.

What is different is that the tone is a lot more light-hearted, owing in no small part to Ryder's personality. I don't see that as a flaw, but then I also always enjoyed the more light-hearted stuff in the original trilogy.

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Still playing Darksiders 2 and I feel like this is the game that never ends.  It's a fun enough game, but holy shit every dungeon feels like it goes on for an eternity, and there is a boatload of optional content including several additional campaigns and multiple optional dungeons.  It has some of the same problems as the first game, namely that combat sequences tend to go on for too long.  This problem didn't pop up much early on in the game, but as you progress it gets worse.  There's a sequence set on Earth where you have a gun and around every fucking corner you get assaulted by a horde of bad guys.  The problem is that it's not challenging, as the guns you have cut right through them.  It just gets annoying because it feels like unnecessary game padding for a game that is already way too long.  That Earth sequence probably took an hour longer than it needed to solely because of all the hordes of enemies you have to mow down en route to finishing your fetch quest.

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1 hour ago, briantw said:

Still playing Darksiders 2 and I feel like this is the game that never ends.  It's a fun enough game, but holy shit every dungeon feels like it goes on for an eternity, and there is a boatload of optional content including several additional campaigns and multiple optional dungeons.  It has some of the same problems as the first game, namely that combat sequences tend to go on for too long.  This problem didn't pop up much early on in the game, but as you progress it gets worse.  There's a sequence set on Earth where you have a gun and around every fucking corner you get assaulted by a horde of bad guys.  The problem is that it's not challenging, as the guns you have cut right through them.  It just gets annoying because it feels like unnecessary game padding for a game that is already way too long.  That Earth sequence probably took an hour longer than it needed to solely because of all the hordes of enemies you have to mow down en route to finishing your fetch quest.

 

Yeah, I guess looking back you're right. I think it's a far better game than the first, but ultimately these games get bogged down in their own sequences. I'm not a fan of endless dungeons (Zelda OOT, I'm looking at you) and the combat can get annoying. I just liked the second Darksiders so much more overall. I gave up on my second playthrough when I was trying to collect everything though. Way too much to find.

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12 hours ago, AndrewJ said:

I'm new to the Persona series myself. But I'm around 65-70 hours in and have finished the third dungeon. (This game looks to be massive, btw. I estimate I'm a quarter to a third through the game. It's still earlyish in July).

But, from what I've read and started to experience - the only real downside of waiting  is your team-mates will be constantly pressing you to complete it and won't really want to be spending much time socialising. If you finish the dungeon ASAP, they will be continually asking you to hang out, giving you the opportunity to develop your relationship with them.

The first dungeon, I did the same as you and left it quite late. The second, I moved at a moderate pace - advancing it in chunks throughout the time limit. The third one, I followed the advice I'd read and completed the three necessary steps in 4 days. That gave me stacks of time afterwards to work on relationships and stats.

But no - there is zero impact on subsequent events/time limits, from what I can see. it seems the game lasts 365 days and is very regimented as to what happens when. And you can do literally nothing to change that in anyway. You can even check your calendar months in advance to see when school exams are scheduled etc. And the blank areas in between are clearly where dungeon infiltrations will slot into.

Thanks for the info :)

I ended up going into the dungeon right away after all to see how I measured up. No problems so far really apart from a couple of the enemies who show up red on the Thief vision thing who could one shot my party members. But they're easy to deal with once you find their weakness, as is everything else. That seems to be my main issue so far, every fight is pretty much the same. Hit whatever their weakness is, knock them all down, then either talk to get a new persona or just finish them off. I'm sure it gets harder later though. I hope anyway. 

Got to the third floor safe room and then backed out cause everyone was out of MP or whatever it's called. I have a bunch of treasure to sell and Ryuji wants me to go train with him so I'll probably spend a couple days preparing before I go back in. I like this system, it's pretty cool. 

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13 hours ago, AndrewJ said:

But no - there is zero impact on subsequent events/time limits, from what I can see. it seems the game lasts 365 days and is very regimented as to what happens when. And you can do literally nothing to change that in anyway. You can even check your calendar months in advance to see when school exams are scheduled etc. And the blank areas in between are clearly where dungeon infiltrations will slot into.

IIRC, in Persona 4 there were a couple rare times that you could change the schedule. For instance, if you had maxed knowledge than you wouldn't need to spend time studying the week before exams. You couldn't advance the story during that time, but you could at least work on raising other stats instead. I think. Its been a long time.

In general though, yeah, things are very regimented in these games. And without knowing exactly what to do and when, you'll not get anywhere close to maxing out all social links (In P4, I got all the party members maxed, and a few others; but there were a bunch I barely touched).

Also, if 5 is like 4, the game will not actually give you 365 days. Persona 4 started in April, and ends in December if you get the bad ending. If you avoid that, it then skips all the way to April next year; where there's one last day which has choices that'll decide if you get the good or true ending. So it was really an 8-month game.

...I really wish Atlus would port these games to PC. They've done it for a lot of their other games.

