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Squeenix NieR: Automata from Yoko Taro and Platinum Games

Haplo

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Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
Normal here as well. My reflexes aren't that hot.
 

Suicidal

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Ok guys, confession time.

How long did it take you to beat the tutorial on hard? 3 hours 32 minutes for me.

Around 20 minutes. :smug:

I had played the demo 3 times on normal before trying hard so I kind of knew it by heart, so not really fair

Did you use a gamepad or KB&M?

Played it on the PS4, so gamepad.

Oh. I used KB&M and the controls for it are not very good to say the least. I was considering installing some mod that improves the KB&M controls but then I finally managed a successful prologue run and don't think that's gonna be necessary anymore because the prologue is the hardest part of the game, apparently.

Apart from the controls, the port seems quite good. Runs very well on max settings on my average (for today's standards) PC.
 

Suicidal

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Only a truly racist game would let you do something like this

AHJysU5.jpg
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
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Codex 2014

Zombra

An iron rock in the river of blood and evil
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Make the Codex Great Again! RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
So ... still enjoying the game ... when fighting, it seems like running away and shooting is 100% benefit. Hitting anything with a sword is just asking to take damage and get stunned, whereas being far away from enemies has no downside, except ... it's kind of boring. Am I crazy?
 

Jinn

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So ... still enjoying the game ... when fighting, it seems like running away and shooting is 100% benefit. Hitting anything with a sword is just asking to take damage and get stunned, whereas being far away from enemies has no downside, except ... it's kind of boring. Am I crazy?

First, what difficulty are you playing on?

Second, if it's the hardest, I found the most fun in engaging in melee in normal encounters. A lot of boss battles take advantage of both aspects of the gameplay very well. Automata is not difficult in the normally accepted game sense. The difficulty usually comes in the way the game actually challenges the way a player thinks they should play a game, in my opinion.

I've been feeling the urge to replay Automata already, so near to my almost full completion of it. It is very rare for me to feel that about a game I've finished so recently. The details of the game, the atmosphere, music, characters, multi-layered storyline, fun combat, sometimes strange mechanics are what are drawing me back. The whole game is so charming to me. I've got a soft spot for Taro and his game design though, having played the first Nier prior to this and appreciating the finer points of it.
 

Suicidal

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So ... still enjoying the game ... when fighting, it seems like running away and shooting is 100% benefit. Hitting anything with a sword is just asking to take damage and get stunned, whereas being far away from enemies has no downside, except ... it's kind of boring. Am I crazy?

The downside of only using your pea shooter is that everything takes 100 years to kill so you will probably die of old age IRL before you finish the game.
 

Zombra

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I'm playing Normal difficulty and haven't bought any weapon upgrades yet. Maybe if I buy better swords they will seem better.
 

Suicidal

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Don't think the enemy HP changes on hard. At least I seem to be killing things pretty quickly with the sword. It's just that nearly everything oneshots you.
 

Jinn

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I'm playing Normal difficulty and haven't bought any weapon upgrades yet. Maybe if I buy better swords they will seem better.

An anecdote about my first time playing Nier: Automata: I chose the very hard setting right from the beginning. I played through the opening sequence for about 3 hours, just getting decimated and having to start over. I didn't know that I could switch the difficulty mid-game, so I kept trying. I felt such a sense of despair, trying again and again to get past the opening of my much anticipated game. The opening line started to become clear to me. I felt such a sense of crushing defeat and jiltedness.

For me, when I understood that I could have switched it at any time was when I gained instant respect for Yoko Taro once again. He knew that people would start with that difficulty, and he decided to begin by making fun of them. Once I learned, I switched the difficulty level down by one, got through that part with very little difficulty, got to the next part, and switched it up again. After that I had a nice even level of difficulty, except for some part near the end where I believe this idea of player expectation is revisited again.

To me, all of that is brilliant. To some, it may be annoying and redundant.

Either way, the game has all sorts of surprises in store for you.
 

Jasede

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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut I'm very into cock and ball torture
No to Drakensang; NieR experience is recommended in the sense that it will make the very last 10% or so of the game more enjoyable by giving context to some scenes and explaining what happened to older characters. One or two emotional gut punches will also be completely missed by not having played NieR - which is clever of the game in the sense that if you have not played NieR you will not even realize these are surprises/punches in the first place; it will just be part of the story for you.

It is also good if you know the NieR 'twist' to get the final ending in that the game will subvert your expectation as to 'what are they gonna do this time I wonder?'
 

praetor

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No to Drakensang; NieR experience is recommended in the sense that it will make the very last 10% or so of the game more enjoyable by giving context to some scenes and explaining what happened to older characters. One or two emotional gut punches will also be completely missed by not having played NieR - which is clever of the game in the sense that if you have not played NieR you will not even realize these are surprises/punches in the first place; it will just be part of the story for you.

