Brother, picking on your example, Avowed had the gall to charge 11€ more than KCD2 while offering a facsimile of what it promised while KCD2 improved upon their past game in every way. The polarisation stems from a game published by one of the richest companies in the world and in production for over 6y delivering a mediocre experience (at best) when compared to CHEAPER offerings that do much more. In truth, it’s not polarisation, it’s requiring a modicum of quality for your money. I returned it because I was advertised an Obsidian RPG and got a linear shooter with barely any choices and performance issues that would not be foreign in a mobile marketplace. That’s the future gamepass brings, slop. Luckily, there’s US indie, Asian and European developers making good games, KCD2 or BG3 being such examples. Shit, even Lords of the Fallen is a better experience than Avowed as people were delivered the experience that was promised in the promotional materials at less than 70€.
Edit: Dragon Age was technically well executed, but, again, as an RPG, it had little to offer. Would be another game perfect for a mobile app store. The total sales of that game and predicted sales of avowed confirm as much, it’s shovelware capitalising on a franchise name to drive sales while having no craft or passion behind it. If you read the reviews for avowed, the overwhelming majority of the thumbs up reviews complain the game is not worth the price of admission and it’s a mid game at best.
You lost me at XII wasn’t great and saying XIII had an OK story. The writing on XIII is one of the most atrocious I’ve experienced, it hits like a korean dramedy. The combat was OK but had the depth of a puddle. A realm reborn has a steep climb to 60 but it’s worth it for the great story and impactful world events (granted the fetch quests get boring, the community makes up for it). XV was not great, the world-building prior to release was exciting but the hit from the game was lacking. They tried to make it better with episodes and extended content but by then I didn’t feel like coming back. The combat was a sore disappointment, long gone were the puzzles of the prior games. The story was OK enough but it didn’t carry the game. XVI suffers from the same problem as XV. The story is pretty fitting in a fantasy setting, the set piece moments are absolutely sublime, but the pacing and combat are off. Not enough depth. It feels, much like XV, as a final fantasy for dummies (and the performance and technical aspects of the game leave a lot to be desired) XII is a goddamn masterpiece.
It’s on PS plus before 6 months, that should be all the red flags you need not to waste your time.
The writing is atrocious, the art style is atrocious (personal opinion), the only saving grace is technical execution, the final product is very polished in terms of bugs, stability and performance.
Old fans dislike the game because all decision making has been removed from the player and it’s a dumbed down fantasy RPG. The combat is so incredibly pared back that you could play it with touch controls (now that it has completed the transition to an action game). It’s not a dragon age game in everything but name. They butchered the game to please the fortnite generation, but no amount of skibidi will bring those players to dragon age, meanwhile the original fans were left behind and consequently opted to play far better games instead, like Baldur’s Gate 3. Bioware is pretty much running on name recognition alone, any talent that existed there has long left the company.
Refunded, was expecting an Obsidian interactive world got served a dead open world with static NPCs, static everything. The only saving grace is combat but it’s not nearly deep enough to carry the game. I’ll get it again when it’s at 10-15€ which is the price I’m comfortable playing for this level of competence. Was back to Kingdom come in a flash.
And that’s just from the top of my head. The closest thing in the known universe to the behaviour of Microsoft is a tumour. It sends metastases to other organisations and then it assimilates and deletes any identity the original organisation had.
Microsoft needs to be broken from Xbox, it already has a monopoly on the gaming sphere by controlling the OS of the majority, now it wants to metastasise to other platforms to begin assimilation. The future of core gaming is bleak.