Recent reviews by femoto

I haven't played any of the Pillars of Eternity games before playing Avowed, but so far, I'm really enjoying my time with this game. I am really surprised that almost all I'm seeing about this game online is negativity and hate, but the Steam review score doesn't really reflect that. We're dealing with a VERY vocal minority, it seems. I don't really understand why Avowed keeps being compared to Skyrim. Yes, they're both primarily first person Action RPGs and some inspiration has obviously been taken from The Elder Scrolls, but Obsidian has never pretended that this would be the 'Elder Scrolls killer', so I don't quite get where people got those expectations from.

I'm still in the first region of the game, but I'm having a great time with it. The performance is acceptable on my system (RTX 4070 Super, R7 7800X3D, 32 GB RAM), but it could definitely be a lot better. I don't like having to use DLSS to get a decent enough framerate. The game does look pretty though, and I dig the art style. Lots of people criticise the writing, but I do enjoy learning about the world's lore, especially since this is my first game in the PoE universe. The addition of the history and lore menu, which can be used to read up on relevant lore during a conversation, really helps with this. I've read mixed opinions about the combat, but it's a ton of fun for me. The movement system in Avowed is probably one of the most responsive-feeling I've seen in a game like this. A point of critique I absolutely agree with is how static and 'dead' the settlements feel. Everyone is just standing around, making them feel more like movie sets with lots of extras than an actual lived-in town. I understand that implementing path-finding systems is challenging, but there could at least be waypoints placed around settlements, that the NPCs can walk around between.

TL;DR: A fun and interesting game, that should be compared less to Skyrim, but could absolutely be improved upon in many places. However, it's not worth 70€. I reckon a better price would be somewhere around 40€.

Tried this game with some friends. We faced a couple of issues that seriously hindered our enjoyment of the game.

The first thing we noticed was that the mouse sensitivity settings didn't work properly. The mouse was suddenly way faster than it was in the lobby when we first set it up. This is only a small issue and not that big of a deal. What was a big deal however was the incredibly buggy audio. Not only did the audio mode setting (mono, stereo, surround etc.) seemingly not actually change the audio mode, but the audio itself was clipping so much that it was often impossible to tell where a sound was coming from. The clipping actually got so bad that it started to hurt my ears. This was especially bad when multiple people were talking at once via the in-game voice chat.

Another thing we noticed was that the monster AI had trouble getting around terrain. We actually managed to get it stuck, simply by baiting it up the stairs. It was completely unable to move until the player it was following jumped down from the stairs. Lastly, the UI can be somewhat unintuitive. After finishing the first level, we were presented with a button that simply read "Exit". It's not entirely clear what this means, as it could be mistaken to mean something along the lines of "exit the current level and continue with the next", like some of us thought initially.

But honestly, after these issues are ironed out, I can genuinely see this becoming a fun game to play with friends. I've seen the audio issues reported multiple times by other people. Fixing those should definitely be a priority. In its current state however, I can't recommend this game.

I was severely disappointed by what they've done with my favourite video game series. This game is devoid of so much that made me fall in love with the previous entries in the series. I don't know who the target audience of this game is supposed to be, but it's certainly not the original Dragon Age fan base.

There's this blatant disregard for any world state players may have created with their own decisions throughout the series and for much of previously established lore. One of the locations this game offers is Minrathous, the capital city of the Tevinter Imperium. The prior games stated that the Tevinter Imperium, as it is, only functions because of the hard work of their many slaves. Yet in Veilguard you see none of this. Minorities like elves, that are frequently enslaved, just freely roam around the streets, getting treated like any other group, and everyone is generally super friendly. It contrasts heavily to the dark fantasy world that especially DA: Origins built up. And you see these kinds of stark contrasts everywhere in the Veilguard. It feels like they were trying to simply remove anything that people may find offensive, causing it to feel like a watered-down, family-friendly version of Dragon Age. Also, one of the biggest plot points at the end of DA: Inquisition was the choice of the new Divine and how this decision can completely reform the Chantry. This isn't even a decision you can import into the Veilguard and the Andrastian Chantry barely gets mentioned at all.

