I finished the game last night. And it's nice. Mostly thumbs up from me.
Especially with regard to my main concern prior to release. But it turns out that normal difficulty actually feels normal. The only two combat encounters I had to do twice were down to game crashes. Annoyingly one of them was Aurora which happened to crash when the last lousy cultist was one hit away from dying. It wasn't vexing, though, and in fact was kind of fun doing the fight all over again.
That's one area where the game is pretty good. The fights are fun, engaging and for the most part not dragged out. I can appreciate how some boss fights are designed to throw a few extra hurdles your way and mix things up in how you solve them.
On the flip side, I didn't stabilize many warp routes. While that's great for leveling my characters, it really highlighted the limited ways in which these encounters were designed. It becomes something of a chore especially on higher levels when the fights involve a lot of real world time activating a ton of abilities only to massacre everything in half a turn. It doesn't help that there was a notable slant towards Khorne and Tzeentch encounters while Slaanesh and Nurgle remained rare. Specific groups also only seem to have one or two deployment variations. That's too much repetition for a frequently recurring feature.
I had a bit of an issue with leveling. I like the game mechanics as such and you can make a lot of meaningful choices up to, I don't know, halfway through the highest archetype tier when you have everything you want and start picking abilities that didn't make the cut earlier. The math formulas don't even bother me as the ability formatting makes is easy enough to understand the function of an ability and figure out quickly if it's for you before you have to do any math and learn the exact value of the boost. But it is a lot of stuff to come back to every time you level your character, at least six times to account for your core party, modified by equipment and attributes, and passive boosts, and stretched out over two month's worth of playing the game. For instance, I couldn't say why Yrliet can shoot five times in her turn without getting any extra turns, but she can. During combat it's all tied to four of five abilities. Past choices are a lot to keep track of when during actual combat most of it is hidden behind a few buttons with no reminder of how you got there.. It's easy to use when it counts, but takes up a good bit of brain space when you level up and try to build on existing strengths.
The story is fun and guess the right kind of over the top four
40k. I guess Owlcat got the tone right. Can't complain about that.
And visual character customization is nice. It doesn't have an overwhelming amount of option, but the ability to import a character portrait alone is great. I played Ministorum origin for no other reason than that there was a haircut available that aligns with a priest from my Sororitas army. Some fiddling with a picture I had of the model to adjust size and add some filters to blend better into the game graphics, and instead of basing my choices on game mechanics, I started out by recreating a model. That was cool. And dumb. Because she ended up as the weakest character in the party. But that's cool, because game difficulty is decent and allows for fluffy choices over hardcore optimization and still let a character function meaningfully.
Catching up on this thread, it looks like giving it half a year for Owlcat to get bugs under control was a good choice. It's not entirely bug free yet, but I had very little that got in the way of enjoying the game.
Mr Morden wrote:Cyel wrote:How exactly am I supposed to kill Malice in Commoragh?
My characters deal paltry 2-3 wounds with the crappy weapons they can find around and they get killed in 2-3 swings/shots. The character chosen to talk to Malice doesn't even get to activate, ever.
Abelard survives longer but, after Malice's goons take out Commissar and his soldiers, his luck ends at some point and just a few hits need to get through to kill him.
What diff are you playing
You can get a load of weapons in the camp before you fight him including a super powerful pistol - I had Abelard fight him whilst Sister and my character slaughtered the rest but I was on normal
I don't think I had trouble with that (on normal difficulty) since I barely remember anything about the fight. I think I had Yrliet and Argenta at the time, along with my Rogue Trader who is a complete bum. Must have worked out pretty well for me, though. I guess I invested in a lot of tanky abilities early on because I found my party to be killy enough without taking every last ability to boost killing power. That may be beneficial in this case, although I can't say that with any amount of certainty.
I do remember that part of the game to be the most challenging because of decreased overall damage and mitigating abilities from wargear, but not so much that any of my characters got downed.
One of my favorite abilities is Argenta's kick (remember to yell SPAAARTAAAA! when you activate it to unlock its full potential) because it can send an enemy to the ground, which takes it out of the fight for a turn. I don't know if it worked on Malice, or if I even had the ability at the time, but if I did, I'm sure I tried. Doesn't matter how bad an enemy is if it can't fight back.
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