the first half (or 2/3rds) is just your standard "indie running around" game, the puzzles are very simple and navigated quickly, some environments seemed somewhat atmospheric, but the fact they are pretty much devout of life or weather made them less entertaining, in my opinion other indie games have gotten atmosphere better, and Im a sucker for atmosphere...imagine the water world being in a literal torrential rain, the desert world incurring a sandstorm limiting visibility, etc...at that point I appreciated how short the game seemed because I would have grow bored of this running around
last third of the game is the best...at that point some puzzles made me pause for a minute...frankly there is no really hard puzzle, each can be figured out in a matter of a minute or two of thinking, I think the most I spend thinking on one was 3 or 4 minutes...if this would have happened around the 33% mark and continued on, maybe adding 2 more spheres into the game, I would have though that the length would be fine...the only real "wow" I experienced was when you jump out of the world you considered overworld as all the time and with 3 spheres you were running around it, but then you literally jump out to the actual overworld, that got me going "wow" and for rest of game I was hoping they are going to pull one more on us, but they never did
I gave it a 7, enjoyable, good idea, but I'd welcome a bit less minimalism, can't go wrong with some npcs, and a tad longer
@faithxvoid: just cause something is played doesn't mean it's good
LoL is the most played game in the world and 100% of players playing it more than 3 months will tell you it is horrible (I myself played it for years and constantly though that and still do)
it is simple bait - addiction - nothing else to do, process, the only thing that will remove WoW permanently is something that will replace it, people that love MMOs and no other games will likely not stop playing because they don't have an alternative
all it needs is a great MMO to replace it, one without an intended quick cash grab model, however, to expect this from a corp who is rich enough to finance a contender like that, well, that is very hard to expect as we talking about ROI of 10 years, which nobody will go for, they will go for 2-3 year ROI and then have to overfeed the game with income mechanics, so any die-hard WoW fan will go just 'why even switch? it's the same crap everywhere'
@jinzo9988: "I don't think they can do much of anything to get me to stop other than to shut down the game"
this is pretty sad tho, I wouldn't call it a hobby, gaming in general is hobby, but being stuck in one place
well I think you just running a classic case of sunk-cost fallacy, i.e. you invested so much time into it, that quitting now seems to you that it would mean all that time was wasted, null and void, however what you are actually doing is just keep wasting more of your future time, as you see that time invested is lost no matter whether you continue or not, you can only impact the usage of your future time
@Icarian: actually you are wrong, they don't start caring even then, however, they can be made to temporary pretend they care and right 'some' wrongs, but they will always do it only on an individual level and in select cases, they will not implement some thorough system because that actually costs A LOT, for too little gain they will calculate, being good does pay itself, because 'most' people nowadays still appreciate cheapest or best goods irrespective of the conditions they were created in
the thing that is sad, is that it is so simple that one only needs basic understanding of economics to know the upward / milk / downward curve of a product or service, like an online game
- a game is new, rises, company tries to popularize it, bring in players, it creates a game people love and enjoy, focus is not on earning primarily, but at least at going even, game is successful it rises, instead of just going even it generates a hefty profit, the investor is thrilled devs managed to do it, so it starts investing more, e.g. before it invested 5M and go a profit of 8M, going by this if they invest 50M they will get 80M, right? (alternative is new investor coming it with the same idea)
- game reaches the top, it has millions of players, but pumping money into something isn't 1:1 for one, the margin of income starts being lower, those 50M generate only 60M, "that is too little, we can generate more than 20% on different project, we need to "improve" this product", the milking phase begins, game is on top, it is reasonable to expect a lot of people will continue playing it irrespective of any shameless milking, income is pushed to 80M, some few players start to leave, but game is still on top, more gets pushed into marketing, now the budget is at 100M, needs to generate 160M, so more and more earning tactics will be introduced
- investor decides, that this has NO FUTURE, what this means is, we are not gonna pretend the game gets on the 'upward' curve again, it will not, it will most likely go down, so we gonna heck as milk it as much as we can OR at best it will stay kinda flat or fall-flat only mellowly, therefore no more big budget is put into it, budget goes down to 10M most of it marketing as that proved to generate most income in upper phase and the game is tasked with earning as much as possible before it dies, kinda, like a Berserker unit, it will die, but it should bring us profit before it does
and that's all the history of all successful online games, the only difference is how long the milk and downward curve phases last, for WoW it has been long, but they never gonna invest (outside of marketing) enough into it to make it a good game again, they will not because they expect NOTHING that has ever entered a milk + downward curve phase is gonna go to upward curve again, hence they consider the game/franchise 'dying' and are gonna use it as a cash cow for however long it lasts
and anybody that believes anyone is gonna make the 'good' again is a blind kid, because that has no happened a single time in history, if it did, it was a PR trick soon to be reversed
@nygamespotter: or maybe different reviewers are doing reviews who are not as strict as the ones before? or maybe companions nowadays pay better money for good reviews? or maybe games did get better and the 00s were a bad decade?
@eran_1: I don't know, Skyrim had good atmosphere, but to be honest overall I played less than Oblivion...I think only people who haven't played Oblivion that much got to enjoy Skyrim to a 10...why? in Oblivion I went to every dungeon and explored every nook and cranny incl. all DLCs and plenty of mods...but, for ex. besides one case (and maybe also in DLCs don't remember those very well), you never found a unique thing, like an artifact for ex. without it relating to a quest...this totally defeated the purposes of exploration...I kept thinking back to times of Morrowind all the time while playing it and how that game rewarded exploration...then I started Skyrim and well, all you could find were the masks and the words of power...so yeah, they improved it, marginally...but not enough, it wasn't motivating enough to keep me interested to keep exploring each and every dungeon across the entire map (tho I did all faction quests and other ones I came across)...so yeah, I think that game could use a lot of improvements...don't get me started on the level spawn thingy, all bandits running around in glass armors and the like...the fact how dragons are weak etc...maybe they repaired parts of this later with the legendary difficulty (don't know didn't play)...but fact is, vanilla Skyrim, which was in the review isn't that great...Witcher 3 was in my opinion better
@hamedmuhammady: people in the marketing department of the company have to act like they are doing something to be worth their money....
....and the company has to have that department because its a common rule they have to have it
....sometimes to judge why or not companies are doing something all you need to be aware of is that everyone in the company needs to act like doing something
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