I have this now. it is very difficult. has anyone mentioned that yet?
For some reason I thought I was supposed to do the Hirata estate before making my way through Ashina Outskirts. After getting my ass handed to me by a drunkard over and over, I decided to explore that other branch and laughed out loud when I was getting tutorial messages in Ashina Outskirts for things Iâd been doing for a while in the Hirata estate. Whoopsie.
Oh yeah, I also discovered like 2 nights ago that there are other tabs under the âAcquire Skillsâ menu. lol.
both of your posts are revelations I failed to have in my time with the game
it starts out with just one though doesnât it?
I normally hate little âNew!â alerts but I feel like the game could have used one here.
You receive other Esoteric Texts as items⌠youâre definitely told when you have new skillsets to work with
Tbh i donât know i feel about the skill trees though, iâm not sure what the logic is behind obscuring all of the skills until you unlock the one before. In a game this punishing it seems to me like forcing the player to operate on incomplete information should be done more carefully than that. Maybe they just wanted to discourage min-maxing the skills.
iâd feel better about that though if there werenât a couple early skills you could miss that are straight up essential. Thatâs the other thing, stuff like the Mikiri counter and the latent power that restores your Vitality when you get deathblows straight up make the game more enjoyable to play and imo they should have just been unlocked on your character by default. (As it is iâm just going to beeline for them every time anyway!)
That and like, giving you at least one more early gourd seed and/or having you start at your first health upgrade level of Vitality/Posture would be the biggest tweaks iâd make to the beginning of this game⌠i do kind of like how fragile you are and i think youâre encouraged to run/hide more often than fight until you start to grasp the combat system better, but there was room for them to tune the difficulty juuuust a little more gently and still get that early feeling of danger across.
All of this said, i ended up replaying the first couple hours âcause iâm away from my own PS4 and this does pass the From/Souls litmus test of ripping through the parts i initially struggled at in less than half the time. Protip: throw oil on dudes and light them on fire lol itâs really useful against the early minibosses
Yeah, do you need an esoteric text to start getting skills from the prosthetics menu? I only realized I had other skill trees when the tengu-masked dude gave me an esoteric text.
Def agree with @sleepysmiles that some of the functions like Mikiri Counter are too essential to allow to be missable and maybe should have been unlocked from the start. At the same time, I think the already slightly overwhelming tutorial (this gameâs action systems are really different for me!) might have felt hopelessly unapproachable had there been much more to it.
Not having any extra health and no extra gourd seeds for so long is real rough, too. Honestly, giving games like this a slightly easier mode that just starts you with
BTW, re: missing things, I am also the person that never found the fishing pond in The Ocarina of Time and didnât know you could talk to whatâs his face in the wheelchair by the mansion in Bloodborne until right before the end of the game.
You receive the prosthetic skill text from the sculptor after you have install a few prosthetics, i think 3 of them?
Unless youâre referencing the prosthetic upgrades, which you get after beating the screaming horse guy (god thatâs a fun fight, i love when they start leaping ten feet into the air like a man-horse Dragoon)
Iâm still trying to gauge where Activisionâs input pushed or pulled, Big M says they maintained entire creative controlâŚso I think it tracks with them staying pretty sparse on directions or tutorials, we see them implementing a handful of direct âhey this is more forgivingâ yet inevitably slipshod motions. Only losing sen/skill pts some of the time (odds are two thirds at best!), Hanbei, who imo is hardly necessary or substantial since any videogame level has grunts for you to practice with and this was no different. There are moves, so maybe they should be listed in menus (arenât they?), you experiment.
Dragonrot stunted to not terminate npcs, vendors, etc.
The Mikiri Counter, at least, is at the very start of your skill tree, and I think they put it there as a way to guarantee that everyone would get it. I believe this is part of an embedded tutorial, where they introduce specialized actions in the skill tree, and the most important specialized action as early as possible in the skill tree.
I mean Iâm one of the dumbest possible gamers and I quickly realized it would be a pretty important skill to grab early
also itâs cheap so thereâs nothing keeping you from getting it at any time if you donât catch on right away
Itâs a bit weird that thrusts are also deflectable, although there is no reason to do it. That was one of the details that made the system hard to keep straight in my mind at first. What were they going for with that
From has always pulled punches and made concessions to learnability and accessibility in all its games. It doesnât make sense to attribute âActivision influenceâ exclusively to things like that. They couldâve given feedback on literally anything. For instance, the vertical traversal, the stealth and the more personal/intimate storyline are all new to From and they couldâve needed help making those work as well as they did.
Well I wasnât trying to exclusively ascribe them to any incoherence in design. Itâs more, short as the words were given a notable place they directly stated as giving pointers toward better player guidance and tutorials. I wouldnât underestimate that having other influence. As compared to Sony w/BB and Bandai Namco, where I donât doubt they offered feedback but also donât remember the same kind of statements.
Yeah i could see that, and like Toups said itâs cheap so youâre likely to pick it up early.
Idk though. Skill trees! That balance between âoptional interesting Skills for Buildsâ and âpractically mandatory skill that fundamentally improves your toolboxâ seems a hard one to strike
Also, i kinda like that your motivation to cure dragonrot is purely narrative. Though i wouldnât have turned up my nose at some Yurt style fuckery with your merchants. Oh, you died 200 times against Juzou and neglected to cure that one guyâs magic plague? Well, he died, and now you canât buy his stuff anymore. You prick.
(with some workarounds to getting his stuff anyway just so itâs not completely unfair, obvs)
The game wants you to think this is going to happen anyway though and i guess this is a good example of why peeling back the curtain on the illusion is a double-edged sword (holy shit sorry for the 3-metaphor-pileup but i canât think of a better way to phrase this atm)
Itâs still strange that the Mikiri Counter and other basic counters arenât just a part of your base repertoire.
Yurt murders the most useless NPCs first and never progresses to murdering Stockwell Thomas so dragonrot would need to be less indiscriminate for that to work
It isnât done ideally but I think thereâs an intent to have the ability to quickstep-dodge into attacks (perilous -> Mikiri) unavailable. Itâs one step up from barebones Sekiro and cuts off the whole branch - makes the game tougher but entirely doable.
Thereâs other counters?
Edit: iâm just now realizing you may have meant additional ones which yeah I wouldâve liked at least one or two others but then you have to imagine the context for themâŚhmm