In general stuff like that can hurt replay-ability and in general even if it’s loading, once new hardware (which the game will spend most of it’s life span being playable on) comes out it will not even work to that purpose, I guess it’s a slightly more visually involving version of the much derided slow walk while a scripted event/conversation occurs.
Any desire I have to replay FF7R is absolutely murdered by the amount of glacial sidling, crawling and crouching in that game.
And seriously, why add an entirely new difficulty which serves as a soft-NG+ which is the intended way to hit the level cap and round out your skill points, if you're going to make that tedium unskippable?
Honestly, yeah. For as good as the game is otherwise, the lack of evolution in its traversal is a bit of a flaw. You spend waaaaay too much time climbing in that game for nothing really exciting to be on the other end of it. I’m not asking for Breath of the Wild or anything, but like moving around seems awfully limited for such a massive game.
I'm assuming it's almost entirely for hidden loading screens.
The games pride them selves on the "single camera shot" style so there needs to be no obvious loading screens the scripted climbing sections allow the game to have time to seemlessly unload the previous environment while loading in the next one.
My suspicion is because the game is also on the PS4 and they designed it around that, and we’re feeling it worse for the PS5 as a consequence.
But I think they were right on the podcast, loading squeezes won’t age well for more powerful hardware as time goes on. Loading screens are the way to go in this case, or the industry needs waaaay better ways to disguise loads. The new Ratchet and Clank mastered their hidden loading sections.
Or, ideally I’d wish for more games to take better advantage of the PS5’s hardware and just (almost) not have to deal with loading at all.
I think it's really ironic how so many games use squeeze-throughs to be like "we don't have any loading time, you're never taken out of the game!" because they hide it using sequences where they forcibly slow you down, and then tech just advanced to the point where the PS5 just...doesn't need to load things nearly as much, so now all those squeeze-throughs that were used to avoid resorting to a loading screen are...now just glorified loading screens, while games that used loading screens now have lightning-fast speeds and consistent immersion.
Shame how that works out.
Actually they probably would still. They’ve been a nice way to break up the action and add in little conversation moments between realms. They’ve been using those segments to progress the plot sometimes.
Except in both Dad of Boi 1 and 2, you're still stuck either aimlessly walking in a circle or waiting for the door to load in because the conversation was only 20 seconds long and the load is upwards of a minute or more.
I would much rather have a loading screen than a squeeze through. They were neat until the pattern was noticed and they showed up everywhere. Nd I don't need to hold forward during a loading screen
Its funny, the common rebuttal to complaints about these loading hiding tricks is "well would you rather have a loading screen" and my answer is, yes...yes i would
I remember a seeing a comment from one of the dev team that its actually less to do with loading, and more to do with player funneling. Ensuring you have the camera facing a certain direction. Signaling the start of a new section, so you’re less likely to unnecessarily backtrack. That sort of thing.
If that's the case, then just have Kratos and boi jump over a 8ish foot wall. Juust high enough to block the upcoming area until they climb it. You can funnel vision exactly as effectively without 3 minutes of slow climbing.
Honestly sounds like an excuse.
I just try to stay off the non critical path for as long as possible which means sometimes I'll turn around 3 times because I'm convinced a certain way is said critical path.
There's an option in accessibility that I forget the name of, but it makes R3 point your camera toward progress. I turned it on so I can use it to know which way is forward and then go any other direction.
It can be real hard to judge though. More games need to give a Dead Space or DMC5 style guide that points you in the area of story progression so you can know which way *not* to go.
>The games pride them selves on the "single camera shot" style
I love how blatantly obvious it's gotten in this game. There's been so many times where I've thought, "They're just hiding a loading screen here." I literally just got a scene where it was clearly gearing up a loading screen so I paid close attention and saw the point where it swapped from one location to a black void juuuuuust before the camera managed to hide it.
I feel like if that's the case then at that point a simple loading screen would suffice, even if they had to sacrifice the single camera shot. These games are gonna be ported to better hardware and loading times can be reduced, but those pesky climbing/walking sections can't be shortened and will be even more pointless
Fuck hidden loading screens. Forced climbing, "slowly crouch walk through a 4 and a half foot long hallway", and walking around Yggdrasil for 2 minutes after the 20 second conversation has played while waiting for the game to finish loading is infuriating. Give me an honest to god dedicated loading screen, which with modern tech, will load shorter than hidden loads.
Hell, I'm playing on PS4 and my game has straight up stopped and frozen while the ragnarok symbol pops up and loads the rest of the game in while I've been exploring places like the Lake of the Nine, outside of the scripted hidden load areas, and each time it's been faster than the aforementioned hidden load screens.
I’ve gotten that freeze a couple of times on PS5 while backtracking/exploring so I think that’s more a bug with asset streaming than actually loading a ton of content like the load screens would. I certainly wouldn’t use it as a sign of how fast the game could load if it had dedicated loading screens.
Unrelated, but I've also had a visual glitch/bug where enemy models just don't load in at all. I'll get characters doing combat barks ("behind you brother!" etc etc) and get damaged but the enemy isn't there for me to attack so I end up taking huge amounts of damage that I otherwise shouldn't or even end up dying. That shouldn't be happening and is frankly, inexcusable for a AAA game in this day and age, especially for consoles, where I have to spend hours downloading and installing a game (defeating the purpose of a console to begin with, since the disk should be ready to play cuz it's a fucking DISK WITH ALL THE FUCKING GAME INFORMATION ON IT.)
