Daweii

A lot of the game looks good. That said I would have liked to see the UI during the combat as it's very difficult to see how it works. Is it lock on? Is it partially turn-based? Are they doing combos with the face buttons to tweak the element of the spell? Is this Arkham Asylum style combat? How does it work? The player looked relatively locked to the ground in almost all of the combat which has me asking questions. Most of the game looks great, but if the combat is lacking then every dungeon, cave and exploration endeavour will feel worse than it should. Hopefully some footage with the HUD appears between now and its launch. Everything else looks awesome though, I am very surprised at how big this game appears to be.

Very curious to see how that plays out with certain weapons. Mimic Tear being super dumb was the only thing that stopped it beating the game while the player sat in a corner. If Mimic Tear now knows to spam weapon arts then that could mean it's more powerful now. Mimic Tear with a player using the Rivers of Blood sword might actually be hilarious.

All the fun/broken stuff in the game has been nerfed in the latest patch. Anyone that was leaning on specific weapon arts like Royal Knights Resolve, Hoarfrost Stomp and Night-and-Flame-Stance will likely find their weapons not performing as they once did. Mimic Tear +10 was completely busted though. The spirit summons are a great equaliser without increasing boss health like player summons do, but it definitely wasn't intended for a spirit summon to be as powerful as Mimic Tear +10 was.

Congratulations to FromSoftware on selling 12 million copies of Elden Ring in 2 weeks.

Started playing Stranger of Paradise today. My first impressions are as follows; The gameplay is good, albeit massively dumbed down compared to Team Ninja's more recent output in Nioh. The game throws a lot of loot at you and most of it is pointless. The only thing the game seems to care about is equipment level. The sheer depth of Nioh's loot is completely missing from this game so far. The voice acting is atrocious. The cutscenes have been awkward with wooden movements and basic lip syncing. The visuals are PS3 quality which would be fine except I have had occasional frame drops running these PS3 visuals on a PS5. I'm not far enough in to talk about the story, but based on what I have played I don't think it'll be the story that keeps me playing. It hasn't impressed me yet. It's a solid 6/10 currently. If you're a fan of games that are purely good gameplay and nothing else then you might enjoy this, but if you need good graphics, story and cutscenes to hold your attention then Stranger of Paradise will likely disappoint.

The game is essentially Nioh with a Final Fantasy skin. Stranger of Paradise has all the depth of Nioh 1 & 2 in a package that is trying to be as absurd as possible. Almost every review talks about how the main characters, the story and the visuals are average/terrible, while praising how good the gameplay is. Part of me thinks Team Ninja would have been better off making Nioh 3 instead.

I believe I was around Level 135 when I entered the final boss arena. I got 31 trophies by the end so I definitely missed some bosses that the game considers important enough to assign a trophy to. I'm not much of a trophy collector though so I'm not sure I'll get them all, unless I do it by accident through playing the game enough. Currently the plan is to see if I missed any areas, but after that I'll probably go into NG+ to do any side quests I permanently blocked myself off from in the first playthrough.

I just finished Elden Ring. My overall thoughts on the game are positive, but I do think FromSoftware will have a lot of lessons to learn from this game. Elden Ring is massive and on the one hand that is a huge selling point, especially in how it handles its exploration. This is a game that from the very beginning, until the very end makes exploration feel rewarding and exciting, but that does come at the expense of pacing. The expertly crafted experience in Bloodborne and past Souls games is largely missing here. Now, this game does have moments where it gets to feel like Dark Souls with the legacy dungeons, but ultimately Elden Ring does feel like it lacks the bespoke nature of past Soulsborne games. My other gripes with the game are mostly around the boss fights feeling lazy at times, while I also think the balancing of the game is a bit off. I don't know how much Vigor they expected players to have going into the Mountaintops of the Giants area, but going from Leyndell to Mountaintops causes the enemies to hit 10x harder. I literally went from enemies needing 5-6 hits to kill me at 60 Vigor to enemies needing 2 hits if that, and I don't think that changed for the rest of the game. The 50% point in the story is literally a reset point where every enemy pre-Morgott is a pussy bitch, and every enemy after Morgott is gigachad supreme. It feels off to me, it doesn't feel like that was the difficulty gradient they were going for. FromSoftware make challenging games, but they don't usually go for cliff face scaling where the difficulty just goes up in a vertical line between two areas. Overall though I enjoyed Elden Ring. It's not my all-time favourite Soulsborne game, Bloodborne still holds that crown, but Elden Ring is a very good game in its own right.

I usually go for a glass cannon dexterity build in every Soulslike, but this time I went sorcery which worked relatively well until late-game. Magic unfortunately doesn't scale too well in Elden Ring given most enemies have some form of magic resist, and that only gets worse as the enemies get tankier. I started pure sorcery, but now I'm more of a dexterity mage using a very powerful intelligence/dex scaling Katana.

