More specifics (Gaming)

by CyberKN , Oh no, Destiny 2 is bad, Monday, March 06, 2017, 18:47 (2823 days ago) @ CyberKN
edited by CyberKN, Monday, March 06, 2017, 19:09

Mechanics:

I mentioned in another post that I was getting tossed around a lot by enemies in this game; In retrospect, I just wasn't playing very smart. I was tackling challenges I just didn't have the tools for, or I had the tools but didn't know how to use them correctly. Also, it's frequently unwise to run up and start attacking a herd of house-sized dinosaur robots, without having some form of strategy first - who knew?

Probably my most memorable fight was with two semi-truck sized rhino-bots, who were flanked by giant emu-bots with deafness-inducing sonic cries. Also the rhino-bots where telekinetic, which quickly negated the "Ha ha, I'm up where you can't reach me!" defence strategy I had come up with.

Both these enemies had tons of components that add to their arsenal of abilities, but can be knocked off with the right tactics. I had just acquired a type of ammunition that was capable of emitting an AOE shock-wave after landing, specifically designed to remove said components.

I think I spent an hour on that one fight alone (dying and retrying multiple times) but boy was it satisfying to figure out! Also: totally optional, and not related to any missions.

I like the originality of the health system; rather than an infinite pool of regenerating health, it's finite, and you have to trigger the regeneration manually. When you run out, you either have to rely on potions or find and pick more medicinal plants. Considering how much medicine you've acquired is pretty critical when weighing whether or not you want to engage in a fight.

Learning how to properly use elemental damage was a big breakthrough for me, and I wish I'd paid more attention to it's usefulness sooner. It's not just that "Enemy X is weak to Damage Y". Rather, being set on fire or coated in ice is bad for pretty much everything, and it's the secondary effects of those statuses that are really useful.

Level Design:

The open-world feels impossibly dense and really expansive at the same time, which is really commendable given how many other games just have one or the other. The only time I felt tempted to use fast-travel was when an objectve was in an opposite corner of the map.

The game let's you toggle between a GPS-step-by-step style of waypoints, or a "here's where you need to go; figure it out" style; I only used the formet when getting a bit lost in a particuarily maze-like dungeon.

Story/Mood:

Like I said, it's a really neat and original sci-fi story, and the game managed to answer pretty much every question I had about how the world got to it's current state, which was the "big" question in my mind. Sidequests felt a little vanilla by comparison, perhaps because most had to do with issues that were much more mundane then "Why are there hostile animal robots everywhere, and where did they come from?"

There's a ton of characters I really like, and suddenly hearing Commander Zavala's VA was a really cool surprise. There might be a few too many characters overall, as I frequently found myself struggling to remember characters by name when they were mentioned in conversation.

I LOVE the dialog wheel conversation system in games. It's a way to ask the player "Would you like to know more about this piece of obscure lore?" without disrupting the flow of a conversation. I heard some complaints about voice acting and lip-sync before I played the game, but everything I saw/heard seemed at least passable.