Since I don’t agree with your initial premise, that review scores are faked or kept high to please the publishers, I also don’t agree that people are being lied to or swindled by them.
And sometimes the original Lords of the Fallen is exactly what you want to play, even if everyone else says it’s bad. That’s entirely my point. General consensus of “good” and “bad” means nothing. Equating popularity and quality is dumb
In a perfect world, where everyone has infinite time and money, sure, just do whatever. However, this world doesn’t exist, so most people probably want to avoid wasting their time or money. That’s why reviews exist.
I also think, most of the time you can equate popularity and quality to some extent. Not that the most popular are the best, but they’re usually at a decently high level. There are always going to be exceptions, of course, and not everyone will like everything.
I haven’t kept up to date with the game, and it’s been a while since I played, Update 6 I think. I’ll wait for a bit longer for mods to update, and maybe check it out in January or February.
Once a generation you might get a Death Stranding 2 or something, and really enjoy it, but other times you’re stuck with the original Lords of the Fallen, because you like Souls-likes, and that’s your only game this month or quarter.
And yes, of course, just because a game is rated highly doesn’t mean you’ll enjoy it. Still, unless you have really specific tastes, the chance that you’re going to enjoy a highly rated game, compared to a mediocre one, is much higher, in my opinion, doesn’t matter if something looks interesting.
I’m also talking about a hypothetical, mainstream consumer here, because those are the ones that a review score is for.
What I mean is even if a game looks interesting, but then I see it’s mixed on Steam or has a bunch of 5/10 reviews, I’d probably give that a pass. There might be a chance it’s some hidden gem or totally up my alley, but why risk it? I’d rather play it safe, and give the 9/10 game a chance, even if the premise isn’t that compelling.
Once you are able to just not care about the money, this can definitely shift. If it turns out that interesting game sucks to play, doesn’t matter, just buy something else.
Risk of Rain Returns was released last week, and I’m having fun with that. It looks fantastic and plays well, for the most part. Some parts feel a bit clunky, since you can only shoot forwards and have to wait for the animation to finish before you can turn around. However, the developers said in the first hotfix patch logs, that they’ll implement controls to specifically shoot left or right, so that will be less of an issue, once that’s implemented. The current behavior definitely made me avoid some characters, just because it’s kind of a pain in frantic fights, where you’re getting swarmed by enemies.
So far I beat the game once, on the default difficulty, with the Loader, but I’m still unlocking stuff, learning, getting used to everything, but mostly just sucking.
Pathfinder: Kingmaker just doesn’t want to end, and it’s starting to get really tedious. After three story chapters back-to-back, and me thinking it might finally pick up the pace, the game throws you a curveball and has like 1–2 years of in-game downtime. Nothing happens, except for the occasional side quest, that takes like five minutes to complete. Who thought that’s a good idea? Yesterday, I finally made it to the next chapter, so I might be able to finish it this week (for real this time).
So many weird design choices, along with a lot of bugs, make it really hard to recommend this game to anyone. I still want to play the sequel, eventually (I wanna be a swarm that eats everything, even though it’s supposed to suck), but some of the things I’ve read don’t really sound appealing.
Scores are just too engrained in this whole review thing at this point, not even just in video games. There was a small movement a few years ago to get away from scores, but not enough big publications joined in, so it didn’t catch on.
just go play the games that interest you, stop caring about scores
Sometimes it’s not that easy, mainly if you can’t just afford every game that catches your eye.
Still Pathfinder: Kingmaker, but I should be able to finish it this coming week.
It feels like I’m always complaining about the game, but it just does have a lot of issues. The gameplay (meaning combat and exploring) is still good enough for me to put up with it though.
The story kinda picks up now, a shame it only happens after I’m already 100h into the game. Even then, there are a bunch of things that don’t make sense. Some parts that your character should know about, but you can ask about it again and again at different points, as if you’re hearing it for the first time. The DLC I did after the third act was ok. The pacing for the quests continues to baffle me. After a cool 200-day gap between Act 3 and 4, now you don’t get any downtime at all. Everything is happening at once, with new notifications for events popping up constantly.
So, the game was originally just RTwP, and turn-based combat was added later via a mod, which was then officially implemented by the devs (I think). Because of this, I’ve been giving the game a pass for minor issues in combat, but this week was just bad at times. The game loves to eat parts of your turn constantly. I think it happens when you’re right at the limit between a normal move action and a double move. The game shows you’ll be able to attack, but then you’re just one pixel too far away and your attack just gets skipped. You can’t even use it for something else, like cast a spell. There are also some other small things, that wouldn’t matter by themselves, but when something small happens all the time, it starts to get annoying.
ESPECIALLY when the general triat of capitalism allows these review companies to have their bias and subjections swayed by not wanting to bite the hand that feeds their comapny’s existence
And my argument is, that a site like IGN, Gamespot, whatever, doesn’t care if they don’t get the latest Ubisoft game prior to release anymore. There are so many games coming out, that they are picking and choosing anyway. One less game on the pile, big whoop.
I mean, Kotaku apparently has been blacklisted by Sony, Bethesda, Ubisoft, and Nintendo at some points (not all at the same time), and they still exist.
Also, with how many freelancers run reviews for all of them, you’d have heard something credible over the years, that scores get artificially inflated to keep the publishers happy, but the only thing I remember is the Kane & Lynch thing at Gamespot, which lead to Jeff Gerstmann getting fired, because he didn’t change his score.
