So I hit my open-world wall in this one, and I'm only doing story missions / stuff that grabs my interest. This keeps happening - the combat and skill trees in the last 3 games doesn't feel like it matters beyond 2 or 3 things to get. Combat just hasn't changed for me in the last 25 or so hours of the game. It's either stealth for a little, then jump out and murder everyone, or .... just jump out and murder everyone.
So I hit my open-world wall in this one, and I'm only doing story missions / stuff that grabs my interest. This keeps happening - the combat and skill trees in the last 3 games doesn't feel like it matters beyond 2 or 3 things to get. Combat just hasn't changed for me in the last 25 or so hours of the game. It's either stealth for a little, then jump out and murder everyone, or .... just jump out and murder everyone.
Yeah, I gave up after 40 h for the same reasons. I can't really understand why the game got such stellar reviews. It's generic and repetetive as hell.
So I hit my open-world wall in this one, and I'm only doing story missions / stuff that grabs my interest. This keeps happening - the combat and skill trees in the last 3 games doesn't feel like it matters beyond 2 or 3 things to get. Combat just hasn't changed for me in the last 25 or so hours of the game. It's either stealth for a little, then jump out and murder everyone, or .... just jump out and murder everyone.
Yeah, I gave up after 40 h for the same reasons. I can't really understand why the game got such stellar reviews. It's generic and repetetive as hell.
The first 20 hours were really good, in my opinion.
So I hit my open-world wall in this one, and I'm only doing story missions / stuff that grabs my interest. This keeps happening - the combat and skill trees in the last 3 games doesn't feel like it matters beyond 2 or 3 things to get. Combat just hasn't changed for me in the last 25 or so hours of the game. It's either stealth for a little, then jump out and murder everyone, or .... just jump out and murder everyone.
Yeah, I gave up after 40 h for the same reasons. I can't really understand why the game got such stellar reviews. It's generic and repetetive as hell.
The first 20 hours were really good, in my opinion.
True. I guess the game just overstayed its welcome. The trend of "massiveness = good" has become more and more persistent over the last decade.
So I hit my open-world wall in this one, and I'm only doing story missions / stuff that grabs my interest. This keeps happening - the combat and skill trees in the last 3 games doesn't feel like it matters beyond 2 or 3 things to get. Combat just hasn't changed for me in the last 25 or so hours of the game. It's either stealth for a little, then jump out and murder everyone, or .... just jump out and murder everyone.
Yeah, I gave up after 40 h for the same reasons. I can't really understand why the game got such stellar reviews. It's generic and repetetive as hell.
The first 20 hours were really good, in my opinion.
True. I guess the game just overstayed its welcome. The trend of "massiveness = good" has become more and more persistent over the last decade.
I feel like the recent trend has been massive games that don't have a solid act structure that switch up gameplay and story. I'm good with massive games if they evolve throughout the experience, but 100 hours of exactly the same story beats and combat situations put on repeat gets old.
And Ubisoft has always had the issue of too much gameplay being expressed through repetitive systems, so the switch to open world feels especially pronounced since it has meant that they've largely gotten rid of the well-designed assassination missions which were the high point of the series in favor of having the plot take place through the open world systems.
It also got really tiring having so many of the alliances wind up being resolved by raising a huge army and raiding a castle. Like... I can take that castle by myself, why do I gotta go through the busywork of raising a fyrd or wooing the lords or whatever?
Hell, one of the castles you assault has you go in ahead of time to sabotage shit, and like, I just bounced through that thing like a hot knife through butter. Why did we need the army to come through afterwards, anyway?
edit: I mean, since we're talking about "massive" Ubisoft games. It follows a similar pattern, but it's more palatable even if it is huge and derivative. The puzzles are actually really well-constructed, the humor tends to grow on you, and it's fairly decent action-wise.
Fenix Rising is going to sell way less than it would if it still was called Gods and Monsters and didn’t release so close to a mainline assassins creed game, and that is kind of sad because of all the big ubi games to come out at the end of the year its probably the best.
So I hit my open-world wall in this one, and I'm only doing story missions / stuff that grabs my interest. This keeps happening - the combat and skill trees in the last 3 games doesn't feel like it matters beyond 2 or 3 things to get. Combat just hasn't changed for me in the last 25 or so hours of the game. It's either stealth for a little, then jump out and murder everyone, or .... just jump out and murder everyone.
Yeah, I gave up after 40 h for the same reasons. I can't really understand why the game got such stellar reviews. It's generic and repetetive as hell.