Unlike so many others, I wasn't particularly bothered by this weird new art style they were going for and its action-game-oriented combat when I started playing. I've even seen many people who've played the older games prefer this new approach to combat. But any potential improvements over the old games are overshadowed by the poor dialogue writing that often makes it hard to take its story seriously. The game has a vision for who your character is supposed to be and how they talk and behave, while pretending to give you the options to role-play as whoever you want to be. There are very few moments where you can deviate from this set personality. Where in previous DA games, you may have dialogue options to be friendly, neutral, inquisitive, or mean, the Veilguard rarely gives you the option to be anything but friendly. Even the more 'mean' dialogue options are still very mild. Regardless of what responses you pick when prompted, your character still behaves like an excessively friendly and caring person outside of dialogue prompts.

That said, there are some positives that I would like to highlight. I thought that the way the game handles the journal/quest log was very well done. It offers great recaps of both the main story and side quests. While the new art style is quite controversial, you can't deny that Veilguard's graphics are pretty, especially its lighting, and the photo mode is good. The main story is still quite interesting, and while I haven't finished it yet, I want to see where it goes. This game also reveals some very interesting things about the past of the elves and dwarves. Some of the initial romance scenes are very cute and feel authentic, at least for Neve and Harding.


TLDR: The Bioware we loved is sadly not 'back'.

Despite the game literally being exclusively about cats, YOU CANNOT PET THEM!!11!1! This is utterly unacceptable!

Very low frame rate and high input latency, even on the lowest graphics settings with NVIDIA Reflex enabled and DLSS on the performance setting, make this game unplayable for me. I understand that the developers faced many difficulties during development and I wish them nothing but success, but sadly, I can't recommend this game in its current state. I hope they fix these issues.

Banning the entire Linux playerbase from playing the game simply because Linux is more 'open' and could technically be used to facilitate cheating is stupid. I've never heard of someone switching to Linux specifically to cheat in this game. The Linux cheating tools I've found in my own research are barely still maintained and don't seem to work that well according to the developers themselves. Until I see some statistics that prove that there is an actual problem with cheaters on Linux that justifies this action, my negative review stays up.

I quite liked this game, although it certainly isn't for everyone. You have to be fine with mainly just walking. The gameplay isn't the focus, it's the relationship between the two main characters. I thought it was a great game to play on the steam deck (with headphones). It's only about 4 to 5 hours long if you're not a completionist, but it felt longer than that to me. Maybe because of all the slow walking :) The story is genuinely interesting though, so it was worth it.

For some reason, there didn't seem to be as big a buzz about this game as the first Life is Strange game. Because of this, I went in with lowered expectations. I was VERY pleasantly surprised. True Colors has some of the most likeable and most "real" characters I've ever seen in a game, especially Alex, the protagonist. This is possibly the perfect game for empaths. Made me quite emotional on many occasions. Out of all LiS games I've played (LiS 1 (haven't played Before the Storm yet), The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit, and about half of LiS 2) I ended up liking this game the most.

More than worth its price. Played it with friends and haven't laughed this hard in a while.

I've been following this game for a while prior to its release. It has certainly lived up to my expectations. You can tell it's a passion project. The attention to detail is insane. Where most other city builders only allow you to build grids, Manor Lords gives you the option of freely drawing up the borders of burgage plots and fields, which are then dynamically populated with additional building extensions (which can be used for farming, producing clothing, beer, arms and armour etc.) depending on the size of the plot. Towns look way more natural this way, Something I love to do is to observe the construction process of the different buildings. It's oddly satisfying. The game is still missing a lot of features but already offers loads of content and polish, and I'm confident in the developers' plans for it.