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Arx is TERRIBLE

I caught you! You really ran out of time towards the end didn`t you? ^^

Come on! The whole game was extremely well done until you get to the bloodmoon island which I dont like for the looks and the atmosphere of it but hey - thats just my opinion. Then the nameless island - brilliant again but then there comes along Arx §/($%/&(). What a TERRIBLE questline you have written there. WAY too many steps that are not properly hinted on, almost impossible to find if you dont read up in the forum where a saviour posts "after 30+ hours i found this and that" (dont wanna spoil but let me just say last door Ahru as an example). This is just SO UNNECESSARY and REALLY destroyed my whole picture of this up until that point very close to perfect game.

PLEASE FIX!

Oh - and while you are at it let me start a new game with the character of a previous walk-through.

Cheers

I got the same feeling, it does feel either rushed or like the devs ran out of ideas towards the end. The whole resolution with the cloaked figure and dallis REALLY felt like the plot jumped the shark. Arx is not -bad-, but more disappointing next to how great the rest of the game was.

Minor spoilers ahead:



All in all I agree with how it needs to be a bit clearer with where you should go and what you should do to progress, and it needs a thorough balancing pass. But overall? I think it's at least decent. The foundation is there for a great chapter. It just needs a bit more love & polish to live up to the rest of the game!

Well i have to say, that all those issues you've mentioned come on top of my frustrations with the quest plot.

You are right: The City itself is made very well. The characters are wonderfully designed. I love the Story in itself (finally!). But just spending hours on the same fight you have mentioned with those Skeletons and still they Keep coming no matter what you do is just frustrating. That alone would leave me with a stained Feeling of the whole game.

So it really Needs ... polishing ;).

I wanna say, that the game is just so really well done that it deserves to be as Close to perfect as it can be with those few, minor tweaks needed.

Cheers

I think the game could definitely do with some polishing up at and beyond the Nameless Isle. There needs to be MORE skills, that is new skills, and the skill-crafting system needs to be reworked and improved, as does the regular crafting system.

Plenty of broken or odd quests in Arx, and the balancing there is quite poor. I literally didn't find Anathema until after I had already beaten the game, I had to go back on an old save and spent about 4 hours or so exploring the entirety of Arx until I found what I had missed.

I still haven't found the Voidwoken route, it might have been on the Nameless Isle via the Sallow Man, but when I encountered him, he immediately looked at Ifan, Ifan looked at him, Sallow man says 'You...die' or something to that affect, I can't turn in Alexander's head, and will never find out if it was that or something else, though supposedly there is such a way.

The option to flood the entire City was Deathfog was pretty cool, the random Deathfog crates in that fight area were not. The instant killing deathfog spider wipes out 3/4 members of my group...and later down there, one of the undead Guards uses a crate to kill multiple members of my team again, requiring me to resurrect them and use a tornado to clean up the deathfog.

I just really didn't enjoy the third part of the game.

Arx does feel a little rushed compared to the rest of the game: where previously there was a lot of attention to detail, there's quite a few rough edges in Arx with things being called "placeholder" and very generic people and objects that would usually have a story attached to them. I guess in spite of going down the publisher-free route they still have time constraints and ran out of it...

IMO, Arx in general is fine, even the Doctor and Spiders, both if which were not THAT bad really once you figure out that you need to kill spiders from range and with doctor it's becoming a lot easier when you setup a fort at the door and spread some slows along the way which takes him years to go through while you kill all the nurses and adds.

The only REAL issue is consulate revenants and Arhu questline door, first is just an annoying slog - it's not even a threat just a giant waste of time and second is really WAY too roundabout in a very nonsensical way with picture being literally hell knows where with no hints to that.

Other than that A+ game as expected, maybe there is sort of lack of narrative in Driftwood with everything being more subtle and somewhat side questy with Dallis nowhere to be seen as opposed to something like Luculla Forest where Conduit was a major presence.

Ah, I've just got to the consulate and now I see why people are complaining. After several attempts to deal with the undead revenants I gave up and snuck past them into the garden, but the portal to the dream-world is even more excruciating. I guess this is D:OS2's equivalent of D2's Zeppelin escort mission: it seems compulsory that they put something in there to drive you nuts! It's a bit of a shame to end on such a frustrating note as the rest of the game has been immensely enjoyable (well, I agree with Bloodmoon Island which is hideous and a bit of a throwback to Beyond Divinity's style... and the reason I didn't finish it). Hopefully as with previous games they'll release a revised version which will hammer out some of the dents.

I actually thought the Undead Revenant fights were quite smart and is the kind of fight the game needs more.

It's the kind of fight that force people to be tactical, thinking about what to do instead of just outright using the strongest attack. It has conditions players must notice in order to win and when they do, they have to think of how to achieve it. I ended up setting the first room on fire so a single bless can clear it instead of going for each puddle at a time while keeping the enemies cc'd and weaker so once I bless them after the room is clean, they all die right away.

Even the quests that actually feels fresh, like how they try to implement stealth mission into the vault.

