Does blindness still exist in this century? Why, I think it does…
What about insensitivity?…Oh yeah.
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ELEX II - Podcast
- Thread starter HiddenX
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Does blindness still exist in this century? Why, I think it does…
What about insensitivity?…Oh yeah.
If you are suggesting that podcasts are a medical condition…
I might think about it.
Joxer you are wrong on this one. Take the loss. Podcasts are more popular than ever. Look it up.
Dude, you can't do that. When it's only you two spending time together you really should pay attention to your dog.I listen to podcasts all the time. Walking my dogs, in the shower, working out, when my wife is talking to me.
JFarrell71
SasqWatch
Remakes are often worse than the original, so that kind of supports his theory if anything.
Their games are very samey, I would hope even their most ardent fans would recognize that. But a lot of devs bring out variations of the same game with minor tweaks for years and years. That's not really an issue for me. It's actually a pet peeve of mine when "Game Series Installment 3" comes out and everyone is like "it's just more Game Series". Well... yeah. As long as the story, characters, dialogue, location, etc aren't a carbon copy, I don't care that devs don't rebuild games from the ground up every time.
All of them available in Australia. I find them patchy, uneven difficulty, poor writing, obtuse, weird controls, awful facial animations (make ME:A look sophisticated) etc. etc. As an RPG I have a choice between being nasty or nastier, hardly a wide choice).
Also, lots of bugs, crashes, aiming is a joke (for example a red x in Elex 2 does not mean you will hit a stationary object even having maxed ranged combat and are less than a few body lengths away), frame rate stutters, there is a currently a memory leak in Elex 2 in chapter 3 etc. etc. (and yes I’m up to date on drivers, patches etc.)
lackblogger
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Yes, it's a perfectly normal thing. Football Manager is the same game with minor tweaks and a few new players every year, best selling game ever. Mario games are the same games with minor tweaks and a few new characters every year, best selling game ever. We could go on and on.
This is the paradox (if you'll excuse the pun) of the RPG market and fanbase. The desire to have 'something like XYZ game' and to be 'angered that new game isn't like XYZ game', only to then massively hate on 'same game anew' just because its the same game with minor tweaks and a few new characters, 'oh no, can't they think of something original' comes the cat-call.
The RPG market started out like a normal game genre, with Wizardry, Ultima and Might and Magic all going to 8-odd iterations & then it just stopped. No RPG franchise since has either wanted to or managed to sustain itself beyond a few iterations.
It's one of my pet topics and underpins most of my opinions on RPG forums, because my primary gaming phase started around the turn of the century when the industry-wide compulsion to convert from PC to Console effectively destroyed all currently existing RPG franchises.
And even those devs that did convert to consoles, they then sacrificed all their IPs on the alter of MMOs, creating a second wave of IP abandonment.
It's one of the main causes that has created such a highly divisive and incoherent audience for the genre that expresses itself as a confusing mess every day on all the RPG forums. You have 100 RPG fans all trying to find the next instalment of a game series that no longer exists. And all 100 are looking for a different type of game.
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You sound like an old grognard.
Gothic was not their peak. Gothic 2+NotR is superior in nearly every way. It kept the same mechanics but gave us a larger game world, more content, more variety, etc. You might prefer the story in Gothic, but G2 is simply the better game in most aspects.
Elex was a definite step up from Risen 2&3, and, from what I've played so far, Elex II seems to be on par.
If any given developer's games seemed that way to me, I would just move on and stop playing them. That's just me though.
Khorinis was vastly better than any of the camps in Gothic 1 though. Khorinis was such a well designed town where you are really rewarded for exploration and the position of everything just makes sense.
Ah is that what happened? That's a great theory.
Like most people here, I played Gothic 2 when it came out because I was a big fan of Gothic. I wasn't blown away by the vanilla version, but I had no problem seeing it was the better overall game when combined with NotR.
I realize there are people like yourself who can't and won't recognize that out of nostalgia for Gothic, and that's fine. I've always sort of looked at them as one game tbh.
I thought ELEX was mediocre and what I have seen of ELEX II (streams) is quite a bit worse than ELEX.
I mostly care about content and the ELEX II intro already turned me off because it is so poorly made. The first dialogue with Adam (German version) is a cringefest that continues straight on with the first dialogue with Caja and Dex.
The writing is abysmal. The characters look goofy and the whole setup is just stupid, full of logical plotholes and pure idiocy.
We already discussed a very good example of inconsistency in the other thread when we talked about the Elex potions no longer affecting Jax in any kind of way. That is exactly the kind of poorly designed, poorly thought through stuff that makes it impossible for me to take any of PB's recent development efforts serious anymore.
I just can't enjoy a game when the developer does not care about keeping their own setting, lore, characters, world, rules etc. consistent in some fashion. As someone on the WoE forums put it quite aptly: PB seems to follow the "rule of cool". If one of their team members sees something cool in another game or in a movie then they put it in the game whether it fits or not.