It is also good if you know the NieR 'twist' to get the final ending in that the game will subvert your expectation as to 'what are they gonna do this time I wonder?'

is there any good Nier LP around? i can't be arsed to dust off the ole PS3 and try to find a decent copy of the game online
 

Jasede

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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut I'm very into cock and ball torture
Well, the thing that made NieR and Drakengard popular in the west in the first place were The Dark Id's screenshot Let's Plays way, way, way back when an LP was pretty much a Something Awful exclusive thing. His LPs were in fact so popular that Yoko Taro took notice and sent him a bunch of stuff as thanks. Also... all the dialogue in Drakengard 3 is suspiciously close to The Dark Id's snarky comments, so much so that some people thought that the translators might have been inspired too much by these LP's.

https://lparchive.org/NIER/

That said, despite me usually advocating LP's for games that are not fun to play (I count NieR to that - it is merely average as a game) nobody can deny the impact will not be as intense as if you play it for yourself. But I recommend against it; NieR's endings require mandatory, enormous grinding - many hours of grinding, in fact. You will probably just YouTube the ending anyway at that point.
 

Haplo

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So ... still enjoying the game ... when fighting, it seems like running away and shooting is 100% benefit. Hitting anything with a sword is just asking to take damage and get stunned, whereas being far away from enemies has no downside, except ... it's kind of boring. Am I crazy?

The downside of only using your pea shooter is that everything takes 100 years to kill so you will probably die of old age IRL before you finish the game.

Yeah. Since your playing on normal, man up and face your enemies. It's much moar fun and you should hardly ever be at risk of dying. Many people recommend the fast weapons. However personally I love the aoe effects of greatswords. Most of the game I've played with a spear+greatword combo, which was very good - spear long thrusts for safety combined with greatsword horizontal slashes for aoe mop-up. Plus the Matrix roundhouse spear-dance never got old.
Eventually with better chips and more experience I've moved to dual greatswords for an even more aggressive playstyle and moar hit impact.

The chips do make a lot of difference in your efficiency and survivability. The ones I consider most important are: Shock Wave (significantly extends range of your attacks, particularly great for greatsword aoe slashes, which will affect lots of enemies at once with their far increased radius, also spear thrusts will be ridiculous), Offensive Heal (heal as you deal damage, you'll only need potions for boss fights and worst clusterfucks), OverClock (aka invincibility... time slows down after a Perfect block... and you can do your worst or heal up), Resilience (cause stagger and knockback suck), Anti Chain Damage (aka invincibility 2... now everytime you get hit for a lot of damage you turn invincible for some seconds to heal up/gain distance/slay threat) and Auto Collect Item (sooo convenienent, don't leave home without it). Melee Defense and Max HP Up can make a huge difference in survivability. Weapon Attack Up and possibly Critical Up are no-brainers, but possibly it's worth not to overdo those and invest something in defense/support as well.

Note most chips scale linearly (and it doesn't make a difference if you slot two cheap+weak ones or 1 stronger but bigger), but some scale exponentially with effects greatly increased once you achieve high chip level. Weapon Attack Up and Melee Defense come to mind.

With such a chip set-up I don't see why you should stay away from melee. But on Normal that should not be actually necessary.
 
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Durandal

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My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.
The nice part about Very Hard is that since you'll die in one hit anyways, you can focus completely on offense

The shit part is the constant backtracking if you do die

Verstuurd vanaf mijn GT-I9301I met Tapatalk
 

Gerrard

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Nov 5, 2007
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http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...mgames-is-working-on-a-nier-automata-pc-patch

"Square Enix and PlatinumGames are working with PC device manufacturers, like AMD, to address the issues with the Steam version of the game. With AMD's help, Square Enix and PlatinumGames have successfully resolved some of the issues, and we hope to achieve similar results with other hardware makers. We appreciate your continued patience and support for NieR: Automata."
>4 months and not a single patch

Platinum cucks.
 

Urbanolo

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May 12, 2014
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I have finished (as in all the endings including the retarded bullet - hell ending) the pirated version after 3 fucking months and boy, was this game a drag. I've been waiting and waiting for the game to give me this 'mind = blown' feeling and I'm not getting it.

Let's start from the best part - music. It was the main thing that kept me from falling asleep when playing the game. Very very good score, might be one of the best I've listened to in a video game in years, and basically the only reason I persevered through the all endings.

