I am actually shocked this game scores as high as it has. It might just be a bias of a small playerbase with a loyal core of fans. I have completed the game and all the side quests in-between. 1st issue: Itemization, there are so many issues with the items in this game. First and foremost being the lack of them. The best items in the game are crafted, it took me half the game to get my first upgraded weapon. Money is almost useless and you can for the most part ignore it. I didn't find a single time I was concerned about running out. 2nd Issue: Story, its a very meh D&D trope. Nothing great nothing bad. 3rd Issue: Buggy gameplay. I had several cases where I could not complete an action with no explanation of why. I only had 1 game crash but the randomly not being able to interact with the game part bug and part terrible UI design. There are very few messages in the game to explain if youre making a mistake. You are expected to know D&D 5E Inside and out. Conclusion: Its only worth the playthrough if you really enjoy D&D 5E (which I do). I only see the most hardcore of fans doing multiple playthroughs. The story isn't work consideration. I almost would have had more fun with this game if it was just a random fight generator without any story at all. Keep doing fight after fight with new gear and upgrades as you go.
I played alpha/beta and now release. The game itself is fine but has so many glaring issues that the server issues are taking the spotlight off of its crazy. The world is designed around PVP, the servers are capped but they cannot handle the populations they intended now you have thousands of people who have put work in unable to access their characters. Players keep remaking their characters only for a streamer to come to that low pop server and completely destroy the game for them. When it comes to combat mechanics, combat can be super fun when you start learning how to string animations together. It will certainly not be for everyone. It has a high skill ceiling for sure. Crafting plays a huge part of the world and it is worth your time to gather. The resources are so plentiful it feels like filler to replace the fact that there the story was clearly an afterthought in this "MMO". There is PVE Content, after the community outcries "inspired" them to make a PVE end game, its not great but its there. The faction system is entirely impossible to balance. Soon as 1 faction takes over its pretty much over. If that faction brings an army of streamer simps, youre better off re-rolling. Travel time is long and boring. There are no mounts, there is only a "click here to fast travel" network. Kind of defeats the purpose of an MMO. the world sure feels small when you blink everywhere. Weapon balance - there isn't any, its a joke end of story. This game needs another 2 years of development to even be remotely close to being viable long term.
No surprise PGI was unable to pull this off. The core game play, actual mech fighting is fine. The AI is useless in every form. The user interface suffers from the EXACT issues MWO has, in other words its terrible. This game is literally sabotaging itself no one who hasn't already played MW is going to find this game inviting or easy to learn. The terrain pop in is still present even though they have changed engines. This is a fundamental failure of the development team and an unwillingness to identify those issues by the management. If this is what they produced after delaying the game a year and taking all of Epic's money i shudder to think what they had planned to release prior to this... EDIT: 2 years later, games still buggy and none of the issues were addressed. Someone needs to take over the Mech Warrior license so it can actually be turned into a successful franchise.
Plagiarize familiar gun play mechanics add a dash of stolen leveling ideas and gear progression and voila you have Outriders. It tries to take all the best ideas from looter shooters and roll them into one. The big issue? Doesn't work. The scaling difficulty isn't explained adequately or it was explained in the demo not in the game, I ran into SEVERAL road blocks in 10 hours of play and had not idea i could just step my world down. problem is that also steps the gear down. So to get upgrades I need to deal with the outrageously poor balancing on my current difficulty or just sacrifice upgrades. If this is the way they are forcing replay its a terrible one. After all that I haven't seen a single system that I would want to play over to grind for gear. There are no clear dungeons or raids. Just a bunch of areas you would clear from start to finish over and over, the lay out of these areas is poor at best. none of this even addresses the gun play issues, lack of interesting abilities, convoluted combos and poor enemy design.
The original review i did was positive 9/10. This was made when there was actually loot in the looter shooter. thats no longer the case. Its pretty clear that the leadership on this game has no idea what they have in their hands and are quickly destroying it.
From the crappy card system to the amazingly terrible AI and the "scaling" racers. This game needs a lot of work under the hood. When my car is 40 lvls ahead of the mission, i should NOT be unable to catch the guy in the lead even when driving perfectly, obvious ploy to force me to grind MORE cards.
