Writing this having finished Act 1 on a fully levelled barbarian.
I played 100 of hours of SWTOR, and it reminds me strongly of that game.
One main questline you follow through major hubs, and lots of side quests & dungeons & “activities” in the zones. You finish one zone’s stuff, then move onto the next. And of course lots of things to complete in a checklist manner (explore all areas, find all waypoints, complete all challenges, gain renown). Like SWTOR, the purpose of the “booster packs” is obvious, it’s to get you to endgame faster, unlike the regular people who grind through each zone to be able to go to the next.
Main positives:
- I literally crashed only once (froze during a quest dialogue). The game is well engineered and just works well.
- The graphics are pretty, though you do need a solid GPU to enjoy them on max setting.
- Music is absolutely great and beautiful. Fits the biomes real well. The voice acting is solid too.
- The game feels like 70-100EUR/USD. It’s like an MMO in terms of content. I can imagine spending 100+ hours on this game to complete it.
Negatives:
- Quite simple. All the negatives are the same negatives as a theme park MMO. It’s not the deep game that non-MMOs or D2 were. It’s pretty shallow in terms of gameplay, it’s very casual oriented. The combat is basically using 3-4 abilities max, and enemies get destroyed pretty easily (couple exceptions like Den Mother, but nothing Dark Souls crazy). It’s pretty much a very casual relative shallow grind to end game. Lots of the gameplay and stuff you do is repetitive, kind of the cheap dopamine fix you get in theme park MMOs. But it’s fairly enjoyable. It’s just not mind blowing to me like Elden Ring exploration, atmosphere, and difficulty was.
- The Story: I had high expectations for the story, based on the initial cutscene of the game. I guess I shouldn’t have. Besides the great first 15 min introduction in the game, I felt the story and characters were on the level of Warcraft. It’s very “good vs evil” cookie cutter story with some cringe moments, pretty much always about “evil corrupted character and turned him to zombie or demon”. I’m hoping the following Acts will be interesting though. I do like the dynamic between Lilith/Inarius in terms of factions. I just don’t expect it to end in a nuanced way (but I wish I could be surprised!)
Conclusion:
I will not buy this on day 1. I would like to see them polish the game and add new content, make it more interesting. I will buy this 6 months in. But I believe the player base at large can play this game on day 1. Unlike people saying they should delay this, I believe it’s a ready game that will provide lots of content on release like SWTOR. I just hope they don’t have a SWTOR event where the end game is found to be not ready, and 1 million players who rushed through the game find themselves doing nothing. (I initially thought the game needed to be delayed and upon sleeping on it, I recanted my views).
Thoughts?