Divided Opinion

It took me until the 15 hour mark to actually get going on the next story mission. That is to say, I spent about 14 hours just exploring Prague: breaking into people's apartments, reading their emails, stealing all their stuff. There is so, so much to explore in this world's nooks and crannies. It scratches that Skyrim itch all over again, of scouring an open-world map and scrounging up all its garbage items.

I'm certain that most of the notes I'm reading, about Pavel joining a gang or Ivenka being deported or whatever the fuck, will never lead anywhere relevant to the main story. But the amount of attention that's paid to these trivial little side-stories is engrossing and awe-inspiring.

(I wish that the NPC voice acting was good enough to meet the same bar. Most of these throwaway actors sound like they were pulled off the streets of Montreal, and do a poor job of pretending to be Czech.)

Unfortunately, one unintended side-effect of my explore-and-collect strategy is that it ended up hitting a pretty major crash bug. Even my fully-upgraded inventory gets completely full of picked-up junk, and if I try to drop a bunch of items to make room for more pickups, it goes kaboom. That's an ... embarrassing problem to have.

Anyway, aside from said crash, Mankind Divided does considerably better than Human Revolution did in terms of performance and reliability. Yeah, the menus are still sometimes wonkier than they should be with a mouse. But otherwise pretty good.

And while I'm not 100% convinced of it, I strongly believe that I've already passed some "boss fight" points in the game, where I would have had to fight a big-bad if not for my formidable hacking reconnaissance. Winning with my own strategy, instead of being forced to use one I'm not interested in; Mankind Divided delivers more strongly on that than ever.