Read: "There's a lot of nostalgia power, but since I like it, then it's alright."

Right? ;)

6 hours till I can play….this is gonna be a long ass day…but then I have four straight days…to sink into a gaming haze.

Nostalgia is completely natural, so that wouldn't be "not alright" in any case. Emotions always dominate upon release of a game - and with hyped or long-awaited titles, you usually have to wait weeks or even months to get rid of all the things people want the game to be - or thought they wanted it to be - and then you finally arrive at what it's really like.

But, true, since I like the game myself - I find it easier to believe it's a 9/10 or 10/10 for real - though I remain sceptical.

Are you going to claim you're not guided by your emotions now? Because you and I both know that would be an utter lie :)

As for Fluent, he's clearly a person who gets high on his extra energy - and as refreshing as that is, I can't say I find a high amount of energy a reliable source of criticism. Sorry :)

KoA has a critic score of 81 but a user score of 6.5

Fwiw, I don't think it's a "bad" game. It's just extremely average, and it's the epitome of mainstream.

I find any game that offers 300+ hours of high quality content much more than "extremely average". The lore, story, exploration, quests, atmosphere, combat, loot and crafting were all done in a way that offered playability long after other games would have become stale. It's rare that I spend 200 hours with a game and not even see all the areas it has to offer. Not only that, but some of the questlines in the game were simply the best I've experienced in a game, such as the House of Ballads and the Dead Kel DLC. Not only just good content, but some of the best-ever (for me) content in those 2 questlines. :)

Anyway, this thread is not about KoA, so let's get back on topic. ;)

Why did I click that link?!?!?!? That song is now replaying over and over in my head and will be for the foreseeable future. My kids have watched that movie about a 100 times in the past few months. It has been seared into my brain.

Great write up fluent. Just guessing, but my opinion of the game will probably be pretty close to yours. Unlike you, though a lot of that WILL be due to nostalgia. The IE games were a huge part of my formative CRPG gaming years.

One question: Have you encountered any major bugs? Obsidian has their reputation for buggy releases and that's one of the reasons I was initially hesitant to play it at release.

A few bugs, but mostly minor things. A few queued actions didn't activate. Sometimes an enemy would be killed and my party would just stand there instead of attacking the next enemy. Casting a Priest spell on a companion by clicking their portrait rather than their character caused my Priest to bug out and act weird without ever casting the spell. Viewing the details about a chant of my Chanter caused text boxes to appear on my screen that couldn't be closed until I restarted the game. Some pathfinding issues as well. A few times my party members couldn't figure out how to get around a small obstacle to surround an enemy.

Nothing major, and there were workarounds for pretty much everything. For example, casting the Priest spell by clicking the character in the battle rather than their portrait fixed that bug, and so on.

It's entirely playable right now and I can say that in 50 hours I have no witnessed any major bugs that I couldn't handle, so I'm happy about that. I usually haven't had problems with bugs on this Alienware laptop for whatever reason. Even Skyrim had limited bugs on this computer. :)

I'm just teasing you, Dart, poking fun at that casual, easygoing arrogance so many of us have grown to love. The Watch would be empty without it. XD

Now now, using charm on me is unfair ;)

Fluent what are your system specs and how is the game performing?

System specs are:

i7 3630qm processor
8 gb ram
amd radeon 7970m 2gb gpu
256gb ssd

It runs well, but when I zoom out in large city areas, the camera is not as smooth when I scroll the screen. I haven't used FRAPS yet to see my framerate, but I imagine it dips during those times. It's not terrible, but it's noticeable, because the game is usually 60 FPS most everywhere else.

When zoomed in more it's buttery smooth in most areas, very smooth and fluid. Hopefully my new computer, whenever it gets built, will be able to keep the game super smooth even when zoomed out in city areas! :)

Hey Fluent…

How long did this take you to install? I'm kind of wondering if my installation is stalled. It's kinda stuck at the 10%-ish mark and my computer's orange light is staying on…^.^;;

I've been reading on the Steam forums this has been taking a very long time so you may be OK.

Ah, whew…thank you. :) I'm so glad it wasn't just me.

The game is super compressed. It's a ~7gb download that convert into basically 18gb.

waiting for eternity…
 

Tried to log on to eternity web site and got:

"waiting for eternity.obsidian.net…" :biggrin:
And I'm still waiting…grr..to log on!.

On Steam:

I thought had "preloaded" now its sucking down another 1.6 GB and taking a very long time for some reason. Most annoying. Is this the extra stuff (DLC) I got as a backer? I see a list of DLC on steam, it says "acquired" but not installed…
but when I peaked in the download folder steam is using I can see some of the PDFs there…

Can already see some people ranting on Steam forum about how terrible the game is … not a brilliant game like DA:I etc etc…

The DLC and other items took some time to install on Steam for me also. As for the comments on the Steam forum I'm not surprised as people love to troll on them.

It's the main reason why I take nothing written on Steam as serious anymore.
Wasteland2 was compressed the same way If I remember correctly. A few developers can learn from InXile, and Obsidian on how not to release 30 GB uncompressed games.

IMO Steam comments have equaled Youtube comments in maturity and relevance.

I don't disagree, but for this game even Steam is overwhelmingly positive - reviews and forum. The one long rant about not being like DA:I is joking.

Played for an hour or so - excellent so far. Having 1-2 characters makes combat much easier than a full party :)

Maybe the solution to no AI is to have a small party…. Hmmm…

Playing on Hard/Expert and the game isn't too hard so far.