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God of War reboot - now on PC

Zlaja

Arcane
Joined
Aug 17, 2006
Messages
5,683
Location
Swedex
I look forward to the new Devil May Cry game where a more older, down to earth and less edgy Dante strolls around the countryside with his new dog companion Stumpy and then his hand ends up being forced by a bunch of evil bullies who just won't accept that Dante has chosen a different path and taken a stand against violence and guns. Towards the end Stumpy ends up getting killed while protecting his friend and in the final cutscene Dante gets all teary and, standing next to Stumpy's grave, he tells him that it took a great friend to teach him the meaning of friendship, compassion and.........OH GOD, STUMPY WHYYYYYY???IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN ME!!!


PS: Bayonetta 3 will feature a more woke heroine spending a lot of time on twitter and tumblr and owning 2 dozen cats.
 

TheHeroOfTime

Arcane
Joined
Nov 3, 2014
Messages
2,879
Location
S-pain
99184652996a97601dd4d48634dc0f6bo.gif
 

aris

Arcane
Joined
Apr 27, 2012
Messages
11,613
Just finished it. It is not the second coming of video game jesus, but it is a very solid game! It is actually a AAA-game that delivers on all of its promises: It has very good presentation and graphics, good gameplay and a good story, and I thoroughly enjoyed playing it to the end.

I give it 19/10
 

DemonKing

Arcane
Joined
Dec 5, 2003
Messages
5,958
Finished over the weekend save for teleporting to a few optional Valkyrie fights. I actually felt it could have been a bit shorter. By the end of the game you have every skill and have upgraded your weapons and armour to ridiculous degrees, meaning combat (with a few exceptions) is more about replicating a successful strategy over and over then thinking on your feet as you have to do in earlier stages of the game (I guess kind of like lower level vs higher level D&D). I probably died more times in a couple of hours playing the Dark Souls remaster last night (4 times) than I did in my whole time with this game.

The Graphics and sound are top notch, but still come across like they scrimped and saved because they reuse the same basic models with different textures over and over and with identical kill animations. Combat is decent, particularly at the beginning but the gameplay loop of exploring and unearthing secret areas/chests is addictive but very repetitive. Story is kind of dumb with anger management dad taking young brat on a tour of Midguard to throw mum's ashes from the highest mountain. When they finally climb the highest mountain they discover there's an even taller mountain in another realm/plane so begin a new quest to go there even though they're told it's basically inaccessible. I'm pretty sure mum wasn't talking about having her ashes spread from the tallest mountain in the universe when she made that request but I guess the game would have been half as long if common sense had prevailed.

Definitely a fun ride though and worth playing once, but not sure I'd bother with it a second time.
 
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Belegarsson

Think about hairy dwarfs all the time ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Patron
Joined
Oct 20, 2015
Messages
1,261
Location
Uwotopia
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I wonder if someday people will start to realize Sony's pumping out "games" with basically the same structure/design philosophy under fresh shiny coat. It's like a PS4 exclusive game generator™ crap out a random third person game with setting randomly picked from a list of "Tropey Game Aethestic/Concept For Dummies". If you don't shoot thing, then you slash things, if you don't slash things, then you stealth, if you don't stealth then you climb stuffs, if you don't climb then you gather resources and craft stuffs, if you don't craft stuffs then you walk around while characters having exposition dialogue, if you don't walk around then you QTE, so on. It's predictable and ironically funny, because I can't fathom how there are people throwing millions of dollar into crafting products that's only half game, and the other half consists of whatever folks think "game as art" is these days. Ubisoft's recent open world games are cookie cutter as hell, yet I found them strangely unapologetic in a gamey way, it's like those games told me "hey I see you got bored with this specific activity, how about go there and do something else you might like and come back later", that's strictly speaking about AC Origins, a game that I didn't like very much at the end but still bother to finish because it rarely made me feel like I'm wasting my time and it never disguised as anything else other than a hand holding heavy open world game with lots of crap to do.

Watching that Matthewmatosis video disappointed me more than playing the game itself, because somehow an okay-at-best game got 10/10 from publication, holding a score of freakin 95/100 on Metacritic, is lauded as "game of this generation", a true phenomenon of modern gaming and so forth, top seller for several months and shit, people out there willingly buy a $500 machine just to get their hand on a piece of mediocrity. I don't think GoW is a bad game, there's a lot of effort in it but ultimately the developers' heart wasn't put it the right place and it's a damn shame, because it clearly deserves a more focused design philosophy and probably would benefit more from smaller scale and budget.

At a father myself, I'm even more disappointed at how poor the relationship between Kratos and Atreus was built. Influencing the kid through specific actions could have been such a great game mechanic, yet the game designers treated the kid like an invisible ghost following you around instead. I didn't raise my own daughter through a bunch of cutscenes, mind you.
 
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sullynathan

Arcane
Joined
Dec 22, 2015
Messages
6,473
Location
Not Europe
One thing that is said in the feature and many other documentaries and interviews in the past is them considering god of war ascension a failure and a low point of the company's history.
 

Doktor Best

Arcane
Joined
Feb 2, 2015
Messages
2,849
Who cares. It's a shit game.

I played it and i would disagree. Its no 10/10 best game ever blabla which the press suggested and the story in particular is overrated, but the gameplay is fun and leagues above crap like Assassins Creed when it comes to combat/enemy design. The gameworld was kind of metroidlike and interesting, the sidequests are low quantity high quality, the puzzles were a little bit on the easy side but a nice distraction, graphics are top notch, the plot/characters were standard fare like i said but nicely done. The boy wasnt as annoying as i thought he would be. It has epic setpieces and cutscenes, bossfights are cool, camera works as soon as you get used to it.