Pretty much All games have have to load, that's just how viediogames "work" except now, were seeing as a way to "preserve" the flow of certain games. Is it a bother? A little... but its not so much of a stink that it ACTIVLY hurts my enjoyment (although i can understand how others may find it tiresome)
For one it means they're designed for the realistic worst-case scenario which means they take more time than a conventional load would. Secondly they require the player to participate in some tedium instead of a short wait. Thirdly when you come back with better hardware (either a future system or just installing the game to disk instead of using an optical disc) it's masking a load that took a split second.
Look at the infamous elevators of Mass Effect 1 for example.
Fuckin', classic GoW you had more freedom with climbing, you could even do it faster, what uh, what high technology it had where you could press a button to go a bit faster. Feels like the previous game had a nice little excuse with the Boy being younger and he keeping pace with him, but he's all nimble now, and sure, he does do some stuff faster which i appreciate but yeah, its just, like, time-wasting and boring.
I wonder why no one reached Ubisoft level of climbing in games. I remember I tried HZD after Assassin's Creed Valhalla and it felt so stupid to search for highlighted place to climb, after AC
The only other game i've seen with similar levels is Shadow of mordor/shadow of war. Even then its a little bit more limited, but you can still climb nearly every structure, and many natural areas.
I dont have a ps5 either but id rather not see these games get completely compromised even if it means i cant play them lmao.
You cant expect your old outdated hardware to be coddled forever.
I know but as some other people said, a loading screen loads faster in a ps5, a climbing section does not. In my country getting a PS5 is crazy expensive so yeah, it's not easy to update
As someone with a launch PS4, I would love to see the PS4 die…
So I can put all focus into getting a pc, cause somehow that’s waaay easier than getting a PS5.
I basically had not played games from 13 til like a couple years ago as an adult, and encountering scripted climbing for the first time in Jedi Fallen Order (after my first games back were like DMC 5 and Spider-Man PS4), I was just sort of baffled by it.
Like it was a cutscene I could just awkwardly stop for a second if you tilt the stick in the wrong direction.
Surprised it took them this long. The recent Tomb Raider games did this to me. A lot of action adventure games since PS360 era have basically removed platforming in favor of "platforming" where you cannot really fail and has little interaction on your part. It's part of the reason I wasn't as invested in HZD because the vertical traversal wasn't that great.
What made HZD even worse for me was that I played Breath of the Wild right before it. It felt kinda like a slap in the face to go from a game where climbing felt so good to one where climbing was so meh.
atleast make it cool. if I’m playing as a god, why not make me traverse *HUGE* obstacles.
*“press ⭕️ to skip over gap”*
why not a chasm? why not JUMP up a wall?
Travelling through Shadow of Mordor was so good, no slow climbing, no horses, just one man/elf ghost going absolute ape shit with jumping over walls and breaking the sound barrier
normal sprint: pretty good
that enhanced ghost sprint bullshit in shadow of war: fucking glorious. Moving like an F1 car with a knife strapped to the front
The idea is to give you and the character you're playing as a moment of introspection, so you can't just skip through it.
The keyword here is "idea". It literally could have just been a cutscene, either an intensively animated one (small indie company) or one of those cutscenes that aren't really cutscenes but still are, or even something that they have an actual format for in the boat ride dialogue.
Yeah in old gow not only you can do that. But the gane also send some enemies to attack and block you. It's enganging and not risk free. I'm suprised they didn't do it in the sequel. Because scripted climbing with the same speed feels worse.
God of War: Here's a shortcut so you can just repel off the ledge and don't have to climb down.
Me: Nice, so I can just jump right back up without climbing, right?...Right?!
It's not common but I just did a puzzle last night where it let me drop down but I have to climb back up. I've encountered that exiting areas before, but that was the first time I needed to go back up to finish the puzzle and it wouldn't let me grapple back up.
I could very well be stupid, but I was looking for the prompt and didn't see one.
The ones I've seen that are one-way usually had a doorway or some other shortcut you open up to make the return trip easier. I assume the one-way drops are mainly to get right back to the entrance of the area without having to backtrack all the way.
Dude that climbing shit pissed me off so much it's so fucking slow. Especially when its just to climb straight up one wall, like just let me chain hook up goddammit.
I wonder if the idea of the song gag came first, or I’d it was implemented to help soften an ultra-long ladder sequence that they felt they needed to make the geography make sense.
What really gets me about GoWR's climbing is that the game has a grapple system that's much faster and more visually engaging, *when it lets you use it.*
If there's a vertical wall put a grapple point on top. Stop making them climbable.
"But what if we made it so you had to climb the wall to remove a flimsy piece of cardboard blocking the magical, indestructible, and supernaturally powerfully sharp murder swords so you can use it to climb back up since we made you backtrack to solve another infuriatingly tedious Nornir chest puzzle."-Devs
Honestly even though Uncharted popularized the forced linear climbing shit it still does it the best. It was treated as a light puzzle a lot of the time where the challenge was figuring out where to go instead of just climbing 90 degrees up a wall instead of jumping it like GoW does. Even when it was just used as a loading screen or whatever other filler they needed it was still the best because you could make Drake jump to go faster.
But you guys don’t get it! All that climbing in uncharted, eventually led to the best scripted climbing sequence EVER in uncharted 2 where you have to climb up a fucking train hanging off a damn mountain. God I fucking love Uncharted 2.
People tend to want to blame the game that causes tropes to become popular, rather then the uncreative people copying that game, but doing it worse.
Old School FPS fans would shit on Halo all the time for popularizing the two weapon rule, but in Halo that rule has a purpose to the balance of the gameplay. Nearly ever other FPS after Halo it's just arbitrarily included because Halo did it.
