Recent reviews by Adeptus ColdCallicus

After playing a couple of hours of The Guild 3 (G3), I can confidently say that I genuinely enjoy this game despite its (major) flaws. This game has luckily become a gateway for me to discover and enjoy The Guild 2 (G2). Mind you, I tried out G2 and watched +10 year old 2hrs worth of YouTube tutorials just to understand the basics. But I got put off quickly by the very old UI, its complexity and graphics and never booted it up again until two years ago.

First of all, my personal gripes with G3:

• The game's graphics look absolutely abysmal for a game that came out in early access in 2017 and full release in 2022.
  
• The lack character customisation is also very disappointing due to its limitation in the character creation menu. Everyone eventually looks the same in the game.
  
• Don't get me started on the audio. You know where the last remaining 10 bucks have been spent on. I will not go through any details of already mentioned flaws and lack of content in comparison to G2

Now to the rest:

• G3 is, by comparison, not as complex in terms of mechanics, jobs, politics, etc. However, this allowed me to quickly understand how the gameplay's' framework works. This includes running different businesses, automating processes, trading, politics, and everything else.. Even YouTube tutorials, without wasting time on searching, helped me understand specific things that I couldn't figure out myself.
  
  In my humble opinion, where the game shines is in its multiplayer. The interactions between players are very entertaining in the discord voice chat. I used to host open and private games for a couple of years and had fun. Especially when everybody is a beginner and discovers how the game works together. You can have your Romeo & Juliet dramas and feuds during games or just be absolutely silly in politics together. If you host public games, just make sure to have simple rules (no early war) for everyone to follow. As a host, make sure to always save your games every 15 mins. 
  
  
• It is clear the game has been released in a buggy state and is (still) lacking depth. Nonetheless, they have supported the game with irregular patches and updates over the years, and after nearly a year of multiplayer instability, they have fixed the issue and even added modding to the game. The game is still janky but is enjoyable nonetheless. I wouldn't have put these (rookie) hours in the game, if it wasn't. 

Despite all the positive and some neutral points, I have to admit that I am still disappointed they did not continue expanding the game. I hope modders can fill that void and eventually turn it into what it was envisioned to be.

I have tried out a couple of mods such as the TG3 Natch's Standalone Mod v1.1 and after a couple of hours, it has fixed some of the things I dislike such as some of the overly grinding aspects of the game.

Buy G3 on sale or wherever you can get it cheaper elsewhere. Just not full price.... unless they pick up development and finish up the game.

If you want to find games, just go to their official discord page.

I remember playing a demo of a similar game for the PSOne back in the day, and ever since then I have always wanted to have a single-person-controlled 3rd person football game, which neither Fifa nor PES provided, iirc. Mind you, I have not played any other football games besides Fifa 98/2000. Additionally, I am not invested in IRL football besides national tournaments.

The bad:

- The game can be absolutely janky, has bugs and terrible lag at times where it turns winning a match into losing one in seconds. Sometimes you just don't take the ball when it clearly touches you.

- Forget playing with mates who live on the other side of the world. High ping will deffo not help you make friends. So rather play in your ping-appropriate area.

- There is (as yet) no way of rewatching previously played games. Would be cool to show off my crazy plays during my breaks next to the office water dispenser ;)

- TURN VOICE CHAT OFF - most people forget to turn off their voice chat and you hear their whole household in the background. It surprises me that most people play next to a washing machine with their mothers in the back screaming at them lol

The good:

- It's actually fun to play casually and you can be creative with your own way of playing without being a cringe sweatlord/meta slave that has to follow every step of a guide they watched on youtube/tiktok.

- Goalkeeper controls are easy to get into after some practice.

- Shooting and passing mechanics work.

- A well-coordinated and understanding team can make the experience very enjoyable.

- No chatbox, so you can focus on the game instead of being a clown.

- Playing a premade team with friends is the most enjoyable experience.

- You can actually join an ongoing game!

