Dragon's Dogma 2's greatest asset is it's overwhelming sense of physicality. Combat and exploration in DD2 force you to consider you and your enemy's relation to the environment far more than any other similar game I have played. The player and enemies alike are able to use their physical strength, size and environmental positioning to gain advantages or impose disadvantages on their opponents. The player also faces many large enemies which often encourage or require climbing onto them to hit weakspots, adding a new layer of tension as your character holds on for dear life on the back of a rampaging minotaur or other similarly sized monster. The combat and exploration are absolutely wonderful in this game in large part due to this reason but the game fails to be interesting in any other avenue. The story is hard to follow and rather uninteresting, the setting is generic, and the open world itself is lacking in points of interest outside of major settlements. The post-game also feels very lacking and extremely easy, with the only real "challenging" content being 2 fights against a worm and 2 fights against a drake all of which I was able to complete without breaking a sweat. All in all, DD2 has an amazing base but struggles to build up from it to create something truly memorable. I can only hope that an extensive DLC cycle will help build this game up into what it could be (a masterpiece).

Everything wrong (or right) with Dragon's Dogma 2:

Fashion's Dogma is dead: Under-armor is completely gone (both the chest and legs slot) and so are the gloves. Instead, all you get are a slim number of accessories that you can wear in tandem with your helmet. The cloaks are also unusually large, but their ineffectiveness makes them the most interchangeable slot. The excuse we got was that there would be more armors to choose from, so did we? Hardly, the original game had 68 chest pieces for instance, while this one has 90. But when you include the under-armor, you have 124 pieces to choose from. Now let's include the 70 glove pieces, that's 194 chest options. See what I mean? This game has 68 pieces of the leg armor and the original had 79, when you include under-armor, you have 111. Helmets are comparable in quantity, there's 88 in the original and and 82 here, 97 if you include accessories. Clearly, armor choice is a massive downgrade this time around and it's unjustifiable.

Vocations are disappointing: They just had to restrict this system as well. Is it really okay to only have ten unlockable skills, (plus one mastery skill), when we can't even use two weapons anymore? Especially with so many skills returning, it's a real shame they couldn't come up with more. You only get to unlock 5 augments per class as well; down from six, most of which are useless. Like dealing 5% more damage when hitting a target's vitals or reducing the time it takes to revive a Pawn by 1 second. Not to mention, the game won't even tell you what the values are (that applies to rings as well). The archer is especially affected, since four of the skills require their respective arrow types when they used to require none. You can no longer equip arrows to use on any skill anymore, nor are there status inflicting skills like Invasive Arrow. Mages used to be able to aim their spells and pinpoint a location on the ground, now it's forcibly automatic. When it comes to new classes, trickster makes a jarring addition to the roster because they can't deal any damage. Why isn't this a pawn class? You're going to be much more effective at dealing damage than any pawn. Wayfarer is much worse than the comparable assassin and should have been an opportunity to combine weapons. Instead, you have the ability to switch between two or three vocations, but you only get three ability slots and worse stats. At least the Mystic Spearhand was incredibly unique and fun to play, it's really the only worthwhile addition. I've also got to point out that all the hybrid vocations involve magic, the thief got nothing to mix with.

The gameplay is excellent: Existing skills have been given additional flair and the physics engine will ensure that you can launch your foes straight into the stratosphere. It's very satisfying and fun, especially thanks to the improved AI. Enemies are much more aggressive, have better tracking, quickly gap close, can stunlock you to death, and will chase you to the ends of the earth. They can be genuinely terrifying and you will need your pawns to survive. Going solo is no longer a viable option, especially when most of the classes don't have a basic dodge. Maybe every single hit shouldn't stagger you though, you can only mitigate knockdowns. Most important of all, they fixed leveling stats. They're tied exclusively to your vocation, so there's no overlap. The max level is no longer 200 as well, now it's 999; which would have been cool if there were high level monsters.

