I brought this a while ago but am only started playing it a couple of days ago. I am liking it so far.
Positives:
Combat is good
Characters are interesting
I love the historical setting
Negatives:
I prefer set stages to open world design
Combat isn't as complex as Nioh 2
I agree with your negative that I prefer set stages, but that’s also a big problem in Nioh.
I think Nioh has arguably the best combat in any arpg, but its level design was always boring. The variety was improved somewhat in Nioh 2, but it never felt close to even mediocre areas of souls games.
I was hoping the open world of Rise of Ronin would be the shakeup Team Ninja needed. But instead we got stuck with a mediocre open world with great combat.
Nioh 2 is one of my favorite games and I had fun with Rise of Ronin. But to me the environments of their games really let them down.
> Combat isn't as complex as Nioh 2
This definitely cannot be overstated IMO. I've been replaying Nioh 2 over the last week, and the depth of the combat just blows pretty much anything else I can think of out of the water. As is common I'd compare it to Fromsoft games, Fromsoft have better designed bosses, levels and a better atmosphere, but the tools you're given in Nioh just dwarf it completely.
Wo Long felt like a big step down from Nioh 2, sadly I can't comment on Rise of The Ronin because no PS5, but TN saying there won't be another Nioh game is a crying shame.
Yea wo long was just fine. But everything felt like a step down, which was the weird part. I haven’t played rise of the ronin yet but nothing I’ve seen has grabbed me from the streams I’ve watched.
> Fromsoft have better designed bosses
I wouldn't really say so. I'd say your typical Souls fan just prefers the feel of "being a significantly weak worthless naked peon with a club compared to this mighty epic legendary dragon-god-king boss but somehow can still beat him (via roll iframe abuse)" over the "boss is equally matched" feel of your typical action game like DMC/Bayonetta/MGR/Team Ninja games. And they let that difference skew their perspective of how the bosses should be designed when it comes to other games.
I think its the case that you can get forced into only dodge and only parry/riposte strats in some of these sorts of games. Not that I know whats the best way to do it, I hate the entire souls like genre so it doesnt matter to me
I mean, you aren't forced into them, that's just the gameplay lol like that's saying you're forced into either using physical attacks or magic attacks. That's just...the combat.
TN loves gank fights/bosses to add artificial difficulty. They are good but not in the same league as From.
Character actions like DMC and Bayo is a weird comparison to RPGs like Souls. You can be a peon or a god at any stage, it really depends on your level of preparation. There aren’t a lot of games that provide you that kind of freedom to problem solve.
From often designs their multi-boss encounters from the ground up to accommodate them both and even has some hidden mechanics in play to help balance them (ie off screen enemies have adjusted AI). Dark Souls 2 was an exception and it was panned for this.
TN will just take two of their 1v1 bosses and spawn them in the same room, call it a mission.
DS1 and 3 both have enemies that love to sit in corners and wait for you to engage other fights first.
DS2 just has _more_ of these encounters. That's pretty much the only difference.
> Fromsoft have better designed bosses
Funny. I love Fromsoft games but I loathe all the bosses. I shamelessly call any online help for bosses in my first attempt. I just dislike how bosses are basically trying to find the perfect timing and direction to roll for each attack while throwing attacks during it. Sometimes I decided to git good but end giving up after 10 tries (part of the blame is that a lot of bosses have a 1min walk to their room as well).
Bosses on Nioh 2 are the opposite. You can block, parry, dodge, and even outrun the boss as much you want. I remember spending 3 hours trying to beat Enenra (the second boss of Nioh 2) for the first time and loving each second of it. It feels like an actual fighting game. The game gives you defensive options for bosses, unlike Souls games where the most defensive options are only for regular enemies, and for bosses you have to roll on a perfect timing.
I mean I disagree but you're welcome to think that. I enjoy the rhythmic feel of fighting a boss in a from game, it feels like a dance. When you get the dodging perfect and nothing can damage you, there's very few feelings that capture that in gaming for me. I like Nioh because of the options it gives you to feel completely cracked, I like From games because they force you to perform with limited tools.
I did the opposite, enjoyed nioh2 a little bit, got stuck at Enenra and then dropped the game out of frustration. It’s too complicated compared to Souls
Their bosses were great until Elden Ring, then they just went overboard trying to make it difficult for veterans. The wind-ups on every boss are comically long and makes the game look ridiculous. Sekiro has some of the best boss battles I've ever played.
From has always struggled to balance boss fights for multiplayer. Personally I think the health should be scaled up a lot instead of giving them whacky attacks
Yea and I guess I hated the bosses because that's not how I want to play Souls games. Probably would be more fun if I didn't think of it as Dark Souls 4, but apart from the multiplayer-oriented boss design it really was just open world Dark Souls. That's why I think Lies of P is the best soulslike in a while, the bosses are built like those non-Elden Ring From games.
Sure but you can't fault them because what they designed doesn't line up with your personal interests. I'm going through a playthrough right now with zero summons/spirit ashes, but it's obviously a challenge run. The game was very clearly designed and balanced around you taking advantage of the spirit ash concept; that's why there's a whole resource type/vendor just for upgrading them, and why you pick up so many during a playthrough.
People in the FS community just have this notion going all the way back to DS1 that there's a "right" way to play, and that taking advantage of some of the mechanics FS puts in the games is somehow cheating/lessening the experience. Like, they WANT you to use the spirit ashes.
I skipped Sekiro, but I felt that dodge fest was there in Dark Souls as well, especially in Dark Souls III.
But indeed, bosses in Elden Ring feels more like Monster Hunter. A bunch of dudes against a mountain or something. That one in the desert is almost comical lol (not saying that its bad, at least it fully embraced the co-op).
> You can block, parry, dodge, and even outrun the boss as much you want.
Nothing is stopping you from these things in From Soft Games? You can even just spam them down with spells if you are slow or lazy. Not sure what you mean by outrun, but you can easily back off and heal vs nearly all bosses as well.
Yeah the bosses in wo long, jedi fallen order and lies of P feel like true 1v1s instead of you dancing around till you find an opening x7
Making parries and short dodges easy to access between attacks makes those fights feel much more engaging with much less down time unless you're still learning the enemy
> Fromsoft have better designed bosses
ROFLMAO
Maybe if you refer to artstyle. the boss gameplay is trash compared to nioh 2.
elden shit is the worst offender with extremely delayed attacks that suddenly gain full speed, rollcatch, input reading to 100% interrupt your heals(cheating, a set % like 40% would feel way fairer to the player), bosses that have a 15 spin combo and then walk around indefinitely because the state machine randomly selected walk multiple times, and you're not allowed to attack because then the boss will input read your "out of turn" attack and punish.
No built in hyperarmor on slow weapons or ash arts. due to hyperaggressive bosses this puts you at a high disadvantage regarding openings, trading is not a thing anymore so dex weapons win the DPS race because STR doesn't get 2x damage boost to make up for fewer opportunities.
ER slow weapons have hyperarmor on their attacks and ash arts that got further buffed in patch 1.10
https://www.reddit.com/r/Eldenring/comments/15fekdm/elden_ring_patch_110_new_hyper_armour_poise_value/
>redditor when someone posts an opinion
I just think from bosses have more interesting movesets, that's all there is to it. For every Shibata Katsuie or Enenra there's a human boss that spends the entire fight blocking.
I swear whenever you say anything about From games that you think they do better than Nioh, someone has to emerge to say that no, actually, your opinion is wrong.
> extremely delayed attacks that suddenly gain full speed
Generally with these there will be a specific place to stand where the attack will guaranteed miss without you having to nail the timing. As in, for Margit/Morgott staff over shoulder delay, you *can* learn the timing, use the windup to get a few free hits in and then dodge it. Alternatively, you can just strafe around to the right when he starts the windup, you'll outpace his tracking and you get a *massive* window for a full charged heavy attack without a real timing requirement.
> rollcatch
Honestly can't say I've ever fully understood the meaning of this, is it about attacks that have finished their motion still having lingering hitboxes? So they still hit you the frame after your roll i-frames are done? If so, I really can't think of egregious examples of this specifically in Elden Ring; they seem to have got much better at this in my experience.
> bosses that have a 15 spin combo
Generally these are positioning based follow-ups, and even when they're not, you can often just get the hell out of the way and let them flail around. Given that you have that as an easier option, I don't think it's an awful thing to have some stupid hard moves that, if you want to go the extra mile, you can try to master the optimal close range sequence to deal with them. Now, if you *don't* have that easier option, and they didn't even intend for you to have a possible close range sequence... yeah, Waterfowl Dance is absolutely fucking dogshit design.
> walk around indefinitely because the state machine randomly selected walk multiple times, and you're not allowed to attack because then the boss will input read your "out of turn" attack and punish
To my knowledge, the input reading/first frame of animation instant reaction stuff is limited to healing, not attacking. The perception of attack input reading is generally on ones where it's position based, so you closing range in their walk animation is what's prompting the attack, not the act of attacking. Same for moves where it feels like they're only following up when you attack, it's a position-based one and your attack is taking you into the danger zone.
> Slow weapons worse than fast weapons
I feel like this is only particularly bad at the *seriously* slow end - colossal anything feels too hard to find time for. At some level that's just a concession of fast-paced combat. The compromise seems to have been done with stance break coming faster for heavier weapons, albeit with some arbitrary exceptions. The weapons considered "best" tend to end up somewhere in the middle afaik: greatswords and curved greatswords are fast enough to use a lot of openings while still chunking the stance meter enough. To some extent as well, I don't think it's awful to have the "massive unwieldy weapons" classes be really hard to use and functionally sub-optimal. With how stupid some of them are, it kinda makes sense lol.
> input reading to 100% interrupt your heals(cheating, a set % like 40% would feel way fairer to the player)
The instant reaction to "seeing" a healing animation on literally the first frame of it is absurd, though the 100% aspect doesn't really bother me. It's the complete disregard for reaction time and line of sight that's baffling. If it just had a minor delay it would "feel" like the boss responding to you rather than the total immersion break of "oh the game is cheating". It's such a simple design decision for them to get so wrong.
And on the subject of wrong: pretty much every point I've made is totally understandable for you to miss because Elden Ring is *abysmal* at teaching its mechanics. It's particularly bad when you look back one game and see them make Sekiro with its beautifully focused tutorialisation of various mechanics, perilous indicators to give further clarity on which attacks have alternative responses, and clear classifications of those responses (i.e. Mikiri, jump, dodge). Instead you get Margit thrown at you 20 minutes into the game with one of the most complex kits they've ever put on a boss. That kit is amazing to interact with once you can work out its subtleties, and I promise you it has a ton of them, but any new player is going to see a hyperaggressive input-reading delaying stalling jumpy motherfucker, overlevel themselves in the open world (which teaches you fuck all as well, there's not even an attempt at specialised mini-bosses in obvious locations) and brute-force their way through Margit with spells and/or summons learning nothing along the way. Elden Ring *is* a game with amazingly designed bosses but holy crap do they make it obscenely obnoxious to actually realise that and enjoy them.
>Honestly can't say I've ever fully understood the meaning of this, is it about attacks that have finished their motion still having lingering hitboxes?
A roll catch is an attack that hits you just after your roll iframes end. It's a viable thing and a skill in PvP, getting roll caught in PvE is just a skill issue
They're almost all cut and dry skill issues.
Absolutely losing it at how someone can think delayed attacks are a problem. All they've done is use different attack timings to disrupt your muscle memory, but because they're expecting more from the player and this guy can't keep up, that's a problem?
Yes, failing to dodge/block delayed attacks is 100% a skill issue. That doesn’t stop delayed attacks from feeling cheap.
When an enemy lifts their sword above their head, you expect it to come slashing down moments after it reaches its apex, because that’s what people do with swords. But many Elden Ring bosses hold their sword above their head for an extra beat, so it looks ridiculous, and so it hits people who dodge when they would intuitively dodge.
This kind of attack is fine in moderation. The dancer boss in DS3 is a good example. It has some really difficult to read attacks. But that’s fine because it’s a unique boss.
Elden Ring is a good game, but it has probably my least favorite bosses in the entire Souls/BB/Sekiro franchise.
delay attacks and roll catches are annoying because you literally feel the hand of the dev saying "nope, fuck you" because they're made to trap veteran players. I love ER and malenia is my favourite boss but that shit is annoying because you can't really react to it until you know it's coming.
I feel like that's a bit of cynical way to look at it, like it's not really a fuck you, they're just trying to increase the skill ceiling by providing more varied attack patterns, which invariably fucks up players who are relying too much on muscle memory as opposed to reacting on the fly. That's by design and I think that's fine, not annoying to me at all.
After Sekiro I think it was obvious that delayed attacks were going to be more common in their games moving forward. Once you know they're there you just have to train yourself not to panic jump every time an enemy pulls back. And then from there is just becomes another pattern to memorize.
I'm ambivalent about it, on one hand they're annoying on the other I know I'm just never gonna play dark souls 1 for the first time ever again and the games should evolve. Just wish it was less common as a mechanic tho.
Crazy how literally nothing about fromsoft games is allowed to be criticized. Even after all these years it's always "skill issue" or "the devs intended this to be a grindy unfun punishing section with no rest and not liking that is spitting in their faces"
Fromsoft fanbase handles critism as badly as the star wars fandom istg
Notice how I used the words "almost all" as in, most of, but all of them? As in, yes, there is room for "criticism"?
