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I've now played this game for around 25 hours and I'm about to quit it entirely, which I've never done with a PB game. Not even Gothic 3 despite the fact that it corrupted my savegames twice or more around launch time. I love Gothic, 2 the most, even 3 to a degree. I already found the Risen series mostly boring and their games steadily decreasing in the quality that to me made Gothic as great as it is. ELEX now seems to have nothing left but interesting world building and a few gritty remarks here and there. There is no character in the world I care for. They all are either entirely uninteresting or simply dicks (or both). I don't care much for the story either, doesn't drag me in nor is it particular interesting. With the expansion of their game worlds, PB lost the control over authoring these worlds and make them as intense and immersive as they did in the first Gothic games. They already struggled there with G3, but since that one was never really a finished product and is just playable due to the CP I'm not so sure if they would've managed to make it. It still felt more directed as Elex. Risen went back to be rather tight and small in comparison, and now they think they got their tech in place without unwanted savegame destruction and can create a huge world, but apparently they can't. Elex is in so many ways amateurish in it's execution that it kind of brings back memories of "AA" games. Their deliberate choice (at least I've read that in an interview somewhere) to keep the team small seems from my perspective as a wrong choice. Beyond the writing and setting choices, there are many things that simple manpower could've solved, such as proper facial rigging and dialogue animation. It's wooden and unimaginative. Now PB never stood out in that area, BUT - and I find that quite interesting - especially G1 and 2 where most animations did not came out of an (badly controlled) automated system but were build by hand it gave the games a special character. I just started G2 the other day and even compared to what would've been possible that time they aren't technically *good* (under the presumtion to achieve "realistic animation") but they had their very own handwriting which - once used to - added to the overall atmosphere of the game world. Since Risen it just looks generic and therefore boring. That handwriting is lost. That is also true for the story as such, which seems to suffer under the amount of characters and places. It's a size issue too. So the mix of bad authoring in terms of technicalities plus bland and unimaginative characters/story makes the mess complete. I used to like the gritty/sarkastic-but-child-friendly writing style. It was refreshing, especially in G1/2 which are imo the best example of a *German* game. 95% of the time German translation and/or VO is just the worst. For the Gothic series though they chose perfect VOs. The unnamed hero in G2 is capable of being mostly a cynical but still has the ability to offer some kind of believable serious tone. Never happend again after they switched. Risen was particular annoying. That might be less interesting here since most of you probably play it in english. And from what I gathered in Elex that could even be the better choice, which is even more annyoing. I might try to switch to english if I decide to continue. Now all that aside the game itself is horrible lacking. Combat is a chore and very unrewarding. XP for monsters is totally off (I know there is a skill to raise that, I have no faith that it actually is good though) and the feeling is horribly wooden without much pleasure. The world is great and invitens pleasently for exploration, but the game dynamics constantly undermine that. I've been to so many locations now where I beat "half the cave" and then ran into some obstacle. Either I couldnt crack the code/lockpick the chest or couldn't defeat that last enemy. Thats another part of what I mentioned above in terms of bad authoring. The game has no guidance in terms of enemy placing. It doesn't know what it wants to be. It offers basically an open world, with the PB typical barriers, but untypically no guidance there. You run into unkillable enemies every 2 meters and either exploit the hell out of the game or go away. That is mostly unsatisfying. Especially since I chose ranged combat, so dependency on ammunition (why wouldn't I though, its a scifi game, lazers!) And of course all the "small" issues. The awful interface (why. the. gently caress. do I have 100 1-row categories but as soon as I want to sell all the poo poo I only have 3? Seriously. Why? Thats a major point of all PB games, unlimited inventory. They never screwed up as much as they did in Elex. Even the 1-row inventory of G1 was more intuitive) not to speak of its ugly, bland design. The general movement, the really horrible double-tap implementation for rolling (should I try playing it with a controller?) The often horrible post processing volumes that turn a pretty nice landscape into a milky scene of generic "this is what post-apocalyptic looks like in my stereotypical driven mind"-poo poo. Why is there just a stupid radar instead of an actual minimap? What is with all the abrupt camera and movement? Do they not know bézier curves?  There are so many questions. PB consists of many veteran devs but it doesnt show. The world itself is tremendously great, as I said, it really invites for exploration. There, PB did not disappoint in making it interesting. Some quests are really nice, like the one with Rat from the Outlaw camp. But mostly it seems like a disconnected mess.
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Nov 17, 2017 23:53
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 09:41 |
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