Author: Jaime Wolf  <q2b6>    200.77.198.60 Use this link if you want to link to this message and its entire thread of discussion. Post a Msg
Date: 9/12/2024 7:09:42 PM
Subject: RE: One year anniversary...

I can't speak on Starfield. I played a whole 30 minutes of it and quit after the 30th loading screen.

I wasn't a big fan of how combat works in Space Marine 2, especially the focus on melee and them doing the whole Ultramarine/Primaris thing. You can't even take a couple of hits from a bunch of shitty hormagaunts before your HP bar disintegrates and you need to spam melee stuns plus pistol shots to farm some more of that delicious paper thin armor that barely does anything. I get the challenge of turning a table top game into an TPP action game but damn, even a godawful game like Darktide understood that the shooty part of the space marine faction is just as important as the stabby part.

Besides that, I agree, it feels as if they were trying for a character action style game but ended up with a very sloppy version of the same. The parry system feels really off in many ways, the chief offender being you trying to parry one of the big nid warriors (Because as the player, you would of course focus on the bigger enemy with the gigantic blue circle on it) and having your parry eaten up by one of the hormagaunts swarming you, thus forcing you to get hit by the big guy due to not being able to parry anymore because there's a parry cooldown. (Which the game never tells you about)

The load times being bad for the co-op portions is just the multiplayer lobby taking a good ol' shit-in-the-bed. The game is actually trying to connect to everyone but instead just hangs during the briefing screen 'til it times out and eventually boots you back to the hub area. You could hand wave away with, "oh it's a new game and it has a lot of players so the servers are struggling" but isn't it funny how this keeps happening to every single big budget co-op game coming out lately? Even though there's plenty of providers out there that could easily serve the 120k pc players + console plebs because of course this game has shitty, broken crossplay with them?

I could see it as a solid 7/10, not the 10/10s it's been getting across the board.

Anyway, I guess the point of this post is to say fuck Games Workshop. They probably didn't have anything to do with this game but fuck 'em anyway.

About Hogwarts Legacy, hit the nail in the head: It's 100% for Potter fans which is why it had gangbuster sales even when faced with the big bad Twitter cancellation boogeyman that never seems to exist outside of Twitter and a couple of comically unhinged people's heads. Looking at it in hindsight, it did have the unusual problem of being a game targeted to potterheads, who range anywhere from 6 year old kids to literal Egyptian mummies. You have to take a really broad, generic approach in order to engage as many of them as possible and I do feel "generic" would my #1 descriptor for Hogwarts. Personally I didn't finish it but then again I don't finish the majority of open world games I start, I did however appreciate the great artistry that went into it.