Ghosts of Tsushima on baseline PS4
It feels like this year I am going through another one of my phases where I play a bunch of single player games, and additionally I seem like I am already going to have trouble short listing my games for the eventual AggroChat games of the year show. Ghosts right now is on that list even though I have not made it terribly far into the game. I am still exploring what is I believe the first major area of the game, and I would probably be going faster were it not for my allergy to horses. What I mean by that is that I ultimately feel more comfortable roaming around on foot than I ever do on a horse in a game like this. I spent most of my play through of Witcher 3 for example ignoring the fact that I had access to Roach, and for now at least I am mostly ignoring poor Nobu.
At it’s core, Ghosts of Tsushima is what you get when you lovingly translate an Akira Kurosawa film to video game form. In practice Tsushima is to swordplay what Horizon Zero Dawn is to bowplay, and combat feels deeply engaging and fluid. I can play super aggressively or defensively and both feel like I am having a meaningful experience. For awhile I thought I had screwed something up and triggered some morality clause in the game, because a Samurai scolded me for not fighting with honor… but in truth it seems like I can flip between being sneaky and striding into the center of an encampment and challenging the leader without much recourse.
I’ve got to admit, it is the later that I enjoy the most. I really love triggering a showdown, and this is the one time that I feel like a Quick Time Event feels purposeful and engaging. Essentially when you stand off against someone it is a game of chicken with you holding the triangle button until after your opponent has begun their strike. If successful you dispatch your foe in a single hit, and then proceed to enter open melee with everyone else in the camp. If you fail… that opponent decimates your health bar making the brawl significantly harder than it would have been otherwise. Initially these stand offs are pretty simple, but I am noticing that the mobs that I am encountering are starting to fake me out and try and get me to attack early.
The quest advisement is pure genius and absolutely the best system in the game that I would love to see other games adapt. Essentially in the story you are being guided by the wind to your destiny, and how this plays out in game is that things will blow in a specific direction that you need to go. You can swipe up on your touch pad and will get a visible wind burst that you can see on the edges of the screen. However EVERYTHING is impacted by this… so you can just follow the direction the leaves or blow or that the pampas grass is bending. The wind direction adjusts constantly to give you a sort of zeroing in on your target, but it is so subtle that it just sorta blends into the rest of the game.
Another really nice touch is that when you accept a major quest, you get this cinematic title card which makes the entire encounter feel like a chapter in a movie. While I have not made it terribly far into the game, I am already starting to reap the benefits of the random people that I save along the road. I am spending a lot of time engaging roaming Mongol patrols and often times end up saving a civilian or two. These fairly regularly end up showing up later at one of the major hubs and call out to me, which triggers a little back and forth about how thankful they are. This gives the feeling that you really are in fact saving your people that you have been given stewardship over.
The only problem that I see initially… is the same problem that I seem to have with all open world games. I know what events will trigger the storyline moving forward and as a result I end up avoiding them like the plague. I spend my time roaming around and knocking out the minor events with the thought process that I will make a pass to wrap up the story elements later. It sorta feels bad when you cross paths with one of the NPCs that are waiting for you to finish the next phase of their story, while you are instead chasing whispers in the woods at night. The game tries to install a sense of urgency that doesn’t actually seem to exist other than in story beats. It feels like I have all the time in the world to roam freely which is a fairly good thing for my natural play style.
I originally was wanting to wait until the launch of the PlayStation 5 to play this game… and I admit there is part of me that wishes I had. I own a baseline PS4 and never upgraded to the pro, and while the game looks pretty… it could look so much better and I am absolutely certain it does on a Pro. Maybe this is a side effect of having played Death Stranding and Horizon Zero Dawn back to back which are both jawdroppingly gorgeous PC games that I played in 4k. So when I look at Ghosts of Tsushima, I mourn slightly at how much better this would have looked on the PC or on Next Gen hardware. I am too hooked now to pause the game and revisit later, but it does make the experience a little bittersweet. It makes no sense at all to get a Pro now when we are on the theoretical cusp of the PS5 release.
If you have a PS4, especially if you have a PS4 Pro… then I highly suggest checking out this game. So far it definitely seems like it might be my favorite game that was released this year. I am including HZD and Death Stranding PC in my games of the year list because they got PC releases this year, but I fully expect that Tsushima is going to take all the honors at the Game Awards. It truly is a masterpiece of cinematic gameplay.