- 5 minutes per match works well for people with jobs. Hop in, play some games, and hop off.

The ugly = the community:

- For soloQs, like in other games, it will get really difficult to play with pre-made squads that only pass between each other and won't involve you at all. They will get all the points from passing while you sit there being ignored. They will ask you to pass the ball, but won't do it themselves.

- Like in Dota/LoL, you have the non-reflecting griefers that spam "very nice" for every little inconvenience and bring nothing to the table. They ragequit the first seconds after the other team scores a goal and blame everyone else but themselves for losing the game.

- The "They're not him/her" players who fatally overestimate themselves doing tricks and dribbling instead of passing the ball. They are not necessarily mean-spirited but the game is 100% not for them. They have 0 awareness nor self-reflection and either can't or refuse to defend. I have seen good players who have once or twice carried the game, but they mostly lose you the games. You will encounter them a lot.

To Sum up:
The game has so much potential and is a rough diamond. If you have a group of friends to play with, it’s an easy recommend. If you're going solo, just keep your expectations in check, turn off the voice chat, and prepare to play with some "not him/her"s.

There are many reasons why this game is amazing:

- The setting
- not being the most op person on the map which is refreshing for once in comparison to other extractions shooters
and most importantly

- THE DEVS WANTS US TO STAY HYDRATED!

This game has so much potential and lots of room for improvement (bugfixes, jankyness, random enemy spawns etc.).
Give this game some time and it will be bloody good! My hopes are that there will be a possiblity to play it in 1st person.

I remember when Hunt:Showdown was in early access and it was an unoptimized mess back then and look at it now... it got it got its 1896's game out! (jokes aside).

Don't buy this game YET with high expectations. I suggest you better wait before purchasing it. For everyone else, try it!

This game runs better in early access than verdun 5 years after release..

This game is exactly what Verdun mixed up with BF1 should have been like :)

My Opinion of the game: (The Pros +| Cons - | Neutral/Both +/- )

Controls/Gameplay experience:

+ You will die a lot... that's just a part of the experience and that's the way you learn the game!

+ You got your different action bolt rifles for 98% of all the classes and squads available. Since I'm not a weapons expert, I can't tell you how good or real the rifles sound or should sound like. But hey, they all look nice in-game!

+ Weapons like machine gun, machine pistols, handguns, flamethrowers, shotguns and sniperrifles are limited to 1 unit per squad to keep the balance in-game which prevents the game of ending up like bf1: A MP-Fest/Semi-Auto/sniper fest which included certain prototype-weapons which were either never or barely used in WW1 :D

+ The WW1 atmosphere is just so well presented in the game especially with arty shell, attack whistles and trench battles in general. Also the music's really good!

- Balance penalties are really a pain since it increases the respawn time of the team with the higher player count especially due to players leaving the game because they are losing and respawn time have already been pushed up since after release

- The controls are still very clunky at times since its early access which was ok back then but they are still not fixed today even after 5 years of being released.

- Increasing the player numbers from 32 up to 64 player was the first big mistake the devs have implemented. I never saw any need of having that many players on a map which has been made for half that size. In the past there were weekly events where you were able to join these games and it felt really like playing a large scale battles. I do not mind playing with that many players on big maps but not on maps like St. Mihiel or Vosges which are way to small for 64 players. This also decreased the amount of other servers being played on during the evening since everybody want to play on a 64 player server which has more players than bots. The only solution to that issue cannot be to play a private 32-player and hoping somebody would join..

- The second fatal mistake was introducing bots to the game. At first, I did not mind them at all since the bots and the 64 player increase which were brought over from Tannenberg.. oh boy, they messed up quite good there: Bots are firstly very easy target to spot and to kill since they have those weird way of movement and are running above the trenches instead of staying inside them. Secondly, the devs try to balance them with some weird aimbot-ish kind of precision. But it does not work. It is very unsatisfying knowing the only reason you have a K/D of 100 is because you killed mostly bots instead of other players

- Third biggest mistake which made me stop playing this game is the penalty system when hitting a teamplayer. Teamkill or Teamdamage is turned off. However, you still get minus points if you hit a friendly just because they walked in front you while you were shooting at the enemy. They also automatically block the shots and you get minus points for team damage even though they don't receive any damages. This is just rubbing salt into the wound. The worst thing is: this happens 90% of the time due to bots just running around randomly (sometimes also players).

