Recent reviews by HSD Absol

I'm only posting this for the Steam badge but

After all the patches, my personal experience with the game has been absolutely solid. As of patch 1.6 I've had very few issues outside of occasional small stuff like cars spawning in the wrong places. As far as I've noticed everything seems to be working properly, and the issues I used to have on my previous play-through don't seem to be around anymore, especially with the NCPD scanner missions. The game overall has a great amount of detail in it's lore and remains fairly faithful to the old school tabletop RPG, but has also gone on to update some of it to suit the modern day standard in a way that still feels mostly natural and fitting to the city's harsh nature.

That being said, the game does go on to exclude the inclusion of some of the corporations from the tabletop game, but some of this is also likely due to licensing reasons due to the inclusion of numerous real world corporations that carry some ties to the in game world. Sadly Porsche was the exception this, when we could've had Mitsubishi or virtually any other car realtor. Numerous smaller cyberware items are also left unmentioned or unused, such as the ChainRipp, Skate Foot, Wolvers, Exotics, etc.

Overall I highly enjoyed the game and it's relative faithfulness to the tabletop RPG and it's lore, even if some of the debatably more interesting features had to be cut or were just completely left out. At the end of the day it's treated as a spin-off entity for the franchise and suffers from the limit of it's engine and modern game optimization methods, on top of a rushed dev cycle thanks to corporate shareholders. The game also has a fairly dedicated modding community, and thanks to the release of official mod tools we're getting far more advanced systems out of modding. It's absolutely worth giving a shot if you have the computer hardware for it, and I highly recommend putting the game on an SSD to help eliminate smaller stutters or if you plan on modding it.

A game that's gone on for so long that it's on an active path of self destruction and strays from it's own foundation.

Siege used to be one of those games that I'd actually enjoy playing with my friends on a near weekly basis, but with the tweaks to the game over the last couple months, I find myself struggling to enjoy it even with friends. The game focuses on and caters heavily to the word of pro-players, and actively makes the game worse for everyone else in exchange for pleasing the 1% of it's community.

One of the reasons so many of my friends and I enjoyed quick play over unranked was because of how short the matches were, so if we got a map we disliked we were at least out quickly. The second most recent update ruins this, as it turns quick play into a secondary beginner playlist instead, despite there being a beginner playlist in the game already. The changes include shorter round prep timers, the inability for defenders to go or shoot outside, and giving the attackers 10 second immunity. The problem is, so many defense operators in the game are based around setting up their gadgets in stationary positions, now sometimes you may not even have the time to do it. The 10 second round start immunity for attackers drives them to storm in without a second thought, rather than using some form of tact and planning, as you can imagine, this leads to a lot of people just rushing into their death. The problem is this game was built and designed to be a tactical shooter, but these changes actively go against the core design of the game. Some maps even automatically reinforce between the sites you'd normally leave open to be able to rotate freely when needed to make it easier to defend both sites. These changes only apply to quick play, but not any other playlists. (including the beginner playlists, where these changes would be better suited and actually make a degree of sense.)


Tying into the point of the previous paragraph, most of the recent "reworks" to existing maps just add walls where there previously weren't any, without actually restructuring almost any of the map in a sensible way. It's to the point where there's hardly any open sightlines, despite the fact that there are two sniper operators in the game, making them far less viable in each new map and rework. These sightlines also being gone has had a negative impact for playing on attack, as the ones that took their place put bias in favor of the defender side. Most of the angles now only give sight to one side of the engagement, typically on the side of the defenders. However, the defender sites are the exact opposite, now having "cover" in positions that actively put the defenders at a disadvantage with how much movement becomes restricted on the sites themselves, on top of the on site windows being in places that put the defenders in a losing position due to them being difficult to defend. In previous versions the answer would be to just use trap operators to cover these windows, but now the game is actively pushing changes that drastically restrict which trap ops are actually viable for this task, and disabling traps and self aid are becoming more oppressive and frequent. You would think this would encourage more tactical play, but more often than not, it doesn't. For a game designed around tactical and gadget based gameplay, it's now been pushed into becoming almost exclusively braindead gun fights that weren't even set up in a way that encourages more tactical play. It leads to stale and repetitive matches that go on for far too long in most other playlists, each match lasting between 20 to sometimes 40 minutes depending on the competence of each team.


The game is also now planning on removing the ability to "cook" frag grenades now due to complaints from "professional" players, despite it being designed to be a gadget that's meant to kill or relocate the defenders, but this now makes the odds of them serving the function even more unlikely. We're already at a point where more often than not, the better use for these is to just use them to destroy gadgets and not much else. Frag grenades were already difficult to get kills with, but they were so satisfying when you did. If they were a tool available on more operators then this change would make more sense, but the odds of you actually seeing them in matches were fairly low as it is, making this issue seem more frequent and oppressive than it actually is.

In short, the game has just become more tedious to play and now actively pushes away from what it was originally designed to be. What was once a game that was designed around tactical gameplay now actively discourages actual thinking about positioning and holding angles, and instead pushes for a hyper aggressive playstyle that instead feels clunky.

Think that I'm done? I wish I was.

The game is also now just insufferable to launch, thanks to "Ubisoft Connect." The game previously used Uplay before it was remade into what it is now. Normally I am not the type to complain about secondary launchers, but now starting up the game takes forever. Ubisoft Connect prompts the user to give administrative control THREE times just to update the service, and the service updates at least once a week. As if that wasn't annoying enough, the game will now restart itself once opened to download security updates, rather than being done with an update for the game itself or via Ubisoft connect. Once that is done, you wait for the game to open once again and wait for it to get past the startup screens. But that's not all, after the conversion to Ubisoft Connect, it's a 50/50 chance of you even being able to invite your friends to a squad. The program frequently breaks and will fail to show some users online, invites won't work, or in some more extreme cases, the UI won't even open for you to accept or send invites. This leads to a process where you have to figure out who can see who appearing online (despite the fact that all users will have their status set to online, but Ubisoft connect will display them as offline.), and go through a process of having each person in the party having to invite someone that you can't see on your list. The easiest workaround for this is to just tab out of the game, manually open Ubisoft Connect, send the invite through the app directly, then tab back into the game, but sometimes that also just doesn't work.



TL;DR
The game has become a chore both for setting up a group with your friends AND to play. In the end, it just isn't fun anymore. Rather than fixing the Ubisoft Connect platform or the actual issues with the game, they take a backseat in exchange for pushing out a new set of cosmetics each week, and balancing takes the backseat while also straying away from the game's foundation. This was once my favorite shooter to play and has some of my favorite gun play in the industry, but it's not worth everything else in the game to experience it anymore.