Why I stopped playing this game after ~10 hours (long rant)

[Radiac]

This is just for dev FYI and my own complaints about game designs I don't particularly like, I'm not trying to say this game "sucks" but it's not for me, and I kinda am a little disappointed about that, because I love the genre but not the execution of how this game works, mechanically, as such.

1. Having the top-down view and then having to aim a gun in 3 dimensions is really weird, and being real-time makes that worse. I know turn-based games go a lot slower, but every time I get in a firefight, I'm just wildly shooting in seemingly random directions because of the interface. Real time, gun-shooter games work a lot better as first person shooters like Destiny 2, for me, and I know there's a mod for that now, but I think it was a terrible idea to try to do it "Diablo style" in the first place. Maybe it was cheaper and quicker to do this in the development of the game, I don't know.

2. I prefer to make my own character rather than play a canned prefab character, and this game only gives you the option of doing it with five specific different prefab characters. I think the good cRPGs I've enjoyed that allow you to make your own character were written as such from the mold of DnD, and designers eventually got lazy and wanted to limit the players options a lot more in order to be able to make the game more puzzle-like. Like, you're not a wizard, so you can't just find a different spell to solve most of the problems they present you with, you have to use your character's limited skill set to do it, and while that is challenging and fun, I like to make my own character and pick my limited set of skills by myself. I want to play as Radiac, the Bounty Hunter or Radiac, the Traveling Preacher not as the five different characters that somebody else invented. It's similar to how I play Magic: the Gathering. I'm one of those players that I gotta make my own deck in order to want to play the game at all. I'm not some sporty tournament player who wants to crowd source the card selection and deck building then just pilot some well tuned meta deck to victory through shady shuffling and angle-shooting loopholes in the rules against noobs. The funniest part of all this, to me, is that if I got to decide what my character looks like, what his name is, and then I just got the same skill sets to choose from, call them"classes" if you like, I'd be a lot happier. As it is, you have to play as "Jane Bell" or whoever the devs decided to make instead of being able to make the character your own in any way. This is the DnD equivalent of the DM telling you that you have to play this character, you can't change their name, what they look like, or anything else about them,
and the whole story is on rails and you have to play it out as such because the DM wrote the story as their own fictional story about their protagonist they care about, not anything you would do if it were you're prerogative to make any decisions about who they are.

3. The characters progress through the game and get power-ups to their abilities, but there is no XP, and you don't get those power-ups just from experience or from accomplishing the goals of the different quests you do. You have to scour every map you go on for Nimp Relics and Golden Aces in order to unlock that stuff, and you might miss them, or they might not randomly appear at all, and you'll never really know which. You just have to comb the maps for that stuff, knowing that it might not actually be there in the first place on every map, every time. I realize that this does create an immersive sense of "lean and hungry" wild west where you have to search and scrap for every morsel, but I don't enjoy it.

4. The gear system works using game mechanics I've seen in other games that are frankly, very klugey for the sake of game balance over immersion. I can see needing fresh medical supplies to treat wounds, and I'm fine with food as a way to heal yourself, but the Guild Wars 2 model of "lets make people buy many, many consumable axes to get wood from trees" was dumb in that game and is dumb in every other game where it appears. In Wasteland 2 and 3, you find books that allow you to increase a skill by one rank, but the book is consumed when you do that, which is mostly for game balance. They didn't want to allow every character in the party to get +1 rank in every skill by reading every book, so the books get consumed upon first use, but that's just not how books work in real life. In reality, you can read a book, then give it to somebody else and they can read it too.
In this game you need to buy consumable lock picks to pick locks, and shovels to dig up loot caches. I'm pretty sure ONE shovel and lock pick kit would last you for many YEARS in real life. And that mechanic, durable tools getting consumed when used, which is very anti-immersive, and somewhat confusing to the player, at first blush, is generally only necessary in games that have player-to-player economics to deal with, like big MMOs. I don't see a need for it in any single player campaign type game at all. If a buried loot cache might contain, randomly, anywhere from 0-10 dollars worth of stuff, and you need a consumable $1 shovel to dig it up, then you could just make players carry around ONE infinitely re-usable shovel, but make the loot caches slightly less lucrative to make the overall money numbers basically the same in the end.

[Lestat2150]

I gave up at 5 hrs because of the same reasons. I might come back and try it from time to time because its fun with the sandbox immersive sim features it has. But yeah....I'd prefer to make my own character. Hate the power up system with no skills or stats.

I would say try the first person shooter mod available right from the main menu. I tried fps and found it actually harder to shoot vs. the vanilla options because mobs move all over the place.

You didn't mention the terrible AI. Companion AI is embarassing. Most of the time in my play through's they would just stand there and get hit, never reciprocating fire. It's clear companions weren't invested into.

[Pastor of Muppets]

Due to #1, I installed the first person mod, only to discover that I can't invert the Y axis with the mod active. That makes the game virtually unplayable for me in first person, so I hung up my spurs after only a couple of hours of play.

[Many-Named]

Despite the design flaws you mentioned I IMMENSELY enjoy the game, but I feel that it could be even better with what you suggest, hopefully the sequel will fix it.

This is a game franchise which has the potential to become real big imo

[Keller20]

Originally posted by Radiac:

In this game you need to buy consumable lock picks to pick locks, and shovels to dig up loot caches.

I don't remember buying a single shovel. Usually there's plenty of shovels around for free.

[Toni 'Bō' Jones]

Originally posted by Keller20:

I don't remember buying a single shovel. Usually there's plenty of shovels around for free.

if playing thoroughly you don't need to buy any pickaxes as well. I'm on Pigman journey and have so much money now I do't even know what to spend them for.

But, regarding on-topic message - I am roughly 40 hrs in on mu current playthrough (total time is about ~70 hrs) and I cannot stop playing. Enjoying the game a lot, even with some minor bugs and shenanigans.

[EthicalPixel]

they have an alternative aiming mode that i used exclusively after trying on xbox you should try it
"free camera aiming style"

[Toni 'Bō' Jones]

Originally posted by EthicalPixel:

they have an alternative aiming mode that i used exclusively after trying on xbox you should try it
"free camera aiming style"

I switched to that one myself, too. I played with twin stick controls at first, but free aiming mode is relatively easy, esp for gamepad.

[Macdallan]

Not enjoying the controls at all, wish this was third person over the shoulder with proper aiming or first person. Man, this game could be GREAT in first person. Even if the camera would go a bit lower, let me zoom in a little more, and if the zoom would stay where I set it instead of re-setting randomly then the game would be much better.

Other issue? Looting. Too much looting.

[Macdallan]

Originally posted by Pastor of Muppets:

Due to #1, I installed the first person mod, only to discover that I can't invert the Y axis with the mod active. That makes the game virtually unplayable for me in first person, so I hung up my spurs after only a couple of hours of play.

Really? They couldn't be bothered to add a simple invert Y option? That's too bad, that means I won't be able to try that out.

[The Gill Thrill]

Originally posted by Macdallan:

Other issue? Looting. Too much looting.

I mean there's a lot of looting, sure. At least the looting isn't as bad as Cyberpunk 2077.