Senaste recensioner av SotiCoto

I'm changing my review.

Since the Sakurajima update this game has been basically unplayable. It feels like I'm constantly fighting just to try and get the game work without crashing. I've lost days of playtime because the game just straight up stopped being able to load worlds without instantly crashing to desktop. It is a bug-riddled unstable mess.

Seriously... the Sakurajima update is the worst thing that has happened to this game, as it barely ever crashed before that.

Dragon's Dogma 2 is a good game.
There. I said it.
I enjoy playing the game.

I do want to make a few things clear: It is NOT a perfect game. It isn't even as good as its predecessor, though admittedly I'm sure there will be more patches and expansions to go for this game before it reaches the end of its development lifecycle. It is a very flawed game that does some things very well and some things really badly.
BUT the insane hate it got from people at release and to some extent ever after is NOT warranted. The vast majority of it is ignorance from mewling casuals who can't be bothered to even pay attention to the game they're playing and then blame it for their own shortcomings.

So let's do a little breakdown, and don't construe my verbosity in the negatives section of having a more negative opinion. I just don't feel the need to wax lyrical about things that are done right.:

{ Positives }
+ : Another Dragon's Dogma game. That is worth a point unto itself. A lot of things like the save system haven't changed a whole lot since the first game, and I appreciate that.
+ : It has a lot of mods available for it already, some of which make huge differences to the gameplay. Always a plus.
+ : Good start. Engaging. Exciting. GRIFFIN.
+ : More Griffin. All the Griffin. I love the Griffin-riding. It is the best part of the game.
+ : It is bigger than the first game. Bigger map. More to explore.
+ : The new enemy designs are great. At least anything bigger than a Saurian is reasonably fun to fight.
+ : The Sphinx is awesome.
+ : Some of the side-quests are pretty nuanced and fun to do.
+ : The Visual Character Creation options are awesome.
+ : Vermund is pretty. Good place to start the game.

{ Negatives }
~ : NPC rendering is terrible in crowded locations. Utterly atrocious. You can actually jump onto an NPC by accident and have them appear out of thing air underneath you several seconds later because the game can only render a small number at a time. Crowded locations don't LOOK crowded, but you can tell they're crowded by how much the frame rate drops. Poor optimisation and all that.
~ : The game has serious issues with its graphical settings in general. The landscape looks sort of good, except for the pixel noise all over everything and shadows behaving very weirdly. It takes a lot of fiddling with the settings AND the addition of mods to make everything not look like a mottled mess. Like they tried to make everything too detailed, then attempted to cut corners in getting performance back.
~ : The main questline doesn't go anywhere. It starts fairly strong, but all of the sub-plots just end up abandoned as you hop from one to another, and then the ending feels really rushed. I guess we can blame the investors for that too.
~ : The combat is vastly worse than DD1's combat, especially against mobs of small enemies. It is far less responsive, far too much commitment to skill animations, especially given goblins can jump across space and time to interrupt you from a thousand miles away in an instant, which seriously destroys immersion. The consequence is that it relies heavily on just being higher levelled than the enemies you face, while they are uncharacteristically skilled... which is the opposite of how it should be.
~ : Spellcasting in particular has been shafted. We've only got half the spell slots, fewer than half the spells, no manual spell-aiming, no strong attack, and the vocation feature is just speeding up casting of spells that have been slowed down in advance, just to bring them back to neutral... and it doesn't even work on the spells that need it most. I've got mods to fix the casting speed issue, so there are two buttons I never ever use because they're utterly worthless, and meanwhile I can only use 3 or 4 spells (depending on if I'm Warfarer or pure Sorcerer).
~ : The entire Pawn / Build process has been massively dumbed down. In the original, the Vocations you played and the order you played them in would have permanent effects upon your attribute distribution and had to be planned around. DD2 did away with that, so your stats only depend on your current vocation. DD2 also replaced the complex Pawn Knowledge of the first game with a small handful of badges that can be easily tackled in a single playthrough. They've essentially removed any and all replayability just to make the game more accessible to idiots.
~ : There are serious Visibility issues. Some of them are due to the camera colliding with the terrain and being jerked around when it bumps into walls or other obstacles, sometimes making it impossible to see what is happening to your Arisen. Night time is also unrealistically dark, indistinguishable from being half a mile underground.


Anyways.... at least it is a far FAR better game than Baldur's Gate 3... but then so is almost every other game out there.

[DISCLAIMER]: If you've got the original Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, you really don't need to buy this as it is basically just the same game again. I'm recommending it only because the original was a good game and this is just the most recent version of it and is a TINY bit better... maybe.

This is just one of those cases like Skyrim where a good game got another release... but in this case the differences to the original are so minor as to be unnoticeable in most cases. About the only thing that really stands out so far is that map areas are no longer level-locked forever at the point you first enter them. They haven't done anything about the levelled loot issues with set items though.
Apparently there is a little extra endgame content as a DLC, but I've not got that far yet and I honestly couldn't care less about it.

