There’s always the option to buy a cheaper game in the genre first, or to wait for a sale. You don’t have to start with the newest biggest title.
I don’t think that there’s a realistic way to measure a fair amount of progression in every game, and it could be hard as a consumer to keep track of the limit. It could work if the minimum limit is 2 hours, and a maximum can be set by devs/publishers, but it seems unlikely many would go for that…
I bought the game and played for roughly 3 hours. If you’ve seen their stream from the technical test, I got roughly as far in the meta-game as they did, but run-wise I got somewhere ~the middle of the third act. Right now I can see at least ~3-5 hours of unlockables I need to get resources for (and more is revealed after more runs/unlocks), and I haven’t tried most new boons yet.
It’s really good. There are three things I’ve noticed are missing (animations for one interactable in the hub world, portraits for 2 characters further in). Aside from that it feels similar quality-wise to the first game, which I last played a week ago, so it’s still fresh in my mind.
I’m sure new content will get slower soon and halt in a couple of hours, but wow is it polished already. There’s also an indication of a lot of additional content coming in the future, but that will have to wait for further patches.
I think the refund would have been right to do from the company side once everything was prepared - it wouldn’t be right for them to keep any money from customers after the content has been integrated into the base game. But only once they are sure nothing will break due to the refund.
Yes, CO did bad releasing an unoptimized game, but if you put pressure for a cosmetic DLC to be removed you can’t be angry that they removed said DLC.
I strongly disagree with this for two reasons:
Nobody put pressure on them to remove the content from the game. “Removing the DLC” can be done in productive or non-productive ways, the latter of which happened here - a better solution would be to set it as non-buyable on Steam and wait with refunds until the patch has been released which allows people to continue playing.
It’s not just grey boxes (which would be bad enough on its own - these people paid for the content, there’s no technical reason for them not to have it right now) - the CO employee literally says:
Assets are replaced by the placeholder boxes, but as the waterfront zoning isn’t available in the base game yet, I recommend holding off on loading saves with a lot of those zones.
So the people who bought the shitty DLC, as in the die-hard fans, can’t play on their saves due to COs fuckup.
But this was such an edge case, removing assets resulting in the unavailability of said assets in game, that this interruption simply couldn’t have been for foreseen.
They couldn’t foresee issues created by removing assets, in a game that is supposed to support user mods, which can be added/removed at any time? Really?
The explanation I’ve seen is that they wanted to pull the DLC as soon as possible, since it was - literally - the worst-rated product on Steam. I’m 99% sure the bean counters responsible for all of the terrible decisions (release the game, no matter what state! Release the DLC, no matter the amount of content!) pulled the lever on this one again - no chance they’ll see any responsibility with themselves.
Thank you for the tips! I don’t know if I just got very lucky or if your tips helped me play more aggressively - but I managed to win 5 runs yesterday and finished the main quest!