Oh and the game changes enemy AI/behaviour on harder difficulties.

7-8/10 i would say. Depends how you want to balance your rating system.
 
Joined
Sep 16, 2016
Messages
296
I wouldn't describe it as shit, but I'd have a hard time describing it as being anything more than "slightly above mediocrity". To comment on my primary concerns in no particular order, the enemy variety is abysmal, meaning you'll see almost everything the game has to offer in the first few hours and the enemy types that are there are not interesting enough to hold the combat up in and of themselves. Enemy attack properties literally changing depending on their relative level to you. For example, an enemy leveled above you might hit you with a move that's unblockable, and then the same enemy type might be a few levels below you, use the exact same move, and do a regular, blockable attack. The RPG mechanics also end up making combat feel unfair. Since enemy types are reused so heavily over the course of the game, you'll run into the same enemy types at various levels, so sometimes you'll get through an encounter and it'll be bizarrely easy, and then the game will arbitrarily have the same enemy kick your ass in a different area. I get that this is a fairly common issue in RPGs, particularly modern ones, but in a game that's primarily an action game, it ends up feeling really out of place and in direct competition with the skill focused mechanics.

Even the basic camera ends up feeling poorly thought out. It actively hinders combat even with the silly threat ring telling you where offscreen attacks are coming from. This could've been alleviated with good directional sound design, but the game has shockingly poor audio that makes it impossible to tell where attacks are coming from, or even if they're coming at all. Yes, you can get used to the camera, but that doesn't suddenly mean it's good or something that contributes to the game at all rather than constantly detracting from it. Plenty more could be said about the pointless RPG mechanics that don't ever allow you to meaningfully change your playstyle, inconsistent hit reactions on enemies that make it impossible to use combos or anything fancy, or how bizarrely similar the weapons end up feeling, but I think those issues largely speak for themselves. Any one of these problems could probably be chalked up as nitpicking, but there are so many nitpicks that God of War ended up feeling really half-baked to me.

To comment quickly on non-combat stuff, the gameworld was okay, but there are zero real movement mechanics. There's no functional distinction between walking, climbing, or rowing somewhere in a boat, which makes the side quests and any degree of backtracking painfully tedious. The game is marred by literal hours of holding the left analog stick forward and occasionally tapping circle to keep moving. The puzzles are clever at first, asking the player to use existing mechanics rather than utilizing minigames or totally separate controls from normal gameplay to manipulate the environment. But then it becomes clear fairly quickly that there's almost zero variety in the puzzles and, outside of the great traps in the vault towards the end of the game, nothing is added beyond what you see in the first few hours.

I'm a firm believer in the notion that the best games are the ones that become more than the sum of their parts by bringing everything together. Story that compliments gameplay and vice versa, and gameplay systems that compliment each other and offer variety while also all feeling like they're part of the same core experience. With that in mind, I'd probably give God of War a 6/10. The gameplay isn't abysmal and, being that I'm a huge storyfag, I found the general journey to be relatively pleasant and interesting. But man, it ends up feeling like a rough first draft of a game made by a tiny indie team that doesn't know what they're doing. Nothing comes together in a satisfying way, with the story and walking segments murdering the pacing of an action game that then gets in its own way with a superfluous gear system and inconsistent mechanics.
 

Tehdagah

Arcane
Joined
Feb 27, 2012
Messages
9,236

Dude sounds like those Youtube hipster weebs who dropped the social studies school. The kind who complains about "ludonarrative dissonance". Also I loled when he said DMC4's annoying camera was an improvement in the genre, I didn't play the new God of War yet but just by watching the videos I can say the camera is much better.
 

DJOGamer PT

Arcane
Joined
Apr 8, 2015
Messages
7,357
Location
Lusitânia
The camera isn't better, it's actually one of the main problem with the game.
DMC4 camera was weird because it kept switching between a on-rails camera and a controllable one. But it wasn't as bad as you're making it out to be, because unlike nuGod of War camera, it visibly showed you the threats and didn't restrict your movements.
The camera in this game pretty much acts a facilitator to the inconsistencies of the combat experience instead of acting as a reliever.
One aspect that backs up this statement, without having to try the game out for yourself, are the danger indicators on the bottom of the screen.
 

DemonKing

Arcane
Joined
Dec 5, 2003
Messages
5,958
I agree it was nowhere near a 10/10 masterpiece but one thing it got right was the music. Bear McReary knocked it out of the park there. Gameplay was only slightly above average and the storyline nothing special but along with the score the grapahics, atmosphere, voice acting and sound design were also good enough to elevate it above most other offerings.
 

Falksi

Arcane
Joined
Feb 14, 2017
Messages
10,539
Location
Nottingham
I'm just playing through GOW3 and, whilst I've never played GOW4, the formula definitely needed a shake-up.

It's just a shame they chose to do it by making Kratos a homo.
 
Joined
Nov 23, 2017
Messages
4,014
Oh, he was trolling...

original.jpg


Seems BlackThunder should've taken a little more pride in there work, gone into the in-game camera, and got something like this:

 
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RickOmbo

Learned
Joined
May 24, 2019
Messages
221
I hope he is brave (woke) enough to make Kratos gay in the next game.
 

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