Recent reviews by ScorpioSymbol

I want to love this game.

I want to love this game as much as I've loved other Owlcat projects.

I want to love this game as much as Warhammer 40K content means to me.

...but I can't. The combination of how painfully, clunky and slow the combat is, the sheer overwhelming number of abilities (the majority of which noone will ever use) and the incredibly opaque systems design that's rarely explained (Profit, hello?) make this painfully hard to enjoy.

Essentially unplayable at 2560x1440, for the exact same reason Stellaris was - the UI text is extremely small and annoying to read. UI Scaling makes everything larger, not just the text, to the point where the community has published mods for Stellaris to increase UI font size, but because it's a mod it disables achievements.

Really annoying to see, what is essentially just a glorified full conversion mod of Stellaris, not address the accessibility based complaint.

Also, for $50+ I expected more than just a Stellaris re-skin :/

It's a great little game, and more importantly a great framework - I think my single biggest complaint is the party size. 4 is just too small for a 5E party, especially as you continue to add more class options :'(

Fun little game, seamlessly syncs on both Steam and Mobile platforms so you can progress your account in both places. There's a little bit of a pay-to-win mechanic because you can literally buy more cards for your deck, which will result in advantages for you that your opponent might not have. That said, the cards you can get just by playing organically are more than sufficient to be very strong against most opponents.

At the time of writing, Steam estimates I've played 29 hours of this game--that's not a correct estimate by a long shot as, like many of you, I've spent a huge portion of that time siting in queue, not playing the game (I'm sure these artificial "play times" will also serve to boost Amazon's rep with how much their game has been played, which is completely unethical.)

The Good:
Graphics: It's a pretty world, the physics feel good, melee weapon hits and combat feel solid and rewarding, and the combo strikes you can deal feel satisfying--at least with the two handed weapons.

Freedom: You're pretty much able to pick up whatever gear you want, whenever you want, and just go with it. Want to try out different abilities? Go for it, the game doesn't punish or lock you into a specific class/ruleset of any kind; you're always free to change it up, and at the the time of writing your initial respec's are free if you want to test out and experiment with class/weapon/stat builds. Definitely a welcome first in the MMO space.

Crafting: The crafting/harvesting system is huge. The physical interactions with the game world, from fishing to mining rocks to chopping down trees all feel reactive and satisfying. Lumbering takes much longer to raise as a skill than the other skills, but there's that *Oh* factor every time you find a new harvesting node that you weren't able to farm before. Making your own gear is one of the things New World does right *the most*. At time of writing crafted gear was just as good as anything we found as loot drops in the game world--a welcome change to most (non-ESO) MMOs.

Physics: Falling is handled really well. Like most MMO players I typically end up yeeting off cliffs and bridges, et al, in order to travel places faster. Games like The Witcher 3 curbed that playstyle for me heavily, as in W3 a three foot drop can shatter all your bones and apparently kill you outright--not so in New World, where you're free to parkour off hill after hill with only minimal damage, and if you remember to jump as you go, you'll tuck and roll upon landing instead of crumbling into a bloody ragdoll pile.

Mass PVP: I'm listing this under good, but I'm warning you now I'm also going to list it under bad, because depending on what your preference is it falls squarely into both. Unlike other mass-scale pvp games, like ESO and GW2, New Worlds body-blocking physics make for a much grittier and physical feel, but at a frenetic and aggressive pace. For some people this will be simply amazing, as the rush and thrill of the fight are very likely to be what some people are looking for in a game.

Soloability: The game lends itself well to those who want to explore a big, beautiful open world as a solo player, and if that's your preferred play-style Amazon's massive open world is yours to discover. A lot of the more dangerous areas are still manageable, as many of the things you'll find in the world will chase you, but ultimately let you get away. In our early play we found we were able to traverse areas with as high as +10 levels on us and still have more than 50/50 odds of escaping through their territory.

The Bad:
Queues: Look, I'm hopeful this will change, and theirs no reason for us to assume it won't, but at time of writing this game is largely unplayable for many people (especially if you have day-time commitments and can't stay home all day in no-life mode). I've personally witnessed people sitting through 8+ hour queues just to have the game error out and put them back into the end of the queue. If I hadn't spent a solid 10 hours playing on launch day, I'd have refunded the game over this alone (that's how bad it is) because since those 10 actual hours played I've almost been in queue almost double that.

Story: What story? Sorry guys but there's a *vague* indication that there might maybe, possibly, be some sort of story with the old blind fisherman, but it's so obscured and opaque at this point (level 23) that there's absolutely nothing to hook me in as a player. Like many MMO players I play this genre of games for immersive story and there's absolutely nothing resembling that currently visible in New World.

