ShadowScythe

2 player local co-op is possible- any more and you'll have to go online, although tbh judging from the comments 2 players is probably for the best as the game will become incredibly cluttered as you add more players. The game is about 17 hours for me and I did all sidequests and dungeons and lore and everything.

Monkey Lungs you have serious entitlement issues if you honestly feel that way. This has nothing to do with honor and no one should owe this person money because he/she didn't bother to research what kind of game he/she was getting.

Alpha Protocol got a generally bad rep amongst mainstream gamers though...making a sequel wouldn't be successful for that reason- they'd be better off making a spiritual successor featuring Steven Heck in a cameo role.

Game was 17 hours for me, doing all the sidequests although I didn't grind so my end game level was 29 of 30.

I think the 10 hours thing is the in game save point counter which is way off. Steam is a better measurement.

DA2 didn't have crap controls and camera, for one. Yes it did. The lack of a tactical camera was absolutely horrible to the more passive and supposedly tactical gameplay- plus that stupid camera would screw up all the time whenever I was in corridors or doorways or some bit of scenery decided to mess with the camera. I personally found the camera in DA2 to be just as bad as DS3. Controlwise Da2 was certainly better but then we had to put up with that awful wave combat and stupidly long cooldown times with boss encounters with the most insanely bloated HP bars- DS3's controls was something you could get used to after a while, you can't get used to terrible encounter design and combat.

Yeah Duke was going to be a best seller for the development history alone.

I'm looking at these negative reviews and I have to ask, were the reviewers playing DA2 by mistake? A lot of these complaints were not brought up with the DA2 reviews and are instead nitpicked ridiculously in DS3 (multiplayer complaints aside)- hell it's like the ratings for the 2 games were swapped too.

While it certainly makes blocking useless I disagree on dodge being too imba. Unlike most rpgs kiting around the map here won't achieve anything in the long term, you don't regain focus, you can't regain power spheres or anything- it's not like witcher 2 or DA2 where you could just run around the map until your vigor/mana regenerated and then jump back into the combat (witcher 2 is especially guilty of this imo). Dodging here is about placement and avoiding taking damage and it's perfectly fine the way it is- I'd argue that it's blocking that needs to be made more useful. What you are doing with geometry of annihilation is a tactic- besides GoA has a huge focus cost and it's mainly useful for taking out trash mobs (which means that after you kill all the trash mobs you won't be able to regen focus to use GoA again as easily since all that's left are the tough and more aggressive bosses) You won't find it as useful against boss encounters (at least in the mid-late game) Chaos: Vampiric is certainly a badass combo with GoA for Reinhart, but I only found one or two pieces of loot that had that stat- how far in the game have you played? Cause after Raven's Rill I found loot that made the old stuff obsolete and meant I couldn't get the Vampiric stat after that (I'm guessing they give that stuff early on to make up for Reinhart's fragility). Don't know about this one either, I wasn't always able to buy everything in the shops- and there was certainly a lot of depth with loot, unlike other rpgs where loot at different tiers are just better than low tiers, there was certainly a lot of depth to the looting stats that meant that even low tier stuff was useful (I found myself dropping down to lower tiered stuff so I could get agility bonuses as I found that more useful than attack raises, and I kept that mobius with chaos vampiric for quite a while until it got completely obsolete because I needed that health stealing edge to compensate for Reinhart's low stamina. Agreed . I'm not sure, compared to other games there was a pretty clear difference between hardcore and normal in terms of how aggressive the AI was- unless you mean the difficulty gradient of the game- in which case I agree except that I found the boss encounters made up for the trash mobs and filler combat (boss battles were tonnes of fun and pretty tactical cause of their combat patterns). I find it strange that you mention DA:Origins as an example of this done right as it's a completely different playstyle and wouldn't work in this setting (the combat is too passive)- also that game abused filler combat and just raising stats a lot as well. And I agree with you on that last point too. But if it was that easy why not just raise the difficulty to hardcore? Unless you're claiming hardcore is easy too (c ocky )

I remember that concept art. Did they say who that was (i.e. like the Hero of DS2 thus further cementing the Radiant Youth as Azunai?)

Agreed on a lot of these sentiments. I would like the WASD controls to be improved as well. A and D should allow you to strafe left or right (and as fast as moving forward instead of the slowly strafing movements in NWN2) rather than tilt the camera like that. I guess most people prefer the point click movements but I'm more of a WASD person myself. Aside from that, I'd love to see any upcoming dlc, I guess it's too much to request a full expansion pack like MOTB or SoZ but dlc with new quests and stories that go past the ending (the ending certainly implied new upcoming stories) would be fun.

since when 74 is a "low" score? on a 100 scale, 74 is 3/4s, how is that "low"? 74 is a decent score by normal peoples' standards (indeed I'd rate DS3 in the 70s by my personal scale) but by metacritic's standards where review scores are incredibly bloated and good-great games are 80+ it's pretty low. @Sannom I think someone posted a while back here (it was around the time the release date was delayed I think) that Square expected around 1 mill sales for the title.

Woah what?! As successful as DNF on steam? I mean, I was a little worried what with the metacritic score currently as low as Alpha Protocol (alpha protocol didn't sell very well right?) good to see the game is selling fairly well after all.

Alot of PC games go for middle mouse button rotation- off the top of my head there's NWN2, Witcher in isometric mode and I think DA:Origins had that too (or was that one right click). As a (clearly very proud) PC gamer how did you not think to use that button?

Ummm...neither does DS3. Call it many things, but it wasn't condescending, it didn't treat the player like a moron, and for an arpg the combat was quite tactical (no buttonmashing or awesome buttons) and the mechanics were quite varied. YMMV on whether DS3 is value for money I guess (I got my money's worth personally) but the other thing you said is incredibly outlandish.

Can't you just go into the help section of the game to find out what all the stats mean (hit esc and click help)? The game manual is kind of in the game itself- unless you mean controls which are also explained within the game.

I suppose the more mundane explanation is that he's finishing off Lonesome Road.

And everyone needs to gib in a fountain of blood. Even if you just slightly tapped them. NO EXCEPTIONS!

I'd say it's less human gene pool deterioration and more niche markets no longer being viable. Although what with all the hand holding in many games nowadays there probably still is some deterioration going on.

^^User reviews suffer as well from random butthurt raids. I mean wasn't portal 2 like 5 user score on metacritic at one point cause a lot of people were randomly angry about the arg? Like slowtrain says, forum communities that I hang out on are my main source of whether or not I'd like the game.

where does the breadcrumb trail (hit r) tell you to go?

I got used to the pc controls pretty quickly with Reinhart. But I think the controls would certainly be much less awkward on console.

Persistent multiplayer is a completely different game and genre imo. AP's dialogue options and New Vegas's faction mechanics wouldn't fit in that kind of setting since people after multiplayer have no interest in stuff like that and just want the loot and exp. So no, adding multiplayer to this theoretical ultimate RPG of all time would just leave it completely unfocused and a mess. On the other hand, this theoretical game could come with co-op + easy to use modding tools so that the players themselves could craft the multiplayer experience instead. In fact, I reckon if DS3 came with a toolkit + level editor that'd probably make up for whatever complaints about multiplayer people were having.

Co-op with a friend on Hardcore and maybe play the game a couple of weeks-months later with different characters.

They're just saving the best for last.