I think we'll see Hogwarts Legacy appear as WB Games have been trying to find a good time to show that game again. The focus on Japanese publishers likely means we'll see something from Capcom and something from Square Enix. I'd like to think we'd see FF16, but I'm tempering expectations and going with the release trailer for Stranger of Paradise instead. Not sure if we'll see Spartacus. That feels like something Sony will just unveil on the PS Blog. Almost everything related to PlayStation itself has been a blog post in the past few years.

I got that overall feeling too. I don't think Forbidden West does enough to set itself apart from Zero Dawn. I'm not a huge fan of Assassins Creed anymore, but if I was to give that series credit for one thing it's that every new game sets itself apart. The location is different, the time period is different, which means the weapons have to be different and the look of the characters have to be different. Now the player might still be doing the same stuff that they did in Odyssey, or Origins, but at least it's all done in a setting that feels like a new game. Forbidden West is just Zero Dawn shifted 1,000 miles down the road from post-apocalyptic Colorado/Utah to post-apocalyptic California/Nevada, it's not a huge shift and it makes everything feel very samey, outside of a few areas where it actually feels unique, but those area are few and far between. I couldn't find the "Shut Up Aloy" setting either. It did cross my mind to just mute all dialogue while exploring, but then having to turn the dialogue volume up again for cutscenes would have probably been more annoying that Aloy talking constantly. If that setting exists I hope they make it more obvious where it is, and if it doesn't exist and that person misspoke then I hope they add the setting. It might spare others a lot of frustration. It took me about 45 hours to beat it while doing a decent amount of side quests. I didn't do all the side quests, but I did enough of them to get to the level required for the final quest. I think you could definitely get 60+ hours out of it though if you wanted to. Forbidden West and GT7 seem like a perfect combo to play while waiting for other games to come out.

Limgrave is super cozy. I can totally understand just existing there for as long as physically possible. It's a small area of the overall map, but it has so much content in it that it'll probably keep you busy for a while longer.

Elden Ring came out so soon after completing Forbidden West that I forgot to give my impressions. Overall I liked the game. I thought the combat was more refined and fleshed out. I also liked seeing the improvement in visuals, audio and mo-cap cutscenes. I also thought the story was serviceable albeit nothing particularly special. I could say more about the things I liked, but most of what I liked aside from the combat refinements are superficial things. Everyone can see the improved visuals, and everyone can see the cutscenes are better than the first game. Just watch a trailer and you'll see 90% of the things I liked about this game, but you won't see any of the things I disliked about it. So I'll talk about the negatives with a bit more detail. My main issues stem from how the game does things; Issue #1 As someone that doesn't like having my hand held in games, Forbidden West was infuriating. Aloy was a character I liked a lot in the original game, but we grew apart over my time playing this game. She talks all the time. Aloy walks the player through this game as if she's carrying a strategy guide, but worse she mentions things that I couldn't even see. "A cave, I wonder what is in there". What cave? I can't see a cave? Some may see that as helpful, I see that as ruining the surprise of stumbling on said cave. She did similar to me when I was climbing a mountain. I had no idea what was up the mountain, but half way up Aloy was like, "A tower, I wonder what is in there?". Thanks Aloy, I just wasted 3 minutes climbing this mountain to discover what is up there, yet little miss strategy guide told me before I got to the top. Strategy guide Aloy also extends to quests. You better not decide to explore after finding a puzzle because Aloy will tell you the solution every 5 seconds until you do it. You better not take longer than 2 seconds to do what the game expects you to do or Aloy will spell it out for you. I have a example of this. I was on a side quest exploring some abandoned outpost and I needed to get into a building. I hadn't even fully explored yet and Aloy was already saying, "The roof looks weak, something heavy could break it. Those ropes, I could shoot them". Keep in mind I didn't even know what roof she was talking about, I hadn't been to the place she was talking about yet. Infuriating, I hated it. Issue #2 This game has a loot problem. Want to know why being told about a tower before I could see is was annoying? It's because the loot sucks in this game. The joy of exploration was finding these places not the contents within. This is a game that has two types of loot chest. The standard chest which are everywhere and mostly contain digital watches and bracelets, and special chests which contain a piece of armour, or a weapon (that a vendor likely already sells). My issue with the former is it's not exciting to find my 400th purple rarity digital watch, but worse is the watch is there because a chest full of metal shards (currency) wouldn't be as exciting. The digital watch has no use, it is only to be sold, which means it is merely metal shards wearing a different costume and I find that boring. Why should I explore this cave (that Aloy spoiled for me) when all I'm going to get from it is some XP and 7 digital watches? Issue #3 The expanded RPG system destroyed the part of the game I enjoyed most about Horizon. I played through the game on a mixture of hard/very hard using the custom difficulty setting, and even then the RPG system made learning the machines weaknesses pointless. There are some abilities in those skill trees that are broken. Braced Arrow can one shot 90% of the smaller machines and do 25-50% damage to the ultra-gigachad machines. Couple that in with some selective perks from other trees to get stamina back ultra fast, an OP spike thrower and the game becomes trivial. Horizon Zero Dawn was a more casual Monster Hunter with a mainstream AAA plot attached to it. The key to upgrading was farming select parts of machines and the key to beating machines was learning each weakness, but the RPG system that is massively more in depth in the sequel has nullified almost all of that. There is still the need to target specific parts for upgrades, but once I felt like the systems I adored were largely nullified I just turned on "easy loot" in the custom difficulty setting which drops every material the machine can drop. I understand that Guerrilla Games wanted this to be more of an RPG than the first game and I commend them for wanting that, but I feel like the RPG systems hurt the core gameplay loop introduced in the first game a lot. That's the end of my negatives for the most part. The game was very much a 7/10 for me, but those that loved the original Horizon will probably not have any of the issues I had with the game. For instance one of my friends beat Forbidden West the other day and was waxing lyrical about how it was a 9/10, how it was so much better than the first and will be 2022's game of the year. I didn't get that feeling at all from Forbidden West which is fine.

