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Anonymous

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You played on the hardest difficulty and took your time. So, it's possible someone playing on Normal and trying to experience the story quickly could come up against a frustrating difficulty spike?
I suppose its possible? Although I'd assume that playing on a lower difficulty would make the game easier, so maybe it wouldn't make much of a difference.

For reference, I believe the idea you need these super orcs (as the reviews claim) is when you're doing defense missions and are attacked by increasingly higher-leved orcs, you want a decent amount of powerful defenders so you aren't overwhelmed. But that's the thing, I simply took over the enemy generals to solve that problem quickly. So as they came in to attack, I dominated them to bolster my defense. Also, some of the useful skills in the game are locked behind a quests and it's a good idea to do those quests (Shadow Domination comes to mind). I hit max level by Stage 3 of 10 in Act 4, so the game also throws tons of XP your way as well.

Generally in Act IV your biggest reason to want to level up is to recruit higher level orcs. Each siege battle pretty much game me a level of experience per siege so it went quickly. Orcs that you dominate can never exceed your own level. So the higher level you are, the higher level your orcs can be. There is also gems you can set on your gear to make this easier. For example, you have a Ring, and a slot for a gem. For the entire game I set it with a white gem, because in the ring slot, that would give levels to any orc I dominated (Up to my own level). I had the top tier gem in my ring slot by the end of the game and orcs would gain 5 levels when dominated.

So for example, If I'm Mr. Max level Talion at level 60, and I dominate a level 49 Captain, with the gem in my ring, that captain instantly levels to 54. If I dominate a level 57 Captain, he gets boosted to level 60. If he's 60 already, he stays 60. If (and this is the highest level I ran into) he's a level 65, then I have no way to dominate him at all and I simply kill him for phat lewt.

There are tough orcs out there, and some tough fights. However, I never felt that I was in a no-win situation, and the game is also designed with the idea you might lose from time to time, which creates interesting situations within the nemesis system. I actually lost a siege battle in Act IV and the jackass that killed me was promoted to Overlord. When I weakened the fortress and assembled a force to take it back, he comes out and makes a speech to the effect of: "That's the thing about Man-filth. You get rid of it once, and the stench comes back twice as strong!"

I gutted him like a fish.

During another siege, I got downed by an orc captain that had the "No Chance" trait, which means my "last chance" ability, where I cant to block a lethal blow to get back up didn't work. Just as the blade was falling, one of my captains burst in and stabbed the guy through the chest with a spear. "Can't let filth like that take you out, Bright Lord," he said. I promoted him to Warchief after I retook the fortress.

Good times.
 
Even the positive user reviews rallying against the complaints about the paid system said it was overly grindy.

Think you might just like open world grindy busywork.
 
Even the positive user reviews rallying against the complaints about the paid system said it was overly grindy.

Think you might just like open world grindy busywork.
I literally played through the final act without grinding anything. But, doesn't matter to me either way. I got my money's worth.
 
You played on the hardest difficulty and took your time. So, it's possible someone playing on Normal and trying to experience the story quickly could come up against a frustrating difficulty spike?
If true, this is a thing I would support. I'm getting tired of people who complain that they can't "binge watch" a game in a weekend (assuming the gameplay isn't artificially lengthened, that is).
Think you might just like open world grindy busywork.
Well, he did live in China for a while...

--Patrick
 
Even the positive user reviews rallying against the complaints about the paid system said it was overly grindy.

Think you might just like open world grindy busywork.
IMO there is no such thing as grinding. Either you enjoying playing the game or you don't. If it truly feels like a grind, maybe it's not the right game for you (and if the majority of the audience feels this way, it could just be poorly made).
 
IMO there is no such thing as grinding. Either you enjoying playing the game or you don't. If it truly feels like a grind, maybe it's not the right game for you (and if the majority of the audience feels this way, it could just be poorly made).
Mindless farming after finishing almost everything else just for the sake of being able to beat a game is 100% poorly made. As long as there are ways to accomplish other things at the same time, it's fine.
 
IMO there is no such thing as grinding. Either you enjoying playing the game or you don't. If it truly feels like a grind, maybe it's not the right game for you (and if the majority of the audience feels this way, it could just be poorly made).
I don't agree, you could like every part of a game except for some tedious bits. I've felt this way about a lot of RPGs in my time. I liked them, just wish there was less grinding.
 

figmentPez

Staff member
I suppose its possible? Although I'd assume that playing on a lower difficulty would make the game easier, so maybe it wouldn't make much of a difference.
That's assuming that the game is properly balanced*, and that WB didn't mandate where to target a difficulty spike. It could be that people rushing through games on Normal are also most likely to shell out for microtransactions. So Nightmare kept it's designed balance, while Normal got a nerf to it's drops to ensure that "casual" players who don't want to grind are incentivized to pay up.