The world is epic! Exploration is hollow: It's massive and sprawling, you'll really feel like you're on some sort of grand adventure; but it's landscapes are realistic to a fault; detrimental to the real meat of the game. For instance, every single dungeon is cave and only a handful of them are going to take you a significant amount of time to explore. You're not going to find anything like Bluemoon Tower, the Catacombs, or Watergod's Altar. Puzzles are gone, levers are gone, anything that could have made the locations district is largely missing. You can even see it in their names: "Strange Corridor", "Hidden Cavern", "Forgotten Tunnel" to name a few. Once more, they're not so rewarding either. There are chests absolutely everywhere, but more often than not, you're going to find a wakestone shard or an item you can already buy at the region's blacksmith. There are duplicates of several weapons and armors as well, why? Notable exceptions exist, but they're few and far between. If there were more armor slots to play with, this wouldn't have been a problem. Maybe focus on filling the world with quality content instead of simply making it large, Skyrim was 12 years ago. To make matters worse, enemy variety is about the same as the first game, just spread across a greater distance. If you were hoping for new additions, all you really get are variants of existing ones, slimes, and one-off bosses. Considering an encounter happens about every 15 seconds, it can get pretty exhausting.

Travelling could have been great: The addition of oxcarts is a welcome one, it's so nice to have more options beyond walking and ferrystones. However, the cart moves so slowly that I'm always opting to "doze off", which usually involves an enemy encounter along the way. Problem is, oxcarts are very destructible; I don't even think it's viable to take them without the time skip, because there are so many enemy encounters along the way. The addition of camping is great because you don't have to walk back to an inn whenever night arises. I do think their spread is too generous though, you'll have an easy time finding one when the need arises. Riftstones are everywhere too, so losing a pawn is hardly detrimental. What really bothers me are the portcrystals. Why are there only two naturally occurring ones in the entire game? Here are the places that should have one but don't: Melve, Bakbattahl, Rest Town, Sacred Arbor, Volcanic Island Camp. It's ridiculous, not to mention the non-existence of an eternal ferrystone, which was probably an excuse to fill up chests. Oh, and there's a portcrystal DLC, maybe that's why Bakbattahl doesn't have one.

Questing is better, but the quests aren't good: Quests are no longer tied to stages in the story, so you don't have to worry about automatically failing them. Timed quests will explicitly tell you in the UI, but I'd appreciate having a day counter. Failure was touted as a possibility, but it's not really something to worry about. They're usually started by encounters (you'll run into an NPC or they'll walk up to you) making them feel like a natural occurrence in the world. I appreciate how cryptic they can be, but sometimes the descriptors are unhelpful and you'll have to rely on a pawn's knowledge. Where they falter is in interest, because there aren't any exciting locations to unlock or exclusive rewards. I couldn't tell you a single memorable one, they all felt like a chore.

The plot is dreadful: The main story might just be the laziest I've ever seen in an RPG. It's even more of an afterthought than the first game. All that intrigue and buildup about the false sovran (which is really just a bunch of half-baked stealth missions) is squandered because of some Godsway MacGuffin. Which I thought was just the beginning of the story, turns out it's actually the half-way point. Your search for answers leads you to Bakbattahl, but the actual region is irrelevant to the plot. You'll head to an alter that raises from the sea, but it isn't a dungeon, just a cave with an elevator... Once you reach Moonglint Tower, it's just an elevator again. They seriously couldn't put a single fucking dungeon in this game to save their lives. Once you reach the top, bootleg Jafar accidentally summons the wrong dragon and it ends about the same way as the first game. Only this time, the post-game sucks bigtime. We're talking time limits, zero saves, three main quests, an obsession with the color red, and no dungeons. But don't worry, it's all doable in under 4 hours and the ending is just a hint at future DLC.

