I simply don’t understand how you can shut down a studio right after they make an amazing game like this. I hope whatever number it changed in whatever spreadsheet was worth it.
It blew my fucking mind. They put out Ghostwire too, right? Two great new IPs for XBOX and theoretically more to come but nah, they didn‘t make CoD 420 so good riddance. Closing a performing, innovative studio. Mindboggling. I just wish and hope they all just go straight founding a new studio and stay as independent as possible.
I really wanted to like this game but I couldn’t get into the rhythm aspect. Shame as I enjoyed DDR and guitar hero back in the day. I couldn’t find the beat, I made it about 30 minutes in and dropped it. The music and art were also not my cup of tea. Seems like many other people really enjoyed it, but it didn’t click for me.
That’s totally fair and I don’t think you’re necessarily missing anything here if you bounce off of the combat. Still, it’s worth a shot even if you don’t typically like rhythm games. I wasn’t super thrilled about the combat initially but it grew on me pretty quickly once I found that beat.
If you didn’t try it the first time, you can enable a beat display. It’s toggled with a button on the controller (share button on the DS5 when on PC) and it will display a very explicit indicator along the bottom of the screen.
Truly an incredible game. One of the rare games where I am actually rocking my head to the beat the entire time. It was one of those games where I knew that playing it will give me a straight up good time
The world is dark - especially in the first game. There is slavery, racism, demons, and a few even darker topics. There are optional sex scenes, but they’re rather clean. One of the demon models is rather skimpy. But in the third game you can pick your time in the game while kids are watching to be mostly fun with bright colours and some fantasy fighting. That might be harder in the first.
There are similarities with Mass Effect, but they do play very differently. The dialog system is very similar in 2 and 3, as are the companion interactions in all three.
It’s been a while since I played, but I think the answer is mostly yes. There are sex scenes, but they’re pretty well-telegraphed ahead of time and I don’t think you can get into them by accident.
how long from startup to the next save point?
What’s a save point, to you? The game allows saving at any point (except maybe during combat?), but this may or may not be a satisfying experience to you. For the most satisfying experience you’d probably want to consider your camp the save point, and that can go a couple of hours between occurences, depending on the quest and how good you are (/the difficulty level).
Is it a lot like Mass Effect?
A very similar narrative style with the focus on your relation to the NPCs. Gameplay is very different. Much more about tactics and less about action. Personally I found that balance really awkward and not enjoyable: I’d rather lean more into the action like a Skyrim (or, indeed, ME) style game, or do tactics properly in a turn-based manner like BG3 or Lord of the Rings: Tactics. But I stuck it out for the story & characters which were great, though I couldn’t bring myself to keep going with the big DLC once I lost momentum thanks to finishing the main story, or to pick up either of the sequels.
Fantasy series with a very D&D-esque world and a combat system that feels a bit like an MMO or a turnbased tactics game. It’s real time with optional pausing, and you operate your whole party at once, with the ability to pause to give each of them precise orders, or to pre-program them with specific responses to situation.
I think it mainly became popular on the back of its characters. The story was good but nothing special, and personally I found the combat in Origins to be absolutely terrible. But building up your party, getting to know the characters and making decisions that affect them was amazing. At least on par in this respect with the original Mass Effect trilogy.
The first one is a love letter to the original Baldur’s Gate games. Tactical group combat, real time with pause, fantasy. It’s an original setting that tries to subvert some Tolkien ideas. It’s pretty good, though it does feel a little old-bioware. The story is a basic “global threat -> gather allies” with a touch of political intrigue. The romance is kind of badly done. It’s peak “give them gifts until sex happens”.
The second one suffered from being extremely rushed. Much asset reuse. It also made the game more “action-y” because I assume some souless suit said that kids don’t want tactics they want biff bam ACTION. The story tries to do something interesting in that it follows a single city over a long period of time as tensions rise. It’s not as bad as people say, but it’s very flawed. The romances are okay. Internet shitheads absolutely lost their minds that gay people exist and might mistakenly think you’re interested until you say no thanks.
This one also switched to the dialogue wheel instead of giving you informed choices about what you’d say. It does a subtle thing where your actions in cutscenes and stuff are informed by what style you often pick.
The third one barely holds on to the origins (pun intended). It really wants to be an action game like mass effect. That kind of sucks because we already have mass effect, and I wanted something different for my different game. The story is okay and has some good beats. The characters are really good. The romance is much improved. The gameplay is kind of okay. Mages are really nerfed despite the story saying they’re super powerful and dangerous. The world is big and has a lot of shallow quests. There’s a shit mobile game style “click a button and wait an hour” mechanic. You can mod that out. The story is also a "global threat -> gather power ". I bet critical analysis of the story is fascinating because a lot of it is kind of suspect, politically. But most gamers are like critically illiterate and probably didn’t think about it.