*How could easier difficulty result in a harder game? If the "easier" orcs are lower level, and thus drop lower level gear, and thus it's harder to get what you need to progress further. You were playing on Nightmare, and thus you may have gotten a lot better drops than on an easier difficulty, if the loot tables weren't balanced properly.
 

figmentPez

Staff member
If true, this is a thing I would support. I'm getting tired of people who complain that they can't "binge watch" a game in a weekend (assuming the gameplay isn't artificially lengthened, that is).
Personally, I'm tired of games that overstay their welcome. Batman: Arkham Origins was a great example of this. More doesn't necessarily mean better. My problem wasn't all the stuff scattered all over the map, I don't mind wandering around collecting shit, if it's optional. My problem was how many trash fights they threw at the player going down linear corridors in-between actual events. What the hell was the point, besides padding? It just made it feel like an actual grind.

Shadow of Mordor was perfect. It had enough side things to do that I could have spent as much time in the world as I wanted, but getting through the main stuff never felt like I had to do everything to get there, nor did any mission feel like "holy shit, this is taking forever, I sure hope this this autosaved recently).

I don't mind shorter games. My love for Costume Quest rivals my love for any Final Fantasy game, in large part because it is a short game. The last time I played through FF7 there were a number of points where I went "oh, shit, I'd forgotten how much this part sucks" and I think almost everyone has one of those (even if not everyone chooses the same bit. I kinda liked chocobo racing...). There's no part of Costume Quest that feels like they should have dropped it to spend more time making the rest of the game better, not to me at least.


IMO there is no such thing as grinding. Either you enjoying playing the game or you don't. If it truly feels like a grind, maybe it's not the right game for you (and if the majority of the audience feels this way, it could just be poorly made).
There's a sort of fatigue that comes about not from boring gameplay, but from too much of the same thing with no break. For example, in the commentary on one of the Half Life games a developer talks about how they try to break up combat with exploration to keep from the player from getting burnt out. A game that's nothing but fight, fight, fight gets tedious for most people. The combat might be fantastic, but doing nothing but fighting can become a grind, no matter how good the combat is.

For me a large part of this is never feeling victorious, and it's one of the problems I'm having with Dead Island Riptide. Because you're constantly fighting zombies, no matter where you go (even more so than the first game), it never feels like I've finished fighting, even if I've finished a quest/mission. It's really stressful and demoralizing to never get a break. In the first game you could find paths that had lower zombie populations, driving in a car generally avoided fights, etc. Riptide is not like that. Every path has lots of zombies. Every time you're in a vehicle zombies chase after you and you have to deal with a crowd when you stop. It's pretty much the exact same combat, but it's unrelenting, and it's starting to be a pain the ass.
 
@Terrik, I'm glad to hear your review. I'll be sure to put the game on my Steam wishlist for a sale later with all the DLC that will assuredly come out over time! I really enjoyed the first game, and the Nemesis system in such too, and more than once ended up with a situation of "hmm... nobody to kill because I've dominated pretty much everybody already!" So I'm 100% on the idea of doing that as a method of progression. I can completely see how for "professional" game reviewers, they're used to tearing through a game main-quest-only and then hitting a wall, whereas if you go through it more like a "I want to finish this zone, THEN the next zone" you can have a very different experience.

As for grind in general, it exists. Well-designed games have little to none, less-well-designed ones have more.
Mindless farming after finishing almost everything else just for the sake of being able to beat a game is 100% poorly made. As long as there are ways to accomplish other things at the same time, it's fine.
I don't agree, you could like every part of a game except for some tedious bits. I've felt this way about a lot of RPGs in my time. I liked them, just wish there was less grinding.
I basically agree with both of you on grind. A good example is the end of FFV with jobs. You're good most of the game not grinding TOO much just to get jobs leveled up, but at the end you kind of have to spend some serious time if you want to master everything. It doesn't happen as part of doing all the sidequests. If it was better designed from back in the day, it would have happened to near-master everything as PART of the sidequests. So you could finish (or attempt to finish) the main quest without grinding the jobs, and be fine, but if you did the sidequests as well, then you could be near-master of all without much grind.
 
How it's dressed can play a part as well.
I mean, psychologically, I'm happier with a quest that is labeled "Find all 8 parts of the Staff of Kings" than I am with a quest that states "Go get me 8 rabid sugar glider pelts."

--Patrick
 
I felt the same way, but honestly it's only the huge budget AAA games industry from giant publishers that are going that way. Games like Golf Story, Tyranny, Hellblade, Pyre etc have proven to me that if the AAA game giants all collapsed, gaming would still be just fine, because there's still a lot of quality titles coming out of the smaller sectors.
The problem really is project bloat & area salaries. A lot of people are hung on the "EA couldn't fit enough lootboxes in!" line, but Visceral (which was in the Bay Area) was working on that game for 4 years at this point, and it would have been 6 years by the time it came out. It was Visceral's only product after Hardline in 2015, and at 70-ish people, EA was probably spending $10-15m keeping the studio lights on. And Motive Studios was helping them, so probably at least another 50 people.

