I LOVED that first zone. That's what sold me. I thought I was being smart when I stopped playing the beta towards the end of the first zone, because I didn't want to spoil it for myself (I hate replaying content in MMOs -- it feels the same as when I'm grinding/farming). I was moderately glad to discover that the second zone also was fun, but disappointed that it lacked all the charming puzzle types that were in that first zone. Things were tougher, and I died a lot more, but everything was still felt achievable. Then the third zone... there was such a leap in difficulty that it was absurd. So I totally agree with you. TSW illustrates just how hard it is to come up with good content. They had a bunch of great ideas and all the real creativity and content originality, it seems, went into that first zone. Other games have had the same issues. That's why so many MMOs feel like more of the same, because they have their signature content overwhelmed by the mounds and mounds of the same old stuff.
I was just rereading what I had written, and then I remembered this article on Massively.com describing exactly what I described about getting stuck and frustrated. The author called it 'hitting a brick wall', and that's exactly how it felt to me. His brick wall came later than mine, but still, I realize from that that I wasn't the only person having this same problem with the game. Well, people are always complaining that MMOs coddle their players, making things too easy. I suppose that TSW may be a response to that complaint.
Well my decision about whether to get it really depends more on what friends say, but it's still useful information.
But most of what people said to get around the issues in TSW was "grind". You had to grind for stat points because the game didn't really have a system to respec, and it tended to be that to give you a good chance of getting points, you need to grind in areas to your level... which in TSW, if you got to the third area, meant dying once every two goddamn seconds. The game wasn't just hard. It was obnoxiously hard. You'd get into combat only for a second or third enemy to join in because you're fighting in such tight-knit spaces with patrolling and wandering enemies, or something would come out of nowhere and BOOM DEAD. It wasn't balanced. It wasn't fun. It's an MMO with areas that are too big, with difficulties all over the place and it just ended up being frustrating rather than interesting.
Well, I've bought Just Cause 2 and it's pretty great. Some times. When you're not playing hide and seek with villages where you only have to destroy, like, one gas tank, and you have no bloody idea where it could be, which is like 90% of the time. But it's not bad, that's not what I'm saying! Nonono! I mean, I've spent 1 hour of the 8 hours on missions; stronghold missions (which are all the same for everything ever), driving missions (which are like max. 4 minutes of your time), and one actual story mission (which was way harder than your average mission, and took probably 40 minutes of that 1 hour). Oh well, off to collect useless collectibles from tiny snow villages!
I have liked Just Cause 2 for a long time. The bosses are not as good as they could be, but wandering around blowing things up and fighting enemy soldiers can be quite fun. It is a damned shame the original Just Cause was unstable on both the PC and the Xbox 360. (I played the 360 version and it crashed every few minutes with no possible workarounds.) BTW, I checked. "Eidos has not released a patch for the PC or Xbox 360 versions of the game." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Cause_(video_game)
Just Cause 2 is really great, but I think it did need a bit of tweaking. I absolutely hate the police in it, because they can easily render the game unplayable with how persistent and destructive they can be. I also felt the map was a bit too big, with too much dead space between places and it could literally take a good number of minutes to cross it even in the fastest vehicles. Okay. Great is maybe the wrong word. But it was SO much fun when you got it right.
Yea, it's great when you're actually somewhere interesting. I've cleared some towns of resource boxes and fuel tanks, but it was tedious and boring, and every time you grapple too close to a soldier, they start shooting all over the place. When you got to a military base, it's fun for some time, till you've murdered every soldier with their own helicopter. Then it's just a hunt for that one fuel tank/resource box/turret you've missed, to complete the base.
Aye. It's not so much boring as a bit frustrating. But IIRC the game at least tells you what you're missing from any given location, which can help narrow it down. I didn't really like the Black Market aspect, either. Too expensive.
Have some of the same issues with Eador. It seems to take an eternity to get anything meaningful done. Anyone know if Fallen Enchantress is any good?
I got the new Fallen Enchantress expansion (Legendary Heroes). It's not drastically different from vanilla Fallen Enchantress. Mostly some tweaking of the graphics and gameplay mechanics, with some added content. I'd call it somewhere between okay and great. What would that be? Good? I'll go with good. Apparently, the first game in the series, War of Magic, was so bad that Stardock gave everybody who bought it Fallen Enchantress for free. I've been playing Eador also, and I kind of agree that it feels pretty "grindy". I've only played the tutorial shard, so maybe it picks up at some point.
I beat the tutorial shard, which wasn't too bad. The shard after it is worse since you aren't given the startup capital that the tutorial provides you with. You also aren't given the helpful estimates of your chances against enemy forces. So unless you are already familiar with all the enemies in the game and their relative strengths ( i.e. a militiaman is a tier 1 unit and so is an orc but a single vampire will rofl stomp your entire party) picking your fights can be a bit of a crap shoot. Most of this can be alleviated by experience though, it's just a really rough start. Edit: Apparently I was experiencing a glitch of some kind. Upon picking up the game again I found that the battle estimation feature worked just fine.
I, like a lot of BioShock Infinite pre-purchasers, got it for free. I bought Binding of Isaac, its DLC and its OST last night, as well as The Basement Collection. Now to wait for Super Meat Boy to go on flash/daily/vote.
That's kind of my experience with it. Legendary Heroes is definitely pretty improved over Fallen Enchantress (I skiped War of Magic, but. I mean. Everyone says that was terrible so.) It still feels a bit... idk. It's probably the best recent game in the fantasy 4x style game genre I've played but. It's not great? It feels like it can't decide between being like, civ and being a squad based tactical RPG thing. (which was the problem Fallen Enchantress vanilla had, too, and they have improved it but not. Perfectly.) Also I end up comparing it to Fall From Heaven since the lead developer of the two is the same, and. FfH is just. Significantly better, which kind of hurts it. (Also comparing it to Stardock's earlier 4x game, GalCiv 2, which again, it comes out unfavorably) I found it more playable than Eador, although that doesn't say that much about the quality because I never actually got passed the clunky UI to PLAY Eador. But, yeah. "Okay, I guess" is kind of my assessment of it. ETA: Also I did end up getting the secret world, mostly on the grounds of "friends play and like it". (I've been enjoying it so far--once I got it to stop crashing on me--but I'm nowhere near far enough to actually asssess the issues brought up here.)
Grabbed Wasteland Angel for €2.49(75% discount). Seemed like a decent price for some mindless topdown vehicle shooting action fun. Not featured anywhere prominent, had to dig through the catalogue to find it.