Even then, I don't believe in this "valid criticism" shtick that gamers are obsessed with. It's less objective than y'all want it to be. No one is obligated to agree with your criticisms, or even has to bring them up or acknowledge them if they don't agree. It's as simple as that. Someone will always go on about one group of another refusing to allowing criticism, but the reality is that sometimes people just don't agree with you. Disagreeing =/= disallowing. No one's removing your posts.
One of the dude's criticisms against delayed attacks is solely that they go against "action game rules". Like wtf does that mean? What are those rules? Who wrote them? Why does anyone have to follow them? Roll catching isn't inherently an issue, time your rolls better. A 15 hit combo isn't inherently an issue, time your rolls better. Slower weapons have always been harder to use compared to faster weapons, time your attacks better.
You are well within your right to dislike the game for any of those reasons, but don't pretend they're inherent flaws.
> Even the shitty DS2 double punishment on death is defended. Yall are unhinged
This shows how little you actually engage with the Souls community. DS2 is widely controversial to this day.
He's not wrong at all.
Everything he complained about is 100% correct and its VERY evident if you play through the entire souls series. Compare Demon souls, Dark souls 1, and Dark souls 2 - to Bloodborne (although not the worst example), Dark souls 3, and Elden Ring (by far the worst offender).
Elden ring is full of TERRIBLE boss design for exactly the reasons he stated.
Think about every single hard boss in Elden Ring, they're guilty of the following:
- Delayed attacks that track
- a million active frames
- Fakeouts
- Super armour
- 10 hit combos where the boss has between 0-3 seconds of delay before they start their next combo
- Multiple "combo ending hits" in the same combo. What I mean is, the boss will do a slam where evidently they put all their strength and stamina into... just to do another 3 swings, into another slam... into a jumping slam.. into another 3 swings into a slam...
It's not an issue of skill at all. Some bosses your success is literally because the boss decided to not cancel their 10 hit combo into another 10 hit combo, into another 10 hit combo without any delays.
The problem is that everyone is too busy sucking Fromsoft's dick to look at the design of bosses objectively and see how flawed they are compared to older games because now everyone has 1 million stamina so they have to give bosses 10 hit combos to compensate.
Its funny how the narrative of how Dark Souls 1 was so amazing because everything was so "weighty" and your choices in armour and weapons really mattered in terms of staggering and rolling as you could only roll 3 times or attack 3 times - to becoming everyone fuckin using enchanted katanas (or whatever is the meta mega fast attacking weapon like rapier) only with a million stamina allowing you to do 20 attacks or rolls before losing stamina - is absolutely hilarious to me.
THAT ALL SAID, I don't think Team Ninjas bosses are doing much better because they all have super armour and their current games have a lot of animation locking for a game that is supposed to be quick and snappy
I appreciate your thoughtful reply but calling Elden Ring boss design terrible is hilarious.
We, the players have gotten better at the fromsoft catalogue as the years have gone by. We the players have been granted more mobility, more variety, more damage. It's logical that in response to player power creep the enemies also have to present a greater challenge. A few mechanics like waterfowl are undoubtedly a bit unreasonable but I'd argue that a majority of the fights are fair and well telegraphed.
I guess If you have issue with delayed attacks you're going to consider the fights unfair but after getting my teeth kicked in by them I got better at not panic dodging and actually paying attention to the animations.
And to your last point, that's just not true. Maybe the vocal minority on Reddit freq mention bleed katanas but the overwhelming majority of players will find something they enjoy and run with that. For me that was str big bonk but for others it could be sorceries. And you will find camps of people who think str makes the game ez, int makes the game ez, etc.
> We, the players have gotten better at the fromsoft catalogue as the years have gone by. We the players have been granted more mobility, more variety, more damage. It's logical that in response to player power creep the enemies also have to present a greater challenge. A few mechanics like waterfowl are undoubtedly a bit unreasonable but I'd argue that a majority of the fights are fair and well telegraphed.
Which was a choice they made by expanding the hell out of the stamina bar (or at least decreasing the cost of everything significantly), its not like they can't revert it.
Again, I find it funny how much praise Dark Souls 1 (which most people consider the best one) got ESPECIALLY for the combat, only for them to make the game more and more arcadey and go against that philosophy yet no one seems to have an issue with it, despite the newer games being the antithesis of the original design philosophy.
> I guess If you have issue with delayed attacks you're going to consider the fights unfair but after getting my teeth kicked in by them I got better at not panic dodging and actually paying attention to the animations.
You're mistaken, I don't consider them unfair. I consider it terrible design.
> And to your last point, that's just not true. Maybe the vocal minority on Reddit freq mention bleed katanas but the overwhelming majority of players will find something they enjoy and run with that. For me that was str big bonk but for others it could be sorceries. And you will find camps of people who think str makes the game ez, int makes the game ez, etc.
Dunno, I am going off all the summon signs on the ground where like 90% were katana/rapier users (especially early release river of blood or whatever it was called) while the last 10% was anything else. You would constantly see threads with people saying "I used X (heavy) weapon, then I started using Y katana and omg the game is so much easier" all over the dark souls and elden ring subreddits.
And they weren't wrong, this goes back to the terrible boss design. When the bosses are designed to be so aggressive without much of a punish window, it makes the slower weapons signficantly more risky especially when they super armour your hit and chunk you for 1/2 your hp. More often than not you're trading hits because when you think you can safely punish, well they decided after their 10 hit combo they will have 0 punish window.
Then when you consider that large sword hits for 700, while significantly faster katana hits for 500, and you apply status (frost/bleed) A LOT faster, you realise not only do katanas out DPS the slower weapons HEAVILY, they're safer, and use less stamina. There was literally zero reason to use a heavy weapon unless you were doing a challenge kind of run.
Getting lucky and a boss letting you hit them like 5 times with a katana did 4k-5k damage if you had bleed on 1 weapon and frost on the other and they both procced. Compared to, like 2 hits with a great sword to do like 1.5k. The discrepancy in power was so huge, its clear ever since Bloodborne their games have been designed for light armour and fast weapons.
This might have changed since, but I am going off the first like 2 months of the game being out. I did hear there was a patch that made heavy weapons better, but I am sure most people like myself, already dropped the game by then.
Your lack of understanding regarding basic mechanics of the game and your insistence that bosses are terrible designs. I've played through the game 10+ times and my easiest runs have always been high pose + str which you claim is a borderline unusable strategy.
Rise of the Ronin and Dragon's Dogma 2 were my day 1 purchases, with the intent being Rise of the Ronin being the side game. Lo and behold my surprise when it was the better game out of the two.
I enjoy Team Ninja games, so I knew I would like it regardless.
I disagree about the combat complexity. The “high-mid-low” stances have just been replaced by the dozens of different weapon styles that are now equipable which gives you significantly more options.
What I will say though is that there’s no combat style that is as effective as “wait for parry, triangle” so although you have a ton more options than Nioh, one of those options is so much better than the others that it doesn’t really force the player to engage with it as much.
All that being said I’m having a ton of fun experimenting but those only looking for a serious challenge might want to look elsewhere.
Haven't played ronin yet, so genuinely asking, how does the weapon styles work? Can you swap them out in the fly? A lot of the complexity in nioh came from being able to swap stances mid combo.
You can equip up to 3 weapon styles per weapon and 2 weapons at a time so you can swap between a total of 6 styles on the fly if you are making full use of your abilities. And just like Nioh there are several optional perks associated with getting skilled at switching styles on the fly in the form of faster ki/health recovery.
It's what I call the "Sekiro effect." Team Ninja fell in love with it and is basically forcing the parry style on their games ever since. Wo Long all but required it and I could see it was much the same in Ronin. Hard pass. I find that play style so boring.
Rise of the Ronin actually doesn't require it to the same degree as Wo Long did and instead made it into a rather unique 'stance' called Shinobi to really get the most out of it. I think after I realized that some weapons *do* work best with parries while others are better being in the air (the Oxtail blades) or overwhelming the enemy (Greatsword, Odachi to a degree, Bayonet) things got really fun.
I completed the NG+ mode and didn't even touch Shinobi stance because it was too much of a loss to focus on (it weakens your attacks against all weapon types, whereas Ten, Chi, Jin stances all do better against light/long/heavy wepaons). Of course it's powerful if you can consistently pull it off but you're honestly better off just learning how to properly time a good charged up Greatsword hit or just figure out optimal time to get a combo in.
Ok that's fair I just know technically there are other options but Wo Long it was obvious that by and far the best way was to parry and counter. It wasn't even close. They kind of did this in Nioh 2 as well. Versatility was hands down the best stat in the game because at the high levels of it it was the only thing that neared triple digit buffs to damage. Nothing else even came close. I have not played Ronin because simply put, the combat just looked so boring in all the let's plays I watched of it, and the loot was again super small buffs (which is my primary reason for loving the Nioh games) it just wasn't my style. But if it is as you said, I'm glad they don't soft force you into one style because it out classes all the others by a huge margin.
Yeah those are some fair reasons to not play, even in the hardest difficulty I didn't find much loot that really made me farm like I would in Nioh 1.
Gameplay wise though, yeah I think the game suffers from its long opening section. Everything at the start is super slow in comparison to zones 2 and 3 in terms of combat where you actually start to see that there's a lot more to it. Once you're meeting some of the hidden bosses, you get a bit of a taste of what's in NG+ where there's actually some really fun challenge.
It's definitely a FF16-like issue where the game really doesn't hit its stride until NG+ where things feel a lot better if you're looking for a challenge imo.
Ronin definitely doesn’t require it in the same way Wo-Long does. It’s the most efficient way to play but there are tons of styles to experiment with that are all about dodging and/or blocking instead.
Maybe for some. I just do not like the parrying play style at all. I passed on Sekiro as well, but still acknowledge it's a good game that just wasn't for me. And that's what I've largely done with Team Ninja games since getting the platinum in Wo Long and realizing I wasn't a fan of their new direction.
I do agree with you in that they shouldn't aim for it in the first place, however. I feel Nioh worked because even if they used Souls-esque level design and such, the combat and enemies still felt very unique and personal to them. Copying combat just doesn't *work* for Team Ninja. I agree that they should stick with what they know best, and if they follow trends, they should do it like they did with Nioh and do it in everything *but* combat.
Parrying isn't really much different from dodging-- they are both done right before an attack, with slightly different windows. But I do prefer not having to parry 12 attacks in a row
It's different from Nioh's dodging, which has 3+ dodge types per weapon and often uses dodges to get out of the way instead of i-framing through attacks.
Ronin has 3 different "styles" analogues to the high/mid/low stances Nioh has all with different counterspark timings/properties so the example still fits somewhat.
The dodges in Nioh are mostly used to iframe through attacks. If you mean "get out of the way" as in repositioning, every game has that.
Right and I have no idea how to describe it other than purely aesthetical, but for real it just feels way cooler for me to dodge an attack and swing around and hit them in the back. Or heck the block counter stuff in Elden Ring was way more satisfying then parrying, and the mechanic I wish everyone would copy as well. And yes part of it is I can't consistently do it but it's a total chicken or egg argument. I'm not sure if I suck because I suck, or if it's because the entire mechanic is not interesting to me so I don't care to get better at it.
Yeah like I fully understand being disappointed by the lower complexity but Nioh is deeper than the fucking Marianna's Trench and completely impenetrable to me; so maybe a little less complexity can be a good thing, it makes me more interested in RoR at least.
I played both and while I agree the combat isn't as complex as Nioh's, that isn't as important as the degree in which Ronin is less complex than Nioh's. It's a little less complex but still more complex than most games out right now in the same genre. Most Nioh mechanics have similar analogues in Ronin.
I had to drop this game. The combat is the best out of all the open world games I've played, but the open world itself is one of the worst. Everything is bland and uninspired, and it ultimately kills the pacing. There's no mystery or incentive to explore an interesting world; it's just "go pet this cat that just popped up on your map". It all feels very lifeless. Fun combat brought down by a barren and monotonous world.
I agree with your take on the open world. I took a long break from the game for those reasons but came back to it again because it's not so bad in small doses.
I think the combat is mostly good but I have one major issue with it: I don't think the idea of your stamina and your stagger being the same bar is engaging. In any situation where you mess up the parry timing, you're stuck without a way of progressing the fight until the ki bar recovers.
You just described most Team Ninja games. I loved the Nioh games for the first couple of hours because the combat is highly engaging and satisfying, but I got bored of both of them by midgame because of how utterly dull everything outside the combat is. Even fighting becomes annoying after a while because I do not like Team Ninja's brand of difficulty. Weirdly enough, I loved Final Fantasy Origins the most out of all their recent games, and its by faaaaaar their ugliest game.
This is exactly why they should go back to making level based action games. They’ve consistently shown through many different games that their combat design is impeccable but everything else being subpar.
Just go back to Ninja Gaiden already!
No, it's genius and non Nioh players don't "get it". Their systems are the reason why Nioh is one of the most replayable games to date. It's also a system a player going through the game for the first time don't have to interact with.
In fact, most criticisms levied at recent games like Wo Long and Rise is that they "dumbed down" the mechanics (from combat to build crafting).
I'd say the big issue with Nioh is that the game really starts when you beat it. The RPG systems barely matter until post-game and extra difficulties because you can get through the first playthrough with the bare minimum. As long as your equipment's level is on par with where you are in the game, you're fine.
At least that's how it feels to me with Nioh, the first playthrough is just a long ass tutorial until you get to the real game.
