ELEX 2 - Is Coming @ C4G
 

C4G makes some predictions about the gameplay, storyline and factions of ELEX 2:

More information.

It baffles me how people anticipate the sequel of a mediocre game that racked a whooping 6.5 metacritic score both from media and users. If any RPG I ever looked forward got a score under 8, I'd be highly disappointed.

Gothic-like games from PB getting low scores world-wide is a tradition by now.

In East-Europe and Germany these games have a very large fan base.
Piranha Bytes doesn't care anymore - they make games for their fans and make a lot of money with it.
I'll will certainly buy it - I have finished every PB game a least twice.

Popular opinion and quality are two different things. Do you only like music, which has been in the top ten of some popular charts?

Have you tried it?

A critic score doesn't tell it all (it's 7.0 from users, btw). It's a PB game. Combat in PB games can be frustrating, unforgiving. Most people who liked Elex knew this and enjoyed the playstyle and the vast living worlds of the previous PB games. And since they enjoyed Elex 1, chance are fair that they are going to enjoy Elex 2 and highly anticipate it.

Going by someone else's rating system is a seriously damaging thing to inflict on yourself. I'd recommend either trying products for yourself or going by the words of folks that you actually know, rather than limiting yourself to what some paid person might think/force upon you. PB enjoys quite a bit of good word-of-mouth by those that enjoy good open world gaming coupled with exploration, character growth, and choices/consequences.

Except Elex isn't anywhere near Gothic quality. I'm a huge Gothic fan and I tried Elex, it's amateur hour. Gothic 2 was ahead of its time, Elex? A joke. It had neither the production value of AAA nor the innovative quality of indie. It's in no man's land.

Why? The answer is simple: PB is not the PB of the old. Their stuff has gotten worse and worse since Risen.

Couldn't agree more.

Elex is vastly overrated. The reviews are too kind honestly.

I tired it for about 1 hour and I agree with the general sentiment. "Big, ambitious, but dull, dated and generally bland". A 6.5 is fair score. The only reason I mention bigger score pools is to point out that it's not just a personal opinion.

I'm not saying it's bad game, just that it gets a lot of spotlight for such an average product. They must have a real good PR to get all this coverage and "hype".

Ahh, fair enough, then. Not every game is for every single person, that's for sure. And good thing, too! Variety being the spice of life and all that. =)

I actually agree that the game was mediocre. I especially didn’t like that for the first 10 hours I had to run from many fights but at the 10 hour mark and beyond the difficulty took a huge swing in the opposite direction and was laughably easy. Hopefully they can keep the difficulty more balanced through out the entire game this time.

Having said that I am looking forward to the sequel. Why? Because they did enough stuff right to see with some tweaking it could be a great game imo. So I want to see if they can take the next step with the second game.

Just because the first game was mediocre is not a guarantee that the second will be. For instance I though BG1 was mediocre but BG2 blew me away.

As for metacritic never been to the site never will. The only score that matters to me is mine. After all if someone give a game a 10 and I hate it does it matter? :)

Elex was a very good game imo - and definitely captured more of that Gothic feel than the Risens did. Looking forward to this next installment… I don't even really need to look at the trailer. PB has never really let me down… well, the community patch helped with Gothic 3, but otherwise… =)

I agree with that.

I just wonder why there are games that aren't popular, but when you talk to people who played it, they say "Hey, it's actually pretty good". It's like 4 years ago everyone I talked to thought Trump was an idiot but he still won the elections. Who is voting this guy, then? And who is saying Elex is good but when it comes the time to give it a score they go "Meh, 6/10".

There is something mysterious there. Probably has to do with a combination of having sympathy for the studio and having low expectations for the product to start with, then really anything feels like it's good enough.

Games could be likened to food. If most people have been raised on highly processed junk, then something more esoteric might seem distasteful.
If the games that are most familiar are mass-appeal, button-mashing shoot 'em ups, then something that requires a bit more patience and skill would be frustrating.

That would make sense if all action/story RPGs had low scores, and we could conclude that they get downvoted because they are not button-massing games for mass appeal, but in truth some of the highest rated games of all time have been pretty story-heavy RPGs similar to Elex in many ways, such as Mass Effect 2, Wtcher 3, Skyrim, Zelda OoT, Bioshock, Fallout NV, etc. If a game gets a low score it's because it's not good enough, not because it doesn't appeal the button-mashing masses.

