Ghost of Tsushima - open world game set in feudal Japan

[Falksi]

It's all pointless busywork.

Beautiful visuals, great looking world, love the aesthetics, love the base combat, but god, the gameplay is just utter trash. Everything feels like doing homework.

Porky, remind me what you think of The Witcher 3 again?

 

[Cyberarmy]

So there IS dismemberment, but only in Ghost Mode™

I think one of the moves also had dismemberment, the one you got from a musician quest. (tales?)

 

[Fedora Master]

I've barely used any of that shit. You can get by with Dodge, Block and Heavy Attack even on Hard difficulty.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Heavy attack is shit, it breaks the combat system (just spam that shit, no fun).

Best way to do combat (where it's actually quite fun): parry regular attacks, dodge red attacks, get perfect parry and perfect dodge abilities, try to time those when you can. I use bows and focus for archers sometimes (if they are in hard to reach places) and for double handed axemen and musket mongols, as those fucks are annoying to fight in melee.

It's all pointless busywork.

Beautiful visuals, great looking world, love the aesthetics, love the base combat, but god, the gameplay is just utter trash. Everything feels like doing homework.

Porky, remind me what you think of The Witcher 3 again?

This is where you display the lack of nuance common to the typical Codex troglodyte. W3 is nothing like GoT on a fundamental level. Yes, it has some elements in common, like bandit camps and monster nests, and a few other Ubisoft-like PoIs on the map, but in W3, those are the relatively minor filler in between a crapload of handcrafted content: exquisitely written quests with tons of C&C, beautifully designed locations, touching characters and events. In GoT, the Ubisoft style content is the majority of the game, there are a few handcrafted questslines (and even those are nothing close to W3 in terms of quality, choices, characters, depth), but mostly it's all "go here, kill that, go there, kill this".

 

[Fedora Master]

Characterizing Lady Masako a brutal and vengeful lesbian in a relationship with a woman probably at least 20 years her junior... Not a great look. Her story arc was pretty lame.
Is there anybody in this game who has, and remains in, a loving heterosexual relationship? Holy crap.

 

[Fedora Master]

So, having finished the main story I can say this game is BANZAI/10. The devs obviously had a great reverence for the Japanese "style" of cinematics and drama and it works. The world looks amazing.
The game is however marred by a bad power curve and too many make-work side activities. In that sense it's very Ubisoft "lowest-common-denominator" design.
There's a lot of game here, too. I still haven't done Iki Island.

I'd say if you can get it for around 25 bucks on Steam it's a good buy. More if you really enjoy Kurosawa I guess.

e: Oh and look at that! The DLC island actually has fat guy mongols that can switch between swords, shield and spear and react to your stance. Cool.

e2: Lord Almighty there are entirely too many "strong women" in this game. The faction leader of the pirates in the DLC is, of course, a woman. The best side story was probably Norio's and Ryuzo's.

 

[fantadomat]

Yes it is feminist garbage,all the men are your enemy unless they are generic worthless idiots like like the wine scam artist.

 

[Modron]

e2: Lord Almighty there are entirely too many "strong women" in this game. The faction leader of the pirates in the DLC is, of course, a woman.

Asscreed Origins had the same issue plus they were all ugly for good measure.

 

[Fedora Master]

As I said, I can accept one significant woman in a samurai story like this but the game makes it look ridiculous.

 

[Parsimonious cook]

Shiiiiiiiiiiiet niguhz. I am started to play this and its really good. It really goes to show that the Assassin´s Creed formula still works when people implementing in arent a bunch of fags. Good stuff all around so far.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

One bad thing about GoT besides the obvious (Ubisoft style gameplay) is its shown from a modern western perspective rather than a true medieval Japanese one. Obviously all the female samurai, and stuff like that, but even beyond that, Jin has this modern human rights viewpoint on stuff, he grieves for for victims, tries to save innocents, etc. This is in stark contrast to historical samurai, who were lifelong warriors who lived for honor, loyalty to their liegelords, pay (for ronin/unemployed samurai), improving their fighting skills, detachment from fear, trying to suppress attachment to life, etc. I feel like most of these themes are barely touched in the game. Jin feels much more like a modern 21st century hero than a medieval Samurai, and that's unfortunate, because these types of games really gain a lot from historical atmosphere and feel. By comparison, Kurosawa's movies were a lot more nuanced and appropriate for the time period. In The Seven Samurai, for example, the Samurai are just doing it for the money (at least initially), they don't really give a shit about the peasants, and the peasants hate the samurai, and try to fool them.

