Civvie11 just tore this game (and Slipgate Ironworks) a new one

[ZIGS]

Relevant part starts at 22:35 but the entire video is gold:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wp7MY16aAI

Haven't seen a beatdown like this since Trump's victory over Hillary in 2016

[Paranoia_Inc]

I just watched the halfway point and I have to say, it's quite a feat to get a Youtube personality to drop the act just to say your developer company is that godawful.

[Bankai9212]

This is why 3drealms really doesn't want civvie to look or review there games. Its why so many are concerned about phantom fury.

[EVG]

He said what many of us were feeling for years now, this company is really not what it once was, and people need to stop treating it like some gaming royalty.

[Bankai9212]

Publicado originalmente por EVG:

He said what many of us were feeling for years now, this company is really not what it once was, and people need to stop treating it like some gaming royalty.

That’s what the entire discord server is like.

[Frotz]

I found myself agreeing with parts of it.

1. Magic is limited without the upgrades, but have it's moments from the start. Fire is great against the skeleton enemies since they eventually die from the damage over time or end up being a one hit for anything. Shock can stun but the group in the water situation doesn't present itself very often. Cold felt meh, even upgraded. Fully upgraded fire and shock are fun, hit a group of zombies and watch them suffer from chain lightning and explosions.
   The range limitations on the spells does hurt, why set a crate on fire when I can shoot it from further away?
   
   
2. Melee is very weak versus anything that isn't zombies, the lycanthropes and skeletons.
   I found myself spamming left click, right click and kick with the staff for some okayish DPS versus zombies. Stamina mainly limited my movement, not the melee fighting.
   IIRC in early access the sword was decent versus the fleshy enemies like the zombies and the lycanthrope and the staff was better against the skeletons.
   The flail arrives too late to be useful. It's hard hitting versus fodder but at that point I wasn't struggling with ammo and had upgraded the fire and shock spells. Melee came out when I wanted to save on ammo or mana.
   
   The best melee weapon of all was the staff with the knockback stone, it costs ~10 mana to knockback enemies, but line them up so they fly into a wall and they die instantly, handy against the clerics and swamp ghouls that otherwise could take a beating.
   
   
3. The inventory system is stupid, changing out your hotbar isn't a problem in singleplayer since the game pauses. It's essentially just forcing me to customize the 3 through 7 numbers keys for selecting my equipment every other minute.
   
   
4. Stamina, as mentioned earlier, only limited my movement for be it for combat or exploration. Could be removed and the game would only improve (since I would no longer hear the constant panting).
   
   
5. Ranged weapons are mostly fine, if somewhat limited in types since half the arsenal is some kind of crossbow.
   
   Some tweaks could be done, like cleaning the lens of the wrist cuff, it never was great for sniping with the low projectile speed anyway. Another change would be to show the mana counters rather than the bars with the weapons that consume mana like the upgraded wrist cuff. I really liked that as long as I had mana I could still fire the upgraded wrist cuff when out of arrows. The magic weapons were OK but could have been more impactful, especially since about all of them required solving optional puzzles or finding secrets to acquire, the only one I ended up using sometimes was the candlestick from the mansion.
   
   
6. Enemy feedback when hit could be better, especially the tanky knights towards the end were hard to read whether a hit did anything or if they just absorbed it, their healing ability was easy to read though. The dried out husk enemies of act 3 look so janky, when I figured out that they were invincible when shooting out the laser beams I stopped wasting ammo and learned that they were infact weak outside of melee range.
   
   
7. The gold penalty on death sucks, especially when you consider the enemies don't really get tougher or stronger, just more numerous. Most enemies hit like freight trains, getting one-shotted happens too often.
   
   I played on flagellant and managed to fully upgrade everything except for the last upgrades on a few of the magic weapons in the end. I was really strapped for cash for ammo et.c. during parts of act 3, due to gold going into bottomless pits from either dying on the edge of the pit or falling in. I noticed I was still losing a tiny bit of money every time I died despite recovering
   the packages, but without the patch that introduced dropping gold on death it would have been worse.

One thing I think the game does well outside of the good art department is the level design and physics that allowed secret hunting. If I could stack barrels or boxes the game usually let me access areas normally outside of reach and wouldn't punish me with invisible walls, instead actually reward me with loot.
I did like that I could cheese the ceiling crusher section in act 3 with metal barrels, there were enough barrels that I could stack them 2 high in the intersections at 3-4 places, blocking four crushers from hitting the floor and allowing me to crouch safely through the area collecting most if not all of the gold.
I did notice that the acts were getting shorter and had less side content (be it quests or things to explore) than act 1.

