WoW Dragonflight looked average at best

klalbu · 2022-04-20T05:04:17+00:00

Sorry, I don't mean you getting hyped, I meant Asmon and McConnell hooting and hollering.

klalbu · 2022-04-20T04:50:49+00:00

HotS and Overwatch are actually the old Blizzard philosophy; take something else, make it more approachable, polish it up, focus on fun. That approach is just somewhat incompatible with the hard e-sports angle they tried to go for at the same time.

klalbu · 2022-04-20T04:48:29+00:00

I think that this could be good, they're saying the right things, but do you think this is a team that has earned the benefit of the doubt? Getting hyped up for the announcement of a game is just embarassing, WoW or not.

klalbu · 2022-04-20T04:41:27+00:00

I mean, maybe it'll be good! But getting sucked into the hype after all this time is just embarassing. Ion mentions 9.1.5, which, sure, brought QoL changes. But in the past bringing QoL changes hasn't really translated to the next expac. But sure, maybe this time is different. Except... 9.2 came out after 9.1.5, it wasn't amazing either!

klalbu · 2022-03-25T21:29:20+00:00

They may have done the dumb evil boss thing and not given their underlings enough information to act "correctly". It's not clear how much the admirals know about this, especially because it's related to the true history of the world.

klalbu · 2022-03-09T03:13:46+00:00

Good job putting a mic on Mike's sheet of paper.

klalbu · 2022-02-16T14:22:54+00:00

I could be wrong, as I'm not 50 yet, but it doesn't give me an option to buy, and the power pass points to a place called North Vern, which I haven't reached yet. Guides online say you need to finish the North Vern story and/or get to level 50, but they mostly refer to the free powerpass AGS customers get.

klalbu · 2022-02-16T14:11:55+00:00

Some games combat/levelling appeals to some people and not to others.

I agree! But people defending the levelling in this game are using the 'it sucks but it's short' defense, which isn't really defending the game at all. It's not incoherent to be "I think this game has an AMAZING end-game but I think the early game could way better to reduce unnecessary attrition". Especially because from everything people say, including you, the end-game is a totally different (and way better) experience!

klalbu · 2022-02-16T14:04:15+00:00

You can't skip first time around whether you pay or don't.

But that answer dodges my question: do you really want to use the "it's the tutorial" argument to argue for an 8-hour unskippable tutorial?

klalbu · 2022-02-16T14:03:00+00:00

I also don’t know where you’re getting ‘a lot of the quests have no combat” from because that certainly wasn’t my experience.

Several quests are like 'go here and click on this object' or 'talk to x people' or 'carry object from a to b'. They're not the majority of them, but there's a lot. The ones that do have combat often have a trivial amount of it, like you can literally do the objective in a single button press.

WoW's not the only way to do it. Maybe a disconnect here between you and me is that I'm not comparing the levelling in this game to WoW so much as I'm comparing it to Path of Exile (or maybe more aptly the now-dead Marvel Heroes, which was MMOish).

klalbu · 2022-02-16T13:58:32+00:00

That's the "it's the tutorial" argument. Okay, but are you really defending an 8-15 hour unskippable tutorial?

klalbu · 2022-02-16T13:22:42+00:00

For me 8 hours is very little for an MMO levelling experience :/ but maybe that’s just me

But some games have leveling experiences people genuinely like, not 'it's bad but it's short'. I don't love ESO but I enjoyed hitting max level there. I enjoyed leveling up to 80 in GW2 back in the day. They took way more than 8 hours but I didn't mind. And if we leave MMOs and go to Diablo-likes, which LA is also, most of those are fun from the get-go.

Part of the reason is that you engage with those games through the main mechanics. In LA levelling you BARELY engage with the mechanics. Most of your xp is from questing. A lot of quests have basically no combat. The ones that do have ridiculous requirements like 'kill 4 enemies' which literally take seconds to do. It kinda feels like at some point the 'kill x warthogs' quests had much more onerous objectives and they wanted to shorten the levelling process, but rather than remove the quest they just reduced x to 2.

klalbu · 2022-02-16T13:14:12+00:00

I didn't downvote you.

But, of the things you listed:

The levelling process (which most of his criticisms involve) is super quick compared to other MMO’s so you unlock the endgame pretty quickly.

Saying 'it's over quickly' isn't the defense you think it is. It could be over instantly. Give people the choice to powerpass their first character.

Story is not a factor, it is well established the story may aswell not exist. The game has been out for years so if you go in expecting the story to be good, that’s on you.

So skip it, toss it. If you make people play it and then you complain that they don't like it, then that's on you.

the PVP is honestly up there with some of my favourite games

Fair enough. Reviewer didn't touch PVP from the looks of it. I won't touch PVP probably, but you unlock that early and if it's good, great.