I have a very hard time accepting that this was Itsuno's true vision for Dragon's Dogma because it's worse than Dark Arisen. Not only does it fail to adequately improve on the original's shortcomings, in many ways it has doubled down on them. Meanwhile, its best aspects have been stripped away. Yet again, there's a great system buried beneath a pile of trash, only this time they took more pages from Ubisoft instead of lighting the book on fire. It's emblematic of everything wrong with modern gaming and this massive open world trend needs to stop already.

This one feels very undercooked and rushed.

Combat is amazing but gets repetitive due to the lack of enemy variety, feels like I'm always killing harpies and goblins every 2 minutes. Also you outlevel enemies way too fast, so any sort of challenge is lost early on in the game.

Side quests are poorly structured, they never tell an interesting story and never give meaningful rewards, so you just forget about them.

But the biggest offender here is the main quest, one of the worst I've ever played in a RPG. Nothing really happens in the main story, its always building up to something big and then it abruptly ends with no conclusion to anything.

It's probably going to get better with a "Dark Arisen" type of expansion later on. But right now, this isn't worthy of your time.

Feels more like a solid remake or a Dragons Dogma 1.5 than a sequel. It's more of the same which can be a good or bad thing depending on your expectations. For example, if you're expecting plenty of new enemy types, bosses or drastic changes to gameplay systems (like improved Pawn AI) compared to the first game that's really not here.
It's mostly the same game as Dragons Dogma 1 base game but bigger. The focus of the game is clearly on a general open world experience with fun to control player classes. There is very little on the side of tight combat focused dungeons like Bitterblack Isle (DD1 Dark Arisen expansion).

The combat and party management is still fun make no mistake, but it's definitely on the side of a power trip game where the player character grows powerful quickly (both statistically and mechanically) but enemies do not improve to match.
The variety of enemy encounters seems like one of the weakest points of the game. It's a sequel but 90% of the enemies you face are things you might already know from DD1. The bulk of enemies are trash mob level goblins, bandits and saurians which have 4-5 recolors based on how far you are in the game. But the way you fight them is exactly the same. It's not like they gain some threatening new attack or AI behavior, so going back to the first area to fight the same enemy class feels much the same.
I think this is a big loss since the core combat does feel good but the enemies really blur together and by the end of the game you might just be doing the same attack sequences and not care about what enemy you're fighting.

The difficulty level is low and XP gain from enemies scales very little; a mid-tier enemy like a Cyclops gives 1/3 the XP of an endgame boss. Exploring the map thoroughly will have you get overleveled for the main story quests quickly even if you don't intend to.

If you're looking for a challenging action RPG dungeon crawling experience like Bitterblack Isle or just lots of new enemies to face and new gameplay systems compared to DD1 that's not in DD2, at least on release.

"The world once shaped by the great will has come to an end.
It was a foregone conclusion. All is preordained.

If in spite of this you still have the will to fight, now is your chance to prove it."

This is a particularly difficult game for me to write about because I want to greedily compare and contrast every ballhair with the first title’s, just so I can diagnose exactly where my issues with it lie - why a game that is functionally so similar in DNA to one of my all-timers doesn’t hit the mark. Personally speakin, the long & short of it is that Dragon’s Dogma 2 is something of a sidegrade to the original title that distances itself too much from what I found spectacular about it to begin with.

Possibly my favourite element of Dragon’s Dogma 2 is one that could be felt from the moment you first gain control of your character. There’s a palpable heft to character locomotion, complimented by the multilayered textuality of the land itself & the threats of wrong turns into the unknown or slipping off a slick cliffside to your untimely demise - it leans wonderfully far into the concept of traversal being a battle unto itself. As was the case with DD1, being tasked to travel from safety to a marker deep into the fog of war is never a simple request. Goblins, ogres, harpies, and whoever else decides to grace you with their presence are waiting in the bushes to act as regular speedbumps to be carefully considered and planned for accordingly.

