I’ve been enjoying the game and seem to be close to the end. I actually like that it is not overly complicated. Makes it easier to pick up for an hour or two and just play.
My problem is the inconsistencies. At times it acts like it wants to be a deeper game and at times it is just mindless action. Feels like they cut a lot of planned content and just smoothed it over. For example, both unique weapons and armor can be upgraded with materials you find and purchase, but only weapons allow upgrading the unique stat itself, and its only a single choice between two options. It seems almost pointless. They should have just dropped that system entirely or expanded it to be more meaningful.
Late in the game are two choices that feel meaningful and appear to influence the map and story. Great, except, where was this for the entire first half of the game? So many choices just seem to be for flavor that when one actually has consequences it is jarring.
Then there is stealth. The game has a stealth mechanic and skills to buff stealth attacks. However, the moment you attack from stealth, every enemy in range is aggro’d to your location and stealth is no longer possible. Stealth is effectively just a first hit damage bonus. Again, it seems like they planned to make stealth a thing, then either cut it or could not make it work, but left parts of it in the game.
Illusions… The game has several, fairly trivial elemental obstacles. Most can be dealt with in several ways. Tangled vines can be burned with fire skills, certain throwables, or a companion ability. Same for electric switches, freezable bars (to shatter them), etc. All except illusions. Those can only be cleared by a specific companion ability, which means late in the game you are either forced to use that companion or give up on anything behind illusions. There is even a spot in the throwables UI that looks like it could be for an extra item type, but I’ve yet to find something to fill it. Maybe in the last area…
Overall I do like the game, but no way is it worth $70.
The worlds and gameplay are varied enough to always keep you from getting bored. The controls are pretty solid but aren’t offering anything groundbreaking. The dialogue is not great, often cringe but occasional good moments. The story and villains are poorly written. Lots of nods to other video games, pretty ham-handed but they can be fun sometimes. The fun you have will depend on who you play with. 7/10 for me.
Translation: Numbers look like shait otherwise we’d brag about them.
It’s always a bit of a letdown when you see a character who has a clear personality, and goals and interests, and suddenly, in the service of this romance that the player has embarked on with them, they now become the player’s yes-person
Looks at Dragon age Origins and Morrigan… How do these people, with 0 knowledge of the actual medium they work in, get to leadership positions? Was it a tokenism thing? To see how the brilliant Avelone got pushed out years ago, and clearly incompetent people are now promoted is truly baffling .
The numbers are an 81 on Open Critic, 77% positive on Steam player reviews, and about 6M people played, mostly through Game Pass.
There is a large contingent of people who don’t like romance mechanics in their RPGs, often for the reasons she states in the article. Obsidian doesn’t do it often in general.
Resounding success, barely anyone touched it outside game pass.
The publicly available data for those 6M comes from mimdgame, which is as reliable as divination.
There is a large contingent of people who don’t like romance mechanics in their RPGs, often for the reasons she states in the article
Give me an example of an Obsidian RPG romance option where the character becomes a yes person? My argument is that reason is bullshit, either that or we hear it from the director that they believe Obsidian doesn’t have the talent to write such characters. You know what, that actually makes sense, the talent is not there, clearly.
They should change their motto to: Obsidian, making mobile games for simpletons
They told people to play it on Game Pass, and that’s where people played it. Mimdgame is about as reliable as divination (source: Viri4thus) even though it’s in line with what we can measure for Indiana Jones and Call of Duty? 6M (a two week old number) is about 1/6 of Game Pass’s subscriber base. Although I guess it’s more like 5.5 since they probably sold a little less than half a million by now.
Give me an example of an Obsidian RPG romance option where the character becomes a yes person?
It’s not an opinion I hold. It’s an opinion that Obsidian developers have seemingly held for a long time. They’d be likely to try to avoid the things that they criticize romanceable NPCs for.
Do you actually enjoy video games? I’ve only ever seen you being miserable and claiming that you don’t enjoy the ones you’re talking about because you’re just too darn smart to enjoy them.
Let’s put the marketing cope for the absolute flop aside (marketing can get anyone to install a game on gamepass for “free”, we’ve seen with HiFi Rush and Veilguard that mimdgame is complete trash at predicting anything).
