Recent reviews by Stevo the noscoper

TL:DR

- The DLC is very shallow, all mentioned systems in this DLC are paper thin
- There is very little diplomacy, non-existent military involvement, no "domain shaping"
- This is the same as the Tavern DLC, where you can complete this in very little time and the DLC equates to paid cheats
- You do not "Shape your domain", you literally just plonk buildings in districts in one tiny location
- Only buy this if this ends up being on sale at 5-10 bucks

Full Review

Shiro have great ideas for their DLC’s but can't seem to implement them to an acceptable level.

Those who have purchased the Tavern DLC will have already experienced this, but for those who haven't, purchasing this DLC is essentially purchasing cheats for this game.

The Tavern DLC was marketed as this grand adventure where you manage a pub, and you build it up as you play the game. In reality, there are three locations where you can move the pub to, starting at a small location, moving to a medium one at a stage, then a final location, of which the entire DLC equates to a money generator for the rest of your play through. It doesn't take long to get to each stage, and you pretty much beat the DLC in 10-15 rests.

For the Tavern DLC, it did not meet the expectations I had for it, especially at it's price point ($18 AUS).

This DLC is the same. Marketing has it being this big chunk of DLC, you get to shape a domain and reign over a fief. The reality is that you plonk buildings in a single castle-like location. Nothing you do affects anything, bar this little castle based in Mount Altis.

The buildings you plonk determine resources your fief produces, which then determines the number of citizens in your castle. Like the Tavern DLC, this castle has stages which unlock when you meet certain goals. NPC's will ask you for things in your throne room, asking you to make decisions that will equate to the same consequences as the Tavern DLC - stat changes.

You interact with other Kingdoms by sending your party on missions, which grant you resources - mostly money and relation. The money in this DLC is, like the Tavern DLC, not in-game money. It's another weird currency.

This currency is used to upgrade your buildings, which you can then access various useful resources like food, repair materials and clone animals/weapons and armour.

This is where the positives end for this DLC.
Here are the negatives I found to be particularly annoying:

1. None of the stats with your fief matter, unless you want to grow it. Nobody attacks the fief (despite there being bandits around the countryside and the bandit checkpoint being nearby), the diplomacy leads to nothing (as I've yet to get any consequences from it), and you can't improve Mount Altis the place to make it an actual location. Why put this random castle in Mount Altis, have me grow this "power" around the place, but I can't get some men to clear the bandit checkpoint, or build a village around the pub down the road, or make the legends arena have an actual road go to it, or have Altis have literally anything that any of the other regions have? This seems like a complete oversight for the one region of the map that makes the least sense to exist in the game, and Shiro dropped the ball. There was so much you could do here.
Ignoring the area, you could have bandits gain forces to force you out of the fief, as revenge for forcing their friends out of it in the first place, or piss off another region and have them attack you, but there is none of that here.

2. The "length" of this DLC is built exactly like the Tavern DLC. Build a pile of arbitrary stats/currency, send some companions to do stuff that you can’t see, hit targets with said stats, rinse and repeat until there are no more targets to hit. As mentioned above, there are no attacks on said Fief, diplomacy is just a set of numbers which effect other numbers and the whole DLC is just boring.

3. There are some seemingly “cool” features in this DLC that have been requested for some time but are not what they seem. You can remove negative traits for example, but they don’t include things like addicted, psychopath, the negative bleed effect, alcoholic, grumpy, etc. I’m not sure what the game considers a negative trait, but all the above I would categorize as such. There are also an animal and armour cloning feature, but you can’t clone your ponies for some reason and only specific armours. Maybe I was missing something here, but the DLC makes no attempt to explain this to you, so I gave up on these very quickly.

4. The missions I mentioned earlier are all three rests. No difference between mission “types”. No difference depending on how many companions you have. All missions make you wait the same amount of time to complete. This need to be looked at before allowing players to purchase this, as this does not make sense. Why would escorting a caravan over in Alazar take the same amount of time as attacking the border in Harag? Who played this in the private beta? A bunch of yes men?

5. Many reviews have posted this, but why can’t you stay in your own fief? Any time you rest, it’s outside the fief. What’s the point of upgrading the fief if you can’t stay there?

There’s a funny glitch where you can rest inside the fief (the outside stuff is still the same), but when you attempt to exit the rest/camp screen, you get stuck in a fief overview screen but can’t select anything in the fief. Nice work devs.

6. You can build a travel post in this fief, right now it’s glitching with the pirates dlc, but you can build one. However, like my point on meaningful changes in this DLC, no roads go anywhere in this region, so how are we trading with anyone? How does anyone know we are here?

7. The fief has an alignment mechanic, where your decisions with managing the fief determine the main citizen type in the fief. I didn’t notice what this did. Like my other points, stat points exist to exist.

8. This DLC, like the Tavern DLC, is just cheats. If Shiro wants to release cheats for this game, just do so and charge us for the privilege. These two DLC’s ruin the game, as they make everything readily available, where it seems you are supposed to grind it.

Edit:

If you build the Market Square, the stalls never restock. No point in building it.


The End
This DLC could’ve been like the Skelmar or Pirates DLC, that add something to the game, however, it’s a huge disappointment.
So many things could’ve been done here, but ultimately nothing for value was added to the game.
Vanilla Wartales is rough around the edges, but still a good game. Pirates and Skelmar mirror that roughness but feel good to play (Skelmar moreso than Pirates), whereas all further DLC’s just seem like a cash grab.
If you are to release another DLC Shiro, please make it fleshed out. Make it have actual consequences on the world. That’s what this game is missing – meaningful choices that affect the world around you.
If you have read this far into my review (and didn’t just read the TL:DR), do not buy this DLC unless it’s on sale, and only if it’s started on a new playthrough.

