If it is “Deckard” I hope they fix the current snares with inside-out tracking. Also hope I don’t have to wait two years between EB Games restocks here in Aus.
I think it can’t be overstated how good VR is in NMS too. There’s so much attention to immersion, even some things that bugged me at first like the mime controls for ground vehicles.
Yeah, the game had severe balance issues too with classes not scaling properly and consequently being either completely dominant or totally useless based on what level you were.
Octopath Traveler. The UI was terrible, the loot was nothing but stat sticks, and most of the dungeons, of which there were too many, were just long tree walk with potions at the leaves. Genuinely the worst game I’ve ever played. The three-directional sprites were also extremely lazy. I think I lost my mind right at the start when the lazy script response saw one of the characters’ childhood friend suddenly develop amnesia and treat him like a stranger because everyone needs generic dialogue.
The music and cast of thousands worldbuilding was fantastic, but otherwise, I hated almost every single of the 80 hours I put into it trying to give ti a fair shake.
Find an independent critic you respect and listen to the tenor of why they say a game is good. Or ignore critics and develop your own taste and sense of which studios, directors, artists, composers, or otherwise will compel you to buy a game.
Commercial media has always been collaborative with whatever power structures or industries it’s associated with. Only good media is independent, and even then you get some really shitty journalists, and sometimes entire rotten publications.
And it has VR too! I think NMS and having actual Daggerfall doesn’t leave me any room to particularly care about Starfield. I don’t get the hype at all.
Would you tell me what games you have as a point of reference that the combat feels stiff and clunky? I think I generally play games with similar kinds of pacing so I haven’t personally noticed anything. It’s not as fast, fluid and flashy as say PSO2 New Genesis, but I wouldn’t say it feels stiff or clunky to me.
Agreed the UI is awful though. There’s a lot of missing functionality too… like there’s just no way to manage echoes in their own screen.
I think Austin’s review actually missed the amount of mechanical depth that exists in the game already. One of his complaints was that there’s seemingly no reason to put melee on “ranged” characters or vice-versa, but I can say that’s definitely wrong. I’ve primarily been playing Venomess with a Sword and Shield, since it pushes her to near-guaranteed critical hits. One of the SnS options has a potion interaction that lets it oneshot enemy guard meters, which puts them in a state of vulnerability and stunlocks them until they recover. I will say Gungrave is a bit lacking since his skills have extremely low multipliers, so his ability to clear dungeons with a gun is extremely lacking until you get the railgun with infinite body and terrain punchthrough.
On a related note, I wouldn’t say the itemisation is lacking either. They’re taking the modern Warframe approach of every weapon doing something cool. There are basic store-bought weapons, but all of the crafted weapons do something interesting that changes your playstyle. One pair of daggers is unusually good at breaking guard meters, and also places a unique buff on you that boosts all damage, including ability damage, which is totally unique to that weapon and that weapon alone. Another pair poison enemies, which lets one of the two “ranged” Wayfinders (Silo in this case) keep a damage vulnerability debuff rolling on the enemy.
Also disagree with the comment about buildcraft being lacking. Different weapons and weapon types interact with the heroes in different ways, so there’s quite a good loop of doing some theorycraft to find your optimal stat ratios for particular combinations, and what your playstyle is. Two weeks in, and the Venomess community on the official Discord are still debating whether to focus on weapon attacks or abilities, which weapons to use, how to balance crit vs base damage, etc.
Also being a huge Warframe fan, this is scratching that JRPG fiend itch for games with weird synergies and interactions and a really rich character building space to experiment in. Haven’t had this much fun since the first six weeks of the Incarnon launch.
Cozy Soulslike is a great concept honestly. I loved the first Dark Souls because it mostly facilitated slow and tactical combat. Favourite build was a pyromancer with a high stability shield. Tweak the numbers to add more tolerance to errors (like the boss demonstration showed) and you do get a much more relaxed Soulslike.
I’ll buy any CyberConnect2 original IPs. Fuga 3 for the Switch 2, babeyyyyyy! I see they also have a couple of other games cooking with no release date.
Apparently the main thing that’s been holding Monolith back from remastering X has been trouble updating the engine for Switch. More powerful hardware might enable it… let’s hope.
With their dev cycle and work culture I don’t think we’re getting a launch Xenoblade though, or even anything.