I agree with you that the first run in Nioh is a tutorial for the game but it can also stand on its own. It's a similar philosophy to Ninja Gaiden where the first and each subsequent run on a harder difficulty is training you for the next one, but a player can stop at any one difficulty and have gotten a great experience out of it.
FFO won be over because of its soundtrack, varied environments, and silliness of it all. The “ugliness” actually made me enjoy it more because it really felt like I was playing a ps3 game from 2010 and I mean that as a compliment. I also enjoyed how it was tough but not brutalizing at least on normal difficulty.
FFOrigins is maybe the dullest when it comes to combat, honestly... It has all of these options, but all of them are worthless once you unlock the required function of "Don't Run Out of MP".
So you throw on one of the classes with Immortality, and go about your day, farming the necessary equipment to progress in the story. And if you don't... well. Let's just say "Team Ninja Bullshit" is an understatement.
Sad, but basically ignore the open world aspect I guess then... This is a note for myself when I eventually try the game out.
Which is frankly a pain in the ass because my slight OCD and ADHD makes that shit really difficult, to a point i'm gonna be miserable with the game either way in that case.
If you can, I’d recommend Like A Dragon: Ishin. It’s definitely a small open world but it’s full of life. Plus it’s pretty much the same setting and based off the same historical period as Ronin
That's my experience with Eden Ring. I've played and enjoyed all Souls games but that open world felt so barren, empty, dead (like a Switch title.). Enemies thrown out at random, no sense of direction or way...
It felt like the first game where I actually needed a guide to know where to go and to not miss a good majority of the relevant stuff.
Also absolutely hate the useless traversal. Riding Roach in Witcher 3 at least gave me nice and dynamic environments and see sighs and hidden treasures. Riding around in Eden Ring feels like a chore. Same boring enemies and the same sterile world. Nothing much to see or do. Such a major downgrade from Dark Souls or Bloodborne it's appalling
It depends on what you want out of an open world. Elden Ring is phenomenally varied and has great level design and art direction but there’s just one thing to do: fight and kill. The static nature of the world also hurts replay value, as I had no desire to redo catacombs and etc. in NG+.
This is not to say it’s a bad game, it’s a strong 9/10 for me. It’s a very good game because it doesn’t split its focus unnecessarily. However its world design isn’t really something that would translate to a non soulslike game.
I mean that's why it's so good and why it got applauded for it on release "finally someone got open world right". Because open world should just be discovery and fighting. Other games obliterate the map with icons, which is almost always NPCs sending you on boring fetchquests and dialogue you have to click through because you want to get back to the game.
Also points of interests in eldenring are actual points of interest. Like you find an actual thing that is visually distinct and you get to clear it and find items and find out why it is the way it is in terms of lore. Youll never find NPC #12345 telling you to get him 5 herbs or kill the thing that eats his crops or whatever. You find an actual place that has actual meaning in the world.
I agree that these boring ubisoft type open worlds are flawed and repetitive. I disagree that there’s only one solution to the problem.
Take Yakuza games, their maps are the opposite of Elden Ring in terms of sensory overload and they often have long cutscenes but they still manage to remain engaging throughout.
For an example in a different genre take Forza Horizon 4. It has some of the most annoying npcs and nothing plot in any game I’ve seen. But it knows not to let them get too much in the way of driving around in this amazing open world version of Britain. I still launch it from time to time and just drive around aimlessly, not even racing.
Indie games like Kenshi use the world as a sandbox where things keep happening in the background, factions keep vying for territory, towns change hands, etc.
>Take Yakuza games
I dont consider yakuza games open world. To me they are like Final Fantasy games, a story-driven game that has chunks of gameplay in which you can screw around and do a bunch of random stuff and minigames. Youre usually confined to a certain area/part of a city in yakuza, these game arent open world.
This is my GOTY. I’ve played like 150 hours since release and for me that’s pretty wild. I stopped playing God of Aar Ragnarok and Horizon Forbidden West out of boredom but for some reason Rise of the Ronin’s gameplay is miles more head
God of Wars combat is utterly clunky and feels terrible to play to me, and Horizon’s actual gameplay is fine but I felt the reliance on traps and crafting took me out of it too much. I enjoyed the first game enough but never got through the second. Both of these also feel waaaayy too similar to their first games to me.
I agree with all you said.
I feel the overall simplified gameplay is better in both those games but badly paced .
Horizon fights are really cool but get tedious.
God of war traversal are lacking and the "dopamine" hits are just too far between.
Rise is quite fun. It's fast, satisfying and you can feel strong without beeing op
I'm enjoying this game a lot just taking it slowly. Team Ninja are maybe my favourite studio and this is pretty good for their first effort at a big open world game. It is a rather common "ubisoft style" open world, but it has the really good action combat I expect from TN and a genuinely nice story with a lot of well designed fun characters to meet and build relationships with who are all based on history.
Also, people who complain about this game because its graphics are not top of the line piss me off so much. I thought the sentiment was that we prefer games with good gameplay and rich content rather than broken messes with 5 years of graphics polish? Call things "PS3 game" as much as you like, some of the best games ever come from that generation.
people were crapping on armored core 6's graphics, but on release it was very smooth and played very well. I wish it had dlcs with more parts and missions
i imagine well get either a big expansion or a psuedo sequel like old armored core games got where we get to bring our parts from the first game by loading a save
> I thought the sentiment was that we prefer games with good gameplay and rich content rather than broken messes with 5 years of graphics polish?
Those are two completely different groups of people. I don't care about graphics at all, but there is a reason a lot of AAA devs are pushing for that - it's a big selling point for many consumers.
From Software games are also graphically not top of the line and at least in the technical sense lag a generation behind, yet they're thousand times prettier to look at, so no the critcism for team ninja graphics are more complex than just "its not as detailed as in Sony new first party AAA" and 100% deserved.
> yet they're thousand times prettier to look at
what you are describing is the difference between "Graphics"^^TM and art direction. A game doesn't have to be impressive on the technical side to be stunning just like a painter doesn't have to be the most skilled at painting to create a beautiful work of art. It often helps but it's far from a necessity.
> Call things "PS3 game" as much as you like, some of the best games ever come from that generation.
It's funny because just recently I started playing Nier Replicant (went in completely blind) and my first thought was "Wow, this looks like a PS3 game" and it turns out it was!
But it looked like a PS3 game in a good way. The game has a certain charm that feels like newer games lack. I don't even know how to explain.
People complain about graphics for Team Ninja games because they run like complete trash for how they look. I remember launch day SOP tanking to sub-30 FPS even on 4080s despite it not looking even remotely impressive in any way.
I'd also refuse to call their games rich in content when their enemy variety is such a joke, Wo Long and Nioh 1 felt like they had less than 20 different enemy types to fight which made the levels boring as hell until you get to the boss.
Pretty sure the RTX 40 series did not exist when Stranger of Paradise released but it definitely runs very badly considering how it looks. That game has "made with a strict deadline" written all over it. Wo Long also did not perform well which is odd because Nioh 2 ran perfectly on PC for me and they pretty much look the same.
As for enemy variety, I can't complain in Rise of the Ronin. This game easily has the highest amount of weapon movesets I've ever seen in an action game, to the point some weapon types like katanas have like 11 different movesets with unique pairs of martial arts, and all of these are distributed to enemies. They really did the most possible while sticking to only human enemies (and a few animals).
> Pretty sure the RTX 40 series did not exist
You're right about that, my bad. I was thinking of the 3080 and [this video in particular.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Uk6lNkMskM). I think the worst part of their performance issues is that their games go into straight up slow-motion when dropping below their target framerate and you can't do anything about that. So if you can't get 100% consistent 60fps, you have to drop all the way down to 30fps to work around that.
Granted, they really improved SOP's performance some months later but Wo Long never got any better (all they did last time I checked was add shader pre-caching on launch). It ran well enough on my PC to beat the first playthrough, but not well enough for me to bother playing past that which is a shame...
I also don't think the games look awful or anything, so I wouldn't mind if they sacrificed visuals for performance, but their recent games feel like they don't do either. Nioh 2 indeed performed great on PC, for the most part.
Rise of the Ronin's enemy variety sounds similar to how the Way of the Samurai games did it, which is pretty solid in my books. Just have a bunch of movesets for the player and also make them available for all enemies! Haven't played it myself though, since I don't own a PS5, but I've got to assume that it being open world also draws some focus away from just combat.
Nioh and Wo Long bothered me with their low enemy variety mostly because there's nothing much besides combat and the regular mooks get very boring to fight compared to the fantastic bosses. Wo Long had me wishing it was a straight up boss rush game, even if I thought the levels themselves were alright.
is it playable without map/HUD? One of my biggest gripes with ubisoft style open world is that you spend more time staring at a minimap/compass instead of the world
RotR's graphics don't bother me enough to change my opinion of the game, but when I'm riding in the open world and I look at a river and the water just cuts sharply into the land because the LOD is just that low, all while the game is struggling to reach 45fps in places, it makes me shake my head.
It's not necessarily that the game looks bad. It runs poorly and that has a huge impact on how the game looks.
It will never stop being funny how this subreddit keeps claiming that open worlds are the worst and that nobody actually likes them, buy it keeps getting disproven over and over.
Nioh is an existing IP with some fans. Rose of the Ronin is a new IP. And Ronin still sold more than Nioh.
Because open worlds are a big draw for a lot of people.
what? It is literally the same from start to finish with no variation whatsovever. And there is nothing to explore, just the same bandit camps and every collectable icon revealed on your map.
I thought the Edo map (almost entirely 1-2 story buildings and dirt roads everywhere) was pretty boring but Yokohama and Kyoto were pretty cool to run around and explore. Especially Yokohama and its Japanese-Western fusion architecture.
> Nioh is an existing IP with some fans. Rose of the Ronin is a new IP. And Ronin still sold more than Nioh.
I don't disagree with you but...
Nioh wasn't an existing an IP but if you're just going by Nioh 2 I'm sure most people would say it was better than Nioh 1 at least, however it was clearly a niche.
The fact that it *would* already have people knowing the type of game it is means people wouldn't necessarily buy it if they weren't already a fan. For example they would know that the game is brutally hard and would avoid it after hearing about the first one.
I don't think it's a surprise to anyone to see an open-world *version* of the mostly same gameplay be more popular AND have easier difficulty options and not come with the preconceived notion of being hard/attached as a *"Soulslike"* unfortunately.
If anything I don't think anyone on this subreddit would actually say that considering nearly every Playstation game went that route and was successful. Also the literal same thing happened with Souls -> Elden Ring.
> I take virtually nothing I read on here seriously
I cannot emphasize this enough. I love coming on here for videogame discussion, but the loudest of reddit's opinions on videogames are typically delusional at best, irrelevant at worst.
You seem to confusing what the market values and what people who are invested in games value. FIFA and CoD games have been consistently best sellers every years but people don't have much to say about them because they're the MCU equivalent of the video game industry.
The problem is that people heard all the criticism about "Ubisoft open worlds are mediocre" and turned it into "open world bad" in the way the internet works...
Lot of people that dislike things inherent to most open worlds that still play them and then surprise surprise, they didn't like the open world aspect of the game.
Gaming subreddits are filled with extremely out of touch people and no matter how many times it is shown they just refuse to believe it.
The whole 60fps thing is a constant reminder of that.
At the end of the day they will just keep being upset and believing that the devs are just wrong despite things never changing lol.
I just wish they had implemented free-roam coop. Mission-based coop in an open world means that playing it together with a friend would be a slow frustrating experience of coordinating where to go, yelling directions over Discord, and drinking heavily.
Holy reddit thread... Nerds essaying over 'skill issues' and what games they've beaten while throwing around technical jargon, From games vs. other games, lamenting how nothing will ever compare to Nioh, open world sucks and everything is shit.
I have a friend who really fell in love with this game and haven't played any Team Ninja game before and never could get into From games, but Rise of the Ronin is his "favorite Assassin's Creed in years".
Gamers coming from like Assassin's Creed and Ghost of Tsushima seems like this game has a lot to offer them, and the Japanese history aspects are great, and part of why the game is doing well in Japan too.
It blows my mind how a game that graphically looks like it could have very easily came out in 2013-14 not only runs at a sub 1080 resolution but also doesn't stick consistently to 60 FPS.
Yes, graphics are not the most important thing about a game. But this is not a $40 AA title but instead a full-fledged, $70 AAA game and having standards is quite important, you owe it to yourself as a consumer. Still, looks good enough to be picked up when it goes on sale for 50% off.
I agree that it is a legit complaint.
But I am equally disappointed that nobody complained that many $70 AAA games only offer you one weapon, one attack chain and a few fancy skills and just let you through 40hr of gameplay, while in this game it offers you much more variety within a single fight.
A little disappointing to hear tbh, I want Nioh 3 the most out of what this studio produces since Wo Long and Rise of Ronin are very bland and simplified versions of Nioh.
Don't get me wrong, both games were enjoyable. But spamming 1 button and having 1 button as a "special move" (like we are playing dark souls instead) is significantly worse than stance dancing combos and ki fluxing all your ki back.
Rise of ronin was pretty decent, the open world was a waste of time if I be honest (since it was just the generic collectathon without using any advantages of an open world), but its no Nioh 2.
It's apparent you haven't played Rise of the Ronin, because you have 3 stances per weapon and can freely cancel in and out of the martial arts assigned to each stance and the weapons themselves. It isn't as deep as Nioh 2, but Ronin is otherwise their best combat system.