[Bankai9212]

The level design was always praised, but when the glue aka gameplay isn’t very good it makes playing a chore.

[LegendaryThunder]

There's a lot of things that civie will on occasion get wrong like how he's ass blasted about any fps game that dethrones a group he worships like 3Drealms vs half-life 1. Hell it took him ages to admit that Doom eternal is a tedious sh*t show that isn't a shooter but instead an apm hurdle.

But boy oh boy did he pin this down and put a branding on its ass, I had a suspicion that perhaps they turned Grayven into the might and magic kicking simulator and that was where the anger was. I couldn't have been more wrong, a shooting and brawling game that has neither, feels like the game industry is collapsing to sh*tty publishers.

I'd bet my hat the reason Bobby kotick got out of the industry was he knew the situation he created and wanted to scram while he could. Collapse coming boys, big or small everyone is going to feel the burn here soon.

[Bankai9212]

I wouldn't go that far, not sure what 3drealms and half-life have to do with doom eternal. As for Bobby dude left because of everything happening at activision blizzard and he got off Scott free.

[patmac]

At least he was able to finish the game without his save/inventory breaking halfway through

[MrBananaGrabber]

It's so funny that in the first demo they went out of their way to create a reference to Civvie, and now years later when they push out this sad pathetic mess, he very justly rips it to pieces

[Syine]

It was nice to feel validated when he dropped this vid - I wanted to like Graven so much after so long, but I'll pass on future SI games till I see some real changes in design (the art and sound is always amazing, just fundamental game design and implementation decisions don't feel finished.) Such a shame, I hope they can pull it out and win us over.

[Damien Azreal]

Publicado originalmente por Bankai9212:

This is why 3drealms really doesn't want civvie to look or review there games. Its why so many are concerned about phantom fury.

Stop making assumptions.
We (3DR and Fulqrum) supplied Civvie with keys to both Wrath and Graven.

[Mesarthim]

I have to say, I agree with Civvie... It's sad, I agree with him and I didn't want to :(

-Wrath bored me to death, I was frustrated with how long we waited to get the game to end with such a result.

No map with labyrinth-like levels which are too big and there are too many enemies with the sudden magic spawn effect ALL THE TIME !!! When I saw enemies spawning, instead of jumping and getting hooked by the action I was like "pffffff not again, leave me alone !"

All this on a boring almost silent music with meaty enemies and how "meh" the weapons and items are. (well, the turret one is fun... Never used them until the last episode and blasted all of them on the last boss which was pretty fun)

The real problem of the game also comes from the fact that those long levels never offer any rewards (secrets never offer anything interesting), no character development with special skills, improvement of your stats and whatnot... You just want to get out of the level instead of turning around trying to find where to go next.

BUUUT the game is pretty, plays well... And it could have been more !
They did cut multiplayer to improve the single player experience? Yeaaaah...

-Never tried Ion Fury and the others so I can't say.

-But Graven, I really wanted to love that game, the first episode in EA was a blast, it felt great, so many amazing things about it. I played the EA 3 times and was so hyped each time, solo and co-op. (each time taking about 10 hours to finish the EA)

Only to realize that on 1.0, graphics are still amazing, music still pretty nice (well, they're in the vibe of Hexen), no more map (why???), levels seems rushed (what happened? The first one was so amazing, it was huge, full of secrets...) and weapons seemed worse somehow?
The inventory could have gotten more love with more magic items to find, more spells and potions, more cool weapons, ...
Still love Graven but it's really not how I pictured 1.0 and somehow, I feel like it's not what the devs pictured either.

Kinda mind blowing how I succeed to complain about how big the levels are on Wrath because it's ALWAYS the same and how small they seems to be in Graven because there's character development and so many interesting stuff that could have been made.
Either way, I felt ripped off by those two games.

[Chillin]

Publicado originalmente por Damien Azreal:

Publicado originalmente por Bankai9212:

This is why 3drealms really doesn't want civvie to look or review there games. Its why so many are concerned about phantom fury.

Stop making assumptions.
We (3DR and Fulqrum) supplied Civvie with keys to both Wrath and Graven.

do you have any word on this or kingpin getting fixed?

[Kalter|Tod]

Publicado originalmente por Bing_Chilling:

Publicado originalmente por Damien Azreal:

Stop making assumptions.
We (3DR and Fulqrum) supplied Civvie with keys to both Wrath and Graven.

do you have any word on this or kingpin getting fixed?

Neither one of these games will ever be fixed.....