knitdanIn ur baseKillin ur guysRegistered Userregular
I hated Niflheim to start with but then once it clicked it became one of my favorite areas. If I had a section with a bunch of wulvers and witches I’d often just run to the next section or if it was early enough I’d just toss myself into a spike wall and restart the run.
“I was quick when I came in here, I’m twice as quick now”
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
0
Options
Dr. ChaosPost nuclear nuisanceRegistered Userregular
edited July 2018
Fuckin wulvers.
Revenants can be annoying but those guys are just a major pain in the ass late game.
Novelization incoming. Written by Cory Barlog's father to boot. Might pick it up if it offers more insight into what Kratos got up to between GoW3 and now, and maybe some back story on Faye.
Everyone has a price. Throw enough gold around and someone will risk disintegration.
Well goddamn... That's way more effort than I expected. Not that the devs are lazy or anything, I just wasn't expecting NG+ to also include new gear and enemy types.
Also, I'm sure everyone's seen the videos and stuff already, but GoW pulled in $131 million in digital sales alone, and sold 3 million copies in the first three days after launch. Crazy!
Everyone has a price. Throw enough gold around and someone will risk disintegration.
-Relive the journey of Kratos and Atreus with all of your previous armours, enchantments, talismans, resources and abilities on the difficulty of your choosing.
-Test your skills against higher level enemies; some of which might even have a few new tricks up their sleeves!
-Unique to New Game+ is a brand new rarity level of equipment to craft and upgrade! Collect ‘Skap Slag’, a new resource to upgrade your gear to the best of the best from our finest blacksmiths.
-Play the game in a whole new way by exploring new customisation options with extremely powerful new armour sets and enchantments.
-Finally, get right back into the action with the newly added ability to skip through cinematics in both normal and New Game+ modes once a full play through has been completed.
Oh man. I am totally doing a new play through. Higher level enemies and higher level gear is the best way to do a NG+ You get to keep all your fancy stuff and it keeps it from becoming totally boring.
0
Options
The_SpaniardIt's never lupinesIrvine, CaliforniaRegistered Userregular
Oops, asked in the wrong thread via search. I'll repost here.
I recently started playing myself and I just got Ivaldi's Corrupted Mind. I'm wondering if that stacks with the pommels that have a low perk activation chance of weakening enemies, or if I should swap out the Axe/Blade's pommels now that I have Ivaldi's Corrupted Mind that passively does it to all enemies in a radius.
Oops, asked in the wrong thread via search. I'll repost here.
I recently started playing myself and I just got Ivaldi's Corrupted Mind. I'm wondering if that stacks with the pommels that have a low perk activation chance of weakening enemies, or if I should swap out the Axe/Blade's pommels now that I have Ivaldi's Corrupted Mind that passively does it to all enemies in a radius.
It does stack, yes. But if you also have the Shattered Gauntlet of Ages, you'll want to socket the rune in there.
0
Options
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Picked this up on sale last week. Liked the story, kinda let down by the ending (not in terms of quality, which was great, just in terms of where it ends), and I was hugely unimpressed with the combat.
Honestly, I'd label the combat design as flat-out bad. It's like it's trying to ape the Dark Souls games for most of the game, but without really having the design quality to at all justify the hugely grindy levels of enemy health and excessive damage. And the camera angle for combat is so terrible; how about just letting me fucking see what's around me, instead of spamming the screen with ugly, clumsy arrows? Bad battle design is also chronic. If nearly every one of your boss fights involves tossing multiple additional enemies at the player and frequently putting unreachable projectile enemies at their back, your boss fight design is fucking awful. Either make the fights shorter, or put in the effort to actually make the fight interesting. The first time I fought a troll, I figured I was doing something wrong because of how many hits it took and how easy it was to dodge; turns out there was no trick, it was just a really lame enemy that never gets better.
Doesn't really help that the enemy variety is pretty poor, with the vast bulk of the combat in the game being the same 6-7 enemies reskinned in various ways. I figure that's why they spam enemies during boss fights, to try and cover up how bad the combat variety is. And enemies with inexplicable immunity to certain attack types? That's about as lazy as it gets for trying to pad out gameplay. I can kill a fucking dragon, but somehow a random mook can completely nullify getting hit with the axe... because it's a frost axe and they're frost enemies.