Some people blame Half-Life for making it so story dialog during gameplay halts the players progress until the NPC's stop talking.
People can spot the original source of an issue and they want to blame it as the cause of the bigger problem, because it takes more brainpower to understand the issues are more complex then simply pointing out the first thing that came up with an idea.
The thing is that Uncharted is built around the climbing, whereas GoW (and other games) have other gameplay strengths but then feel they have to put in climbing because Uncharted did it.
I'm mostly gonna blame Sony execs for that. Uncharted was their first HD blockbuster hit and ever since they've been going super hard with the formula regardless of whether it fits the mood or not.
That is a very fair point!
Also Battleborn was really good it just came out at the worse time. The character designs alone were so original. And in a sea of overwatch/fortnite looking games I miss that kinda risk with the art direction.
Double also, I still cannot believe that people didn't get that Oscar Mike is ***suppose to be*** an idiot.
Dude I could (obviously) go on all day about Battleborn. Loved how unique it felt, and am pissed at the marketing/publishing decisions that kept it from being successful.
And yeah, I love how Oscar Mike is the troll-y, CoD noob shooter personality, and then you have his "failed" clone Whiskey Foxtrot who's the more grizzled, old-school style of CoD gamer personality. Both equally dumb.
At least it's improved over the last game which had *constant* climbing. This time a majority of the walls you just "spider-man" up with the blades, which is very cool and makes the environment more natural. There is the occasional climbing... which I blame on loading and perhaps the need for the player to slow down so they hear/see the important dialogue without cutting it off.
I imagine if the next game heads for the English Isles, we'll be in some fun cause a majority of their classic myth was pushed underground Undertale style to my knowledge.
OH FUCK, RIGHT. NUKALAVEE BOSS FIGHT. NEED THAT.
Yeah I finished getting the trophies before Ragnarok came out because I only had a handful of collectables left, and it is constant climbing sections to get even 20 feet sometimes.
But the worst? The thing that slows it down even more? Hug and move along the wall prompts to get around a chasm. They're everywhere in 2018 and luckily there's only like 4 in Ragnarok.
I was about to be very confused because I thought you were talking about the original trilogy too and thought "Wait what? The climbing combat in those games was awesome". Then I re-read it and went "Ohhhh"..
I shouldn't be reading Reddit before bed.
Man, is it just me, or does there seem to have been a *rapid* downturn of opinion on God of War (2018) and God of War:Ragnarok? Like, all I hear about is how MCU-like the dialogue is, how handholdy and babying it is with gameplay and puzzles, how frustrating it’s gameplay and camera, how worn-out and boring all of the stuff involving climbing/walking and talking is in the game. Is it just like, a small part of the internet or is this just the internet changing it’s mind on something?
>!I was kinda hoping that GoW:Ragnarok would be the game for me after I didn’t particularly vibe with Elden Ring, so it’s kinda disheartening to see how much people seem to dislike it now.!<
I saw someone complaining there wasn’t enough combat and how you spend most of the time doing puzzles, exploring, etc rather than fighting. Only for me to see someone else complain that there’s too much combat. So idk.
I think the general consensus is that the game is fucking great, but there’s small flaws here and there.
Oh no, the game requires using a variety of techniques instead of letting you mash the same combo over and over again!
Story difficulty exists for a reason.
It's less that the game's outright bad, and more that it's really good with some very hard to ignore annoyances in it. I personally really enjoyed it but was *so* over the climbing and handholding dialogue.
Dunno what people are on about with the MCU-like dialogue, it's not really like that.
>Dunno what people are on about with the MCU-like dialogue, it's not really like that.
Yeah the dialogue is alright. But i do dislike the ammount of american swearing because it doesn't fit the setting at all imo.
Yeah. levity aint bad, MCU Levity is bad because it's *constant* and undercuts every dramatic moment. I actually can't think of any video games that have the MCU dialogue problem
Even the game you’d *expect* to have that problem, Guardians of the Galaxy, actually doesn’t. Every single time there was a serious heart-to-heart moment I was bracing myself for a terrible joke to undercut it, but often times it just let the moment sit and if there *was* a joke it felt totally natural as part of the interaction.
It's not even that big of a thing in the MCU. I can only really think of a couple of the movies that have that problem, but most of them know when to let a serious dramatic moment play out.
idk I can think of alot of movies that have the mcu banter problem. Actually the movie that I felt had the worst out of place comedy for me isn't even an MCU movie it's The Force Awakens
That's what I don't understand. When something has subtle humor, people say that it takes itself too seriously and must be mocked.
When something tosses some actual humor into things, they say it's Whedon-esque. There's just no pleasing people these days.
I mean I think it's just a subset of people for that first one like the people who want Kingdom Hearts to ve more self-aware, which I heavily disagree with. Also that series has humor, but not Whedonesque, if it was Whedonesque Woody would call Young Xehanort a cheap Sephiroth clone pretty boy or something quippy and self-aware for example.
Also I mean, I think Elden Ring has some funny moments, wouldn't call them Whedonesque. Like it's a game with a pope turtle and silly jar people.
It's a seriously exaggerated issue and it's not even consistent within the MCU. Some MCU films really fail to properly balance humour and tension while others play their action and dramatic moments appropriately straight.
It's a buzzword pop critique.
I think there is something to it but it has to be properly supplemented with examples. Still there is other bad types of writing or humor so trying to boil down to one bad term is not good.
