Recent reviews by damnusername

I've played this game a while. I'll probably keep playing it and might even enjoy it. This might piss me off enough to make me leave, IDK.

But Pdx, you do not have the credibility to be releasing season passes right now. Your publishing arm has had 3 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in a row, your release quality is questionable at best, and the performance on this game still chugs harder than a fat kid at an all you can drink soda convention.

Until pdx either produces solid, quality bangers for years or they reverse the decision to be doing this season pass ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, I'm going to be putting my feeble voice out and a giant "♥♥♥♥ you".

So, about 8 months ago, Gaijin ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up. They got too greedy, and pushed a little too hard, and made me actually get off my lazy ass to write a review. Reviewed it negatively. I'd leave the original review up, but I hit the character limit with it, and pastebin apparently decided it was too spicy for them to host.

You might notice that despite the above, my review is now positive. In those 8 months, Gaijin created a roadmap that was extremely pro consumer, and fixed a lot of the issues I have with the game when it comes to grind. Also, unlike most companies in Gaijin's position, they've actually stuck to their roadmap. Everything on the map so far, with the exception of the last item has been put in the game already, and the last step was only scheduled for around this time.

I'll put the details down below, but the TLDR is that while I still have many, many gripes with the game, those gripes are almost completely in the realm of balance decisions now instead of monetisation and grind.

The long form, or what did gaijin do right (that I care about)?


First of all, they actually reversed the changes that were being made, which is better than some other companies can say (WARGAMING).

Rebalanced RP costs more or less across the board, reducing them.

Foldered a lot of vehicles, also significantly reducing the amount of research needed to create filled out lineups, as well as making it faster to get through.

Upped SL (the in game currency) gain modifiers.

Reduced repair costs across the board.

Made it so that if you die super fast, your repair cost is reduced.

reduced how bad the stock experience is in ground forces.

Don't get me wrong. Gaijin isn't perfect by any means. Some of the balancing decisions are baffling and likely automated, their 'historical accuracy' excuse is a thin veneer they use to decide what to add or not (for example, recently the top round for a bunch of NATO mid tier tanks was heavily nerfed. The reason is that someone submitted a bug report where the submitter misinterpreted their source. This was caught and acknowledged by their own moderation staff, but went through anyways, with a promise of "we'll get around to it eventually". Another example is the engine overheat for a bunch of german planes was nerfed because someone said that it "felt wrong". Conversely, a youtuber has gotten basically every piece of documentation they can without running afoul of classified documents and gaijin still just goes "nah bro, not good enough"), their map design is more miss than hit, their bizarre insistence that any game mode other than team deathmatch isn't good enough, keeping the BRs compressed, ect.

But, all of this are complaints I've started to pick up at over 2,000 hours of playtime. For the average user, I could seem them saying this game is a good use of time, so I recommend it. Also because if I'm gonna ♥♥♥♥♥ gaijin out for ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ up, I've gotta at least acknowledge when they fix it. Otherwise there's no point to them (or any other game developer. again WARGAMING YOU ♥♥♥♥♥) rolling back bad changes.

gonna post the TL:DR here. I've played this game since CBT, so for about 6 years now. When it first came out it was great. Now it's ♥♥♥♥. Dev's predatory and extensive monetization has actively ruined the game. Avoid, it's not worth it.

So, I Played way back since the CBT. If you go to https://na.wows-numbers.com/player/1001365207,damnusername/ you can see my profile, including the ships I have. I only include this information to show that I'm not some jackass who played a game for 15 minutes and then started burning the game down.

When I first started the game was great, and if the devs ever stop squeezing the community and decide to toss subs out, it can be great again. Not gonna happen though, WG has a list of PR disasters stretching back till 2017. Almost every one of them is caused by WG pushing aggressive monetization strategies. Pretty much everything WG puts out now is based on loot crates. These loot crates also have shortlists of things you can get before actually having a chance to get everything. WG has been caught doing this several times, and I doubt they have any intentions of stopping.

They've also gotten worse over the years as to what you can "earn". It used to be that in game achievements gave flags, which can be used to boost your ship. That got removed, now you have to buy them using in game currency (doesn't have to be premium currency, but it's another drain). It used to be that you had a chance to earn multiple premium ships when WG entered a partnership with an anime or other franchise. Now you have a chance to buy ship camos. Their dockyard missions, where you grind to be able to buy a ship for cheaper, have been getting longer and harder, while the actual ships themselves have been getting worse.

Every indication is that the monetization is going to get worse as time goes on. Save yourself time and frustration, don't bother. Hell, if you have the sudden urge to waste time and get angry, go play WT. It's only a marginally better experience, but when your baseline bar is the wine cellar in hell, just being eye poppingly frustrating sometimes is an improvement.

A really great game with at least 50-60 hours of gameplay before you start including mods or absurd factory optimization. There's a demo if you want to try it, although keep in mind the gameplay before you start the factory up and running is different to the rest of the game. Also, the devs are based in a way that keeps external ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ influence out of the game, so you know it's not gonna get shafted by stupid decisions.

I'm starting this review off by saying that as a newcomer to the Anno series, I really enjoyed this game. The production chain building and shipping from island to island is well done and is quite fun. It also offers a surprising amount of replayability. Also unlike some other old Ubisoft titles (Endwar springs to mind) the serverside portion of the game (voting on events, timed missions, ect) is still running and offers a good shakeup. Its worth noting that I haven't tried the domination multiplayer gamemode, but it looks like it is very good.

I unfortunatly can't comment on the graphics because every computer I've run this game on is a potatoe, but thats my problem.

Onto what caused so many people to vote this game down, the DRM. I personally haven't had any trouble with it but I installed Uplay before hand because of other games, so I don't speak for the majority of the playerbase aparently.

The elephant in the room, Tages, almost never caused me problems and when it did it was understandable. The only time I ran into an issue was when I was messing about with VM's and I only ran into the problem on the 5th VM try. All it took to fix it was talking to ubisoft support to get it sorted out, and I haven't had a problem since.

All in all, near perfect game (the combat is very obviously not the focus of gameplay or design work) with a little bit of annoyance related to DRM, but nothing that even got me close to upset. I'd recomend this game at anything up to $45, as the amount of enjoyment you can get out of it is amazing.