 

[VerSacrum]

One bad thing about GoT besides the obvious (Ubisoft style gameplay) is its shown from a modern western perspective rather than a true medieval Japanese one. Obviously all the female samurai, and stuff like that, but even beyond that, Jin has this modern human rights viewpoint on stuff, he grieves for for victims, tries to save innocents, etc. This is in stark contrast to historical samurai, who were lifelong warriors who lived for honor, loyalty to their liegelords, pay (for ronin/unemployed samurai), improving their fighting skills, detachment from fear, trying to suppress attachment to life, etc. I feel like most of these themes are barely touched in the game. Jin feels much more like a modern 21st century hero than a medieval Samurai, and that's unfortunate, because these types of games really gain a lot from historical atmosphere and feel. By comparison, Kurosawa's movies were a lot more nuanced and appropriate for the time period. In The Seven Samurai, for example, the Samurai are just doing it for the money (at least initially), they don't really give a shit about the peasants, and the peasants hate the samurai, and try to fool them.

Except for Katsushirō, the idealistic young noble. Even gives the farmers coin to buy more rice after it got stolen because he knew the other Samurai would fuck off if they couldn't feed them anymore, telling them to keep it quiet.

Really nothing wrong at all to depict a Samurai with an idealistic streak, the game has bigger concerns.

 

[Dedicated_Dark]

Finished it recently. After the first act I was getting pretty bored, the combat system started to run out of depth and mundane side quests and the trite open world crap wasn't doing the game any favours. Act 3 looked hideous, the snow really doesn't work for the game. For some reason they felt they needed to be like zelda and have 3 zones with different themes. They introduce poison, where it takes 1 resolve to heal it, other than that it doesn't change anything.

The story had 3 decent bits, 1 good moment in Act 1, one in Act 2 and the ending in Act 3; the only reason I kept playing. Had to drop difficulty down from hard to normal in Act 3 as the game seems to have been balanced with the expectation that you got a lot of health upgrades. To be completely frank, Assassin's Creed has better gameplay than this game. Here there is no parkour, stealth is poor and barebones, has archery but no interesting set-ups or level design to actually use it and melee is overpowered so story themes are weakened. Just due to the sometimes good writing, even with the weak characterizations the game is brought up above other trite. Overall, it's alright. 6/10 on days when I'm feeling generous. It just makes you more aware of your fallen standards than anything else.​

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[KeAShizuku]

Making a giant map is one thing actually filling it with interesting stuff is something else entirely.

To be honest I prefer linear games because I'm getting jaded.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Making open world games with actually interesting open worlds is one of the highest skills in game development, imo. Most well known open world studios (Bethesda, Rockstar, Ubisoft) are actually really bad at this, as they generally fill up their vast open worlds with shallow, repetitive content, and now these up and coming studios like Sucker Punch are trying to do it the same way, and failing in the same manner.

Piranha Bytes is the absolute master in this field, despite half their games sucking. That half the time that they don't shit out an absolute turd (Gothic 3, Risen 2/3, ELEX 2), they just know how to design game world in a way where it feels intimate, alive, meaningful, and interesting. Besides them, I thought Nintendo did a great job with Breath of the Wild, but then kinda lost some of that magic with Tears of the Kingdom. Kingdom Come: Deliverance was another game that managed to create an interesting world, as did Fallout: New Vegas.

 

[Rahdulan]

Making open world games with actually interesting open worlds is one of the highest skills in game development, imo. Most well known open world studios (Bethesda, Rockstar, Ubisoft) are actually really bad at this, as they generally fill up their vast open worlds with shallow, repetitive content, and now these up and coming studios like Sucker Punch are trying to do it the same way, and failing in the same manner.

Piranha Bytes is the absolute master in this field, despite half their games sucking. That half the time that they don't shit out an absolute turd (Gothic 3, Risen 2/3, ELEX 2), they just know how to design game world in a way where it feels intimate, alive, meaningful, and interesting. Besides them, I thought Nintendo did a great job with Breath of the Wild, but then kinda lost some of that magic with Tears of the Kingdom. Kingdom Come: Deliverance was another game that managed to create an interesting world, as did Fallout: New Vegas.

At some point people have to stop being impressed by sheer size of worlds, and that applies to developers as well. PB nailed the perfect sweet spot when a world seems bigger than it actually is and by the end you can navigate it from memory. I wonder how many enjoying modern open worlds could do the same. Doubly so without map or landmarks to constantly reference.