Daweii

7 minutes ago, Stevo985 said:

There's a YouTuber I watch who plays Gran Turismo and his last couple of videos have been of races he did over the last couple of weeks because he said the game was offline at the moment. Dunno if it's an issue or planned or what

The game has had a lot of downtime recently. Not sure what the cause of the current downtime is, but just a few days ago the game was down for 30 hours because the patch to nerf event payouts had a serious undisclosed bug in it. 

16 hours ago, villa4europe said:

Further to what @Daweii said in the GT thread, Sony have bought a new studio, Haven and they're working a new AAA multiplayer IP for them

The woman who runs the studio is ex assasins creed, watch dogs, far cry 4 and then also battlefront for EA

I'm curious to see what this project winds up being. 

Not a fan of Sony going all in on live service games though. The last definitive statement from Sony on the number of first party games in development was 25 games (pre-GT7/Horizon 2 release). If 10 of those are live service multiplayer then that's a massive amount of their single player identity gone. 

Very curious to see how this goes. I am sure Sony won't be affected in the slightest as live service gaming is where the money is, but those PlayStation fans that love Sony's AAA single player games might have less of them to play going forward which would be a shame. 

Firstly this game based on the pendant in the image probably means this game is following the School of the Cat. This potentially means an all new main character, all new locations and hopefully a very fresh feeling game with a fresh playstyle. Geralt was cool, but his combat style was very methodical and wooden, it would nice to get a main character that fits a more fluid rogue combat style. 

Secondly. I do wish they had held off on this announcement until Cyberpunk 2077 was in a slightly better state. There are some very promising developments from this announcement, but I think its timing is a little too soon. I know that this announcement is probably more to assist them in hiring more staff, but it still feels too soon. As for the promising things. They are moving to Unreal Engine 5 for this one which should streamline development massively, while also solving almost every shortcoming they had during the development of Cyberpunk 2077. CDPR have always used their own engine (REDengine) which worked well for the Witcher games, but became a hinderance as the scope got larger. For CDPR to identify issues, acknowledge them and move away from their own proprietary engine gives me faith that they're doing everything to make this game a success. 

I agree 100% with @villa4europe though that if this has been announced now, I hope it means a release in the next 2 years. I really don't want another repeat of Cyberpunk where the game is announced today and we don't see it until 2030, that would be abysmal even if the game is a 10/10 all-time great when it finally releases.  

3 minutes ago, villa4europe said:

Not sure which other games don't could apply it to though, which might be why they've hit GT so hard

Destiny players might be worried 

Again, personally I don't get it, a car costs £150 in real money... Just don't get that car... But at the same time I doubt I'll ever venture outside of cafe mode so it'll be interesting to see how this actually impacts me 

Sony have 10 live service games in development to release before 2025. Their focus is already slowly turning towards always-online/multiplayer. This new microtransaction push likely won't affect Spider-Man 2, or Wolverine, or God of War 2, but it will likely affect most if not all of the currently unannounced live service games. Gran Turismo 7 might be considered as one of those live service games, Sony haven't delved into it much since making their future intentions clear. 

The issue of a game tuned around the microtransactions is less about "just don't buy the car", and more about how much the deck is stacked against the player that refuses to buy in. A McLaren F1 '94 in Gran Turismo 6 costs 1 million credits. That exact same car in Gran Turismo 7 is 18.5 million credits (1750% increase in cost). This isn't about the car. This is about Polyphony changing things in a game with microtransactions to make the grind deliberately longer. Now you may not be someone that is easily lead by these psychological systems which is great, but the game is still worse for everyone because of the microtransactions. 

This is a game that people bought for £70 that is likely incompletable for car collectors. This is a game that removed the ability to sell cars because that would speed up the acquisition of the cars enthusiasts want to own. This is a game that has increased the cost of some cars by 1750% between iterations of the game. It is very easy to not buy credits with real money, but in the end the people that don't buy in will likely struggle to meet any car acquisition goals they set for themselves, unless the cars they want are the cheaper cars. GT Café is definitely the game at its best and I'm glad you're enjoying that, but outside of that mode it's a mess right now and the fans are justifiably not happy.

34 minutes ago, lapal_fan said:

It's got the lowest user scores for any game? 

Not looking great. 

A series of events has lead to that.

Firstly it needs to be stated that the user score has nothing to do with the on-track racing, or almost anything to do with the main GT Café campaign. Gran Turismo 7 is arguably the greatest Gran Turismo of all time if we factor in quality of the car models, accuracy of the simulation and everything else that has been improved since Gran Turismo 6.

Where it all falls apart is in how the game was handled post-launch. 