I was genuinely irritated when I got to about 2/3rds of the way through the game before finally getting weapons that weren't clumsy as shit and were actually enjoyable to use. Even then, the various combat options are so clumsy in their own ways that meshing them together is far, far more trouble than it's worth; once I got the proper Kratos weapons back, there was virtually never any reason to use anything else except when forced to by enemy immunity.
Best decision I made in the game was cranking the difficulty down to the minimum, just to stop having to deal with absolute snorefest of combat. Kratos can toss a thousand-ton rock on a guy or get punched through a cliff face, but has to hit some random mook twenty times to kill it and dies in two hits himself? He can fall half a mile and land uninjured, but can get one-shotted by a largish sword? Hell, how about just giving me an actual damn health regen between fights, this "healthstone" crap is gamey and clumsy as fuck.
So much of the game just feels contrived, and it's perpetually and painfully obvious. I came away from the game feeling like the combat was just a big chore to get to the story parts.
0
Options
Johnny ChopsockyScootaloo! We have to cook!Grillin' HaysenburgersRegistered Userregular
I don't think I can agree with a single one of your combat opinions there, Ninja Snarl P. I guess it just clicked and latched onto a thing I wanted more for me than it did for you.
Everyone has a price. Throw enough gold around and someone will risk disintegration.
+12
Options
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
edited August 2018
The gameplay started getting somewhere towards the end, but everything before that felt like the devs were making the player play crippled in order to really drag out the power curve. I'd say the last 10-15% of the game is about where the gameplay should have started at the very beginning. If somebody had handed me a NG+ to start with, I think I'd view the game a lot more favorably.
I mean, I haven't played a God of War game since, I dunno, the first or second one? It's been a long time. And I still ended up wondering why they took the game from "fast and awesome" to "clumsy and slow". Or why I can go from super-badass in what is essentially a cutscene, to getting two-shotted from behind by a random low-level enemy because the devs took about ten steps back on the camera view design.
The vast majority of the combat was just an exercise in frustration for me, like the devs completely ignored anything from any other combat games that do it a lot better and even mostly threw out or held back the gameplay unique to the series. I never felt the kind of achievement I did from progressing in Dark Souls or Bloodborne from getting through a fight, I was just glad it was over with so I could stop hitting the same dull enemy twenty times and finally move on with the story. It's just a never-ending pile of cheap tricks and annoying limitations to try and force artificial difficulty, instead of actually challenging the player with high-risk high-reward combat.
I'd argue that the game is built around high-risk/high-reward combat. But if you didn't vibe with the combat then so be it. I don't think anyone here's going to really try to change your mind on it.
0
Options
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
edited August 2018
It seemed to be a whole lot more "high risk, low reward" to me. At anything above the lowest difficulty setting, enemies have so much HP that it gets absurd, but they don't really get any more challenging. The attacks you can see are telegraphed from a mile away, but even a successful counter means loads and loads of just chopping away. And the same enemy you fight at the start of the game does the same thing as his reskinned cousin at the end.
Something like the Dark Souls series makes countering tougher, but it also makes countering worthwhile; you can counter and get critical hits as a reward, even on bosses. For this game, the countering is dead easy but it's so dang boring having to hit the same enemy a couple dozen times to finally bring them down. About the only "difficult" part is when the fights just throw a bunch of enemies at your back, which is most fights. You just want to focus a damn enemy down, but have to dodge away constantly to make sure you can actually see what you're doing and not get clocked from behind by one arrow out of a pile of arrows. The "challenge" comes from crowd control while the game does everything it can to hold back on decent crowd control abilities; once you get the axes back, boom, all these chump enemies permanently become the chumps they should be if you weren't stuck chopping away at them one at a time from a foot and a half away or waiting on ability cooldowns.
Kratos is an ancient Greek murder machine of a god and he's hitting enemies with a whiffle ball bat while he seems to be made of glass. Probably wouldn't have minded if they'd had him depowered for the story or something, but nope, he's supposedly full-on Kratos from the start.
