Recent reviews by sourdough ender

i'm not even halfway through the damn story and i already think most of the people in this review section are either asking for CBU3 to pull another Shadowbringers out of their ass or are just plainly unpleasant.

in terms of my own thoughts on the expack:
i think the story is alright. it's not the best -- i do think they lay on the life lessons a bit thick -- but i still like it. it's fun, it's still got interesting conflict, there's a lot of humour to it that i enjoy. looks great, fun to play, happy that CBU3 is experimenting with autocombos in PVE (though i hope they extend this to the 123s, my keybind real estate is suffering dude please help).
the music choices for Tuliyollal don't really feel like they fit the location that well, but damn if it ain't some smooth-ass jazz. the art direction is absolutely beautiful, although i wonder why the Yok Huy gotta have them bigass eyeballs dude why are they so big. i feel like i can pluck them out like giant grapes.
Wuk Lamat is not the most amazing character. she's kind of a bumbling idiot at the start of the expack. i think that's the point so i'm fine with that. i wish a little less time was spent on her describing what she's learning and more time acting on it, but it fits into the story well enough, and that's good enough for me.
they certainly bumped up the difficulty on trials and the like so far, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. i know that's gonna make a couple people i know real happy and i'm a little bit scared to see the extreme versions haha 💦
will admit, with how people have been dogging on this expack, i went in expecting it to be at least something like what they described, but i was pleasantly surprised to find more interesting nuance than what i was told. so uh. thanks for directly contributing to my enjoyment lol

for the people angry that Wuk Lamat is the main character of the expansion and not the WOL:
you have never been the main character of the story. i know, hard to believe the idea that you as the player character aren't the main protagonist, especially since 2.0 STARTS with Hydaelyn crowning you her special baby, but it's true. the story and its expansions, all its major story beats, have all revolved around the now-former SotSD. the story was built around them and you're, for lack of a better way to put it, the super overlevelled near-silent party member they call on to help them pull through the boss battles. you're a protagonist for sure, but you were never the protagonist.

for the people who are annoyed at Wuk Lamat as a character feeling annoying and childish:
yeah that's. the point of her character arc. i'm not saying she's a masterwork in character design, she's no Emet-Selch, but for the story dawntrail is trying to tell? she works just fine. you don't have to necessarily like it and that's fine, but like, it was plainly obvious barely ten quests into the expack that Wuk Lamat's character arc was about her personal growth and the more i go through it, the more i feel like people just kind of stopped paying attention because she wasn't suffering enough.

for the people who are annoyed that Wuk Lamat et al are kind of saturday morning cartoony about the story morals:
probably the most valid complaints here. the expack is a bit heavyhanded, but i feel like it's fine. it didn't have to be another masterpiece like Shadowbringers, we aren't in the peaks of the Hydaelyn & Zodiark story or anything. it's a new story and it's okay that it's not blowing your kupo nuts clean off. i'm an adult, i don't need all my stories to be super dark and mature and brooding. besides, there is interesting conflict here. you look at the intercommunity conflicts inside all the different turali groups and tell me that's not good enough.

for the people who are annoyed at "Speak with Wuk Lamat x 236529375273":
you're her advisor dude. you were literally HIRED TO SPEAK WITH WUK LAMAT. of course a lot of the expansion is going to be spent talking to her because again, the story revolves around her. you've been advancing the entire story up to this point by Speaking with H'uevar Thyfuque and the only reason it's annoying now to people is because it's the same person more often.

for the people upset at DT's story being a rehash of previous story arcs and other characters/stories:
media literacy is dead. everyone copies from eachother. xenophobia, people doing horrible things for sympathetic goals, and characters being focused on are not unique concepts to one place and time. sorry you had to find out this way. if you need what you experience to be completely different from anything you've seen before, go read a manual for some specialised factory machinery or something.

for the people who find the sound balancing and voice-acting bad:
bad sound design? literally who? do you guys not touch your sound settings at all? everyone sounds fine to me. honestly the "worst" voice-acting i've heard so far were from the Yok Huy, and it's only because i'm fighting a sore throat and listening to people gargle gravel like chunky Listerine was making it worse. i've always had to adjust every game's sound settings, no matter how highly its sound balancing is praised. it's not DT's fault you play your games with /bgm 100 and deafened yourself. you're a grown ass adult, adjust your damn audio to what you need.
also Wuk's VA sounds perfectly fine. i feel like you guys are more upset about the voice actor than the voice acting and don't wanna just say it out loud.

this isn't going to work but i may as well. you know what the deal is with the aimbot hell.

if a valve employee happens to see this: just know that you can't refuse to do the treadmill work just because you don't want to do it, because the game's current state is what happens if you don't put in the effort. you inherently signed up to do the treadmill work by running a master server and your own game servers, you have to take the responsibility to at least try to reduce cheating and botting if you can't remove it outright. if you can't even do that, you shouldn't be running the casual mode in the first place.

