God of War Thread
- Thread starter Tyaren
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I've beaten the game, did all the side content and crafted/upgraded end-game gear till I couldn't take the grinding any longer and I have to say… there is not a single naked tiddy in the game! 0/10!!!
On a more serious note: I enjoyed this more than GoW3, but that's not a particularly high bar. Still doesn't strike me as a GoW game at all. Feels like they made the game they wanted to make (or rather made what they thought might sell) and then slapped the GoW label on it to cash in on the existing fanbase and reduce marketing costs. The connections to the previous games are really sparse and more or less irrelevant for the overall plot.
In general while I thought that the (handful of) characters were interesting and well written, the plot as a whole and the foundation were… meh. They also took quite a few liberties with the “source material”. While Norse mythology isn't exactly congruent anyway, I think most people would agree that the characterization of the Aesir in particular is vastly different (more so than the Greek gods in previous games imo) That's fine I guess, though they completely wasted Loki in my opinion.
The 30-35h estimates for the main story are a bit of a stretch imo, took me around 30h to finish the story and most of the side content except for end/post-game stuff and finishing all collectibles. Still a decent amount of content though.
I thought traveling between realms would be more relevant, but the areas besides Midgard are fairly small and only visited briefly… Muspel- and Niflheim are just areas for end game grinding and have no relevance at all. The arena challenges in Muspelheim are fun for a while at least. Niflheim was awful though. It's a random dungeon with a timer and you have to leave before you die to salvage your rewards. Initially you can't make it very far in, so you have to leave with hardly anything. But once you got some gear that gives you more time and you grasped the basic layout of the dungeon, you just run from start to finish opening chests. That gets old pretty quickly and you have to do it quite a bit to get all the possible rewards (and even more if you wanted to craft and upgrade all relevant gear…)
Combat is well done and fun for the most part, wouldn't call it particularly deep though. You have 2.5 weapons (Fists count as half) and basically what you expect in terms of options + 3 Specials for Kratos (2 Runic Attacks, 1 Talisman) and Atreus can be instructed to shoot arrows and cast a special (and does other AI controlled stuff). There are a bunch of Runic Attacks, but since you can only equip 2 at a time, they are not that relevant and you can upgrade them, I'd wager a good chunk of the players never switched out the first 2 they found. You can do some obscure things like pinning an enemy to the wall with your Axe throw, but that's not that useful, since the fanciest stuff only works on enemies that are easy to kill anyway.
Boss battles are a bit of a letdown imo… I think almost half of the story bosses are Trolls. Their moveset expands and later Trolls might have a unique gimmick, but still… half of them! 2 other story bosses are re-used as boss type enemies in side content, that leaves you with very few unique fights. Severe lack of god and mythical beast killing in general.
I don't get the praise for the side quests and exploration at all… There are 15 side quests in the game and a good chunk is pretty mundane stuff. Freeing the dragons is run around the area and smash 3 rune stones, the quests from spirits are bog-standard “go there, kill and/or collect stuff, come back”- type of quests, Niflheim quests boil down to opening chests to collect X Mist Echoes. Only the 5 quests in the Dwarven Blacksmith questline are more involved and yield interesting stuff. Same for the exploration, you can find some worthwhile items, but most relevant stuff like gear sets, health/rage upgrades, Runic Attacks etc. are found primarily along the main path. This leaves you with enchantments (stat/effect buffs that you can slot in your armor) and weapon grips (basically the equivalent for your weapon). There is nothing wrong with any of this, it just didn't strike me as anything special. The game also has some of the usual open world game padding, like collect all artefacts, kill all of Odin's ravens, read all Jötnar shrines etc.
This probably sounds more negative than it should, since I actually think it's a pretty good game. But you can read what's great about the game in basically any review XD Thus I think some nitpicking is warranted
Not sure if I will go for a second playthrough, since I don't think you can skip the cutscenes and there are ~8h of them… and I don't want to do all the crafting again. I'd rather have the highest difficulty as a NG+ kind of thing instead of a normal New Game…
edit: typos
On a more serious note: I enjoyed this more than GoW3, but that's not a particularly high bar. Still doesn't strike me as a GoW game at all. Feels like they made the game they wanted to make (or rather made what they thought might sell) and then slapped the GoW label on it to cash in on the existing fanbase and reduce marketing costs. The connections to the previous games are really sparse and more or less irrelevant for the overall plot.
In general while I thought that the (handful of) characters were interesting and well written, the plot as a whole and the foundation were… meh. They also took quite a few liberties with the “source material”. While Norse mythology isn't exactly congruent anyway, I think most people would agree that the characterization of the Aesir in particular is vastly different (more so than the Greek gods in previous games imo) That's fine I guess, though they completely wasted Loki in my opinion.
The 30-35h estimates for the main story are a bit of a stretch imo, took me around 30h to finish the story and most of the side content except for end/post-game stuff and finishing all collectibles. Still a decent amount of content though.