Factions: So for those of you who hated the ending of Mass Effect 3, you're absolutely going to hate New World--where your choice is Green, Purple, or Yellow and other than the colour of the gang you join, there's very little distinguishing at the time of writing. From the servers I've visited it seems like the purple faction is overwhelming dominating all of those servers, and the bad news for players there is that unless you pick the most dominant faction you're always going to be at a disadvantage on the map compared to players who did. It's a neat ideal, but there's a very good reason why purely PVP MMOs don't work long term, and fall back on PVE content and, you know, Story.

Mass PVP: So... here's the problem with the endless large scale PVP--New World invests you in settlement territories and you earn experience points in each town whose region you quest and earn experience in. If that region falls into the hands of one of the other 2 colours (you have to pick a colour, sorry), then your access to those perks and abilities you spent hours grinding up is shut off. You lose access to your characters bank and have to physically go to the location you stored your stuff at and manually carry it to another location (friendly, presumably--neutral at worst) and if that's just not possible and all territories are hostile? Well I guess you're screwed then. You can still function in those regions if you're not flagged for PVP, but everything is stacked against you and you can expect to be treated with hostility by your rival factions. The constant struggle to maintain control over a region becomes the all consuming focus of this game play very quickly, and it's easy to see how large, coordinated groups using voice communication will easily dominate this space; if your plan was to be a crafter and stay out of PVP you should either scout which is the dominant faction on your server and roll that way, or get used to moving towns a lot because at time of writing the game seems to revolve *entirely* around the PVP control of towns.

Stealth: New World handles stealth differently--you're not playing a back-stabbing rogue or ninja in the current iteration of New World, you hide behind things; no "invisibility-like" stealth here.

Magic: Aside from the story, okay and the queues, this is my biggest disappointment. Like ESO and GW2 the abilities your character has access to in New World are based on the weapon you are wielding. There are no character classes (or races), you're simply able to do anything you want based on what gear you wield and what gear you wear, and that's both a strength and and weakness of the game. As I mentioned above its very freeing to be able to do whatever you like, but for those of us who enjoy theory crafting and class identity, this is not the game for you. The magic system is present, but extremely shallow and, as with everything in New World, focused entirely on combat. Magic is just another way to handle damage (inflicting or healing it).

Conclusions:
If world PVP is your thing, and really your only thing, you're going to love New World as long as it's around (likely), assuming you can actual get into the game and that you picked the right colour.

If you're more a PVE player, however, New World isn't viable to really relevant to your interests long term, and I'd guess that it's going to see a large portion of its more PVE-centric players leave when FF14's expansion comes out, or when a new WoW expac, or Ashes of Creation finally goes live.

Final Score:

PVP 7.5/10
PVE 4.5/10

[EA Review, 2020]

I have very few complaints about the game as it is now - I like that you can solve situations and objectives in a variety of different ways, and really my only real complaint about the game as it currently is in EA is the Trademarked Larian puddles left behind after every bloody thing--it makes cantrips *way* stronger than they are in 5E tabletop rules, and it'll be the first thing I look to remove with addons when the game goes live:

PUDDLES BE GONE.

Other than that, I'm not sure what classes/races are intended for final release, but every single class I wanted to play as my main character is currently missing from the game :D

--

[Update 2024]

And now, after the full release and I have been seeing each other for a while, I can honestly say this is one of the best games I've ever played.

I'm an ex-BioWare dev, so going into BG3 I had some pretty high expectations, and Larian met or exceeded each of them. My *only* real complaint about BG3 is that we're apparently not going to get any more BG3 :'(

I see a lot of people saying this is X-Com like... it's not. It's a board game, very much a board game. I'm sure some people will enjoy it, but it definitely wasn't for me.

Don't go into this expecting anything like X-Com, or any fantasy isometric RPGs like Baldur's Gate, or Sword Coast.

I've been an OOTP Baseball player since the 2009 edition, faithfully upgrading each and every year, much in the way you might upgrade your NHL, MADDEN or FIFA games - is OOTP 18 radically different from 17? Not specifically, but it does add enough improvements, UI updates, and small improvements that it's worth the upgrade - so much so that I wouldn't want ot play a previous version without said improvements.

It's worth taking the time to install player pictures, logos and other fan developed add-ons through the workshop, if you're looking for a more realistic looking sim, and its definitely the best baseball game out there.

Having a lot of fun with this so far... "One more turn!", that said It's crashing, fairly reliably, about every 1.5 hours. Feels like a memory leak, but I haven't got the patience to check for one.


Make sure your auto save is on :/

If I'd known this version wasn't actually a Steam game, but rather, a Uplay game... I wouldn't have purchased this :( Uplay gives me no end of problems and Steam is always reliable. *sigh*