Finding it Hard to Like
 

After about 5 hours I'm at a crossroads between bored and annoyed. Too many crates to break, weak mobs and rushing around at a sprinting pace. The combat is sort of fun when you are using skills but ultimately there is little to do but mash when you are close and personal. The dodging is a neat idea but it really doesn't buy you much and the aim free machine gun archery doesn't impress.

The animations praised in the Watch reviews I'm finding very crude. I guess I'm used to ragdoll or at least some blood in melee. There is no tactile feel. When I tried the Dragon controls in the dream I wasn't impressed. Visuals are nice but nothing to justify the merely OK framerate and I really don't get that "can't wait to explore" feeling.

My biggest annoyance was the game balance transition from laughably easy (pre dragon dream) to pretty hard (post dream) in the newly opened area. That just sort of capped of my impression with such a jarring jump in difficulty without even bothering to introduce anything new. Oh boy those level 9 skels look so much more potent than the level 4's! Oh wait the are….:rolleyes:

There are areas that come between those two in difficulty!! :)

I'll give it a few more hours, but I'm thinking of switching to STALKER.

Awesome game.. just make sure to get the latest patch + bugfix mod when you do decide to play it.

Yeah I just spent some time trying to wade through the patch releases… world wide vs. US, patch logs, vista concerns blah blah. I'm going to patch to 1.0006 world wide and give it a go. I've also downloaded the no head bobbing mod but I'll try the game without it first.

Fair warning, there's still a lot of bugs if you only use the official patch. There's a mod, although I forget the name, that pretty much does nothing but fix remaining bugs. You can find it at the GSC Game World official forums.

Yeah but the remaining bugs are mostly scripting bugs and no gamebreakers I believe.
(I am assuming you guys are talking about SOC since I have found no bugs to speak of
in COP yet).

btw I Recently played SOC with the oblivion lost mod (only for ~10h) definately worth a
try for anyone who has finished and loved SOC.

JDR13 do you recommend Stalker or Novice? I'll start with the official patch and see where it goes, but if you could get me the mod name or something to google I'll try it.

Played Divinity 2 a few more hours now. The challenge makes it better.

What I like best about Div 2 is the open character system. You can build pretty much any character you want. If you find the gameplay of your current character a bit dull, you might want to try out different talents and abilities.

I can see that. Now that I'm dying alot I'm looking at the skills more closely. I'm grabbing levels of fireball but the opponent HP is more than keeping pace with my leveling. It is now forcing me to consider assault tactics and landscape instead of the usual rush in to destroy. I could learn to like this game. One thing that seems a bit strange however is that the assigned quests seem to have dried up once I had the dragon dream. I'm just purging and XP farming the landscape basically, delaying the assault on the tower.

I'm sure Stalker would be fine. Isn't there 2 more difficulty levels beyond that?

I wish I could remember the name of the mod for SOC, but it escapes me. The one for Stalker: Clear Sky is easy because it's simply called "Clear Sky Bug Fix mod". I would suggest just asking for the best mod over at their forums.

Yeah it has 4 levels but Stalker earned quite a reputation for difficulty. I'll look into the mods, thanks for the advice. For now I'm holding Stalker on deck because I'm still giving Divinity 2 a shot. Its all installed and ready to go though and I did the first assault mission. I'm averaging 35 FPS maxed out visually with all dynamic lighting enabled. I wish I could say the same about Divinity 2!

I enjoyed this game back when i started it.
Then I got to Sentinel Island and got bored, and RL interfered, and i gave it a long break. Had some spare time lately and tried to get back into it, but it just feels so "dead" and aimless suddenly, plus the blood elves? and other crap on the island don't seem much of a challenge.

I'm wondering if i should at least force myself on until i have the tower..?? o_O

I bought this game for $30 recently, and I played a few hours, then I stopped. It just seemed pointless somehow. Maybe I should go back and try again, I dunno.

Anderson, I think I might have said this to you before, but I really like you avatar pic. You have good taste in games, for sure ;) .
To give you an idea, my previous username (still is on some forums) is Balmoran.

..and your pic seems to be taken just a ways up the Azuran coast North-East from Balmora. Now why can't they make a TES game like that again? :/

To come back to Div 2, it does get better if you perservere a bit. Maybe I'm just a bit stuck at present because I'd left it too long.

Bah, so any of you Watch guys that would recommend pushing on and finishing this?

I still haven't killed Laiken and frankly have no desire to finish that annoying segment in the Throne room. Its just not that great and from what I understand once I get dragon skills it sort of goes south from there. South from where???

"Weak mobs" ??? Did you play the same game as I did ???

To me, the difficulty in combats was very, very difficult at "normal". EVERY encounter was a fight for the hero's life !

But … - it might have something to do that I played an archer. As soon as I went into close combat, things became much easier.

Actually, the difficulty was - next to my decision that my PC was a bit too weak for the game - one of the major reasons I gave it up.

The Archer is definitively the harder way, it seems to me. And forum posts in the Larian forums seem to indicate towards that, too.
Therefore I can definitively NOT agree when you speak of "weak mobs" !

And the barrels … Well, you *could* just ignore them. Fortunately there's a direct sign saying whether there is something in them or not - unlike in many other games.

I'm playing a warrior/priest/mage, and I really haven't find the combat too difficult up to now, but then i use two creatures to go and soften 'em up, while i shoot missiles and fireballs from afar, which seems to be working quite well.

I can hit them a few shots with my sword if they come close, but by that time their health is already down.

Thanks, Rivian, er, Balmoran. I like it too.

Yup, Morrowind was a great game. I hope ES V approaches its brilliance.

p.s. And I think you're right about the location….