This means it is appropriately priced for a game that has returned to an Alpha state.
If you hate the game so much, why do you still play?
Because I do not hate the game, I hate what they have done to it with Age of War and Age of Heroes. When they live streamed the new purge, they live streamed the local sync issue, promising a fix, and it has just gotten worse.
They gave us the old stamina system back, but saddled us with this crap combat system and animation we are locked into. They added fatalities that keep getting me killed or prevent my stamina from regenning. They took a working inventory system and broke it. Thrall AI keeps getting worse.
Since Age of Sorcery, these are the positive additions to the game in my mind:
Attribute points - No longer do our build end with unspent points
Action based emotes - the dive is always fun, why are there not more?
Thrall behavior seen and set in the thrall inventory screen
While I agree with the mjority of your points, I thought Iād just add a couple of additional opinions.
a small improvement at best (it hardly took a great deal of effort to open the old radial menu version) and it came at the cost of no longer being able to order followers to āhaltā at a particular location. So while it is (slightly) easier to see the settings, we lost an important control instead.
Another small improvement that came with a counter-balancing detriment. In this case we lost our working inventory system in return for slightly faster ability to put things into chests, provided we have already carefully established what items are in a chest, and provided that we want to put all such items away at once. I still mostly manually sort items to put away (because, for example, I frequently want to put some gathered items in a chest for later, while retaining some of them in my inventory for short term use, or to place into a nearby workstation), so have gained little from the quick stack system, but deeply miss the lost ācustom inventory sortingā or ability to reliably choose which items to drop at any given momentā¦
I like having the old stamina back, and am maybe less bothered by the combat system (though that latter may be because I am not stuck with āofficialā settings - for instance, I have fatalities turned off, which makes a big difference, and suggests that on present evidence it was a totally worthless addition).
So Iād say that I feel the positive additions to the game are even fewer than you feel. At present, especially with Funcom having abandoned any pretense at even acknowledging bug reports, I cannot recommend the game even at its reduced price. Perhaps more relevant, I would strongly urge anyone asking my opinion to avoid any and all Funcom products unless they want this same treatment in their turn.
I have long been a supporter of this game, and like you I do not hate the game, I hate what has been done to it, through poor decisions and apathetic negligence. Unless there is actual meaningful improvement made, with a return to acknowledging bug reports and responding to helpdesk enquiries, continuing bug fixes, and an attempt to put right some of the most egregious decsions of the past several updates, then Funcom is a company I will not return to and will not ever give future money - be it for Dune or some future CE2 or whatever else.
Used to be able to go a LOT further (canāt even cross noob river from an island to the bank without them overrriding the instruction). But thatās still better than nothing. Questionable whether itās a long enough ātetherā to allow fighting the Artena Champion while the follower waits in the side chamber - but I donāt have time to test that right now. Good to have the info, thanks.
Weird note - I get a different set of options (singleplayer, unmodded) -
Just checked the price history on Steam and the last couple months has seen some of the lowest prices on this game on record. Is this a last ditch effort to capture sales from the Bazaar from people who have yet to pick up this game?..before they close service?
We must be closing in on 1yr roughly for the announcement and beta testing of AoH ch1. That chapter was so reported on as having bugs before it launched ( i myself was among the testers) that when it went live completely broken i lost whatever good will i had left with them. They spent time working on a the 1st chapter of a new age only to leave half the content on the cuttingroom floor unfinished (dregs reboot from the datamined devkit) and what was launched didnāt work at all- companion quests and living settlements.
So the entire chapter was essentially stripped of content. Then comes the announcement that in between content will be major bug fixes, pushing the already long stretch between playable content even further apart to onceā¦ONCE per year! I cannot see how this company comes back from this, and i actually want them too because i love or loved this game.
