I'm currently 12 hours in the game: my first impressions of the game are pretty decent. But I'm hoping some big issues will be solved once I get all my powers and I get to the “second half” of the game.
Game's big draw is the nemesis system- and that isn't because you'll actually give a crap if an Orc remembers you, or features a scar from the last time you fight him- the surprise of that wears off fast.
The good thing about the nemesis system is the random generation- Orcs can be immune to stealth, melee, ranged attacks, stun, leaping over them, etc. They can also have weaknesses that range from fears of fire/beasts to things that kill them instantly.
It's a good system because it forces you to strategize how to take an Orc Captain down. You don't always need to, put you're always at risk if you see a Captain you have no intel on, and you try to engage, because he may be extremely weak or immune to freaking everything.
However, there are some issues with Captain's being immune to almost everything in the freaking universe, except for things that require abilities you haven't unlocked yet. I had one “Lorm the Runner” who got to be a level 20 legendary Captain, and he was immune to everything but ranged attacks at a time when I didn't have the ability replenish my arrows mid-fight, essentially making him nigh-impossible to take down. You won't die to Captains too often early on- so they won't get to this guys level so easily, but sometimes you'll just randomly run into an unknown Captain at a bad time, and he'll kill you because you do something that you aren't aware of him being able to counter.
To compensate, any time you target an Orc Captain to kill, you get an objective on the minimap revolving around whatever the Orc is doing. He may be having a duel with another Orc Captain, and you can use that to kill him when he's weak, he may be having a feast and you can poison his grog then, or he may be fighting Carigores for fun, and you can arrow-pin him to the ground and let the beast maul him etc. The problem is sometimes these “power struggles” as they are called do not give you an objective that allows you to exploit their weakness, and essentially it gives you no new way to strategize in those instances.
Warchiefs are tough as hell, and you generally need to strategize to beat them. It can be fun to manipulate the nemesis system to weaken them or gain intel on a weakness to gain the upper hand, but there are also some issues with this every now and then. Whenever you want to kill a Warchief, you have to “Draw him out” by completing some objective. Sometimes, however, the way you “draw them out” into the world (you can't fight them otherwise) is in direct contradiction to how you kill them based on their strengths/weaknesses in the nemesis system.
Because the Warchiefs and the missions on them are randomly generated, you can have this “Catch-22” situation I had.
I was up against a Warchief with basically no way to kill him other than stealth. However, the mission in which I had to “draw him out” REQUIRED that I go in and purposely set off the alarm in an Orc Fortress so I get swarmed. What the actual fuck??
