Status 3DMYSTIC Dec 20, 2022
Not sure when or why I became such a ruthless critic, and believe me when I say-- I wish I wasn't.
First 20-30 minutes of this game has had some pain for me, so far. Really hoping that I can stick with this though, I have been intrigued, wanting to play for a while and so far the vibes are …
Not sure when or why I became such a ruthless critic, and believe me when I say-- I wish I wasn't.
First 20-30 minutes of this game has had some pain for me, so far. Really hoping that I can stick with this though, I have been intrigued, wanting to play for a while and so far the vibes are there. It's possibly going to lose me for feeling like lots of other big-budget open worlds. We shall see.
Stuff I've liked:
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Looks incredible, still even on the baseline PS4 that I am playing it on. It's outdated now technically, but this is still quite a nice game on the technical side. Always interesting to see what highly trained and funded teams can produce.
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Music and atmosphere are working for me, also a big fan of these types of stories/plot setup. I'd even say that the TRUE post-post-apocalypse like we see here is still plenty fresh of a setting.
Stuff I have not liked:
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Absolutely no disrespect to the talented voice actors, but I am really having a lot of moments with Rost where I am thinking "we couldn't have gotten that line again? there wasn't a better take? really?" but it seems to just be a tone or direction thing, if I had to take a wild guess. Comes across real choppy and disjointed with the oDd in FlecTiO N . Most people, "in real life", do not speak like that. It sounds cheesy. Stilted. Like a guy in a voice acting booth.
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Hitting me over the head with lots of collectible audio logs at the start was a specific design choice, and I understand why they tried that. It annoyed me. It didn't feel like, "oh I am learning about this new world now, to get situated." it felt more like "oh great, I'm collecting f*****g audio logs in a game, already. Immediately. Great. That's so great, my favorite thing that I have definitely never done before." Broke my immersion right away somehow, even though I think audio log type collectibles are a fairly well accepted boilerplate aspect of open world games. An attempt was made to give me some freedom to find out about the world for myself right off the bat, but there could have been a better way to dip me in slowly.
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Tutorials are always a weak point for me. If you can't build your game where I get to find out the controls myself, I am gonna be annoyed. Obviously this is not an option for studio games. They have to have a concise tutorial or people will not play their game. They tried, and I appreciated the fact that it was simple and rather short. It just felt, again, stale and ham-fisted, old, annoying, immersion breaking. There was a better way to do this.
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Similar complaint to the tutorial, not sure if I am going to enjoy the process of harvesting lots of materials. I am not sure how important this really is in games-- it might be fine, if the player simply just "presses A" and sees a short animation, and then gets their stuff. I do worry that there is some disconnect though, or burnout with this, in open-craft-em-ups. PTSD from Assassins Creed Odyssey maybe.
