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The discussion earlier about best direct sequels led me to thinking about the worst #2 games in a franchise and that's a much tougher question. My personal answer would be Mercenaries 2 (or if you want to get old and really obscure, Asheron's Call 2), but I could see but I could see a popular case for Zelda 2 (I also remember a lot of griping about Dragon Age 2 but never played it myself).  Jezza of OZPOS posted:e: im in the wrong thread for this but i think the single funniest thing about the game was just switching to trevor and he'd just be passed out on a rock in the middle of nowhere or getting into an argument with a bus driver or whatever Zero_Grade has a new favorite as of 19:55 on Dec 2, 2023 |
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Dec 2, 2023 19:24
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| # ? Jun 6, 2024 00:57 |
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A lot of the GTAV humour didn’t land for me, but I still think about the scooter brother transition once in a while
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Dec 2, 2023 19:34
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Zero_Grade posted:The discussion earlier about best direct sequels led me to thinking about the worst #2 games in a franchise and that's a much tougher question. My personal answer would be Mercenaries 2 (or if you want to get old and really obscure, Asheron's Call 2), but I could see popular cases for Zelda 2 or Dragon Age 2. I actually give some praise to Zelda 2 for doing an interesting change in style before the 2D games really set the overhead view in stone. I can't really rank it in terms of gameplay though, it's tough enough that I gave up on it forever ages ago. I'd be there for either version of Mario Bros 2, though. The Japanese version is just an uninspired (and sometimes cheap) romhack, and the US version is just kind of meh in general, even if I like a lot of the enemies it brought over to the franchise. I can't really think of any later games in the main series that I like less - the NSMB got kind of uninspired, but I'd still rather play them in general.
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Dec 2, 2023 19:35
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Zelda 2 wasn't even meant to be a Zelda game for most of its development.
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Dec 2, 2023 19:36
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Honestly Dragon Age 2 is my favorite of the series these days, but it's so wildly different from 1 that I bounced off it hard the first time I played it. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 was such a flop that it killed the Ultimate Alliance series for the whole time the MCU was a juggernaut.
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Dec 2, 2023 19:50
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Zero_Grade posted:(I also remember a lot of griping about Dragon Age 2 but never played it myself). DA:2 had two major problems, one of them being the maps getting very samey very quickly. There was a stock "Cave" map, and you would travel to it for a quest that was outside of the city, you'd fight the monsters inside and take their loot, carry on with the quest, and then go back to the city. Then you'd get another quest, and part of the "travel" to that quest was the same cave map as before, but with a cave-in blocking one corner and a new opening in the other corner, but the same enemies/environment/etc. with one new path to walk down. You were blatantly being given Cave_1 and Cave_2, oftentimes back-to-back as you doing side quests. I think some of the side quests even outright used the exact same map, repopulated with enemies, to find an item that feels like you should've been able to find on your own, but the item/resource wouldn't exist until you talked to the questgiver. The other was enemy waves. You'd be fighting that group of spiders from the same Cave_1 map as before, kill them all, and then 5 more spiders would appear out of thin air. Nothing different about them, just more of the same things to fight. i remember walking around the city could incur a fight against random thieves/bandits, which would be a 2 to 3 wave fight, and they're supposed to just be random mooks robbing people in the back alleys. You also could never tell if a fight was going to have multiple waves. So you'd walk into a map you've already been to, to fight a group of enemies that you've already killed during the last quest, and any time you'd finish a fight, the game would hit a button that says "nuh-uh, do-over" and make you fight a second wave of the same enemies in the same cave and ugh.
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Dec 2, 2023 19:52
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Inspector Gesicht posted:Zelda 2 wasn't even meant to be a Zelda game for most of its development. Huh, I didn't remember that. No big surprise, I guess.
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Dec 2, 2023 19:53
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Splicer posted:How's the gear itself? Any cool effects or are they mainly just +numbers? There are some that are just +5% crit rate or whatever, but there are also some very useful ones that do things like extend the duration of status effects that character causes. The annoying thing is that each effect has 3 tiers and to get to tier 2 you need do a good bit of crafting, and to get to tier 3 you need to do a ton of crafting and get super lucky while gathering, as far as I can tell. There are also some like +15% wind resistance that I absolutely cannot fathom bothering with unless the post game content really takes things up a notch or seven. Like I said, you can just ignore them entirely and be fine.
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Dec 2, 2023 20:02
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bawk posted:
The waves really sucked because it was almost always trash mobs that could not effectively hurt you, that you could delete with an AOE attack. It really just meant you’d have to cast Trash Delete 3 times instead of once. And you’d have to wait for their “coming to the battle” animation to finish before you deleted them.
