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I'm doing a review-in-progress, because unfortunately, day job stuff kept me from beating DL2. It's a lot like the original game so far, except there's much more of a focus on melee and the map's a lot bigger with a lot to do, find, and see. I'm also barely ready to leave the first zone after 20 hours, so I don't know what the hell some of these sites are talking about by getting an ending in that little an amount of time. One of the things I ended up liking a lot about the original DL was that someone had paid some attention to the mission structure, so Crane was always A) doing missions for people who genuinely could not do it for themselves, and B) was generally doing his best to improve life in Harran for people. It wasn't the random idiocy of a Dead Rising 2 or even Dead Island; you were actually making sensible runs for sensible people. DL2 more or less furthers that, although a few of the side quests I've seen are a little silly, and a couple seem to have just been conversations, which is weird. There's a real sense that life in the city is lovely, but it does go on, and you've got the ability to make it better here and there if you play your cards right. It's also got the same curve that DL did, where you're pretty weak at the start of the game and need to focus most of your energy on evasion. Stamina seems to be a lot more important than health early on, too.
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Feb 2, 2022 23:45
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| # ¿ Apr 23, 2024 10:25 |
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Noirex posted:How is the human combat? It's the weakest part of DL1 imo. And how's night play so far? The previews make the night seem brighter and less scary than the first one. Humans tend to show up in small groups, use throwing weapons, and a disconcerting number of them have a power attack that can't be blocked. It's not my favorite part of the game, but it's all right, and it does encourage you to cheat like hell to get past them. There are a lot of advanced abilities in the combat tree that I know I'll never think to use, but which do let you style on fools. The nights start off pretty sedate, then get insane as you get past midnight. At least in the early parts of the city, there's a Howler every 20 feet, and if it spots you, you're almost guaranteed to get into a desperate chase scene. Mordja posted:The biggest thing they hyped up was how reactive the game is and that Choices Matter (tm) and could even change large sections of the map. Have you really seen any of that or is it something they ended up leaving on the drawing board? I just got to a big factional choice that actually did switch things up, although it starts slowly. One of the first big plot branches is who to side with in the first area: the survivors or the Peacekeepers. Go with the former, and they'll set up more parkour stuff for you; go with the latter, and they'll litter the streets with traps. Basically, the further you go to assign factional control to an area, the more that faction will change the city. I haven't gotten far enough along to see major benefits either way, though.
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Feb 3, 2022 00:30
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Noirex posted:Human combat sounds like what annoyed me with the first, their op throwing weapon damage and blocking. But I still love DL1 so it's not a deal breaker. Is the parkour as good or at least improved with more moves? And please keep updating your (non spoilery) playthrough thoughts too I just unlocked "tic-tac" for wall-running before I had to crash out last night, so I'll need to play with that some.
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Feb 3, 2022 00:56
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I have to admit, I'm not seeing what everyone's complaining about with the writing. It's a little by-the-numbers, because it's an AAA video game, but it never struck me as that egregious. As a way to get you from point A to point B, it does the job. It's pretty leisurely paced, though. I only just met a character who I assume will be a major part of the plot, because she's voiced by Rosario Dawson, at the 20+ hour mark.
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Feb 3, 2022 09:29
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Bloody Hedgehog posted:Pretty sure this guy is playing Nolan North playing Aiden. This where we are with voice acting, not even trying to create an interesting voice, just imitating other voice actors that have had success. On the one hand, I was sure Aiden was voiced by Troy Baker until I finally looked at IMDB. On the other, it wouldn't surprise me if Scott was being specifically directed to not be memorable or interesting. Aiden's pretty much your stock audience surrogate character. He's not as flavorless as some I've seen, since he actually has a lot of dialogue and makes a few jokes, but this isn't the sort of role that is going to encourage a performer to flex his acting chops.
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Feb 3, 2022 22:36
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Bloody Hedgehog posted:I mean, he's literally playing Nolan North. Aiden was in one of the DLC's for DL1, and he was played by North there. Now he's back in DL2, but they have a sound-alike imitating North. Nolan North's character in the "Cuisine & Cargo" DLC was named Bernard Smith. Aiden in DL2 is explicitly young enough that he doesn't have any strong memories of what life was like before the worldwide outbreak. There are a couple of early side quests that deal with that; he doesn't know what mobile apps were and there's a funny conversation with a lady who makes perfume where she has to explain what "new car smell" is to him. If there was a character named Aiden in DL somewhere, this explicitly isn't him.
