Dexterryu

Thank you both. This definitely sounds like a wait for a big discount/sale type game. I did try the first one though not until recently. It was hard for me to gauge because it was very dated in pretty much every aspect... quests, character interactions, and world design (felt big, full of 'stuff', but empty of substance).

Hey all. Would love to ask your opinions about the game and whether based on the post below if I would enjoy it. I have not purchased it yet, but am thinking about it. I initially was very interested but the bugs, performance, and some of the reviews have made me hesitate. Especially at a $70 price tag. I love RPGs, and they're probably my favorite genre but like anyone I like some more than others. What I like most about RPGs - Story and Characters: Looking at the RPGs that I've loved the most. The Witcher series stands out to me as the best. The characters are fleshed out, complex, and their are meaningful choices to be made and consequences. Recently BG3 stands out, and historically ME trilogy and Dragon Age: Origins stand out (the sequels were decent, but a big step down). While I liked Skyrim the silent, bland, player character and robotic NPCs. How are the story and NPCs in DD2? Are the pawns generic or do they have real back stories and such? Exploration: I love the exploration and risk/reward of Elden Ring. The dungeons were dangerous and challenging. Witcher comes to mind here, but more because the exploration and side quests did a great job of having story elements to them rather than a just a random copy/paste bethesda style dungeon. I've heard DD2 has great exploration and dungeons to find, but do they have narrative elements? Do they fit the story or are they just some place to find that's filled with more monsters? Combat: Souls/Elden Ring are the gold standard for me. BG3 too, but it's a totally different approach. Witcher was serviceable but not great. Where does DD2 fall? It looks cool from the reviews I saw but it's also an area where most reported a lot of the jankiness. This board has always done well steering me to good decisions. Appreciate the help/thoughts!

Diablo 4? It's endgame is far from perfect but the mainline game is really quite good. Most of the negativity around it is a repetitive endgame and endgame loot being a little stale. Hell Divers 2 is another good option.

It was OK, but it's not Ghost Recon. It's 3rd person far-cry with a military/spec-ops plot. So so true. Somewhat encouraged by Ready or Not inspiration, but the other 3 do not impress me. If I wanted to play COD/Battlefield, I'd play COD/Battlefield.

Definitely the most fun I've had in a co-op game since ME3. It's just the right mix of good gunplay, tactics, progression, and hilarity.

I actually kinda hope the opposite. There are TONS of FPS games out there. The fighting in the movies was mostly fist fights and/or smartly taking advantage of the environment. Rarely was fighting just about fighting... it was about rescuing/chasing/obtaining someone or something. Overall, I hope the combat in the game has some plot driven reason vs just mowing down the bad guys.

It looks good, but I also don't see it as a day 1 purchase at that price.

I'd love for the game to be good. I hope it is, but early impressions sounds eerily similar to Redfall to me.

I'd say less polarizing and more some venues are less about crapping all over it until they see the final product. Once the final product hits and people see it all, they'll have a firmer opinion. I'd bet there will be several generous scores just related to the fandom of the source material but I anticipate this game to bomb hard in the reviews and sales.

The Dev's trying to get people to believe that it isn't a live service game feels pretty tone def to me. Pretty much every hands on I saw says it feels like a live service game. As for the co-op game play, I think the coop shooter/super hero stuff has been played out from the sense that beyond just hanging out and fighting bad guys together is kind of played out. I say that vs games where the mechanics are built around a high degree of cooperation (It Takes Two/A Way Out) or tactics (Ready or Not/GTF) in order to be successful. Beyond the DC universe is there much that would make 100s of the same fight over and over again much different than borderlands?

I think it was just a matter of focusing on the controversy vs how I was using it to articulate my sentiment that companies pander. Where I attempted to tie it to the conversation was to say that in many businesses ID&E is part of how they brand themselves as "good" to customers/advertisers/media. In my first hand experience often ID&E has been prioritized over actual measurable performance.

And so are you. You are cherry picking data points to articulate your beliefs. There is a certain amount of "duh" here when we're talking about a company like Activision, which is a male dominated field (IT & Developers) making a product who's target audience is also male by a high percentage. You're also inferring a lot of meaning out of my earlier post about job security and marketability of males 40-55 and refusing to see the meaning behind it... which is that from a demographic perspective, have little protection from a policy/public perception perspective. I have experienced this protection first hand on several occasions (I once had an employee of a protected class routinely ignore their responsibilities, leave work for hours to do errands (their laundry), and had general poor performance, year over year. HR would do nothing specifically because of their "class". Had that person been a white male, they'd have been gone very quickly. This is not to say that companies are targeting white males. They are not. White males are the "safest" to lay off when they need to cut costs or cycle their workforce with lower cost new grads.