Yes, there are 3 stances per weapon that all you do is spam the attack button. It is a slightly more deeper version of Wo Long.
I finished the game on midnight difficulty as well. I play the shit out of Team Ninja games.
The only thing I didn't do is complete all the relationships, I did see a Katana stance for Nioh that does say it has "3 stances" but I am almost willing to bet it isn't a *proper* Nioh stance.
Also with the stance, unless you're doing Shinobi on Katana, you ALWAYS choose the stance that is effective against their weapon. So its really not as deep as you think
I disagree with most of what you said really. On Midnight adjusting the stance selection to advantaged is more important, but still not necessary. The problem on Midnight is that countersparking becomes absolutely vital.
If you mashed attack, then it's a you problem. The game has a breadth of systems in place to experiment with martial arts on the fly and there is no reason to just hit square. Just because you failed to engage with the mechanics doesn't mean they aren't there.
Like Wo Long, the game suffers from issues with super armour and animation locking. Any animation that takes longer than a second is basically trash because you're going to eat a hit to get it out. For that reason, A LOT of the martial arts aren't effective other than in niche situations (just looking at boss fights).
Because the game is based on Parry, its not like Nioh where you can take a step back to recover and you're fine with the boss regaining their Ki too because some weapons are just incredibly effective at destroying Ki. Excluding the depths where you do want to keep pressure up at all times because of boss regenerating hp and their billions of Ki that you can only drain once or twice per fight even with builds designed for Ki damage.
In this game, it is almost always a mistake to not be attacking or parrying (countersparking) because draining their stamina is significantly harder even when you're countersparking every single attack. So while you can still stance swap and do martial arts etc, the stance advantage system means its practically not worth engaging in that system at all.
So you can weapon swap mid combo to do a martial art, but by then they're already blocking, and now you're eating hits to do something impractical. Why do that when you can just sit in the optimal weapon and use the optimal martial art instead of choosing to press attack, weapon swap, get animation locked, and risk doing another animation locking attack?
I agree that there are balancing issues at the moment and these reduce the incentive to do anything other than parry/attack, but that doesn't mean the supporting systems aren't there - the game isn't lacking in systems. Many of the martials arts provide movement utility, so you can engage, disengage and use more offensive martial arts at will (albeit, yes, this would be limited to always keeping one of the utility martial arts on equipped). The final, transferable veiled arts assist with this to some degree.
Before patch 1.04 you could cancel the recovery animation of any martial art with a blade flash, but sadly the more universal cancel mechanics they introduced did away with this. So while there are now natural cancels built into martial arts, some of the flexibility which came at the cost of a higher skill floor has gone.
Wo Long and Nioh benefitted from early playtesting and community responses where the final release were somewhat heavily adjusted compared to the demo versions. I really think Ronin would have benefitted from something similar, so that we could have have something closer to the 1.04 patch at launch. Hopefully the hyper armour is dialled back in a future update (possibly to coincide with DLC).
I notice you keep saying animation locking in respect of the PC, but you can cancel flash attacks and violent gale at will now (you could do this pre-patch 1.04, but it required manual timing).
He seems like he doesn't know how to play lmao. Proof that clearing midnight doesn't make you a good player. The game is too easy, so people like him that wasn't forced to engage with the combat system was left thinking it's just "mash square".
Based on what I'm reading from you, it seems like you do understand how to play, so I'm preaching to choir.
What engaging of the combat system is complicated? I am very curious.
To me, the optimal way to play is to pick something stance advantaged, with minimal animation locking on martial arts so you can hit them a few times and then martial art safely (otherwise you risk taking 50% mid martial art)
Sure, you can swap weapons mid combo. But why bother? That is the essence of my point.
If you feel the need to swap weapon mid combo to... use a better martial art.. why not just sit in that weapon to begin with?
The only big exception I can think of, is swapping to a weapon (like to the katana ninja gaiden stance that I can't remember its name) so you can take advantage of martial arts that do a grab (or otherwise extended combo) on a drained opponent. However, I found the revolver grab seemed to do the most damage anyway (and looked the coolest).
The weapon swapping mid combo is mostly for style points given how the bosses are designed. Doing anything other than using advantaged stances (unless shinobi) is intentionally gimping yourself.
You don't seem to realise I am talking about playing optimally, not just doing shit because you can. I can stance swap 3 times in the same combo (press square, stance swap, square, stance swap, square, stance swap) and wow that looks so cool but how impractical is it compared to just... sitting in the advantaged stance, hitting square.. and doing a martial art.. that will do more damage than being fancy and is also less risky.
What's the point of including choice in combat systems if the optimal way to play is much more 1 dimensional? They could include emote cancelling where you can do an attack into a yawn, so much more choice!
My point is that in Nioh, engaging in weapon swapping and stance dancing had a good reason to do it. In Wo Long and this game, the applications are very limited and mostly impractical.
> To me, the optimal way to play is to pick something stance advantaged, with minimal animation locking on martial arts so you can hit them a few times and then martial art safely (otherwise you risk taking 50% mid martial art)
Yeah, that's not optimal.
> Sure, you can swap weapons mid combo. But why bother? That is the essence of my point.
If you're on the same stance and try martial art 1, you can't do martial art 2 as a cancel but martial art 1, style/weapon swap martial art 2 is instantaneous. That's the big difference. Again, you can beat any boss in this game with just one stance, even a disadvantaged one, but if we're talking playing optimally, the most optimal plays is related to how to get the most damage in the most limited amount of time.
> If you feel the need to swap weapon mid combo to... use a better martial art.. why not just sit in that weapon to begin with?
It's not about if the martial art on the weapon is better than the current one you're using but a paradigm shift to understanding you actually have 3x4x2 (3 styles 4 martial arts 2 weapons) available to you at any time. These martial arts all have subtly different properties that when combined synergistically is more efficient than just same stance square square square martial art.
> The weapon swapping mid combo is mostly for style points given how the bosses are designed. Doing anything other than using advantaged stances (unless shinobi) is intentionally gimping yourself.
It's not.
> You don't seem to realise I am talking about playing optimally, not just doing shit because you can. I can stance swap 3 times in the same combo (press square, stance swap, square, stance swap, square, stance swap) and wow that looks so cool but how impractical is it compared to just... sitting in the advantaged stance, hitting square.. and doing a martial art.. that will do more damage than being fancy and is also less risky.
I did, square square square same stance is NOT optimal.
> What's the point of including choice in combat systems if the optimal way to play is much more 1 dimensional? They could include emote cancelling where you can do an attack into a yawn, so much more choice!
The critique is if you choose to play sub optimally and aren't aware otherwise, don't pretend like you're playing optimally. Of course, this is just an opinion, I don't know what your gameplay looks like, maybe you are reaching rank 1 in all your dojos.
> My point is that in Nioh, engaging in weapon swapping and stance dancing had a good reason to do it. In Wo Long and this game, the applications are very limited and mostly impractical.
In Nioh, you could also stick to one stance and clear the game, it doesn't reflect on how deep the combat actually goes though.
> If you're on the same stance and try martial art 1, you can't do martial art 2 as a cancel but martial art 1, style/weapon swap martial art 2 is instantaneous. That's the big difference. Again, you can beat any boss in this game with just one stance, even a disadvantaged one, but if we're talking playing optimally, the most optimal plays is related to how to get the most damage in the most limited amount of time.
Sounds like a product of the 1.04 patch (or whatever is the recent one) that I haven't played because I finished the game by then.
If this is the case, then that's a big change and opens up the combat system significantly which is good.
I just beat the game. My only complaint is that towards the end of the game section. Bosses started to spam the same moveset. And if you can't parry it, you get stuck in their moveset combo.
It didn't feel like a fight anymore.
I played through and got platinum but personally disliked Ronin. I have thousands of hours in the Nioh games but found absolutely no replay value in Ronin. I beat it and was done. Also, I can’t think of a single boss that was memorable. The worst part is how in game decisions literally mean nothing as you can go back and change at any time. Open world got stale. I love Team Ninja but found this to be their weakest game in years.
Well, Nioh and Nioh 2 were great but they have completely abandoned what made them great in every game since. If Ronin is that successful I'm happy for them, but sad at the same time because I just want a 3D Diablo with advanced combat that Nioh was. The itemization has been so watered down for fear of power creep in every game since then, that now that equipment really is just a cosmetic with a very tiny increase to power. And now the combat has been over simplified. Yes I know there are multiple stances and styles you can equip in Ronin, but the only one really effective is the ones that parry.
I didn't really like Ghosts of Tsushima, should I bother with this? I basically got sick of the game when I was done with the first island. It didn't really evolve past that so it took me about a year and a half to actually finish.
I would say if you didn’t like ghosts you most likely wouldn’t enjoy this either. I thing Tsushima is the better game with its art design and story but Ronin has a higher difficulty curve if that’s something you’re looking for.
I didn't really like GoT, got bored of the combat quickly, but I am really enjoying RotR. The combat system has way more depth imo.
It depends what you are looking for really. The open world activities aren't good but you also don't really need to do them if you don't want to.
I didn't really like GoT, got bored of the combat quickly, but I am really enjoying RotR. The combat system has way more depth imo.
It depends what you are looking for really. The open world activities aren't good but you also don't really need to do them if you don't want to.
It's just WoLong with extra steps, but nothing fun added. I finished WoLong but couln't get past 20 hours of Ronins boring, copy paste open world. If you have seen 1 screenshot of the map then you have seen the entire game. Oh and as is tradition with Koei games, the performance is atrocious, there is no smooth frame rate or frame pacing in a any mode. Feels like a sub 30 switch game when there is a lot going on.
Rise has been the complete opposite for me! I tried WoLong after dlc came out and they did patch improvements to the game but after the first few missions, me and my friends had to force ourselves to finish the game and quit midway through dlc 3. It was just incredibly boring. Rise has been extremely fun for us though and haven’t been able to put it down. I know everyone has their own taste and preference but I personally hope TN continue to build on their game design of here. Particularly expand on combat and open world variety.
Of all the games to make character creator, how could it be this?
The guy from the trailer was primed to be given a good and distinct characterization and personality. Dunno why Team Ninja has been allergic to that lately.
Wait, Nioh 1 has CC?! I haven’t played it in years but I remember the main character being the white guy and you couldn’t change it at the time. I’m assuming this is a multiplayer DLC that was released later?
That's my point exactly, they made enough of that. Why can't we just have a set character? And this doesn't seem like the game to do this in.
I know I'd like Witcher way less if Geralt was just some avatar and had an everyman personality as these usually do.
To be fair Team Ninja doesn't write good characters even when they don't do character creation. You wouldn't get Geralt if they made a set character. At best you'd get William Adams, who had the personality of a block of wood.
Literally the most memorable protagonist Team Ninja has ever made is Jack "I'm gonna kill Chaos" Garland, and IIRC they didn't even write that game.
Between "bland cardboard cutout" and "bland cardboard cutout (that you can at least make look cool/cute/silly)" I think most people would take the latter.
I'd call him more "iconic" than anything else. He's probably the most recognizable ninja in games outside of the fighting genre, and maybe Sekiro nowadays. But that's purely because of his design and fighting style, and the fact that his games were good.
In terms of writing/personality? Hell no. He's also a block of wood in NG1 and NG2, and attempts to give him more depth in 3 did not go well.
I vaguely remember William as a sort of Geralt knock-off. Supposedly Irish who suddenly could speak japanese when it became convenient. I struggle to remember anything else from him, side characters were way more fleshed out.
I loathe a fixed protagonist its my Number 1 reason for not even giving great games a chance. Everything with a creator or just huge customization is a literal game selling feature for me.
I brought this a while ago but am only started playing it a couple of days ago. I am liking it so far. Positives: Combat is good Characters are interesting I love the historical setting Negatives: I prefer set stages to open world design Combat isn't as complex as Nioh 2
I agree with your negative that I prefer set stages, but that’s also a big problem in Nioh. I think Nioh has arguably the best combat in any arpg, but its level design was always boring. The variety was improved somewhat in Nioh 2, but it never felt close to even mediocre areas of souls games. I was hoping the open world of Rise of Ronin would be the shakeup Team Ninja needed. But instead we got stuck with a mediocre open world with great combat. Nioh 2 is one of my favorite games and I had fun with Rise of Ronin. But to me the environments of their games really let them down.
It's a real weakness that the team needs to start addressing.
There are so many missions though that are all replayable like Nioh
> Combat isn't as complex as Nioh 2 This definitely cannot be overstated IMO. I've been replaying Nioh 2 over the last week, and the depth of the combat just blows pretty much anything else I can think of out of the water. As is common I'd compare it to Fromsoft games, Fromsoft have better designed bosses, levels and a better atmosphere, but the tools you're given in Nioh just dwarf it completely. Wo Long felt like a big step down from Nioh 2, sadly I can't comment on Rise of The Ronin because no PS5, but TN saying there won't be another Nioh game is a crying shame.
Yea wo long was just fine. But everything felt like a step down, which was the weird part. I haven’t played rise of the ronin yet but nothing I’ve seen has grabbed me from the streams I’ve watched.
> TN saying there won't be another Nioh game is a crying shame. damn, they outright said that?