So yeah: I "recommend" this because KoA:R is a good game and KoA:RR is basically a copy of it... but you don't need two copies.

Good story, good combat, LOADS of character build choices.
Particularly great for anyone who loved D&D 3.5, which the Pathfinder rules are derived from.
A far better IRPG than Baldur's Gate 3 in every possible way besides graphics.

It does represent a massive time investment though, particularly if you're aiming for 100% Completion. And towards the end things become a little unravelled and graphically unoptimised, causing unavoidable lag. That aside though, I had a good time with this one. Probably too much time, honestly. I'm ready to move on to other things.

I thought this was a Metal game.
If you're going to cause potential copyright trouble for streamers and video-makers by adding licensed music to the game, shouldn't it at least all be Metal?
I only like one of the tracks included, and that one track does not mesh well with the game, so there is literally no good reason for me to use this DLC at all. If I want to listen to Disturbed, I can just load up my playlist in Winamp.

I ain't even finished it yet, but I'm going to approve it right now.

The soundtrack rocks. Definite headbanging awesomeness.

Besides the tutorial interruptions, which are kinda unwelcome, the gameplay is mostly smooth. My issues with the reloading throwing me off are entirely a skill issue on my part. In fact I couldn't find anything actively wrong with this game that wasn't my own fault somehow... besides the tutorial thing.

Anyway... if you like listening to metal, either buy this game or watch someone else play it.
You could even watch me play it if you really want since I made a video of the first three stages... but I'm just plain bad at it, so you might want to watch someone better.

I will be completely honest here: This is a well-made game. It does what it sets out to do exceedingly well, especially given the small amount of HD space it takes up and the low cost.

BUT due to the very nature of the game I'm finding it stressful, and the aching of my body from being constantly on edge while playing is difficult to tolerate. What I'm saying is that the game is causing me physical pain.

As such I would only recommend it to specifically those who enjoy survival horror and / or roguelike games. Anyone who gets invested in their characters or progress in games would probably do well to give this a miss... as well as anyone easily disheartened by failure. This is a game that can bring about enjoyment, pain and depression in equal measure.
It is also worth noting that while this has controller support, it is kinda bad... and playing Mouse & WASD causes me severe RSI, which just added to the overall physical discomfort.

Plus despite my opinion of this game generally being a pained positive, I will note that the EULA and general tone the game takes towards the player is a little too sarcastic and antagonistic. Just because you're bigging up the "everyone dies eventually" angle is no reason to be mocking about it.

Anyway... yeah, I've said my bit.

Typical DLC content for a bad game. Released long after the game itself ceased to be relevant. Completely screwed up my 100% for a game I was glad to be done with forever.

A tiny microcosm add-on to the game world where everything happens in its own little pocket area beyond any sense or reason. Even Fallout 4 did better.
The plot is mostly as tedious as that of the main game... though if anything it railroads even harder with more pointlessly immortal quest NPCs and huge swathes of gameplay / story segregation.
Plus of course the game itself is still a bug-riddled mess that crashes on a regular basis and has graphical glitches, broken quests and messes galore. I just got used to having to restart the game every half hour or so since something would render it impossible to continue (or just CTD).

It gets maybe +1 point for providing a different ending to the game, but it is arguably a worse ending than most of the vanilla options.

But the "Somewhat Damaged" quest in particular can eat a bag of d!cks. -1000 points for that. Trying to jump on the horror game trend and ruining the only things that were still redeemable about this awful game in the process. What do you think this is? Resident Evil? You think I want to stumble about blindly in the dark without a light source, with the quest markers turned off, trying to deal with an enemy that is magically immune to all damage and quickhacks for no greater reason than "plot says so"? And the absolute toxic cherry on this cosmic sh!t-cake is that it was impossible to get past the memory at the end of the chapter. The game consistently CTD'd every single time, rendering that path of the DLC impossible to finish.

CDPR can go fŭck themselves up their collective arses with a chainsaw. One chainsaw. They all have to share it, no matter how clogged up with blood and sh!t it gets.

It is a bit pretentious, and very simple, but still a fun game to play.
Good humour. Interesting and efficient art style. Mostly dark-mode.

Objectively a better game than Baldur's Gate 3.

A Very Silly, Very Cute, Very Fluffy Game full of Cats, Doggos, Bunnies and other adorable animals.
You can put them on your head.
You can rub your face on them.
You can make them big and ride on them.
You can make donuts by giving a cat scritches so it will knead the dough.

Yeah, a few parts of it are kinda rough, a bit janky and unpolished... but it is thoroughly saccharine and does not take itself seriously, which makes it a good game in my books.

Objectively better than Baldur's Gate 3.