Usually I’d be making this post from my main account, cod, but for some reason I’ve tried posting multiple times today and it hasn’t let me, it keeps giving me an error. So here we go! Weekly post from a different account this week. Hopefully next week I can go back to my main again.
Wow, I knew a decent chunk of the game relied on RNG but I didn’t know it was that extensive.
I got pretty lucky by getting the Nebula gun in my first world. It makes getting through trash mobs a lot easier. Its good even up to boss enemies since I can squirt them and duck under cover while the acid kills them.
I’m on Root Earth which I assume is near endgame and I’ve only unlocked one other archetype and found like three new traits. I was starting to wonder what I was doing wrong but it seems being a pain in the ass is just how the game is designed. I haven’t even found new armor yet! (I know there are two sets you can buy in Ward 13)
I’m in the middle of a playthrough right now, and while I’m enjoying it (I originally came to this thread to post about Remnant 2, then read your comment and realized I agreed with every single thing you said), it’s frustrating how they chose to design things. The games had great intentions held back by poor implementation.
They wanted to make the game replayable, but they did so by artificially limiting what you could encounter in a single playthrough. For completionists this is torture. For one-and-done players it could be a deal breaker.
They wanted endless exploration, but the random maps make exploring unrewarding. I lost count of the number of interesting map features that ended up being completely empty aside from common enemies and some smashable pots (which are empty 90% of the time and drop a paltry amount of basic currency when they aren’t). Remnant 2 is at least way better about this than the first, where the maps were a chore to get through.
They knew one of people’s favorite things about Souls games is piecing things together from obscure clues, so designed the game in a way that the entire playerbase would work together to learn how to unlock everything. The downside is that obtaining many basic things like classes and gear requires ARG-level shenanigans (plus a hefty dose of luck), and if you don’t use a wiki you’ll miss some of the game’s best content.
And the constant hordes you mentioned are a result of the game needing to drip-feed ammo drops to the player since most guns can burn through your entire reserve in under a minute of fighting, especially against the bullet sponge bosses. That Engineer archetype I linked to in my first comment has a mechanic where it regenerates ammo for its special weapons over time when they’re not in use - something like that (or the first Mass Effect’s heat mechanics) would have been preferable if they wanted to force players to swap weapons from time to time rather than get complacent. They clearly played with these ideas during development since there are a few weapon mods and archetype powers that work like that.
I love the gameplay, the lore, the characters, the visual and sound design, hell nearly everything save the parts I complained about, but I’m left with the unpleasant suspicion that these games would have been significantly better if they dropped half of what made them unique in the first place.