This game is coming out in one week, which is surprising. I would have expected more attention. I dug around a little, found some previews, and discovered why there wasn't much hype.
Every preview I saw raised serious concerns. I didn't see any previews that were largely positive and enthusiastic. Most of the previews raised concerns about the combat, and several raised other concerns about the storytelling or design.
Here are some excerpts from five previews I read:
"The combat itself just feels a bit janky. Dodgy animations, some awkward controls and repetitiousness work against the combat - especially when you're bullied by more than a single enemy at a time.
"Vampyr is tough, we get that - it's designed to punish you for not embracing your vampirism. But paired with awkward controls, confusing hitboxes, framerate lag and more... well, it becomes unfun."
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/tech/ga...lawed-moral-dilemma-of-a-game-xbox-one-ps4-pc
"The Vampyr session started an hour and forty-five minutes ago, and I'm seriously wondering if I putting down the controller, thanking my hosts and leaving before the end would miraculously pass for something other than rude impoliteness. Several fellow journalists felt the same, all stuck on the same sequence of the demo, peeking feverishly at the screens of their comrades, for fear of being the only bad player in the group. Everything had started very well, one good surprise after another. But once Dr. Jonathan Reid started his first real fights with a weapon in hand, damn, what an impossible beatdown. There is something rotten in the kingdom of Vampyr, and Dontnod has four short months to clean that up."
https://www.gamekult.com/jeux/vampyr-3050394023/test.html
"This is the confusion of Vampyr. It’s a game that tells me that taking a life matters, but then finds ways to throw disposable enemies at me whenever I leave the safety of the hospital. It’s a game that wants me to consider my choice of victim, but I’m only killing them so that I can unlock awesome new murdery vampire abilities. And I was shocked by how quickly it moves from being the story of a freshly turned vampire to being a game in which the existence of vampires, in various forms, and the presence of a vampire-killing cult in central London is entirely ordinary. Some of the mystery of the myth is waved aside far too quickly.
"Two hours is far from enough to judge the game as a whole and my hope is that I’ve been scratching at an unappealingly scabby surface and if I’d been able to keep at it, I’d have found that sweet blood I craved. Only time will tell, but for now, I’m going to proceed with caution."
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/02/14/vampyr-preview/
"Unfortunately, from the two hours I played at a recent preview event, it appears Vampyr doesn’t live up to either of Dontnod’s previous efforts."
"Vampyr is unsatisfying from the start. For a game that has been pitched as one of choice and consequence, where you interact with a whole city of people, choosing who lives and dies to sate your thirst, it is disappointingly linear."
"The only people you encounter in the smog-filled streets are characterless vampire hunters and blood-starved vampiric creatures who exist only to be killed by you. There is no talking to them or avoiding them. This wouldn’t be such an obvious blemish if it weren’t for the shallow combat."
"I found Vampyr’s combat too rough to be much fun. My attacks didn’t appear to combo, so the animations repeated without flow, becoming awkward and dull."
https://www.pcgamesn.com/vampyr/vampyr-combat-story
"It’s always a shame when you finally get your hands on a game for the first time, after you’ve been following it for years and have always liked what you’ve seen and heard, only to be left sadly disappointed by it. While I still believe there is a lot of potential in Vampyr’s core concept and that longer time needs to be spent with it to fully see the effect of your decisions, from the two hours I spent playing I felt the excursion in a number of key areas was well off the mark."
"I just thought a lot of the dialogue writing and the voice acting was so poor that I was constantly dragged out of the moment. So many of the conversations were littered with really stilted dialogue that felt so disjointed. For instance, a barman said to me: “have you heard about the murders?” and Reid replies with: “tell me about these murders?” Absolutely nobody in reality talks like that! There was no sign of surprise or horror, just repeating what the barman has just said. There was umpteen examples of this and when so much of a game involves long conversations, when there is so much talking, it’s imperative that it’s engaging throughout. Oh, it’s especially weird when you notice that the top half of characters’ heads don’t move at all."
"The second biggest aspect of Vampyr – combat – was also a disappointment as well. Now, I will cut some slack as I had made things harder for myself by choosing not to feast and so I didn’t get access to some upgrade attacks (even though most of the skills on the skill tree were really boring stat increases that you don’t see), but regardless I found the combat to be repetitive and dull. There’s just one optimum way of dealing with enemies, so there’s never any variation."
http://www.godisageek.com/2018/02/v...mechanics-but-still-has-a-bit-of-a-way-to-go/
Those previews were from mid-February, so Dontnod only had 3 or 4 months to change things before release. I seriously doubt that with only a few months, they would've been able to overhaul combat, design, and dialog enough to address all these issues.