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Feb 4, 2022 01:47
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Kaddish posted:It makes no sense there are no guns left in this world, only 15 years after the collapse or whatever. It's not the world so much as it's this city. You're somewhere in continental Europe, the city was locked down for vaccine research before things got really bad, and a couple of other things happened. There's a side quest about it in the first area that I just did last night. Back when the army was in charge, they tried to confiscate arms from the civilian population, and the result was an event that's now known as the "March Massacre" where over 60 people died. The army ended up with at least most of the weapons and ammunition, and now it's been over a decade and the ammunition's run out. There's actually a pretty easy-to-find one-handed mace that's made from what looks like a pistol with a nightstick grafted onto the slide.
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Feb 4, 2022 02:11
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Kaddish posted:I'm confused about windmills. Aren't I supposed to be able to assign them to either faction or is that mechanic unlocked later? I haven't quite figured it out yet either. I think the deal is that if you capture a windmill in a neutral area, you only unlock it as a base camp for yourself with no additional facilities. Once a faction controls the neighborhood, the windmill also gains a trader, craftsman, loot, and potentially a couple of side quests. The windmill also adds power to the neighborhood, and once you've got enough juice flowing, it can unlock an additional activity.
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Feb 4, 2022 21:52
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Calaveron posted:Also what country is this analogous to? One of the lady NPCs at the beginning of the game had this hilariously bad accent that either sounded like an australian trying to do a southern accent or a southerner trying to do an australian accent I'm pretty sure they're not supposed to all originally be from the city. There are these campfire events you can find on rooftops during the day where people will tell stories, and often it's about how they're refugees from somewhere else. There's a broad panoply of accents on display, anyway.
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Feb 5, 2022 00:40
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BeanpolePeckerwood posted:That's because it's like the cousin to HL2 crossbow, the perfect crossbow. This is Painkiller erasure.
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Feb 5, 2022 23:40
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The Lone Badger posted:How does the combat upgrade that 'requires a knife' work? The closest thing I've seen to a knife is the 1H machetes. It means the throwing knives. Both the stealth-kill upgrade and the later addition to it that lets you chain a knife throw off it will use up one of your stock of knives. The original upgrade does seem to dramatically speed up the animation for a stealth kill even if you don't opt to use up a knife, but I have noticed that if you try to stealth a zombie that's higher-rank than you are, you have to use the stab to do any damage at all or they'll simply kick free of the attack and counter.
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Feb 6, 2022 01:42
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The Lone Badger posted:The most annoying thing for me so far is that there's all these zones you're supposed to explore at night, except there's a Howler every few metres on the street so it's really hard to actually find and reach the zone entrance. Yeah, I don't care for that at all. One thing that's useful is to pop Molotovs on them from above, though. Two rank-1/2 Molotovs will generally take them out from a far enough distance that they won't raise an alarm. Lakbay posted:Do the trophies to upgrade blueprints have a higher chance to drop on zombies at night or something? Upgrading blueprints is going to be the biggest pain in the rear end because a lot of the time I loot zombies and they don't have anything on them The secret sauce for zombie looting is to go do something else for a bit, then come back. If a corpse has anything on it when it despawns, the loot appears as a satchel that you can just grab off the floor.
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Feb 6, 2022 01:44
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DL2 is the kind of game that a lot of professional reviewers are going to have a chip on their shoulder about going in, because Techland was treating its sheer length as a selling point. While it does respect your time reasonably well, and Techland had codes for the game go out a solid two and a half weeks ahead of release, it's going to be infuriating for anyone who is obligated to beat it before they can write it up. That's the kind of environment where a mild annoyance gets inflated into a personal atrocity, and it's one of the issues with the current games review model. With something like DL2, a Paradox "grand strategy" game, or the last couple of Assassin's Creeds, you aren't going to get an honest or useful review until a few weeks after release. There's just too much content to realistically go through. At the point I'm at, there are certainly things about the plot that I feel decent about criticizing (Lawan makes a real sharp turn from antagonist to borderline love interest the moment she sees the scars on Aiden's arm), and you can count the genuinely likable characters in the City on one hand (almost all of whom are in side quests), but it's not the all-out assault on the player's sensibilities that some of the other reviews have apparently portrayed it as. That being said, there are a couple of rough points that make me wonder if there was a hasty rewrite or two after Avellone's exit in 2020, and a couple of the side quests are real goddamned stupid, like the guy who's running post-apocalyptic Tinder. Rinkles posted:is the tone as bleak as 1? Yes and no. It's a much worse situation than DL and it's global, with a lot of sidelong mentions of how bad things are everywhere outside the City. (Aiden tells a British guy at one point that there are maybe four settlements left into the UK, and London no longer exists.) The City itself is a constant war zone that's on the verge of destruction when you enter the game's story. On the other hand, DL2, like the original, is very much a game about how life goes on. People stand around and complain, but they're working together, caring for each other, and doing their best to survive and rebuild. It's not stuck in the "Walking Dead" model where every human being is a sociopath waiting to happen; this is an apocalypse with some hope built into it. Wanderer fucked around with this message at 04:56 on Feb 6, 2022 |
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Feb 6, 2022 04:53
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Basic Chunnel posted:I don’t think the game respects your time enough - and I say this as someone who’s about to write a loving essay on a games forum. I’m not a game reviewer but I am an adult human with a full rear end work week. I haven’t played a game that unfolds this slowly since KOTOR2, which had the advantage of being written fairly well. That's an entirely fair point. I was thinking of it in terms of how easy DL2 is to put down and pick back up. You generally have auto-saves in smart places, and dying usually doesn't put you back more than a minute or two. If you have to quit suddenly, you'll usually spawn at the closest safe zone the next time you start the game.