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Got this game on recommendation of some of my peers. I will be completely honest, I don't really like this game, both because of my personal tastes of what I'm looking for in a VR swordplay title, and because of certain gameplay elements that don't mesh well together IMHO.

It's a great game in concept. Each class feels different in playstyle and the devs clearly tried really hard to make them all fun to play in their own right. It's a game I respect quite a bit for what it's trying to go for, and I can't in good conscience say the game is bad. In fact, it's quite good.

However, do NOT go into this game thinking it will be like Blade & Sorcery or any other VR swordplay title. Broken Edge is not swordplay so much as it is specifically fencing. One of the biggest draws of VR swordplay for me personally is the defensive aspect of weapons, allowing you to deflect blows as much as deal them.
Broken Edge mostly drops this aspect; rather than your weapon also serving as a shield to protect your health, it now is your health. The name of the game, by design, becomes about maximising the damage to your opponent's blade (by striking as close to the hilt as possible) while minimising the damage to your own. You can still go for the body, but the design is mainly around reducing your opponent's healthbar through their sword.

Now, this is all well and good! It's not what I'm looking for, but it's an idea that really makes Broken Edge shine as a competitive game, in large part because it solves IMO the biggest issue with VR multiplayer swordplay: making netcode for weapon clashing. No real physics simulation means much less netcode has to account for.
However, that's not to say that there isn't one big glaring problem Broken Edge does have -- latency. Your ping can seriously be, and often is, the deciding factor between your blade striking true or completely phasing through your opponent's, allowing them to easily hit you. It's most notable on classes like Samurai, where building Focus (the main resource every class builds through specific actions) requires quick movements.

Speaking of Focus, let's talk about that for a minute. As mentioned before, every class builds it through specific movements (e.g. Samurai strikes poses, Knight keeps their blade tip always pointed towards the opponent, Duelist points at the opponent while waving their sword, etc.), and your Focus being higher than your opponents allows you to dish out more damage and take less. At its core, this mechanic really sells Broken Edge's fundamental swords-as-health design.
However, how certain classes gather and use this Focus has some pretty glaring issues. Certain classes have some fairly demanding Focus gestures, notably ones with complex/specific movements like Persian and the aforementioned Samurai -- oftentimes, the game has trouble reading my movements and doesn't build Focus. Others require a wide range of movement, like Viking, pushing that already-existing restrictiveness on playspace to its limits. Ronin, the newest class added to the game, has a scabbard that you sheathe your katana in to build Focus, but actually swinging the blade can completely consume your Focus before you can even land it, ultimately giving your opponent the advantage.

Because of the difficulties a lot of classes have with the Focus mechanic, it's often difficult (at least for me) to actually engage with the game in the manner that it's designed to be. Swords that should have Focus inexplicably don't register it; swings that should have landed often phase through your target and get you hit instead. Some of these issues have actually been the result of now-patched glitches, such as Knight rapidly dropping Focus detection and Ronin's sword and scabbard becoming varying degrees of incorporeal, but a lot of the remaining issues boil down to design choices.

However, not everyone is stopped by these issues. There are plenty of people online who seem to have much less trouble than I do with these gameplay issues and can maintain Focus just fine. Ultimately, if you have a relatively good connection (or a consistently really bad one), a large playspace and maybe a Quest 2 for higher range of movement, you may enjoy this game as long as you remember that it's fundamentally a fencing game despite only having one fencer class. It just isn't what I'm looking for, and I personally had quite a lot of difficulty with the mechanics.

very intuitive, charming and fun social platform -- easy to get into, barely any modelling or scripting knowledge necessary to create fun worlds and there's already a trove of amazing content to explore. sadly, its life as a social platform has long since ended, having seen a whopping zero players in like a year. it's such a shame to see such an ambitious project die at the feet of the titan VRChat, even after its terrible EAC update.

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