@Chindie I'm glad Vaati made a video like that. I had already started plotting out my own path to making future playthroughs as fast as possible, but Vaati has completely nailed it as always. My biggest concern throughout my playthrough has been, "this game is incredible, but I don't know if I'll be able to play it again". As much I love it, I don't want every playthrough to be this 80+ hour thing. Very happy to see this video exists.

It's hard to say really. I think experiences may vary wildly depending on comfort levels with Soulslike games in general, plus how much a player explores. Exploring does mean more chance to level up, but it also means you can roam into areas you're not supposed to be in yet. I have personally found the game rather easy. I am about 8 hours in and I've died 9 times, but a friend of mine died like 67 times in the first 6 hours he played so it's going to depend on the player in the end.

This game is phenomenal.

There is a day one patch that went live earlier that From Software asked tech reviewers to wait for which likely fixes a lot of that stuff. That said it's a standard FromSoft release. Even the PS5/Series X versions are massively inconsistent performance wise (at least without the patch). Hovering around 50-60FPS on PS5 in performance mode won't feel super smooth either. FromSoft have always struggled with the technical side of game development. They nail the lore, world, gameplay, atmosphere and audio, but they rarely get the performance right.

97/100 on Metacritic based on 37 reviews of the PS5 version. 97/100 on Opencritic based on 95 reviews of all versions. It is harder to get a high score on Opencritic as they lump all platforms in as one. The game has to be good and fully playable on all platforms or the aggregate score will be damaged by those other platforms. It keeps developers in check, if they want a high score they need to treat all platforms with respect which is good. A 97 on Opencritic makes it one of the greatest games ever made. I can't wait to dive in. I was sold 100% after the network test, I just want to throw hundreds of hours at the full game now.

I was expecting more changes, but Gerrard sees them every day in training so I trust his selection here. I am glad to see Watkins dropped though. He's a good player, he just needs to find that fight and ambition that got him to this club in the first place. Hopefully the shock of being benched is the catalyst for that.

A lot of the more impartial reviews describe a game that improves on Zero Dawn in some aspects, is worse in other aspects and leaves a lot of things unchanged. Based on the reviews I've read it seems like a solid 8/10 game which is good.

What's going on? You'd think we were on a 18 match losing streak the way we're playing, we're so nervous on the ball. Chambers and Mings are at the back padding their passing stats. Martinez seems nervous. Cash can't seem to control the ball anymore. Digne is struggling to communicate with anyone on the pitch right now. Luiz is doing surprisingly well, if you ignore that fact his free kicks and corners have been worse than an 8-year old playing Sunday League. Coutinho/Buendia have been anonymous, although I don't think it's their fault given everything I just talked about. Everyone is playing as if we're on the worst run of form in the clubs history. I get that Newcastle are pressing hard, but that shouldn't be making us as nervous as it seems to be.

Back to normal for a lot of our players hopefully. Martinez didn't play great against Leeds, but he definitely wasn't helped by Konsa, Mings and Luiz who are his main line of defence. That Leeds game was just bad all round outside of Buendia, Coutinho and Ramsey bossing it in attack.

Currently playing Sifu. It's as brilliant as it is difficult and it's very very difficult.

That half told me that Ramsey is smart enough to be on the same wavelength as Coutinho, but Watkins isn't and may never be. I'm struggling to see what Watkins offers while he's playing like this. He's making terrible runs that no one wants to pick out, he's lazy off the ball and his only saving grace is he makes space, which is great but I'd prefer him to play smarter. If someone watched us for the first time and I asked them who our striker was they'd say it was Ramsey. Watkins has been invisible for months now.

We're gonna win 6-0