Bingo. Perfectly said.

Nothing directly beyond this: Companies care about their brand/image more than anything else. That's what brings in both customers and talent in potential hires. They are in an interesting spot right now in trying to attract new graduates (who place a high value on ID&E) and top talent (who primarily care about $$ and getting stuff done). The bud light campaign last year pissed off their primary customers and hurt their brand, costing them billions in sales and market value. Most companies really don't care about ID&E (they care about $$ and share value), but they do care about it from the perspective that not being ID&E friendly gets them killed by the media. So they pander (which blew up in Bud Lights face).

If you're waiting for data you'll never find it because no one will ever say it and will actively hide it for a multitude of reasons. As you saw with the Bud Light fiasco last year, businesses don't want to piss of a major demographic. So it's something that you can consciously ignore if you wish.

I should probably be more clear. There are not conversations about targeting white males. There absolutely conversations about protecting others for ID&E reasons. Higher performing people (with the data to back it up) are let go due to protecting lower performing (also with data) employees that fit an ID&E statistic.

I can tell you that I am in a role where these factors are actively discussed and play directly into decisions for ratings/reviews and potential layoffs.

It's kind of 2 fold right now. 1. You have the normal process of corporations pushing out older, higher compensated employees for younger that they feel will perform at a similar level. 2. You have all of the ID&E efforts going on that effectively protects anyone that is not a white male, regardless of performance. The combination makes job security and finding opportunities a challenge for white males aged 40-55, regardless of their ability to perform.

Great sale on some great games... too bad I have all of the ones I might have wanted.

I picked this up on steam and played about 90 minutes before I refunded it. As a FS fan (and Lies of P) the Dark Souls 2 feeling and comparison is spot on and just like DS2 I wanted to like it but just didn't. It has all of the ingredients, but for whatever reason it just doesn't fit right to my tastes.

Emergent event's are great... they're neither padding nor plotted. They're just there and make the world feel dynamic and alive. So honestly a bit of a different topic.

Calling out Witcher 2 & 3 on this as a great example of what to do vs what not. They integrated clues, witcher senses, etc... to help you find/hunt whatever it was in everything from main quests, side quests, and quick contracts.

Ironically, this is something I find fairly realistic. Look at what happened with Covid and with Global Warming. Regardless of where you fall politically it's universally challenging to understand the objective truth due to the amount of media manipulation & misinformation (Aside: "Don't look up" articulates this so well). So despite what the Grey Wardens knew to be an apocalyptic threat, the general population and nobility were basically shrugging their shoulders and greedily maneuvering to gain power.

Responding to the two above. Yes, quality is largely a thing here but also narrative value. That's what makes something have a little impact vs just being filler. Great points on Elden Ring (both the not-overwhelming part and the journal). As for side quests being at odds with the narrative, that depends. Ideally they should be able to deliver one of two things: 1 - Adding something to the main narrative or 2 - Be worthy of standing on it's own in a way that's good enough that you'd want to do it after completing the main game. I like to call back to Witcher 3 on this one because they really nailed the aspect of being a Witcher with the contracts board. The means of getting the quest from the board felt like a very in-world way of accepting the quest. They were almost always local to the village (no traveling to a remote corner of the world to deliver a love note). They were all "Witcher things" kill x monster that is doing evil things and get paid. They generally had a mini-story with a few ways of solving it. They fit just as well for living in the world after the main narrative as during. They weren't in your face pestering you to do them while you were doing the main quests (a la Cyberpunk/Far Cry 5 & 6).

That's actually kind of what I'm getting at. When do we consider something an actual side quest vs just something to do in the world. Hogwarts is an interesting topic in this regard because it was all over the place. It had the main quest, which was decent. The companion quests, which were excellent. A few side quests where an NPC gave you something to do which were honestly a mix of forgettable/annoying for me. Yes, it had item collection/puzzles identified on the map as "quests" but I don't really consider those things quests as much as just stuff to do in the world. One of the things that HW did well was make it fairly easy to distinguish between them because it was a game that for me, sort of dragged on, got a bit repetitive, and it's idea of increasing difficulty was just more bad guys at once or endlessly spawning bad guys. So it made it very easy for me to realize that I didn't care about searching for so & so's missing stones and ignore it.