Topic: What PS5 Games Are You Currently Playing?

@colonelkilgore Have you started GT7 yet?
Just bought it (along with psvr2) so if you fancy a race.
Delivery is estimated to be 29 May (this is from Amazon) so you have time to get some practice laps in.

@CaptD I haven’t yet mate, but thanks for the heads up… before we get to that though, when will be a good time to get that CoD:MW2 co-op done?

@colonelkilgore Anytime is fine with me except Sunday's. It would be good to get it done and deleted from my internal ssd because I wish to install GT7 on the internal ssd as I read somewhere that it can crash when installed on the external ssd. I don't know ho much truth there is to that and it depend on other factors (external ssd type etc..).

@CaptD it could take a few sessions tbh mate, some of the trophies are somewhat challenging. Maybe we’ll try and make a start one evening next week.

@CaptD @colonelkilgore We run a just for fun session of racing on a Sunday night with @render and a few others if you fancy joining, nothing serious, just a giggle and a few laps in some fast cars.

@nitram2k11 cheers mate, I’ll keep that in mind 👍

@nitram2k11 Cheers. I think it will take a while before I have a decent car otherwise all I will be hearing "who is the wally in the Renault 5?"
Can't wait to have a garage that would make Jay Leno green with envy.

@CaptD ahh, so you hit me up for a banger-race 😉

@colonelkilgore What else would you do with a Renault 5?

@CaptD well, that would be telling mate…

@colonelkilgore Does it involve a banana?

@JohnnyShoulder you wish… I remember how excited you got about having a tussle a few months back 🤣

@colonelkilgore So you weren't putting a banana up the exhaust pipe?

@JohnnyShoulder man, do I look like Eddie Murphy from the ‘80’s!?!?

@colonelkilgore No, more like Robert Duvall from the seventies.

I took a break from other gaming to satisfy my curiosity about Stellar Blade, and I came away from the demo with mixed feelings.

The positive:

• The setting is well done and since Nier Automata is one of my favorite games, the returning from space to an abandoned post-apocalyptic earth is something that I’ve always found interesting. Some of the dilapidated buildings also have a The Last of Us vibe, design-wise.
• The graphics are really nice. Special shout-out to the enemy design.
• The gameplay is fun. Eve is fun to play as, she moves so athletically and gracefully, very much like 2B, or Cal Kestis. The combat system is also really intricate and satisfying. We’re really getting to a point where the term “Souls-like” is becoming harder to define. I wouldn’t technically call this Souls-like, but it borrows a lot from the genre, if nothing else. The main thing it appears to lack is the loss of “souls” or XP currency upon death, but it has the ‘bonfire’ respawning checkpoints, intersecting paths with shortcuts, the timing based calculated gameplay, cheap hidden enemies around corners, the epic boss battles, and crushing difficulty. Speaking of…

The negative:

• The game is pretty difficult. I finally had to turn down the difficulty and even then I kept struggling. I just really don’t do well with parry mechanics and this relies heavily on that. I upgraded my dodge window but didn’t end up with enough skill points to upgrade the parry window, and presumably that helps. But still, I’m going to go down kicking and screaming against this trend now where every game has to rely on parrying. (Even after many hours of Spider-Man 2, I’ve still struggled with it there. I’ve had to adjust the difficulty sliders there too)
• The fan-service is quite strong. I’m okay with it being there (as it was in Nier), but it’s bordering on distracting, so I wish/hope there’s a way to tone it down a little. Part of my issue isn’t so much the latex, the jiggle, the high heels, the thicc design, the revealing outfits, or the Barbie dress-up nature to having customizable glasses, earrings, etc, but also how Eve’s character is the half-step between a realistic design and an anime design. The proportions of even her face are weird to me - exaggerated size of her eyes and small sharp triangular chin and dainty mouth, and the size of her head compared to her body… well it just looks borderline bizarre to me. The problem is Adam looks normal. He’s a handsome man who was also made to be attractive, but he looks like a real person, rather than an anime. I had a similar complaint about Jill’s anime face design in FF16 compare to Clive (and about every other character in the game) but of course it’s even more magnified here with Eve. I get it that Eastern developers are moving toward Western design elements and probably want to also keep some of their roots too, but in my opinion they ought to just go one direction or another.