The axe throwing was one of the most innovative combat methods I've seen come out of AAA gaming in years
+5
Options
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
After giving it a bit more thought, I think I should amend my criticism for the combat to "decent combat system, it just takes way too damn long for the game to get to it". Because ultimately the problem was that by the time I got to the point where Kratos finally felt like Kratos instead of somebody who was inexplicably indestructible for cutscenes and one big glass jaw for everything else, I was too annoyed with the combat limitations and I just wanted to wrap up the game. The tools are there for decent combat, but the devs end up making it something like a 9-hour tutorial to get those tools.
0
Options
knitdanIn ur baseKillin ur guysRegistered Userregular
My personal handwave to that whole thing is
As Gods go, the Greeks are a bunch of coddled softies. They grew up around the Mediterranean where life is easy and food is plentiful.
Norse gods grew up where the two main crops are ice and rocks
So of course the Greek God of War is going to struggle against even the most basic mooks at first.
“I was quick when I came in here, I’m twice as quick now”
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
It isn't really possible to reconcile how quickly you can die in these kinds of games with how powerful the characters are supposed to be / are in cutscenes.
The game would be a snoozefest if you were actually as powerful as Kratos is because nothing other than other gods can really threaten him seriously. This isn't exactly unique to GoW either, whether it's Dante from DMC or Bayonetta or any number of other action games, the player character has to be nerfed to provide some actual challenge.
Now I'd agree enemies become a little too HP spongey on the hardest two settings, and also that the enemy variety is lacking. But overall I really like the combat style and the camera angle.
Steam / Xbox Live: WSDX NNID: W-S-D-X 3DS FC: 2637-9461-8549
0
Options
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
In terms of why Kratos swings wildly between "angry sponge" and "slab of deathcrete", depowering Kratos, even after the opening sequence, would be no big deal. A million other games have done something similar, and you don't end up with this absurdity where he's effectively immortal one moment and then falls to a stubbed toe the next moment. There's all sorts of magic and monsters around that he has no idea about, it would be incredibly easy to just have him get hit with some kind of Norse magic whammy that takes him a while to work his way free. Heck, just have him be weaker because he's so far from home or something, and has to work his way back up to full strength.
I get the practical reason for why Kratos is crap to start with, it just feels really really poorly handled in an otherwise-great story. And having the blades held back so long felt like nothing more than a really cheap way to try and force some challenge into the game by crippling the player; the way they come up in the story is great, but my gameplay experience was not even remotely improved by the wait. Once I got the blades, I never even pulled out the axe save for puzzles or enemy immunities.
Additionally, the problem of the easy, simple puzzles that should be trivialized by Kratos' strength, except he somehow keeps forgetting that he can handily jam his axe into a rock or, hell, jam his hands into rock. At least for that, I can cover up the hole in the writing by just assuming it's because Kratos is teaching his son how to do things without sheer brute strength, so he chooses to do everything the hard way.
Not that I was a fan of most of the puzzles in general. They were mostly pretty bland, and the ones attached to chests could be especially grating; pixel hunting for blue runes is not my idea of fun. But at least those are optional.
I'm guessing everyone is done with this game. I was lucky enough to get it for Xmas, but I'm really struggling to get in to it. I'm at Alfheim at the moment and the combat feels kind of... bad? I dread every time the game slows for a battle, not because they're particularly tough but just because it feels a bit...clumsy.
I'll give it a bit longer because the game has won a ridiculous number of GOTY awards, but up to now it's not really doing anything for me. Pretty though.
I'm guessing everyone is done with this game. I was lucky enough to get it for Xmas, but I'm really struggling to get in to it. I'm at Alfheim at the moment and the combat feels kind of... bad? I dread every time the game slows for a battle, not because they're particularly tough but just because it feels a bit...clumsy.
I'll give it a bit longer because the game has won a ridiculous number of GOTY awards, but up to now it's not really doing anything for me. Pretty though.
Combat does open up as you unlock abilities and equipment, so I would recommend sticking with it for a bit longer. I recall feeling a bit restricted when I got to Alfheim and was fighting flying dudes there. No shame if you decide it isn't for you, though.
