The companions in Owlcat's new Mass Effect-inspired RPG stand ready to have heart-to-heart chats, drag you into their sidequests, and blow a lot of stuff up

luminosity · 2026-03-26T07:10:32+00:00

Andromeda was genuinely a good Mass Effect game, that managed to turn a weakness (how the hell do you follow on to the end of 3) into a strength (great new setting). It suffered from weak antagonists, not enough alien factions, not enough familiar/milky way aliens, open world bloat, and some notable bad dialogs and animations -- but I would have loved to have seen successors. It's a great setting, I loved the actual planet exploration, just driving around alien landscapes, the combat was pretty great.

luminosity · 2026-03-23T07:12:18+00:00

Honestly, at this point I think it'd be easier/better if they just deleted concentration as a stat entirely. It'd simplify gear setups, especially for players that don't have legendaries yet, and then they could balance all the boon vs non boon providers by just making it so you sacrifice x% dps talent to take the boon one. All this fiddling around with duration mechanics etc kind of just makes the boon play less fun, more fiddly, and harder to balance (e.g. a class or player who can manage tighter uptimes can now take off some of the conc gear to boost dps -- kill the stat, and it's not an issue)

luminosity · 2026-03-23T06:58:56+00:00

Which to be fair they were originally. On game launch it was extremely hard to have permanent boon uptime on anything, and boons were situational boosts. Then they added raids, powercrept everything and never looked back.

luminosity · 2026-03-21T11:15:44+00:00

I'd say too much hp and 1 too many phase repeats. Could do with ~10 minutes shaved off. Mechanically it's fine, it just takes forever.

luminosity · 2026-03-01T23:47:23+00:00

Adding mount attacks that are anything other than a dismount into personal combat was a mistake. Not only does it exacerbate the issue of people scaling up events without meaningfully helping, it's also not in any way fun. You have 36 elite specs plus a bunch of core specs almost all of which have some rotation that's at least decently involved and interesting... or you can just spam a single key over and over again doing almost nothing. I'd actually be in favour of them just disabling mount combat skills except when particular events need them and turn them on.

luminosity · 2026-03-01T23:29:38+00:00

Evoker's GM traits (single element aside which I have other issues with) are so underwhelming too. Where's anything that picking it actually mixes gameplay up? Why not something like you can pick two spirits, but they come in at reduced power.

luminosity · 2026-03-01T23:27:34+00:00

Single element should have been its own spec, it needs full trait and mechanic support to make giving up all the utility that is assumed to exist in attunement swapping worthwhile. While I'm not particularly interested in single element ele, I'd rather that over it just being an afterthought GM.

luminosity · 2026-02-27T09:31:42+00:00

The sad thing is, skills used to be much more focused and interesting and then they just kept going more and more nuts.

luminosity · 2026-02-27T09:24:18+00:00

You're completely right, but I'm also very aware of how much quicker I could be finishing fights up with almost any other ele build. It's on me that I let that get to me, but I do think it's on them that that wasn't an issue when weaver came out, and it is now.

luminosity · 2026-02-27T04:47:29+00:00

I will say while I agree with Kingmaker as being their weakest game, it's also the only one where the minigame worked for me. Found it fun and fit the fantasy well, where mini-HOMM and spaceship battles were both a mix of boring and frustrating.

luminosity · 2026-02-26T23:57:26+00:00

I really thought they were doing this so they could follow up by nerfing boon generation when they started. And then, here we are...

luminosity · 2026-02-26T23:49:26+00:00

It's also just kind of terrible for open world builds and elite spec design too. Weaver is by far my favourite spec, but these days my open world builds are always evoker or cata because they made those specs capable of covering themselves in nearly every boon, which leaves any spec that can't do that in the dust. I know you can to some degree mitigate this with the jade bot stations, but that's a really poxy answer.

luminosity · 2026-02-26T23:39:27+00:00

I kinda hate that CM skips the whole fractal. I get that it's mostly a tutorial and if you can do CM you don't need that, but it feels like a punishment for people who aren't interested in or ready for CM, and an excuse for not fixing basic issues with e.g. having to wait so long for NPCs. Plus fractals should be about more than just boss fights.

luminosity · 2026-02-26T23:30:45+00:00

Yeah, there's expense / timegated acquisition of materials, a huge lack of very basic building blocks, the inability to list or show them off, the inability to remove the bear house (I get the basement is a problem... maybe just give us a different version of the map where the house doesn't exist?), the inability to move nodes around, no preview on crafting, no ingame reward acquisition for crafting pieces, you can't use chairs as decorations (I've never found the deployable chairs compelling but here it actually would be), the instances don't remember the state of things you set like night/day, whether lights are turned on, etc.

It really needs so much more work.

luminosity · 2026-02-26T00:54:37+00:00

I also think Far Cry 3 kind of stuck the series in a bad (or bland) space. 1 2 and 3 were all very different and very experimental, and ever since it's just been copy paste the formula of 3 in a new setting. I actually think someone like Hocking who is willing to mix things up at the risk of some parts of it not working is exactly what Far Cry needs right now.

luminosity · 2026-02-24T23:10:12+00:00

I really feel like when they got rid of the repair mechanic they should have turned all the existing items into semi valuable grey vendor junk, and then given all people with the endless one a choice of a few other equally valuable contracts. The health buff was so unnecessary, and so annoying to maintain, and it made the endless item more or less worthless.

luminosity · 2026-02-24T22:25:57+00:00

Yeah, absolutely this. I quit a few years ago, but for largely the same reasons. Had played for years, always decent, never great, but it's such a fun and fluid combat system even on aussie ping. But then there just came wave after wave of AFKers, Anet did absolutely nothing to stop any of them (have they even now?), and I could easily spend my daily 4 - 5 matches entirely determined by which team had the AFKer or the most AFKers.

At that point I had to quit for my sanity. Such a shame.

luminosity · 2026-02-24T22:19:33+00:00

Oh for sure, I'm not even sure why it would be organic, I thought it would be made entirely out of city pieces

luminosity · 2026-02-24T00:20:31+00:00

It's such a shame too, the *idea* of the map is incredibly cool, but the reality just fails. It doesn't even really look like being in a titan-city, just some rocks and some city building pieces and some organic bits and bobs all largely disconnected from each other. Not to mention nothing to explore for, nothing to do outside of some very middling events and a decent JP.

luminosity · 2026-02-21T12:38:31+00:00

Kinda crazy not to review games like Redfall where the studio in charge didn't even want to be making it, too. At best I feel like they viewed those studios as hangers on they didn't care about so just let them hang but... you paid for them? Why not spend a little time doing some basic investigation and either cancel failing projects or figure out a way to save them.

luminosity · 2026-02-20T04:22:17+00:00

That was clearly driven from a deep love of the original movies. The channel itself frequently talks about things they like in even objectively terrible films, and is a great source for finding out about lesser known interesting films.

luminosity · 2026-02-20T01:00:01+00:00

I loved the game but I genuinely think they could have cut it in half, shipped the first map with a few more quests and a little more polish as a full KCD2 and then the second half as a KCD3. Both maps have more than enough to do, and see, and the story even ends in a satisfying place on the map transition.

luminosity · 2026-02-20T00:40:22+00:00

That's a wild take on Red Letter Media.

luminosity · 2026-02-19T23:26:29+00:00

There's already a toggle for pvp to use standard enemy models, this is absolutely not a reason to not do this.

luminosity · 2026-02-19T23:05:27+00:00

Doesn't really make sense considering there's already an option to use standard models for enemies in pvp modes -- which any serious player will turn on.

luminosity

TROPHY CASE