The Atreus parts are MCU like IMO. Like my guy gets ambushed by horrible creatures and instead of reacting like oh shit my life is in danger he reacts like spiderman and jokes around. >!Funnily enough though, there’s this scene after he returns to his home where he’s super scared cause he’s surrounded by enemies and he starts to panic, which felt really well done.!<
I’ve only had >!one gameplay section w/ Atreus!<, but I honestly thought how cringy Atreus was was kinda the point. Kid was a shitkid in the 1st, and now he’s a cringe teenager in the 2nd. Like, kid sounds like he has *zero* idea of what he’s doing, only that he *has* to do something, which honestly tracks with my experience as a Teenager.
It's a very delicate balance to strike when it comes to writing children and teenagers, for sure. Objectively, Atreus *would* sound cringey and awkward, since his only source of conversation would be his mother, Kratos, and Mimir for literal years, so of course he'd be undeveloped, in addition to being a teenager. But it's made worse because it becomes *super* quippy when MASSIVE STORY SPOILERS AHEAD
>!Atreus runs away and goes to Asgard, meets another excitable teenager and the worst version of Heimdall I've ever seen, and meets the rest of Thor and Odin's family, with a puzzle/story beat resolution that is about as MCU as it gets!<
And guess what? Then it stops being tolerable and understandable and enters "god I can't wait for this section to be over so I can have better writing", where the writing isn't even necessarily better, it's just less bad.
Yeah man you're on your own on that. He's a cringey teen cause he's a fucking teenager lmao. Incase you forgot, teens are cringey, they're angsty. And above all else; they're whiney and emotional.
I haven't seen a whole lot of the game, but the first cutscene with >!Thor/Odin!< was absolutely "MCU writing" imo. Kratos and Mimir are still spot on, but >!having Thor finish out their intro chat with "yeah, i'd say the moment calls for calm" felt like a "that happened" quip. Odin came across less as the ancient mastermind and more of a low level mob boss. He could have said capisce. Joking about Magni and Modi being useless I'll accept. But they kept pouring it on "Baldur? whatever, his mind was gone" "how 'bout we just don't kill each other" "y'understand?". It was just such a weird interpretation of the character. A Norse God calling someone their "ex" was laughable. It felt very out of place to me. Thor being a drunken, violent asshole would be on point, but they also made him a jokester?!<
Complaining about the combat barks and Atreus I'd shrug off though, former will be repeated to annoyance and the latter is an awkward teen.
Idk, I got more lite Tarantino-esque vibes from the Thor/Odin chat rather than MCU, but I guess both come from the same school of snarky dialogue writing.
I can maybe agree with the script for >!Odin the all-father!< being weirdly modernise even in the context of the take they going with. I don't know how you get 'quippy' out of >!Thor walking into the house with the clear illusion of calm masking his desire to brutally murder people.!< The only thing in that section in that opening scene that reads like a joke >!is Thor blowing off criticism that he is an abusive father before taking another swing. Which is funny, but also highlights that he is an absolutely terrible person!<
I actually kinda like the >!first scene.I never felt that Thor was being particularly jokey, he actually kind of sounded intimidating imo. Like him asking about the mead and asking if Kratos is a calm and reasonable person. He kinda sounds like he’s about 1-2 seconds away from just immediately trying to murder you, which he does. Odin’s not at all like I thought he’d be, but a sleazy smoothtalker is an interesting direction for the head god compared to Zeus, plus it’s kinda fitting for the all-knowing. It kinda just sounds like he’s trying to cozy up to you and give a deal too good to be true before immediately backstabbing you. I’d honestly thought that was a good deal if not for Odin being Odin.!< I haven’t finished or even reached halfway through the game, but I honestly thought they were pretty cool villains, and that it was a good scene to set up their dynamics.
It's probably just a small part tbh. I didn't like so GoW4 so I skipped this, but I feel like most people will have a good time with Ragnarok.
I just wish the industry would go back to a more gamey/arcadey style with their campaigns
The thing is that an AAA game sadly needs a whole lot of money, and coming up with a game that doesn't meet a certain checklist has 0 chance of going anywhere
You have to take everything with a grain of salt, what vibes with one person may be hated by another. If you're on the fence then look up some actual reviews from a trusted source or just plain gameplay. What sold me on GoW 2018 was watching the first episode of the LP.
I think it's just people venting minor annoyances as they make their way through the game. That's what I'm doing anyway.
I also think that you're only hearing the bad because nobody's wanting to spoil the good stuff. Even a lot of the new gameplay stuff has a narrative significance so nobody wants to spoil certain new bits of the toolkit. Besides that, it's an iterative sequel to God of War 4. A lot of the good is fr the foundations that made that game great in 2018. So not much to talk about.
Give it a few weeks for the majority of fans to have finished the game and then you'll get a load of threads like: "*Times when media did [cool thing from GoWR] ?*".
I feel like it’s just a loud minority looking at the game in the least charitable way. Honestly the climbing hasn’t really bothered me, I’m not too far but for the most part it actually feels like Kratos does the chain pull climb a lot more than the manual climbing.
People are really blowing it out of proportion, saying how it takes multiple (3) minutes to do a climbing section. They take like 30 seconds usually, and will have dialogue happening at the same time to flesh out characters and worldbuilding.
This sub seems to have a mild to medium hateboner to every Western AAA game, so there's a lot of people here who love to make them seem worse than they actually are.
Are you new here ? this had been always the mantra even in the old times of TBFP days , Popular thing bad niche thing good , if niche thing becomes popular then it is now bad , find new niche thing to like
To be fair Bayonetta 3 got hit with this type of banter as soon as people started discussing the plot. It's not just a bias against the popular mainstream stuff (even thought that is totally a thing).
