I’m most happy that the haiku gets inscribed permanently on the gear you get as a reward, because I’m almost positive they grabbed that from what we (I) did with Shadow of War gear, which tries to memorialize the procedural character who dropped it by leaving you with a dialogue line from them. I think there’s huge possibility in treating procedural, player-involved text as a first-class citizen next to world lore dumps and flavor text and this can be pushed so, so much further.
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The refrain of memorializing your activities in a game is something I feel open world games have been attempting for a long time (“every gun will have a story”) but I wonder if there are better ways to represent the player experience than with something as small as a handful of words. That sounds like a perpetually limited implementation because you can only write/generate so many words with finite meanings in a game but there is no way to know what exactly about an experience any particular player values.
In a way, I wonder if all the loot games that give you monster/dungeon themed weapons and armor are pulling at a similar sentiment. I am more able to attach the visual of a Monster Hunter monster’s scales and teeth on my new weapon to my memories of fighting those monsters than I am of GoT’s haiku and their viewpoints or a lore-themed equipment description and whatever the heck you did to get that equipment.
In The Last of Us 3 every enemy will have a name and you can retrieve every bullet you kill an enemy with, which will be permanently engraved with the victim’s name, the names of their immediate family, where they got hit, and how many days they were away from retirement.
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If you read more into the game than it probably intended so as to make it more interesting, like you can do with a lot of this game, I like how the four people you play in the Legends multiplayer expansion are four figures from the Mythic Tales group of quests. These were quests based around tall tales of local folk heroes that ended with you obtaining some sort of item used by whoever the real person was. These were also the only place where the game’s one or two hints of mysticism came in, aside from the animals guiding you through forests and praying at shrines made animals appear.
So this Legends expansion seems to be about four of these folk heroes teaming up to battle a horde of demons. It’s like another tall tale a musician has weaved together using well known heroes. It’s in-world fanfiction.
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Oh hey! This is mine. I’m honored to be a fishbone in the throat of a media thread!
I platinum’ed this game and shared a bunch of media from it on the Twitters. This is probably my favorite.
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Completed it.
I enjoyed it a lot more than many games I played this year but the game is mostly refinement, there’s not a lot new here.
I loved the theming of Jin’s parents through natural UI elements acting as guides (father wind and mother bird). It felt very straightforward as a little character-related bit of story through mechanics. I guess his parents really want him to find all the vanity items.
The plot and ending in particular was pretty dour, and without getting into specifics I both liked this direction and felt that very little of the game will ultimately stay with me.
This game makes it very easy and pleasant to 100% which is a shame since I’ll be moving on to other stuff. Loved being in the world but combat stances can piss off. The guard break button stays the same but your stance wasn’t right? Also I have had it with combat systems where moving away and dodging are categorically different actions. If I’m out of range the enemy shouldn’t vacuum on to me just because a narrow concept of ‘dodge’ wasn’t correctly defined by my input.
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Yeah, the game loves to do what a lot of games like to do, where the difference between dodging and rolling is like, a split second button hold apart. I did, once or twice, manage to do the cool “dodge an attack and poke your sword through a guy’s chest in return” maneuver.
I think my main beef as I came to the end of the game was that the final area (and, by proxy, act of the game) just kinda feels…there?
The change in environment doesn’t do much (other than make enemies easier to see, I guess). There’s not much new to learn (other than one special technique that came about so late that I forgot to use it until the final big combat sequence). It just kinda puts you through the same paces as before, marching you to the gloomy end.
I mean, I had fun with it, overall. But I agree - I don’t think anything from the game is really gonna stick with me a few years from now, much less a few months.
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I feel conflicted about the final area. I kinda really like that it’s basically empty and devoid of much since it fits the environment. But also it feels like a weird denouement. Like the game is just tired of its own shit at that point and just wants Jin to end it all.
I mean, to be fair, it’s kinda how I felt by the end, too! So maybe it is fitting.
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Witcher 3 did dodging and rolling correctly. Most of the time you use dodge which just kind makes Gerald sidestep out of the way of an incoming attack. Dodging doesn’t consume any stamina or stop regen for your meter. Rolling will make Gerald dive roll way out of the way and is great for big monster fights and avoiding stuff you can’t block or dodge but it consumes stamina and stops your meter regenning while you’re doing it.
So it’s a pretty good way to do it once you’re familiar with the what each move does and when it’s appropriate to use but it does require having very distinct enemy types like human, animal, monster and giant boss monster. Haven’t played Ghost but maybe it just doesn’t have the enemy variety to justify having dodge and roll be two different moves? Or does it even have two different moves or is it just like you’ve got a dodge button but it only works right in very specific circumstances or timing windows?
You can unlock rolling as a skill which is performed by double-tapping dodge. It mainly just gives you space since dodge works for most attacks (enemy combos catch it eventually). Very often (before unlocking rolling) I would just try to move my character out of the way by walking or running in the opposite direction. The game has a ‘soft lock on’ where you can’t manually lock but the game tries to predict which enemy you want to attack based on your left stick input. So once you’re in combat it just thinks you’d never want to move away from enemies (outside of dodging) until combat is over, unless you want to deliberately flee the encounter.
