You have to be kidding, Sonson. I agree with a lot of your stuff but this is just silly.
Playing TW1 on release felt like playing a game from the 1990s, and not in a good way, at all. It’s not “10 years ago” bad. It’s “20 years ago” bad, and like kind of a “failed experiment”-type game from 20-odd years ago, too, not a successful design. I was pretty hyped about it, but it played far, far worse than than any other positively-regarded CRPG or action-CRPG of that period.
It’s particularly weird when you consider they used the Aurora Engine (KotOR, NWN, etc.).
I do agree with you later point that that doesn’t make it “not a classic”, and I think it’s more classic than TW2 by a long margin, but it was remarkably and unusually shitty in it’s design/gameplay even for 2007. It did have cool ideas, though, even if it felt like retrogaming even when it game out.
TW2 improved on all of that, but managed to somehow fall even further behind the curve in terms of “enjoyable gameplay”. It isn’t as remarkable, either. It didn’t have that “retrogame” vibe - it had a “We have literally no idea how to design fun gameplay” vibe.
Trainwreck is a valid opinion re: TW1, sorry, it is. It’s not one I have - I thought it was pretty classic, but the combination of ultra-terrible gameplay that felt a decade out of date on release, weird 1980s-style sexism (which was at least more funny than nasty, thank goodness for that), and tons of bugs and gameplay issues (beyond those created by intentional design) mean that there’s no way you can invoke “let’s be real” here. Being real, it’s acceptable to put it in “trainwreck” territory. Not required, but valid.
It wouldn’t be the only classic which was ALSO a trainwreck, note. Specifically Shadoko said:
That is really indisputable - and it was so prominent that someone could reasonably call the entire game a trainwreck - but Shadoko isn’t, nor am I.
That doesn’t surprise me at all. The original D:OS is an extremely mean-spirited game at times that thinks some quite unpleasant stuff is “funny” (and not in a “darkly humorous” kind of way either), and I fully expected the “darker” sequel to double-down on the mean-spirited-ness.
Of course I suspect for a lot of people that’s easily shrugged off or not even noticed, but personally it pisses me off, so I will continue to avoid D:OS2 for now, despite it’s “OMG BEST GAME EVER” rep. Also the stuff with armour sounds really dumb, but I guess mods can fix that.
Personally I’ve been playing a semi-terrible semi-awesome game I got for Christmas - Shadow of War. It certainly lives up to “Like Shadow of Mordor, only more and better”. I’ve been playing it on Nemesis, because allegedly that’s the right difficulty if the original felt easy (and I presume most people felt the original was kind of easy), and whilst it was a bit hair-raising at first, I’ve got used to it, and am now coming to stuff with a plan, running away BEFORE I’m on a sliver of health, and so on. I do get killed a LOT, but it does make the victories feel a lot more “HAH, in your face!”. I am not sure how I feel about this “Okay you killed them but now you have to press a random button or they get away!” business though .
I am very impressed with the sheer amount of STUFF that is on-screen and is going on, too. Like, how am I getting a decent framerate with all this?
The only thing I am unimpressed with is that it has a menu option that allows you to change the button prompts to PS4 prompts (I use a PS4 pad). Great! In theory… in reality, it changes about 80% of button prompts, which I feel is almost more confusing than before, where they were at least consistently all Xbox button prompts. Particularly galling is that it uses the Xbox prompt for parries, and the PS4 prompt for dodges… C’mon guys…