:fa_gamepad: Black Desert
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It's fine. My friend and I will play Portal Knights some more. I made an archer, and it's been quite fun!
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So I played the game, as a witch and a valkyrie, to level 14.
Valkyrie is technical, in a really boring way. The blocking feels horribly soft.
Witch feels fairly bad, partly because she has a melee combo that does almost no damage, so no one would ever use it. She's very powerful, and once you learn mana drain and chain lightning, she becomes fairly cool, but she's still slow.Basically, none of the combat feels meaty. Because that's the thing I care most about, I'm understandably disappointed. I'm going to try a Tamer and either the Berserker or the Ranger, and if I don't find something I enjoy doing, I'll just go back to Vindictus.
If you set all the graphics to maximum, some things look really good, like puddles of water after it rains, and night time is noticeably seriously dark. There's a lot of awesome stuff going on. But a lot of the things look really bad. The textures for rocks and plants are absolutely horrible. I saw a guy with a really old, detailed face, whose armor was all pixely: things just don't quite match up.
But perhaps I'll enjoy later content more. But for now, this game is not really what I was hoping for.
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If you set all the graphics to maximum, some things look really good, like puddles of water after it rains, and night time is noticeably seriously dark. There's a lot of awesome stuff going on. But a lot of the things look really bad. The textures for rocks and plants are absolutely horrible. I saw a guy with a really old, detailed face, whose armor was all pixely: things just don't quite match up.
Sometimes that's not the fault of the artists, but the fault of the game engine failing to load higher-res textures when necessary. (Either because of a bug, or due to lack of memory somewhere.)
RAGE, which made such a huge deal about it's mega-textures, had that bug ALL OVER THE PLACE. So the game was crowing about its huge textures, meanwhile on screen you were seeing something that would have disappointed a Playstation 2 gamer. It was also a shitty dumb game in every other way.
Let me know how the Ranger plays.
And, to be fair, it is a Korean game, so it had a few dozen strikes against it from day one.
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To be fair, there's a lot to be said for it. It's got very much the 'explore and do what you want' vibe, which I can support, and the gameplay isn't bad, it's just not something I enjoy. It's very combo heavy, but with weird combos being more important than timing, and so far my powerful spells feel disappointing. But you can pretty much do whatever you want, so if I wanted to do a bunch of the other things, I'm certain I could find it enjoyable and swallow my complaints about the combat.
In essence, I don't know if I'm the right person to recommend this game or not, since I don't think I'm the target audience. But I definitely think it has a target audience.
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RAGE, which made such a huge deal about it's mega-textures, had that bug ALL OVER THE PLACE. So the game was crowing about its huge textures, meanwhile on screen you were seeing something that would have disappointed a Playstation 2 gamer.
Oh, I remember that game. If you had a beefy-enough machine, it looked awesome.
It was also a shitty dumb game in every other way.
That was the first game I can remember thinking “Duuuude, where's my boss fight?” about. Which summed up the key flaws pretty well; play that ended up really disappointing because of the lack of real challenge at any point that gated you to the next phase of the game. Maybe they should have hired a game designer?
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I would say I think they only shipped about a third of the game, but that would open it up for Lorne to come in here and start crowing about DLC so I won't.
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Which summed up the key flaws pretty well; play that ended up really disappointing because of the lack of real challenge at any point that gated you to the next phase of the game. Maybe they should have hired a game designer?
That's definitely how this game is, on purpose. Money is the way to upgrade things, though there are bosses that are important.
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And people who are actually Elder Scrolls fans know nothing about him, because they (by and large) don't want to play an MMO. Meanwhile, a bunch of World of Warcraft players who don't give a whit about Razum-Dar are playing ESO because they want more MMOs. It's a tragedy.
To emphasize this point: I skipped out on getting it during the Humble Bundle sales because I just wasn't that interested in an MMO, but I love single-player RPGs. Going by what you've said, I'd at least like the game - but the marketing as an MMO threw me off. And now I'm too poor to get it atm, so if they want my money they have to hope I remember it when I can afford it. And that there's not something more interesting in the way.
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Money is the way to upgrade things, though there are bosses that are important.
Yes, but it's still relatively common to have a new section of content gated by an enemy (or group of enemies) that are particularly difficult and that require the use of all the techniques available so far to progress. The ultimate form of that is the end-boss that you have to beat in order to complete the main story content of the game.
Rage didn't bother with this sort of thing much, so it was really disappointing when you hit the end. A game shouldn't leave you thinking “was that it?” when you finish it, or at least not unless it's got some sort of replayability to it (such as fighting games). It should be very satisfying to beat a game.
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From what I can tell, this game is like that too. It's meant to be more about player interactions with npcs and each other, especially guilds.
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So, since the time I posted about playing this game, I haven't had any will to try again. However, Path of Exile updated with a bunch of new skills, random events, new dungeons, class specializations...
It's way more fun now. You can even do a damage over time build built around skills that dying enemies spread!
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Unintuitive UI, "energy" system taken from the original free-to-play release that makes no sense in the Guild Wars 2 purchase model, stupid dialog mini-game needed to obtain quests, complex under-explained crafting mechanics.
I think I'll pass.
Oh and most damning: gear you get from drops doesn't actually show up on your character. The only armors or dyes that show up on your character cost real-world money.
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I mean, I still think it's worth trying, because it definitely does some things well, and has a rather unique style of play, but those things are definitely true, and I don't like it much anyway.
Meanwhile vindictus is quite great, but won't let me run it anymore for no reason.
So, path of exile it is!
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Is it $30 worth trying?
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Probably not in your case.