The problem is that they keep forcing you to redo the same kind of fight that the mechanic no longer feels fresh. The game also has almost none of the unique stuff in Act 2 so there's nothing preparing the player for Act 3. Everything else in the game is just "Talk to A, Go to B, look for hidden switch C, do fight with D to fetch E for A, finish" and a shorter or longer variation of that. Only one quest in bloodmoon really get you to try something new based on the text you read that give you the quest.

I think we've already been here several times before: not everybody wants a tactical, strategic game and they certainly shouldn't be forced into it. From my perspective, it's most unwelcome. I view it as an RPG I can explore and I consider this sort of thing to be an obstacle that I don't particularly enjoy climbing.

I guess I'm thankful that it's near the end of the game so I haven't lost too much should I abandon it at this point, which is likely, but please don't assume that everybody does or should play primarily for the combat. There's a lot more to it than that, or at least there should be. While I welcome a challenge, there's a fine line between it being that or just being a chore, and where that line is drawn varies a lot from player to player.

Considering how most fights are optional, they can add those into some of the main quests as all of them already have multiple approaches. People that don't like the tactical stuff can just avoid the tactical approach and go for the work-around one.

At least it will get more discussion going outside "Stack stat, go for the key targets, win".

I'm just pissed with all the red targets...exactly who thought it was a good idea to flag even the lamp posts as red?! I got to -30 attitude just by walking around in a freaking building. Like seriously, the whole screen is flooded with red traps. No wonder the damned reds use this city as their main base.

my issue with the cursed revenants is that they're currently bugged, from what i've seen. i just use my rogue to sneak past them when i get to that point in the game, rather than fight an endless battle because there's necrofire in the walls or whatever

if it had been executed better then it would have been fine

my issue with arx is that despite how big and interesting-looking the city is, there's deceptively little to do. aside from the main quest and a couple of other lines, you just spend most of the time running around and selling loot to vendors (and i really do mean selling, because by this point in the game i'm barely buying anything, so i'm just stockpiling cash for nothing in particular since the game is about to end). there are far less side quests in this area than there were in driftwood, and most of the scenery is the same (you're either in a dungeon or running through the streets). fort joy was terrific, driftwood was terrific, i noticed a slight impatience with the nameless isle in that it goes by rather quickly, though i don't think it by itself is considered a full act. then you get to arx and the game seems to come to a complete standstill; there's no real direction, no quest markers (aside from maybe one?) and aside from potential companion quests you're pretty much resigned to aimlessly wandering through places that look important talking to people who look important (and being disappointed at least half the time when the person turns out to be completely irrelevant to the story). that or looking things up on the internet, which no one should fault you for

i've been loving this game and playing it pretty much exclusively for the past week or so but there is a noticeable dip in quality as the game nears the end and it does feel rushed. the quests are more of a mess and the journal is especially unhelpful. the city itself looks nice, i just wish it delivered more in terms of content

overall though, this is probably one of my favourite rpgs (or games in general) of all time

This all reminds me a bit of VtM Bloodlines, where the first half of the game was awesome and interesting, and the second half just felt like a real slog and was much too shooty. But it remains awesome in spite of them running out of steam/money/time/patience/whatevs. OS2 is more fortunate in that it's really just the last bit of the game that fell a bit flat, and based on previous experience with Larian they may well revisit it at some point in the future.

Oh man, VTM bloodlines was made infinitely better by turning on godmode so you can to an extent ignore the awful combat and focus on the plot. I still weep for that game, it would've DEFINED what aRPGs are if it got even one-two more weeks of development. Bloody shame, that is;

In contrast, Arx still feels like there was an intent to keep things RPGy at the end. So I salute the devs for that, it truly is hard to top what they have made with the first 3 chapters. Maybe that's just it -- the rest of the game is just too good, with nothing in the world quite able to live up to the bar of quality it set for itself.

Yeah, that's exactly what I did. A lot of the game's second-half scenes looked ready for more interesting gameplay but it had pretty much turned into an albeit still fairly narrative shooter by that point. But not how it started out. I should really replay it (or at least its first half!) with the other character types.

Huge FPS drop in Arx. City Square is a slideshow. And fucking cursed revenants drive me crazy.

Apparently I never finished the whole dwarf thing and Arx got destroyed, RIP lol. Like I went back upstairs for that Kid in cage (Mistake) and then went up to see paladins and then completely forgot. But what Alchemist Assassination? Is that the Dwaren wedding? Or something else, I might have missed a few more things looking at this.

I didn't do the Consulate one, with the Necrofire lizards, was playing with a friend and apparently it was bugged for us. So no idea what could have happened with that fight.

Also, the game is not optimized. After hitting Nameless Isle the game just slogs. Hell, it happens even in Reapers from time to time, but it gets pretty bad with Nameless Isle.

Also a question, with the Doctor Daeva fight, like the first 2-3 times we tried it, he had like 17k physical armour and stuff, but the other time, we dragged everyone outside, forcing em to walk through the door, but he only had like 4k physical and like magical, did we bug him out or what happened?

Also I read Malady meets you there, but nothing. No Jahan anywhere, not even in the basement or w/e? Was it bugged for us? I wouldn't be surprised if it was considering A LOT of the quests were bugged for us. (Tarquins quest, Trial of seasons, Consulate, etc etc).