Fun aside: the first game has a “sex scene” where one of the character’s naked state is less revealing than her ridiculously revealing "armor ". The third game you can actually see nipples in the sex scenes, but I think they haven’t crossed the line to show a vag or erect dong (though I haven’t done all the romances). Lots of folks are still ashamed of bodies.
You can import saves from one game into the next. There are a lot of choices to make in all of them.
And that’s my off the cuff typed on my phone quick summary of the games.
Mages are really nerfed despite the story saying they’re super powerful and dangerous.
This is kinda selling mages in the setting short.
Magic in this setting is basically the same as it is in Warhammer 40k: mages get their power from an alternate dream dimension that is also where demons reside, they can spontaneously explode and/or summon demons if they’re not careful, and they’re heavily regulated/repressed. Rogue mages are hunted down and killed by Templars, and everyone else is mostly confined to wizard towers that double as prison camps.
It never comes across in gameplay, but mages and how they’re treated are major plot points in all three games.
That’s what I meant. In the story they’re super dangerous walking nuclear bombs. In the first game, it kind of lives up to it in the game play. You have a massive fireball (with knockdown!), blood magic shuts down the whole field, and more.
But by the third game, mages are more of a “control” class. If you want to actually do damage and kill monsters, you want to play a rogue. It’s extremely disappointing.
I wanted it to be more like dragon’s dogma where you summon meteors and tornadoes. Instead it’s like some ice cubes and a campfire.
I hope they bring back spells like Virulent Walking Bomb from the first games. That one would poison an enemy and make them explode when they died, and if any enemy nearby died to the explosion or within the next few seconds they’d explode too, and so on.
It wasn’t the best spell, but it fit the “mages are one misstep away from becoming eldritch abominations” narrative and damn did it make you feel powerful when the secondaries went off and it turned an entire room full of enemies into mist.
The second one suffered from being extremely rushed. Much asset reuse. It also made the game more “action-y” because I assume some souless suit said that kids don’t want tactics they want biff bam ACTION.
It also made every encounter consist of multiple waves, with enemy reinforcements popping into existence inside your party and rendering positioning nearly useless. It’s like they were going down a checklist of ways to make combat less tactical.
Opinions will differ, but generally people really like the first and/or third. The second was rushed, and it shows, mostly by a ton of reused assets and locations.
The first is more loved by hardcore or oldschool RPG fans. The third is more action oriented, generally a lot more colourful, and very much larger. Its combat is generally liked more than the first (except, again, by CRPG fans).
I’ll be a contrarian and throw in my vote for the second game - it’s rushed and flawed and the asset reuse is blatant to the point of being legendary, but the setting and story are the best and most original of these 3 games. Just being a hero of one single city instead of the entire world is surprisingly refreshing.
In general I’d say that 1 has the best combat/tone, 2 has the best setting/story, 3 has the best characters. I’ve heard that 3 can be quite enjoyable if you pretty much only do the main story and companion quests - but I wouldn’t know, I’m one of the poor fools who got stuck in the Hinterlands, and that mistake + the very underwhelming main story sapped my will to continue playing.
Honestly, they’re all at least decent. Which one is the best will vary drastically from person to person. Personally, I liked 1 the most. 2 was decent. 3 was… playable, but with some extreme flaws. 3 is the only one I never finished.
I mean I would assume so. I primarily played inquisition and origins on console and never actually played the second. I would assume there’s a modding community but don’t really know.
I played through the third recently, yes there are a few mods. The game isn’t very mod friendly so there’s not a ton there but I found like a dozen or so that were worth installing on nexus.
Game still kinda sucks but good enough for one play through if you liked the first (two)
bought hades 2 straight up without reviews and knowing it’s gonna be wonky early access, just because the dev has a history of honest and inspired banger games. 😎👍
keep in mind that most profiteering rats pile onto the biggest cash cow games. indie scene is better than ever these days
It’s not the cost. I’ve not pirated anything since Steam and GOG came along. It’s just that games nowadays want you to be online all the time, force you to open accounts you don’t want, try to sell you in game items (that’s a brilliant idea to get money from certain types of people, a bit like religion, do congratulations to whoever came up with that).
I want games to be single player playable, offline, start to finish. I’ll buy expansion packs if the game is worth it. It’s it too much to ask?
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