This is not very logical. Why should the same people, who say that Elex is good, give it a Score of 6.5? The average number only says that the people, who like Elex, are a minority. This means that the game doesn't appeal to the mainstream, which is completely ok for me.

But it is also completely ok to be a casual player who only likes games appealing to the majority.

Doesn't feel like a minority to me. I feel like I am the minority in thinking 6.5 score is fair.

On RPGWatch may be. But people here don't represent the gaming mainstream.

It is like in your Trump example: You had the luck to speak only to sane people, who all agreed that trump is an idiot. But that doesn't mean that they lied to you and voted for Trump later on. That would require that your discussion partners gave a representative image of society as a whole. But I rather assume that you were simply lucky to know the more civilized people.

:lol:

It's a good point, but I don't think RPGWatch has that higher standards when it comes to games. I used to think that kinda, but then PhoenixPoint got 2nd place for best RPG of the year and that sand castle crumbled hard.

Besides, good RPGs do get good scores from reviews and in sites like Metacritic, even when they are not that mainstream. Still a mystery to me, other than the two reasons I mentioned before: PB has good/likeable rep as a studio for niche RPG audiences, and when you don't expect much, "decent" seems pretty good.

Priranha Bytes' games are valued by their fans, because

1. the open world is not a free scaling open world - you can go everywhere in theory, but you have to overcome bigger and bigger enemies, quests and puzzles to advance - they reward exploring
2. the games are challenging (at least in the beginning) - you have to build a better and better character over time to make things easier in the end - they reward character building
3. PB games often offer very different solutions to quests (talk your way through, find a hidden door or lure animals to an enemy city …) - they reward thinking of the player
4. PB games provide a living world - animals, NPCs react to your behavior, NPCs have schedules
5. social interaction, connected quests, exclusive quests for joining a faction/working for a faction - it is fun to replay a PB game, because you have to make hard choices
6. good loot is rare and often unique - when you find new gear in PB games it is often a game changer
7. crafting, cooking, collecting, world interaction in general makes PB worlds more alive and fun

All in all I admire Björn & Jennifer Pankratz and their team for their game design skills and agree with many of their game design principles.

If you can speak German just watch their latest video about player types and you get a hint how much thought they put into their game design decisions. (They can even evaluate what type of player you are by looking at your achievements)

An hour isn't really trying Elex tbh. You don't even scratch the surface of that game until 10+.

Elex has a 7.0 on Metacritic, so I'm not sure why you keep repeating 6.5, but you probably already know that Metacritic scores are largely useless anyways. For example, PoE II only has a 7.8, and I'm willing to bet you think that should be significantly higher.

Piranha Bytes doesn't make games to please the mainstream, they make games that appeal to a specific fanbase. In that way, they're one of the few long-time developers that hasn't sold out.

After one hour, you are barely out of the tutorial part. In all honesty, after one hour I gave up with the game for a couple of days.. then I went back and discovered that it could be pretty good and fun.

There are plenty of high scoring metacritic games that I think are terrible, boring, or just plain uninteresting so while metacritic might provide a general perception of a game, it doesn't always weed out bad games from good or vice versa.

PB is Dark Chocolate… most people like the more sugary Milk Chocolate. But there is still a significant niche of Dark Chocolate lovers.

PB embraced the term Eurojank and never looked back. You will either love the games they make or hate them. They must have enough of a fan-base to still be in business.I'm guessing most of their fans are from Europe as they always had a hard time with critics in the US. I fondly remember the debates about how the scores are wrong.

True, I could give it a better shot, it just didn't grab me. I just checked Metacritic again, you're right, PC score is 7, it was PS4 what has 6.5 (from public reviews anyway, the media gives it a 5.8).

Again, I mentioned Metacritict because it's a valid demographic, so it didn't sound like "Elex is a mediocre game" was my personal opinion alone. Also, I can tell you from working in the industry that a lot of studios get rewarded based on the metacritic score their game reaches (incentives, bonuses, share profits etc), so it's more valuable than you make it seem, whether we like it or not.

So, about the video…

He mentions there will be more than 3 factions this time, but only 2 from the first game - Beserkers and Outlaws. I wonder who the new factions will be and why the Clerics were excluded.

He also voices the same concern I had about the flying mechanic and how it will effect exploration.

Also, it'll apparently have more dialogue and C&C than any previous PB game.

It's not that. The game opens up a lot. It just take 5.hours to do so. So the people who tend to stick with PB games love them. Others who don't tend to hate the game or find it very mediocre.

