I think the core of the combat gameplay could have been fine. There's satisfying rewards for higher risk stuff like parrying and a decent RPS thing going on with the stances. But much like other aspects of the game, it's like they had a solid central idea then did everything they could to make it annoying. People call it 'arkham combat' but the arkham games have a tight sense of rhythm to enemy attacks and make your own attacks very sticky so it's hard to miss, within a combat framework that's all about style and combo retention.
With this game, the enemies attack totally chaotically, your own attacks don't 'stick' much at all (unless you turn on a lot of auto target stuff in the options which aren't the default), yet enemy attacks track like crazy. Like Witcher 3, there's 2 evasion options in the game for no reason except to stop dark souls fans from bitching about not having a roll. That forces them to balance fights around your crazy movement options, so enemies develop psychic skills to cover your roll with a long tracking attack or punish you for striking their comrade, unless you kite the shit out of them. I've seen them start a multi-attack string then track 180 degrees to perfectly punish my roll which I used to evade their first move. So why even put a roll in the game? I'd honestly turn it off and rely entirely on the dodge if I could, but they're the same button and there's loads of skills gated behind the roll skill. It wouldn't be quite so bad if half their shit wasn't unblockable and unseeably fast.
Stealth, I don't really give a shit about and I'm trying to stealth as little as possible.
the usual corporate trappings of not understanding fun
Perfect example of this was in my last session where some mongols were storming an area with some friendly peasants around. The mechanic where one mongol will decide, from 100m away, to lock onto an unarmed friendly he can't even see and rush blindly towards them to take them out, at which point he turns into an obtrusive skull and crossbones symbol and it's all just a thinly disguised failure timer, is pure cancer. It made zero in-world sense either. None of the peasants were particularly significant in story terms and there's no reason a mongol soldier should be ignoring me to get to them. It's a bullshit way of forcing the player to do annoying pointless stuff, when they could just have me fight the fucking mongols, rather than create dynamic hostage rescue mechanics just because they can.
I think the core of the combat gameplay could have been fine. There's satisfying rewards for higher risk stuff like parrying and a decent RPS thing going on with the stances. But much like other aspects of the game, it's like they had a solid central idea then did everything they could to make it annoying. People call it 'arkham combat' but the arkham games have a tight sense of rhythm to enemy attacks and make your own attacks very sticky so it's hard to miss, within a combat framework that's all about style and combo retention.
With this game, the enemies attack totally chaotically, your own attacks don't 'stick' much at all (unless you turn on a lot of auto target stuff in the options which aren't the default), yet enemy attacks track like crazy. Like Witcher 3, there's 2 evasion options in the game for no reason except to stop dark souls fans from bitching about not having a roll. That forces them to balance fights around your crazy movement options, so enemies develop psychic skills to cover your roll with a long tracking attack or punish you for striking their comrade, unless you kite the shit out of them. I've seen them start a multi-attack string then track 180 degrees to perfectly punish my roll which I used to evade their first move. So why even put a roll in the game? I'd honestly turn it off and rely entirely on the dodge if I could, but they're the same button and there's loads of skills gated behind the roll skill. It wouldn't be quite so bad if half their shit wasn't unblockable and unseeably fast.
Stealth, I don't really give a shit about and I'm trying to stealth as little as possible.
the usual corporate trappings of not understanding fun
Perfect example of this was in my last session where some mongols were storming an area with some friendly peasants around. The mechanic where one mongol will decide, from 100m away, to lock onto an unarmed friendly he can't even see and rush blindly towards them to take them out, at which point he turns into an obtrusive skull and crossbones symbol and it's all just a thinly disguised failure timer, is pure cancer. It made zero in-world sense either. None of the peasants were particularly significant in story terms and there's no reason a mongol soldier should be ignoring me to get to them. It's just a bullshit way of forcing the player to do annoying stuff, when they could just have me fight the fucking mongols, rather than create dynamic hostage rescue mechanics just because they can.