Thanks for the super thorough reply, I really appreciate it! I did do the ritual, I think I got the “ring ending” for Morrigan as I entered the portal with her in the Witch Hunt DLC.
I agree with you on the appeal of these long series of games with save-import being the continuity, so it’s a shame to hear it’s not more elaborate than that. I know Welonz did a full Dragon Age series playthrough last year so I might just watch that some day. If Veilguard turns out to be incredible (doubtful) I’ll take your advice and just watch story recaps I think.
Would you say seeing your choices reverberate through the story by importing your saves makes it worthwhile, or no?
I’ve played and really enjoyed Origins, but haven’t (yet) taken on the other two. With the size of my backlog I’d be happy to leave the other two unplayed as I was satisfied at the end of Origins, but the fact that you can import saves and have your decisions matter does interest me.
They’re a bit different than the military ones, but the first three Splinter Cell games are fantastic if you enjoy stealth. Chaos Theory in particular is absolute cinema, one of the best stealth games of all time.
The themes are great and I really enjoyed the atmosphere. There are parts of the gameplay I don’t like as much (and a bit too much backtracking through samey environmens), but I think it’s really cool how bold they went with how it plays completely differently from the whole rest of the game.
I was hoping for his thoughts on Dead Money specifically, but I agree New Vegas has a great storyline.
It’s strange you haven’t been able to get it to work though, there are lots of stability and performance mods out there by now that combine to make the game fairly stable. The Viva New Vegas guide is a good place to start if you need direction.
I’d say so. The biggest selling point is the Origins-system itself and the player agency from both that and your gameplay choices. The extent to which your chosen Origin affects the game is staggering and very few games (perhaps none?) has even attempted something similar. I can tell you this, it puts the “background” choice in Cyberpunk to shame.
The overall plot is fairly standard-fare boilerplate fantasy stuff but the world is decent and the companions are mostly very enjoyable, though some are more well-written than others. Alistair is - in my opinion - one of the best companions Bioware ever produced. Morrigan is also a great character.
The combat is okay, RTwP is a divisive system and I personally think it lacks the depth of Baldur’s Gate II (though I always play the latter with Swoard Coast Strategems). I installed some mods that expanded the built-in “Tactics” function that lets you set triggers for your companions to execute actions, and I had great fun in programming my party to play itself with me completely hands-off.
My main complaints with the game that I’d like to see fixed would probably be beyond the scope of the term “remaster”. The facial animations during dialogue were pretty uncanny in the base game, but they’re good in the DLC and sequel.
To me this feels like perfectly within the scope of what should be the realm of “remaster”, it’s just that history teaches us to expect less.
Very excited for you to take on the Sierra Madre! It’s a pretty divisive DLC, people either really love it or really hate it. I personally really enjoyed it, but there are certainly parts of it where I can see how they’d make some people dislike it.
This all sounds great, but the one thing I truly wish they’d eventually add is official VR support. I played the game briefly with the VR mod, and it was already apparent how well the game is suited for it, but I wish it had fully integrated VR controls for full immersion.