- Melee (basically auto-aim) in this game is terrible in comparison to red orchestra 2 (or beyond the wire)

+ There is a squad progession system which was a great and fresh idea back then in EA. It motivated me to keep playing with my previous squadmembers in later games in order to unlock NCO abilites (better arty etc.) and cosmetics (you start first with 1914 outfits and during the progression you will get the 1918 ones).

- However, this mechanic has turned way too OP since release. You always know that you are going to get rekt or lose the match if you see more than 2 enemy squads on the leaderboard which belong to a clan. You always start with Squad lvl1 if you play with people for the first time and you find yourself already in a disadvantage playing against lvl 100 squads. This needs to be nerfed. But it's not impossible to win against them.... it's just more difficult

+ Most Maps are quite fun and good looking.

- About Fort Douaumont... Well ♥♥♥♥ Fort Douaumont !

Gamemodes:

+ I mainly spent my 300 hours playing in the frontline mode since it was the game's greatest strength. It is always nerve racking trying to attack or defend your position from enemy's push. Sometimes you fight a very intense battle for 20-30 minutes and you just end up having a draw.

- Tannenberg's Maneuver mode could have also been added to Verdun for a change

Graphics and Performance + Bugs:

+/- In all honesty, the graphics are between meh and good depending on how well your pc can run the game with your settings. However, for me it has always been the gameplay that counts rather than the graphics.

+ There has been some graphical improvement in the last years which I liked. But there is nothing positve nor negative to add it besides what I have already mentioned.

- The game still has some issues with the optimisation, bugs and lags after every update which is worsening the game experience. E.g. the graphical bug that a grenade is floating in front you which can be really game breaking and annoying since it covers part of your vision. I'm not sure if this has already been fixed.

The Community:

+ The community is still alive! The game is not dead as people mentioned in their reviews. Buut it is kinda slowly dying. Otherwise there would not have been a need for bots ;)

- It is a niche game so you can expect the servers being partly empty or full of bots outside peak times of in both Tannenberg and Verdun..

- The community has been split between Tannenberg and Verdun since Tannenberg's release. It should have been developped as a DLC instead of a stand-alone game in my point of view. I know they already explained why they made it a stand alone game..

+/- The EU server population is always active between 20:00 until 0:00 during the week and on weekends. But after that you will be mostly facing bots for the rest of the night which leaves me no other option than to play on US-East servers.

- On US-Servers, if you join the entente you are always forced to join US-Squads since the people there always have an obsession to always play in a US-Squad for whatever reasons (patriotism? dunno).

- There is absolutely no limit on how many times you can vote which squad you want to play as. So people within the squads can abuse by calling out the votes so many times until either everybody either leaves the squad or votes yes because they are tired of always having to vote. There should be a time limit of about 10 minutes after every vote which has failed or succeeded if there are more than 2 players in the squad. This happens in both EU and US.

+ In general people in the chat are always polite (if your ignore the trolls and all that politics talk in the chat), provided you are also being polite towards them. If people ask question, there is always somebody helping out.

- Very few people use voice chat and I think most people don't even know it exists :D
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Verdun is (or lets say "used to be") a good game with a pretty cool concept which recreated the horrors of the western front during WW1, which had its mentioned issues. However, after 6-7 years, everything went kinda downhill for me due to the poor decisions of devs and the way part the community behaves during games. It was the only "authentic" WW1 Shooter back then which was fun play for hours during its early access phase in 2013-2015 and it and wasn't too arcadey like BF1.

Would I recommend Verdun? Yes, just play it during the evening whereever you are! It's still good despite the issues I mentioned