{"id":5014,"date":"2018-06-06T10:59:40","date_gmt":"2018-06-06T10:59:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.offkorn.com\/blog\/?p=5014"},"modified":"2020-09-07T00:13:43","modified_gmt":"2020-09-07T00:13:43","slug":"elex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.offkorn.com\/blog\/elex\/","title":{"rendered":"ELEX"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#8217;ve ever played a <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Gothic_(series)\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Gothic<\/a> or <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Risen_(series)\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Risen<\/a> game before, then the content of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gog.com\/game\/elex\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">ELEX<\/a> won&#8217;t be much of a surprise: Clunky melee combat which deals notably more damage than ranged or magic attacks, no character respec option, large open world with pre-leveled enemies, uneven voice acting, and a choice between several joinable factions.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m almost level 17 at the moment, having explored a chunk of Edan, some of Abessa and the Volcano area, and a small part of the Desert&#8230; and I do not think I&#8217;ll get much further. The main problem is the combat, which is the second worst out of the developer&#8217;s catalog (<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Risen_2:_Dark_Waters\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Risen 2<\/a>&#8216;s being the worst). You see, in addition to the clunky combo system they&#8217;ve added the requirement that attacking, dodging, and blocking all use Stamina&#8230; meaning you&#8217;ll often find yourself utterly helpless to avoid enemy attacks which, and here&#8217;s the real killer; do <em>not<\/em> require Stamina. Creatures don&#8217;t lose Stamina from attacking period, and NPCs can attack\/parry even at 0 Stamina (though, admittedly, they usually won&#8217;t).<\/p>\n<p>Ranged attacking does not require Stamina, but the trade off is that those attacks are only as strong as an equivalent melee weapon&#8217;s fast attack. There is no equivalent to melee&#8217;s strong\/heavy attacks, which is a major problem since that&#8217;s where most of your damage is coming from. So ranged, at least in the early\/mid-game, is worthless unless you want to spend like 5 minutes slowly whittling something&#8217;s health down.<\/p>\n<p>Even were the combat less unfun though, there&#8217;s another issue: The conversations and quests. You literally have to exhaust all dialog options in order to receive and\/or advance quests, and the dialog choices range wildly in tone. Aggressive lines that sound like you&#8217;re trying to pick a fight are all mixed together with understanding\/passive and uncaring\/cold responses making the protagonist come off as schizophrenic at best. In a way the dialog is nearly as painful as the combat.<\/p>\n<p>So I can&#8217;t really recommend playing this game.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking of which: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gog.com\/game\/the_age_of_decadence\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">The Age of Decadence<\/a>. I heard a lot of good things about it and finally got around to playing a bit earlier. Didn&#8217;t get very far though because while the combat is fine the way text-adventure-like events kept popping-up almost like <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Quick_time_event\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">QTE<\/a>&#8216;s quickly became infuriating.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#8217;ve ever played a Gothic or Risen game before, then the content of ELEX won&#8217;t be much of a surprise: Clunky melee combat which deals notably more damage than ranged or magic attacks, no character respec option, large open world with pre-leveled enemies, uneven voice acting, and a choice between several joinable factions. I&#8217;m almost level 17 at the moment, having explored a chunk of Edan, some of Abessa and the Volcano area, and a small part of the Desert&#8230; and I do not think I&#8217;ll get much further. The main problem is the combat, which is the second worst out of the developer&#8217;s catalog (Risen 2&#8216;s being the worst). You see, in addition to the clunky combo system they&#8217;ve added the requirement that attacking, dodging, and blocking all use Stamina&#8230; meaning you&#8217;ll often find yourself utterly helpless to avoid enemy attacks which, and here&#8217;s the real killer; do not require Stamina. Creatures don&#8217;t lose Stamina from attacking period, and NPCs can attack\/parry even at 0 Stamina (though, admittedly, they usually won&#8217;t). Ranged attacking does not require Stamina, but the trade off is that those attacks are only as strong as an equivalent melee weapon&#8217;s fast attack. There is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,7],"tags":[477,121,62,473],"class_list":["post-5014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pc","category-video-game-related","tag-exploration","tag-rpg","tag-science-fiction","tag-third-person-perspective"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.offkorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.offkorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.offkorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.offkorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.offkorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5014"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.offkorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5014\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.offkorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.offkorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.offkorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}