Except:
- Insufferable and repetitive pawn chatter you can't ever turn off (seriously, what were they thinking)
talk you your pawn at the chair in town, your own pawn does become quiet when you do it ,it's other people's rented pawns that still talk
- Repetitive encounters. Oh yay goblins again! How terribly exciting. BBI largely fixed that but it's still a problem in the main game
are you kidding me, repetitive encounters? There's so much variety
- Stupidest "romance" system ever and it's mandatory
true that it's silly, but has no bearing on anything in the game other than a 30 second cutscene at the end of the story... so why does it even matter
- Clunky menus
fixed in the dark arisen goty edition, the only issue is that it's a pain to use healing items or the buff items which just made me not use them, a pc port with some hotkeys would have solved this but instead we got the typical console controls limitations
- A plethora of boring grindy MMO-like "kill X, collect Y" quests (or even more annoying and pointless "escort" ones) and a very small minority of substantial and interesting side-quests (one of which forces you into some idiotic romance subplot which is actually unrelated to the in-game affinity system.... >_<)
Those are bounty board side quests that you have no reason to even do in the first place, all the 'kill quests' are completed naturally MANY times over just by playing the game normally.
I skipped the escort quests the game has so much meaningful content that the token bounty board filler can be safely ignored.
- A tepid-at-best story (I don't care much, but it's definitely not a strong point)
Opinions, I enjoyed the story behind the boss a lot, if you didn't that is fair, I think skyrim has awful tolkien style lollore and others seem to like it, so again; opinions
What the game does objectively have in spades is ATMOSPHERE though, the world building is so good and the sense of adventure is the best in any action rpg.
- An exploitable but stupid loot drop system (high end gear from Everfall and BBI mostly)
You're talking about everfall chests,starting to wonder if you actually played BBI as there is no such thing in the expansion, the loot system and progression is amazing.
If you feel compelled or forced to farm those chests in everfall that's on you and your OCD, I am glad the chests actually gave some good loot while I'm going through everfall, the combat is so much fun why would you go reset and farm chests? And why the hell should namco 'nerf' the chests so OCD people wouldn't feel compelled to abuse them at he expense of all the regular players
- Atrocious framerate drops vs certain bosses and/or during certain spells (talking about sub-Blighttown slideshows here, no hyperbole)
very true, the framerate gets bad at times (the average framerate is improved a lot in the dark arisen GOTY version because they lowered the draw distance etc, but there were still a few areas like the 3 cyclops fortress battle where the framerate just tanked.)
Running with 3 sorc pawns was a bad idea too as that would be guaranteed to hurt your framerate.
95 percent of the game stayed at or "close enough" 30 fps though (let's be clear I'm talking about console standards here, I don't think 30 fps or sub 30 fps is acceptable, but it's no worse than infamous 2 or uncharted 2 or the ac games on consoles)
- Only one save slot, so you need an alternate PSN account to make a new character (I can't imagine how infuriating that must be on Xbox since I doubt people would get an additional XBL Gold account...)
yes and no
It's an absolutely retarded restriction that shouldn't exist, but in the end it didn't affect me the way I thought it would because you can reroll as you please with no cost and I ended up playing ALL classes to completion on my one save
Sure is a dumb ass restriction though it would've been nice to be able to replay certain missions at will
- Class balance could use some improvements, some classes really are there for Augment grinding only (Warrior y u suck so bad?)
ALL classes can complete BBI 2.0 just fine (I know because I did so), warrior is the weaker one of the bunch but it still works fine
Whining about class balance is a huge disservice to how fun all the classes are to play, and class 'balance' in a singleplayer game can suck my dick tbh, this isn't a blizzard game (thank god it's not a blizzard game, thank fucking god)
- Presence of bikini armours (yes, that's a negative in my book)
The males had bikini armor too and overall this game had lots of classy realistic looking armor sets for females. more than other games, but whatever.
- Lack of challenge outside of BBI. Hard mode is more annoying than really challenging
Everfall wasn't challenging?
Yes the game had 2 big difficulty spikes and a big difficulty drop off for the last 30 percent of the story mode (before post game) and this is a legit downside, but BBI more than makes up for it.
I feel like everyone who complains about this is one of those people who got stomped by bandits and is still mad.
Don't get me wrong, I love the game, put hundreds of hours into it, have 2 characters both at high level with BBI lv3. gear, but there is definitely plenty about the game could be massively, massively improved. I for one couldn't care less for a PC port, but I'd love a sequel that addressed all of those issues. It could go from "pretty damn good" to "serious competition to the Souls games" if they did. ^^