Sometimes this works out well (like the jetpack flying which they wanted to put in because they found it cool when playing a Lego game with sonny) but most of the time it doesn't because they just are not able to match the quality of larger dev efforts with their small team. This leads to lots of things leaving the impression of a half-assed implementation.
That is why, to me(!), it is sad what their games have become
I don't even care (too much) about old tech. They are a small team. That's OK.
But it does not take a huge team to write an engaging story, decent quests or interesting characters. It just takes a truly creative person or two. Make it happen.
Yes, you're not a fan of the setting and lore in ELEX. You've made that clear before. I get it. The weird blend of sci-fi and fantasy isn't for everyone.
It's still better than Risen 2&3 though. You keep talking about how sad you are about what their game have become. I'd be a lot sadder if they had kept going down the path they were headed with Risen 3.
As for ELEX 2, yes, the intro is bad. I was like "wtf" myself like I mentioned in the other thread. However, it turns around pretty quick after that. It's a shame, and surprising, that those first few hours are so bad because it gives a terrible first impression. My overall impression after 40+ hours though is much better, and the few here who have already finished the game seem to have liked it quite a bit.
Well, I just finished it yesterday and I must say that I have a problem with the general credibility of the setting. I don't know why I didn't have that problem with Elex 1… or I just don't remember.
But now in Elex 2 I realized how close together and small everything is. I mean there are the "lands" of Magalan, so Edan, Ignadon, Xarcor etc. But in fact these "lands" are damn small and only consist of little settlements (rather are villages than actual towns) that are dann close to each other. I mean how many people could live in something like the Fort? There are like 20 houses. So 100?
And these 5 villages make "humanity"?
With the constant conflicts between the faction and the monsters roaming the lands, this "humanity" wouldn't last 5 years.
I mean it wouldn't be that bad if they just chose a plot with some inter-factional conflicts, but the actual plot just shoves in your face that all is about saving humanity and the planet.
Then you have these "big" battles where "armies" invade the lands. But actually it's like 15 creatures attacking and Jax and his single follower defending. I mean… come on.
Also why on earth doesn't Jax take his comrades-in-arms with him every time? They're recruited into the 6. force for exactly this reason, to increase combat strength, but (except from their personal quests) they do nothing but to chill in the bastion?
The PB formula of course worked well in Gothic and also good enough in Risen. But to me it just doesn't make any sense for Elex.
But now in Elex 2 I realized how close together and small everything is. I mean there are the "lands" of Magalan, so Edan, Ignadon, Xarcor etc. But in fact these "lands" are damn small and only consist of little settlements (rather are villages than actual towns) that are dann close to each other. I mean how many people could live in something like the Fort? There are like 20 houses. So 100?
And these 5 villages make "humanity"?
With the constant conflicts between the faction and the monsters roaming the lands, this "humanity" wouldn't last 5 years.
I mean it wouldn't be that bad if they just chose a plot with some inter-factional conflicts, but the actual plot just shoves in your face that all is about saving humanity and the planet.
Then you have these "big" battles where "armies" invade the lands. But actually it's like 15 creatures attacking and Jax and his single follower defending. I mean… come on.
Also why on earth doesn't Jax take his comrades-in-arms with him every time? They're recruited into the 6. force for exactly this reason, to increase combat strength, but (except from their personal quests) they do nothing but to chill in the bastion?
The PB formula of course worked well in Gothic and also good enough in Risen. But to me it just doesn't make any sense for Elex.
That seems like a strange complaint since it would apply to every other open-world RPG as well. You're just finally noticing this now?
It's a video game, so it's not like the scale of the settlements is going to be very realistic. Novigrad in The Witcher 3 is still probably the most impressive city I've seen in a game, but even that is woefully small if you start thinking about it in real-life terms.
They also have to balance realism vs tediousness. How many houses do you really want to look into before you get back to exploring the wilderness? Look at how many people complain that they didn't like the city of Baldur's Gate because it was "too much".
Generally yes, and it might indeed be that I'm over critical here and ignore others who did it equally bad.
The games I think of solved it a lot better:
In TW3 you play only in segments of the continent which aren't seamlessly connected. And even in these segments you have multiple of small settlements nearly as big as the Fort in Elex. TW3 doesn't give you the impression that the world only consists of what you can visit in the game. It's communicated that there is more beyond.
Or Skyrim which only plays in this one region also having multiple settlements. It's known that there are multiple equally sized regions in Tamriel.
Which games do you think do it equally bad as Elex?
As many to make a suspension of disbelief possible. That of course is highly individual - but for me in Elex it just isn't enough.
Neither does Elex. Where is it said that that's the entire world?
In fact, I can clearly remember notes and audio logs in the first game mentioning other places. I can't say I've come across anything like that yet in Elex II, but I also haven't seen anything that would make me think the playable area is all that exists.
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