I think it goes to show you how bad things are but it does seem like a bunch of people are buying that game as a way of snubbing Ubisoft's artificial hyping which is pretty funny but this is a classic example of just because the crowds seem to like something doesn't mean you'll find it fun.
If Sony really does end up doing a purge of it's western studios though, the may be able to muscle in on market share simply by virtue of not being woke it doesn't change the fact that I think most open world titles are beyond boring and follow the ubisoft design philosophy. They're probably going to make millions simply by not following through on censorship half as much as other studios lol.
. Create empty open world with random NPCs that's way too big so even if it looks pretty there isn't that much to do
. Extremely awkward camera angles and behaviour you can't adjust to your liking
. Scatter collectible crap in it you barely use if you're simply going through the main story and it doesn't really have much impact on the story anyway
. Don't even attempt to try and play this game M&K
. Spam QTE on fucking everything even if you're just trying to do something like turn a wheel or stand up
Just something to be aware of if you see anyone trying to hype up these titles.
Glad its once again "because I don't like something, its trash and everyone who likes it is retarded normies."
Its a game with fun combat and a solid story mostly free of any modern wokeness (which is why mainstream media hated it on release, because of its "racism"). That's why people are buying it, its fun and it has a reputation for being so without any strings besides the open world being tacked on. Fortunately because its tacked on its so useless that you can also nearly completely ignore it and just chain missions. Not a defense of it, but literally nobody defends it either.
I refuse to double dip, especially full price, so I can't speak of any changes this Director's Cut and new island made from the original. But the entire reason anyone liked it was because the combat was fun and just felt good to play, as well as being a legitimate stealth game in an industry that hates those.
To be fair all those things could have been and are done by indie devs. That's not what make something corporate slop.
REAL YAKUZA USE A GAMEPAD
(jk I do prefer mkb but some types of games just work better with a pad even when both options are available)
Really it has QTE? Why is that still a thing? You're not calling "Tap X to turn wheel" QTE are you?
i just finished my second playthrough on pc two days ago, can't remember a singular QTE...
If it's not QTE what do we call it? Either way, I find it very annoying.
interacting with objects in a game?
Happens in cut scenes though as well.
there isn't a single qte in a cutscene in the game, are you talking about some other game? or are you literally talking about the one intro sequence interaction where it has you sneak into a house to grab your sword and calling a scripted mission a "qte"?
No when you press X to try and pick up your sword and then end up collapsing anyway as part of the 'story', a real case of, why even put that fucking sequence in and not just have it play as a normal cutscene?
I will never not rant about this sort of thing in games.
the part where you're already seemingly dead, and pressing x moves the cutscene forward and has you ball up your fist next to the sword before a cut to black? that's a rant-worthy qte?
you have awful taste. not only is it, as far as i remember, the only instance of such a cutscene input in the game (one that was so non-egregious i even forgot about it, as you could tell), but if anything, it's an effective use of player input in cutscenes. had it just been a cutscene, it woulda been some crappy marvel "wow he's not dead!! omg" shot.
so this is a miss, and you're exaggerating/lying just to yell about a video game that, by the sounds of it, you're bad at, since you're blaming the mouse and keyboard i just finished a full Lethal run on. you should probably keep to reviewing anime visual novels or whatever it is like you better set in japan.
okay, now that i'm finished being mean, do try the game out for real. Lethal is fun, it does what hard difficulties should do and makes both you and the enemy easy to kill, rather than it just being mega sponge city like Hard. the combat is predictably the best part of the game.
I don't think that's considered QTE no, though I do hate when games mix faux-interactivity and scripted sequences. (cutscene or not)
Press X unnecessarily during a cutscene to pick up your sword! PRESS X! PRESS IT! PRESS IT OR GAMEOVER! REEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
GoT is crap not because of QTE but because of Feminist bullshit
They made all the female NPC models look SUPER ugly and gave you tons of quests with "female samurai"
Despite the good graphics the story is shit too
My honest advise is to never simply progress past the first act as the game's writer decides to go full retard on the late game
I mean, the game spends a lot of time and effort saying that they are in fact retarded for acting like that. The entire point of the MC's character arc is learning how stupid those tactics are and how they are doomed to fail the moment they face an outside problem. Heck the first 20 seconds of the game are them telling you that, followed by the first stealth section, and the entire ending.
The only time it ever even pretends the "by any means necessary" has a downside is the section you are talking about where the Mongols learn from your actions that the poison plant exists and how it works, leading to them getting worse because of your actions and committing outright genocide in the last area.