The first 20 hours were really good, in my opinion.
True. I guess the game just overstayed its welcome. The trend of "massiveness = good" has become more and more persistent over the last decade.
I feel like at the beginning of this gen, games were a regular 15-20 hours and it was good. And then all of a sudden devs decided everything had to be 60 hours long minimum and it's fucking obnoxious. We need to go back to 20 hour games again.
So I hit my open-world wall in this one, and I'm only doing story missions / stuff that grabs my interest. This keeps happening - the combat and skill trees in the last 3 games doesn't feel like it matters beyond 2 or 3 things to get. Combat just hasn't changed for me in the last 25 or so hours of the game. It's either stealth for a little, then jump out and murder everyone, or .... just jump out and murder everyone.
Yeah, I gave up after 40 h for the same reasons. I can't really understand why the game got such stellar reviews. It's generic and repetetive as hell.
The first 20 hours were really good, in my opinion.
True. I guess the game just overstayed its welcome. The trend of "massiveness = good" has become more and more persistent over the last decade.
I feel like at the beginning of this gen, games were a regular 15-20 hours and it was good. And then all of a sudden devs decided everything had to be 60 hours long minimum and it's fucking obnoxious. We need to go back to 20 hour games again.
I don’t know if every game needs to be 15 hours either, but I definitely feel there is a lot of bloat.
I feel like the older assassins creed and fallout games were about 30 hours and felt pretty good. Outer Worlds felt fine at 25 or so hours.
For a narrative focused game that is designed to be played through once I feel like that is a good range. I had 60 hours in witcher 3 and never finished it, I feel like I can confidently say if a game is much more than 50 hours on a playthrough I’m not going to finish no matter how much I like it.
If there’s going to be a lot of content more than that I feel like games should be more willing to take the Skyrim/elder scrolls approach and put more content in discrete questlines that are self-contained and not necessary to complete the main game, so the experience can be spread across multiple playthroughs. Give the player a lot of options to explore, but also build in a “Get on With It” story path to wrap things up if the player is getting bored, and don’t punish the player by locking this path off behind things like “complete all quests in every zone” or “be this ridiculously high level that you can only get to by completing all content in the game”.
There has been some discussion in game design about not locking out content in a playthrough and making sure players see everything, so work doesn’t go wasted if a player only plays through once, and as important as that is, I also feel like I will feel a lot better about a game if I get to the end and have content left over to do post-game or in alternate playthroughs than if I quit after 50 hours because I am bored and want to move on.
Jealous Deva on
0
Dr_KeenbeanDumb as a buttPlanet Express ShipRegistered Userregular
I've sunk about 80 hours into Valhalla. Ubisoft Connect pegs me at 92% total completion. I've accomplished all I wanted to and then some.
I was going to skip this one but I'm just a sucker for this time period in England and doubly a sucker for Vikings. I enjoyed my time but 'overstayed its welcome' is a perfect descriptor. I love me some Ass Creed (haven't skipped a single mainline installment) but I don't think I can do this again. That's not to say that Valhalla is bad at all. It's outstanding; easily the best of the nu-AC games.
I've definitely reached a point in my life where I'd much rather sit down with a 10-20 hour game than a 60-100 hour game, I just wish I wasn't such a sucker for the latter (sidelong glance at the remaining 5 Yakuza games in my backlog).
I don't even think it's a game length issue. Odyssey was great and stayed great and I could probably still duck in for more. As the story wrapped up, it drew me in even more. The stakes felt personal and meaningful.
Valhalla just turned more and more into "Viking Simulator" as I cared less and less about Eivor and the people around them. Hell, most of the people you were supposed to give a shit about I either forgot because they only came back for very specific story beats, or I had long ago started _disliking_ because they were acting like an idiot and/or piece of shit to everyone around them.
Plus, at one point Eivor even picks up a piece of Plot (when off in Vinland) and then sets it back down going "nah, I'm not curious about this in the slightest, even though it's what my second-greatest enemy (by birthright, you see) was desperately trying to uncover. If Eivor doesn't give a shit, why the fuck should I?
+4
Dr_KeenbeanDumb as a buttPlanet Express ShipRegistered Userregular
Ubi is currently running their Winter Sale and even the new releases like Valhalla are discounted.
Further, they have a thing where if you put anything else in your cart it drops the overall cart price by an additional 21%. So I just grabbed Fenix Rising Gold (on sale for $80) and Splinter Cell Chaos Theory (on sale for $2.50) for a grand total of $65.17.