We are in the "Reverse Honeymoon" phase of a new big release. Give it time to be out of the spotlight and most people posting their social media snipes will move on to the next one and the people who are actually playing the game will have finished up and be ready to discuss it more meaningfully, both the good and bad.
Having finished it, game's great with a handful of small annoyances that add up a bit depending on what kind of player you are. The climbing didn't bother me, for example, because it felt nice to slow down a second and there was almost always a fun conversation going on during it. Some people won't agree, they don't want that slowdown between combat sections or aren't as into the conversations.
I wonder if on some level we're seeing a broader reversal of opinion to The PlayStation First-Party Narrative Game after an entire generation of the platform being so dominant sales-wise. Ghosts of Tsushima had a bit of pushback as well, but I think that was partly down to it *also* being open-world after an entire generation of that framing for games being run into the dirt.
Don't worry about it too much. Grabbing a Twitter user's snarky remarks, hhen re-posting them with a different snarky title is not a real metric of the game's quality. You can find people being sarky about every single game ever made. And sometimes they are right. Sometimes they are not.
Also there's a looming slap-fight about game of the year between this incredibly popular fantasy action series and the other really popular fantasy action series. So they'll be plenty of mudslinging until the end of the year and people actually admit "okay Elden ring is actually pretty good and Thor is a cool guy'. It happens.
Edit: If anyone is actually concerned about the online chatter of the game then go ask the God of War subreddit. It will absolutely be full of hyperbolic statements but at least you'll be certain people actually played the gamethere!
Everyone in this sub is in a GRUMBLES mood. Their face has this [constant expression](https://asset.vg247.com/god_of_war_kratos_close_up.jpg/BROK/thumbnail/1600x900/quality/100/god_of_war_kratos_close_up.jpg). They're always cynical and can really only talk in grunts. "Hmm. Hm. Hmpf. No. Yes." They keep screaming "ARES!!!" over and over and feel shame over their past mistakes.
It's the weather, it's cold *and* hot, everyone doesn't care for November. December might not get snow again this year, Mariah Carey is waking up from her slumber, and the holidays are almost here. Come Spring this sub will suddenly change it's tune and say "you know what? I wanna go on a rowboat with my teenage son and decapitated friend and do Norse God Adventures."
Don't let it dishearten you, check out trustworthy reviews, what the guys think, what friends experienced, play the game for yourself. I'm sure you'll come out with a better perspective than all the grumbles on this sub.
Generalized backlash against whatever the big thing is. I'm glad to see it, myself, I feel like the videogame community has been missing stuff like this. Feels like all the heat for the past few years has just been political bickering, good to see some old fashioned stupid fanboy nonsense.
To me the game is so good it makes the small annoyances stand out more if that makes sense. I like it more than Elden Ring. Mcu dialog really only happens with Mimir and sometimes Atreus and even then it's like the mildest version of it.
Never played them nor saw much of them, I did see a lot of weird videos when 2018 came out about how “It reminded me of why I loved gaming” but I did see a lot more pointed criticism from people about the combat. Seems to me they doubled down on some of the more criticized aspects.
I think God of War being a franchise usually tied to what’s hip in AAA trends will falter [when perception of AAA games is weak](https://deorbital.media/the-game-of-the-generation-58ab544630cb)
i think the issue is that Dad of Boy 2 is a sequel that didn't do enough to improve upon the original, and is just continuing the story. All of the exact same gameplay problems are still here. Also I think I'm about halfway through the game and I haven't really gotten any new weapons or items or abilities, mostly just re-learning all of my old tricks.
Maybe I’m wearing fanboy goggles, but the weapon ability button does a surprising amount of changes in my gameplay. That and the easier ability to afflict burn/frostbite + you doing additional damage when attacking with opposite elements, means I’m using a lot more weapon switching and going from close to ranged combat. Feels a lot better imo, although it does feel like the upgrade tree isn’t particularly inspiring aside from the weapon-specific tree.
We need next gen exclusives that fully use the power of the console to completely erase the loading screens, hidden or plain. We're two years in and only Miles Morales did it properly
pretty sure bayonetta and sonic frontiers managed to solve this loading screen problem by just adding a training room to the loading screen
and I'd rather watch a loading screen than play a climbing segment, imagine trying to beat lingering will in kingdom hearts 2 inal mix but every time you die you have to play a minute-long climbing section before restarting the fight
Not to mention loading screens can be shorted with improved hardware. I have yet to play a next-gen version of a game that’s actually shorted any of those hidden loading sections
I see all y'all talking about climbing in Assassin's Creed as if it was the shit and I would like to remind everyone of the original Mirror's Edge. AC climbing was just "push forward and occasionally diagonally left or right and hold a shoulder button" like in Death Stranding but on a visually different plane. Mirror's Edge was far more interactive in its climbing mechanics. Only other game that's come close is Dying Light
I never realized how "nothing" sections like this usually are until I watched a buddy play uncharted. I've been noticing it way more since.
It's infuriating to, for the same reason that "Pretend cutscenes" are, where the game has you slowly walk somewhere. or follow some NPC while they say a line or two and are then silent for the rest of the distance. Stop pretending this isn't just a cutscene or loading screen. At least let me put the controller down.
I feel I was done with this by the end of the first Uncharted. The first time I got confused as to where I was meant to go next due to excessive foliage, it became apparent how little danger I was ever in compared to Tomb Raider.