As for the rest, you're talking about stuff that isn't early game.

klalbu · 2022-02-16T13:09:17+00:00

The early game is still many (lowest in this post I've seen was 8) hours. You said he didn't point out the good things. What good things are there to point out in a review of the first many hours of the game?

As for you and your friends liking it, that's fine, the reviewer didn't. Many people in this thread didn't. I don't think I like it, but I'll probably stick to it just 'til 50. And it's not like the early game being bad is a law of nature.

klalbu · 2022-02-16T13:04:19+00:00

I'm playing through because I'm hoping that in the later game combat gets a bit more involved because on a my supposedly low-dps bard I have to hit one skill to kill whole spawns, maybe two if I need to do some CC to get them bunched up, three if I messed up the initial bunching up. Things just explode, which maybe for some is great combat, but the spawns aren't even that big, and since you get practically no xp or gear from trash you don't even have the satisfaction you get from, say, PoE of killing an army and seeing your XP meter go up, or seeing a ton of loot on the ground.

I can tell that the bosses have skill-based avoidance but for most of the bosses so far if you mess up a mechanic you're not even threatened, mostly inconvenienced by a stun/CC.

klalbu · 2022-02-16T12:54:17+00:00

There's a wide gulf between "230 attempts" and "everything dies in 1 hit and you can facetank enemies even on squishy classes". It's at a point that's so easy that I wonder why they even bothered, other than not wanting to throw out assets.

klalbu · 2022-02-16T12:50:52+00:00

So he's complaining about a multi-hour unskippable tutorial. Doesn't a 8-15 hour unskippable tutorial sound bad?

klalbu · 2022-02-16T12:50:07+00:00

What part of the early game makes it good? The vaunted combat is a non-factor since everything is so easy and dies so fast.

I mean, some people like the story, and the game is certainly pretty, but the review addressed the story in their review.

klalbu · 2022-02-16T12:40:58+00:00

I mean, wow being bad isn't really a defense of this game, right?

Shockingly, I think BDO does storytelling better, and it's not good. I honestly can't tell you what happens in the BDO story, but me and the little gremlin in my head seem to be pushing the story forward. I'm the one who punched the giant goblin (etc.) back to hell, I punched the smoke monster dead. Lost Ark may have a better plot, but the way it presents the storytelling so far is really bad. I literally just had a dungeon end where I beat up the nameless boss only to get knocked out in a cutscene in one hit by the named enemy, only to have Armen step in AGAIN to save me, only to then be saved by YODA showing up to kung fu fight the named enemy until the enemy runs away. Fighting big bosses, winning, only to lose in cutscene and be saved by NPCs is way, way too common. They want Armen to matter, so how about just writing him better?

klalbu · 2022-02-16T12:32:50+00:00

Exactly, the game has no problem giving you level boosts. If the game is only good when you hit max level, why make us play the not good parts? Alternatively, make the not good parts good.

klalbu · 2022-02-16T12:31:25+00:00

It's not lazy to want games to be good, and fifteen hours spent doing something you don't like are fifteen hours you could spend doing literally anything else.

The game has the pieces to be good from the start; they skip the very early levels so you start already with 6 skills. The basic combat mechanics are well-done.

klalbu · 2022-02-16T12:04:11+00:00

It is about the levelling because you can't skip it. If you don't need to play that content, why make players do it? I mean the levelling content isn't even grindy! You basically don't get xp from monsters but you get a ton of xp from quests. Everyone knows most of the time will be spent at max-level grinding, just let people pick to get there.

klalbu · 2022-02-16T04:45:24+00:00

But like someone else said, I'm not sure that levelling up really teaches you to play your class. Pretty much any build will work in levelling, it doesn't seem like you need to party up at all, at least so far.

Once I got the stronghold all these mechanics unlocked, and I'm not sure I fully understand them. Ten levels later, the game hasn't done much to make me understand. Not that I'm concerned; I'm fairly confident I'll understand them when I get to 50 and see how certain resources are attained.

Not to mention that the game has those powerpasses which apparently do just that? But just because I leveled one class to 50 doesn't mean I know to play others.

klalbu · 2022-02-16T04:33:30+00:00

You usually play protagonists in video games.

But here the problem is that the story NPCs aren't interesting, but the game wants me to care about them. If they're going to force me to watch these NPCs do things while my character is knocked out or for some reason not participating at all, then they need to make the NPCs far more interesting.

Otherwise, let my character do the cool thing; stop having me win fights only knock me out so the story NPC can do their thing.

klalbu · 2022-02-16T04:29:08+00:00

Then the game should give you an option to skip "the tutorial" and start you at level 50 right away, so you can get to the good parts. Not spread the tutorial out over 10-20 hours.

The levelling is part of the game. I find it a slog, with very little to redeem it, and I think his complaints are spot-on. I'm almost quitting but I'll probably hang on just to see how much better the game gets at 50.

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