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9 hours ago, Jon AS said:

 

What I really don't get is complaints that the writing is a noticeable step down from previous ME games. I feel it's on a similar level, and while there are some clunky lines and ill-conceived (or at least badly executed) smaller stories, the same was true for all installments in the series.

What is different is that the tone is a lot more light-hearted, owing in no small part to Ryder's personality. I don't see that as a flaw, but then I also always enjoyed the more light-hearted stuff in the original trilogy.

I'm not someone who thinks that the original trilogy's writing was phenomenal- part of the charm of Mass Effect for me has always been that it's schlocky, cheesy, fun, space opera. I always played as a Renegade and that fit perfectly into the setting; I was the badass action hero with terrible one liners, who occasionally enjoyed punching reporters and kicking people out windows. But I will say that I found the worldbuilding to be excellent, along with much of the character writing, especially in Mass Effect 2.

Andromeda has a lot of that too, and like others in this thread I'm enjoyed the semi-lighthearted tone and the fact you can play Ryder as a goofball. But a lot of the worldbuilding doesn't seem to hang together. You get to Andromeda, and all of a sudden everyone is referencing the Scourge and the Remnant as if they've known about them forever. You meet the Kett for the first time and it's automatically a gunfight. You meet the Angara for the first time and the game completely underplays the first contact moment; they in general are a pretty underwritten and contradictory species (one example: there's a whole quest about an Angaran learning what credits are, and that's interesting. But then when you access the inner market, every Angaran accepts credits). You fight an Architect for the first time and suddenly everyone in the Galaxy is talking about Architects, but nobody seems to care about what they are- there's not even a codex entry for them! There's just a lot of sloppy writing everywhere, and an absence of a sense of discovery or emotion. It makes the cluster feel like a collection of random elements, rather than a cohesive whole like the Milky Way. It also doesn't help that the main plot is a very lazy mish mash of Mass Effect 1 (Protheans= Remnant) and Mass Effect 2 (Collectors = Kett), at least so far.

But I do think there's good writing in there that matches the original trilogy, especially for some characters and for quests dealing with Milky Way species. Kadara and Elaaden are much more interesting in this regard then say, Voeld; on Voeld, every quest the Angara give you boil down to "help us fight Kett! We are oppressed!" On the other worlds, you have conflicts between groups and species that are well established, and you get some choices to play around with. I hope Bioware Montreal learns from this experience and for their next game provides more of a focus so the good stuff isn't stretched so thin. And that Bioware as a whole realizes that maybe it's trying to do too much, making huge Dragon Age games and Mass Effect games and new IP and working on the Old Republic. I would love if the next Dragon Age is a more intimate, focused experience along the lines of what they were trying to do in ME2 and DA2, even if it retains some open world elements.

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6 hours ago, Simon Steele said:

Yeah, I guess looking back you're right. I think it's a far better game than the first, but ultimately these games get bogged down in their own sequences. I'm not a fan of endless dungeons (Zelda OOT, I'm looking at you) and the combat can get annoying. I just liked the second Darksiders so much more overall. I gave up on my second playthrough when I was trying to collect everything though. Way too much to find.

I think it's definitely better than the first.  There's much more focus on puzzles and exploration, which were the best parts of the first game.  I also like that you constantly get weapon and item drops in the game, as it adds the feeling of constant character improvement, even though I don't know what half the stats mean because the game never bothered explaining it.  

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You can read a 400-page coffee table book on the history of CRPGs here, for free. Apparently it's a non-profit project which they can't actually make affordable (due to the licensing cost of screenshots), so they're giving it away. It'll also still be periodically updated. It covers over 250 games starting with Beneath Apple Manor (1978) and runs up to Pillars of Eternity (2015) and there's plenty of under-appreciated gems there.

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4 hours ago, Caligula_K3 said:

You get to Andromeda, and all of a sudden everyone is referencing the Scourge and the Remnant as if they've known about them forever.

That happens a couple of times, yeah. It's part of what I meant by editing problems.

4 hours ago, Caligula_K3 said:

You meet the Angara for the first time and the game completely underplays the first contact moment

It's not a first contact moment for them, though. They even later explain that they didn't bother explaining much to you because they'd assumed you were working with the exiles at Kadara.

It is however a weird writing decision to handle it this way. For some reason the transition from the early game to the completely open part just doesn't really work. Makes me think they went through a number of iterations and ultimately ended up stitching things together.

4 hours ago, Caligula_K3 said:

(one example: there's a whole quest about an Angaran learning what credits are, and that's interesting. But then when you access the inner market, every Angaran accepts credits)

That's another editing/sequence breaking issue. The guy is actually testing you under orders from the resistance leader. Seems like a quest that should have gotten cut, though.

The fact that there's actually a credit-based economy, and that there are stores the player interacts with directly in the game is one of those questionable design decisions. But a lot of people complained about the lack of a proper player inventory in ME2/3, so now got random loot back, which in turn means we need some place to dump all that vendor trash.

