I've taken my time exploring every area, going through the full campaign (and starting Tier III), and doing just about each piece of content. The gameplay itself is well done. The game is fun to play. Story story, though, is not that amazing. It doesn't try anything new, and uses the same tropes from every single "safe" fantasy story. It is clear that love and care were taken to make a game that plays well, but the time that could have been spent on more story, doing something new and memorable, etc, was instead spent on making sure there was room for a live service component. I've spent my entire life playing D&D, MMO's, reading fantasy novels, etc and a couple of the characters were decent, but most of the game is just simple tropes to get you from point A to point B so you can start the live service part of the game. Honestly, I took my time leveling, doing the story, watching all cutscenes, and trying to experience everything the first playthrough but I'm not sure how much longer I'll play it after finishing the main story. I've started the "repeatable stuff" at the end and it feels hollow. I was in a drought of games to play, with over 10k hours in heavily modded Skyrim in the last 5 yrs, and I don't regret buying it but this isn't going to be that memorable to me in a few months, I have a feeling. Unfortunately, it appears that Activision (I don't call them Blizz anymore) had the story writers spend more time in their formula and making sure there is nothing memorable, funny, or possibly offensive to a single person, rather than writing something truly memorable. The story is just.... meh.
Reviews
2 Reviews
Very pretty... writing hurts my soul
5 September 2022
The visuals are amazing... however, every time I start to get into a little immersion and start to almost enjoy it, the writers do something blatantly terrible.
Honestly, if it wasn't for the visuals, I'd rate it even lower. It's the only thing holding the two episodes my wife and I watched up.
The pacing is terrible, the dialogue is... constantly pointless and the characters are just not interesting. I will give credit, since much of the acting seems on-par however none of it seems to be above par.
I'm not going to list any spoilers but too often, and I accept this is a fantasy world, the story does things which (even for a fantasy setting) are just completely unrealistic. Ex: Seeing something clearly 100 feet underwater in the dark? Much of the combat for the main cast. Etc.
Even the ... positive things.... that critics are raving about... are half-arsed and seem more like checking boxes than good writing and make no sense. I wish they'd have taken this story, not tried to force it into Tolkien's world, and just basically stood on thier own story since it's clear that they didn't have any respect for the source material (what little there was for this period) and the amount of .... "liberties" they took with it, which completely break a lot of established lore. I'm not even what I'd call hugely versed in Middle-Earth lore, and constantly I got ripped out of any immersion by the glaring breaks in it.
The sad part was, my wife was trying to enjoy it, and even she (not having read a single book and only seeing the previous movies once) wasn't having it.
With the amount of money they spent on this and the marketing, I'd wished they'd taken a small piece of that and put on better writers and story. It's just said, it could have been amazing.
Now it just looks amazing and has no soul.
Honestly, if it wasn't for the visuals, I'd rate it even lower. It's the only thing holding the two episodes my wife and I watched up.
The pacing is terrible, the dialogue is... constantly pointless and the characters are just not interesting. I will give credit, since much of the acting seems on-par however none of it seems to be above par.
I'm not going to list any spoilers but too often, and I accept this is a fantasy world, the story does things which (even for a fantasy setting) are just completely unrealistic. Ex: Seeing something clearly 100 feet underwater in the dark? Much of the combat for the main cast. Etc.
Even the ... positive things.... that critics are raving about... are half-arsed and seem more like checking boxes than good writing and make no sense. I wish they'd have taken this story, not tried to force it into Tolkien's world, and just basically stood on thier own story since it's clear that they didn't have any respect for the source material (what little there was for this period) and the amount of .... "liberties" they took with it, which completely break a lot of established lore. I'm not even what I'd call hugely versed in Middle-Earth lore, and constantly I got ripped out of any immersion by the glaring breaks in it.
The sad part was, my wife was trying to enjoy it, and even she (not having read a single book and only seeing the previous movies once) wasn't having it.
With the amount of money they spent on this and the marketing, I'd wished they'd taken a small piece of that and put on better writers and story. It's just said, it could have been amazing.
Now it just looks amazing and has no soul.
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