Where DD2 slips at this for me is in how little it reciprocates for what it demands. This is a sequel that has ballooned itself in scale to a dizzying near 5x the original map’s size, but hasn’t developed the enemy roster nor the environmental design acumen to make use of it. Take for instance that DD2 has fifty caves strewn around its tectonic world map, and I don’t think a single one is as impressive as one that could be found in DD1. Where the caves/dungeons in DD1 were concerned, there would be special objectives relevant to the overall story, a person you were going there on behalf of who represented a town or group, they would unlock shortcuts for faster world traversal and upon repeat visits you’d notice the location’s role in the world change for the denizens. They would be densely designed so that every corner was worth being scanned to the best of your ability for pickups, shortcuts, levers, climbing points - lending to the almost DnD-esque adventure core followed passionately by the game’s design. Hell, the locales would generally sound and look different too, built to purpose so as to become plausible enough to justify their utility in the world and lend credence to exploring them.

Compared to that, DD2 has shockingly little of this. Its myriad nondescript caves wallhugging the world could scarcely be five prefab rooms tied into a loop to house a few potions, or some equipment you could find at a store. No unique gimmicks or trials, only populated by a handful of gobbos and maybe a midboss as a treat. I feel that Dragonsbreath Tower was supposed to act as something of a callback to Bluemoon Tower from DD1 - it being a perilous journey across a handful of biomes towards a crumbling hanging dungeon that houses a flying peril, but it’s so bereft of pomp and confidence. A truly memetic core routine that made me think less of adventures and more of waypoints and upgrade materials. I want to use a Neuralyzer to remove BotW shrines from the face of the earth. And god why is none of the new music good.

DD2 implies at a big story, but to me it felt like nothing came together. I had no idea who anyone was supposed to be beyond Brant, Sven and Wilhelmina. DD1’s progression from Wyrmhunt -> Investigate the Cult -> Kill Grigori -> Deal with the Everfall -> Confront the Seneschal was great, and throughout all of that you kept up with characters like the King and got to see his downfall. The writing and delivery of the cult leader and Grigori himself far surpasses anything in DD2, despite having very similar subjects. Outpaced by DD1 in setpieces and pop-offs and thematics. There's barely any antagonistic people in the game and once you get to Battahl it feels as though the game trails off like it’s got dementia.

It's a completely different kind of design that, sure, encourages player freedom - but communicates it in this really loose way that I just don't care about. I spent much of my playthrough having no idea what I was doing besides wiping off the blank smudges of world map. What expounds this problem is that quest discoverability is astonishingly low here, oftentimes made worse by restricting itself to AI astrology, time of day, relationship levels (??). The duke could stand to commission a farcking quest board imo!!! I won’t kid myself and say that the quests in DD1 were even a bronze standard, but they worked and communicated exactly what they needed to do while also leaving open ends available for interpretation. But in DD2, they’re just awful, I absolutely hated the experience of trying to clear up Vermund’s quests before pushing Main Story progression and at this point I wish I cared as little as the game does. What need is there for almost all of them to have a “return to me in a few days” component in a game with such limited fast travel, do you want me to throw you into the brine? Frankly the game is never as interesting as when you're doing Sphinx riddles.

Combat’s good enough, I do enjoy how the interplay of systems would present the player with all sorts of unique situations, but even these can and do begin to feel samey when a very slim enemy pool on shuffle. What makes these emergent conflicts even less impressive to me is how I can't help but feel as though the ogres, trolls and chimeras in particular have had their difficulties neutered. The hardest time I had with the chimera was during a sidequest where you had to get the poison-lover to be doused in chimeric snake venom. They're barely a threat otherwise, and can either be chain stunlocked with well-placed shots or slashes, or get too lost in their own attack animations to really hit anyone. Comparing these enemies to DD1 where climbing was far more effective at dealing damage encouraged the player to get real up close to them and it felt like their AI knew how to deal with that. Like when I fought the Medusa it felt like they didn't have any idea where the party even was. I think if the hardest encounters the game has to offer is Too Many Goblins we have a problem. (Dullahan is very cool though)