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Feb 6, 2022 21:06
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The Lone Badger posted:Dark Hollows, Convoys etc don't get marked off on my map once I loot them. Do they 'refill', or do I need to remember which ones I've done? As far as I can tell, they refill, since it's just a bunch of drops and chests in a small, dangerous place.
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Feb 6, 2022 22:31
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smoobles posted:this raises questions about zombie culture, are they living their own lives in there like I Am Legend? Yes, but they're also hoarders, so it's really not that much of a life.
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Feb 6, 2022 22:44
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Hub Cat posted:1. Not necessarily a criticism but am I the only one that thinks the story parts are intensely weird? They all feel really disjointed and they frequently have you talk to someone just to go somewhere else and talk to the person you're looking for or they show up while you're talking. Just feel super weird but I can't quite nail down why. Yeah, I'm looking forward to the post-mortem on DL2. I'm wondering if kicking out Avellone had more knock-on effects than they've let on, so what we've got now is what they put together in a relative hurry.
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Feb 7, 2022 23:20
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Hub Cat posted:Edit: Besides the real nitpicky question is what are they fueling all these generators with? At this point, I'd imagine they've been converted to run on vegetable oil. Given how fast everything seems to grow in the city, it wouldn't be that hard to cultivate sunflowers.
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Feb 9, 2022 01:52
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Game: "Hey, this is a dark zone. Come back when it's nighttime." Me: "I see your point, I respect it, but how about we see what happens when I roll a propane tank in through the front door and follow up with a half-dozen DIY grenades."
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Feb 12, 2022 13:32
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Nanohahn posted:I ended up finding a bow that was around a 50% improvement on the one the story hands you, and combined with some ranger gear most enemies seem to go down in a couple hits. I've been visiting traders looking for something better, but no luck so far. Thanks to everyone for the tips! For whatever it's worth, every time I go to the trader at the Fish Eye, she seems to have an artifact-quality bow.
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Feb 13, 2022 00:56
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I just watched a bunch of mourners at a funeral take a break to fight off a single biter. In the process of doing so, four of the five of them set themselves ablaze on their friend's funeral pyre and died. d0grent posted:game is very fun with many flaws 7/10 Yeah, co-signed. You really do start to feel the designers' reach exceeded their grasp as you get towards the back half, but when it's doing parkour things and giving you these enormous climbing missions, that's where it shines. I'd argue that the best part of Dying Light is the massive climb up the side of a building in the final story mission, and DL2 beats that pretty early on.
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Feb 13, 2022 04:23
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| # ¿ Apr 23, 2024 10:25 |
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Bushmaori posted:What are the glitches you guys have had? I got the quest to start the Couriers' Guild chain from the bartender at the Fish Eye, and when I got to the Guild, I couldn't interact with the door. On my map, a bunch of quests in Old Villedor are "completed" somehow but have seemingly permanent icons. Several different "ghost Howlers" on the nighttime map who cannot be attacked. Several occasions where zombies hit me through a closed door or thin wall. I had the black screen ending bug late last night that a few people have mentioned, where it looked like the game hard-locked for a few minutes before eventually sorting itself out. I had another one right before the final mission where I had control of my character for a few seconds between my trip to the Stronghold and reappearing back in the city, which was just long enough to open my inventory screen, so the game immediately went to black and hard-locked.
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Feb 13, 2022 21:32
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