Diablo IV, for me. I love the Diablo series and just a bit ago, I sank 2 hours down to get my necromancer character up and set in Diablo II Resurrection. I have Diablo III and its expansion too, but they’re online only and I almost can’t be bothered to go through that. I’ve beaten it a long time ago.
And I really do want to get Diablo IV, but they’ve made that online-only as well. Like, I know I’m always online and everything but I do like to have that fallback where if I am without internet or I can’t afford internet for a time, I can play or watch things to bide the time over. I can’t do that with online-only games because it’s like being gated away from something you bought.
So everytime I look at Diablo IV, I just get a little depressed at times. Blizzard should do what D2R did, have an online character and have an offline character.
Cyberpunk 2077 - it still doesn’t go on steep enough sales to justify buying when I have hundreds of unplayed games on Steam. But I’m keeping an eye on its downward progress. Maybe when it reaches £10-13…
That’s my strategy as well. Whenever Witcher 3 is on sale i think to myself “Can’t wait for Cyberpunk to get that low”. Same thing for Elden Ring +DLC, except there i would be willing to pay about 30-40 bucks.
I’m also waiting for it to hit a low-enough price to justify the amount of time I will lose just trying to mod the thing into a playable, enjoyable state.
I bought it this winter for 25. Solid beginning. Haven’t finished it. But it’s there. I hop on when I want to veg out and the story is pretty damn good.
It’s still a buggy mess, but it’s usually very pretty and occasionally fun.
buggy mess? not at all. 100+ hours, i don’t even remember a single bug. I’m sure i must have encountered some but clearly the nothing memorable. could be buggy but buggy mess is a ridiculous overstatement.
giving you the benefit of the doubt it could be related to hardware difference or something.
I encounter some kind of bizarre NPC behavior or graphics glitch about every ten minutes.
For example NPCs panicking for obvious or not so obvious reasons, trying to flee but nearly or actually hurting people by driving or running away, which incites the ire of NCPD, which results in them gunning down those civilians, which causes more to panic and flee, and suddenly the cops are just dumping lead at everyone with a pulse but no badge. I’m sure you’ve noticed the random screaming and cops shooting but I guess you never bothered to figure out why.
Another common one is people missing textures, their limbs (especially heads) wiggling chaotically or missing entirely, and then of course the classic A-pose. The latter is much more rare than on release in my experience, but I often catch someone just barely coming out of it as I turn to look at them and the game freshly renders their animation.
None of the above is game breaking, but it’s plenty noticeable if you’re paying attention, and it’s not the kind of thing you expect to see from a full priced AA or AAA game years after its release. Snaps my immersion in half every time.
that’s wild. never encountered such noticeable bugs myself, I guess I was lucky.
It’s probably a matter of framing as well.
If you go into a game expecting a buggy mess, you’re going to notice bugs more often.
Whether or not the objective amount of bugs present meets your criteria for “buggy mess” or not is of course highly subjective, even if you noticed 100% of the ones you encountered.
Do yourself a favour and get the Ultimate Edition. Phantom Liberty is the only real reason to put yourself through it.
I played before phantom liberty and thought it was a neat enough game. Maybe I should give it another shot.
I wish I could go back and never experience it before PL. It’s what it should have been at release, took me ages to get around to trying it after the broken and underwhelming early versions because the main story was long and linear. I’m glad I did though, it’s an entirely different experience
I think the base game is really a testament to the fact that CDPR have a lot of success with open world games, but don’t really do them very well… They make really solid campaigns, and then pad them out with utter nonsense that kills the pacing stone-cold dead.
“Oh hey, here’s something really urgent. We cannot stress enough how urgent it is. By the way we’ve also just unlocked about a hundred side quests. Enjoy!”
I’m still salty that I missed one of the ending achievements because if you follow the instructions it gives you, it will cause a fail state on that particular ending.
Make sure to make a save at the appropriate point so you can do both paths.