True there were big consequences for using the poison but keep in mind japs weren't all about honor and shit, they also engaged in subterfuge (assassination included) so the whole moot point of "honor" feels like a flowery western outlook on Japanese history and not something that's thoroughly researched
I think its pretty obvious the point was to mimic Samurai movies (which is why it had Kurosawa mode as an option) and their mythologized version of that "honor" system rather than the historical thugs they actually were.
In the same way Ninja games are always about Kabuki theater dressed assassins creeping around on rooftops rather than a dude dressed like a peasant shooting a bow from across the field like they historically did.
Have you ever considered just not playing open world games? You clearly hate them. Why did you spend your time on it?
I don’t think it’s that, the game just doesn’t “click” for certain people, I dunno.
I play a lot of open worlds, and I absolutely loved this one at first, but it got stale for me REALLY quickly. I don’t know if it’s the wind blowing or the pan flutes or Jin’s delivery... but yeah, for some reason I can’t get beyond the first island without losing all interest. It’s just the same shit over and over - same enemy camps, same mission types, same fugly female companions.
Take for example an absolute shit game like Valhalla, came out broken and bug riddled around the same time as GoT, with all the same repetition, copy/paste enemy camps, ugly bitches etc, AS WELL AS all the sweet baby social cancer in it; as much as I viscerally hated that game, I think I honestly found it livelier and more interesting than GoT (and BELIEVE me I wanna kick my own ass like Ed Norton in fight club for saying that). About a year after my first attempt, I began to think maybe I should just give GoT another go, maybe I just needed to give it another chance, but I just got bored again.
I dunno, maybe it’s just too much of a slow burn for me. I won’t admonish others for enjoying it though, it was definitely made with good intentions and is legit one of the most beautiful games I’ve ever seen. It’s just not for me 🤷🏼♂️
I can’t say I played GoT, so maybe you’re right and there is something “off” with this particular open world. But Lethn raises this complaint about every open world game. He doesn’t like it as a design choice. I’m not saying that just because he didn’t like this one.
GoT is very much a slow burn in the first zone, to a point where its an absolutely slog at times if you try to do all the open world stuff.
I think in the latter half of the second zone, when all the characters start to get to their climaxes in their arcs is when it shines most in terms of writing and characters.
Until then its really just a case of "do you find the combat fun on its own?" Which I did, and it carried me until the writing and pace picked up. But if its not making the time fly by for you, then its probably just not your game and that's not a bad thing for anyone.
I generally don't, I thought I'd check it out a bit though.
I agree with most stuff but curious what your problem is with the M&KB controls? Everything's rebindable and most of the defaults are intuitive, haven't noticed any problem with mouse smoothing and the cam control is okay except for certain tight angles where the cam turns to shit even on pad. It's leagues ahead of some of the problems I had with, say, Max Payne 3 back in the day.
I've had some hair-tearing moments with the gameplay, like the bullshit tracking attacks and jankily sped up attack animations on Lethal difficulty. The most annoying part for me is the checkpointing, where on death you have no penalty except that you get reset into a random nearby position while the enemies who killed you are usually randomly deleted from the world, so you don't even get a retry. That's for random encounters... die during a map/story location and it's way more arbitrary where you end up; could be somewhere in the middle, could be right at the beginning with all enemies respawned but some bonus objective progress saved, but also some of your consumed items gone... who knows. The fact that I haven't seen a single person complain about this tells me that maybe it's just the standard for open world slop these days so I've been well off avoiding it these past few years.
I'm also unimpressed that very few people online flagged up the latent feminism. Main char gets his life saved by a woman who on first introduction appears to be a crying helpless peasant but soon turns out to be a badass ladybandit who assassinates Mongols on a dime, also she's butt ugly. Dialogue can never resist reminding me she's a handful and always down for a fight. A little while later I encounter a grizzled, no-nonsense lady samurai who's the only survivor of her assassinated family; she's also ugly (because old), but since this one's angry and sad she's also rude and (obviously) a badass, plus a bit of a handful to control when we're trying to get information out of people. Then, in a sidequest, I encounter a samurai warrior who has arrived in the region to help train up the local resistance fighters - this warrior is, obviously, a lady. In a world first, she isn't very badass, but this turns out to be more of a gameplay device to force you to save her in a protect quest when her fearless anger (naturally she has this) causes her to charge head first into a fight. An utterly infuriating encounter on Lethal, to the extent I would have hated her no matter what kind of character she was otherwise. She was however slightly less ugly.
Next I decide to go on a treasure hunt for some antique legendary armour. The way to the treasure is littered with mongol bodies so I know it's guarded by a badass. Such a badass that it turns out to be my first taste of Tsushima's boss-like encounters, which I became more familiar with afterwards. The boss iiiiis... a no-nonsense lady samurai, highly skilled, the last of her line- wait, didn't we just do this unlikely archetype? Guess you can never have too many. Whatever. I was getting too jaded to note down how ugly this one was.
