Strongly disagree on this review. Playing on PC, this is one of the least buggy AAA I've seen over the past couple years; its got nothing on the issues in PC versions of Dishonored 2, Deus Ex, Quantum Break, etc. And the writing gets spotty in some places, but overall its a fun, well-done sci fi adventure.
Its 3/5 bare minimum, and I'm leaning towards 4/5.
@rorie: I am. I think more highly of the writing than Brad apparently does, but that's certainly subjective. On the technical side though, I've had almost no issues. In 40+ hours I've encountered two very specific bugs and that's it; no T-poses, no broken quests, no animation glitches, nothing. And while the human (and asari) faces have their issues, the rest of the game looks fantastic on Ultra; especially the planet environments.
@cvagts: During the EA Access period (I haven't checked if its been fixed yet), there was a chance that if you created a second character and started the game with them, some of the triggers from the first game would bleed over to it. So in the first room in the game (which is a returnable location) characters who aren't supposed to show up for hours are already there; optional conversations won't start; and because the game thinks you already have your scanner it won't give it to you and the second required objective of the game is literally impossible to complete.
@mrpandaman: Maybe the consoles are much worse than the PC version, but between EA Access and post-release I've played about 15 hours and only encountered one major bug (the one related to second character save files) and some graphical glitches. Bethesda games are way worse than this, Obsidian games are way worse (at least, their AAA games were), AC: Unity was far worse, etc.
Going back to the comparison everyone wants to make, I'm not sure if The Witcher 3 was actually buggier or if I was just less lucky there (and CDPR did a real nice job of patching most of those issue), but bug-wise ME:A has been smoother on that front so far.
@ccyhd: For me, the MP became fine as soon as I started hosting all my matches myself (I have a 200Mbps connection). Before that, when I was joining games with other hosts, I'd say around half the time the matches were unplayable due to rubberbanding; albeit with a very small sample size.
I thought the MP was fun; but damn do I hate it when games decide to go P2P instead of having dedicated servers.
@petiew: @zeik: Interesting. Thanks. I may need to give this a shot once I'm done with Mass Effect. It does look really good.
My one concern is that I played the first Nier (Gestalt I think, not Replicant) and I didn't like it that much; except for the voice acting of that book, which was just incredible. I never beat it even once, stopping around 10 hours in I think it was. A lot of it was because the world was so drab and barren that I couldn't stand looking at the game though; and this looks a lot more vibrant.
So since its sounds like a playthrough isn't that long; how different are each of the playthroughs? Is it the same gameplay content with some different dialog or is completely different areas and bosses?
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