It’s a lot to say based on a couple hours with a demo, but it has me both simultaneously excited for the game and also thinking that I’ll give it a pass. I’ll have to see how the final product reviews. Especially about the difficulty thing. I assume I could ‘get gud’ with enough time and practice but that’s not what I was hoping for this game.

@JohnnyShoulder exactly 🤣

@Th3solution as we’ve discussed previously, parrying does not come naturally to me neither… but I do find if I stick with something that requires it (like Sekiro it does click eventually. It’s whether the game appeals enough to get through that initial period of discomfort I guess.

@Th3solution I know you can make the open world Assassin's Creed games into parrying combat games as well if you choose to, and I'm not half bad at that in them, but that is discouraging to see that Stellar Blade is quite difficult. Granted Bayonetta can get difficult at times, I was hoping for something more along the lines of that than something closer to the Souls games.

I know you said it's not quite a Souls-like, but if the difficulty is along the same lines, I may end up cancelling my pre-order. I play games to have fun, not to want to throw my controller across the room. Or like I did once with my Series X, and that was slam the controller off of my bed and have it accidentally bounce all the way onto the floor. I may have to break down and try the demo, something I prefer not to do much anymore as I like to go into games blind (and the fact that the game appears on my profile twice then now).

@KilloWertz If it’s any consolation, there’s a message that pops up at the beginning of the demo which states that your progress and save file will transfer over to the full game when you boot it up. Not sure if that makes any difference or not for you.

Indeed the demo is just the beginning cinematic, the tutorial, a few cut scenes, then the starting area up to the first boss. Then after that, it unlocks a little trailer with some gameplay sections we haven’t seen before (for example there’s some gameplay scenes of gun combat too, so eventually Eve gets firearms too, which is cool) but it’s a quick series of teasers with minimal spoilage. Then there’s a boss challenge unlocked also which you can do and it has a lot of the upgrades unlocked so you can mess around with how it might feel to have access to those. But that’s where I got quite frustrated because the boss was really tough. I was able to beat the boss in the first area, but the boss challenge was too hard for me and after 3-4 deaths I gave up. I reckon there’s a degree of timing and muscle memory that will come along as you progress through the full game and so perhaps a mid-to-late game bosses won’t feel quite as hard when you get there… hopefully? In my defense I’ve recently played FF16 and SM2 which both have these combat ability wheels where you press a shoulder button and also a corresponding face button to trigger a special ability and this game does that too but it’s a different shoulder button and there’s was many times I was pressing R2 in the middle of combat when I was supposed to be pressing L1, so that would be reprogrammed in my brain eventually, given enough time.

The “story mode” difficulty did make it easier and I could make it through enemy encounters without depleting all my health items, but the bosses look tough. And the Souls style of “shall I use this save point to renew all my health and have to deal with everything respawning, or should I push forward with less health knowing I at least don’t have to beat those enemies again?” 🤔 The good thing about it is, unlike Souls bonfires, in this game the saving at a checkpoint and the sitting on the chair to renew health are two separate actions, so you can save there to respawn there upon death and not renew you health if you want, versus Souls games (and all Souls-likes that I recall atm) have the two actions connected, so you kind of have to respawn the enemies.

Another thing I noted was Stellar Blade does have other automatic checkpoints between save spots, because at one part when I died I respawned back to mid level checkpoint rather than all the way back at the save point, so that was nice.

Also, it’s possible there will be less backtracking in this game and it felt more linear, but it’s hard to say based on such a small sample size.

Like you I’m always annoyed at how the demo stays in your library so then you have two icons in there for one game, but I do think it’s probably worth your while to try it, since you may end up not clicking with the style of combat.