Black Myth: Wu Kong - a.k.a. "Sekiro 2: now YOU are the monkey"

[Lyre Mors]

10% off on Fanatical:

https://www.fanatical.com/en/game/black-myth-wukong

I will keep my Steam preorder, but maybe somebody else will bite.

This'll be where I get it if another better deal doesn't show up on launch day. I've seen enough gameplay footage and read enough varied takes on the overall structure of the game that I know I'll enjoy it, and I'm ready for some Chinese action.

 

[Jermu]

 

[Thalstarion]

If it plays smoothly on the PS5 then I may very well get it. Most of the games I am looking forward to playing are either very far out or have been delayed so this might be a fun distraction.

 

[Yosharian]

I didn't think it was possible for this developer to be even more based than I previously thought, but here we go

I wish I was flush enough to just buy this at full price on Steam but I just bought SM2 so I can't justify it

 

[Yosharian]

Lol, I actually read* Journey to the West and 99% of the women in it were sex demons and goddesses. Fucking lol.

based

 

[ferratilis]

I tried the benchmark thing they released on Steam, the game looks blurry no matter the settings, even at 100% res. I noticed this in Lords of the Fallen as well. At this point, I hate UE5 more than all version of Unity combined. Also, it can't get over 60fps with DLSS quality at 1440p, with a 4070. Lol.

I don't really care about graphics in games, but when a game looks like someone smeared shit on your screen, it's very hard to get into it. FromSoft games are a lot more pleasing on the eyes, despite all the shit people say about how their engine is "outdated."

 

[jaekl]

It's so you can practice squinting so you'll fit in once they take over the world

 

[cruel]

Preload is available on Steam - 118 GB.

 

[Lyre Mors]

Sweet JESUS that's a lot of gigahoots

 

[Damned Registrations]

Sweet JESUS that's a lot of gigahoots

Eh, I've seen comparable numbers from older games. Generally the actual download is a lot smaller, and the large number is including the space needed to unpack everything at once before compressing stuff and deleting install files and such after they're done. Unless the devs are total shit at their jobs.

 

[Lyre Mors]

I mean, I'm not that surprised really. It's just the only games that have even come close for me in several years are BG3 and Stranger of Paradise.

I need a spanking new 5TB SSD so I don't have to worry about this shit for another 5 years.

 

[Poseidon00]

Going to buy this for my uncle since it's right up his alley

Will give my opinions on it when I see it

China good, game journalists bad

 

[Yosharian]

I mean, I'm not that surprised really. It's just the only games that have even come close for me in several years are BG3 and Stranger of Paradise.

I need a spanking new 5TB SSD so I don't have to worry about this shit for another 5 years.

I paid £168 for a Samsung 4TB SSD back in Nov '23

Same drive is £243 now

SSD prices fluctuate a lot, you just need to get in there when they're good

 

[Lyric Suite]

I don't really care about graphics in games, but when a game looks like someone smeared shit on your screen, it's very hard to get into it. FromSoft games are a lot more pleasing on the eyes, despite all the shit people say about how their engine is "outdated."

It's one of the many cancers that still afflict gaming since the decline era. Shit brown or vomit green filters, post-processing diarrhea everywhere, temporal anti-aliasing that makes everything look blurry. It's an atrocity. I remember trying the first Diry Rally, the Code Masters one, and the game looked 10 times better if you set the post-processing slider to the lowest setting. It's incredible how nobody sees just how bad this shit is. They had a free period of Battlefied 4 once on steam, so i had a chance to try the single player, and the thing that horrified me the most was not the shit gameplay, but how terrible the visuals were. And this was supposed to be cream of the crop back then, one of the "best" looking games of its generation. I remember not being able to even see what the fuck i was shooting at at times because of all the effects getting in the way. But even the enviorments, it was just so hard to see what anything even was and the color filter was just so fucking bad. I remeber the part where you are on top of the carrier and everything looked so terrible. Even the water looked like shit.

So yeah, can't say the bench inspired confidence in me as it seems to share in some of those problems.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

I’ve found rare crafting materials to make new weapons or armor

Why?
Why crafting mechanics in a fighter?

I blame nu-GoW for this shit...

 

[Lyric Suite]

The game isn't even open world how does that work? Why not just have consumables like Sekiro.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

The game isn't even open world how does that work?

My guess, a menu between missions

These types of systems in pure action games are such a retarded idea
For one the activity itself is just boring
And the constrast between how menial they are and how involved the regular gameplay is, it's simply jarring
Also in my experience they either end-up being pretty much useless or heavily skewer the difficulty, there's no in-between

 

[Damned Registrations]

People seem to be associating crafting with minecraft and punching trees, but I always think back to stuff like making weapons and armour out of dragon parts and such. I'm generally on board with the latter- the point is to give the player exclusive choices between really nice pieces of gear, the way lord souls can be used in the soul series to make one of two weapons. Except, you know, it'd be nice if those weapons didn't suck donkey balls or offer such niche options that there's no real choice at all.