I’m not miffed no matter how miffed I sound. When do people like me ever get sequels to games they love? I’ll tell u dear reader it’s Never. Dragon’s Dogma 2 is full of wonder & delight and I think anyone less fatigued by SCALE and SANDBOX than me has a home in it. I feel a little left behind, having spent 12 years wasting away in the waiting room rotating in my head the concepts DD1 confidently wields, and its further potential as a foundation for a sequel. A game that was absolutely 'for me', course correcting into sick-of-this-already airspace. I’ll be excited to see whatever news, expansions or the like the future holds for DD2. Right now, though? I think DD1 has a stronger jawline.

In that primordial placeless origin, through the mist-veil of time, since man first airbrushed Merlin smoking a pipe on the side of a van, there, you can feel it in the noosphere, a moon-lit dream, The Dream, a call in the heart of the human soul. Some have seen some small part of this dream- The Legend of Zelda, The Elder Scrolls, Ultima, Dark Souls, Adventure, Dragon Quest, King's Field, Wizardry, among innumerable others, nameless here forevermore, all have failed to reach The Dream. Perhaps cruel circumstance chained them to Earthly bond, perhaps cowardice stayed their hand, perhaps they lacked the naivety and earnestness necessary to behold a waking dream. Whatever their individual situation, the results have always been, like Lion of Gripsholm Castle, a mutant, an aberration, at best a passing resemblance. Dragon's Dogma is The Dream, forged in the furnace of the heart, it is not visually plain- it is clean, it is not halfbaked- it is too goodly to exist totally in a world half-evil, it achieves the promise of videogames, and proves that creative endeavour above all else is the greatest goal humanity can strive for. it is the twinkle in the eye of Merlin smoking a pipe airbrushed on the side of a van.

Doom should be understood not as a "first-person shooter" but as a highly asymmetrical real-time chess variant. While the first Doom is arguably the better experience right out of the box, mainly due to the sequel's less consistent level design, the addition of the super shotgun and a richer bestiary add a great deal of depth to the game. Of course, Doom II is not just the game out of the proverbial box: it's also the entry ticket to perhaps the single richest archive of fan-made levels for any game, and it's this fact that makes it an essential game. Many people tend to regard fan-made content as necessarily inferior to "professional" design work, especially when it dares to push the difficulty ceiling beyond their comfort zone, but this is ignorance and laziness. The truth is quite the opposite: the collective effort of iteration over years and decades inevitably pushes a game's level design in directions that no single team could accomplish or even imagine in the span of a release cycle or two. Of course that isn't possible if the base game isn't good at its core. Doom II just happens to be perfect.

If Rain World was Tarkovky's Stalker, then Downpour is a collection of AO3's best rated fanfics of Tarkovsky's Stalker. The bloat here is stupefying, most times at odds with the sanctity of original vision, and unfathomably cursed when one of the campaigns ends on a combat gauntlet with a final boss in the end. You cannot deny care and attention that went into Downpour construction tho, and there's still that same brilliant core that makes any progress journeying through the world an undertaking of extraordinary reward. Slugcats with neat gimmicks present a rather good time but I'd recommend meeting them with managed expectations.

I love the way exploration works here; the refusal to budge on fast travel save for diegetic ox carts, snatching back dark arisen's infinite ferrystone, and stretching the landmass both horizontally and (especially) vertically is wonderful. in many, many ways it's a bigger, slower, denser game, and they did it all while focusing on the most mundane environments devoid of giant theme park attractions bulging from every flat surface

likewise I love the idea of elaborating on the sense of traversal and moving toward a holistic spirit of adventure. deteriorating health ceilings aid attrition and help answer the inherent slime of menu heals, and having campfire rests operate as something of a risk/reward mechanism goes a long way toward giving each journey a greater heft and substance

even something as transparently gamey as designing the map as a network of funnels and chokepoints stippled with smaller threats and crosshatched with bigger ones was very clever; it's all just nouns crashing against nouns as they fire down chutes, but when coupled with the meaty physicality of the game's interactivity it goes a long way toward building up those Big Moments

but the consequence of trash mobs operating as speedbumps means moment-to-moment encounters operate more as filler than anything you could consider independently engaging scenarios. it also means that despite the map being several times larger than gransys it ends up feeling a lot more suffocating due to all the overlapping nouns slamming and interrupting each other without end