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Dec 2, 2023 20:21
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Byzantine posted:Honestly Dragon Age 2 is my favorite of the series these days, but it's so wildly different from 1 that I bounced off it hard the first time I played it. You know another BW sequel which was wildly different from the first one? Mass Effect 2. And yet it has always been and will probably always be the most popular ME game. DA2 meanwhile. even after all these years, is still fairly divisive. Sad. DA2 might be my favorite but it's kinda like MGS2 in that "favorite" does not mean "best." As a cohesive, well-made video game, MGS1 and DA Origins are way better. They're actually finished, for one thing. But as for DAO vs. DA2, the origins, the variety in dialogue and characterization choices, the branching paths in quests - DAO destroys DA2 and DAI in these areas. But in spite of all that, DA2 is my favorite because I like the gameplay way more. I like the characters a lot. The Qunari are far and away the most interesting and unique thing about the setting and DA2 gives them the most focus in any of the games. The Arishok is the best antagonist in any BioWare game, for sure. Someday we'll get DA Legendary Edition. Someday.
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Dec 2, 2023 20:22
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Splicer posted:How's the gear itself? Any cool effects or are they mainly just +numbers? Last I played all the equipment was linear. Replace the Level 3 stuff with the Level 4 stuff. They tried spicing it up with a gem system that was so complicated at launch that nobody bothered with it.
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Dec 2, 2023 20:24
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Byzantine posted:Honestly Dragon Age 2 is my favorite of the series these days, but it's so wildly different from 1 that I bounced off it hard the first time I played it. Ultimate Alliance 2 was so hosed from a fundamental level because the whole appeal of those games is making a team from a huge roster, and the dumbass Civil War storyline meant you only had half the roster at max for 90% of the game.
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Dec 2, 2023 21:01
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I hated Ultimate Alliance 3 but it’s hard to explain exactly why. It just played badly. I think enemies had too much health and it just didn’t feel satisfying.
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Dec 2, 2023 21:03
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Zero_Grade posted:The discussion earlier about best direct sequels led me to thinking about the worst #2 games in a franchise and that's a much tougher question. My personal answer would be Mercenaries 2 (or if you want to get old and really obscure, Asheron's Call 2), but I could see but I could see a popular case for Zelda 2 (I also remember a lot of griping about Dragon Age 2 but never played it myself). Mercenaries 2 was pretty good, wasn't it? Wasn't it just more more more of Mercenaries? Also Asheron's Call 2 was a weird game but after a couple years it became a sort of Diablo 2-like and was pretty fun!
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Dec 2, 2023 21:07
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Ugly In The Morning posted:I hated Ultimate Alliance 3 but it’s hard to explain exactly why. It just played badly. I think enemies had too much health and it just didn’t feel satisfying. I mostly remember it being really grindy. Benched characters didn't level up in the background like the old games, so it was annoying to try to experiment with your team. And there was like some side skill tree with its own currency? It got too fiddly with numbers and wasn't nearly as fun to just pick up and play as UA1 or the X-Men Legends games.
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Dec 2, 2023 21:19
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Deus Ex 2 and Devil May Cry 2 both were worse than the first, and had better sequels. I feel there were probably a bunch of games that made an awkward 2D-3D transition - Prince of Persia comes to mind if you consider Prince of Persia -> Prince of Persia 3D -> Sands of Time as part of the same franchise.
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Dec 2, 2023 21:24
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Crowetron posted:I mostly remember it being really grindy. Benched characters didn't level up in the background like the old games, so it was annoying to try to experiment with your team. And there was like some side skill tree with its own currency? It got too fiddly with numbers and wasn't nearly as fun to just pick up and play as UA1 or the X-Men Legends games. I had totally forgotten about the lack of an XP share, so you had to grind or characters would be useless. Also there were challenge levels you could enter when you found them in levels. You couldn’t exit them and go back to the level where you found them, you had to quit to the main menu and then continue. loving  choice right there.
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Dec 2, 2023 21:38
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Zero_Grade posted:the worst #2 games in a franchise Crackdown 2, man what a letdown. Felt like a mission pack for C1 with unfun missions at best.
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Dec 2, 2023 22:11
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NoneMoreNegative posted:Crackdown 2, man what a letdown. Felt like a mission pack for C1 with unfun missions at best. Oh man, I forgot about Crackdown 2. Take the novel idea of an over-the-top Judge Dredd with super powers game and turn it into a generic zombie slog. What an absolute mess. I never checked out Crackdown 3 but whatever it is, it's better than 2.
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Dec 2, 2023 22:16
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Pacman 2 managed to be the only good game in the Pacman franchise.