Gran Turismo 7 was sent to reviewers without the microtransactions implemented. So every review from a critic talks of a game that is very good, and of a game that is very liberal with free cars and credits. If you play the GT Café and nothing else you won't think anything is wrong. The issue is everything outside of GT Café is tuned around the credits people can buy with real money. For instance some cars are 20 million credits, which is 20 hours of grinding the game efficiently, or 40 hours if you're not playing efficiently, or you could just give Polyphony £150. 2 million credits costs $19.99 (I couldn't find the UK price in a quick Google search), but you need to buy 10x 2 million to buy that 20 million car, or you grind 40 hours for it, but that car isn't just a car, it likely has a 10 million engine upgrade and a 15 million body kit upgrade. Now there are more affordable cars in the game for sure, but if you're a car collector then you're looking at potentially thousands of hours just to get 50% of cars in the game, or you're looking at tens of thousands of pounds if you use real money. 

It gets worse though. The game also has a roulette which you earn tickets to enter. You earn these tickets either by driving at least 26.2 miles per day which is part of the "Daily Workout", or you get them throughout the course of the GT Café campaign. This roulette largely offers the player the lowest reward possible, but on the occasion that it does give the player something good, that something good could still be something bad. The roulette has something called "invitations" and these invitations grant the player the ability to buy an expensive car. These cars can't be bought any other way than with an invitation from the roulette. Now you don't get the car at a discount or anything like that, it is merely a time limited chance to buy a specific car for 2-3+ million credits. So not only is this game utilising grindy free to play systems, but its roulette throws FOMO (fear of missing out) mechanics at the player too. 

I wish that was the end of it though. A recent update lowered the rewards for 16 different events. So not only was the grind already free to play levels of absurd, it has now gotten worse because rewards were cut by 50%. So not only is Gran Turismo 7 a £70 game with free to play mechanics, but it seems to be deliberately guiding players towards spending real money on buying these cars. 

Gran Turismo 7 is a great game that is being held back by greed. If this is the future of PlayStation Studios games then we're in for a rough ride.

11 minutes ago, Designer1 said:

Hmmm.

Without sounding like a whiny so and so I think the last boss is broken at present.

Two phases is fair enough, but the first phase being a fully fledged boss in his own right followed directly by one of the most frustrating fights in soulsborne history is a bit of a piss take tbh.

The camera on Elden Beast is horrendous for melee builds. It makes it so difficult to work out which attacks you are being subjected to and couple that with the fact that you spend 90 percent of the fight chasing around the arena after the boss I'm finding it a chore to finish. It's tarnishing (hehe) my love of the game somewhat. 

The camera is terrible in this game for all the giant bosses. I really hope FromSoftware get it out of their system as hacking away at a bosses ankle, or a bosses stomach while you can't see the rest of it isn't epic. Plus it introduces so many camera issues as the lock on tries to track a boss that fills the screen. Give me a whole game full of hyper-difficult, turbo speed, weapon art spamming boss fights over another game with screen filling bosses.

Currently playing Tunic.

I'm enjoying it so far. I'm not too far in, I've fought a couple bosses and cleared a handful of areas, but it's fun so far. 

Finished the game. Wait for a discount. 

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. 

6 minutes ago, Designer1 said:

Mimic Tear damage is down but they've definitely rejigged its ai to be smarter. I think it's a pretty good trade off tbh.

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. 

18 minutes ago, jacketspuds said:

Apparently this has been nerfed a bit with the latest patch. 

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. 

2 minutes ago, Designer1 said:

@Daweii

Out of interest, what level did you end up at for the last boss?

Did you have many trophies left?

Are you intending to go to ng+ or just mopping up misc quests and areas?

 

Ta.

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. 

3 hours ago, dubbs said:

Out of interest what type of build do you guys go for initially? On my first playthrough of any have like this I tend to opt for melee / strength build. 

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. 

12 minutes ago, villa4europe said:

I think it has a weird problem where it might be a better game than the first one but I'm enjoying it less

100% agree on the loot, it's worse than assasins creed

Alloy talking was mentioned on the computer game show podcast and I'm sure one of them said you can turn it off but I don't know how, the accessibility options on the game are huge, I'm sure they also said you can have the tap R3 scan for yellow handles on the rocks permanently turned on too

The RPG skill tree thing I'm not invested in enough, I don't fully understand the valor system or bother using it half the time, I watch some YouTube videos of people just destroying machines with it but I don't get it which is making it harder for me but I've not found myself bothered by it, think I've only died once or twice 

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. 

5 minutes ago, villa4europe said:

How long did it take you to finish it @Daweii?

I think I could maybe do it in another 10-15 hours but then also with a potential gap coming up I can also see myself putting 60-80 hours in to this whilst playing GT7 on the side for a few months, I'd have thought beyond the new playstation plus surprising me with something this is me for a while now

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. 

5 minutes ago, picicata said:

Is it wrong that I'm just enjoying existing in Limgrave? I'm about level 30 and still happily exploring the opening area. At some point I will give Magrit a go but I doubt it'll be for a while yet!

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.

56 minutes ago, villa4europe said:

Where does it sit on the difficulty scale? 

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.

8 minutes ago, Chindie said:

Apparently the PC release is a bit of a shitshow which is the only thing letting the side down really.

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.