Fenix Rising is going to sell way less than it would if it still was called Gods and Monsters and didn’t release so close to a mainline assassins creed game, and that is kind of sad because of all the big ubi games to come out at the end of the year its probably the best.
I bought Valhalla on release because I had a week off and wasn't going anywhere for Thanksgiving, so I wanted something to lose myself in. Other than that, I don't buy Ubi games on release because they always go on sale within weeks and are half price or less within a couple months.
OK so, I just found out that they fixed the bug that I've had a bug up my ass about since the game initially released - the ghost opal map marker thingie with Synin and whatnot.
So I'm probably going to start over. I may mess around with this tomorrow. I'm really excited to finally get into the game. I know there are some other bugs but whatever.
That said, I'm deeeeeeeep into Immortals: Fenyx Rising. I have reversed my opinion of the tone of the game - not sure if I talked about that here, or in the Zelda thread, but I agree with @Jealous Deva - it's actually the best of the Ubi bunch of massive open world games that came out recently. I haven't loaded up Watch Dogs 3 yet so my comment is barring that. It's just so bright and fun and smart and slick. It may be derivative, but it seems bug free and it really does have some very intelligent Breath of the Wild-type puzzles. I'm definitely going to 100% it and it's currently my #1 go to game, even over Cyberpunk 2077 even though I'm honestly not having that many technical issues with it (on PC).
edit: I'm going to start over because I only played about 2-3 hours on release day, so I didn't get that far and I would have absolutely no idea what is even going on at this point.
Question about a nearly end game (or post end game)bug, so potentially big spoiler
After visiting Eivors grave as Basim, I went back to the animus to finish up the final area. Got through the Kingdoms End quest and then nothing. No new marker.
Not home to test but looks like exiting and re-entering the animus may fix it.
Anybody else had this? Will that fix it or is there another step?
Question about a nearly end game (or post end game)bug, so potentially big spoiler
After visiting Eivors grave as Basim, I went back to the animus to finish up the final area. Got through the Kingdoms End quest and then nothing. No new marker.
Not home to test but looks like exiting and re-entering the animus may fix it.
Anybody else had this? Will that fix it or is there another step?
Is that the one where you go rescue some prisoners and the guy says meet me at this camp but it doesn't spawn the camp or give you a waypoint? If so then try loading an earlier autosave and talk to him again and it should work (or at least did for me)
Question about a nearly end game (or post end game)bug, so potentially big spoiler
After visiting Eivors grave as Basim, I went back to the animus to finish up the final area. Got through the Kingdoms End quest and then nothing. No new marker.
Not home to test but looks like exiting and re-entering the animus may fix it.
Anybody else had this? Will that fix it or is there another step?
Is that the one where you go rescue some prisoners and the guy says meet me at this camp but it doesn't spawn the camp or give you a waypoint? If so then try loading an earlier autosave and talk to him again and it should work (or at least did for me)
Yeah I had that exact same thing happen and I thought the game bugged. I saved and exited the game on my PS5 then when I went back in they magically appeared.
Yeah I had that exact same thing happen and I thought the game bugged. I saved and exited the game on my PS5 then when I went back in they magically appeared.
I mean, I think you were right. Without clicking the spoiler, it sounds like a bug to me even if you were able to quickly resolve it. :P
Switch: SW-7690-2320-9238Steam/PSN/Xbox: Drezdar
0
DemonStaceyTTODewback's DaughterIn love with the TaySwayRegistered Userregular
I have a funny bug where anytime I load the game I load back it SUPER drunk.
It's... interesting...
Also impressed with just how many bugs i ran into while trying to do the holiday events. For such a small scale thing with simple quests and only available for a limited time it was a bit frustrating.
0
FreiA French Prometheus UnboundDeadwoodRegistered Userregular
edited December 2020
probably been said, but I feel like they hit the spot for me when it comes to the battle system. it recreates the great feeling of visceral and impactful kills on most units for most attacks (which didn't happen in the last two where you just got a an animation on the last unit in the fight, sometimes, and it often glitched out or didn't play and the other kills were just weird ragdolls that would either fly 20 feet away or crumple in place) with overall great animation, without just the constant counter kill system. Best combat system since the Paris one, which had a pretty great combat system that just took too long to shine because you unlock things so slowly or later in the plot. i think it was the only AC where combat was pretty deadly, if you messed up too much or had too many enemies on you, it was pretty hard to deal with all the bullets and attacks while managing all the counters and LOs blocking/human shielding you needed to do, and when you actually get hit, it hurts.
