- I can unreservedly say that the environments in this game look gorgeous, but animations in the world vary wildly between being 1. unnecessarily detailed for a top-down MMO played at this level of zoom, and 2. absolutely horrendous, like they were legitimately only half completed
- The big setpiece battles look incredible! The rendered scale of battles here shits all over the battles in Diablo 3 (and similar battles in other Diablo clones). It's the only time during the main campaign where you feel like your character is as powerful as the story says they are. I'm level 40, why am I still killing six boars at a time? Spawn more enemies please.
- Loads of classic MMO bullshit. Classes locked to a certain gender, painfully over-acted dialogue (even for an MMO), horrendously horny animations and armor for any female subclass. I tend to play as female characters in most games and I think this is the first time I've ever been outright embarrassed about it. I've got a fairly high tolerance for it but when I equip all the new, strong armor I get after a dungeon and see my character is wearing dolphin shorts and a... uh... cheongsam crop top(?) it's gonna get an eye roll from me.
- For an MMO it's actually kinda hard to play with your friends? You can party up but you have to go back to the friends list to see where on the map they are, you don't get to see what quest they're doing or where their objective is, but if their objective is "eliminate 10 rats" or w/e you can contribute to that without being aware of it at all. If someone who isn't the party leader tries to start a dungeon it just laughs at you and doesn't notify the party leader at all, so you've gotta tell the party leader what waypoint is closest to you (if they're not on the same map) and have them manually run all the way to the dungeon to start it. Maybe endgame content is easier to coordinate, but boy did they make the main campaign a pain.
- Classes are actually fairly interesting overall, and the ability to modify each skill as you level it provides an opportunity for build variety among each subclass (although not to the same degree as D3). The specialty skills are my favorite part of this system, as it offers you a sort of gameplay "anchor" to build around. Personal favorites are the gunslingers' gun-swapping, the soulfist's 3-tiered damage amp, and the gunlancer's shielding/status immunity.
- I'm not at endgame yet but I've enjoyed my time with it so far. There's a lot of bullshit "mash G until the quest is complete" nonsense mixed in here but fighting stuff is enough of a treat that I'm hoping for something like the rifts from Reaper of Souls once I clear the story. There are a lot of systems here that I haven't had to engage with yet (or don't care to, e.g. housing) but unless this game takes a hard left turn before endgame I'll probably continue to put time into this for a couple more weeks. I can't really see myself coming back to this long-term, though. We'll see if that changes - right now I'm biding my time until I can see what this game looks like once you're truly finished with the story.
- The big setpiece battles look incredible! The rendered scale of battles here shits all over the battles in Diablo 3 (and similar battles in other Diablo clones). It's the only time during the main campaign where you feel like your character is as powerful as the story says they are. I'm level 40, why am I still killing six boars at a time? Spawn more enemies please.
- Loads of classic MMO bullshit. Classes locked to a certain gender, painfully over-acted dialogue (even for an MMO), horrendously horny animations and armor for any female subclass. I tend to play as female characters in most games and I think this is the first time I've ever been outright embarrassed about it. I've got a fairly high tolerance for it but when I equip all the new, strong armor I get after a dungeon and see my character is wearing dolphin shorts and a... uh... cheongsam crop top(?) it's gonna get an eye roll from me.
- For an MMO it's actually kinda hard to play with your friends? You can party up but you have to go back to the friends list to see where on the map they are, you don't get to see what quest they're doing or where their objective is, but if their objective is "eliminate 10 rats" or w/e you can contribute to that without being aware of it at all. If someone who isn't the party leader tries to start a dungeon it just laughs at you and doesn't notify the party leader at all, so you've gotta tell the party leader what waypoint is closest to you (if they're not on the same map) and have them manually run all the way to the dungeon to start it. Maybe endgame content is easier to coordinate, but boy did they make the main campaign a pain.
- Classes are actually fairly interesting overall, and the ability to modify each skill as you level it provides an opportunity for build variety among each subclass (although not to the same degree as D3). The specialty skills are my favorite part of this system, as it offers you a sort of gameplay "anchor" to build around. Personal favorites are the gunslingers' gun-swapping, the soulfist's 3-tiered damage amp, and the gunlancer's shielding/status immunity.
- I'm not at endgame yet but I've enjoyed my time with it so far. There's a lot of bullshit "mash G until the quest is complete" nonsense mixed in here but fighting stuff is enough of a treat that I'm hoping for something like the rifts from Reaper of Souls once I clear the story. There are a lot of systems here that I haven't had to engage with yet (or don't care to, e.g. housing) but unless this game takes a hard left turn before endgame I'll probably continue to put time into this for a couple more weeks. I can't really see myself coming back to this long-term, though. We'll see if that changes - right now I'm biding my time until I can see what this game looks like once you're truly finished with the story.