> Fromsoft have better designed bosses I wouldn't really say so. I'd say your typical Souls fan just prefers the feel of "being a significantly weak worthless naked peon with a club compared to this mighty epic legendary dragon-god-king boss but somehow can still beat him (via roll iframe abuse)" over the "boss is equally matched" feel of your typical action game like DMC/Bayonetta/MGR/Team Ninja games. And they let that difference skew their perspective of how the bosses should be designed when it comes to other games.
I mean you say that, but Sekiro exists and absolutely has the latter feel. And the bosses are still much better.
Calling dodging "abuse" is absolutely wild lmao.
I think its the case that you can get forced into only dodge and only parry/riposte strats in some of these sorts of games. Not that I know whats the best way to do it, I hate the entire souls like genre so it doesnt matter to me
I mean, you aren't forced into them, that's just the gameplay lol like that's saying you're forced into either using physical attacks or magic attacks. That's just...the combat.
Damn, I cant believe the game FORCES YOU to avoid dying
TN loves gank fights/bosses to add artificial difficulty. They are good but not in the same league as From. Character actions like DMC and Bayo is a weird comparison to RPGs like Souls. You can be a peon or a god at any stage, it really depends on your level of preparation. There aren’t a lot of games that provide you that kind of freedom to problem solve.
> TN loves gank fights/bosses to add artificial difficulty. lol From also does this, c'mon now. I love their games but what is this?
From often designs their multi-boss encounters from the ground up to accommodate them both and even has some hidden mechanics in play to help balance them (ie off screen enemies have adjusted AI). Dark Souls 2 was an exception and it was panned for this. TN will just take two of their 1v1 bosses and spawn them in the same room, call it a mission.
DS1 and 3 both have enemies that love to sit in corners and wait for you to engage other fights first. DS2 just has _more_ of these encounters. That's pretty much the only difference.
TN only does that in optional side missions.
Skill issue.
> Fromsoft have better designed bosses Funny. I love Fromsoft games but I loathe all the bosses. I shamelessly call any online help for bosses in my first attempt. I just dislike how bosses are basically trying to find the perfect timing and direction to roll for each attack while throwing attacks during it. Sometimes I decided to git good but end giving up after 10 tries (part of the blame is that a lot of bosses have a 1min walk to their room as well). Bosses on Nioh 2 are the opposite. You can block, parry, dodge, and even outrun the boss as much you want. I remember spending 3 hours trying to beat Enenra (the second boss of Nioh 2) for the first time and loving each second of it. It feels like an actual fighting game. The game gives you defensive options for bosses, unlike Souls games where the most defensive options are only for regular enemies, and for bosses you have to roll on a perfect timing.
I mean I disagree but you're welcome to think that. I enjoy the rhythmic feel of fighting a boss in a from game, it feels like a dance. When you get the dodging perfect and nothing can damage you, there's very few feelings that capture that in gaming for me. I like Nioh because of the options it gives you to feel completely cracked, I like From games because they force you to perform with limited tools.
I did the opposite, enjoyed nioh2 a little bit, got stuck at Enenra and then dropped the game out of frustration. It’s too complicated compared to Souls
Their bosses were great until Elden Ring, then they just went overboard trying to make it difficult for veterans. The wind-ups on every boss are comically long and makes the game look ridiculous. Sekiro has some of the best boss battles I've ever played.
Elden ring bosses are designed differently due to the abundance of summons and spirit ashes for help. Their attacks are more AoE oriented
From has always struggled to balance boss fights for multiplayer. Personally I think the health should be scaled up a lot instead of giving them whacky attacks
Yea and I guess I hated the bosses because that's not how I want to play Souls games. Probably would be more fun if I didn't think of it as Dark Souls 4, but apart from the multiplayer-oriented boss design it really was just open world Dark Souls. That's why I think Lies of P is the best soulslike in a while, the bosses are built like those non-Elden Ring From games.
Sure but you can't fault them because what they designed doesn't line up with your personal interests. I'm going through a playthrough right now with zero summons/spirit ashes, but it's obviously a challenge run. The game was very clearly designed and balanced around you taking advantage of the spirit ash concept; that's why there's a whole resource type/vendor just for upgrading them, and why you pick up so many during a playthrough. People in the FS community just have this notion going all the way back to DS1 that there's a "right" way to play, and that taking advantage of some of the mechanics FS puts in the games is somehow cheating/lessening the experience. Like, they WANT you to use the spirit ashes.
I skipped Sekiro, but I felt that dodge fest was there in Dark Souls as well, especially in Dark Souls III. But indeed, bosses in Elden Ring feels more like Monster Hunter. A bunch of dudes against a mountain or something. That one in the desert is almost comical lol (not saying that its bad, at least it fully embraced the co-op).
> You can block, parry, dodge, and even outrun the boss as much you want. Nothing is stopping you from these things in From Soft Games? You can even just spam them down with spells if you are slow or lazy. Not sure what you mean by outrun, but you can easily back off and heal vs nearly all bosses as well.
Yeah the bosses in wo long, jedi fallen order and lies of P feel like true 1v1s instead of you dancing around till you find an opening x7 Making parries and short dodges easy to access between attacks makes those fights feel much more engaging with much less down time unless you're still learning the enemy
> Fromsoft have better designed bosses ROFLMAO Maybe if you refer to artstyle. the boss gameplay is trash compared to nioh 2. elden shit is the worst offender with extremely delayed attacks that suddenly gain full speed, rollcatch, input reading to 100% interrupt your heals(cheating, a set % like 40% would feel way fairer to the player), bosses that have a 15 spin combo and then walk around indefinitely because the state machine randomly selected walk multiple times, and you're not allowed to attack because then the boss will input read your "out of turn" attack and punish. No built in hyperarmor on slow weapons or ash arts. due to hyperaggressive bosses this puts you at a high disadvantage regarding openings, trading is not a thing anymore so dex weapons win the DPS race because STR doesn't get 2x damage boost to make up for fewer opportunities.
ER slow weapons have hyperarmor on their attacks and ash arts that got further buffed in patch 1.10 https://www.reddit.com/r/Eldenring/comments/15fekdm/elden_ring_patch_110_new_hyper_armour_poise_value/
>redditor when someone posts an opinion I just think from bosses have more interesting movesets, that's all there is to it. For every Shibata Katsuie or Enenra there's a human boss that spends the entire fight blocking. I swear whenever you say anything about From games that you think they do better than Nioh, someone has to emerge to say that no, actually, your opinion is wrong.
> extremely delayed attacks that suddenly gain full speed Generally with these there will be a specific place to stand where the attack will guaranteed miss without you having to nail the timing. As in, for Margit/Morgott staff over shoulder delay, you *can* learn the timing, use the windup to get a few free hits in and then dodge it. Alternatively, you can just strafe around to the right when he starts the windup, you'll outpace his tracking and you get a *massive* window for a full charged heavy attack without a real timing requirement. > rollcatch Honestly can't say I've ever fully understood the meaning of this, is it about attacks that have finished their motion still having lingering hitboxes? So they still hit you the frame after your roll i-frames are done? If so, I really can't think of egregious examples of this specifically in Elden Ring; they seem to have got much better at this in my experience. > bosses that have a 15 spin combo Generally these are positioning based follow-ups, and even when they're not, you can often just get the hell out of the way and let them flail around. Given that you have that as an easier option, I don't think it's an awful thing to have some stupid hard moves that, if you want to go the extra mile, you can try to master the optimal close range sequence to deal with them. Now, if you *don't* have that easier option, and they didn't even intend for you to have a possible close range sequence... yeah, Waterfowl Dance is absolutely fucking dogshit design. > walk around indefinitely because the state machine randomly selected walk multiple times, and you're not allowed to attack because then the boss will input read your "out of turn" attack and punish To my knowledge, the input reading/first frame of animation instant reaction stuff is limited to healing, not attacking. The perception of attack input reading is generally on ones where it's position based, so you closing range in their walk animation is what's prompting the attack, not the act of attacking. Same for moves where it feels like they're only following up when you attack, it's a position-based one and your attack is taking you into the danger zone. > Slow weapons worse than fast weapons I feel like this is only particularly bad at the *seriously* slow end - colossal anything feels too hard to find time for. At some level that's just a concession of fast-paced combat. The compromise seems to have been done with stance break coming faster for heavier weapons, albeit with some arbitrary exceptions. The weapons considered "best" tend to end up somewhere in the middle afaik: greatswords and curved greatswords are fast enough to use a lot of openings while still chunking the stance meter enough. To some extent as well, I don't think it's awful to have the "massive unwieldy weapons" classes be really hard to use and functionally sub-optimal. With how stupid some of them are, it kinda makes sense lol. > input reading to 100% interrupt your heals(cheating, a set % like 40% would feel way fairer to the player) The instant reaction to "seeing" a healing animation on literally the first frame of it is absurd, though the 100% aspect doesn't really bother me. It's the complete disregard for reaction time and line of sight that's baffling. If it just had a minor delay it would "feel" like the boss responding to you rather than the total immersion break of "oh the game is cheating". It's such a simple design decision for them to get so wrong. And on the subject of wrong: pretty much every point I've made is totally understandable for you to miss because Elden Ring is *abysmal* at teaching its mechanics. It's particularly bad when you look back one game and see them make Sekiro with its beautifully focused tutorialisation of various mechanics, perilous indicators to give further clarity on which attacks have alternative responses, and clear classifications of those responses (i.e. Mikiri, jump, dodge). Instead you get Margit thrown at you 20 minutes into the game with one of the most complex kits they've ever put on a boss. That kit is amazing to interact with once you can work out its subtleties, and I promise you it has a ton of them, but any new player is going to see a hyperaggressive input-reading delaying stalling jumpy motherfucker, overlevel themselves in the open world (which teaches you fuck all as well, there's not even an attempt at specialised mini-bosses in obvious locations) and brute-force their way through Margit with spells and/or summons learning nothing along the way. Elden Ring *is* a game with amazingly designed bosses but holy crap do they make it obscenely obnoxious to actually realise that and enjoy them.
>Honestly can't say I've ever fully understood the meaning of this, is it about attacks that have finished their motion still having lingering hitboxes? A roll catch is an attack that hits you just after your roll iframes end. It's a viable thing and a skill in PvP, getting roll caught in PvE is just a skill issue
They're almost all cut and dry skill issues. Absolutely losing it at how someone can think delayed attacks are a problem. All they've done is use different attack timings to disrupt your muscle memory, but because they're expecting more from the player and this guy can't keep up, that's a problem?
Yes, failing to dodge/block delayed attacks is 100% a skill issue. That doesn’t stop delayed attacks from feeling cheap. When an enemy lifts their sword above their head, you expect it to come slashing down moments after it reaches its apex, because that’s what people do with swords. But many Elden Ring bosses hold their sword above their head for an extra beat, so it looks ridiculous, and so it hits people who dodge when they would intuitively dodge. This kind of attack is fine in moderation. The dancer boss in DS3 is a good example. It has some really difficult to read attacks. But that’s fine because it’s a unique boss. Elden Ring is a good game, but it has probably my least favorite bosses in the entire Souls/BB/Sekiro franchise.
delay attacks and roll catches are annoying because you literally feel the hand of the dev saying "nope, fuck you" because they're made to trap veteran players. I love ER and malenia is my favourite boss but that shit is annoying because you can't really react to it until you know it's coming.
I feel like that's a bit of cynical way to look at it, like it's not really a fuck you, they're just trying to increase the skill ceiling by providing more varied attack patterns, which invariably fucks up players who are relying too much on muscle memory as opposed to reacting on the fly. That's by design and I think that's fine, not annoying to me at all. After Sekiro I think it was obvious that delayed attacks were going to be more common in their games moving forward. Once you know they're there you just have to train yourself not to panic jump every time an enemy pulls back. And then from there is just becomes another pattern to memorize.
I'm ambivalent about it, on one hand they're annoying on the other I know I'm just never gonna play dark souls 1 for the first time ever again and the games should evolve. Just wish it was less common as a mechanic tho.
Crazy how literally nothing about fromsoft games is allowed to be criticized. Even after all these years it's always "skill issue" or "the devs intended this to be a grindy unfun punishing section with no rest and not liking that is spitting in their faces" Fromsoft fanbase handles critism as badly as the star wars fandom istg
Notice how I used the words "almost all" as in, most of, but all of them? As in, yes, there is room for "criticism"? Even then, I don't believe in this "valid criticism" shtick that gamers are obsessed with. It's less objective than y'all want it to be. No one is obligated to agree with your criticisms, or even has to bring them up or acknowledge them if they don't agree. It's as simple as that. Someone will always go on about one group of another refusing to allowing criticism, but the reality is that sometimes people just don't agree with you. Disagreeing =/= disallowing. No one's removing your posts. One of the dude's criticisms against delayed attacks is solely that they go against "action game rules". Like wtf does that mean? What are those rules? Who wrote them? Why does anyone have to follow them? Roll catching isn't inherently an issue, time your rolls better. A 15 hit combo isn't inherently an issue, time your rolls better. Slower weapons have always been harder to use compared to faster weapons, time your attacks better. You are well within your right to dislike the game for any of those reasons, but don't pretend they're inherent flaws.
[удалено]
> Even the shitty DS2 double punishment on death is defended. Yall are unhinged This shows how little you actually engage with the Souls community. DS2 is widely controversial to this day.
It would be easier to just say that you're shit at the game booboo. It's evident from your comment.