I'm guessing everyone is done with this game. I was lucky enough to get it for Xmas, but I'm really struggling to get in to it. I'm at Alfheim at the moment and the combat feels kind of... bad? I dread every time the game slows for a battle, not because they're particularly tough but just because it feels a bit...clumsy.
I'll give it a bit longer because the game has won a ridiculous number of GOTY awards, but up to now it's not really doing anything for me. Pretty though.
I picked it up at some point last year and it probably wasn't until about the last 10-15% of the game, after you get all the weapons, where I found the combat finally reached anything I would consider moderately okay. Before that point, I was just perpetually frustrated with how utterly utterly crippled Kratos felt compared to every other game I've played him in, and how stiff and ungainly the combat was in general. It really didn't help that enemies are repetitive damage sinks, and the level system is a clumsily artificial way of trying to pad out the gametime.
I was enjoying this game, but set it down to get ready for my move and somehow never picked it up again. I keep thinking I might finish it (someday) but I already have a ton of stuff in my queue and not enough time for that already so who knows?
I was enjoying this game, but set it down to get ready for my move and somehow never picked it up again. I keep thinking I might finish it (someday) but I already have a ton of stuff in my queue and not enough time for that already so who knows?
I hate when this happens. I've noticed if I don't finish a game before something big then it'll get lost forever... Including motivation to complete it.
I'm guessing everyone is done with this game. I was lucky enough to get it for Xmas, but I'm really struggling to get in to it. I'm at Alfheim at the moment and the combat feels kind of... bad? I dread every time the game slows for a battle, not because they're particularly tough but just because it feels a bit...clumsy.
I'll give it a bit longer because the game has won a ridiculous number of GOTY awards, but up to now it's not really doing anything for me. Pretty though.
I really disliked the combat at first and I recall being in Alfheim thinking, "Maybe this one just isn't for me". Combat was tough and felt really repetitive and boring despite my dying all the time and it seemed like there was too much empty space without story in it and just really lackluster.
Stick with it. I think it was shortly after the first trip through Alfheim that it turned a corner for me and became one of my probably top 5 games of the last couple years. By the end I thought the combat was excellent and it wasn't just a matter of getting used to it or getting good; the skills and stuff don't seem like a big deal but they really change the feel and flow of fights and some of the equipment you'll unlock later is revelatory.
I'm a bit further in now with a big boss fight, this is more what I think of when I think God of War! Combat has got a little more intuitive and I've unlocked a few more useful moves.
Enemy variety is pretty poor though, it's largely all the same type of bad guy with a troll thrown in every now and then. It's nice to have a decent boss in here at last.
I'll definitely finish it up, but up to now I can't say I see the "Game of the Year" hype personally but at least I've largely moved beyond "confusion" in to "enjoying it".
I also was really not feeling the combat at first. Just a lot of getting yourself punched in the back from things you couldn't see, and that little indicator felt like a band-aid for that poor design. That said, I actually got used to it, and the big thing is that in addition to that little indicator you'll actually get vocal warnings from Atreus and Mimir if something is coming from your side or behind. Realizing and listening to that made things a lot better and I stopped getting suckerpunched. I still don't think the combat is as utterly amazing as other people think and I'd certainly change a few things, but I was able to finally enjoy fighting groups of enemies without getting pissed off.
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
Posts
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
Revenants can be annoying but those guys are just a major pain in the ass late game.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
https://blog.us.playstation.com/2018/08/08/god-of-war-new-game-launches-august-20/
Also, I'm sure everyone's seen the videos and stuff already, but GoW pulled in $131 million in digital sales alone, and sold 3 million copies in the first three days after launch. Crazy!
Oh man. I am totally doing a new play through. Higher level enemies and higher level gear is the best way to do a NG+ You get to keep all your fancy stuff and it keeps it from becoming totally boring.
I recently started playing myself and I just got Ivaldi's Corrupted Mind. I'm wondering if that stacks with the pommels that have a low perk activation chance of weakening enemies, or if I should swap out the Axe/Blade's pommels now that I have Ivaldi's Corrupted Mind that passively does it to all enemies in a radius.