So, if you're reading this, you're already aware that this game was a letdown. Was a letdown, and it has now been abandoned by the "developer".

Let me first get this out of the way, Aspyr is a terrible "developer". First there was the lack of KOTOR 2 restored content mod just on the Switch (which they promised would be there on release), then there was the piss-poor state of the KOTOR 1 remake (which they lost the privilege to make, thank god), then there was this.

Aspyr are barely a developer - their most well known games are all "remasters" and "re-releases". They couldn't release an original game if they tried.

Okay, with that out of the way, why would I not recommend this game?

1. If you are buying this to play BF1, don't bother. This game in this "collection" is still broken in singleplayer. Certain sections of maps act as if you are trying to climb a hill on flat terrain, certain maps have un-passable areas and vehicles run like crap. Multiplayer is non-existent. Play the GOG supported original if you want to play with friends.

Once again, if you are buying this for BF1, don't bother.

2. If you are buying this for BF2 singleplayer, then this part of the "collection" is solid. The campaign is the campaign (not a huge fan of it, but to each their own), Galactic Conquest AI is better than the original, AI can now play as heroes and the game has all the Xbox exclusive content (BF1 maps, Kit Fisto and Ventress).

What is there not to love with all of the above?

Well, the reason why all the Xbox content is in the game, is because they literally ported the Xbox version of the game for all platforms. "How is this a problem?" you may ask? The UI is completely different. "So how is this a problem?" you may ask again?

The problem here is Instant Action. Instant Action is an absolute pain to setup. Firstly, you need to click add to add a single map, then click again to add another map, one by one. Added the wrong map? Instead of clicking on Add, you now need to click on remove for each map you want to remove. How this made it to the PC port, I will never know.

Secondly, YOU CAN'T SET YOUR MAP QUEUE TO RANDOM!!!

Who thought this was a good idea? Why didn't you just re-release the PC port for PC players? That has random map queues!

But wait, it gets worse... Ventress' addition to the game is not the original from the 2005 game... It's stolen from a modder who made a mod to add Ventress to the PC version of the game!!!

And if things can't get any worse, even though they did nothing with this game, even though they did a half-arse release of the game, somehow, this game takes 60gb of space to install. I don't know how they managed to make a game from 2005 this big without doing anything. It's astounding how they managed this achievement.

Here is where I planned on entering point 3 for BF2 multiplayer, but Aspyr killed multiplayer before it even began. There are games with 3 or 4 players here and there, but unless you have friends who also want to buy this game, don't bother. As an Australian player, I can never find a game with good ping. Half the games are in the EU, and the others are in the states. Peer to peer games are still rough, with the handful of servers that have been available since launch being the only way to get a good experience.

The End
Aspyr are a joke of a developer, re-releasing Star Wars classics without putting any effort in, whilst also stealing content from other creators. Hopefully, with their parent company having broken off from Embracer (and having kept the rights to KOTOR 1), they don't go anywhere near the KOTOR remake, if it ever sees the light of day.

Do not buy this game, and, if you can, do not support Aspyr.

This game takes the rich story, great turn-based combat and awesome character progression from the previous game and has built/improved it by tenfold.

Adding in extra races, characters with origin stories that actually effect the story of the game, having a storyline that makes more sense then the last game and adding in romance options has really created an atmosphere that exeeds the previous game.

Adding in more spells (a new school has been added; Polymorph) and adding physical armour and magic armour instead of just health has really expanded on the combat.

The only con to this game is the quests and the way that they are explained/the player is directed. This was a problem in the previous game, where if you don't do the quest exactly as the game wants it, you won't complete it. As well as this, the game once again doesn't explain quests adequetly. Quests will have very vague references that leave the player running around entire maps not understanding what the next step is. This was a very big problem for me in the Driftwood area, where there were a lot of quests, but I was given literally nothing to give me a clue as where to go.

I'd still give the game a 9/10 regardless, because I liked this game very much, and still continue to play it. There's a lot more content here than the previous game.

If you were wondering were some of the duels from the original series went, they're in this dlc.

If you want to make a classics deck, you kind need this dlc. It has a lot of cards frequently used throughout the original series. Also, if you want to make a decent removed from play (banish) deck, you need this dlc. Cards like Dimensional Fisure, Banisher of the Light and Banisher of the Radience, are needed in a deck that focuses on crippling your enemy's deck.

The ritual deck is decent, you'll probably need to add serveral more cards to make it work more effectively.

Overall, good dlc.

I bought this game with the idea that the game would be long finished by now. The devs even said a while back that the game would be finished by mid 2016. After having this game for a few years, the game still has a lot of bugs. Some of these bugs have been a part of the game since release. Some of them even game breaking for me.

The game also lacks diversity. All the buildings are the same (it gets to the point where you know which buildings have loot and which don't), the items are the same, players (if you can find any) look the same.

As well as this, there are no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ control maps. When I first started playing the game I had to Google how to do pretty much anything.

The game had so much promise, but like No Man's Sky, the game just hasn't worked out. Maybe someday development of this game will finish and I will change my stance, but until then, it's not a game I can recommend.