So by today, the game's total development, which included no marketing, would have already been somewhere north of $50M with two more years to go and probably $50-60M in marketing coming up. So now we're at $120-$140M to get that game out the door. As a rule of thumb, publishers make around $20 per unit sold, because of how much they give to retailers and how game sales scale down in price so fast, so Visceral Star Wars wouldn't even break even without selling at least 6-7M units, unless they can re-monetize a lot.

By comparison, CDPR had 240 people working on The Witcher 3 over 3.5 years, but the average salary in Warsaw is waaaay less than that in the Bay Area, and their total cost making TW3 was $81M, including marketing, according to the studio leaders. They sold 6M units, and reputedly made ~$60M in profit on the game.

Essentially, big AAA games need to either make more than an average of $20 per unit, or they need to cut development costs/studio bloat, because otherwise they won't make any money.
 
Divinity: Original Sin 2 received a patch. Bugfixes, QoL improvements, rebalancing, etc. However, apparently it breaks more things than it fixes, such as by introducing new bugs, adding new annoying sound effects, not actually fixing bugs that the patch notes say were fixed, and so on. The new update is also apparently not compatible with a good chunk of mods.

I haven't had a chance to play and test the effect of this patch myself, but I'm seeing quite a few complaints on the DOS subreddit and on Steam. So, if you're planning on playing DOS2 in the near future... watch out.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Divinity: Original Sin 2 received a patch. Bugfixes, QoL improvements, rebalancing, etc. However, apparently it breaks more things than it fixes, such as by introducing new bugs, adding new annoying sound effects, not actually fixing bugs that the patch notes say were fixed, and so on. The new update is also apparently not compatible with a good chunk of mods.

I haven't had a chance to play and test the effect of this patch myself, but I'm seeing quite a few complaints on the DOS subreddit and on Steam. So, if you're planning on playing DOS2 in the near future... watch out.
Paging @GasBandit, @Dei, and @Terrik...

--Patrick
I think the others are kinda done with it for now, but I've been progressing my playthrough... and I played tonight before I noticed it was patched. While playing I did notice new sound effects and I also noticed some quests didn't progress as I expected them to, compared to my first playthrough... My "Gareth" questline seems to also be bugged out and stalled, and Gareth is super mad at me for some reason even though he's on the Lady Vengeance...

Anyway, things proceed apace. I didn't see anything in the patch notes about it, but I hope they fixed the bugs pertaining to the later part of act 2. Also I'm still not clear on why there are 7 ways to gain max source points when you only can upgrade twice and all the ways to do so are pretty much gated by level - as in, at the beginning, only one method is in your level range, and doing that levels you up enough for the second... and bam, you're maxed out. But there's still like 5 more higher level ways to increase source point max, and it does you no good. IMO, you should be able to get more source points. 3 is a stupid maximum. Six would be better, especially given how the early parts of each act pretty much seem to require you using up all your source points in every single battle until you level into the flow of things.
 
Me too. And that they ended the strike without getting royalties, calling a "$2100 bonus" a compromise win tells me everybody else did too.
I don't think they ever expected to get royalties. That's a big ask that's mostly there to be a bargaining chip.

The strike was mostly resolved months ago when they came to an agreement and changed a lot of the practices that had been industry standard for voice actors. Things like now having to reveal to an actor the game and role they are taking before negotiating a price, limits on how much they can be asked to strain their voice (no 10 hour sessions of death grunts) etc. I think it's just now all been finalized.
 
Cyberpunk 2077 will include online elements to ensure long-term success.

Hurm. Really don't like the way this sounds. After Witcher 3 and how CD Projekt Red treated their fanbase, I've seriously considered pre-ordering Cyberpunk 2077 based purely on the good faith they've built.

But this smells of microtransactions. I had hoped CD Projekt Red wouldn't fall prey to the current bad business models of bigger companies.
Online elements can mean lots of things. I wouldn't think the worst until they give something more specific.
 
Online elements can mean lots of things. I wouldn't think the worst until they give something more specific.
True. I'm still optimistic given the good faith they've built. I'm just hesitant. Looking at some older articles, they've mentioned some multiplayer elements before. Which, given the setting, wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing depending on the execution.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Cyberpunk 2077 will include online elements to ensure long-term success.

Hurm. Really don't like the way this sounds. After Witcher 3 and how CD Projekt Red treated their fanbase, I've seriously considered pre-ordering Cyberpunk 2077 based purely on the good faith they've built.

But this smells of microtransactions. I had hoped CD Projekt Red wouldn't fall prey to the current bad business models of bigger companies.
They want you to know they won't fuck it up.

 
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