Hellmeat

That's true, campaigns like in Medal Of Honor, Modern Warfare 1,2, Homefront are horribly primitive, linear and scripted with zero replayability value. But when you put Dungeon Siege 3 in the context of other RPGs and its predecessors the world is pretty small. It doesn't feel like an epic journey just due to lack of that scope. You seem to have conveniently left out the fact that most people buy these games for the Multiplayer aspect, which you can usually log easily up to a couple hundred hours if that's your thing. DS3 was short, extremely linear, and little to no replay value unless you just HAVE to play through with every character. I would have released this for $20 on PSN and Xbox Live. Just my opinion.

Yeah but the funny part is I LIKE the game, I just don't understand how they can keep kicking out games that feel like they are still in early stages of Beta testing and expect people to (gasp) not be upset? I am a huge fan of these type of games ... but to be honest Baldur's Gate on the original Xbox makes this game look just ... terrible. And that came out in like what ... 2002? Step the F**k up, Obsidian. Seriously.

My friend bought me this game on Steam for my birthday, pre-ordered, actually. We knew that the first two games in the series that you got with the pre-order would be single player, which seemed a little weird but ok .. I personally played the (for lack of a better term for it) half-assed demo and took it with a grain of salt after coming to the forums here and reading that it was crippled (on purpose). Ok, I get it. Obsidian was polishing the game, etc, and released a half-baked demo. Let me preface this by saying the following: I think Obsidian is a bad developer. I thought Fallout: New Vegas and Alpha Protocol were bug-ridden piles of loose dog crap that should never have been released until a majority of the bugs were fixed. It is my opinion that whatever cash-grabbing, two bit grubbing stooge that kicks these incomplete games out the door should have his **** repeatedly smashed with a hammer until they learn a lesson. Sadly, I am not Ruler of the Planet, and can only vote with my wallet. My friend decided to buy this for me for a birthday gift. I was skeptical to say the least. On the magical day when the game unlocked, I started it up and he joined my game. Several hours later I was left with a positive feeling overshadowed with many "Why the F*** did they DO that?" questions while my friend was less than impressed, mainly due to the same "I just don't understand this design decision..." feelings. The main difference? I was using a wired Xbox 360 controller, which actually made the game very easy to play. I was having a great time while my friend had to constantly try and figure out what the keys were, tried to find where the key bindings were (ha ha! This was priceless...), and in general developed an instant love / hate relationship with the game. Skip ahead a couple days, now three of us are all playing the game I hosted. Again, I am having a pretty good time, but you know why? I think a major part of it is that I DIDN'T DROP $50 ON THE GAME. If I did, all the little weird idiosyncrasies would mean a lot more to me, I think. For Example: * The documentation in the game is utter butt. * No key remapping at launch? Someone should be fired and blackballed from working on games again, forever. * The whole saved game thing, Ok, I understand that you don't want a max level guy jumping in a new Co-Op game and steamrolling through the what .. 7 hours of play? I get this. It's still not a popular decision. * The merchant / store interface is probably the absolute worst I have ever seen. Did someone's 8 year old kid design this? And the whole shared loot, while I understand it ties into the terrible Co-Op design, sucks so much raw chicken ass I don't even know where to start.. * The camera, mixed in with the ultra bright AoE effects on the floor, make large battles a painful clusterf*** of tears. It's like someone vomited a bellyfull of half-digested Skittles onto my screen while I am looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope, making it hard to see what the F I am even doing much of the time. * We use Vent, much like a huge population of gamers who game with friends use their own brand of Chat. Why the CRAP can we not turn off the in game chat ... IN GAME? I was able to puzzle through and find out how to turn off Voice for all of steam ... but for F***ks sake, didn't ANY QA go on at all during development? How could something as simple as this issue NOT come up from a Tester? To me, and this is my opinion ... I am having fun, but I also didn't drop $50 on the game and treat it as a console game. So saying, I would probably not have bought this game on PSN or Xbox Live unless it was like $10-$15 ... for $50? No way. At least my expectations of future Obsidian games have not been shattered. Obsidian is where great game ideas go to be murdered and raped =/