Review scores and review sites are dumb
You could argue that scores are outdated, because too many people just look at the number and don’t read the review and how this rating came to be. However, sites dedicated to reviewing games, still have a place out there.
Still playing Pathfinder: Kingmaker. I’m about halfway through, and right now doing a small DLC side campaign. This DLC campaign runs parallel to the main story, in a neighboring barony, so it can maybe add some details and flesh out the world a bit.
Speaking of story, I think this is by far the weakest aspect of the game. Including the prologue, there have been four small story lines so far, that have been pretty much separated for the most part. While there are some small inklings here and there about some grander plot going on, there’s nothing concrete, so who knows. Act 3 was pretty good, there’s some shit going down in your kingdom, and I was really invested and felt like I was racing against time, but that just meant I blasted through the main quests in about a week or two in-game time, and then had like 200+ days of downtime until the next big thing happens. Yes, there are some (really basic) side quests, you can explore, and of course manage your kingdom, but it just doesn’t feel good. You need these long timeframes, because the kingdom management just has all these small time-skips (if you don’t use mods), but like I said last week, I don’t think the developers found the right balance here.
I’ve read that, but I was planning on playing both anyway, so I decided to start with Kingmaker. Depending on the game, it can be hit-or-miss to go back to an older release by a developer. I just played Divinity 2 after BG3, and missing a lot of the changes and QoL additions that Larian has made, was a bit of a pain at times.
Sounds like you didn’t encounter the overleveled undead random encounter on the western side
I might have gotten it today (two undead, level 14 and 17 or something), but I was already level 9, so it wasn’t a huge deal. Actually, I’m surprised at how much higher level enemies the game throws at you, but you can pretty comfortably win against, as long as you’re prepared (I’m playing on the recommended difficulty for someone new to the Pathfinder system). A few times I had to reload and get a different weapon to actually kill an enemy or change and refresh my spells, because I wandered into an unexpected fight, but did manage to get them down.
Every time this goes on sale, I’m debating on whether to buy it or not. Like you, I’ve never played one of the Ace Combat games before, but some arcade style gameplay could be fun.
I’m currently going through Pathfinder: Kingmaker, which is my first experience with the Pathfinder system.
While I do enjoy it right now, the beginning was kinda rough (super long rant incoming). Right after the short tutorial, I went to pick up some berries in a spider-infested cave, which wasn’t too bad, just that the spiders have poison that reduce your stats. In hindsight, this wasn’t that bad, just some missing information on my part and maybe bad tooltips, because the poison was supposed to go away after resting, but it didn’t. What the tooltip fails to mention, the stat penalty can stack and every 8 hours of rest removes one stack, so you might have to wait around for a day or so, before you’re back to normal.
Then, while I was still recovering from that (mentally and in-game) I stumbled on a text-only event, where you’re going through some marshes and find a seemingly evil idol. Me, being the Lawful Good monk that I am, of course decide to destroy it, but get cursed in return (-2 constitution). Curses are of course permanent, until you can start to remove them at level 5. I was level 2 at the time. Consumable items to remove them exist, but for some reason, drinking a potion can fail. I guess your character just spills everything over the floor. These potions are also super expensive and the vendor had just two of them, while I had four or five people in my party. Thank god my character is also a time wizard, so I cast Quick Load, and was good as new.
After those two experiences, like an hour into the prologue or act 1, I was ready to get fucked at every turn, but that was basically it. No idea why the devs chose to put these quests and events super close to your starting base.
My only other gripe with the game is the Kingdom Management. After you become a baron, you have to start managing your lands, which is fine in general, but I don’t think the devs have found a good balance, because there are just so many events that are constantly popping up, and I felt like I was making no progress with the actual CRPG part of the game. Regularly I’d leave my capital, just to get a notification that something happened, after like five seconds. So I go back to check it out, and it’s always some unimportant stuff. Experienced players might know that you can ignore these things for a bit, but as a new player, this was just super annoying. Then you also have some projects that force you to skip 14 days of in-game time, while your character is busy, and a few times, when I did that, I got notifications for like eight new things that happened. That’s when I called it, pulled out the mods and basically nerfed the shit out of that mechanic. Events now take only a fraction of their normal time, I can’t fail, and most importantly, I can manage most things, while out on the road. I’ll probably have to skip a ton more days manually, but I take that over the default implementation. FYI, you can turn down the difficulty of the management stuff in-game or even completely automate it (that way you lose some throne room events and interactions I think), I just had the mod installed already, because of a different reason, so I just used that.
Anyway, I still enjoy the CRPG part of the game. The combat is fun, although for a complete beginner to Pathfinder (and little experience with DnD) some tooltips are really lacking information. There are tons of keywords and mechanics getting thrown around, that I have no idea what they do. On your character sheet you’re presented with tons of different scores, and for half of them I don’t know how they got there (the others list a neat breakdown for each bonus you get). I think there are also some bonuses that only apply in certain cases, but aren’t reflected on your character sheet, but I wouldn’t know, because it’s not explained. I’m playing on normal or whatever is the recommended difficulty for newcomers to Pathfinder, and it’s not that difficult, so you can get by.
Other than that, I did “finish” Wolfenstein 3D and killed Hitler. There are more episodes and an expansion, but I’ll skip them. Like I said last week, I found the game kinda boring, it’s just too basic for me nowadays. Just a handful of different enemies, just three weapons, and the levels look all the same.
Now I’m deciding on the next retro shooter, that I want to tackle. Right now I’m thinking either Ion Fury or Doom 64, but something else might catch my eye.