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https://blog.playstation.com/2020/10/05/ghost-of-tsushima-legends-and-new-game-out-october-16/
Glad to know they respect the fear of the bear. And Ghost Dog is now canon. I’m going to assume they got the idea from making Ghost Dog jokes too.
I’m not expecting a whole lot out of this other than some cool costumes and colors, and maybe something I can futz around in every now and then for an afternoon. But I’m open to being surprised.
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I played some of the GAAS of Tsushima update (called “Legends”) and it’s weird how this feels like the most competent Destiny wannabe since Destiny came out. Like, sure it’s limited in its scope of activities since it’s not a standalone game, but playing through the story mode you can see just how many capital M Mechanics have been added, and you can see how it’s slowly training you for the The Raid. I’ve only played the first three story levels and I never played the Destiny The Raids but let me know how many of these are straight ripped from Destiny:
- There are single use 'healing drums" you can activate that heal anyone standing nearby
- Some enemies are soul-linked, and if you do not kill both of them fast enough then one of them will revive.
- There are enemies called the Disciples of Iyo who cause health regeneration to all enemies in a rather large area around them, and they also have this super strong AOE attack
- There are some other new enemy types like a spear wielding Oni that can thrust and fly a really far distance and a magical Oni that does AOE stuff.
- There is an elemental attunement mechanic. Some enemies will be associated with one of three elements and you must attune your weapon at an elemental shrine to do meaningful damage to enemies of the same element. Each player can only have one element at a time and each elemental shrine can only be used for one active attunement.
- There are also these elemental monuments you need to destroy by expending the same-element attunement in your weapon.
- There are magical platforms that will only appear if someone of the same attunement jumps on it. So magical platforms of varying elements in a row need the players to work together to create platforms for each other to get across gaps.
- The achievements mention the The Raid having “Corruption Stacks”.
You can see how all of these are going to work together to make the wacky the The Raid challenges and puzzles.
There are four classes with initially feel pretty similar despite the tutorial telling you otherwise. The tutorial tells you how the Samurai can do melee attacks and the Hunter can do ranged attacks and the Assassin can do stealth stuff and so on, but then you play the game and realize every class can do melee attacks and ranged attacks and stealth stuff. This was in disappointing until the class differentiation slowly came out as I found loot and leveled up, because your class skills and your ninja tools push you to specialize in specific playstyles. So the classes do matter, even if it’s the typical MMO framework because games don’t know how to do anything else nowadays. Of course these classes are all just splitting off the various abilities you get in the single player, but I think stat boosts from your skills might have some additional perks to your abilities to acommodate the MP style gameplay. There are also super moves that are a mix of new stuff and stuff from the SP.
You’ve got loot with rarity and special perks and gear scores and stat/perk rerolling, and special currencies, and dailies and weeklies, and gear-score locked activities, and mission modifiers, and weekly Nightmare Difficulty Missions with guaranteed Epic Rarity loot, and a three part The Raid, and lots of cosmetics that are unlocked by accomplishing feats rather than paying currencies.
The story mode is around 10 two-player missions that basically teleport you between enemy camps, enemy controlled towns, or enemy formations in the middle of the forests and stuff. So you’re not running through the open world or anything. It feels like playing Ghost of Tsushima but two players, so you pretty much know what it’s like except for all the wacky new mechanics. You individually don’t have the breadth of abilities or the damage output of the single player so the story mode is really designed for two players. You can play it single player but it’ll be a lot more difficult.
The survival mode is four-player and has I think 4 maps that are fairly large, and you’re trying to protect three control points against numerous waves. There are boss waves and wave modifiers like random explosions or poison gas. You also build up points you can spend at a home base to do things like set enemies on fire or summon a spirit bear. It could have been the fault of the map I as playing but I think the pacing could have been better. Enemies spawned near one of the three control points so you were fighting enemies in the same places each time, but there’s a fair bit of traversal between them where you’re just trying to rush from one location to the next rather than actively engaging with anything. The first map on normal difficulty took about 30 minutes.
You have a ping system and some voice commands and everyone has this same incredibly low voice that sounds like they pitched down someone who was talking normally. It sounds hilarious.
Aesthetically Legends goes very hard on horror so there are a lot neat masks you can wear.
I can see myself futzing around with it off and on. One weird thing is that you have to go into PSN and “claim” the update to play it, which makes me wonder if that’s required to make it easier to update or if there are any intentions to build it into a standalone product. I don’t know there’s enough variety in the levels to make it last long term but as an MP mode for a single player game it’s surprisingly fleshed out mechanically.
If anyone wants to mess around with it together let me know.