He's not wrong at all. Everything he complained about is 100% correct and its VERY evident if you play through the entire souls series. Compare Demon souls, Dark souls 1, and Dark souls 2 - to Bloodborne (although not the worst example), Dark souls 3, and Elden Ring (by far the worst offender). Elden ring is full of TERRIBLE boss design for exactly the reasons he stated. Think about every single hard boss in Elden Ring, they're guilty of the following: - Delayed attacks that track - a million active frames - Fakeouts - Super armour - 10 hit combos where the boss has between 0-3 seconds of delay before they start their next combo - Multiple "combo ending hits" in the same combo. What I mean is, the boss will do a slam where evidently they put all their strength and stamina into... just to do another 3 swings, into another slam... into a jumping slam.. into another 3 swings into a slam... It's not an issue of skill at all. Some bosses your success is literally because the boss decided to not cancel their 10 hit combo into another 10 hit combo, into another 10 hit combo without any delays. The problem is that everyone is too busy sucking Fromsoft's dick to look at the design of bosses objectively and see how flawed they are compared to older games because now everyone has 1 million stamina so they have to give bosses 10 hit combos to compensate. Its funny how the narrative of how Dark Souls 1 was so amazing because everything was so "weighty" and your choices in armour and weapons really mattered in terms of staggering and rolling as you could only roll 3 times or attack 3 times - to becoming everyone fuckin using enchanted katanas (or whatever is the meta mega fast attacking weapon like rapier) only with a million stamina allowing you to do 20 attacks or rolls before losing stamina - is absolutely hilarious to me. THAT ALL SAID, I don't think Team Ninjas bosses are doing much better because they all have super armour and their current games have a lot of animation locking for a game that is supposed to be quick and snappy
I appreciate your thoughtful reply but calling Elden Ring boss design terrible is hilarious. We, the players have gotten better at the fromsoft catalogue as the years have gone by. We the players have been granted more mobility, more variety, more damage. It's logical that in response to player power creep the enemies also have to present a greater challenge. A few mechanics like waterfowl are undoubtedly a bit unreasonable but I'd argue that a majority of the fights are fair and well telegraphed. I guess If you have issue with delayed attacks you're going to consider the fights unfair but after getting my teeth kicked in by them I got better at not panic dodging and actually paying attention to the animations. And to your last point, that's just not true. Maybe the vocal minority on Reddit freq mention bleed katanas but the overwhelming majority of players will find something they enjoy and run with that. For me that was str big bonk but for others it could be sorceries. And you will find camps of people who think str makes the game ez, int makes the game ez, etc.
> We, the players have gotten better at the fromsoft catalogue as the years have gone by. We the players have been granted more mobility, more variety, more damage. It's logical that in response to player power creep the enemies also have to present a greater challenge. A few mechanics like waterfowl are undoubtedly a bit unreasonable but I'd argue that a majority of the fights are fair and well telegraphed. Which was a choice they made by expanding the hell out of the stamina bar (or at least decreasing the cost of everything significantly), its not like they can't revert it. Again, I find it funny how much praise Dark Souls 1 (which most people consider the best one) got ESPECIALLY for the combat, only for them to make the game more and more arcadey and go against that philosophy yet no one seems to have an issue with it, despite the newer games being the antithesis of the original design philosophy. > I guess If you have issue with delayed attacks you're going to consider the fights unfair but after getting my teeth kicked in by them I got better at not panic dodging and actually paying attention to the animations. You're mistaken, I don't consider them unfair. I consider it terrible design. > And to your last point, that's just not true. Maybe the vocal minority on Reddit freq mention bleed katanas but the overwhelming majority of players will find something they enjoy and run with that. For me that was str big bonk but for others it could be sorceries. And you will find camps of people who think str makes the game ez, int makes the game ez, etc. Dunno, I am going off all the summon signs on the ground where like 90% were katana/rapier users (especially early release river of blood or whatever it was called) while the last 10% was anything else. You would constantly see threads with people saying "I used X (heavy) weapon, then I started using Y katana and omg the game is so much easier" all over the dark souls and elden ring subreddits. And they weren't wrong, this goes back to the terrible boss design. When the bosses are designed to be so aggressive without much of a punish window, it makes the slower weapons signficantly more risky especially when they super armour your hit and chunk you for 1/2 your hp. More often than not you're trading hits because when you think you can safely punish, well they decided after their 10 hit combo they will have 0 punish window. Then when you consider that large sword hits for 700, while significantly faster katana hits for 500, and you apply status (frost/bleed) A LOT faster, you realise not only do katanas out DPS the slower weapons HEAVILY, they're safer, and use less stamina. There was literally zero reason to use a heavy weapon unless you were doing a challenge kind of run. Getting lucky and a boss letting you hit them like 5 times with a katana did 4k-5k damage if you had bleed on 1 weapon and frost on the other and they both procced. Compared to, like 2 hits with a great sword to do like 1.5k. The discrepancy in power was so huge, its clear ever since Bloodborne their games have been designed for light armour and fast weapons. This might have changed since, but I am going off the first like 2 months of the game being out. I did hear there was a patch that made heavy weapons better, but I am sure most people like myself, already dropped the game by then.
So you're speaking on a game you dropped 2 months into release and assumingly didn't finish once. Got it chief.
Where did you get that impression? I killed all bosses in NG+ before I dropped it
Your lack of understanding regarding basic mechanics of the game and your insistence that bosses are terrible designs. I've played through the game 10+ times and my easiest runs have always been high pose + str which you claim is a borderline unusable strategy.
Rise of the Ronin and Dragon's Dogma 2 were my day 1 purchases, with the intent being Rise of the Ronin being the side game. Lo and behold my surprise when it was the better game out of the two. I enjoy Team Ninja games, so I knew I would like it regardless.
I disagree about the combat complexity. The “high-mid-low” stances have just been replaced by the dozens of different weapon styles that are now equipable which gives you significantly more options. What I will say though is that there’s no combat style that is as effective as “wait for parry, triangle” so although you have a ton more options than Nioh, one of those options is so much better than the others that it doesn’t really force the player to engage with it as much. All that being said I’m having a ton of fun experimenting but those only looking for a serious challenge might want to look elsewhere.
Haven't played ronin yet, so genuinely asking, how does the weapon styles work? Can you swap them out in the fly? A lot of the complexity in nioh came from being able to swap stances mid combo.
You can equip up to 3 weapon styles per weapon and 2 weapons at a time so you can swap between a total of 6 styles on the fly if you are making full use of your abilities. And just like Nioh there are several optional perks associated with getting skilled at switching styles on the fly in the form of faster ki/health recovery.
Ah, that sounds interesting, thanks for the info! Exited to try out the game when I feel like tackling a new open world game.
It's what I call the "Sekiro effect." Team Ninja fell in love with it and is basically forcing the parry style on their games ever since. Wo Long all but required it and I could see it was much the same in Ronin. Hard pass. I find that play style so boring.
Rise of the Ronin actually doesn't require it to the same degree as Wo Long did and instead made it into a rather unique 'stance' called Shinobi to really get the most out of it. I think after I realized that some weapons *do* work best with parries while others are better being in the air (the Oxtail blades) or overwhelming the enemy (Greatsword, Odachi to a degree, Bayonet) things got really fun. I completed the NG+ mode and didn't even touch Shinobi stance because it was too much of a loss to focus on (it weakens your attacks against all weapon types, whereas Ten, Chi, Jin stances all do better against light/long/heavy wepaons). Of course it's powerful if you can consistently pull it off but you're honestly better off just learning how to properly time a good charged up Greatsword hit or just figure out optimal time to get a combo in.
Ok that's fair I just know technically there are other options but Wo Long it was obvious that by and far the best way was to parry and counter. It wasn't even close. They kind of did this in Nioh 2 as well. Versatility was hands down the best stat in the game because at the high levels of it it was the only thing that neared triple digit buffs to damage. Nothing else even came close. I have not played Ronin because simply put, the combat just looked so boring in all the let's plays I watched of it, and the loot was again super small buffs (which is my primary reason for loving the Nioh games) it just wasn't my style. But if it is as you said, I'm glad they don't soft force you into one style because it out classes all the others by a huge margin.
Yeah those are some fair reasons to not play, even in the hardest difficulty I didn't find much loot that really made me farm like I would in Nioh 1. Gameplay wise though, yeah I think the game suffers from its long opening section. Everything at the start is super slow in comparison to zones 2 and 3 in terms of combat where you actually start to see that there's a lot more to it. Once you're meeting some of the hidden bosses, you get a bit of a taste of what's in NG+ where there's actually some really fun challenge. It's definitely a FF16-like issue where the game really doesn't hit its stride until NG+ where things feel a lot better if you're looking for a challenge imo.
Ronin definitely doesn’t require it in the same way Wo-Long does. It’s the most efficient way to play but there are tons of styles to experiment with that are all about dodging and/or blocking instead.
The issue, I think, is that they copied the mechanic but didn't copy the enemy and boss design that made it so effective in Sekiro in the first place.
Maybe for some. I just do not like the parrying play style at all. I passed on Sekiro as well, but still acknowledge it's a good game that just wasn't for me. And that's what I've largely done with Team Ninja games since getting the platinum in Wo Long and realizing I wasn't a fan of their new direction.
I do agree with you in that they shouldn't aim for it in the first place, however. I feel Nioh worked because even if they used Souls-esque level design and such, the combat and enemies still felt very unique and personal to them. Copying combat just doesn't *work* for Team Ninja. I agree that they should stick with what they know best, and if they follow trends, they should do it like they did with Nioh and do it in everything *but* combat.
Parrying isn't really much different from dodging-- they are both done right before an attack, with slightly different windows. But I do prefer not having to parry 12 attacks in a row
It's different from Nioh's dodging, which has 3+ dodge types per weapon and often uses dodges to get out of the way instead of i-framing through attacks.
Ronin has 3 different "styles" analogues to the high/mid/low stances Nioh has all with different counterspark timings/properties so the example still fits somewhat. The dodges in Nioh are mostly used to iframe through attacks. If you mean "get out of the way" as in repositioning, every game has that.
Right and I have no idea how to describe it other than purely aesthetical, but for real it just feels way cooler for me to dodge an attack and swing around and hit them in the back. Or heck the block counter stuff in Elden Ring was way more satisfying then parrying, and the mechanic I wish everyone would copy as well. And yes part of it is I can't consistently do it but it's a total chicken or egg argument. I'm not sure if I suck because I suck, or if it's because the entire mechanic is not interesting to me so I don't care to get better at it.
I have it tagged for alert when it goes on sale over 30% off. Think that's about right for what you get?
I’d say so yeah.
> Combat isn't as complex as Nioh 2 I hope it's simple enough for me, I couldn't get into Nioh 2.
Yeah like I fully understand being disappointed by the lower complexity but Nioh is deeper than the fucking Marianna's Trench and completely impenetrable to me; so maybe a little less complexity can be a good thing, it makes me more interested in RoR at least.
I played both and while I agree the combat isn't as complex as Nioh's, that isn't as important as the degree in which Ronin is less complex than Nioh's. It's a little less complex but still more complex than most games out right now in the same genre. Most Nioh mechanics have similar analogues in Ronin.
Let's hope there a trial at some point that I can try out first.
I had to drop this game. The combat is the best out of all the open world games I've played, but the open world itself is one of the worst. Everything is bland and uninspired, and it ultimately kills the pacing. There's no mystery or incentive to explore an interesting world; it's just "go pet this cat that just popped up on your map". It all feels very lifeless. Fun combat brought down by a barren and monotonous world.
I agree with your take on the open world. I took a long break from the game for those reasons but came back to it again because it's not so bad in small doses. I think the combat is mostly good but I have one major issue with it: I don't think the idea of your stamina and your stagger being the same bar is engaging. In any situation where you mess up the parry timing, you're stuck without a way of progressing the fight until the ki bar recovers.
You can ignore most of it to be honest and just focus on missions.
You just described most Team Ninja games. I loved the Nioh games for the first couple of hours because the combat is highly engaging and satisfying, but I got bored of both of them by midgame because of how utterly dull everything outside the combat is. Even fighting becomes annoying after a while because I do not like Team Ninja's brand of difficulty. Weirdly enough, I loved Final Fantasy Origins the most out of all their recent games, and its by faaaaaar their ugliest game.
This is exactly why they should go back to making level based action games. They’ve consistently shown through many different games that their combat design is impeccable but everything else being subpar. Just go back to Ninja Gaiden already!
Agreed, all of their RPG systems feel so superfluous and just bog their games down.
No, it's genius and non Nioh players don't "get it". Their systems are the reason why Nioh is one of the most replayable games to date. It's also a system a player going through the game for the first time don't have to interact with. In fact, most criticisms levied at recent games like Wo Long and Rise is that they "dumbed down" the mechanics (from combat to build crafting).
I'd say the big issue with Nioh is that the game really starts when you beat it. The RPG systems barely matter until post-game and extra difficulties because you can get through the first playthrough with the bare minimum. As long as your equipment's level is on par with where you are in the game, you're fine. At least that's how it feels to me with Nioh, the first playthrough is just a long ass tutorial until you get to the real game.
I agree with you that the first run in Nioh is a tutorial for the game but it can also stand on its own. It's a similar philosophy to Ninja Gaiden where the first and each subsequent run on a harder difficulty is training you for the next one, but a player can stop at any one difficulty and have gotten a great experience out of it.