It does stack, yes. But if you also have the Shattered Gauntlet of Ages, you'll want to socket the rune in there.
Honestly, I'd label the combat design as flat-out bad. It's like it's trying to ape the Dark Souls games for most of the game, but without really having the design quality to at all justify the hugely grindy levels of enemy health and excessive damage. And the camera angle for combat is so terrible; how about just letting me fucking see what's around me, instead of spamming the screen with ugly, clumsy arrows? Bad battle design is also chronic. If nearly every one of your boss fights involves tossing multiple additional enemies at the player and frequently putting unreachable projectile enemies at their back, your boss fight design is fucking awful. Either make the fights shorter, or put in the effort to actually make the fight interesting. The first time I fought a troll, I figured I was doing something wrong because of how many hits it took and how easy it was to dodge; turns out there was no trick, it was just a really lame enemy that never gets better.
Doesn't really help that the enemy variety is pretty poor, with the vast bulk of the combat in the game being the same 6-7 enemies reskinned in various ways. I figure that's why they spam enemies during boss fights, to try and cover up how bad the combat variety is. And enemies with inexplicable immunity to certain attack types? That's about as lazy as it gets for trying to pad out gameplay. I can kill a fucking dragon, but somehow a random mook can completely nullify getting hit with the axe... because it's a frost axe and they're frost enemies.
I was genuinely irritated when I got to about 2/3rds of the way through the game before finally getting weapons that weren't clumsy as shit and were actually enjoyable to use. Even then, the various combat options are so clumsy in their own ways that meshing them together is far, far more trouble than it's worth; once I got the proper Kratos weapons back, there was virtually never any reason to use anything else except when forced to by enemy immunity.
Best decision I made in the game was cranking the difficulty down to the minimum, just to stop having to deal with absolute snorefest of combat. Kratos can toss a thousand-ton rock on a guy or get punched through a cliff face, but has to hit some random mook twenty times to kill it and dies in two hits himself? He can fall half a mile and land uninjured, but can get one-shotted by a largish sword? Hell, how about just giving me an actual damn health regen between fights, this "healthstone" crap is gamey and clumsy as fuck.
So much of the game just feels contrived, and it's perpetually and painfully obvious. I came away from the game feeling like the combat was just a big chore to get to the story parts.
Steam ID XBL: JohnnyChopsocky PSN:Stud_Beefpile WiiU:JohnnyChopsocky
I mean, I haven't played a God of War game since, I dunno, the first or second one? It's been a long time. And I still ended up wondering why they took the game from "fast and awesome" to "clumsy and slow". Or why I can go from super-badass in what is essentially a cutscene, to getting two-shotted from behind by a random low-level enemy because the devs took about ten steps back on the camera view design.
The vast majority of the combat was just an exercise in frustration for me, like the devs completely ignored anything from any other combat games that do it a lot better and even mostly threw out or held back the gameplay unique to the series. I never felt the kind of achievement I did from progressing in Dark Souls or Bloodborne from getting through a fight, I was just glad it was over with so I could stop hitting the same dull enemy twenty times and finally move on with the story. It's just a never-ending pile of cheap tricks and annoying limitations to try and force artificial difficulty, instead of actually challenging the player with high-risk high-reward combat.
Something like the Dark Souls series makes countering tougher, but it also makes countering worthwhile; you can counter and get critical hits as a reward, even on bosses. For this game, the countering is dead easy but it's so dang boring having to hit the same enemy a couple dozen times to finally bring them down. About the only "difficult" part is when the fights just throw a bunch of enemies at your back, which is most fights. You just want to focus a damn enemy down, but have to dodge away constantly to make sure you can actually see what you're doing and not get clocked from behind by one arrow out of a pile of arrows. The "challenge" comes from crowd control while the game does everything it can to hold back on decent crowd control abilities; once you get the axes back, boom, all these chump enemies permanently become the chumps they should be if you weren't stuck chopping away at them one at a time from a foot and a half away or waiting on ability cooldowns.
