Out today on Steam. Most of the early buzz I’ve seen has been good, though PC Gamer somehow scored it lower than Gollum, maybe as a way of proving that scoring systems for games are absolutely useless.
Owlcat made the Pathfinder games, which I never played because I’m completely uninterested in Pathfinder. They were well received, though, and I’m a sucker for 40k’s ludicrous setting.
You do have to feel bad for any CRPG playing followup to Baldur’s Gate this year, even if the genre is completely different.
Anybody planning on picking it up? I’ll be checking sobe more early reviews when I get home and might grab it to play this weekend.
I’m a huge fan of Warhammer 40k as a setting, but mostly from a cool lore perspective. I’ve played many of the RTS games happily, but many of the games suffer from Lucas-esque style high licensing costs that have $20-30 games selling for twice that.
The most recent example being Mechanicus. I was really burned out by that, because it felt like I should have loved it in the same way I like Table top games like Descent but it felt half finished (the little 40k morality choices felt tacked on, the fast travel between rooms, cut/paste repetitions, etc) while being charged full price. Thank god I bought it on a steep steam sale or I’d have been more pissed off.
Yes, I know it’s an entirely different team, but still… I’ll wait.
Oh yeah, mechanicus was fun for a while, but then you realize that you’re not actually getting cool new items, just Item +2 and Item +3 from the original pool. That was the straw that broke my back and made me lose interest.
Then again, Chaos Gate was a real delight and absolutely stuck the landing. And Darktide hit the visual tone of Warhammer better than any 40k game I’ve played. So there’s hope, even in the grim darkness of our modern day video game industry.
I played a little bit of this, and—I am not sure what I was expecting, precisely, but it has a lot of turn-based combat. Which is not a particularly original idea. So it all depends on whether you want to put hours and hours into that sort of thing. There is also an option to start a game in “story mode”, but I haven’t tried that.
The game is definitely a plot that’s used to string together XCOM-style combat, but I’m enjoying it so far. They’ve definitely nailed the tone.
My biggest complaint is that the graphics are pretty rough, particularly the character models. I know it’s a bridge too far to expect BG3 graphics, but they still feel very outdated.
I made some time to try it out this weekend. I rather enjoyed what I’ve played so far.
I did run into a bug where all of my settings got tweaked, and my font size was reduced to… Zero. I couldn’t figure out why nobody was saying anything, just small, empty dialogs. If it happens to you, just go into your accessibility settings and set it to an actual value…
I’ve run into a number of bugs, mostly related to visuals and pathing. Lots more issues with the UI that probably aren’t bugs so much as a lack of polish.
Pros so far: the voice acting is quite good, it’s too bad there’s not more of it. The combat is crunchy in a good way, and the blend of the tabletop rules with extra bits for tactical combat seems to work. The sense of scale is good, the first time you go up against a chaos marine is a real “oh shit!” moment because of his size. So far it seems like there are lots and lots of different pieces of equipment to build around, which I like.
More cons: some stuff is extremely opaque, like the way the game handles warp phenomena. I mentioned errors in pathing above and they’re really annoying; even with auto-pausing, it’s too easy to accidentally trigger a trap or combat because your guys walk where they shouldn’t.
The alignment system is interesting, giving you period options to be either iconoclastic (good), heretical (evil), or dogmatic (still evil, but 40k Imperium evil). I decided to go heretical and thought it would be a slow decline into temptation situation, but no. You pretty much get to be all-in for chaos from jump, which doesn’t seem to fit well with the overall narrative. I’m bouncing between heretical and iconoclastic, playing it as a character who ultimately embraces chaos due to being too willing to let things slide or look the other way. If I do a second playthrough I’ll be full unwavering dogmatic.
It’s fully turn based in combat, the auto-pause is when you’re walking around outside combat and one of your guys sees a trap or something else dangerous.
So far buffing outside of combat doesn’t seem feasible (I don’t know if it’s even possible). I know that was a big complaint with the PF games.
There ,are definitely builds entirely focused around buffs. My main character is a noble whose basically names a different character her “servant” and us incentived to buff only that character for the fight.
Other builds seem to have lots of synergies, things like “if you do X to an ally already affected by Y, then extra stuff happens.”