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After playing through it a bit more I think all of the issues with encounter and environment design are about the same here. I thought the story mode would slowly build up the mechanics and have you running around playing with elemental effects to defeat enemies, but instead every mission has it’s own unique mechanical gimmick, and it’s never taken so far as to supersede the effectiveness of just regular combat. I guess that keeps it accessible but ultimately it boils down to fighting a large group of enemies in an open area, like a normal fight in the normal game.
So all of the numerous mechanics that show up in the story mode feel less like they’re being there to create interesting experiences in the story mode and feel more like they’re there to teach you how they work in advance of the The Raid.
I tried two of the four survival maps and they both have the issue of enemy encounters primarily occurring in one of the three control points, which are wide open circles, rather than anywhere else in the vast map that make up the level. Everything in between control points is just to make it take long to get from point A to point B, but the actual environment design between those points- like a village or craggy cliffs on a coast- isn’t actually used in combat. So ultimately you’re mostly just fighting a large group of enemies in the open areas.
I still think it’s neat that this is a thing that exists, but I wish it were able to lean heavier on aspects of the game that weren’t just the regular combat itself. Make me play in the environment during combat, make me consider where I pick my fights in the survival mode, make utilize the wacky mechanics to change the rhythm of a fight.
Co-op melee fights that scale from solo encounters seem like one of the under-solved problems for making this work; Ghost of Tsushima explicitly builds off a lot of the Shadow of Mordor systems which have very strict numbers of AIs able to fight at once, limiting the difference between small and large encounters. Presumably the new enemy types with their area-effecting attacks break the difference and allow players to help each other?
I keep going back and forth on this based on how reliable my partner is and how quickly fights descend into chaos, but as far as the different enemy types go I don’t feel like they really make much of a difference by themselves. You’ve always only had two options for dealing with enemies, which is blocking/parrying or dodge rolling away, and I find that these new enemies don’t really change that dynamic in any way other than you’re dodging rolling even more. The game already had a generous amount of un-blockable attacks and 360-degree attacks you had to dodge roll to get away from, so adding several more enemies who have ranged un-blockable attacks doesn’t actually make you play much differently. At least for me.
The other thing that makes me feel like it’s lacking something is how abilities are, as usual, cooldown based. You have less skills compared to the single player, but your special abilities and ninja tools all work on cool downs that can range from 30 seconds to a minute and a half. Without those abilities every class is pretty much using swords like usual, with everyone wacking away on the same enemy. The archer naturally does more damage with bows, so she can at least fall back on that to differentiate herself a bit, if she can get some space. But the assassin works best on stealth-based damage and once combat starts you can’t really lose aggro and do stealth attacks again without using one of your cooldown based abilities. So it just feels like the class differentiation dissipates for too long too often.
Where things do change up however, and this is a bit of a mea culpa on my part, is when elemental attunements get involved. Now one thing I’ve learned is that the levels are changing based on difficulty. As you go up in difficulty the levels are changing their enemy types and layouts, and levels can integrate more mechanics than they did on the normal difficulty. So a level that previously featured only Soul-Linked enemies (you have to kill two enemies quickly or they revive) now might feature Soul-Linked enemies who are also elementally attuned (they take little damage unless you’ve attuned you’re weapon at a corresponding elemental shrine).
It’s that elemental attunment thing that can change the flow of combat, because there might be three elements in play but only two players in story mode, so you’re constantly trying to kite enemies around as you and your partner attune with different elements to fight the strong enemies, all the while meanwhile dodging a large horde of enemies. Those are the moments where it really feels like you are your partner have to work together.
The higher difficulties are also adding in more Oni type enemies, who have stronger attacks and way more health, so those encounters are also tending to require you to work with your partner to belt out damage and kite enemies around as someone gets overwhelming by a large group. So depending on the moment I’m sometimes liking GoT Legends more than other times.
I’m still impressed Legends is a thing though.
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Some pictures.
Very standard GAAS equipment mechanics. Weapons, accessory, and ninja tools that have gear score, rarities, stat boosts, and perks. You can also re-roll equipment stats, rarity, and perks. That costs a special resource of course, but there’s no micro-transactions so it’s more for time gating and pacing your growth. Most equipment seems to be equippable by all classes so you can generally raise every class to your current gear score cap together, but they rank up individually and ranks are needed to unlock new techniques on a class’s skill tree.
Skill trees exist for each class. The bottom three rows force you to elect one skill per row, so I guess Builds can be a thing.
The Assassin can unlock the ultimate ninja technique and Super Assassinate people.
Lots of cosmetics for each class. All of these are unlocked by accomplishing specific feats, like getting a certain number of headshots with the Hunter or finding some collectibles in some missions.
There are lots of feats/challenges that unlock cosmetics for each class.
Mission selection. There are I think 9 story missions, 4 survival maps, 3 raids (which aren’t unlocked yet), and 2 weekly Nightmare stages. Difficulties levels seem to change the levels a great amount, so that’s good. You need to have the minimum gear score to play higher difficulties. Nightmare Weeklies also seem to give you a score at the end and there are leaderboards for each one.
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