Looking forward to seeing thoughts on this DLC from people that hated XVI.
Every once and a while you get a DLC that fixes most of the base game's issues and turns opinion around. I'm not expecting that here, but would be nice if it was at least like a Torna > XB2 kind of thing.
As someone that really didn't like XVI and sort of disliked it more and more each time I thought about it after finishing it but was open to having their mind changed (the DLC for XB3 basically saved the game for me), this DLC kinda just reinforces my belief that CBU3 has no fucking idea what they're doing half the time and underscores how much garbage a lot of XVI's game design is.
Very very briefly I was optimistic. The start of the DLC features some somewhat amusing party banter. For a brief moment, it seems like things will be different.
Except they're not different, it's all the same shit with a new coat of paint. On the way to the town I saw what I thought would be an optional cave, except no, it's blocked by a bunch of bushes. Dunno why I was getting my hopes up.
I'm walking down hallways collecting pinches of beaver ass or some such nonsense for a crafting system I'm never going to use. I'm doing sidequests where a minimal amount of information is conveyed in the most smarmy self-interested and boated verbose out the ass manner and then I go pick up some flowers or kill some enemy I've fought before. All the random world big enemies I've seen are just palette swaps all over again. The cutscenes direction is notably worse than the base game and the sidequests somehow are too. The + icon ones here just seem to be to unlock features you already had that the game took away. I'm unlocking crafting recipes for gear that's weaker that stuff I already have. I'm getting items to sell for gil when I already have gil out the ass.
The Omega DLC gets you into the dungeon relatively quickly and you get a succession of unique bosses albeit with some copy past shit in between, but here it feels like they doubled down on the bad version of XVI but just with a prettier skybox.
As for leviathan's powers, I now just mash triangle to end any random encounter and the rift thing is kinda cool, but its just another example of a bunch of powers that feel very functionally similar to a lot of other eikon abilities.
Jill, idk what's happening with Jill. Waiting for her time to shine but so far she's done the same old hang out in the background of cutscenes and sometimes say a line during exploration.
There's a couple things they did right with the this expansion and the last one:
- Accessories that do things. (albeit you're basically never incentivized to use them because it's a hassle to menu all that shit or change eikon stuff, and the game is piss easy as is). This is the absolute bare minimum of what should have been a stat and perk sphere grid or sth.
- Pieces of content that felt substantive but different from the main story's nonstop sadness/slavery/grim shit.
- Art direction, at least in the second DLC, is more interesting than almost the entirety of the base game, which just feels like bumfuck nowhere in the middle of the UK, with 3 locations that could generously be described as "green" and one that was "tan".
If XVI had launched like this I think I would overall be more charitable, but the fact that they had an extra year, charged a cumulative $90+ and are still making rookie mistakes is ridiculous.
I would be fine if nothing about XVI is ever revisited again, aside from perhaps the core gamefeel of combat and some of the technical stuff/spectacle.