Kratos is an ancient Greek murder machine of a god and he's hitting enemies with a whiffle ball bat while he seems to be made of glass. Probably wouldn't have minded if they'd had him depowered for the story or something, but nope, he's supposedly full-on Kratos from the start.
I hope you find something more enjoyable for the next game you play.
As Gods go, the Greeks are a bunch of coddled softies. They grew up around the Mediterranean where life is easy and food is plentiful.
Norse gods grew up where the two main crops are ice and rocks
So of course the Greek God of War is going to struggle against even the most basic mooks at first.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
The game would be a snoozefest if you were actually as powerful as Kratos is because nothing other than other gods can really threaten him seriously. This isn't exactly unique to GoW either, whether it's Dante from DMC or Bayonetta or any number of other action games, the player character has to be nerfed to provide some actual challenge.
Now I'd agree enemies become a little too HP spongey on the hardest two settings, and also that the enemy variety is lacking. But overall I really like the combat style and the camera angle.
I get the practical reason for why Kratos is crap to start with, it just feels really really poorly handled in an otherwise-great story. And having the blades held back so long felt like nothing more than a really cheap way to try and force some challenge into the game by crippling the player; the way they come up in the story is great, but my gameplay experience was not even remotely improved by the wait. Once I got the blades, I never even pulled out the axe save for puzzles or enemy immunities.
Additionally, the problem of the easy, simple puzzles that should be trivialized by Kratos' strength, except he somehow keeps forgetting that he can handily jam his axe into a rock or, hell, jam his hands into rock. At least for that, I can cover up the hole in the writing by just assuming it's because Kratos is teaching his son how to do things without sheer brute strength, so he chooses to do everything the hard way.
Not that I was a fan of most of the puzzles in general. They were mostly pretty bland, and the ones attached to chests could be especially grating; pixel hunting for blue runes is not my idea of fun. But at least those are optional.
Well, OK, I used lightning arrows for groups, but still.
voice acting is by Lanipator, of DragonBallZ Abridged notoriety.
Steam - NotoriusBEN | Uplay - notoriusben | Xbox,Windows Live - ThatBEN
I'll give it a bit longer because the game has won a ridiculous number of GOTY awards, but up to now it's not really doing anything for me. Pretty though.
PSN: SirGrinchX
Oculus Rift: Sir_Grinch
Combat does open up as you unlock abilities and equipment, so I would recommend sticking with it for a bit longer. I recall feeling a bit restricted when I got to Alfheim and was fighting flying dudes there. No shame if you decide it isn't for you, though.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
I picked it up at some point last year and it probably wasn't until about the last 10-15% of the game, after you get all the weapons, where I found the combat finally reached anything I would consider moderately okay. Before that point, I was just perpetually frustrated with how utterly utterly crippled Kratos felt compared to every other game I've played him in, and how stiff and ungainly the combat was in general. It really didn't help that enemies are repetitive damage sinks, and the level system is a clumsily artificial way of trying to pad out the gametime.
I loved everything that wasn't combat, though.
I hate when this happens. I've noticed if I don't finish a game before something big then it'll get lost forever... Including motivation to complete it.
I found past versions floaty and 90% of combats where just brainless chores with zero challenge
I really disliked the combat at first and I recall being in Alfheim thinking, "Maybe this one just isn't for me". Combat was tough and felt really repetitive and boring despite my dying all the time and it seemed like there was too much empty space without story in it and just really lackluster.
Stick with it. I think it was shortly after the first trip through Alfheim that it turned a corner for me and became one of my probably top 5 games of the last couple years. By the end I thought the combat was excellent and it wasn't just a matter of getting used to it or getting good; the skills and stuff don't seem like a big deal but they really change the feel and flow of fights and some of the equipment you'll unlock later is revelatory.
Enemy variety is pretty poor though, it's largely all the same type of bad guy with a troll thrown in every now and then. It's nice to have a decent boss in here at last.
I'll definitely finish it up, but up to now I can't say I see the "Game of the Year" hype personally but at least I've largely moved beyond "confusion" in to "enjoying it".
PSN: SirGrinchX
Oculus Rift: Sir_Grinch