oh, it’s online? i assumed it was just a single player lonely game like the originals
You can play offline but it is definitely a populated game. The developers have been really good about having the community guide certain changes in the universe and are still actively supporting it.
In 6 i threw a guy through a plate glass window into a restaurant, picked him up, and slammed his face into a table
A guy stood up from his dinner to applaud me.
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6’s combat took a lot of criticism from people who only joined the series with zero/kiwami, but man, it was a lot of fun and things like this are part of it, definitely.
That stuff’s really cool and I liked the fluidity of fighting from outside to indoors but with as much fighting as you do in the game, it’d be nice if 6 had a little more to the moveset besides swinging someone around in every group encounter. They probably should’ve stuck with the styles from 0 on, new engine or not.
I feel 2 improved on this but I don’t disagree.
Should have stuck with 0’s xp system as well.
put a few hours into Ringo Ishikawa on Switch and it feels… empty
I really love the idea here but the game feels almost unfinished. Nothing I do feels of consequence and the entire experience is really slow. Just like in real life. So I guess as far as ludonarrative is concerned, the game really nails the mark. In terms of actual plot progression and gameplay, though, there’s a lot to be desired. Once I explored the entire town and saw everything there was to see, the only thing left to experience is the story, so I end up asking myself, “Is there more here? Should I keep playing and see what happens? Is there going to be any plot progression in 20, 50, 100 in-game days?”
bleh
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I assume this is referring to the Assassin’s Creed/Arkham Asylum combat model. I have good news! It’s almost dead.
Assassin’s moved to a Souls-inspired control scheme 2 games ago, God of War represents the highest-profile Western injection of Souls combat and will be the standard-setter for at least half a decade. Spider-Man was the last big use of this style, but they made a bunch of improvements by reducing the duration and information on parry prompts.
(To be clear, I’d define this system as: player attacks choose their anim by target angle and distance (no predictable combos), enemy attacks prompt counters with loud icons, counter windows are active for the entire duration of enemy attacks, rather than short parry windows)
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I’m going to misphrase things here but I’ve thought of the assassin’s creed / arkham asylum combat model as (cliche alert, maybe) more like an extension of the qte, like they feel like they’re mostly just about responding to stimuli? It all feels so divorced from ~classic (japanese?) action game design~ which has p much always been on some fundamental level about moving hitboxes around? Which is why I always thought those games were like super two dimensional, idk.
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Yeah, spacing is basically non-existent; player and enemy attack distances are extremely broad, and a different anim will be selected based on how far the attack target is, and they’ll just slide to make up any distance in between. Really bad implementations will have differently-timed attacks, but smarter devs keep all the player attack anims roughly the same duration so you have more consistent rhythm.
An implication of this combat style is that you can’t really support more than one player weapon, because a) timing and spacing aren’t variables that you have to play with, and b) you’re developing grosses of anims for the player’s one weapon, rather than the 20-30 for a Souls-style weapon. Any time you have unique anims for ‘from behind’, ‘from side’, ‘from front’ you are looking at drastically reducing the player weapon count (this is a main reason why Sekiro only has one weapon: they added all these stealth attacks and it’s unfeasible to support more than one set of these anims. Another thing they could have done is run all stealth attacks from something like a dagger, so they could swap the main weapon (note how Shadow of Mordor carries a broken sword-dagger so they had the option to swap (they didn’t use that option)).
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I finally (the better part of a year later) finished the Hazelnut Bastille demo. It’s maybe more interesting than I thought!
What felt like sloppiness in the combat seems to actually be a deliberate decision to focus on quick movement and deliberate attacks. Sword stabs are still NES slow, but there’s a sprint button. The encounter design in the demo is pretty meh, so I don’t know how well it’ll work overall, but it’s not just a bad LttP.
The obligatory Zelda block puzzles are also dramatically better than the originals. I mean, they still are what they are, but they mostly require some level of spatial reasoning and creativity. It definitely feels like the developers are trying to do something at least a little beyond pure nostalgia mongering.
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Media Molecule’s Dreams feels like browsing something like Newgrounds, flying around Second Life, or wandering through Playstation Home. It is one of those things that’s going to brush up against people’s preconceptions of something being called a “game” or being viewed as a “game” creation tool, when it really feels more like playing with a Macromedia Flash editor back in the day.
And by that I mean it is wonderful. I haven’t messed around with creation at all because that’s going to take a while but it’s been pleasing to just sit back and look around the various mini games to play, mini worlds you just walk around and look at, art pieces to view, and animations to watch. It is peak hangoutitude.
I particularly like this one dream where you walk up to a window, press triangle to Drink Absinthe, and then watch the view outside your window turn into a recreation of van Gogh’s Starry Night. But there’s a lot of wild, wild stuff out there. It’ll be interesting to see just how much these dreams develop as people learn from each other and create more complex things.
There are also built in game/art Jams where people just make things based on a theme. Right now it’s themed around Spring so there’s a lot of levels of forests with flowers, or 3D artwork of birds perched on branches looking at the sun, or 3D models of frogs.
One super cool thing is that it seems you can pull elements out of someone’s Dream, such as the level, a model, or a sound, to study how it was made or use it in your own creations. You can also explore the history of each of these elements, seeing who originally created it, view all the iterations of its creation, see comments people have written about the thing, and see all of the other Dreams people have used it in.
It’s like a media creation tool, and a media player, a community site, and an asset store all in one.
From what I understand the $30 Dreams Early Access that’s up for download on PSN right now will also get you the final game once it comes out (which I imagine will be the full $60) so if you’re at all curious it’s not a bad thing to check out (the PlayStation Blog faq claims there’s a limit to how many people can get the Early Access). I imagine this is being used to get more feedback from a larger pool of players and also to generate a lot of content for people to play once the game final game is out and tons of casual people hop in to check it out.
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I’m really excited about Dreams and what people will do with it and haven’t got it yet but will but really my only complaint is why does everything have to look fluffy and feathery.
I never did like LBP at all but I love the look of this
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I did a bit better in the next Yakuza Kiwami chapter the funeral until the boss beat me up for a while. I did as someone elsewhere told me and used my early upgrades on unlocking heat moves which helped. The boss there was tough as as far as I can gather you can’t actually block his attacks and I somehow missed the whole detail about the tired glowy stance meaning they are recovering health and it can only be interrupted by doing a special move of the same color so you had better keep a full meter of that at all times. I gotta go look at all the upgrades next time to see if there is one that makes filling the meter easier (or better yet makes it so that getting hit doesn’t drain it quite as fast) as on first blush that system feels like a bit of a jerk. “Oops you got hit right before he decided to recharge, go punch him and hope you can refill said meter in time before he refills half his health” is… rough.
I assume that’s the default look to give the game a defined personality and make it recognizable at a glance. It probably also helps punch up the mundane stuff most people will make, giving them a bit more life. But there’s stuff out there that isn’t soft or feathery though so I imagine there’s customization to the general tone of your visuals if you want it.
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Dreams is rad. There’s a lot of wonderful stuff people are whipping up.
Then ya got stuff like this, which, well! It’s still neat!
I haven’t had a chance to watch it just yet, but Giant Bomb did a video with some folks from MM to show off some of the sculpting and scripting stuff.
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Don’t worry, people have already used it to recreate Silent Hill PT.
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Someone made the opening area to Silent Hill 2, too.
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