Yes and Yes. I quite like the story and world/lore so far. There’s more reason to be out in this world than there ever was in a Far Cry (and IMO a TES game as well). I would second rrmorton’s “the story is in a class with Witcher 3 even if it isn’t as good”. It’s also not the full on Ubi-thon where the map is a sea of icons that existed even before there was such a thing as a map or space time. There’s been some actually exploration both in terms of finding interesting but unmarked locals and in terms of finding things like “lorables” (which you’ll want to find). You could easily ignore the AWACs-asauri (the game’s radio towers, and there are only 5, and they’re so much less tedious to do than the towers at least two in) I suspect. There’s an early vendor that sells maps that point at the general area of some collectible items but I think you can ignore them (I bought the maps not thinking about what I was doing. No biggie). And the AWACs-asauri may only just reveal fog of war, I;m unclear because I purchased the maps. Leave the maps at home.
The flaws in the game so far are, IMO, the inventory really is crap (@Teiman arguably undersells it) and the UI is missing some critical quality of life functionality. And I think it’s straight up busted/bugged in one case.
Once you know that many of the things you collect are sitting in stacks then it makes dealing with running out of room (you get 100 slots fully upgraded) easier (although the frustration can still appear; I’ve hit it twice). You say “oh, I guess I really don’t need 1500 wood for making basic ammo, I can ditch 3-4 slots of crap right there”. But it’s a weird system in a game that asks you to collect all the things and craft all the things and it shouldn’t be something we need to think about overmuch beyond “time to upgrade!”. Really there’s no reason for the stack sizes to be capped the way they are (e.g. wood caps at 250. “lenses” - you’ll see - cap at 10), and tweaks here would remove most of the frustration without actually impacting game balance (you’ll still be driven to collect all the things because there’s so many different ammo types to craft, and you need exotic parts to buy weapon upgrades from merchants. To say nothing of what would typically be the satisfaction of selling a heap of trash and getting a lot of monies, and you do need the monies even with all the crafting).
About that vendor trash; all items are clearly labeled (e.g. “sell for monies”, “craft ammo”, “craft x”, “trade with vendor” - for weapon upgrades - etc). items can have multiple tags. But there’s no way to sell all vendor trash at once. There’s a multi sell button that puts you through the 100% useless and unnecessary inventory phase of having to select how many items to sell (it’s vendor trash guys, JUST SELL IT ALL). And you have to hold down X to sell every time, and why oh god has this become a full UI thing. A simple “sell all pure vendor trash” would be one of those huge quality of life features the game is missing. The other would be that while ammo crafting can be done rapidly and on the fly (from the weapon selection wheel - a superb UI addition) doing potions and the like must be done in the inventory screen and you can only craft one potion at a time. There is no “max craft” button, which makes zero fucking sense and hurts twice as much because of the stupid multi sell trash thing.
Oh, and I didn’t see a way to filter, so at least you could just move to the vendor trash section and quickly sell that way. But navigating the inventory in the sell screen is surprisingly quick and easy for what it is (it wraps horizontally and vertically staying on the same row/column, which is nice), so there’s that.
Yes that was like seventeen paragraphs bitching about four UI things but this shit matters, people.
The rest of the game is, so far, pretty great and hasn’t gotten repetative. The first time I saw [redacted], [redacted], [redacted], and [redacted] I was like “naw,”, “hell naw”, “shut the fuck up”, “get the fuck out seriously get out” and then an NPC was like "have fun when you get to hunt [4th redacted’] and I just wanted to stab but the game wouldn’t let me. Playing on the normal PS4 it’s gorgeous and the vistas are marvelous and the only time you need to load is fast travel (incidentally, fast travel is handled via an easily crafted doo-dad). The bonfire placement (you can only travel too such spots) is occasionally completely bizarre but it’s a small and largely irrelevant detail in a very magical world.
Yes you need rabbit gro-ins and fox ears and turkey bladders to make all the [increase X capacity] upgrades but this is easier to do than in any Ubigame I’ve ever player. Wild life is abundant and all over and there’s no wandering this one map area for an hour waiting for the golden narwhal to spawn so you can make the next stupid wallet upgrade (mind you, the various bits are uncommon drops so it might take some time to get the specific ones you need but it hasn’t been too onerous so far).
The Magical Vision Sensory Mechanic is the most thematically coherent and best implemented I’ve seen, edging Witcher sense and I just try to forget all the batman senses honestly but YMMV.
You will want to buy all the weapons, and use all their ammo. You will sprint and rope sprint and climb fairly dexterously (it’s not quite Shadow Warrior 2 on laddders but it’s much zippier than any genre example I can remember, thank the gods). You will collect things and lord yourself over the warm and fuzzy creature of the forest for the lackof tool making and higher mathematics, and then use all their parts. One time I was gonna stealth kill a thing but it turned out it was a different, scarier thing that resembled what I thought it was and that was awkward.
Also, there are robot dinosaurs.
Recommend.
