I’m playing through it now, on and off, for the first time. I love the lore, the plot, and the environments. I also like the slow but continuous progression and variation of enemies and powers. But the combat feels like a bag full of chocolate: it looks wonderful at first, but after a while I’ve started to get sick of it. I could use fewer (or even no) random encounters, if only they weren’t necessary to allow for grinding.
One thing that takes some of the shine off the whole thing for me is the way that lore pickups are handled. When other “timely” things occur, one of your menu buttons is temporarily repurposed as a “do exactly that right now” button, so why not lore pickups? Especially because the lore is often best consumed in the time and place where you find it. But because actually reviewing it requires me to go through mutiple levels of menus every time, I usually put it off until I have several waiting for me.
Almost as annoying is the fact that for things you can experience within the game world (movies, videos, and tapes), the item will still be marked as “unread” in the lore menu system until you review it there, even if you stood still in the game and waited for the whole thing to finish. Since they’re already in a separate lore category, I think it’s safe to risk using a simple algorithm (for example, the player stayed within X distance for 95% of the total runtime, without an enemy encounter) to mark an item as “read” in the lore list.
I’m playing through it now, on and off, for the first time. I love the lore, the plot, and the environments. I also like the slow but continuous progression and variation of enemies and powers. But the combat feels like a bag full of chocolate: it looks wonderful at first, but after a while I’ve started to get sick of it. I could use fewer (or even no) random encounters, if only they weren’t necessary to allow for grinding.
One thing that takes some of the shine off the whole thing for me is the way that lore pickups are handled. When other “timely” things occur, one of your menu buttons is temporarily repurposed as a “do exactly that right now” button, so why not lore pickups? Especially because the lore is often best consumed in the time and place where you find it. But because actually reviewing it requires me to go through mutiple levels of menus every time, I usually put it off until I have several waiting for me.
Almost as annoying is the fact that for things you can experience within the game world (movies, videos, and tapes), the item will still be marked as “unread” in the lore menu system until you review it there, even if you stood still in the game and waited for the whole thing to finish. Since they’re already in a separate lore category, I think it’s safe to risk using a simple algorithm (for example, the player stayed within X distance for 95% of the total runtime, without an enemy encounter) to mark an item as “read” in the lore list.