I like games, what I don’t like is being advertised a deep RPG from one of the old greats, paying 70€ and refunding because I was not served an RPG but a middle of the road first person fantasy shooter with a static world and a bunch of numbers on weapons, that are even more insignificant that the RPG elements of destiny. Logically that creates antibodies towards what was supposed to be a great game and, conversely, ended up as a mindless shooter that would not be out of place among steam greenlight projects.
Avowed is not a good game, it’s a C, painfully mediocre and unimaginative. Coming from Obsidian, with 6y of development and after the ad campaign they did, together with asking for 70€ upront!? Fuck that noise, that is unacceptable. Of course, Microsoft has a great marketing team, so they created a culture war around the game, if you like it, you’re woke, if you don’t, you’re a chud. This poisons the well and destroys the discussion about how one of the dearest RPG developers in the West is now writing characters that sound like they were written by chat GPT. There’s a reason the best RPGs of the past few years come from independent European devs and the best Action games come from Japan… So, keep your dearest mediocre game and your culture wars, Obsidian lost yet another fan and because of people burying their head in the sand, they won’t know about the very large amount they lost… Well, they kinda do, looking at Grounded (not a masterpiece but a mediocre game like Avowed that conversely did not promise the wprld), priced at max 39€, and already for a long time on gamepass, 30k peak, current 3,5k. Avowed, the deep RPG, 19k peak, 2,8k current. Avowed flopped hard. Keep your feelings about the game however you want, it’s quite obvious for anyone with two neurons avowed flopped and is yet another symptom of the “mobile game” trajectory a lot of US American devs are taking due to the subscription model becoming ubiquitous. Strap in for the slop avalanche à lá Netflix.
There it is with your two neurons again. But those neurons sure seem to be betraying you if they’re telling you this culture war bullshit was Microsoft’s doing or intention, or that Game Pass isn’t a material factor in this game’s success. For someone who claims to be so smart, that seems very dumb.
Never once claimed to be smart, for someone claiming to be so smart, reading comprehension is not your forte. If minimum A -> B is a pretty easy concept to grasp.
Regarding the purported success of Avowed I just have to sit and wait for the other shoe to drop, so, I’m good. See ya at the next layoff party.
Clearly Avellone did something right, other than the great pentiment (which started as a rogue project), they have yet to release anything of note since he left.
Seems a lot of people hate this game for what it’s not, while I’m just taking it for what it is and having a great time. I LOVE being rewarded for exploring so much. Seemingly every nook and cranny hides a chest or a body or a trinket and it keeps me going. I appreciate how they focused on having a fun experience and not micro-managing. It was a nice change from the norm.
I don’t know his work but that background makes so much sense because as good as these games are, they are extremely rigid. There is only one plot path to success.
There’s a point in It Takes Two that some people might not want to take the action suggested, but you have to in order to move the story forward.
(Slight spoiler, it involves deliberately attempting to make their daughter cry.)
There was a Halo show? Oh Paramount, I hate paramount. When I had to do the contracts for renewing channels at a cable system they were by far the worst.
It generally sucked. I was the sysadmin and the whole system was maintained with near end of life or end of life equipment. I fell into doing the renewal contracts for programming because I maintained the channel maps. The worst were viacom, paramount and espn. What a bunch of opportunist trash. I started in late 2008 before netflix hit and watched the price go up as the subscribers for TV went down. I battled the old school notions of cable while watching the owner and his cronies flail about without understanding the changes. They couldn’t understand why we were topping out on bandwidth every night and I tried to tell them that people were actually using it now. They wouldn’t pay for any type of proxy. They also at first wouldn’t pay for more bandwidth. They had a absurd user to bandwidth calculation in their head from ten years before and were slow to recognize that what was true then wouldn’t stay that way.
I did predicted how it would end up though. Cable isn’t gone like everyone said it would be but many cable companies have dumped video completely. There is no profit in carrying video. I knew that netflix wouldn’t remain the only game in town and that all those cord cutters would soon be faced with similar bills to keep the same amount of access to programming in the end. I was told I was wrong by both sides of it and I have to say the smug from being right about it all hasn’t earned me one dime. All in all I’m glad I’m out it.
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