 

[ind33d]

so apparently the real reason for the controversy is that the US government's official position is that China was built by Africans (instead of the ancient Aryans who actually settled there and built all the pyramids), so because Wukong doesn't show black people and the Chinese are not playing along with the west's meth-fueled marxist hallucination, Black Myth is racist.

 

[Elttharion]

This gave me a chuckle

Strange times. Now people buy Chinese games to avoid Communist propaganda

 

[Shrimp]

People seem to be associating crafting with minecraft and punching trees, but I always think back to stuff like making weapons and armour out of dragon parts and such. I'm generally on board with the latter- the point is to give the player exclusive choices between really nice pieces of gear, the way lord souls can be used in the soul series to make one of two weapons. Except, you know, it'd be nice if those weapons didn't suck donkey balls or offer such niche options that there's no real choice at all.

Personally I tend to associate it with having to vacuum clean containers for sticks or pebbles and enemies dropping niche materials for niche items that you craft through a menu.
I don't mind crafting if the crafted items and general management of resources play a larger role in the gameplay and the game's economy, but more often than not crafting systems in action games are nothing like this. When crafting is a system that easily could get replaced with a shopkeeper that sells the exact same items for a singular currency or gadgets obtained from boss fights it ends up feeling like something that's just there for the sake of giving the game a certain tag on store sites.

 

[Lyric Suite]

This is the problem with the game being Chinese. You don't know what kind of third world retardation they gonna put in the game. Same with a lot of Korean games (which is a first world country what's with all the ghetto MMOs). I hope to be proven wrong though.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Yeah, I get that. All the consumable crafting in Elden Ring was completely retarded. Like I said, it works best when it essentially creates limited tokens that can be exchanged for limited prizes. Like as an example:

Item A;
-Ring of mana shielding
-Amulet of Fast Casting
-Circlet of Mana Regeneration

Item B;
-Boots of Haste
-Cloak of Invisibility
-Goggles of Truesight

Item C;
-Spear of Poison
-Amulet of Vampirism
-Shield of Reflection

Now, if you just dumped all that into a shop for generic currency, the mage obviously buys the first 3 items. But with a crafting system you can make them pick and choose which type of advantage they want most and maybe encourage some experimentation since you're getting something from category C even if none of it really fits a pure mage build. It also means you can grant an early game reward that will still be useful at the end of the game without fucking up the economy.

 

[abija]

But that's not a crafting system, just mental gymnastics. If you just want to limit buying stuff from a category, do that.

 

[Dr Skeleton]

Lol, I actually read* Journey to the West and 99% of the women in it were sex demons and goddesses. Fucking lol.

* It's like a million pages so I skimmed it and watched one of the old tv shows.

I've read the entire thing, and this is accurate. The monk keeps getting kidnapped by various female demons who want his dick and he keeps getting rescued, the demon usually gets killed, sometimes they're rehabilitated to not be rapey sex demons anymore, but that's more rare. One time the monk gets falsely accused of rape after refusing to sleep with a women in a town they pass. The progressives would hate it, if only they could read.

In many ways the entire journey reads like an RPG, the party moves to a new area, meets new people with their problems, fights a local demon or a lair of demons, loots their stuff and moves on. The looting of the stuff is specifically mentioned, several times. They also ride on a turtle, two times in fact. The monkey king is overpowered as hell and carries the entire party, the monk is mostly useless and keeps getting kidnapped or fooled by everyone they meet (which makes sense, the others are there specifically to escort him to India and ascend in the process), Zhu (the pig) is a lazy pervert glutton, but he can fight reasonably well when he has to, the Sand Monk is just sort of there, he rarely talks and just does what he's supposed to, the dragon-prince horse the monk rides on does absolutely nothing of note for the whole journey, which I guess is why most adaptations cut him entirely. Movie adaptations don't really do the book justice, they're forced to cut too much, including all of the weird shit, and condense 100 chapters of several books into a few hours, that's just not doable.

Spoiler

then there is that time when the monk and Zhu drink some water in the country of women and get pregnant. The other members of the party have to go to the legendary abortion stream and get some abortion-water for them, but the stream is occupied by a guy who is a relative of one of the demons they fought earlier, so they have to fight him too to get the water. I wonder if they keep that part for the game? Sounds more like something the Japanese would put into their JRPGs. That's not the only time weird shit like this happens