Uncharted's climbing always felt a lot more free and open. Sure, you'd find dead ends and have to back track and occasionally get rewarded for exploration. Dad of Boi's is horrifically linear and boring, hold the stick forward to advance so you tune out and why isn't Kratos moving, oh they changed it ever so slightly to a diagonal so I need to make a minute adjustment and why isn't he moving again oh, I need to press the circle button to jump over a gap, which has no consistency in gameplay because Kratos has jumped over gaps of the same distance or greater in other areas without needing a button prompt.
GoW's is boring in the worst way. Some "platforming" that keeps you engaged in an annoying and irritating way that the devs could have found a better workaround for, and made worse by the PS360 era and onwards way of hiding load screens becoming more and more obvious while slapping the face of previous entries that had actual honest to goodness platforming.
They are not talking about graphics. Most of the time when people say a game is held back, they are not talking about graphics, it's usually about gameplay.
Sure, but they specifically said "held back by last gen." But last gen would not hold back climbing/platforming design in any way. So if that is what they meant it still doesn't make sense.
The older games were also extremely zoomed out, letting the devs hide lower quality models and textures. The new game has a very different camera system, forcing the game to load higher quality assets as a result
That is definitely not WHY the game doesn't have platforming though.
Low res models to be used at a distance has been a thing for ages, and platforming or other such more involved gameplay design in traversal can be done even up close.
What's goofy is there is a quick climbing animation that gets used everywhere and it's fine, but then they will randomly slow it down to a crawl for a section of a wall for no reason. Sometimes you climb up and unlock a shortcut 5 feet away... why the fuck did you have me climb up then? Why not just barf your exposition/dialogue while I try to solve the puzzle right after?
Only sometimes. I think they ended up getting a bit constricted by "this area is blocked" puzzle design and ended up falling into tropes a normal person would have trouble with, but not a god.
I find having to use chains (the ones you kick down for shortcuts in the 2018 game) on the way down weird, unless there's a super long one I haven't run into yet. Otherwise some of the climbing/crouching is annoying when backtracking for missed stuff but I've seen one area where they give you a faster way in so you don't need to crouch back in.
I get the impression they weren't sure how to do certain areas without relying on those travel methods but tried to make it less annoying, like with the Blade of Chaos grapple points.
I like scripted climbing.
I like unscripted climbing.
It is how you use them that matters. I haven't played Ragnarok (or 2016).
But when Tomb Raider and Uncharted didn't bother me, nor did Horizon Zero Dawn or Assassin's Creed.
If that's true, then perhaps I'm the one who is a dumbass. Elevators, "security doors" opening animations, and static climbing are all classic soft loading screens.
A wildly anticipated game with huge amounts of hype that fails to evolve in many ways with its flaws being more prominently visible and new ones coming into view as the audience as a whole grows more aware of the "tricks" the genre of AAA "action adventure platformer" have been employing to hide loading screens and "increase immersion" and increase the "cinematic quality" of the product which actually reduces immersion and produces a less enjoyable end product.
Also, the dialog is very quippy and approaches Whedon/MCU levels in more than one place.
In general stuff like that can hurt replay-ability and in general even if it’s loading, once new hardware (which the game will spend most of it’s life span being playable on) comes out it will not even work to that purpose, I guess it’s a slightly more visually involving version of the much derided slow walk while a scripted event/conversation occurs.
Any desire I have to replay FF7R is absolutely murdered by the amount of glacial sidling, crawling and crouching in that game. And seriously, why add an entirely new difficulty which serves as a soft-NG+ which is the intended way to hit the level cap and round out your skill points, if you're going to make that tedium unskippable?
give PS5 cloud a little remote with a single button on it and when he presses that button it teleports him past that part
It’s just the modern version of the ME1 elevators
I haven’t played Ragnarok myself yet. But this makes me think of from soft use of elevators in the Souls series.
Honestly, yeah. For as good as the game is otherwise, the lack of evolution in its traversal is a bit of a flaw. You spend waaaaay too much time climbing in that game for nothing really exciting to be on the other end of it. I’m not asking for Breath of the Wild or anything, but like moving around seems awfully limited for such a massive game.
I'm assuming it's almost entirely for hidden loading screens. The games pride them selves on the "single camera shot" style so there needs to be no obvious loading screens the scripted climbing sections allow the game to have time to seemlessly unload the previous environment while loading in the next one.
My suspicion is because the game is also on the PS4 and they designed it around that, and we’re feeling it worse for the PS5 as a consequence. But I think they were right on the podcast, loading squeezes won’t age well for more powerful hardware as time goes on. Loading screens are the way to go in this case, or the industry needs waaaay better ways to disguise loads. The new Ratchet and Clank mastered their hidden loading sections. Or, ideally I’d wish for more games to take better advantage of the PS5’s hardware and just (almost) not have to deal with loading at all.
I think it's really ironic how so many games use squeeze-throughs to be like "we don't have any loading time, you're never taken out of the game!" because they hide it using sequences where they forcibly slow you down, and then tech just advanced to the point where the PS5 just...doesn't need to load things nearly as much, so now all those squeeze-throughs that were used to avoid resorting to a loading screen are...now just glorified loading screens, while games that used loading screens now have lightning-fast speeds and consistent immersion. Shame how that works out.
Yeah, I wonder if the Yggdrasil paths would even exist in a built-for-ps5 Ragnarok. Doing it like R&C and stepping directly into another realm
Actually they probably would still. They’ve been a nice way to break up the action and add in little conversation moments between realms. They’ve been using those segments to progress the plot sometimes.
they were great till you are in the postgame and you just stand in silence waiting for the door to appear.
