oh no I think it’s incredibly boring and I should’ve known better
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why did you all say it has good combat, all the enemies are spongey as hell and all of your moves are so cancellable that I’m too bored to even find the energy to cancel out of them
every enemy feels too laboured to be a regular mook but they only have like one move
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It’s chunkier enemies are generally more aggressive and the “tactile/force” feedback, as in push pushback on the player - much thwackier than even DMCV
DMC5 felt good though, this is just… loud
this troll miniboss is like… really? this is supposed to be fun the whole way through?
I gotta take a break from Sony stuff from a while, it’s way too heavy handed for me at this point
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It’s a crossroad of Godhand and RE4+ Mikami groundedness with attack path directional and vertical juggling. The combo types and weapon/ability moveset variety become character action after that, I think.
It’s of best in class when it comes to this type of combat imo, you are tethered into engaging one way or another and don’t have time to knife through butter ballet. It’s blood pumpy
Combat and enemies suck until you hit the lake or first realm. I had the same complaints until I reached that point. The big guys are just not fun to fight until you have more tools to deal with them. Until then it’s just tedious.
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yeah it was the posts itt about the encounter design and the promise of eclectic mythology that sold me on it for $20 but I’m having that experience where I’m so turned off by what they thought would be a compelling start that I’m not sure I have the confidence to stick around
I’m on one notch above normal difficulty too
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Also I don’t know what normal difficulty is like. I played hard and that makes things a bit longer at the beginning but more fun once you hit the hub world, and then still easy once you hit the end.
I quit somewhere around the halfway point of the game, so it stays tedious imo. The ham-fisted story turned me off more, though. I was slogging through the combat until I lost my faith in the writing.
EDIT: Hard is bad in the beginning. It’s poorly balanced in general. It takes way too long to kill things at the start, and everything gets way too easy when you unlock enough to chain cooldowns and switch weapons.
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Gotta be a diametric difference in gamefeel thing, I used to tear into the old games relentless and was more than ready to again.
Oh shit I did go hard difficulty and no hud almost immediately, see what does to your grappling. Might’ve gave this a big personal, positive handicap from the average experience. Felt good to play as a 10 x gravity locked cousin to the fellows DMC3 and Bayo, to a lesser slower degree MGR in my fightbook
Ok though, thinking back about a third of the total moves aren’t nearly as attractive but do provide solid useable variety.
they stunlocked my baby boy
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yeah hold off judging the combat until you at least get the ability to reposte. keep popping into the menu to bring your moveset up to date; the way it handled experience gained before dying and checkpointing felt a little flaky to me
i found the first stretch until the lake really tedious as well. playing on a harder mode does nothing for it except making unchallenging mooks more absorptive.
well thanks everyone for corroborating my crabbiness now
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Seemed like you were already boarding the flight. Not gonna rush to the airport in some grand gesture.
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i guess it’s my fault. not really sorry tbh
to be honest even as Sony stuff goes I feel like it does the “you’re about to be hit from off screen!!!” thing less well even than spiderman because it’s not really about staying in motion the same way so it’s just a neverending series of dodge roll windows that are too generous to take seriously, then you play sloppily, and you get “no, father, don’t leave me!” and nngh
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“maybe it’ll make me think about how my father insisted for years on helping him rake leaves onto a tarpaulin with a big hole in the middle when he could’ve just bought a new one, that sounds diverting”
“did it really just tell me to block and dodge only after I’d been wailing on four of these guys a dozen times each, what does it think I’ve been doing”
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shoulda had him shake your corpse in first person and crack annoying gags for that extra naughtydog credit
if you’re playing on hard you probably shouldn’t until you get your powers; the most important change is that your attacks on hard don’t interrupt same-level enemies and the combat truly expects you to be able to push forward on one guy until you’re a master of canceling backwards
the combat design (and the GDC ‘Evolving Combat’ talk is the best one of three they made that were combat-relevant and really goes into this; looks like it’s not free on youtube yet) is highly pushing you to vary attack types and target selection. Enemies have ridiculously large health pools because the stun effects you can apply to them are so powerful that they want you to use your: light chain finishers, heavies, heavy throws, BOY grabs to get small edges of state applications. Watch the duration of the knockback and especially the into-wall and into-ally knocback effects.
At higher difficulty they also want you to do the positioning game to push enemies into each other as you apply states; the light chain continues through an evade for this reason.
Ranged and boss combat is intended to be an Atreus and axe throw specialty but I definitely agree that it turns into wait-and-respond; the trolls and those damn poison witches just have no give to them at all.
Unfortunately once you start unlocking abilities their scheme leaves them all available at the start of every combat and even on hard this is enough to resolve everything before it starts, so you’d have to choose to avoid this.
‘Play with your food’ and ‘plow the road’ were design mantras they used, and you can see that in the push towards varied recoils and state responses and forward, gathering attacks. Watch the way his attacks cause enemies to recoil towards the center of the camera, not the physically correct vector from Kratos to the enemy. Watch the way units reposition themselves to be at your forward. Watch the way units enable attack mode and rush in, allowing others to move back. Watch the way, if you turn your back on an enemy, they move to keep themselves in the same quadrant your remember them in, just so you’re not surprised when they back attack you.
oh! and the most flabbergasting decision they made, the one that brought me no end of pain, the worst possible compromise!!-- the 2-step dodge roll, right? The short evade is invulnerable, but the second, the long roll, is only invulnerable if you’re moving away from attacks. So you’ll sometimes see it pass right through but if you’re stuck in a corner you’re just, well, you’re just dead probably. Sorry. Sorry our health design will refill you on respawn but didn’t give you the tool to start this encounter with these resources
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all of this stuff is so chewy and fascinating to me; i don’t think i care that it’s not logically intuitive because i love being forced to rewire my incentives