LegalBagel

This is also where I'm coming down on the game about 25 hours in. The pacing just feels off compared to the last game. Lots of areas feel longer than they need to be, and often it feels like their default solution to add 30-60 minutes to every area and sidequest is "insert 6 more random battles and 3 easy puzzles that take several minutes to solve." Even when it's completely unnecessary or makes no sense. Rarely you'll get a unique boss battle or interesting puzzle, but usually it's a bunch of trash encounters and find-the-pixel that often sap the momentum.

I get wanting to break up the action and story with some variety, but it just doesn't feel right, especially for a 40-60+ hour game. Add in the myriad different upgrade menus and equipment slots that the game wants you to slog through constantly and I'm struggling to keep going. Luckily whenever I'm on the verge of dropping, the game feeds a big story beat or mixes up the gameplay enough to get me back in.

Yeah, after hearing all the complaints I was expecting nothing, but checked my wishlist of games and nearly half of them are on there if I bump up one tier. Returnal, Demon's Souls, and Miles Morales were all games I was looking to get now that I finally got a PS5 this month. Even if I bought them all on a like 50-60% off sale like I was expecting, that's still more than the price of a year subscription.

Though I suppose the problem will be down the road when Sony releases the new God of War or other notable games and gives everyone the choice of buying for $70 at launch or waiting the 1-2+ years until they decide to put it on your subscription service. At that point it's going to be pretty annoying to have to do that dance and wonder what you're paying for compared to Game Pass.

I feel like they've compensated for that by how much stamina you have now. I can viscerally recall when I had finally upgraded my endurance in Dark Souls 1 enough that I could now swing my sword four times instead of three before I ran out of stamina.

In Elden Ring I've barely touched my endurance and I almost never run out of stamina. I can get like ten sword swings in and roll like crazy without ever thinking about stamina. Makes crowd management and boss dodging a lot easier if you can just spam attacks or dodges without much consequence.

SMT V

I'm curious how much they can actually facilitate refunds on consoles given that the digital marketplaces are notorious for not allowing refunds. Also the fact that they're cutting off the refund period in a week is pretty gross - you're still going to have a fair amount of people buying or receiving it over the holidays, booting up their console, and then realizing its an unplayable mess.

But overall this doesn't even come close to counteracting the bad faith in them launching the game in a nightmarish state while preventing every outlet from telling anyone that was the case. That's not something you can just apologize for, make a half-hearted attempt to make good, and go back to being the beloved, scrappy devs that love the gamers unlike those other big, evil companies.

I'm sure they'll patch the hell out of it and burn another year of the development team's life fixing the game, but this isn't something your reputation can recover from easily. People will be talking about the Cyberpunk release nightmare and being wary of not buying into hype for any game they make/release for the next 5-10 years.

@toughshed: Thanks! There’s a very small amount of required stealth, and you can try to stealth takedown some enemies in an area, but otherwise it’s very open to you just running in like a Viking headlong to each situation.

I feel like the combat is slightly improved from Origins, especially once things open up with more skills. It’s largely the same set of parry or dodge attacks, mix in ranged attacks, use some abilities. But at least so far I haven’t run into damage sponge enemies or annoying encounters like the previous games. And there is some more variety in skill load outs and weapon options from what I’ve seen so far.

Agreed with how good this game is, they feel like they finally tuned their post-Origins open world / RPG design to something that works for me. Origins I liked for the story and some of the quests, but it took me quite a bit to finally finish it. Odyssey I dropped 30-odd hours into, but felt like I still had 100-hours left and it was overwhelming to make any progress. This corrects most of that:

Bite-size few minute sidestories and environmental puzzles when I feel like roaming around. Plus everything gives you something meaningful in terms of upgrade currency, collectibles, items, skills or XP. Those are laid out in contrast to bigger, multi-hour / multi-part questlines with memorable characters that get fleshed out for each area. Combined with eliminating the huge mercenary ladder from Odyssey and combining it with a more focused web of nefarious bad guys to hunt, and it never feels like I have a checklist of eighty quests or things to finish in each area.

Even 15-20 hours in I still only have one major questline, a few minor long-term questlines on my list, and a fairly manageable list of open-world exploration things to do in each area. It at least feels possible to 100% this game, and never feels overwhelming in terms of crap on my questlog and map. In comparison with 20 hours of Odyssey I had about two dozen major and minor quests, 10+ areas with another dozens of little things to do on the map, the giant order/mercenary trees, AND some other ancillary side-systems. And none of it felt rewarding to do!

