makari

If you're one to rule out mythic+ and raids as endgame options, WoW will always feel a little scant at max level. They are the main repeatable sources of progressing your character. The warfront and its associated 'island' provide a more casual catch-up but they aren't very compelling. The island expeditions were an interesting diversion at first, but I'm rather sick of them at this point. They recently upped the rate of rewards, but a lot of pets and toys aren't really my thing.

The Azerite system feels wonky. It, in some ways, punishes casual players for getting gear upgrades if they don't play enough to keep up with their necklace levels. If you're not one to be blasting through content and doing all your world quests every day you will inevitably find yourself behind on requirements for high ilvl gear pieces. I don't think they need an AP system in the game anymore. It doesn't keep people playing. People who are hardcore for endgame will grind anything, making it moot, and those that don't will feel held hostage by it. I hope they do away with it next expansion.

The dungeons and raids are good this expansion. The art and questing experience are fantastic. The endgame is WoW endgame... if you aren't busying yourself with it all it can feel unrewarding, but busying yourself with it all can lead to burn-out.

There are some really wonky power curves in 8.0 leveling. The 60-80 experience is excruciatingly slow and your character power compared to what it was before in the 90-100 range is a bit out of whack. The enemies seem to have a disproportionate amount of health in comparison to smoother level ranges. Once you hit 100 you suddenly become a golden god of power level in comparison.

Thankfully, there is a way to circumvent the 90-100 experience almost entirely, but it might be out of reach of new players or those without friends able to help out.

It is a world where people have small problems and the world has big problems. WoW gives you slices of both of these from one moment to the next. Due to its wide and open nature, the all-too-easy way of missing story beats and picking up on endings to stories before encountering their beginnings, and a LOT of the story being told in outside media that is barely touched if at all in-game it is very difficult to have a cohesive narrative experience.

As someone who loremasters every expansion and even reads some of the novels at times it is full of cute nods and obscure recurring characters. There have been minor plot threads from one expansion that carry on in unexpected ways in later expansions, but if you weren't there or skipped past those quests it would be totally lost on you or seem insignificant. If you have the time and care to pay attention you can get a lot out of the fandom. It is, admittedly, really hard to do so nowadays, especially if you're just starting out.

It's very common for a WoW player (even long-time fans) to say 'who is this major expansion character? Where did they come from? Why should I care?' The answers exist, but sometimes you have to dig. And sometimes it's really deep.

I played (and streamed) the game for a few hours this morning and had no technical troubles or crashes. It's not a very resource-demanding game at all and seems pretty well optimised. Here's a clip of a boss fight at 1080p, highest settings, 60fps mode on a gtx1060 for reference.

It feels like it was rushed or the team was less experienced/didn't have enough time to complete it. I hesitate to say out and out that it is a lazy job because game dev is complicated, but it isn't all it could be. Apart from the random crashes, the new UI is pretty ugly and the character ring menus aren't as intuitive. There has been work on some cutscene and exposition scripts for character movement in particular that have had some effort put into them but others seem to merely use the original game's scripts and look very awkward in 3D, as if they only had time to smooth out some scenes and not others.

It might sound like the game is a trainwreck from the above criticisms but the issue is mainly that the game is at times too faithful where it could have been smoothed out and some changed parts are just not that well executed. It's like a warts-and-all graphical upgrade that adds some new warts. It's not entirely without merit, since essentially it is still the SoM you remember with some pretty minor changes, but it's a tough sell for the price.

The real heinous crime of the remake is that they didn't bother to remake the classic mode-7 cannon-firing scenes for when you use cannon transports, which is in my mind one of the most iconic SoM scenes. Given the fantastic new world map design they had a chance to really hit it out of the park in terms of nostalgia, but the scene is completely absent, which is baffling to me.

@Marino I'm about 15 hours into it. It is pretty similar in overall feel to Setsuna. The biggest divergence is the combat, which strips the cross-skills that were inspired by Chrono Trigger for the Vulcosuits. The game feels a little more story-heavy and unevenly paced than Setsuna. The demo in particular is an example of a small dungeon that gets cut up a lot by exposition. Not all dungeons in the game are like this, but there are very big parts of the game where there is a lot of story and little to no combat. It makes the story, world and characters richer but I could see people thinking it's a little slow.

The cross-skills concept is still in the game. The main character's Vulcosuit power is team-up attack, of which you unlock several over the course of the game, but this makes them a lot more limited-use than cross-skills in Setsuna which were used liberally in every encounter. It does free up the other characters to have their own unique powers so overall there is more variety but less usability as these are technically powerful 'ultimates' that all use up a shared resource. It means for the most part you will ping-pong from normal combat to Vulcosuit combat in situations where you think it makes sense, so there's a little more strategy in that respect than Setsuna's 'find a good set of cross-skills and abuse them constantly' which was how I personally played it.

This game is less Chrono-inspired and more it's own thing, but it still feels very much a Tokyo RPG Factory game.

Disappointing movie. I'm not on board with their portrayal of Luke, although the Force User half of the movie had all the films good moments. The Resistance half of the movie is pointless garbage and stunts interest in an already narrative-thin cast of supporting characters and reduces the villains to a slapstick motley of utter incompetents. The blatant MCU humour was out of place and diffused what should have been tense dramatic scenes too often.

If you get a full 3-stage Blade combo off on a mob it'll put an element orb of the attacks element on the enemy. You can stack an element orb of each element onto a single creature but most story stuff you'll only need one or two because their health is so low. When in a chain attack, attacks of certain elements will either damage or break the orbs, opposite elements to the orb will almost always break the orb immediately. When you break an orb, you get more combo time and a QTE to refresh the cooldown on all your Blades. If you miss the QTE the Blades you used in the previous round will be on cooldown, which is a big problem if in the early game with Tora since he only has one Blade to contribute to the combo chain. If he doesn't have a Blade to contribute the chain will end regardless of other factors.

You don't really need to engage with soul matching until ng+ but it is nice the option is there. It is certainly futile to try to soul match something you got in the first level and hold it through til the end of the game, the cost is just too overbearing and frankly, if you are going to engage in ng+ in any way, is a waste of gold. In ng+ you will use it a lot, since it is the only way to raise the +level of equipment.

At endgame, all equipment is level 150 and no higher, but can have a +modifier (150+1, 150+2, etc, up to +10). Feeding a +1 to a +0 will make it +1, then feeding a +1 to a +1 will make a +2, a +2 to a +2 makes a +3 and so on. The cost for this is quite cheap in comparison to bringing up a low level item so your gold is better saved for this if you want to go down the perfect loot rabbit hole that ng+ offers you.

It will never cease to amaze me how much you try to apply real-world logic, situations and politics to fairy tales. Sure, it's funny reading you freak out, but I worry for you sometimes, you know? How do you appreciate any story at all? Perhaps MST3K'ing everything is your source of joy in fiction, who am I to judge :P