The post Ghosts of Tsushima Impressions appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Ghosts of Tsushima on baseline PS4
It feels like this year I am going through another one of my phases where I play a bunch of single player games, and additionally I seem like I am already going to have trouble short listing my games for the eventual AggroChat games of the year show. Ghosts right now is on that list even though I have not made it terribly far into the game. I am still exploring what is I believe the first major area of the game, and I would probably be going faster were it not for my allergy to horses. What I mean by that is that I ultimately feel more comfortable roaming around on foot than I ever do on a horse in a game like this. I spent most of my play through of Witcher 3 for example ignoring the fact that I had access to Roach, and for now at least I am mostly ignoring poor Nobu.
At it’s core, Ghosts of Tsushima is what you get when you lovingly translate an Akira Kurosawa film to video game form. In practice Tsushima is to swordplay what Horizon Zero Dawn is to bowplay, and combat feels deeply engaging and fluid. I can play super aggressively or defensively and both feel like I am having a meaningful experience. For awhile I thought I had screwed something up and triggered some morality clause in the game, because a Samurai scolded me for not fighting with honor… but in truth it seems like I can flip between being sneaky and striding into the center of an encampment and challenging the leader without much recourse.
I’ve got to admit, it is the later that I enjoy the most. I really love triggering a showdown, and this is the one time that I feel like a Quick Time Event feels purposeful and engaging. Essentially when you stand off against someone it is a game of chicken with you holding the triangle button until after your opponent has begun their strike. If successful you dispatch your foe in a single hit, and then proceed to enter open melee with everyone else in the camp. If you fail… that opponent decimates your health bar making the brawl significantly harder than it would have been otherwise. Initially these stand offs are pretty simple, but I am noticing that the mobs that I am encountering are starting to fake me out and try and get me to attack early.
The quest advisement is pure genius and absolutely the best system in the game that I would love to see other games adapt. Essentially in the story you are being guided by the wind to your destiny, and how this plays out in game is that things will blow in a specific direction that you need to go. You can swipe up on your touch pad and will get a visible wind burst that you can see on the edges of the screen. However EVERYTHING is impacted by this… so you can just follow the direction the leaves or blow or that the pampas grass is bending. The wind direction adjusts constantly to give you a sort of zeroing in on your target, but it is so subtle that it just sorta blends into the rest of the game.
Another really nice touch is that when you accept a major quest, you get this cinematic title card which makes the entire encounter feel like a chapter in a movie. While I have not made it terribly far into the game, I am already starting to reap the benefits of the random people that I save along the road. I am spending a lot of time engaging roaming Mongol patrols and often times end up saving a civilian or two. These fairly regularly end up showing up later at one of the major hubs and call out to me, which triggers a little back and forth about how thankful they are. This gives the feeling that you really are in fact saving your people that you have been given stewardship over.
The only problem that I see initially… is the same problem that I seem to have with all open world games. I know what events will trigger the storyline moving forward and as a result I end up avoiding them like the plague. I spend my time roaming around and knocking out the minor events with the thought process that I will make a pass to wrap up the story elements later. It sorta feels bad when you cross paths with one of the NPCs that are waiting for you to finish the next phase of their story, while you are instead chasing whispers in the woods at night. The game tries to install a sense of urgency that doesn’t actually seem to exist other than in story beats. It feels like I have all the time in the world to roam freely which is a fairly good thing for my natural play style.
I originally was wanting to wait until the launch of the PlayStation 5 to play this game… and I admit there is part of me that wishes I had. I own a baseline PS4 and never upgraded to the pro, and while the game looks pretty… it could look so much better and I am absolutely certain it does on a Pro. Maybe this is a side effect of having played Death Stranding and Horizon Zero Dawn back to back which are both jawdroppingly gorgeous PC games that I played in 4k. So when I look at Ghosts of Tsushima, I mourn slightly at how much better this would have looked on the PC or on Next Gen hardware. I am too hooked now to pause the game and revisit later, but it does make the experience a little bittersweet. It makes no sense at all to get a Pro now when we are on the theoretical cusp of the PS5 release.
If you have a PS4, especially if you have a PS4 Pro… then I highly suggest checking out this game. So far it definitely seems like it might be my favorite game that was released this year. I am including HZD and Death Stranding PC in my games of the year list because they got PC releases this year, but I fully expect that Tsushima is going to take all the honors at the Game Awards. It truly is a masterpiece of cinematic gameplay.
The post Ghosts of Tsushima Impressions appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Innocuous Credit Sequence Screenshot from Horizon Zero Dawn
This morning I have a handful of topics to talk about, and none of them really feel like they are big enough to fill an entire post. As a result you are going to get a number of tidbits about each. Starting up with a screenshot from the credit roll sequence of Horizon Zero Dawn that is in no way a spoiler for the game as a whole. This is the second time I have gotten a credit roll for this game as I had originally played it on the PlayStation. Knowing how the game goes does not stop the fact that the ending was still an emotional sucker punch and I did not have dry eyes at several points during it.
