Fantastic if its your kind of game. Very well made and clear the devs know the type of product they're putting out. Has its niggling initial release issues like every game but all have been acknowledged and are supposedly worked on. Also has a very vocal director who is communicating a lot with fans about what the direction is.
They clearly have wonderful game devs and designers working for them. A lot of their games have some really neat mechanics that are fun to play with.
But then they fuck it all up by monetizing it all to shit, or padding the game with so much useless bullshit it becomes a chore to play, or fucking up the pacing of the story with the sheer amount of useless side quests.
I'll freely admit - I enjoy playing their open world collect-a-thon games. But I have to play it in parts, because it just gets too grating. And of course I only buy their games when they're already a few years old, so I can take advantage of sales. No way I'm paying €120 for a game, even with all the spinning rims and fancy baubles.
I think the only way I'd be willing to play their modern open world games is through piracy, assuming piracy let's you have the paid xp boosts to make it a reasonable rate. I played Odyssey for a bit, but if feels so slow to level if you aren't willing to hand over more cash to make leveling faster. They actively make their games worse to sell the cure, which wouldn't be too horrible if they weren't also so expensive.
I think fantastic is overstating it a bit. It feels like a middle of the road CoD. Kind of a boots on the ground version of one of the hero shooter Black Ops entries with a little roughness to it.
Not bad but not great either. For the price though, it's great value.
It hasn't gained the traction it has by being just OK. Its a great game, just might not be a great game for you.
As much as cod gets shit on, the reason its so unanimous is because its arguably been the absolute best game of its kind for over a decade, the fact that xdefiant is remotely threatening that. I would say is proof alone that it is a fantastic game.
I see there are good numbers on release but I would take them with a pinch of salt. Apparently it had between 500,000 and 700,000 concurrent players on release which is already down to 300,000. Estimates of over 7mil unique players.
Now look at The Finals which has 8mil unique players. It had 250,000 concurrent players on release and is now down to around 15,000 6 months later.
Reviews wise The Finals did better on both critic and public ratings. Arguably (in my opinion) the Finals has a less interesting replayability loop but is more polished and higher quality gameplay wise.
The fact is these numbers are sadly pretty common drop offs for f2p shooters, as a lot of people want to check them out but not stick with them. Will be interesting to see how the player number fare when the next CoD comes out on Game Pass.
I guess that's where me and you differ then because I'd say the finals is a fantastic game also. The number of people who play a game long term doesn't factor into my opinion on that.
Xdefiant. Very good if you like earlier cod games and want a lot of the random BS like killstreaks/death streaks out & a more team oriented system in place