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Dec 2, 2023 22:20
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The Moon Monster posted:Pacman 2 managed to be the only good game in the Pacman franchise. Thats the one with the slingshot right
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Dec 2, 2023 22:21
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Playing Remnant 2 and the books lying around are super dumb because they are all way too long. This is a third person shooter, I'm not reading 10 pages of lore about some random character.
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Dec 2, 2023 22:22
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Baldur's Gate 2 is one of the best ever games, but you should not play it before you play Baldur's Gate 1, but Baldur's Gate 1 is terrible and should not be played.
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Dec 2, 2023 22:32
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FFXIV: Shadowbringers may be regarded and all, but this Ran'jit guy loving sucks. Every time he shows up its a 10 minute long scripted boss-fight that's by the numbers. There are no checkpoints with these things and they feel like a gimmick that goes out of hand.
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Dec 2, 2023 22:58
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Snake Maze posted:BG3 is fantastic but it's true that its inventory is weirdly clunky, with a lot of annoyances that have already been solved by older games in the genre. Stuff like each character having their own individual inventory, with their own individual weight limit, despite the fact that you can transfer items between characters or send them to the infinite camp storage any time, even mid-combat, so that the weight limit does literally nothing except force you to do some menuing now and then while looting. Apparently the newest BG3 patch addresses exactly this, lol.
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Dec 3, 2023 00:52
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The Moon Monster posted:I've been playing Chained Echoes which is a new indie jrpg that fixes a lot of decades old gripes with the genre. For example you start every fight fully healed so there's no reason to hold back on skills and such for "trash" enemies. That's not a particularly new innovation, it's been done a few times over the years; the first game that springs to mind that did it was Megaman Battle Network. A large reason why most games don't do it is because for any encounter to possibly pose any degree of threat or challenge it has to be capable of reducing you from full to 0 HP since damage doesn't last and there's no meaningful war of attrition in you vs. the dungeon. Which means a lot of the time enemies either wind up incredibly over tuned, or way too weak. Inspector Gesicht posted:FFXIV: Shadowbringers may be regarded and all, but this Ran'jit guy loving sucks. Every time he shows up its a 10 minute long scripted boss-fight that's by the numbers. There are no checkpoints with these things and they feel like a gimmick that goes out of hand. Shadowbringers' story was cool but, yeah. I think stormblood was where they really started going ham with the scripted boss battles and they suck, doubly so if you don't super care about whatever villain they're making you fight. I remember the first time Zenos was introduced, you have to fight him in this long rear end scripted fight where not only is he unkillable, but after a couple of minutes he does an instant kill attack on you to prove he's just that much of a badass. Most of the game's fanbase loving loved him. But like, I didn't find the fight interesting or hard at all and had the guy down to like half health and I had barely even gotten hit until he busted out the instakill move and so my takeaway was just like "This is lame, boring, and I don't get what the big deal it; this guy sucks." But I might as well have been saying we should murder the devs for how people took that.
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Dec 3, 2023 00:52
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Nuebot posted:Shadowbringers' story was cool but, yeah. I think stormblood was where they really started going ham with the scripted boss battles and they suck, doubly so if you don't super care about whatever villain they're making you fight. I remember the first time Zenos was introduced, you have to fight him in this long rear end scripted fight where not only is he unkillable, but after a couple of minutes he does an instant kill attack on you to prove he's just that much of a badass. Most of the game's fanbase loving loved him. But like, I didn't find the fight interesting or hard at all and had the guy down to like half health and I had barely even gotten hit until he busted out the instakill move and so my takeaway was just like "This is lame, boring, and I don't get what the big deal it; this guy sucks." But I might as well have been saying we should murder the devs for how people took that. They liked Zenos because he was a Hot Sad Boy who's very strongly implied to be inyo the player character romantically, and that's just exactly what FFXIV'a fanbase most adores. Ran'jit's actually better than Zenos on all fronts in terms of being a recurring boss character you plot-lose to, but he's a weird buff old guy, so it counts for nothing.
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Dec 3, 2023 01:20
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Nuebot posted:That's not a particularly new innovation, it's been done a few times over the years; the first game that springs to mind that did it was Megaman Battle Network. A large reason why most games don't do it is because for any encounter to possibly pose any degree of threat or challenge it has to be capable of reducing you from full to 0 HP since damage doesn't last and there's no meaningful war of attrition in you vs. the dungeon. Which means a lot of the time enemies either wind up incredibly over tuned, or way too weak. Which is exactly what happened in Battle Network, plus when they had one dungeon threaten you with limited healing as its gimmick, it became an infamous annoyance spike.
