It's been a long time since I played it, but I'm with applehiku. I found the game very boring. The characters were dull and lifeless, living on Open World #9769424 with point Stuff To Do here, there and everywhere. It does have an interesting premise but there's only so many times you can upgrade a bow in games before it gets repetitive.

I can get behind the praise for setting and gameplay, but this part is curious to me. Have you played it to the end?

Contrary to others, I really enjoyed the open world gameplay. But i also loved Far Cry Primal which received similar criticism. What I didn't like about HZD was the story-telling with regard to everything concerning the past technology and cataclysm. That was just plain boring, typical nerdy lore obsession. Everything was so long winded and drawn out, so much fuss over something that every second videogame is about. The present world was much more interesting than the past. Give me robot dinos all day, but don't put me to sleep with the explanation of how they came to be.

You've got it backwards. When I want to play a DW game, that's what I want to play. 9 is and Origins seems like utter crap because they wildly changed it. While there's plenty of room to innovate while remaining the same game that people actually want/expect.

"formula" is a pejorative used by people who simply don't like the game. Let's not empower them.

(And they have done plenty of exploratory/innovations that still remained the "same game" -- the subcontracted Hyrule Warriors and Dragon Quest Heroes both did nifty things while retaining the parts that make me like the Warriors games.)

The western game they did -ish in the formula, the French one, wasn't good either.

Wait what was the French warrior game?

'Oxenfree II: Lost Signals'. Loved the first one, I played its sequel a while ago but I didn't find it as intriguing or touching. I wouldn't say it's a bad game, perhaps it's just a matter of connecting with the story and its characters, but this one didn't do it for me unfortunately.

I say it's
final Fantasy 16

first started out OK, then it's lore-bomb and same-y

The clue is in the number

-Ish.
[url=https://koei.fandom.com/wiki/Bladestorm:_The_Hundred_Years%27_War]https://koei.fandom.com/wiki/Bladestorm:_The_Hundred_Years%27_War[/url]

Agree. I played 1 hour of the game and couldn't be bothered to keep playing.
Yeah, played about 1/2 hour of the game, turned it off, and played Elex instead.

Many of you people are just spoiled like a over-aged brat. I bet, if any teen or child who got near zero games from a very poor family got the chance to play any of those games... they would be totally fascinated and enjoy every second of its gametime. Even myself is a bit degenerating i feel... simply spoiled to much. So i try to reverse this "sickness" and mentally going back to the roots, which means... to appreciate my ability to play once again.

At first the experience starts within ourselves, and only if it is proper within ourselves we might value "external things".
In general i can enjoy most games as long as it is "doable"... but my time is simply limited, so i need to be very picky soon and try to select the games i might adore the most. I already got way to much...

Of course a poor child living in destitution would be over the moon to have generously received something far beyond his/her means, that on the grand scheme of things has relatively minor flaws. But what if the family of this child had to suffer in further poverty, scraping together coins just in order to afford a brief moment of happiness, would this child still enjoy every second?
Are the people here really acting spoiled, or are they jaded and critical adults, having experienced truly great products? If our time is limited and we have the income at our desposal to afford a premium product - a game created by professionals with budgets greater than my total lifetime income, should we still settle for poor, lazy constructions? Professionals should be held to a high standard. The moment it stops being worthy of our time, we should no longer give it the time of day.

Kinda making an overdrive here. Your lifetime budget will become shared between... in some cases... way to many developers. So, on some AAA-titles as well hundreds of users will have to participate and in such a case the budget may not require "a life-time" anymore.

Actually around 5% or so of all games are generating a profit several times higher than the development cost. One of the most extreme cases is for sure "Black Myth Wukong" which now made around 1 billion in profit with a dev cost of around 70 million. However, those games are the big minority... most games got rather minor profit, in many cases not even any profit at all. I somehow wonder where the people got so much money from, on a pretty pricey game... even world wide. Apparently they are not that poor as they seem to believe in most cases.

It is not even AAA-titles... it could be a Indie as well: For example "Stardew Valley" a Indie title made by a single dev with rather low cost (probably lesser than your lifetime-income) and it made countless times, actually more than 100 times, the dev cost in profit. It is simply a matter of success...

If you think games are poor or lazy, why not to create it yourself? You could become millionaire if you really are that much better than most of the other devs. I mean, not even great graphics needed... the dev of Stardew Valley is now very wealthy and the graphics is super simple. In my mind, this game should not cost that much as the price asked but people are paying it... so why not?

I like to be a critic but it should be paired with respect as well. Many things we find so "disturbing", we even stop playing it after, are rather hilarious... for example we do consider a certain character "cocky" and story simply not good enough or what else.

Many users are reimbursing games just because "it was not good enough for them". On GOG i actually never was reimbursing a game... and i am someone paying hardest for it! On other platforms i usually only reimburse because of tech issues, for example DRM!