I was about to ask about the drunk start! Thought I blanked on a story reason it happens, at least it's not just me. Today a whole fortress of guys were walking into walls, nothing else major so far
Question about a nearly end game (or post end game)bug, so potentially big spoiler
After visiting Eivors grave as Basim, I went back to the animus to finish up the final area. Got through the Kingdoms End quest and then nothing. No new marker.
Not home to test but looks like exiting and re-entering the animus may fix it.
Anybody else had this? Will that fix it or is there another step?
Is that the one where you go rescue some prisoners and the guy says meet me at this camp but it doesn't spawn the camp or give you a waypoint? If so then try loading an earlier autosave and talk to him again and it should work (or at least did for me)
Yep, thank you will try that
This sorted it, thank you!
And since the yule stuff, I load in to a drunk Eivor every time too haha
completed all the order targets and the main story. Did not get my settlement upgraded to 6 or finish the Asgard quests. That will be later. After 90 hours I need something new.
Hoping the next game gives us more Basim story, because unless I missed something I don't know his motivation for his late game actions.
completed all the order targets and the main story. Did not get my settlement upgraded to 6 or finish the Asgard quests. That will be later. After 90 hours I need something new.
Hoping the next game gives us more Basim story, because unless I missed something I don't know his motivation for his late game actions.
There is more Basim story if you:
Do the Asgard quests and/or all of the animus anomolies
completed all the order targets and the main story. Did not get my settlement upgraded to 6 or finish the Asgard quests. That will be later. After 90 hours I need something new.
Hoping the next game gives us more Basim story, because unless I missed something I don't know his motivation for his late game actions.
There is more Basim story if you:
Do the Asgard quests and/or all of the animus anomolies
MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited December 2020
Hey guys, I'm looking for an old music/montage video that was made for ac1 and ac2.
It featured some really complex editing, a great tune, and it showed the progression of altair and ezio up to desmond, ending with desmond fighting. While desmond is fighting it blended animation clips of Altair and Ezio into him to hammer home the Animus connection.
I cannot find this clip anywhere and I'm kinda desperate to show a friend of mine. Anyone know what this was called?
edit: NEVERMIND i found it, it was called beautiful lies if anyone is interested.
Through the endgame and cleaning up stuff, can anyone give me a very vague idea of when the search for the last member of the order kicks off? Avoiding anything that might spoil it or I’d search myself...
0
SnicketysnickThe Greatest Hype Man inWesterosRegistered Userregular
edited December 2020
The final Order member is directly tied to story progression, you can't really miss them. It's also in an epilogue section so you can't really skip to them either.
Late to this, but you also need to make sure you've got the _entire rest_ of the order, including the wandering shitheads. I'd grab a guide for that, though, because I explored the heck out of this game while playing for the first half and I never even ran into a third of the ones I should have.
This game is too fucking long and a good example of games being needlessly large.
Like, do you need to have community hub building, fishing, hunting, drinking games, matchy rock puzzles, boring platforming glitch puzzles, raids, horse upgrading, weapon upgrading, Flyting (I like the flyting), target-shooting, Asgardian side stories, etc etc as components of one title about Assassins?
I like this game but there is way too much of it. Go home Assassin's Creed.
+2
DeadfallI don't think you realize just how rich he is.In fact, I should put on a monocle.Registered Userregular
Late to this, but you also need to make sure you've got the _entire rest_ of the order, including the wandering shitheads. I'd grab a guide for that, though, because I explored the heck out of this game while playing for the first half and I never even ran into a third of the ones I should have.
When you take out the bigger Order bad guys, the Zealots unlock on the map.
xbl - HowYouGetAnts
steam - WeAreAllGeth
0
syndalisGetting ClassyOn the WallRegistered User, Loves Apple Productsregular
This game is too fucking long and a good example of games being needlessly large.
Like, do you need to have community hub building, fishing, hunting, drinking games, matchy rock puzzles, boring platforming glitch puzzles, raids, horse upgrading, weapon upgrading, Flyting (I like the flyting), target-shooting, Asgardian side stories, etc etc as components of one title about Assassins?
I like this game but there is way too much of it. Go home Assassin's Creed.
They could have had all of those systems, just not so much of each of them, and it would still be fine.