I just about luxuriated in the rare opportunities to enjoy brief spells of negative space; I savoured it like one of those FMV steaks. I'd kill for more moments like the arbor or the battleground where I was able to inhabit the world as a pilgrim or wanderer rather than serial wolf slaughterer or battahl sanitation expert, but they're very few and far between

there's no escaping the impenetrable walls of goblins, wolves, harpies, and saurians polluting every inch of the world. the already slender DD bestiary's been ported over nearly 1:1 with about as many additions as subtractions, and between the absurd density and massive landmass the variety ends up looking and feeling significantly worse than it did when it was first pilloried twelve years ago in a notoriously incomplete game

when the Big Moments do happen they're often spectacular, and it's easy to see why the chaotic intersection of AI, systems, and mechanics was prioritized so heavily and centered as the focal point of the entire experience. early on every bridge that breaks behind you, every ogre leaping from city walls, and every gryphon that crushes your ox cart feels huge and spellbinding; the game's at its best when all the moving parts align just right to achieve dynamic simulacrum, leveraging unpredictability to carry encounters well above their station

where that stuff loses me most is in the complete lack of friction. for a game with so many well considered means of drawing tension out of discovery it manages to render most of them meaningless when you're never being properly threatened enough to let them kick in. camping, eating, crafting, consumables, ambushes, and setpieces all take a significant blow from the chronic lack of bite, and it's frustrating to see so much potential go to waste when everything's already set up unbelievably well for success

even if you choose to go it alone, or do as I did and run with a party of two (ida + ozma: wily beastren + weakest creature), it only does so much when every corner of the map has CAPCOM Co., Ltd superpawns and npcs popping out of the ground to aid you unbidden and monsters are all mâché sculptures begging to be stunlocked. where's hard mode? why does it feel like everything DDDA did right got ignored? we just don't know

I'd have been happy if the game yanked a bit of control back with some kinda endgame/post-game dungeon, but there isn't one; there aren't really dungeons in general. in opting for quantity (50+!!) over quality we end up with none of them feeling particularly curated, and none of them having the scope or menace of the everfall, let alone bitterblack. no ur-dragon either, which is just baffling. the entire run from endgame to post-game is a gaping hole where something oughta be but certainly isn't

when I hit credits I felt almost confused, like I'd just been tricked into playing a remake or reboot of the original dragon's dogma that somehow had less material stretched even thinner. I enjoyed what I played for the most part, but the more thought I put into it the more it feels compromised and unfinished in all the exact ways itsuno promised over and over it wouldn't be this time around

there's a lot to love here: stuff like fucked up modular teeth, the sphinx, seeker coin platforming, pawn bullshitting, the dragonsplague, cyclops ragdolls, opaque sidequests, intentional tedium, and routinely bizarre interactions. much of what was good in the past remains good, and even bits that stumble backward generally land someplace close to decent regardless. some of the vocation/gear downgrades aren't to my liking, and there's an odd shallowness that hangs over the experience, but I think I liked it?

I just don't really get it

I feel it's important to note that a combination of two things finally got me to play my first real Souls: playing Sekiro and later growing to miss it dearly, and attempting to play a much worse Soulslike and getting so fed up I took solace in the real thing. For all their fearsome reputation, FromSoft games function like eductational tools: they take your hand and gently guide you from a novice to a player who can confidently defeat even the nastiest boss. They want you to succeed and they speak a consistent and thoughtful language to teach you how. If other games truly want to grab a piece of From's shining star, they don't need to learn a combat system or checkpoint-based level design, they need to learn how to teach.