On the systems side there's a completely fixed loot system focused around collecting sets of equipment and upgrading ones that fit your style. No more having to spend 10 minutes of every hour comparing and breaking down loot, or trying to find a new, higher level, higher rarity piece of equipment that fits your style. And an improved leveling system that gives you a good combination of standard numbers-go-up improvements to your "level" along with skills/upgrades, with a fun element of uncovering the web to see what skills are hidden. Skill points also come along at a fairly good clip if you're doing quests or exploring, so you don't have to worry too much about tossing them into things you like.

Overall just feels like they've learned from the mistakes of the previous two games and found an open-world style that works.

EDIT: One thing that I can complain about is that the game still has unfun open world jank. I've had several of the joint chest/door opening animations bug out and the lock me out of things. Climbing/parkour is finicky in parts and makes the "chase" mini-collectibles annoying to get. Stealth doesn't feel great and the spotting/line-of-sight on characters seems broken at times. None of it has broken the experience, but I do run into an annoying thing every hour or so.

After another week of play I think the shitty gacha elements (and bad luck) may push me away. I've gone through all my easy/free 10-pulls and have very little to show for it. One 5-star character I'm not sure I like that much, a bunch of OK 4-star characters, none of the big flashy characters they show off in the campaign. And now that I've burned through the starting currency and most easy sources, at the standard currency rates it's looking like I'll be only able to do a big set of wishes once a week or so. Pretty depressing.

I'm lucky I don't have the gambling impulses that cause me to spend money to counter the bad luck, but instead for these types of games a string of bad luck does tend to push me away entirely. I'll probably keep going with the main campaign and exploring, but trying to engage long-term with whatever high-end stuff they drop or trying to build a high-power team doesn't seem in the cards.

Surprisingly good! I can take or leave the obvious waifu element to almost all the characters and I'm still wary about how much the gachi/lootbox elements will end up limiting gameplay or progress. But in terms of the hours I've put in so far it is incredibly expansive and in many ways a better take on the Breath of the Wild elements that they cloned.

Breath of the Wild exploration and freedom to climb/glide, tons of little things to discover and little environmental puzzle elements, tons of random encounters and temples, and a fairly good combat system with elemental combinations undergirding it. And (unlike BotW) it has leveling/upgrade systems that are typical in this type of game, but actually make the exploration feel far more rewarding. I have lots of characters to level and I'm finding things that are useful and not just a weapon I'm going to toss or lose. BotW exploration was amazing, which held it together, but finding the same upgrade orbs from temples and interchangable degrading weapons got old pretty quick.

I'm still going through the initial story/tutorial elements, so I'm waiting to see how much they give you for free versus having to subject yourself to the whims of lootboxes. If there are crucial gameplay options or elemental pieces hidden behind a 1% gachi drop I'm going to sour on the game really quickly. But at least so far the 5 characters I've gotten for free have given a lot of gameplay and combat variety.

I played 15-20 hours in early access, managed to avoid playing the last few updates prior to release, and starting a fresh save on Switch has been amazing. I don't know if this game will have the 300+ hour deep gameplay of Slay the Spire or Binding of Isaac, where every run feels unique and the difficulty curve grows with you over time until it reaches top levels, but so far it has very much held up and keeps unlocking fun new things I haven't seen. And it is by several orders of magnitude the best storytelling in a run-based game - the amount of dialogue and unique interactions you see based on where you are and what has been done is just mind-boggling.

Just had my first win using the Rail last night. Got an Ares Boon that gave a huge Doom hit on attack, supplemented that with the support boon that makes Doom stack damage on multiple hits and the hammer that ramps up the Rail attack speed and ammo clip. Basically could roll around, unload 18 shots into enemies, then watch a 400+ damage Doom hit go off. Tons of of fun. The way they subtly push runs into certain builds and combined boons is really smart, while having artifacts and choices that lets you push towards your own ideas once you know the interactions better.

The only complaint I have is that the hammers seem like they are key to really switching things up and unlocking certain build types, and sometimes you can go runs completely without them. The most fun I've had is when I've gotten several hammers that combine to completely change how a weapon works, but that feels comparatively rare.