Droog White Smile
Educated
I love the art direction, the writing and the superb voice acting with regional British accents, the beautiful soundtrack, but there's so many things wrong with this game.
1. First of all, the game encourages save-reload. How so? All loot and quest rewards are randomized. Just like DivDiv it tries to imitate Diablo's item system. But the thing is Diablo had randomized loot because the loot was infinite, whereas in Div2 enemies don't respawn and dungeons never reset. Adding to the problem is the fact that everything is heavily randomized, i.e. the same chest can give you a heroic item or... a tomato on the next load. Even unique rewards have random stats, so it's pretty much mandatory to save before turning in a quest if you want a good item. Suffice to say, the only way to get really good items is by abusing the system with a lot of save-reloading.
2. The game has no level scaling. Yay? Nay! It has damage scaling instead. That is, the amount of damage you can do and receive is scaled to your level. You'll be barely able to scratch enemies 5 levels above you whereas you can strip naked in front of the enemies 5 levels below you and they'll still be doing 0 damage. Unless you've already played through the game at least once or follow a walkthrough you're in for a lot of difficulty spikes, because while the game is supposedly free roam you still have to follow a specific path that the designers had in mind.
3. This also means that the game has the worst form of grinding. You have to find every nook and cranny, kill all mobs and do all possible quests to be able to survive the next area. Don't like the flying fortresses? Too bad, no Hall of Echoes for you.
4. XP scaling. Again, the game encourages that you read a walkthrough. The XP that you gain from killing mobs is scaled to your level, if you're too high level you'll be getting very few XP, sometimes just 1XP per kill. On the other hand, if you're low level or the same level as the mobs, you'll be getting up to 2-3k XP per kill. This means that if don't do a specific area at a specific level, you'll miss out on a lot of XP. And this is a big problem, since the mobs don't respawn. Additionally, the XP you get from doing quests doesn't scale, so the game encourages you to not do the quests until you're absolutely sure you've killed all the mobs you could take on in the area.
Anyway, yeah. I've finally reached the Hall of Echoes with my second character at lvl 31, but I die there in a few seconds. The walkthroughs suggest that I should grind through the flying fortresses (5 or 6 huge but almost absolutely identical dungeons) until I'm about lvl 34 to survive the Hall of Echoes and finally see the infamous ending. How about no? Fuck you, Larian, and fuck your game.
1. First of all, the game encourages save-reload. How so? All loot and quest rewards are randomized. Just like DivDiv it tries to imitate Diablo's item system. But the thing is Diablo had randomized loot because the loot was infinite, whereas in Div2 enemies don't respawn and dungeons never reset. Adding to the problem is the fact that everything is heavily randomized, i.e. the same chest can give you a heroic item or... a tomato on the next load. Even unique rewards have random stats, so it's pretty much mandatory to save before turning in a quest if you want a good item. Suffice to say, the only way to get really good items is by abusing the system with a lot of save-reloading.
2. The game has no level scaling. Yay? Nay! It has damage scaling instead. That is, the amount of damage you can do and receive is scaled to your level. You'll be barely able to scratch enemies 5 levels above you whereas you can strip naked in front of the enemies 5 levels below you and they'll still be doing 0 damage. Unless you've already played through the game at least once or follow a walkthrough you're in for a lot of difficulty spikes, because while the game is supposedly free roam you still have to follow a specific path that the designers had in mind.
3. This also means that the game has the worst form of grinding. You have to find every nook and cranny, kill all mobs and do all possible quests to be able to survive the next area. Don't like the flying fortresses? Too bad, no Hall of Echoes for you.
4. XP scaling. Again, the game encourages that you read a walkthrough. The XP that you gain from killing mobs is scaled to your level, if you're too high level you'll be getting very few XP, sometimes just 1XP per kill. On the other hand, if you're low level or the same level as the mobs, you'll be getting up to 2-3k XP per kill. This means that if don't do a specific area at a specific level, you'll miss out on a lot of XP. And this is a big problem, since the mobs don't respawn. Additionally, the XP you get from doing quests doesn't scale, so the game encourages you to not do the quests until you're absolutely sure you've killed all the mobs you could take on in the area.
Anyway, yeah. I've finally reached the Hall of Echoes with my second character at lvl 31, but I die there in a few seconds. The walkthroughs suggest that I should grind through the flying fortresses (5 or 6 huge but almost absolutely identical dungeons) until I'm about lvl 34 to survive the Hall of Echoes and finally see the infamous ending. How about no? Fuck you, Larian, and fuck your game.