The only advice I would give is that it personally felt better to pause the main story at some point and go knock out the DLC content, and that more or less paid off well. I love it when a game gives you a moment to visit with your friends that you met along the way one last time before the looming end battle. Playing through the DLC ahead of this moment meant that elements of the DLC were included which felt really good. I personally paused the main story shortly after getting to the main city of the game and getting the quest directive “Find <character name> at the Excavation Site” and that seemed to be a good place because it was a lull in what was happening.
Yeah Kamala I feel the same way
I feel like I am getting dangerously close to beating a dead horse at this point with this topic. I tweeted my feelings on Friday and spent a good chunk of Saturday’s podcast talking through it as well. Avengers was not a game that I had been following super closely, but I was hoping it would be enjoyable and had been looking forward to it. On Friday’s I have to take a half day furlough and as a result I had planned on spending my afternoon playing the game. I ultimately lasted about two hours before giving up and asking Steam for a refund. I verified this but in the entire history of using steam since September 22nd of 2004… I have asked for two refunds. The first was for Skater XL, because I was hoping for something like Tony Hawk Pro Skater and when I asked if there was a way to configure the game to behave like that the community was toxic as fuck to me. The second game is Avengers, because I feel like the problems I have with this game will not be fixable within the time frame of a September launch.
The sad thing about this is that I really was enjoying the story beats, but the core gameplay loop felt awful. If you have ever played a truly alpha game, there is a phase that sorta happens early on when all of the pieces that make up the combat system are in the game, but nothing has really been tuned to make it feel enjoyable. The characters are making attacks but they don’t really have a solid flow that they feed into. This is what Avengers felt like to me, as I fought with the overly aggressive camera and screen shake and combat that didn’t feel seem to feel like it was actually connected to what my character was doing. The similarly aggressive Quick Time Event system and the fact that sometimes they just wouldn’t fire when you needed one of them to… like swinging over a chasm… got tiring as well.
We are effectively two and a half weeks away from launch, and at this point… I have no faith that the game is going to change in a significant way. Unless they made the stupid decision of having players play through a year or more old demo… the game is effectively where it is going to be when the game launches. Ultimately it came down to the fact that nothing I was doing was really “fun” because I didn’t feel like I was engaged with the world around me. Maybe it feels particularly bad because I have been playing Horizon Zero Dawn and Ghosts of Tsushima… both games with phenomenally engaging combat systems. As it stands it is doing a lot of the things that DC Universe Online did in 2011 but instead gives you less freedom of movement and throws in a bunch of Quick Time Event infused cinematics for you to watch. However I believed the combat in DCUO, which I guess makes it the better game.
Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2 Warehouse Demo
Another demo that I got to play with this weekend is the Warehouse level from Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2. I don’t have a ton to talk about this because I have only played a few sessions, but I know enough now to feel like this is legitimately going to be a good game. I have been playing THPS2 on my RG350 emulator handheld, and I have to say that this essentially checks all of the boxes that the original game did. The only thing that takes a little getting used to is that the game as a whole is considerably faster than the original. The other thing that is a bit weird is that instead of standing up after a wipe, you sorta do this glitchy rewind thing which is stylized… but takes some getting used to. Those things aside… it was after a few minutes that my muscle memory started to come back. I do want to play around a bit with button mappings because as it stands a few of the buttons should be handled better with triggers.
Ghosts of Tsushima on baseline PS4
I spent the majority of Sunday playing Ghosts of Tsushima. I had been wanting to play through HZD before really getting into this game in earnest. I gotta say I am really enjoying myself and the only thing that would have made the experience better is… 1) if it were on a PC and 2) if I was playing with a keyboard and mouse. Essentially controller just isn’t my jam but I suffer through it on occasion for games that I feel are worthy of the frustration. I am still largely in the first area of the game, slowly working my way through the story missions and recruiting help. I am sure I will have more to say in the coming days. I know everyone has been talking about this already for months but it is all new to me.
The post The Good, the Bad and the Ghost appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring:Â Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Bel spent a few hours playing the Avengers Beta and has some things to say about it. There are what he feels to be fundamental problems with the game that are not likely fixable before the September 4th launch. Kodra gives some recommendations for a few Sudoku games that allow you to play some of those interesting edge case games. We pick up a conversation from last week and talked about Warhammer 40,000 9th Edition and more directly the update cycle for physical games and how it doesn’t exactly work. Warframe announced a major change at Virtual TennoCon and we talk about the Helminth and how it is going to shake up the meta. Finally Bel talks quickly about the Tony Hawk Pro Skater Warehouse Demo and how the game feels exceptionally good.
