The slight advantage Baldur's Gate 3 has over a AW2, that you don't have to play the prior games of the former two to know what's going on. As with Alan Wake II, you have to know and have played what was going on in the first game, some of the DLC stories, and another game, Control's DLC to get the full picture. Before getting the second game, I played the first game twice, and I just YouTubed Control's DLC.
It's funny because whenever a big game sequel comes out I see the questions all over like "do I have to play the previous game(s) first" and always the answer is no because of course no one's gonna make a mass-appeal game that assumes people played some game(s) from years ago.
Wasn’t 7th gen all about this kinda stuff though too? Like even on Xbox there was Halo trilogy ala “finish the fight” and the Gears trilogy, then a bunch of PS3 series like God of War capping off the trilogy, three Uncharted’s, and there’s of course Mass Effect which I haven’t played but have heard is all connected because everyone was pissed about how it ended promoting a bloody rewrite.
Oh maybe.. i kinda skipped that era of gaming. So my brain only goes back to PS3 era, the console where I started gaming again on the reg. And I played AC2 and you didn't need to have played AC1 to get anything 'cause the main playable characters are different. And later games like Skyrim and Witcher 3 which are franchises and sequels and whatnot but it doesn't matter, so that's what I was thinking.
Resident Evil 2 through 6 says hi. And God of War 2 through Ragnarok. And Metal Gear Solid in general. Especially Metal Gear Solid. The first MGS was a sequel to the MSX games. I know you mentioned you took a break from gaming around this point and didn't get back until the late 7th generation era, but I wanted to give you several notes.
Yeah, I never finished Hades because of that. The writing is good, but there's just not enough content to justify how much plot there is. There's only so many times I can kill the Hydra or Theseus and the Minotaur before I'm just bored of it. They really needed more unique bosses and challenges if they intended to have a narrative that long, either that or just stop drip-feeding the story to me a couple of conversations at a time. It takes 50+ runs of the game to get the full Hades story and that's just too many runs for a game with only like 7 unique boss-fights (I refuse to count the different Hydra iterations as unique boss fights because almost nothing changes about how you approach the fight).
No that wouldn't have helped. That would have just increased the number of room and enemy combinations, but the big issue with the game was just a lack of bosses. They would have needed to just design way more bosses.
There are some side quests that are definitely worth doing. Some of them have specific upgrades locked behind them, but some of them have cool story content. I'm going to list off the side quests I think are definitely worth doing. I won't tell you why or give any spoilers, but all of these add to the plot and characterization, and tend to be pretty major quests. One of them even opens up an entirely new area which you would otherwise skip completely (and this area is worth doing as it has the best drop rate for crafting materials and has a bunch of cool boss fights).
Not exactly easy to miss but there’s an epilogue story thread that’s well worth it.
Even if they had more boss variety, like 80% of the game was doing the same rooms with the same enemies again and again. A lot of modern roguelikes think they can just randomize rooms and powerups and call it a day, but proc-gen is the thing that gave old-school roguelikes near endless replay-ability.
I never got as bored with the rooms as I did with the bosses. Theseus in particular is just such a long fight and it's the same every time. Different god calls really don't change the fight at all.
I have the exact same opinion as you of Hades- great gameplay and art that wore thin and I definitely got tired of repeatedly fighting the bosses especially Theseus = Minotaur.
I'm actually cool with playing Roguelites overall. I probably have a couple hundred hours in Binding of Isaac and Enter the Gungeon, but both of those have a lot more variety in terms of builds and boss fights.
I did the Freya one in Vanaheim and I liked it. I'm gonna check out some of the other ones. To be fair, I really like Freya as a character and getting to see more of her was totally worth the investment. I also did the Weight of Chains quest already and that was quite engaging.