The story was average to good (attention spoilers, since some of you are still playing), some twists were pretty predictable
council of humanity twist
, some were clever
2B=2E
and but I was waiting for the game to leave me with a lingering philosophical theme to ponder on after ending and what I've got was an 'ummm is this the last true real final ending already? I really can't say I understand all the people on the internet claiming how they cried at the ending reveal or how the game sticked with them for months after finishing, but then again I can't remember when if I ever got 'emotionally attached' to a char in video game. My english proficiency isn't good enough to discuss with you guys philosophical themes in more depth, but I thought it was a standard sci - fi AI fare combined with some evolutionary Darwinism themes. Nothing that wasn't presented in wide array of media in the last 50 years.

Sidequests = 90% pure boring fedex quests at a boring open world with nothing to do.

Fighting system in Nier for an action game is very simplistic, dodge is overpowered and comboing basically resorts to mashing buttons (compare this to Bayonetta, which I generally dislike, but you can't say the combat system wasn't actually though out). It's flashy, but gets old real fast, since there is not much thought or difficulty involved, especially with any decent plug - in chips combination.

My biggest gripes - hacking and 9S attack animation with this levitating sword of his. Worst part of the game and made me bore-quit about a dozen times. Route B with the repeating content is probably the part of the game I would rate at 0/10.

All in all I rate the game at about 4/10. It could have been a good game, if not for obligatory 9S segments, hacking and empty open world that was only used to pad the game. If not for the music it might have been one of the worst action games I've sit through in the last couple of years (maybe except Arkham Knight).
 
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Dayyālu

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Automata has no "clever philosophical themes": it's a jap game after all. Taro is not going the Torment way, it's trolling ye. Narratively, Automata is an endless amount of what. With the last ending being .... something. Obligatory "pirated game, lol" reply goes here, as methinks you lost an important detail of ending E. All pseudo-deep crap is kinda thrown there and whatever, no depth but a somewhat well-built story where the true protagonist is 9S, despite being a twat (A2 is master race, by the way.).

You played on Normal as I did (noticeable from the comments about chips and difficulty) and the game on Normal is an easy stroll. Sidequests are mostly fedex with twists, but again, it's somewhat of a Taro tradition, with them giving hints on the true nature of things or trolling the player.

Disliking such a simple minigame as hacking is weird. It can be mostly ignored and it becomes almost a tool of the narrative. Don't tell me you find Automata's hacking hard.

It's still a very charming little game, done with a love you can't find in AAA titles. 4\10 because you are bad at hacking is a tad harsh, kind sir.
 

Urbanolo

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May 12, 2014
Messages
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Automata has no "clever philosophical themes": it's a jap game after all. Taro is not going the Torment way, it's trolling ye. Narratively, Automata is an endless amount of what. With the last ending being .... something. Obligatory "pirated game, lol" reply goes here, as methinks you lost an important detail of ending E. All pseudo-deep crap is kinda thrown there and whatever, no depth but a somewhat well-built story where the true protagonist is 9S, despite being a twat (A2 is master race, by the way.).

You played on Normal as I did (noticeable from the comments about chips and difficulty) and the game on Normal is an easy stroll. Sidequests are mostly fedex with twists, but again, it's somewhat of a Taro tradition, with them giving hints on the true nature of things or trolling the player.

Disliking such a simple minigame as hacking is weird. It can be mostly ignored and it becomes almost a tool of the narrative. Don't tell me you find Automata's hacking hard.

It's still a very charming little game, done with a love you can't find in AAA titles. 4\10 because you are bad at hacking is a tad harsh, kind sir.

I didn't find hacking hard, I found it tedious. Don't tell me it can be mostly ignored. I'm pretty sure from route B onwards you are required to hack some shit every 5 minutes and it isn't fun in the slightest. But I guess if you are a 'true fan' of some nip guy you can explain mind numbing fedex side quests and boring ass mandatory minigames as 'Yoko Taro trolling you lul'. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's how it works.

As to 9S - I didn't have a problem with his char development or whatever, what I had a problem was a terrible unresponsivness on his attacks compared to 2B/A2 and that his combos are literally mashing X X X X X X X.

Then again, I'm not much into japanese games, but I did find certain moments in the story engaging/fun. But to get to the fun parts you have to go through heaps of shit and boredom. Can't say it was worth it to me.
 

Haplo

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Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
The sidequests are very disconnected from the main story, often make little sense, often are FedEX in nature, but at the same time are very varied and provide another change of pace. Many are practically different minigames.

Hacking gets progressively more frequent as you progress from route B onward. Some sections are not very easy and the controls for hacking are bad, at least on M+KB.

9S attacks are much slower, it's not easy to adapt after fast & furious 2B (and A2) dual-wielding combat style. But they are still quite effective and have a little more range, I think (he's not actually holding the weapons, but remotely operating them telekinetically). Again, greatswords worked well for me due to the high stagger and wide aoe slashes. With all the chips gathered on route A, one should have little trouble winning combat on route B.
 

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