What I liked: The massive world is intricately designed with a clear aesthetic that still allows for most regions to possess a distinctive look. Most of the time, I loved exploring the far corners and tiny niches of the map. The game also provides many different ways for players to make their way through that world allowing for a great deal of experimentation with its wide variety of weapons, tools, and spells.
What I didn’t like falls into multiple categories that all fall around one major theme: the game lacks nearly all of the features of modern games and uses complex, confusing, and inconsistent systems with weak elements designed to artificially increase its size and difficulty.
The story: Basically, there isn’t one. What bits and pieces that a player can put together all leads to a terrible land infected by terrible beings that requires terrible deeds to bring about terrible endings. Quest lines are nearly incomprehensible with characters disappearing and reappearing without warning or logical consistency. Some quest lines end abruptly with no clear resolution. Others simply vanish without any reason given. Sometimes, they require the use of obscure items or gestures—and the player is lucky if a clue regarding either is given.
Difficulty: Much is touted about how this game “doesn’t hold gamers’ hands” and requires players to just "get gud” [sic]. Quite simply, it’s a game that only has an ultra hard difficulty setting and lists is lack of a basic difficulty slider as a selling point. It astounds me that people are taking this clear weakness and using it as a sort of badge of honor, especially since so much of the difficulty comes from poorly designed spawn points and an imprecise control system.
The combat controls: That’s right; the controls are not good. Before anyone gets all high and mighty about how I need to just “get gud,” I should point out that I beat both the game and the optional boss Malenia (touted as the toughest boss) without using coop. One can get used to the poor controls, figure out the timing and hit boxes, and memorize environment layouts and boss patterns, but still recognize that it is a poor control system that locks players into actions unless interrupted by the attacking creature. This was made even clearer to me when, after beating the game, I started playing a game with better, modern controls.
Movement: Even worse were the jumping controls. The character (or the steed) often moves too far, or not far enough just when walking. When adding in jumping (and the game has many areas that rely on balance and jumping), the controls are downright awful, reminding me of the early attempts at 3D platforming games (like Castlevania 64).
Targeting: The lock on system is awful, but without it, targeting is nearly impossible. The game touts the idea of letting the player choose any type of weapon; it clearly means any weapon except bows or crossbows. Even spells often missed massive targets that were directly in front of my character due to the bizarre locations that the lock on system would target on the creature. Even worse, the same button (R3) was used to reorient the camera to the direction that the character was facing, often spinning around the camera directly away from the creature the player tried to target.
Spawning points: The game is wildly inconsistent with spawning points. Sometimes, they are right on top of each other. Other times, the are massively far apart with many enemies and the aforementioned balance and jumping sections between them. It is particularly frustrating that many of the major bosses do not have a spawn point nearby. Thus, one has to travel quite a distance, sometimes for minutes before getting back to a boss fight that might take several dozen attempts (and possibly more than one form).
Limited options: While the game provides a huge number of weapons, spells, and tools, the player is extremely limited in what can be used in any given encounter. The powerful Ashes of War can only have one power (possibly a second) in use at any time. The spell slots and talisman slots are woefully small. Sure, one can play through different attempts with different builds, but that requires a massive investment for such a massive game. Meanwhile, the armor is nearly useless, and many of the better items are one time use with only a limited amount available in the entire game (Rune arcs).
There is more, but I feel that I’ve made and defended my point. It’s fine if other people like the game; certainly, there were aspects that I enjoyed. My frustration is with it winning game of the year and perfect scores not only with its clear faults but with better games like Horizon Forbidden West and God of War: Ragnarok getting lower ratings.
Also, I had avoided games of this type out of concern for my controllers. That concern was justified. While I did not throw or intentionally damage them in my gameplay, the tension I put on the left (movement) pad not only had me disable the crouch control (which was assigned to the L3 button) but has left a bit of a drift on both controllers that I used. It’s fair to say that I will not be playing this game (or its ilk) again if I can avoid it.