allergyboyfun

Not a coincidence that they sponsored two of the slowest vehicles on the grid, lest anyone missed the ad!

@get2sammyb What doesn't sit well with me is that when I bought my PS5 and saw on the box it says 8k, 4k, 120fps, I remember thinking "it's probably 8k or 120fps; but perhaps 4k/60 fps most of the time"? But as it turns out, I'd have to spend 800 USD on another console 4 years later for what was originally advertised for PS5. I am not suggesting false advertisement, but I don't think I was the only person believing that PS5 promised 4k at 60 fps for most games this generation.

Even if this is a very late deal that Sony signed with Game Science, as some have implied here--we have to assume they were willing to shoulder huge legal risks when the game had already been announced to come to Xbox day one--what would they get out of it? Would this have had much impact on console sales? We all agree the biggest market for the game is Asia. Would keeping the game off Xbox have tipped the balance in favor of Playstation in Asia so significantly that it would be worth the money and the risk? None of this makes much sense to me.

@Fiendish-Beaver Wait. Did Sony not help with the development of Callisto Protocol? Did that also happen at the detriment of Microsoft? Was the game not released on Xbox platforms day one?

@Northern_munkey
Apologies if my original response caused any confusion. I meant to say that he is in about 95 chapters.

The game assumes the player has an intimate knowledge of the original novel. In many ways, it is designed to complement the novel in that it gives back stories and motivations to an entire cast of major and minor characters (some of whom only merited a sentence or two) in the original. Other localisation issues aside, this may be the biggest hurdle for it to achieve any reasonable level of success outside China. And the decision to design each chapter as if it were a standalone offshoot also doesn't help. To conclude each chapter with an animated short, however, was an inspired choice, I thought.

@B0udoir
I hate to break it to you, but the Journey to the West has 100 chapters, and Wukong is in all except a handful of chapters towards the first 1/5.

According to some reviewers:

For the version that some journalists and YouTubers played during the last hands-on experience, when they effectively played the entire first chapter, Game Science kept a punishing mechanism like Sekiro, whereby the player loses half the experience points at each death. They removed it from the final release.

@ShogunRok
For me the key feature of a soulslike is the punishing mechanism for deaths. The trepidation that comes with it, and the kind of resource management that it necessitates in a fight, and of course the thrill and relief of finally overcoming all of it. Gratification comes from how punishing the game is.

But Black Myth Wukong does NOT have that. Instead, the player's character grows effectively stronger after each failed boss fight, as he not only gets to keep all the resources but also collects more en route to the next fight.

Could this have been better optimized? Absolutely. But if you thought FF16 was playable at launch, then so is this, if not better.

For me, depending on the boss one fights the combat experience varies a good deal, from your typical Soulslike, to FF16, and God of War, if that makes any sense. As you don't get penalized for dying, you naturally level up en route to fight the same boss each time. I got stuck on an early boss and it took me half a dozen trips to beat him. During the process I gained two levels and was able to beat the next couple of bosses on my first go.

@Rambo-kind
Of all 6 chapters, Chapter 1 is closest to a boss-rush level, while the others are more expansive and offer more in terms of exploration. Pre-release reviews were only allowed to include footage and discussion of the first 2 chapters, and those who have had hands-on experiences (dating back to the last Gamescom) mostly played Chapter 1. All of this ended up giving the skewed impression that this game is all boss rush. Granted, there are are lot of bosses and mini-bosses still.

It says something when even the sarcasm is starting to tire.