Polygon is a joke. They rated a $60 microtransacation cashgrab garbage a 7.5/10
Hope this is the last one. 93 in metacritic is still good.
Fun topic...;) I'll bite! Ah, yes, mealy-mouthed game reviews that pretend to authorship by the "Sages of the Universe," who understand all...;)
Always a fun excursion into mediocrity and triviality and general nincompoopishness by the Wise Ones Among Us...;)
My opinion: this game is
fabulous--as good as they get. I agree with you--so much of the "criticism" of OS 2 I have read is from people who very often simply haven't learned how to play the game--and are still stubbornly insisting that it
"play like the last game of its type that I played recently," etc.--hooo boy, you know you've got a humdinger when they talk like this as if it makes sense...;)
"The last game of its type that I played"...(Please. Don't. Hit. Me. Again...! Stop...;))
It's the
round peg in square hole syndrome--dedicated to the proposition that "Game X will play like Game Z or I'll force it to do so, eventually"--and so on.
Meanwhile Game X is terrible because it doesn't
"play like Game Z would play if Game Z was Game X"--a literally nonsensical statement if ever there was one.
Don't know how many "criticisms" and "Bug reports" I've seen written by people who do crazy illogical things like not finishing quests and then wonder why they weren't awarded XP--they played it *wrong* and think that they should have been awarded with XP, anyway, because
*in their minds* they had finished it correctly...;) What follows is paraphrased but true, and only the names have been changed to protect the innocent NPCs and game developers--who are not responsible for the stupidity of the player:
"After I killed the void monsters threatening mother and son, I ignored the woman and child I had just rescued (the boy was the original quest giver)--I abandoned them without a so much as "by your leave" and immediately ran into the smoking house--away from them--and started stealing stuff--went down a ladder and started stealing stuff--but when I came back up the ladder, mother and child were gone--they just vanished--and I got no XP for the quest! *BUG ALERT* This is a really, really bad *bug* and I don't feel like retracing my steps because I did not save the game before the fight--so I'm out of here! Call me in the year 2099 when Larian gets all the bugs fixed!"
In reality, there was no quest bug at all--except in the mind and Modus Operandi of that particular player. Had he simply talked to mother and child after the fight to inquire as to their health, to see if there was a reward, or even just to talk to the child who gave the quest in the first place--he'd have been awarded his XP, known where mother and child were off to, and *then* he could have begun his next stage which apparently was to steal everything he could find in their home. He simply never completed the quest rationally or logically--so he got no XP. Just the same as with any other game quest that isn't completed. But he chalked it off to a *game bug*...! Too funny...;) All too familiar, sadly.
Then there are all the innumerable little bits that various players/reviewers call "bugs" because the way the features work in the game doesn't correspond to the way the player imagines those features should work, and so the player/reviewer concludes that the "glitched" features are *bugs* in the game. The reality is that the "glitches" were simply holes in the player's understanding of how to play the game--not *code bugs.* No amount of developer code fixes can debug a player's misapprehensions and misunderstandings about the game or the way it must be played--in this game or any other game, as well. No game of any kind can be played satisfactorily without a thorough understanding of the *rules of the game* and the knowledge of how to play that game...;) Scrabble to O Sin2--it's all the same.
Are there bugs in OS 2? Of course there are--there always are in any game the size and scope of this masterpiece. The read.me's that Larian has published in its version Change Logs attest to the number of bugs that have so far been fixed in the game--a good number of bugs fixed so far.
*However,* those fixes can only be compared with the total size and complexity of the game itself, which means that those bug lists are a tiny fraction of the total amount of code in the game that *could* be bugged but isn't! This is a huge game. To illustrate how huge it is, I note with some surprise that out of all the bug fixes Larian has stipulated "fixed" that in now some ~100 hours + put into the game so far (I'm still in Chapter II wrapping up believe it or not!), that I have encountered not one of the bugs Larian lists as fixed in the patches to date...not a single one of them! And I started playing a week before the game was formally released on 9/14.
Sometimes I think game reviewers these days lack a lot--a lot of perspective and experience, mostly. Old hands like me, though, are not going to miss the quality of this game to date--especially compared to many, many others we could all discuss if we were crazy enough to do so..;)
