Do you have much crowd control in your party? Can you disable either him or his minions? Pay attention to what he is vulnerable to and what makes him vulnerable when he goes into that other state. Remember that you can inspect any enemy and see their buffs and what type of enemy they are. Perhaps you have special arrows strong against that type. Perhaps you have some spells that do a type of damage that works well against him.
Do you have any more info to provide for that fight without spoilers for others so that I can point you in the right direction? What's the issue you're running into in that fight?
Yeah, I haven't seen any combo system. Following up a light with another hit is always that same jumping spin slash. If there's more depth there, the game didn't want to tell me about it. Likewise, when they had that developer direct, they said they were improving the combat system but with no description of how they were doing so; just a lot of fluff talk that was kind of about nothing. As for the puzzles, I like the ones that aren't just finding the symbols in the environment. Those puzzles can actually be reasoned out, as opposed to the symbols where plenty of things look like those shapes and they just picked one that they felt was the best fit for it, so I mostly just end up waiting for the game to inform me whether I'm hotter or colder as I get close to the magic spot.
This game also does something that I haven't seen many games do that always seemed like a natural evolution of story-driven games. The industry, operating at this level of production value, for the most part ended up going open world, even and especially for games that were better off being smaller and linear, and that's a real bummer. If you keep things small and linear, you can start loading the next scene while the current one is still playing, and then you can seamlessly cut to the next scene much like a movie would, but you get all the benefits of rendering the game in real time. This shouldn't be so rare, but the industry's obsession with being "bigger" made it rare.
I played a bit more Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice ahead of the sequel in a few months. There are a few major components to the game's core loop, and the one I'm not thrilled with is its hidden object puzzles, but the rest of it is working for me.
When I've got some podcasts to get through, Palworld has proven to be a great second screen game. There are some things I'd like to see them tweak about the progression, but they're very small complaints thus far. Ultimately, this game is working for me in a way that Pokemon hasn't in about 20 years.
I thought I would take a break from Pillars of Eternity after finishing the first game, because it did become quite exhausting late in the game, but after a discussion with some friends, I ended up excited to jump right into Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, and so far, it's answering nearly all of my issues with the first game. For one, more quests can be resolved by being clever and avoiding combat, plus when the combat does happen, it's far more readable. As a blessing from the gods themselves, the quest log also lets you know if a quest is too high level for you, so you know which content is intended for your current level without checking it out early and dying to an enemy mob in a few seconds.
Ahead of Combo Breaker, I'm also back on the Skullgirls grind. My Black Dahlia mix and setplay are weak, and I'm giving my opponents too many opportunities to take their turn back, so I need to tighten that up.
In the shooter space, just things I'm hopeful for, but I don't know how likely it is they'll scratch that itch. I've got my eyes on Mouse, Core Decay, and Phantom Fury.
I don't buy modern AAA FPS either, but that's because they've been chasing those longer play times lately, or they end up not particularly interesting like Immortals of Aveum and then blame the market for not buying their game. I'm waiting for the indie scene to get past boomer shooters and start emulating the era just after that, and I'll gladly pay more than $15 to have it. There are a couple of candidates, but nothing for sure.
Sure, but plenty of my other favorite FPS campaigns don't have that, and I definitely won't get 60 hours of playtime out of them, but they're still my favorites. It's been a long time since we got a great FPS campaign, and I hope it's not because the market those games are targeting have a $1/hr threshold to meet. $1/hr is also a fairly arbitrary metric in the face of inflation, because it essentially means that games need to keep being made on scrappier and scrappier budgets as time goes on in order to meet it. It's a fool's errand to try to convince someone that their opinion is wrong, so hopefully that's not what it sounds like I'm doing, but personally, I find it to be a poor measure of the value of a game or any kind of entertainment for that matter.
How we each choose to spend our money is very much a personal decision, and if you feel you need more length out of a game in order to get your money's worth, no one can really tell you you're wrong. Something to consider though is that your dollars spent decides what gets made in the future. If enough people feel the way you do, it's no wonder so many games are designed to be repetitive time sucks instead of tighter, better paced experiences, because they're not making their money back on a 15 hour AAA game if everyone waits for it to drop in price to $15 first. Personally, I've seen plenty of my favorite franchises become worse off for being larger, longer experiences (that also cost them more time and money to make, meaning these games come out less frequently), and I'd love for them to return to the excellent games they used to be when they were leaner. Halo going open world hurts the most.
I think the hours you get out of it is a valid component of the value you get out of a game, but it's trivial to make a game longer, and a tight 5-10 hour game can frequently be more valuable to me than a 70 hour game, a lot of Capcom's games among them. Part of the reason Suicide Squad and Skull and Bones are getting slammed in reviews right now is because they made games that could be played for hundreds of hours, and that happened at the expense of making great games that you'd be done with in 15 hours. When is the last time you bought a movie or went to the theater? I'll wager a guess it cost you more than $3 even if it was really long.
And all hours are not created equal either. An action game that takes 50 hours would probably be exhausting, but a turn based game like an RPG or a 4X would feel right at home there, since you're spending a lot of time in menus making slower decisions.
Hours per dollar isn't a great metric for all sorts of reasons, but I do fully understand typically getting more value for your dollar out of indie games. That's not the only thing that makes this an apples and oranges comparison though. Games in the 90s and 00s were often cranked out in 9-18 months, with a number of developers in the single and double digits, compared to a lot of productions today taking hundreds of people to develop for 5 years before they come to market. Capcom in particular hasn't been getting too crazy with development timelines, because their projects usually aren't overscoped compared to their competitors, but we're still talking way more salaries to pay for a much longer period of time to create a single video game these days. Rather than DLC, it was designing games around strategy guides, hint hotlines, and coin operation in the arcades, resulting in decisions like making the first level really easy and the next level really hard, so you couldn't finish it with one rental, and you'd need to pay for additional materials to find out the obtuse answers to problems in the game. Duck Tales may have sold 1.67 million copies while its break even point was way, way, way lower than it is for the likes of Dragon's Dogma 2, which might need to sell that many copies to make back the money it took to create it, and it's not even a foregone conclusion that it will sell that many either.
Volition surprised me by staying open as long as it did. It hadn't made a hit since Saints Row IV, and it had several high profile flops since then. I would have loved for Free Radical to finish making a type of FPS that doesn't get made anymore, but apparently they spent two years of that studio's life chasing Fortnite.