Well the voice overs volume bug seems to have fixed itself. At least I didn't patch. I just noticed in the middle of playing last night that it suddenly started working.
Also getting the random mid-battle freeze up and crash. I think that's their "3 hours in the multi-lobby then you get logged out" thing, except the message telling you it's going to happen isn't appearing, and so you just DC in the middle of a fight and the game craps itself.
Overall.....I like it.
Pros:
-More polished in some ways. The experience from DBZXV1 has just been fleshed out in the right places. There's enough workaday collectathon/repeatable mission stuff that the game doesn't feel constrained to PQs, Time Patrol and shopping in a big empty city. Things feel, overall, less clunky than they did in DBXV1. Particularly menus, talking to people, navigation, etc...
-There's more depth to the combat now. It's faster, tighter (although still not as tight as a dedicated fighting game like Budokai etc...) What really cinches it though is there are real skill moves now, not just timing a perfect block. The Vanishing Step manuever is a game changer, allowing you to move, attack and dodge with teleports that don't cost stamina. Done right they can even Guard Break the fuck out of people. There are other combo moves that don't rely on Stamina/Ki to work that allow someone with good timing to really equalize the odds in fights. There's just more overall to DO in combat now other than punch punch punch ki blast/strike/ultimate.
-Balance overall just feels better. Money actually matters because there's things you wan to buy (mostly clothing so you can make new QQ Bangs.) Ultimates feel like they have more parity with each other. There's less curb stomping death match bull shit from AI designed to be hard (although when the game is trying to teach you something specific it can sometimes feel that way.) PQs, the ones we've done, don't seem as hung up on the pure randomness of the extra objectives, so they're not as frustrating to get ultimate finishes for.
-Progression is better metered once you figure out how it works now. Basically Time Patrols --> Training With Various Fighters --> Advancement Tests --> Time Rifts --> PQs. Time Patrols meter core gameplay progression like Gear and Transformations and available fighters to train with. Training with fighters seems to net you the most XP out of anything you do and is where you do serious leveling up, and where you acquire the bulk of in-game abilities. When you've run out of trainers, you take your Advancement Test, which unlocks yet more trainers, more XP, more abilities. When you run out of trainers again but haven't acquired enough training experience for another advance test, you turn to Time Rifts as the sort of hourly mini-quests that net you cash and covers micro-progression like Transformations, Attribute Level Caps and general Zeni/Medal/Item farming. And when you've cleaned up all the Time Rifts for the moment, you either go do PQs or head back to Time Patrol to push the story forward, reveal more trainers and the whole cycle starts over again. There's basically little cause for not having something level appropriate to do where you can make XP and boost stats and get stuff. Unlike DBZXV1 where you'd hit a brick wall in Time Patrol and have to go endlessly grind PQs until you leveled up enough to take on harder time Patrols, or hit a brick wall in PQs.
-It's just enough of an MMO that there's always some low impact thing to do to kill time and earn something.
Cons:
-It's pretty fetch quest-y. That's essentially what Time Rifts feel like. Or Milk Delivery. Or Collecting Stones. Or Time Patrol challenges. Or even really training with other fighters. There's a lot of busy work and while it gives you something to do, much of it doesn't have teeth. I'm reminded of Assassin's Creed's Collectathon put 40 dozen trivial things on your map for you to do. Either you can play games like that or the low-nutrition/high-fat content of it drives you away.
-A lot of fights you do, training or otherwise, are very trivial. It gives the game a kind of frenetic pace where there's always a three or four things you could do quickly, on top of Time Rifts spamming you that they have stuff for you to do.
-I hate how you're constantly having your abilities and stats switched depending on what you're doing. In DBZXV1, your load out was your load out and you used it everywhere. Here different scenarios often change your skills for the purposes of demonstration or challenge. On the one hand forced variety does help shake things up. On the other though you end up feeling kind of disconnected from your character at times. It seems like this happens more often in the early game and less so as you progress.
-The level of polish only goes so far. I've seen broken AI in Challenges that got stuck in a loop and made it impossible to finish it. AI in PQs and TPs bugging each other out leading to weird behavior. All the aforementioned bugs/missed polish points before this. None of them are a real deal breakers but the game clearly was rushed to release, and some of them are kind of annoying.
-The story is pretty bad. They don't make much effort to make any part of it really interesting, or give a good reason for why it's happening. Villains be villains, Dragonballs in danger, messing with the past for REASONS. I suppose it's not much worse than DBZXV1, but since there's so much MORE of it now, you get quantity over quality.
Overall I agree with what my friend said last night. "I know I'm being ripped off on some level. Missions are exactly the same, the dialog, the moves. Sure there's more of it but it doesn't change the fact 50% of the original game was recycled. And I'm OK with that. I'm OK with being ripped off because I'm enjoying myself despite knowing this was a shameless recycled product." Personally there's enough additions that for me it's worth playing.
Also, the proper way of adding each other is hosting a private PQ lobby, steam inviting the buddy, playing the match, navigate to "recent players", add him to favorite, voila! It's quite intuitive.
We got it figured out. But no, it's not intuitive at all. Being able to search the DBZXV players list directly and making friends from there, or inviting to Teams directly from your Steam menu, would be intuitive. What really tripped me up is having played the first game and knowing how all this should work, but their merciless tutorial metering of features left me confused because I thought I was missing something.
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Topic: Dragon Ball Z Xenoverse 2: DBZXV2LMNOPQRSTUVW. That's Time Travel baby. (Read 10647 times)