By short review, this is actually a re-posting of a post I left on the Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora Facebook page because... oh. my. Eywa.
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First, I want to say I am a HUGE fan of Avatar, of the moves, the lore, everything; ridiculously so. This game is SO beautiful. A dream come true. The game is GORGEOUS.
But, as a gamer, there are severe issues with this game that is filling me with a lot of regret: First, I'm left-handed and the default left-handed controls are nothing like in any other game. They're really bad >_> Which in itself is not the issue. I have found out when I close out this game and restart it later, I have to manually re-enter ALL of the key bindings I did.... WHAT? EVERY TIME? Guys.... Please send this comment to whatever department it needs to go to because this NEEDS to be fixed.
Secondly, why is this an open-world game but I cannot save the game when *I* want to save it? Reading on Reddit, a LOT of people are not happy about this. And If I miss the 3 dots in the corner of the screen indicating that it did save, I'll have no clue when it saved. On top of that, the game won't save when you exit.... GUYS. That makes NO sense. The only thing I can think of is you all want people to play as long as possible to log hours and show how popular the game is, when in truth we're only playing longer than we mean to because we're waiting on the game to save. That is NOT cool.
And apparently you only get ONE save file per game, so if you run into a game-breaking bug... that's it, you have to start over. Are you serious? Who on your development team approved that?!
Also, rebinding keys has two major flaws:
- You cannot actually rebind any two-key inputs, for example the "roll" inputs on the ikran.
- The ESC key is the confirm key instead of, you know, the cancel key. There is no cancel key.
W H Y ?
Why do you guys insist on going backwards? Even the original Avatar game you guys did had multiple saves and you could save where you wished, if I recall correctly. In any case, this is still all a backwards move.
Also, please stop putting ads in your game menus for buying things like unnecessary cosmetic packs and season passes... not cool. At LEAST make it a sub-menu! No one likes being advertised to in their games; we want IMMERSION. Which is, as I recall, the reason you guys made it first-person only... well I don't feel very immersed if I have to constantly stress about when my game saved itself and if I'm going to run into a game-breaking quest that'll make me start over.
Please do yourself, as a company, a favor and look at what Larian did with Baldur's Gate 3. There are MANY reasons why they swept the game awards this year. The main one? Player autonomy and choice, guys. Stop taking player choice away.
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I want to re-iterate here:
- You cannot save your game manually;
- The game chooses when it will save itself, and this does not include when you exit the game, so you will lose your progress up to when the game last saved itself;
- You only get ONE save file, which saves over itself every time, so there is no "going back".
- If you want to quit the game when you want to, hopefully you're fine with losing progress.
- You have to re-bind your keys every time you launch the game.
- What. The. Actual. Fuck.
Yea, um, stop taking player choice away--especially when the developers make bad decision upon bad decision. Guys, if your game saves right before a big battle and you find yourself wholly unprepared and you get beat every time, guess what? That's your endless loop, because there is only one save file, that saves over itself when IT wishes, not when YOU wish.
That means you just have to start a whole new game and not make a single "mistake".
Did I mention this game also will not save itself when you exit, so you have to just notice or guess where it saved last? The other day I wanted to take a break because I was playing too long, but I didn't want to lose any progress, had no idea where it saved last, and had to keep playing until
As a gamer, I don't advise buying this game. Ubisoft made horrible decisions by taking player autonomy away, for no reason that I can see.
As an Avatar fan, I also can't advise buying this game unless you want to drive yourself to insanity, because it's so beautiful but so infuriating.
I'm starting to wonder who has regulations about taking lead out of baby's toys because all the developers are making the WORST decisions for a game you could EVER make...
Also, random other bits I find annoying (and I will be editing this post to add to it variously);
- First-person view only. *sigh*
- It's not an RPG. Open-world, yes. RPG, no. You don't get to make any decisions. Your character does that for you. *sighs again*
- So many NPCs but you can't talk to them or ask them questions. There's no such thing as dialogue trees.
- Again I need to stop playing to do something but my last save was... when? I don't want to lose the items I just collected. And when I do log back into the game, I need to reset the keybindings--okay, I'm just gonna stop playing tonight. I'm too annoyed.