There is some magic in Slice & Dice, and I don't mean spells. At its best, it captures the sense of combinatorial wonder of a deckbuilder roguelike with a dramatically simpler structure. In my first winning run I went wild using a clever combination of classes and equipment to make a dozen mana a turn, and I was in hog heaven. The problem is, while there are certainly jewels of excitement there to mine, the player has almost no control over when and how they're accessed.

Here is the structure of the game. You begin with a D&D-style party of five characters each of whom has a selection of abilities. You fight waves of enemies, and after each wave you receive either a piece of equipment which provides some unique bonus or a level up for one of your characters. Each character has a range of level 2 and level 3 classes, each with a totally different set of abilities.

What this means is that your choices early in the game have essentially no bearing on the endgame. Early equipment is so weak as to be irrelevant, and the level 2 classes you choose have no bearing on which level 3 classes you have access to or which abilities they have. Any equipment you choose to optimize a midgame party will likely be suboptimal for the endgame.

This severely limits the replayability of the game. When the first 2/3s of the game have no bearing on the rest of it, it just becomes an elongated loading screen you have to get through before the real fun starts. Why not have classes exist in a tree, where level 3s are upgraded versions of level 2s that retain the core concepts? Why even have early-game equipment that's guaranteed to be worse to equip than not later on? This game could be great, but instead it is merely good.

Six years and a switch in directors, platform and setting led to their slowest but also their most intense and atmospheric work. Morrowind - however, is actually two games in one: The deliberate explorer and the moon-jumping alteration mage. The former is where the trademark 'haunting' component of dungeon-crawlers takes over the world, turning it into an agonizing wasteland in which the mood, weather, wildlife and natives are all hostile in their own way. It's also a classic example of exploration, first by dropping the tutorial dungeons, reducing fast travel to a paid service and - after a few minutes of walking and character creation, begins by wishing the player "good luck!". What comes next is perhaps the most 'involved' form of navigation ever. Via signposts, checking for directions (using a quest menu that takes after a messy journal) and frequent use of the map, players basically perform the gameplay loop of towns in prior TES games outwards. A similar process also affects its structure, as Daggerfall's dungeon verticality translates into complex world geometry (hills, mountains, valleys, even floating areas). The addition of random encounters (not only while resting, and whose rate becomes comical lategame) lends a new layer of tension to traversal, and in-between - their talent for strange-but-memorable moments shows in its roadside quests.

Alteration spells define the other side of their program, a hyper-busted strategy where magic becomes as freely explorable as its world. Movement-related ones such as levitate, jump and slowfall take on higher parameters - with access to more extreme effects via spellmaking, and the result is a progressively wild game of 'fast travel' in which players cross incredible distances with a single leap. Levitation - in particular, revolutionizes dungeon progression the way that Jump does to the overworld, while other spell types, whether new (conjuration) or expanded (illusion & mysticism), also benefit from the bugs/oversights of such a wonderfully broken spellcrafting system. Essentially, users must choose between slow-burn wandering and a superhero sim. What these two playstyles have in common is that the overworld is now the centerpiece.

Not every change is a huge plus (e.g. verbose topic-based dialogue system, combat that relies heavily on stamina) but the rest marks a major step forward in quality, variety and personality.

third time giving this a shot. was not the charm. for all the comparisons people made to quake when hyping it up, it fails to do ANYTHING that made quake good. movement is Amiga level bad, weapons are lame (so much hitscan...), music is filler, levels are Alright at best, except for the part where every single one of them has a rape joke hidden in it so you can unlock a rape joke steam achievement. had this actually come out in the 90s it would be relegated to the same bins as SiN and Gunman Chronicles; the idea anyone likes it more than Doom is, genuinely, driving me to drink as i type.

there's a reason the multiplayer is deader than Daikatana's.