Releases for €60 in my local currency, so far it seems on a technical level it’s done well enough, FPS seems stable except during cutscenes (oddly enough, a lot report dropping to 30 or lower).
Sadly have not found information yet about FoV or keybindings.
The world of the first one is 10/10, and maybe the “story” is fine, but the actual writing in the first was awful. The sidequests were especially bad.
The story of the present day in the first was bland. The story of the past was interesting to explore. I agree about the side quests, I skipped them entirely in the first, but some of the side quests in the 2nd were worth doing. The 2nd does a good job of listing which are side-story and which are side-fetch quests.
Thank youuuuu.
The world building was solid enough to distract me from the writing for a long time. This probably sounds like a nitpick but here goes.
The part where the scientists are explaining GAIA (whatever its called) was so badly done I lost all suspension of disbelief. Like why did these people spend, presumably hours of their precious time, creating an Apple style keynote speech explaining their plan to save the world. Like maybe just focus on saving the world? And one of them has a valley accent. No disrespect to valley accents but if you’re trying to convince me I’m listening to one of the smartest people in the world it’s definitely a bad choice to give them an accent attributed to ignorant white girls.
The place where it broke down for me was a moment where, as part of the main quest of the game, a character asks Aloy to help with a very emotionally personal request (help figure out what happened to his dead sister), and Aloy starts off with “that’s your war, not mine” and is super reluctant. Then, not 2 minutes later, I talk to a side quest NPC asking for help investigating a stolen heirloom, and Aloy is like “yeah sure, I have time for that and also maybe I could run and get your grocieries and do your dry cleaning and whatever else no problem.”