I’ve been revisiting anno 2205, infamously the ugly duckling of the Anno series of RTS games. I don’t mind so much the fact that it’s different, lacks customisation and random map generation - I’m bothered because the game is so slow to progress through on challenge settings, and it feels like a game designed just to artificially waste your time; in other anno games, you can always pull tricks to dig yourself out of economic crisis - selling off assets and surplus goods, completing quests for other parties, or taking loans. 2205 is very very confined in terms of what you can do to financially recover in the early game and forces you into a lot of military events.
Baldur’s Gate 3. Game falls apart after the first act imo. Voice acting was great, first act is very fun and I can still play it, but I just can’t manage to make myself even finish act 2. I do get why people like it, but maintain that as a game it was very much overrated. It’s made my wife swear they should only do GOTY selection for the previous year after the full game has been released and played through entirely. I get the sense their early testing allowed for lots of tweaking an adjustment in the first act but they ran out of time to give the rest the same treatment.
I disagree on the falling off point. Act 2 has that funnel, pulling you into the final showdown at the end of the act. It is cinematic, epic, and such a great ending to the act that it feels like an ending to the game (which it technically is, since there’s an optional ending at the end of the act). The problem really begins with act 3, since the tight narrative choices at the end of act 2 primes you for a tight, claustrophobic narrative for the third act as you race against the clock to the finish and instead… it’s the biggest act in the entire game, with the most amount of side quests, most of which aren’t optional if you want all of the origin characters to have good endings. You’ll even stop leveling up about halfway through act 3, so the reward feedback loop really dies off in this act. Makes the ending so incredibly hard to complete.
I agree with this so much - the end of act 2 was such a narrative high I was excited to see how they topped it!
And then they didn’t. And then I stopped levelling. It wasn’t the climax to the story I was expecting.
I always struggled to describe what was so disappointing but you hit the nail on the head. Starting act 3 felt like I was sent in time back to act 1 - aimlessly wandering around the map until finally stumbling across the next main story point.
Act 3 is like half the total game. If you didn’t even make it halfway through the game then I don’t think you played enough of it.
Eh, I don’t buy that you need to play an entire game before deciding it’s overrated. There’s this game criticism catch-22 among gamers that is used to invalidate all criticism… if you don’t finish it or play X hours you’ll be told you didn’t play enough. If you do, you’ll be told by someone else it can’t be that bad because you finished it or played too many hours for it to be bad.
I watched the rest on YouTube and didn’t feel like I missed much. I really don’t feel like what I missed was half the game… actual hours don’t mean much here because 5e naturally takes a lot longer to play at higher levels.
I’m not saying you need to play the entire game, but you said you enjoyed act 1. Act 3 is more open, like act 1. Act 2 is just a short interlude that plays differently than most of the game.
It’s also just a huge part of the game and feels like it’s what the game as a whole is meant to be.
You’re entitled to your opinions, but the question at hand refers to a game you sunk a lot of time into, and you didn’t even get halfway through this one.
I have a few hundred hours (481 between my wife and I… my guess is about 300-350 of that is me). That’s a lot of time. Remember, I said I tried to get through it multiple times, and each time I got bored with it near the end of Act 2, so that playtime adds up. I’m just past the point in my life where I’m willing to put up with much slog to get to good parts near the end, I’ll just watch a video with dinner and call it a day. I actually feel like I wasted too much time on it as it is, but I guess if you have lots of time on your hands some might not consider it much… I do, though.
Again, I’ve seen the rest of the game and don’t agree with the characterization that it’s just the halfway point. It might be in terms of actual time played, but again, turns tend to take quite a bit longer in 5e at higher levels.