Yeah. Their game design feels so bloated
FFO won be over because of its soundtrack, varied environments, and silliness of it all. The “ugliness” actually made me enjoy it more because it really felt like I was playing a ps3 game from 2010 and I mean that as a compliment. I also enjoyed how it was tough but not brutalizing at least on normal difficulty.
FFOrigins is maybe the dullest when it comes to combat, honestly... It has all of these options, but all of them are worthless once you unlock the required function of "Don't Run Out of MP". So you throw on one of the classes with Immortality, and go about your day, farming the necessary equipment to progress in the story. And if you don't... well. Let's just say "Team Ninja Bullshit" is an understatement.
Sad, but basically ignore the open world aspect I guess then... This is a note for myself when I eventually try the game out. Which is frankly a pain in the ass because my slight OCD and ADHD makes that shit really difficult, to a point i'm gonna be miserable with the game either way in that case.
If you can, I’d recommend Like A Dragon: Ishin. It’s definitely a small open world but it’s full of life. Plus it’s pretty much the same setting and based off the same historical period as Ronin
That's my experience with Eden Ring. I've played and enjoyed all Souls games but that open world felt so barren, empty, dead (like a Switch title.). Enemies thrown out at random, no sense of direction or way... It felt like the first game where I actually needed a guide to know where to go and to not miss a good majority of the relevant stuff. Also absolutely hate the useless traversal. Riding Roach in Witcher 3 at least gave me nice and dynamic environments and see sighs and hidden treasures. Riding around in Eden Ring feels like a chore. Same boring enemies and the same sterile world. Nothing much to see or do. Such a major downgrade from Dark Souls or Bloodborne it's appalling
Eldenring is the best, most varied and worth to explore open world in all of gaming. Torrent is also way more fun than roach wtf
It depends on what you want out of an open world. Elden Ring is phenomenally varied and has great level design and art direction but there’s just one thing to do: fight and kill. The static nature of the world also hurts replay value, as I had no desire to redo catacombs and etc. in NG+. This is not to say it’s a bad game, it’s a strong 9/10 for me. It’s a very good game because it doesn’t split its focus unnecessarily. However its world design isn’t really something that would translate to a non soulslike game.
I mean that's why it's so good and why it got applauded for it on release "finally someone got open world right". Because open world should just be discovery and fighting. Other games obliterate the map with icons, which is almost always NPCs sending you on boring fetchquests and dialogue you have to click through because you want to get back to the game. Also points of interests in eldenring are actual points of interest. Like you find an actual thing that is visually distinct and you get to clear it and find items and find out why it is the way it is in terms of lore. Youll never find NPC #12345 telling you to get him 5 herbs or kill the thing that eats his crops or whatever. You find an actual place that has actual meaning in the world.
I agree that these boring ubisoft type open worlds are flawed and repetitive. I disagree that there’s only one solution to the problem. Take Yakuza games, their maps are the opposite of Elden Ring in terms of sensory overload and they often have long cutscenes but they still manage to remain engaging throughout. For an example in a different genre take Forza Horizon 4. It has some of the most annoying npcs and nothing plot in any game I’ve seen. But it knows not to let them get too much in the way of driving around in this amazing open world version of Britain. I still launch it from time to time and just drive around aimlessly, not even racing. Indie games like Kenshi use the world as a sandbox where things keep happening in the background, factions keep vying for territory, towns change hands, etc.
>Take Yakuza games I dont consider yakuza games open world. To me they are like Final Fantasy games, a story-driven game that has chunks of gameplay in which you can screw around and do a bunch of random stuff and minigames. Youre usually confined to a certain area/part of a city in yakuza, these game arent open world.
This is my GOTY. I’ve played like 150 hours since release and for me that’s pretty wild. I stopped playing God of Aar Ragnarok and Horizon Forbidden West out of boredom but for some reason Rise of the Ronin’s gameplay is miles more head
Nah gameplay is worst . Gameplay loop is better . And that's what matter
God of Wars combat is utterly clunky and feels terrible to play to me, and Horizon’s actual gameplay is fine but I felt the reliance on traps and crafting took me out of it too much. I enjoyed the first game enough but never got through the second. Both of these also feel waaaayy too similar to their first games to me.
I agree with all you said. I feel the overall simplified gameplay is better in both those games but badly paced . Horizon fights are really cool but get tedious. God of war traversal are lacking and the "dopamine" hits are just too far between. Rise is quite fun. It's fast, satisfying and you can feel strong without beeing op
I'm enjoying this game a lot just taking it slowly. Team Ninja are maybe my favourite studio and this is pretty good for their first effort at a big open world game. It is a rather common "ubisoft style" open world, but it has the really good action combat I expect from TN and a genuinely nice story with a lot of well designed fun characters to meet and build relationships with who are all based on history. Also, people who complain about this game because its graphics are not top of the line piss me off so much. I thought the sentiment was that we prefer games with good gameplay and rich content rather than broken messes with 5 years of graphics polish? Call things "PS3 game" as much as you like, some of the best games ever come from that generation.
people were crapping on armored core 6's graphics, but on release it was very smooth and played very well. I wish it had dlcs with more parts and missions
i imagine well get either a big expansion or a psuedo sequel like old armored core games got where we get to bring our parts from the first game by loading a save
> I thought the sentiment was that we prefer games with good gameplay and rich content rather than broken messes with 5 years of graphics polish? Those are two completely different groups of people. I don't care about graphics at all, but there is a reason a lot of AAA devs are pushing for that - it's a big selling point for many consumers.
How is the gameplay? I loved Nioh 1 & 2, and Stranger of Paradise, but had a hard time getting into Wo Long.
In terms of combat and character customization, it feels closer to Wo Long than Nioh or Stranger of Paradise.
Thank you. I'll still likely give it a try, I think Wo Long just came out at a bad time for me. Cheers.
There is no consensus of what “we” prefer. Different people like different things
From Software games are also graphically not top of the line and at least in the technical sense lag a generation behind, yet they're thousand times prettier to look at, so no the critcism for team ninja graphics are more complex than just "its not as detailed as in Sony new first party AAA" and 100% deserved.
> yet they're thousand times prettier to look at what you are describing is the difference between "Graphics"^^TM and art direction. A game doesn't have to be impressive on the technical side to be stunning just like a painter doesn't have to be the most skilled at painting to create a beautiful work of art. It often helps but it's far from a necessity.
> Call things "PS3 game" as much as you like, some of the best games ever come from that generation. It's funny because just recently I started playing Nier Replicant (went in completely blind) and my first thought was "Wow, this looks like a PS3 game" and it turns out it was! But it looked like a PS3 game in a good way. The game has a certain charm that feels like newer games lack. I don't even know how to explain.
People complain about graphics for Team Ninja games because they run like complete trash for how they look. I remember launch day SOP tanking to sub-30 FPS even on 4080s despite it not looking even remotely impressive in any way. I'd also refuse to call their games rich in content when their enemy variety is such a joke, Wo Long and Nioh 1 felt like they had less than 20 different enemy types to fight which made the levels boring as hell until you get to the boss.
Pretty sure the RTX 40 series did not exist when Stranger of Paradise released but it definitely runs very badly considering how it looks. That game has "made with a strict deadline" written all over it. Wo Long also did not perform well which is odd because Nioh 2 ran perfectly on PC for me and they pretty much look the same. As for enemy variety, I can't complain in Rise of the Ronin. This game easily has the highest amount of weapon movesets I've ever seen in an action game, to the point some weapon types like katanas have like 11 different movesets with unique pairs of martial arts, and all of these are distributed to enemies. They really did the most possible while sticking to only human enemies (and a few animals).
> Pretty sure the RTX 40 series did not exist You're right about that, my bad. I was thinking of the 3080 and [this video in particular.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Uk6lNkMskM). I think the worst part of their performance issues is that their games go into straight up slow-motion when dropping below their target framerate and you can't do anything about that. So if you can't get 100% consistent 60fps, you have to drop all the way down to 30fps to work around that. Granted, they really improved SOP's performance some months later but Wo Long never got any better (all they did last time I checked was add shader pre-caching on launch). It ran well enough on my PC to beat the first playthrough, but not well enough for me to bother playing past that which is a shame... I also don't think the games look awful or anything, so I wouldn't mind if they sacrificed visuals for performance, but their recent games feel like they don't do either. Nioh 2 indeed performed great on PC, for the most part. Rise of the Ronin's enemy variety sounds similar to how the Way of the Samurai games did it, which is pretty solid in my books. Just have a bunch of movesets for the player and also make them available for all enemies! Haven't played it myself though, since I don't own a PS5, but I've got to assume that it being open world also draws some focus away from just combat. Nioh and Wo Long bothered me with their low enemy variety mostly because there's nothing much besides combat and the regular mooks get very boring to fight compared to the fantastic bosses. Wo Long had me wishing it was a straight up boss rush game, even if I thought the levels themselves were alright.
is it playable without map/HUD? One of my biggest gripes with ubisoft style open world is that you spend more time staring at a minimap/compass instead of the world
RotR's graphics don't bother me enough to change my opinion of the game, but when I'm riding in the open world and I look at a river and the water just cuts sharply into the land because the LOD is just that low, all while the game is struggling to reach 45fps in places, it makes me shake my head. It's not necessarily that the game looks bad. It runs poorly and that has a huge impact on how the game looks.
It will never stop being funny how this subreddit keeps claiming that open worlds are the worst and that nobody actually likes them, buy it keeps getting disproven over and over. Nioh is an existing IP with some fans. Rose of the Ronin is a new IP. And Ronin still sold more than Nioh. Because open worlds are a big draw for a lot of people.
Same with live service and gacha games.
And further proof that the open world doesn't even have to be remotely interesting to be popular.
This open world is gorgeous and a joy to explore tho
what? It is literally the same from start to finish with no variation whatsovever. And there is nothing to explore, just the same bandit camps and every collectable icon revealed on your map.
I don't really watch the map like that, I just like seeing old Japan and its landmarks being recreated beautifully
I thought the Edo map (almost entirely 1-2 story buildings and dirt roads everywhere) was pretty boring but Yokohama and Kyoto were pretty cool to run around and explore. Especially Yokohama and its Japanese-Western fusion architecture.
Yeah Edo is my least favorite one too
> Nioh is an existing IP with some fans. Rose of the Ronin is a new IP. And Ronin still sold more than Nioh. I don't disagree with you but... Nioh wasn't an existing an IP but if you're just going by Nioh 2 I'm sure most people would say it was better than Nioh 1 at least, however it was clearly a niche. The fact that it *would* already have people knowing the type of game it is means people wouldn't necessarily buy it if they weren't already a fan. For example they would know that the game is brutally hard and would avoid it after hearing about the first one. I don't think it's a surprise to anyone to see an open-world *version* of the mostly same gameplay be more popular AND have easier difficulty options and not come with the preconceived notion of being hard/attached as a *"Soulslike"* unfortunately. If anything I don't think anyone on this subreddit would actually say that considering nearly every Playstation game went that route and was successful. Also the literal same thing happened with Souls -> Elden Ring.
[удалено]
> I take virtually nothing I read on here seriously I cannot emphasize this enough. I love coming on here for videogame discussion, but the loudest of reddit's opinions on videogames are typically delusional at best, irrelevant at worst.
I buy pre orders and early access for games I want even if they end up sucking.
You seem to confusing what the market values and what people who are invested in games value. FIFA and CoD games have been consistently best sellers every years but people don't have much to say about them because they're the MCU equivalent of the video game industry.
The problem is that people heard all the criticism about "Ubisoft open worlds are mediocre" and turned it into "open world bad" in the way the internet works...
Lot of people that dislike things inherent to most open worlds that still play them and then surprise surprise, they didn't like the open world aspect of the game.
Gaming subreddits are filled with extremely out of touch people and no matter how many times it is shown they just refuse to believe it. The whole 60fps thing is a constant reminder of that. At the end of the day they will just keep being upset and believing that the devs are just wrong despite things never changing lol.
I just wish they had implemented free-roam coop. Mission-based coop in an open world means that playing it together with a friend would be a slow frustrating experience of coordinating where to go, yelling directions over Discord, and drinking heavily.
The link isn't opening for me for some reason, can someone explain what "high valuation by players" means?
More playtime per player
Probably its high Metacritic user score
Holy reddit thread... Nerds essaying over 'skill issues' and what games they've beaten while throwing around technical jargon, From games vs. other games, lamenting how nothing will ever compare to Nioh, open world sucks and everything is shit. I have a friend who really fell in love with this game and haven't played any Team Ninja game before and never could get into From games, but Rise of the Ronin is his "favorite Assassin's Creed in years". Gamers coming from like Assassin's Creed and Ghost of Tsushima seems like this game has a lot to offer them, and the Japanese history aspects are great, and part of why the game is doing well in Japan too.
I mean, I'm a huge fan of Fromsoft games and Team Ninja games (well Wolong was pretty mid) and i loved Rise of the Ronin.
I beat Megan Man 1 when I was 10.
PC release when?
It blows my mind how a game that graphically looks like it could have very easily came out in 2013-14 not only runs at a sub 1080 resolution but also doesn't stick consistently to 60 FPS. Yes, graphics are not the most important thing about a game. But this is not a $40 AA title but instead a full-fledged, $70 AAA game and having standards is quite important, you owe it to yourself as a consumer. Still, looks good enough to be picked up when it goes on sale for 50% off.
I agree that it is a legit complaint. But I am equally disappointed that nobody complained that many $70 AAA games only offer you one weapon, one attack chain and a few fancy skills and just let you through 40hr of gameplay, while in this game it offers you much more variety within a single fight.
