Honestly… it’s not great. I would not recommend it unless you’re playing with somebody who is not put off by constant bugs and general jank.
In terms of bugs, I’ve had several occasions where one player can no longer open the map - it just starts opening the quest log instead of the map. I’ve also had a few occasions of the screen just going completely white. Also, I’ve had a player just become locked in a dialogue with no way of exiting.
For an example of jankiness, one key aspect of the whole game, dialogues, is just completely awful:
Both players can begin separate dialogues at the same time, one just gets muted
It’s impossible to automatically begin a dialogue with two players, one player has to start it, and the other has to “listen” to it as an additional step
It’s impossible to switch control of dialogues during a dialogue. This is constantly an issue, because sometimes, dialogues are triggered when you walk past some invisible checkpoint. Basically you’re forced to always have your high charisma player to walk in front and hope they end up triggering all the dialogues.
It’s impossible to contribute to dialogues in any way as the “listening” player. Even if you have some aspect to your character that might provide an interesting line, you are just locked out.
If both players speak to a character in succession, the exact same dialogue gets repeated. It’s jarring and completely breaks immersion.
There’s more, but I’m kind of getting more and more annoyed at the game as I write this, so I think I will just stop here, you probably get the picture 😅
I think the co-op is a complete afterthought in this game, and I will probably be replaying it in single player for a hopefully better experience at some point.
I’ve played the first two hours on PS Plus and it’s excellent so far. I’m actually considering purchasing it separately on Steam just so I can play it on the Steam Deck as well 👀
This approach makes so much sense from a business perspective.
How many here have this experience: out of my entire friend group that I grew up playing video games with, I can’t think of a single person who kept pirating games after acquiring disposable income, even though we all exclusively played pirated games as teenagers. Without piracy, none of us would have had access to any games, and very likely none of us would still be into gaming today, spending probably thousands of euros every year on games, consoles, PC components, etc.