Gothic, Risen... ELEX

Does anyone know what the bonus to general skills does? IE: In the charisma tree, you can get +1 crafting skill. What does that do? Is it like +1 to all skills? IE: 3/3 of trophy becomes 4/3?

I also found an amulet that gave me +1 to experience hunter. A mob that gave 60 xp, then gave 63. So that skill is totally not worth it. This means there are plenty of worthless skills in the game.

Maybe your overall skill level is based on how many skills in that area you have, e.g. Combat 3, but a bonus like that just gets added to the top line without affecting underlying skills. Seems more likely :)

The jet pack is fun but it can break immersion a bit. I entered a compound by flying over a wall. On my way out, a guard tries to shake me for 200 credits… to get in.

A few more impressions…

The fact that there is no limit to your inventory is great. Managing inventory is a pain in the ass in most games.

Some of the story elements for the companions are… Not terrible!

While he is not wrong about first impressions , if he can’t be bothered to even get into the lore a represented a little bit I am not sure why he reviews RPG in the first place. And I will reiterate that in hour 25 it is still a good game despite it’s shortcomings. It is not a highly polished experience like Witcher or ME, but then it only had a fraction of their budgets.

Yeah, I agree, though at least it was clearly labeled first impressions and not presented as a review. I’ve seen reviews in the past where it was clear the reviewer hadn’t played much far than this guy has played Elex.

I’m not sure what it was presented as… an attempt to be funny or irreverant while disrespecting the developers’ work in an unprofessional and ugly manner?

Anyway it’s clear from the comments beneath the article that many people do treat something like that as a review. Even our own @triggercut has basically claimed the game a disaster based on that single hour’s play!

So are any of the points that first hour of impressions wrong based on just having played that first hour?

I played Gothic 3 and Risen. Those were disasters. This sounds like it might be one. If it isn’t, cool. I don’t really care.

The first impression might be correct if you never played a PB game before. Many of his claims are just ignorant of the background and he purposefully misrepresented some exposition. If you do not care, good for you, but I feel that one hour “I don’t get how this works and I can’t be bothered to even try” post is not adding any useful information to the discussion.

On the plus side I have been playing more and so much background info is in notes and tapes you find. If you don’t bother reading stuff you will not miss much in terms of XP or useful quest knowledge but there is a bunch of lore hidden away that gives you a glimpse in the early days of what happened to the world and shortly before it. I think that is very well done.

I also finally grasped the combo combat. The damage on a full combo bar is really noticeably bigger then usual. So don’t always fire off the special attack as that empties the bar. I found keeping the bar filled much more useful against multiple opponents or really though opponents. Some skull enemies I could only injure when the bar is full. I also realized timed parries are a thing. I am unable to pull them off properly. Propably because I am also trained by the last few years of games to just hit the button that conveniently flashes for you when appropriate.

I turned down combat difficulty as well, even on easy it is not a cake walk.

15 hours in and I have to say the high points of the game are the quests. Even the ones that seem like fedex or collection quests on the surface end up involving choices and consequences.

The quests are great. I walk up to an NPC thinking I’m going to destroy him for stealing chems, only to end up donating food to the poor guy. Definitely some interesting twists and turns in this game.

I do wish there were some sort of quest-level indicator. I feel like a small kid at an amusement park: lots of cool rides but I can only go on certain ones due to my height. With ELEX, the ride signs are missing, so I get on the ride, die a horrible death, then go look for a more suitable ride.

Right - If I had slower load times, I would probably be dropping more of the difficulty options. At the moment, it’s like - this ride’s not for you, ok, nor this one, ok, not this one neither, ok, this one’s for you, yay! Press on…

If the loads were like some other games, I expect I’d be on the internet cursing jankiness.

The one weird thing I don’t understand is the 4 lumbering steps I generally take before sprinting. Feels unresponsive. Is that an M&K thing?

I also dropped the combat difficulty to “easy”, which is not something I’ve ever done in a game before. At that level, I found combat to be what I’d expect to see in a normal, or even hard level of difficulty, in terms of how much damage enemies did and received.

Ultimately, I find that the combat’s pretty janky and not the best part of the game anyway, so turning down the difficulty improved the game overall for me.

I think I went down to easy then bumped some of the sub options back up. I have ‘Balanced’ behaviour rather than aggressive, and the combo option from Easy. Damage I left at the harder setting. I also turned off the focus and aim ‘help’.

Combat’s certainly less jarring now. I don’t know if that’s these, or the single upgrade I’ve put into each relevant skill and item, or just more familiarity on my side. Forcing myself not to binge play now :)

I like how things make sense in this game.

I am in some starting town and I saw some arrow practice dummies and told myself “that would be a good place to find arrows” and yea, there was arrow in the dummies.

In other game would would kill a wasp and get a pack of 100 arrows.

It does this when using controller also, on PC at least.

Hey I didn’t even realise these options existed! I’m not so fond of the way the wildlife no longer warns you off as it did in previous games, but instead always seems to attack after spotting you - guessing this can help revert that! Cool.

It does warn you off. At least for me they do.

Yeah but they always seem to attack me even if I back off!

I thought this was likely to make that ‘friends with beasts’ skill or whatever more useful. But I guess that may just stop low level beasts attacking altogether.

Yea, the game is hilariously badly balanced. But is not a problem for me. I am playing a “unintended peacefist asshole run” so far. Where I don’t kill stuff, I can’t talk about the guy that follow me around, he do kill stuff. So I go around looting, talking to people, I am the brain and my friend is the muscle.

Ha - same here.

I think all my major victories have involved the trigger-some-spiders-then-run-on-by tactic.