I thought traveling between realms would be more relevant, but the areas besides Midgard are fairly small and only visited briefly… Muspel- and Niflheim are just areas for end game grinding and have no relevance at all. The arena challenges in Muspelheim are fun for a while at least. Niflheim was awful though. It's a random dungeon with a timer and you have to leave before you die to salvage your rewards. Initially you can't make it very far in, so you have to leave with hardly anything. But once you got some gear that gives you more time and you grasped the basic layout of the dungeon, you just run from start to finish opening chests. That gets old pretty quickly and you have to do it quite a bit to get all the possible rewards (and even more if you wanted to craft and upgrade all relevant gear…)
Combat is well done and fun for the most part, wouldn't call it particularly deep though. You have 2.5 weapons (Fists count as half) and basically what you expect in terms of options + 3 Specials for Kratos (2 Runic Attacks, 1 Talisman) and Atreus can be instructed to shoot arrows and cast a special (and does other AI controlled stuff). There are a bunch of Runic Attacks, but since you can only equip 2 at a time, they are not that relevant and you can upgrade them, I'd wager a good chunk of the players never switched out the first 2 they found. You can do some obscure things like pinning an enemy to the wall with your Axe throw, but that's not that useful, since the fanciest stuff only works on enemies that are easy to kill anyway.
Boss battles are a bit of a letdown imo… I think almost half of the story bosses are Trolls. Their moveset expands and later Trolls might have a unique gimmick, but still… half of them! 2 other story bosses are re-used as boss type enemies in side content, that leaves you with very few unique fights. Severe lack of god and mythical beast killing in general.
I don't get the praise for the side quests and exploration at all… There are 15 side quests in the game and a good chunk is pretty mundane stuff. Freeing the dragons is run around the area and smash 3 rune stones, the quests from spirits are bog-standard “go there, kill and/or collect stuff, come back”- type of quests, Niflheim quests boil down to opening chests to collect X Mist Echoes. Only the 5 quests in the Dwarven Blacksmith questline are more involved and yield interesting stuff. Same for the exploration, you can find some worthwhile items, but most relevant stuff like gear sets, health/rage upgrades, Runic Attacks etc. are found primarily along the main path. This leaves you with enchantments (stat/effect buffs that you can slot in your armor) and weapon grips (basically the equivalent for your weapon). There is nothing wrong with any of this, it just didn't strike me as anything special. The game also has some of the usual open world game padding, like collect all artefacts, kill all of Odin's ravens, read all Jötnar shrines etc.
This probably sounds more negative than it should, since I actually think it's a pretty good game. But you can read what's great about the game in basically any review XD Thus I think some nitpicking is warranted
Not sure if I will go for a second playthrough, since I don't think you can skip the cutscenes and there are ~8h of them… and I don't want to do all the crafting again. I'd rather have the highest difficulty as a NG+ kind of thing instead of a normal New Game…
edit: typos
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Lulu
Well-Known Member
And you know whats messed up... there actually is a Good Game underneath all the RPG Elements... but they just couldn't help themselves.
Edit: So it wasn't just me.
http://www.pushsquare.com/news/2018...rified_when_he_first_played_god_of_war_on_ps4
Also seriously ? They managed to fix it in only 6 Months ? IMPOSSIBLE !!!
Edit: So it wasn't just me.
http://www.pushsquare.com/news/2018...rified_when_he_first_played_god_of_war_on_ps4
Also seriously ? They managed to fix it in only 6 Months ? IMPOSSIBLE !!!
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So Santa Monica Studio released a nice infographic with some gameplay related factoids and I thought it's kinda interesting:
in spoilers, since it's rather large and I guess contains possible spoilers…
To nobody's surprise, the most popular runic attacks are indeed the first 2 found in the game (and the most popular talisman is also the first one) I don't even know what gear that is… it's not even golden though XD
The Sigrun KD ratio is surprisingly high imo… but since you can't replay the fight and I doubt many players went for more than one playthrough…
Not sure if Sony gave updated sales numbers, but with the # of Plats from the graphic and the completion, you can get a rough idea of the game's sales… 493k Plats with 5.4% of players having the plat, means around 9 million players. Obviously not entirely correct due to lack of precision and possible ”non-purchase” Plats, like Plat on multiple accounts, lend the game, bought a used copy, players not connected to the PSN etc. (though all those are likely a drop in the bucket)
While interesting, it's a bit creepy that basically all this information is sent to Sony… given that GoW is a pure, single player offline game.
in spoilers, since it's rather large and I guess contains possible spoilers…
To nobody's surprise, the most popular runic attacks are indeed the first 2 found in the game (and the most popular talisman is also the first one) I don't even know what gear that is… it's not even golden though XD
The Sigrun KD ratio is surprisingly high imo… but since you can't replay the fight and I doubt many players went for more than one playthrough…
Not sure if Sony gave updated sales numbers, but with the # of Plats from the graphic and the completion, you can get a rough idea of the game's sales… 493k Plats with 5.4% of players having the plat, means around 9 million players. Obviously not entirely correct due to lack of precision and possible ”non-purchase” Plats, like Plat on multiple accounts, lend the game, bought a used copy, players not connected to the PSN etc. (though all those are likely a drop in the bucket)
While interesting, it's a bit creepy that basically all this information is sent to Sony… given that GoW is a pure, single player offline game.