Definitely one of my least favourite CRPG tropes, btw. I would have preferred a system similar to ME2, but preferably without any money and resource gathering. Let me find cool stuff I can use after a particularly difficult encounter, rather than making me go deconstruct/sell everything I pick up.

I could also do without crafting, but again a lot of other people love this kind of mechanic for some reason. At least the system in Andromeda is pretty straightforward and doesn't break the game.

4 hours ago, Caligula_K3 said:

You fight an Architect for the first time and suddenly everyone in the Galaxy is talking about Architects, but nobody seems to care about what they are- there's not even a codex entry for them!

Yup, storywise these things were a complete disappointment. The one on Voeld was a lot of fun to fight, though.

4 hours ago, Caligula_K3 said:

It also doesn't help that the main plot is a very lazy mish mash of Mass Effect 1 (Protheans= Remnant) and Mass Effect 2 (Collectors = Kett), at least so far.

While the MacGuffin chase is reminiscent of ME1, the remnant tech is much more present throughout the game than the protheans were. Shepard spent most of ME1 fighting geth.

The kett also have autonomy, while the collectors were enslaved. I like that their motivation appears to be religious, hopefully that means we get spared any attempts at a tortured logical explanation for their behaviour. I always thought that such a motive would have been a good out to explain the reapers instead of what we actually got.

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11 hours ago, KiDisaster said:

Thanks for the info :)

I ended up going into the dungeon right away after all to see how I measured up. No problems so far really apart from a couple of the enemies who show up red on the Thief vision thing who could one shot my party members. But they're easy to deal with once you find their weakness, as is everything else. That seems to be my main issue so far, every fight is pretty much the same. Hit whatever their weakness is, knock them all down, then either talk to get a new persona or just finish them off. I'm sure it gets harder later though. I hope anyway. 

Got to the third floor safe room and then backed out cause everyone was out of MP or whatever it's called. I have a bunch of treasure to sell and Ryuji wants me to go train with him so I'll probably spend a couple days preparing before I go back in. I like this system, it's pretty cool. 

Yeah, the difficulty increases and the boss fights can be fairly challenging. But you're right - the game as very much about learning each enemy's weakness and exploiting it to the fullest. As you're finding, managing your SP to get as far as possible before it runs out is key (at least until you gain ways to mitigate lost SP).

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10 hours ago, Fez said:

IIRC, in Persona 4 there were a couple rare times that you could change the schedule. For instance, if you had maxed knowledge than you wouldn't need to spend time studying the week before exams. You couldn't advance the story during that time, but you could at least work on raising other stats instead. I think. Its been a long time.

In general though, yeah, things are very regimented in these games. And without knowing exactly what to do and when, you'll not get anywhere close to maxing out all social links (In P4, I got all the party members maxed, and a few others; but there were a bunch I barely touched).

Also, if 5 is like 4, the game will not actually give you 365 days. Persona 4 started in April, and ends in December if you get the bad ending. If you avoid that, it then skips all the way to April next year; where there's one last day which has choices that'll decide if you get the good or true ending. So it was really an 8-month game.

...I really wish Atlus would port these games to PC. They've done it for a lot of their other games.

I had seen mention of Valentine's Day in P5. So I figured it must pretty much go to the end of the 12 month period. But it's highly possible it skips chunks of time down the track. I guess I'll find out in due course. :)

 

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16 hours ago, briantw said:

Still playing Darksiders 2 and I feel like this is the game that never ends.  It's a fun enough game, but holy shit every dungeon feels like it goes on for an eternity, and there is a boatload of optional content including several additional campaigns and multiple optional dungeons.  It has some of the same problems as the first game, namely that combat sequences tend to go on for too long.  This problem didn't pop up much early on in the game, but as you progress it gets worse.  There's a sequence set on Earth where you have a gun and around every fucking corner you get assaulted by a horde of bad guys.  The problem is that it's not challenging, as the guns you have cut right through them.  It just gets annoying because it feels like unnecessary game padding for a game that is already way too long.  That Earth sequence probably took an hour longer than it needed to solely because of all the hordes of enemies you have to mow down en route to finishing your fetch quest.

This was my experience with both Darksiders games. They are a lot of fun with decent production values until you abruptly hit a wall of "Well, that's enough of that forever."

My current theory is that it's down to a fundamental misapprehension, by the designers, of what people like about those games. No one cares about their extensive move lists and long fight sequences, it's the Zelda-esque puzzles people like. Failing to realize that, we get lots of the former and eventually burn out.

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2 minutes ago, Inigima said:

This was my experience with both Darksiders games. They are a lot of fun with decent production values until you abruptly hit a wall of "Well, that's enough of that forever."

My current theory is that it's down to a fundamental misapprehension, by the designers, of what people like about those games. No one cares about their extensive move lists and long fight sequences, it's the Zelda-esque puzzles people like. Failing to realize that, we get lots of the former and eventually burn out.

I think Zelda typically did a great job with combat that was fun but rarely frustrating.  It was simple, but still had some depth.  Darksiders veered too far into God of War territory but was a bit too clunky to pull it off.

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