What does studios getting rewarded have to do with the scores? Do you think the people scoring them care about that?

Metacritic only gives a general perception of things at best, and is often skewed by trolling from gamers who are jaded about something or didn't like the game because it was too difficult, etc. I could give numerous examples of games that, realistically, should have scored significantly higher than they did.

Because she's talking about critic scores and you're talking about user scores. Maybe. Never, ever pay attention to Metacritic user scores.

For the record, Elex is 6.7 (67) on Metacritic, and PoE 2 is an 8.8 (88)

Regarding the Clerics: may be Jax eventually told them the truth about their god and they dissolved…:cool:

And now to something completely different: I would like to see Caja or Nasty as a playable character, but choosing among more than one playable characters would probably be non-PB-style…

We were both talking about user-scores. She was orginally quoting the PS4 score which is why there was a difference.

Not sure why you think the critics scores are somehow more valid or why you're trying to convert them like that.

*Edit* I suppose converting them doesn't make a difference, but I don't put much faith in critics scores either for various reasons…especially when it comes to games that aren't from mainstream studios.

If they're going to exclude one of the previous factions, I'd have preferred it was the Outlaws myself. I found them the least compelling of the three.

I think it could be interesting to take control of another character temporarily during part of a quest perhaps. I don't see them ever giving us multiple characters to choose from though. Think of all the extra writing they'd have to do for that.

I also assume that it would be too expensive for them, I was only dreaming…

On the other hand I liked how it was possible to play a male or female protagonist in Prey without need to have extra writing. But probably there is no way storywise to do something similar here…

Regarding the clerics: The robots and weapons of the clerics were very similar to those of the Albs, as if they had planned initially to make the outcast albs a playable faction in Elex 1. May be they make those a playable faction now instead?

Some people are more vocal with what pleases them, and far less about negativity when something does not. I find myself simply walking away from things most of the time rather than complaining about them, yet when something truly strikes a chord with me, I'll rant and rave about it. I think, at least for me, it's more about accentuating the positives and trying to leave most of the negatives to others.

Elex sucked me in completely when I played it. I wasn't a day one player, matter of fact I think I waited a year or so, and got it at a very reasonable price. And I couldn't stop playing the bloody thing, for like six weeks.

It's possible, but I don't picture the Albs being very interesting as a joinable faction. Plus, I'd think they would be diminished after the events of the first game.

My guess is that PB is introducing at least two new factions. Perhaps groups from another region that we never saw in the first game.

Funny you write that. If I pay attention at all, I only pay attention to the user scores. Gaming "journalists" are terrible and have been for decades… they are a broken, bought off, and deceptive industry… and the fact that the industry has also jumped onto the politics and social engineering bandwagons doesn't help.

However, I'm fully aware of the 100% and 0% scorers and adjust my perception accordingly. What I tend to scour for are recurring complaints or compliments as there is generally truth when something is spotlighted again and again by many different people.

You can't really pay attention to either users or journalists. Anything counts as a journalist these days, and their criteria is questionable, especially when they tend to analyse games they don't like to start with, or get it wrong altogether, like analysing Mass Effect as a shooter. However, journalists at least try to be sensible. Users have the "Black&White" mindset. Especially if they don't like the studio or publisher for some reason, it's automatic 0, which destroys the validity of any averages.

In general, both user and journalist scores do give you an idea of how good a game is, though.

Piranha Bytes games often expose game journalists who write a review just after a few hours of playing.

In the beginning of a PB game you can't win fights easily and your swordfighting is clunky, because a) you have to learn swordfighting first and b) buy/find/craft a decent weapon and later c) join a faction to learn/get the real good stuff.

There's no instant gratification, with lots of loot, easy enemies and questmarker handholding in the beginning.

PB tried to make the game mechanics more mainstream with Risen 2 and Risen 3 and got a lot of critique from the oldschool Gothic crowd (game is way too easy now) and from the mainstream crowd, too (still to hard, no quality of life features, no aaa gfx etc.)

I would think that would be the case, yeah, but there plenty of times when they don't.

look at you profile picture the answers is within. anyway hope you'r at a beach and that's the reason you'r so salty.

Elex was the first and only PB game that I actually enjoyed, although it had a lot of flaws. I didn't finish it, though. I got burned out of it and never found motivation to go back to it later (but that's nothing extraordinary on my part, I don't finish many games I play).

But I'm curious about the sequel, anyway. I'll keep it on my radar.