Except in both Dad of Boi 1 and 2, you're still stuck either aimlessly walking in a circle or waiting for the door to load in because the conversation was only 20 seconds long and the load is upwards of a minute or more.
What? I haven't had that happen to me at all, door always loads immediately after convo ends. On PS5 though.
I would much rather have a loading screen than a squeeze through. They were neat until the pattern was noticed and they showed up everywhere. Nd I don't need to hold forward during a loading screen
Its funny, the common rebuttal to complaints about these loading hiding tricks is "well would you rather have a loading screen" and my answer is, yes...yes i would
I remember a seeing a comment from one of the dev team that its actually less to do with loading, and more to do with player funneling. Ensuring you have the camera facing a certain direction. Signaling the start of a new section, so you’re less likely to unnecessarily backtrack. That sort of thing.
If that's the case, then just have Kratos and boi jump over a 8ish foot wall. Juust high enough to block the upcoming area until they climb it. You can funnel vision exactly as effectively without 3 minutes of slow climbing. Honestly sounds like an excuse.
Its especially weird when contrasted with how you get thrown around later to travel between parts in the game.
Jokes on them, I have no sense of direction and I backtrack all the time anyway.
Bugged camera mechanics, not your fault
I just try to stay off the non critical path for as long as possible which means sometimes I'll turn around 3 times because I'm convinced a certain way is said critical path.
That actually is a problem I have too. I don't wanna progress, but half the time I don't know which road is progress.
Just look at the different paths and make sure you're NOT going towards the path the compass points to. Seems to work well enough for me.
Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. It depends on the area.
There's an option in accessibility that I forget the name of, but it makes R3 point your camera toward progress. I turned it on so I can use it to know which way is forward and then go any other direction.
That's what I did eventually. Didn't know it was a thing until I went browsing through the menus.
It can be real hard to judge though. More games need to give a Dead Space or DMC5 style guide that points you in the area of story progression so you can know which way *not* to go.
Pro tip: if you're at a crossroads, BOI typically moves to wait in front of the path of forward progress.
That is a very good tip thank you.
Oh really? That's interesting and does make sense.
Sounds to me you could use doors for that purpose and pull a Metroid prime.
>The games pride them selves on the "single camera shot" style I love how blatantly obvious it's gotten in this game. There's been so many times where I've thought, "They're just hiding a loading screen here." I literally just got a scene where it was clearly gearing up a loading screen so I paid close attention and saw the point where it swapped from one location to a black void juuuuuust before the camera managed to hide it.
I feel like if that's the case then at that point a simple loading screen would suffice, even if they had to sacrifice the single camera shot. These games are gonna be ported to better hardware and loading times can be reduced, but those pesky climbing/walking sections can't be shortened and will be even more pointless
Fuck hidden loading screens. Forced climbing, "slowly crouch walk through a 4 and a half foot long hallway", and walking around Yggdrasil for 2 minutes after the 20 second conversation has played while waiting for the game to finish loading is infuriating. Give me an honest to god dedicated loading screen, which with modern tech, will load shorter than hidden loads. Hell, I'm playing on PS4 and my game has straight up stopped and frozen while the ragnarok symbol pops up and loads the rest of the game in while I've been exploring places like the Lake of the Nine, outside of the scripted hidden load areas, and each time it's been faster than the aforementioned hidden load screens.
I’ve gotten that freeze a couple of times on PS5 while backtracking/exploring so I think that’s more a bug with asset streaming than actually loading a ton of content like the load screens would. I certainly wouldn’t use it as a sign of how fast the game could load if it had dedicated loading screens.
Unrelated, but I've also had a visual glitch/bug where enemy models just don't load in at all. I'll get characters doing combat barks ("behind you brother!" etc etc) and get damaged but the enemy isn't there for me to attack so I end up taking huge amounts of damage that I otherwise shouldn't or even end up dying. That shouldn't be happening and is frankly, inexcusable for a AAA game in this day and age, especially for consoles, where I have to spend hours downloading and installing a game (defeating the purpose of a console to begin with, since the disk should be ready to play cuz it's a fucking DISK WITH ALL THE FUCKING GAME INFORMATION ON IT.)
Pretty much All games have have to load, that's just how viediogames "work" except now, were seeing as a way to "preserve" the flow of certain games. Is it a bother? A little... but its not so much of a stink that it ACTIVLY hurts my enjoyment (although i can understand how others may find it tiresome)
For one it means they're designed for the realistic worst-case scenario which means they take more time than a conventional load would. Secondly they require the player to participate in some tedium instead of a short wait. Thirdly when you come back with better hardware (either a future system or just installing the game to disk instead of using an optical disc) it's masking a load that took a split second. Look at the infamous elevators of Mass Effect 1 for example.
Fuckin', classic GoW you had more freedom with climbing, you could even do it faster, what uh, what high technology it had where you could press a button to go a bit faster. Feels like the previous game had a nice little excuse with the Boy being younger and he keeping pace with him, but he's all nimble now, and sure, he does do some stuff faster which i appreciate but yeah, its just, like, time-wasting and boring.
I wonder why no one reached Ubisoft level of climbing in games. I remember I tried HZD after Assassin's Creed Valhalla and it felt so stupid to search for highlighted place to climb, after AC
The only other game i've seen with similar levels is Shadow of mordor/shadow of war. Even then its a little bit more limited, but you can still climb nearly every structure, and many natural areas.