All this within the first few hours of what could be dozens if not hundreds of hours of gameplay. I get that in story terms, most of the fighting men have been killed by the mongols. Yet it's funny that there seem to still be plenty of fighting age men left among the dozens of dishonnaburru Japanese bandits I'm forced to slay, while the very first bandit I encountered in the entire world was my buttfaced lady sidekick who I now owe everything to, and never another female one since. How come the resistance is all ladybosses and the treacherous Japanese sellouts are all men? I will be completely unsurprised if I go the entire game without there being an interesting male ally character or male friendship.
Anyway the game is occasionally fun when you're allowed to engage with the core of the combat and not having to deal with trash gameplay conventions. The open world might not stack up to some others...? IDK, I'm not much of a judge of open worlds, but for me it's on a par in atmosphere and interactibles to parts of Witcher 3's Velen, in terms of being a wartorn medieval countryside with a believable soul and aesthetic. It's fun for me to explore and there's enough attention to detail to convince me much of this game was made with love (flute playing and Jin praying when you bow to corpses is a nice touch). But with that said it's at best a fun, pretty game that's obviously written by feminists. Much like Disco Elysium was a kind of cool game-prototype that was obviously made by communists. The fact it has only been maimed by ideology as opposed to completely destroyed by it seems like weak cause for celebration imo. I'm starting to think the overton window's shifted so much that the effect is just invisible to most.
It's like you went to Yapistan and back.
With all the solo raging I've been doing at the game, I had a lot to get off my chest. eat ittttt
Yeah the game is madly kiked with feminist writing
Maybe its actually a bad thing that soyny is releasing its garbage on PC...
LOL that took awhile to get through but I do agree with you generally, I do have rants about the woke aspects of gaming myself. However at the same time I like to point out that purely from a gameplay and technical standpoint, these games are incredibly average at best and fall into the usual corporate trappings of not understanding fun.
I think the core of the combat gameplay could have been fine. There's satisfying rewards for higher risk stuff like parrying and a decent RPS thing going on with the stances. But much like other aspects of the game, it's like they had a solid central idea then did everything they could to make it annoying. People call it 'arkham combat' but the arkham games have a tight sense of rhythm to enemy attacks and make your own attacks very sticky so it's hard to miss, within a combat framework that's all about style and combo retention.
With this game, the enemies attack totally chaotically, your own attacks don't 'stick' much at all (unless you turn on a lot of auto target stuff in the options which aren't the default), yet enemy attacks track like crazy. Like Witcher 3, there's 2 evasion options in the game for no reason except to stop dark souls fans from bitching about not having a roll. That forces them to balance fights around your crazy movement options, so enemies develop psychic skills to cover your roll with a long tracking attack or punish you for striking their comrade, unless you kite the shit out of them. I've seen them start a multi-attack string then track 180 degrees to perfectly punish my roll which I used to evade their first move. So why even put a roll in the game? I'd honestly turn it off and rely entirely on the dodge if I could, but they're the same button and there's loads of skills gated behind the roll skill. It wouldn't be quite so bad if half their shit wasn't unblockable and unseeably fast.
Stealth, I don't really give a shit about and I'm trying to stealth as little as possible.
Perfect example of this was in my last session where some mongols were storming an area with some friendly peasants around. The mechanic where one mongol will decide, from 100m away, to lock onto an unarmed friendly he can't even see and rush blindly towards them to take them out, at which point he turns into an obtrusive skull and crossbones symbol and it's all just a thinly disguised failure timer, is pure cancer. It made zero in-world sense either. None of the peasants were particularly significant in story terms and there's no reason a mongol soldier should be ignoring me to get to them. It's a bullshit way of forcing the player to do annoying pointless stuff, when they could just have me fight the fucking mongols, rather than create dynamic hostage rescue mechanics just because they can.
Iirc the most woke thing about ghost is the pandering to the women npcs and the fact one of them is lgbt
I enjoyed it when it came out, but never dove back in for the dlc. The three islands can feel very formulaic though. Like, it still commits the open world node collectithon sin which gets very repetitive. The rigid rock paper fighting stance system also really stifles creativity, like if you dare to not use a spicific stance for spicific enemies the game will pause and basicly force you to do it how it wants you to. Story wasn't bad, even if it made me want to personally throttle the pompous uncle for being so incredibly narrow minded. 7/10 imo
One funny thing about this game on release is the Japanese said the characters were too ugly.
Other than that it's solid, the game both romanticizes and deconstructs bushido in a way that's pretty fair. I don't think you'd get something similar from a western dev on any western history.
I think it's a good founding material sample. A torch in the dark to mark the way.