izigame.me

the latest changes and the whole dlc situation is just upsetting. i havent really bothered writing a review before but now i feel like this is just the perfect occasion.
first off, the dlc. i obviously can't point out any issues with the dlc because good ol gearbox decided that because of the country i reside in, whether i support the political decisions of the president or not, i shouldn't be allowed to own the dlc despite waiting for it for a really long time now and never even being informed that it would be restricted. the store page was, mind you, open for everyone before the dlc's actual release. the moment it got released however it became "not available in your region". that's fun.
now, the patch. not getting to see the dlc would obviously feel a bit bad for me and everybody else who also was caught off guard by the restriction, but even if you don't get involved into the dlc you still get shit on by the changes to the base game. now it just overall feels worse to play. these are some of the oddest changes that i can't even really guess the reason for.
obviously the first thing you notice is the bugs. the moment you join the game you'll be shown a "new" marker on the settings menu. yes, there are indeed new settings, but the new indicator never goes away. it's just always there. now when you start a run you may or may not immediately notice that some sounds are weirdly bugged and just sound off. seems to be random from my experience.
the next thing i noticed is that now for some reason elite lesser wisps don't get stunned when you shoot them, which just makes them... not exactly fair to fight. they're (almost) a hitscan enemy so seeing an elite one just means that you'll consistently get status effects applied to you until it's dead no matter what you do. then when i started the teleporter event it definitely felt like there were quite a bit more enemies than usual, but that might just be me being rusty, i can't really tell. what i could tell however is that for some odd reason the stone titans that spawned weren't flashing red when they took damage, and better yet, one of them was *permanently* glowing red like it was taking damage. i died there, and not even to the bosses.
speaking of death, the new damage indicator is absolutely horrible. not only is it off by default, which means you don't get ANY feedback for taking damage, but even the one you do get when you turn it on is just not good. at all. it's supposed to be "directional", but it doesn't update its position when you turn so it could actually mislead you if you happen to be turning as you take damage. not only that, but it's also horrible at representing how much damage you actually took. taking 25% of your max health of damage looks pretty much the same as taking something like 90%, so you need to have a staring contest with your healthbar to even determine whether you need to be worrying about health at the moment (not to mention that fall damage gives no feedback AT ALL). but even that won't really help because now there's some sort of cosmetic change to healing/taking damage that makes the healthbar not instantly snap to the amount of health you have, but rather smoothly lower/rise to that point. while a similar effect was there before as well, it used to take like a tenth of a second. now it can take 3. the healthbar feels really unresponsive and it is impossible to just tell how much health you have by looking at the healthbar after taking damage/healing, you need to specifically read the number on it. not great for a fast-paced game.
the item-related changes are weird as well. for some reason multishop items no longer have outlines, which just makes them look bland and sometimes even makes it harder to tell what item it actually is. and since the same multishop system applies to shipping request forms you can no longer tell what rarity the question mark item is as the outline was the only thing that showed that.
they also attemped implementing the logbook mid-game and an "inspect" feature to let you read full item descriptions in the inventory menu, aka the tab menu. obviously the idea itself doesn't have any issues with it, in fact i'd fully support something like that. however for some reason you can no longer run/jump while the tab menu is open, so you can't actually do much in-game while inspecting items and you're kind of a sitting duck to be shot at by enemies, and the only way to counter that is the "pause when inspecting" option. this pretty much means that all this feature does is save like 5 seconds of looking up what the item does, as it doesn't really allow you to just do it mid-game as it supposedly should.
these are just the changes i've seen so far. there might be more, but honestly i don't really feel like even trying to look for any more considering the game is now a lot harder just because the things that allowed you to tell when you took damage or healed just don't do that well anymore. i really hope that this stuff is fixed in due time, and maybe the dlc even becomes actually available for the solid part of the game's playerbase despite their location.