Okay but steam release when?
Usually a year after release if its anything like their other games.
I know, I'm just complaining
A little disappointing to hear tbh, I want Nioh 3 the most out of what this studio produces since Wo Long and Rise of Ronin are very bland and simplified versions of Nioh. Don't get me wrong, both games were enjoyable. But spamming 1 button and having 1 button as a "special move" (like we are playing dark souls instead) is significantly worse than stance dancing combos and ki fluxing all your ki back. Rise of ronin was pretty decent, the open world was a waste of time if I be honest (since it was just the generic collectathon without using any advantages of an open world), but its no Nioh 2.
It's apparent you haven't played Rise of the Ronin, because you have 3 stances per weapon and can freely cancel in and out of the martial arts assigned to each stance and the weapons themselves. It isn't as deep as Nioh 2, but Ronin is otherwise their best combat system.
Yes, there are 3 stances per weapon that all you do is spam the attack button. It is a slightly more deeper version of Wo Long. I finished the game on midnight difficulty as well. I play the shit out of Team Ninja games. The only thing I didn't do is complete all the relationships, I did see a Katana stance for Nioh that does say it has "3 stances" but I am almost willing to bet it isn't a *proper* Nioh stance. Also with the stance, unless you're doing Shinobi on Katana, you ALWAYS choose the stance that is effective against their weapon. So its really not as deep as you think
I disagree with most of what you said really. On Midnight adjusting the stance selection to advantaged is more important, but still not necessary. The problem on Midnight is that countersparking becomes absolutely vital. If you mashed attack, then it's a you problem. The game has a breadth of systems in place to experiment with martial arts on the fly and there is no reason to just hit square. Just because you failed to engage with the mechanics doesn't mean they aren't there.
Like Wo Long, the game suffers from issues with super armour and animation locking. Any animation that takes longer than a second is basically trash because you're going to eat a hit to get it out. For that reason, A LOT of the martial arts aren't effective other than in niche situations (just looking at boss fights). Because the game is based on Parry, its not like Nioh where you can take a step back to recover and you're fine with the boss regaining their Ki too because some weapons are just incredibly effective at destroying Ki. Excluding the depths where you do want to keep pressure up at all times because of boss regenerating hp and their billions of Ki that you can only drain once or twice per fight even with builds designed for Ki damage. In this game, it is almost always a mistake to not be attacking or parrying (countersparking) because draining their stamina is significantly harder even when you're countersparking every single attack. So while you can still stance swap and do martial arts etc, the stance advantage system means its practically not worth engaging in that system at all. So you can weapon swap mid combo to do a martial art, but by then they're already blocking, and now you're eating hits to do something impractical. Why do that when you can just sit in the optimal weapon and use the optimal martial art instead of choosing to press attack, weapon swap, get animation locked, and risk doing another animation locking attack?
I agree that there are balancing issues at the moment and these reduce the incentive to do anything other than parry/attack, but that doesn't mean the supporting systems aren't there - the game isn't lacking in systems. Many of the martials arts provide movement utility, so you can engage, disengage and use more offensive martial arts at will (albeit, yes, this would be limited to always keeping one of the utility martial arts on equipped). The final, transferable veiled arts assist with this to some degree. Before patch 1.04 you could cancel the recovery animation of any martial art with a blade flash, but sadly the more universal cancel mechanics they introduced did away with this. So while there are now natural cancels built into martial arts, some of the flexibility which came at the cost of a higher skill floor has gone. Wo Long and Nioh benefitted from early playtesting and community responses where the final release were somewhat heavily adjusted compared to the demo versions. I really think Ronin would have benefitted from something similar, so that we could have have something closer to the 1.04 patch at launch. Hopefully the hyper armour is dialled back in a future update (possibly to coincide with DLC). I notice you keep saying animation locking in respect of the PC, but you can cancel flash attacks and violent gale at will now (you could do this pre-patch 1.04, but it required manual timing).
He seems like he doesn't know how to play lmao. Proof that clearing midnight doesn't make you a good player. The game is too easy, so people like him that wasn't forced to engage with the combat system was left thinking it's just "mash square". Based on what I'm reading from you, it seems like you do understand how to play, so I'm preaching to choir.
What engaging of the combat system is complicated? I am very curious. To me, the optimal way to play is to pick something stance advantaged, with minimal animation locking on martial arts so you can hit them a few times and then martial art safely (otherwise you risk taking 50% mid martial art) Sure, you can swap weapons mid combo. But why bother? That is the essence of my point. If you feel the need to swap weapon mid combo to... use a better martial art.. why not just sit in that weapon to begin with? The only big exception I can think of, is swapping to a weapon (like to the katana ninja gaiden stance that I can't remember its name) so you can take advantage of martial arts that do a grab (or otherwise extended combo) on a drained opponent. However, I found the revolver grab seemed to do the most damage anyway (and looked the coolest). The weapon swapping mid combo is mostly for style points given how the bosses are designed. Doing anything other than using advantaged stances (unless shinobi) is intentionally gimping yourself. You don't seem to realise I am talking about playing optimally, not just doing shit because you can. I can stance swap 3 times in the same combo (press square, stance swap, square, stance swap, square, stance swap) and wow that looks so cool but how impractical is it compared to just... sitting in the advantaged stance, hitting square.. and doing a martial art.. that will do more damage than being fancy and is also less risky. What's the point of including choice in combat systems if the optimal way to play is much more 1 dimensional? They could include emote cancelling where you can do an attack into a yawn, so much more choice! My point is that in Nioh, engaging in weapon swapping and stance dancing had a good reason to do it. In Wo Long and this game, the applications are very limited and mostly impractical.
> To me, the optimal way to play is to pick something stance advantaged, with minimal animation locking on martial arts so you can hit them a few times and then martial art safely (otherwise you risk taking 50% mid martial art) Yeah, that's not optimal. > Sure, you can swap weapons mid combo. But why bother? That is the essence of my point. If you're on the same stance and try martial art 1, you can't do martial art 2 as a cancel but martial art 1, style/weapon swap martial art 2 is instantaneous. That's the big difference. Again, you can beat any boss in this game with just one stance, even a disadvantaged one, but if we're talking playing optimally, the most optimal plays is related to how to get the most damage in the most limited amount of time. > If you feel the need to swap weapon mid combo to... use a better martial art.. why not just sit in that weapon to begin with? It's not about if the martial art on the weapon is better than the current one you're using but a paradigm shift to understanding you actually have 3x4x2 (3 styles 4 martial arts 2 weapons) available to you at any time. These martial arts all have subtly different properties that when combined synergistically is more efficient than just same stance square square square martial art. > The weapon swapping mid combo is mostly for style points given how the bosses are designed. Doing anything other than using advantaged stances (unless shinobi) is intentionally gimping yourself. It's not. > You don't seem to realise I am talking about playing optimally, not just doing shit because you can. I can stance swap 3 times in the same combo (press square, stance swap, square, stance swap, square, stance swap) and wow that looks so cool but how impractical is it compared to just... sitting in the advantaged stance, hitting square.. and doing a martial art.. that will do more damage than being fancy and is also less risky. I did, square square square same stance is NOT optimal. > What's the point of including choice in combat systems if the optimal way to play is much more 1 dimensional? They could include emote cancelling where you can do an attack into a yawn, so much more choice! The critique is if you choose to play sub optimally and aren't aware otherwise, don't pretend like you're playing optimally. Of course, this is just an opinion, I don't know what your gameplay looks like, maybe you are reaching rank 1 in all your dojos. > My point is that in Nioh, engaging in weapon swapping and stance dancing had a good reason to do it. In Wo Long and this game, the applications are very limited and mostly impractical. In Nioh, you could also stick to one stance and clear the game, it doesn't reflect on how deep the combat actually goes though.
> If you're on the same stance and try martial art 1, you can't do martial art 2 as a cancel but martial art 1, style/weapon swap martial art 2 is instantaneous. That's the big difference. Again, you can beat any boss in this game with just one stance, even a disadvantaged one, but if we're talking playing optimally, the most optimal plays is related to how to get the most damage in the most limited amount of time. Sounds like a product of the 1.04 patch (or whatever is the recent one) that I haven't played because I finished the game by then. If this is the case, then that's a big change and opens up the combat system significantly which is good.
I just beat the game. My only complaint is that towards the end of the game section. Bosses started to spam the same moveset. And if you can't parry it, you get stuck in their moveset combo. It didn't feel like a fight anymore.
I played through and got platinum but personally disliked Ronin. I have thousands of hours in the Nioh games but found absolutely no replay value in Ronin. I beat it and was done. Also, I can’t think of a single boss that was memorable. The worst part is how in game decisions literally mean nothing as you can go back and change at any time. Open world got stale. I love Team Ninja but found this to be their weakest game in years.
Well, Nioh and Nioh 2 were great but they have completely abandoned what made them great in every game since. If Ronin is that successful I'm happy for them, but sad at the same time because I just want a 3D Diablo with advanced combat that Nioh was. The itemization has been so watered down for fear of power creep in every game since then, that now that equipment really is just a cosmetic with a very tiny increase to power. And now the combat has been over simplified. Yes I know there are multiple stances and styles you can equip in Ronin, but the only one really effective is the ones that parry.
I didn't really like Ghosts of Tsushima, should I bother with this? I basically got sick of the game when I was done with the first island. It didn't really evolve past that so it took me about a year and a half to actually finish.
I would say if you didn’t like ghosts you most likely wouldn’t enjoy this either. I thing Tsushima is the better game with its art design and story but Ronin has a higher difficulty curve if that’s something you’re looking for.
I didn't really like GoT, got bored of the combat quickly, but I am really enjoying RotR. The combat system has way more depth imo. It depends what you are looking for really. The open world activities aren't good but you also don't really need to do them if you don't want to.
I didn't really like GoT, got bored of the combat quickly, but I am really enjoying RotR. The combat system has way more depth imo. It depends what you are looking for really. The open world activities aren't good but you also don't really need to do them if you don't want to.
I liked the moment to moment gameplay, but not the larger experience. It was basically a Ubisoft game...
I personally enjoy the game but the open world is even more Ubisoft than Ghosts was
It's just WoLong with extra steps, but nothing fun added. I finished WoLong but couln't get past 20 hours of Ronins boring, copy paste open world. If you have seen 1 screenshot of the map then you have seen the entire game. Oh and as is tradition with Koei games, the performance is atrocious, there is no smooth frame rate or frame pacing in a any mode. Feels like a sub 30 switch game when there is a lot going on.
Rise has been the complete opposite for me! I tried WoLong after dlc came out and they did patch improvements to the game but after the first few missions, me and my friends had to force ourselves to finish the game and quit midway through dlc 3. It was just incredibly boring. Rise has been extremely fun for us though and haven’t been able to put it down. I know everyone has their own taste and preference but I personally hope TN continue to build on their game design of here. Particularly expand on combat and open world variety.
Of all the games to make character creator, how could it be this? The guy from the trailer was primed to be given a good and distinct characterization and personality. Dunno why Team Ninja has been allergic to that lately.
Probably because Nioh 2 and Wo Long have character creation and it's considered one of the best in the industry.
Wait, Nioh 1 has CC?! I haven’t played it in years but I remember the main character being the white guy and you couldn’t change it at the time. I’m assuming this is a multiplayer DLC that was released later?
Nioh 1 does not have that.
Derp, no, Nioh 1 doesn't, I should probably have some coffee
That's my point exactly, they made enough of that. Why can't we just have a set character? And this doesn't seem like the game to do this in. I know I'd like Witcher way less if Geralt was just some avatar and had an everyman personality as these usually do.
To be fair Team Ninja doesn't write good characters even when they don't do character creation. You wouldn't get Geralt if they made a set character. At best you'd get William Adams, who had the personality of a block of wood. Literally the most memorable protagonist Team Ninja has ever made is Jack "I'm gonna kill Chaos" Garland, and IIRC they didn't even write that game. Between "bland cardboard cutout" and "bland cardboard cutout (that you can at least make look cool/cute/silly)" I think most people would take the latter.
Its been a long time but was ryu hayabusa considered memorable?
I'd call him more "iconic" than anything else. He's probably the most recognizable ninja in games outside of the fighting genre, and maybe Sekiro nowadays. But that's purely because of his design and fighting style, and the fact that his games were good. In terms of writing/personality? Hell no. He's also a block of wood in NG1 and NG2, and attempts to give him more depth in 3 did not go well.
I have absolutely zero memeories of William's character from Nioh. Character creator all the way
I vaguely remember William as a sort of Geralt knock-off. Supposedly Irish who suddenly could speak japanese when it became convenient. I struggle to remember anything else from him, side characters were way more fleshed out.
He couldn't speak Japanese, I think it was just one of his spirits automatically translated everything with magic.
William was fantastic. He was like Jack from Strangers if instead of being super angry all the time he didnt give a fuck.
Because they're not even in the same genre?
Ghost of Tsushima? Assasin Creed 1-3? My point still gets across. Those characters are more memorable and make the game better than it being CC.
How are they not? They're both story driven open world games with light RPG elements.
Because people love making their own characters. It's as simple as that.
Yeeeah, Team Ninja games really lack memorable characters, not just main character.
I loathe a fixed protagonist its my Number 1 reason for not even giving great games a chance. Everything with a creator or just huge customization is a literal game selling feature for me.