There is a part of me that says this is less of a problem for people who get maybe 1-2 games a year. That you could EASILY stretch this out over 6 months is a feature, not a bug, to those folks.
For me, the game started getting really fucking tedious around the midway point, and I basically powered through to the ending so I could play Cyberpunk. If I didn't have that artificial deadline imposed on it (by me), I might have enjoyed the game more.
syndalis on
SW-4158-3990-6116
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Late to this, but you also need to make sure you've got the _entire rest_ of the order, including the wandering shitheads. I'd grab a guide for that, though, because I explored the heck out of this game while playing for the first half and I never even ran into a third of the ones I should have.
When you take out the bigger Order bad guys, the Zealots unlock on the map.
Not sure what you're talking about. I had the entire game done and the whole Order cleaned out except the Head Honcho and all the Zealots. The Head Honcho doesn't unlock until you clean out everyone else, including the Zealots, who you have to chase down across the map. They never just showed up like other Order targets, I had to get physically close enough to them to see their icon on the map before I could start tracking them.
Maybe they changed this in a patch? Or perhaps we're just remembering differently? I remember being very frustrated by all the hunting I had to do.
Posts
Yeah, I gave up after 40 h for the same reasons. I can't really understand why the game got such stellar reviews. It's generic and repetetive as hell.
The first 20 hours were really good, in my opinion.
True. I guess the game just overstayed its welcome. The trend of "massiveness = good" has become more and more persistent over the last decade.
I feel like the recent trend has been massive games that don't have a solid act structure that switch up gameplay and story. I'm good with massive games if they evolve throughout the experience, but 100 hours of exactly the same story beats and combat situations put on repeat gets old.
And Ubisoft has always had the issue of too much gameplay being expressed through repetitive systems, so the switch to open world feels especially pronounced since it has meant that they've largely gotten rid of the well-designed assassination missions which were the high point of the series in favor of having the plot take place through the open world systems.
Hell, one of the castles you assault has you go in ahead of time to sabotage shit, and like, I just bounced through that thing like a hot knife through butter. Why did we need the army to come through afterwards, anyway?
edit: I mean, since we're talking about "massive" Ubisoft games. It follows a similar pattern, but it's more palatable even if it is huge and derivative. The puzzles are actually really well-constructed, the humor tends to grow on you, and it's fairly decent action-wise.
I feel like at the beginning of this gen, games were a regular 15-20 hours and it was good. And then all of a sudden devs decided everything had to be 60 hours long minimum and it's fucking obnoxious. We need to go back to 20 hour games again.
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
I don’t know if every game needs to be 15 hours either, but I definitely feel there is a lot of bloat.
I feel like the older assassins creed and fallout games were about 30 hours and felt pretty good. Outer Worlds felt fine at 25 or so hours.
For a narrative focused game that is designed to be played through once I feel like that is a good range. I had 60 hours in witcher 3 and never finished it, I feel like I can confidently say if a game is much more than 50 hours on a playthrough I’m not going to finish no matter how much I like it.
If there’s going to be a lot of content more than that I feel like games should be more willing to take the Skyrim/elder scrolls approach and put more content in discrete questlines that are self-contained and not necessary to complete the main game, so the experience can be spread across multiple playthroughs. Give the player a lot of options to explore, but also build in a “Get on With It” story path to wrap things up if the player is getting bored, and don’t punish the player by locking this path off behind things like “complete all quests in every zone” or “be this ridiculously high level that you can only get to by completing all content in the game”.
There has been some discussion in game design about not locking out content in a playthrough and making sure players see everything, so work doesn’t go wasted if a player only plays through once, and as important as that is, I also feel like I will feel a lot better about a game if I get to the end and have content left over to do post-game or in alternate playthroughs than if I quit after 50 hours because I am bored and want to move on.
I was going to skip this one but I'm just a sucker for this time period in England and doubly a sucker for Vikings. I enjoyed my time but 'overstayed its welcome' is a perfect descriptor. I love me some Ass Creed (haven't skipped a single mainline installment) but I don't think I can do this again. That's not to say that Valhalla is bad at all. It's outstanding; easily the best of the nu-AC games.
I've definitely reached a point in my life where I'd much rather sit down with a 10-20 hour game than a 60-100 hour game, I just wish I wasn't such a sucker for the latter (sidelong glance at the remaining 5 Yakuza games in my backlog).
