So far, as a free game, I'm enjoying it.
The story seems like absolute trash. I played Halo 1 and 2, but that's it. And I was never in love with their universe. So cut to D2 introducing basically everything in a 45 second opening cutscene, then wasting the next 45 minutes of my life re-introducing characters I never knew like I'm supposed to care, supposedly killing them like I'm supposed to care as well, having the Earth be taken over in about 5 minutes like I'm supposed to care.....then 20 minutes of a tedious walking and talking tutorial, chalk full of stunning vistas, swelling music so epic I thought my heart was going to explode and exactly zero interesting gameplay. They really, really, really wanted you to feel them feels.
And then the actual game starts and you can have some fun. At first it was pretty damn overwhelming. Shit's unlocking left and right. You spawn in to an active combat zone with other players around, a WoW-esqe endless stream of enemy mooks spawning within 5 feet of you every 5 minutes, quests to do, faction stuff to understand, daily quests, tunnels with bosses and loot at the end of them, various chests scattered around to find and loot, public events.....good god they just throw it all at you in the first 5 actual minutes of gameplay.
Then you play a while more and it starts to make more sense and you start to see how gameplay is organized. Levels have main missions, side missions, "lost sectors" to find, kill the boss and loot, loot chests fixed and randomly spawned in the areas, and public events.
The UI is.....damn it's bad. It's both bland and uninteresting and visually unintuitive. They believe slightly flashing icons in a screen full of flashy glowing stuff is enough to let you know things are clickable. The first guy's faction screen is trying to tell you like 5 things at once in descending order but you have to hover over each thing to actually understand what it's talking about. You do things and get Dusklight Crystals which you turn in for what is essentially a loot box. Open enough loot boxes and you get the PRIVILEGE to spend the in-game money and the salvage from scrapped epic items to get more epic items. It's not that it's unreadable or incomprehensible, but it takes a while to get in the head of the UI designer and figure out how they expect you to look at things. And then there's your character inventory with multiple tabs and shit you have to click to do things, and your collections and your trophies....I feel like half of my first two hours was just navigating all the screens and checking for gently pulsing shit which wants to be clicked on. I think the game's biggest problem is the use of screen real-estate. It's got that new-age UI philosophy where everything needs to be minimal and there needs to be shit loads of open space on the screen. What that translates to is most of the information you want to know being scattered across multiple screens and submenus instead of collected and displayed in mostly one place. It makes the UI look empty and sterile most of the time, and all the elements of it just are just fucking boring. White lines and borders and flat uninteresting font choices. Am I being anal about UIs. Absolutely. But it's so bad to me it actually rises to the level of being worth bitching about.
Now about the things I actually like. I enjoy the gunplay. It immediately felt like Halo gunplay which you either like or you hate depending on your comfort level with console FPS games. The minute I pulled out the Scout Rifle I knew it was a Bungie game, with headshots magically being granted despite being 5 to 8 pixels off their actual head. That said so far the gun play is less bullet spongey than Borderlands, it feels like, and you're very mobile with the sprinting and the double jump and the Hunter's dodge ability. Melee actually does something so it feels like it blends well with close quarters combat. (Honestly melee actually feels more effective than most guns.) The game reminds me very strongly of The Division. It feels like a mashup of The Division's gear meta and level layout and design, and a cut down and much less OP and goofy version of Borderland's gun mechanics. The class system and design feels like a mix of Division and Borderlands. (Honestly Division probably cribbed their class system right from Borderlands as I think about it.) While I wasn't wild about the Division's class and gearing system, it was serviceable there and it's the same here. Maybe slightly more interesting actually.
And as much as I hate being this way, I'm a sucker for open world job-a-thons due to all my time spent playing Assassin's Creed games. So D2 is a comfortable checklist of things to go and do and knock out, all while enjoying moving through the environment, having firefights with packs of enemies, doing the occasional public event.....
Will I go the distance with the game? It's hard to say. I've yet to go to Titan where the rest of the game opens up. Right now I'm just enjoying feeling my way around, going through the campaign missions and kicking some ass and trying out different guns. When I max out in character level and get in to the gear grind, and run up against the need for a Clan, Bright Engrams and needing to buy the expansion to continue progressing, that will really determine whether or not I keep playing.
But for a free game, I'm enjoying my time so far. Seeing what I've seen now, there's no way I would have gone out and bought this at anything near full price. But I may get invested enough to buy the DLC, as I'm sure was their plan all along. Just depends on whether the game still feels fresh after completing the story, or if I can see the miles long grind ahead of me before I've even gotten in to it.
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Topic: SALES Thread (Read 1484768 times)