Sounds like the author has a skill issue with Stealth.
Mobs are leashed? Cool, that doesn’t matter cause I play the game like a high fantasy battle mage, and don’t run from fights.
Also, mobs are leashed in most games to some extent or another. Avowed is well written, well voice acted, tells an interesting story, and is fun to play through.
Really just feels like people were expecting Skyrim and are upset they got something more focused.
The Master Chief Collection is the single reason that I will never ever preorder another game no matter what bonuses it comes with or how confident I am with the developer.
In general though, Microsoft Games is pretty good about not pushing bugs out the door.
I honestly don’t understand the middle reception to Avowed, it’s been truly fantastic so far, and completely rock solid.
It has stealth, it has magic, it has melee combat, it has ranged combat, it has dialogue options for talking your way through stuff, it has multiple ways of solving quest lines…
It’s basically Skyrim, if it was smaller and more focused, with better combat, voice acting, level design, and heads and tails better writing.
Also, from a mechanistic standpoint I think that mostly has to do with the high cost of entry for games.
At $80-$100 for a full priced game these days, it’s hard to just buy on a whim. The only time you would is when they’re on sale, which happens well after initial release. So initial sales of games are basically entirely driven by reviews and online discourse (which itself has an effect on reviews), and you basically just have a bunch of people all waiting for the signal to buy or not.
I do think that services like Gamepass are a genuinely good way of reducing that effect, because now anyone can try anything on a lark.
People are complaining about Avowed? What the fuck is wrong with them?
I’ve been too busy loving it to be online reading anything, honestly cannot fathom what their complaints are tho. Avowed has repeatedly impressed me by being more clever and nuanced than I was expecting a game to be, in writing, level design, and combat.
I mean, there are huge problems with American health care companies and insurance in general will always tend towards being a scam unless it’s extremely heavily regulated, but at a fundamental level insurance does offer a service (that of socializing the cost of extreme losses), and while executives do have fiduciary duties, the idea that they always have to pursue short term profit no matter what from a legal standpoint, is overblown and exaggerated.
We left Reddit because it was a corporate captured shit show that killed the only nice apps for interacting with it. We didn’t leave because they were too mean to health insurance executives, or because they made glib jokes in dark situations.
Understandably. I’m emotionally removed from the situation enough to know that I shouldn’t actively celebrate, if I knew a loved one who’s medical care was denied by a for profit health insurer or if I had to waste my life fighting with them for basic care, then I’m sure I would be actively celebrating too.
Quite frankly, executives of health insurance companies continually make money by denying medical coverage to people with children and letting them agonizingly die slowly.
I’m not on here celebrating his death for the sole reason that I think it’s just as likely this corporate espionage / assassination for money, but if it is a normal person shooting a health insurance executive for denying a loved ones’ coverage it’s hard to imagine how the executive didn’t deserve it.
You don’t get to be separated from the morality of your actions, just because you use neutral sounding business language to describe how you’re fucking over and killing people for personal profit.
I hear what you’re saying, but gamers in this thread (and every thread), are demanding that it come out on Steam, not on GOG, which makes them a huge part of the problem.
Lock in exists partially because gamers have lionized Valve for throwing them trinkets and refuse to use anything else, while Valve has designed their platform around a mandatory launcher and done what they can to lock players into it.