3DS: 1650-8480-6786
Switch: SW-0653-8208-4705
Valhalla just turned more and more into "Viking Simulator" as I cared less and less about Eivor and the people around them. Hell, most of the people you were supposed to give a shit about I either forgot because they only came back for very specific story beats, or I had long ago started _disliking_ because they were acting like an idiot and/or piece of shit to everyone around them.
Further, they have a thing where if you put anything else in your cart it drops the overall cart price by an additional 21%. So I just grabbed Fenix Rising Gold (on sale for $80) and Splinter Cell Chaos Theory (on sale for $2.50) for a grand total of $65.17.
3DS: 1650-8480-6786
Switch: SW-0653-8208-4705
I bought Valhalla on release because I had a week off and wasn't going anywhere for Thanksgiving, so I wanted something to lose myself in. Other than that, I don't buy Ubi games on release because they always go on sale within weeks and are half price or less within a couple months.
Repeat when there's something new and shiny.
So I'm probably going to start over. I may mess around with this tomorrow. I'm really excited to finally get into the game. I know there are some other bugs but whatever.
That said, I'm deeeeeeeep into Immortals: Fenyx Rising. I have reversed my opinion of the tone of the game - not sure if I talked about that here, or in the Zelda thread, but I agree with @Jealous Deva - it's actually the best of the Ubi bunch of massive open world games that came out recently. I haven't loaded up Watch Dogs 3 yet so my comment is barring that. It's just so bright and fun and smart and slick. It may be derivative, but it seems bug free and it really does have some very intelligent Breath of the Wild-type puzzles. I'm definitely going to 100% it and it's currently my #1 go to game, even over Cyberpunk 2077 even though I'm honestly not having that many technical issues with it (on PC).
edit: I'm going to start over because I only played about 2-3 hours on release day, so I didn't get that far and I would have absolutely no idea what is even going on at this point.
Not home to test but looks like exiting and re-entering the animus may fix it.
Anybody else had this? Will that fix it or is there another step?
D3 Steam #TeamTangent STO
Yep, thank you will try that
The first time was stealthy.
Second time I was a lot less circumspect...
I mean, I think you were right. Without clicking the spoiler, it sounds like a bug to me even if you were able to quickly resolve it. :P
It's... interesting...
Also impressed with just how many bugs i ran into while trying to do the holiday events. For such a small scale thing with simple quests and only available for a limited time it was a bit frustrating.
This sorted it, thank you!
And since the yule stuff, I load in to a drunk Eivor every time too haha
Hoping the next game gives us more Basim story, because unless I missed something I don't know his motivation for his late game actions.
Ok, cool. Looks like I need to finish those up
It featured some really complex editing, a great tune, and it showed the progression of altair and ezio up to desmond, ending with desmond fighting. While desmond is fighting it blended animation clips of Altair and Ezio into him to hammer home the Animus connection.
I cannot find this clip anywhere and I'm kinda desperate to show a friend of mine. Anyone know what this was called?
edit: NEVERMIND i found it, it was called beautiful lies if anyone is interested.
xbl - HowYouGetAnts
steam - WeAreAllGeth
D3 Steam #TeamTangent STO
Like, do you need to have community hub building, fishing, hunting, drinking games, matchy rock puzzles, boring platforming glitch puzzles, raids, horse upgrading, weapon upgrading, Flyting (I like the flyting), target-shooting, Asgardian side stories, etc etc as components of one title about Assassins?
I like this game but there is way too much of it. Go home Assassin's Creed.
When you take out the bigger Order bad guys, the Zealots unlock on the map.
xbl - HowYouGetAnts
steam - WeAreAllGeth
They could have had all of those systems, just not so much of each of them, and it would still be fine.
There is a part of me that says this is less of a problem for people who get maybe 1-2 games a year. That you could EASILY stretch this out over 6 months is a feature, not a bug, to those folks.
For me, the game started getting really fucking tedious around the midway point, and I basically powered through to the ending so I could play Cyberpunk. If I didn't have that artificial deadline imposed on it (by me), I might have enjoyed the game more.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Not sure what you're talking about. I had the entire game done and the whole Order cleaned out except the Head Honcho and all the Zealots. The Head Honcho doesn't unlock until you clean out everyone else, including the Zealots, who you have to chase down across the map. They never just showed up like other Order targets, I had to get physically close enough to them to see their icon on the map before I could start tracking them.
Maybe they changed this in a patch? Or perhaps we're just remembering differently? I remember being very frustrated by all the hunting I had to do.