Sure, if people are reimbursing a lot... those users exist, they do not have to much money at their disposal or maybe they are stingy, i dunno.

Whats clear... we have a strongly success-based system and as long as a game can perhaps gather more than 5 million buyers it is usually a success "at the price asked". If there are lesser buyers... it depends on the price, but everything below 2 million buyers could become tricky... unless the dev cost was very low... usually Indie-games.

Surely we are not neutral. Some games we hype like crazy... just madness, almost. And other games i do consider great games but they may not find any appeal on the majority. It is important to hit the taste of the majority and then become "hyped" after... if it will succeed it can generate profit like a cash cow producing liquid gold. The hype is critical... and yes it is rare... only few games a year are becoming hyped in general. Humans are sheeps, never forget... just a few are wolves. Those handing out critics may not even be competent, it is in many cases just a matter of taste and "for the sake of being critical".

It is good being critical, but a good critics is always competent and as well respectful, else not so much use.

Oh and besides; yes the dev of Stardew Valley actually made me smile: A "Plasma TV" is 4500 and a "Budget TV" 750 only... he surely is not dumb.

Anyway, yes... there are 1000 other Indies who barely make any money and at least 100 of them are pretty good and still barely any money made out of it. Success is a evil thing... if you got it the wealth is like never seen before but not any sooner than that.

I've been really cautious about buying stuff chiefly because of 2 events:

Master of Orion 3
A lot was promised, very little was delivered.
A mountain of little levers to pull and an automated assisant who was so bad at pulling those levers you had to do everything yourself anyway. Making it even worse for micromanagement than it's predecessors.
I have no idea why my admins decided they wanted to spend so much time and effort flooding the reserve pool with transport ships, but that's what they focused almost 100% of the industrial capacity on the instant they were activated.

But worst of all was the most fun part of the previous games was removed entirely - ship-to-ship combat.
Replaced instead with a 3D view thing where you could only give the most basic orders at a group level, and couldn't really see anything anyway because it was so large scale.
It lost all of the charm and excitement of the previous versions, and gained a mountain of tedium.

Literally the only 2 things the game got right were terraforming, and the semi-randomised tech tree.
Everything else was toss.

Homeworld 2
I love Homeworld, it's one of my favourite games ever. Cataclysm was an amazing spin-off, so I was hype af for the actual sequel.
And it did look great. Fantastic even.
But it played like arse.

Everything was so fragile and took no effort to kill, and the entire game was a much faster pace in general meaning you no longer had any time to just look around, or watch for other things happening, or do things in multiple locations.
All the mechanics were changed so everything behaved differently, some mechanics were just removed entirely.
And my favourite class of ship, the frigate was now almost completely useless as even a pack of scouts could kill them.

The UI was better and grouping up strike craft was a good idea, but the entire game just felt like a completely different game dressed up as Homeworld.

After that I became incredibly suspicious of everything about games, and will quite happily wait years to see if a game I'm interested in will 'meet expectations' or not.
Most do not.

My disappointment, just as i told already, is way more in the "general aspect" of the whole industry and the direction they are heading. So it is not very specific... rather a ethical view regarding what makes me upset here. No no... DEI (as a ethical approach) is as well just a small fragment of what could increase or decrease my gameplay, but not the "whole picture".

I think we had a great increase related to this matter, until very recently... in which a good bunch of companies who previously was supporting GOG are all of a sudden "stepping down", and in general increasing any hassle we already got on PC. On the console-spot... we have the issue that they start to become lazy... a lot of remakes but way lesser "new titles"... and almost any game goes to PC anyway... some of them instantly because they see themself not anymore as a true "console-provider" but rather another "digital store" just for any system accessing it. So, there is a harsh "digital-agenda" going on which seeks to wipe out any other approach and even DRM free is a bit struggling now once again... as many new titles... even from well known Indie- companies (Sea of Stars, Hades... and way more) just stopped appearing on GOG.

So, somehow the industry kinda in my mind was decreasing the true ethics... but instead increasing the "less critical ethics" with pretty mixed opinions from the users.

Anyway, if it will become even more worse than this... i may at around 2030, when PS6 is becoming released (in worst case without a drive anymore... just a DRM-digital-store with blackfriday-sales and whatelse... as if it was the ONLY thing we ever needed because it does apparently not exist anywhere) stop buying new games and from this moment on only play my retro-games i got on consoles and PC altogether. Which is now around 450 curated console games and in 2030 probably as well around 450 curated PC games, so in total around 900 carefully selected games. This is enough to play until the very far future...

But who knows... perhaps the situation may increase once again... maybe on GOG something awesome may still become released. So i can not predict the future, but if there are no huge changes anymore... it is not sure i may still ride the "hype train" beyond 2030.

I've worked very hard to earn money to be able to afford to buy video games (amongst other hobbies and calls on my time).

I'm entitled to be spoiled and disappointed by them.