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Dec 3, 2023 01:21
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Dragging games down: Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance 1/2 got modern pc ports, but Champions of Norrath 1/2 haven't.
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Dec 3, 2023 02:02
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Zero_Grade posted:The discussion earlier about best direct sequels led me to thinking about the worst #2 games in a franchise and that's a much tougher question. My personal answer would be Mercenaries 2 (or if you want to get old and really obscure, Asheron's Call 2), but I could see but I could see a popular case for Zelda 2 (I also remember a lot of griping about Dragon Age 2 but never played it myself). Tales from the Borderlands? Hilarious, arguably both the best Borderlands game and the best Telltale game. New Tales from the Borderlands? Dogshit.
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Dec 3, 2023 02:21
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Zero_Grade posted:The discussion earlier about best direct sequels led me to thinking about the worst #2 games in a franchise and that's a much tougher question. My personal answer would be Mercenaries 2 (or if you want to get old and really obscure, Asheron's Call 2), but I could see but I could see a popular case for Zelda 2 (I also remember a lot of griping about Dragon Age 2 but never played it myself). Mercenaries 2 gave us this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEbE3fGfF-o It also had Peter Stormare (also Jennifer Hale and Phil LaMarr but that just means it's a video game with voice acting). It's definitely worse than the first one, though. Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction and Sniper Elite were two of my favorite PS2 games (Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, MGS3: Snake Eater, and GTA: San Andreas are the rest of the top 5, but I don't know how I'd actually rank them). Saints Row 2 and Just Cause 2 were both really good sequels that didn't take themselves too seriously most of the time. The ending of the Julius Little mission in SR2 was a real "am I the baddies?" moment, though. Yes, Julius blew you up so hard you turned into a lady, but drat, Playa. Just Cause 2 made para-gliding around really fun, the plot was basically "go blow up everything," and it had BOLO SANTOSI!
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Dec 3, 2023 02:25
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Caphi posted:Which is exactly what happened in Battle Network, plus when they had one dungeon threaten you with limited healing as its gimmick, it became an infamous annoyance spike. Didn't they ditch that from 2 onward? The first mmbn was like a test case for the series
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Dec 3, 2023 02:43
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Zelda 2 was the first game in the series I ever played so I had no idea that the game was doing it wrong or changing a ton of poo poo so I remember really liking it.
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Dec 3, 2023 04:12
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Zelda 2 seriously has some of the best-feeling controls for an action platformer across the entire NES, the game feels fluid and great to play (especially compared to something like OG Castlevania). It’s really a shame so much of it is sort of inscrutable.
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Dec 3, 2023 04:44
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NikkolasKing posted:
DA2 was the first real time party based RPG I'd played, so I played it 'wrong'. I played it pretty much as a hack'n'slash dating simulator and had a great time. I then watched my wife play it using strategy and the other party members abilities and was like 'whoa'. The arishok was fantastic, I kept going back to see if he had new dialogue after every quest. I was so pissed that I had to kill him halfway through the drat game. Didn't even get to take him on a date.
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Dec 3, 2023 05:10
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Tender Bender posted:Apparently the newest BG3 patch addresses exactly this, lol. What!? patch notes posted:While at camp, you can now access and manage the inventories of companions who aren't in your active party. Yes! This rules! This couldn't get any b-- patch notes posted:Boo will no longer take damage when thrown. YES!!!
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Dec 3, 2023 05:37
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Crowetron posted:Oh man, I forgot about Crackdown 2. Take the novel idea of an over-the-top Judge Dredd with super powers game and turn it into a generic zombie slog. What an absolute mess. I never checked out Crackdown 3 but whatever it is, it's better than 2. But it would of been loving RAD if it came out in 2010-2013.
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Dec 3, 2023 08:21
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Caphi posted:Which is exactly what happened in Battle Network, plus when they had one dungeon threaten you with limited healing as its gimmick, it became an infamous annoyance spike. I'd say the power plant is the low point of the series, but 4 goes some real poo poo places.
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Dec 3, 2023 08:23
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One of my biggest problems with Ran'jit in FFXIV, besides the fact that he's basically just some OP rando who only exists to shoehorn in some tension with no real buildup, is that he was obviously supposed to be a foil/rival for Thancred. But it's an MMO, and your character isn't Thancred, so he keeps having to be your character's problem to ultimately deal with. Even the part where you DO temporarily play as Thancred, all you're doing is flailing about trying to stall for time because only the WoL is allowed to take down the boss enemies, when a single player game would have had that be a big character defining moment for Thancred.
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Dec 3, 2023 10:43
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Every single solo battle duty is a travesty that brings the whole mmo down
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Dec 3, 2023 10:46
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