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Notes -
I heard about Nox via a breathless manifesto on its alleged perfect PvP balance. I can’t find it now, but it was one of those notepad docs, and it had strong opinions on most every spell and skill interaction between the classes. Depth! Mind games! Wizarding!
So I downloaded it, started the story, and found myself standing on a beach in a t-shirt, hitting crabs with a stick. Yeah, I’m with you on this one.
Yeah, the solo and story mode of the game were... pretty uninspired. There's probably some important role they played in building toward the modern action adventure RPG (and maybe even a bit of modern MMOs) as a step away from Diablo-likes, but at best it's extremely dated, and more often it's reason to get pushed to other better games of the same era.
Multiplayer was fun back at the time. I wouldn't exactly write a big paper drooling over it, because it did develop a lot of jank pretty quickly (and then EA killed the servers), but you could tell that it was actually trying for some level of good multiplayer play (contrast eg: Mechwarrior 3's PPC meta).
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