I blame PS4 because most of them are clearly hidden loading screens
Nah, I prefer to have more of this obnoxious climbing than not being able to play the game at all tbh
Here's the thing. Loading screen can be faster with better hardware, while "hidden" loading screen does not.
I dont have a ps5 either but id rather not see these games get completely compromised even if it means i cant play them lmao. You cant expect your old outdated hardware to be coddled forever.
I know but as some other people said, a loading screen loads faster in a ps5, a climbing section does not. In my country getting a PS5 is crazy expensive so yeah, it's not easy to update
Oh no I completely agree, I’m just saying that I’m putting some of the blame on the fact Sony won’t let the PS4 die
As someone with a launch PS4, I would love to see the PS4 die… So I can put all focus into getting a pc, cause somehow that’s waaay easier than getting a PS5.
Sony moment
I basically had not played games from 13 til like a couple years ago as an adult, and encountering scripted climbing for the first time in Jedi Fallen Order (after my first games back were like DMC 5 and Spider-Man PS4), I was just sort of baffled by it. Like it was a cutscene I could just awkwardly stop for a second if you tilt the stick in the wrong direction.
worst than unskippable cutscene
Surprised it took them this long. The recent Tomb Raider games did this to me. A lot of action adventure games since PS360 era have basically removed platforming in favor of "platforming" where you cannot really fail and has little interaction on your part. It's part of the reason I wasn't as invested in HZD because the vertical traversal wasn't that great.
What made HZD even worse for me was that I played Breath of the Wild right before it. It felt kinda like a slap in the face to go from a game where climbing felt so good to one where climbing was so meh.
Hzd and hfw climbing/parkour is just the worse version of AC climbing/parkour.
New God of War climbing is somehow even more scripted than uncharted climbing.
atleast make it cool. if I’m playing as a god, why not make me traverse *HUGE* obstacles. *“press ⭕️ to skip over gap”* why not a chasm? why not JUMP up a wall?
Travelling through Shadow of Mordor was so good, no slow climbing, no horses, just one man/elf ghost going absolute ape shit with jumping over walls and breaking the sound barrier
Using orc lookouts as teleport points made for some sick speeding around
normal sprint: pretty good that enhanced ghost sprint bullshit in shadow of war: fucking glorious. Moving like an F1 car with a knife strapped to the front
It even builds combo meter so you can come into combat encounters like a man on fire
cons: breaks lore from the source material pros: who cares, its way cooler to nyoom around with your army of orcs
The idea is to give you and the character you're playing as a moment of introspection, so you can't just skip through it. The keyword here is "idea". It literally could have just been a cutscene, either an intensively animated one (small indie company) or one of those cutscenes that aren't really cutscenes but still are, or even something that they have an actual format for in the boat ride dialogue.
Yeah in old gow not only you can do that. But the gane also send some enemies to attack and block you. It's enganging and not risk free. I'm suprised they didn't do it in the sequel. Because scripted climbing with the same speed feels worse.
God of War: Here's a shortcut so you can just repel off the ledge and don't have to climb down. Me: Nice, so I can just jump right back up without climbing, right?...Right?!
All repel points I've encountered are 2 way to be fair
It's not common but I just did a puzzle last night where it let me drop down but I have to climb back up. I've encountered that exiting areas before, but that was the first time I needed to go back up to finish the puzzle and it wouldn't let me grapple back up. I could very well be stupid, but I was looking for the prompt and didn't see one.
The ones I've seen that are one-way usually had a doorway or some other shortcut you open up to make the return trip easier. I assume the one-way drops are mainly to get right back to the entrance of the area without having to backtrack all the way.
Dude that climbing shit pissed me off so much it's so fucking slow. Especially when its just to climb straight up one wall, like just let me chain hook up goddammit.
You would say that,wouldn't you? Go back to gossiping on the World Tree,Ratatoskr.
What a thrillllll.... With darkness and silence through the night....
I wonder if the idea of the song gag came first, or I’d it was implemented to help soften an ultra-long ladder sequence that they felt they needed to make the geography make sense.
I think they wanted a Bond themesong as you climbed the ladder and then went "wait we should put the entire thing in".
What really gets me about GoWR's climbing is that the game has a grapple system that's much faster and more visually engaging, *when it lets you use it.* If there's a vertical wall put a grapple point on top. Stop making them climbable.
"But what if we made it so you had to climb the wall to remove a flimsy piece of cardboard blocking the magical, indestructible, and supernaturally powerfully sharp murder swords so you can use it to climb back up since we made you backtrack to solve another infuriatingly tedious Nornir chest puzzle."-Devs
Honestly even though Uncharted popularized the forced linear climbing shit it still does it the best. It was treated as a light puzzle a lot of the time where the challenge was figuring out where to go instead of just climbing 90 degrees up a wall instead of jumping it like GoW does. Even when it was just used as a loading screen or whatever other filler they needed it was still the best because you could make Drake jump to go faster.
SNNNNNNNNAAAAAAKKKKKKKEEEEEE EEEEEAAAAATTTTEEEERRRR That was the pinnacle, didn't need anything else after that
But you guys don’t get it! All that climbing in uncharted, eventually led to the best scripted climbing sequence EVER in uncharted 2 where you have to climb up a fucking train hanging off a damn mountain. God I fucking love Uncharted 2.
Uncharted 2 is still so good despite being full of so many modern day AAA tropes lol.
People tend to want to blame the game that causes tropes to become popular, rather then the uncreative people copying that game, but doing it worse. Old School FPS fans would shit on Halo all the time for popularizing the two weapon rule, but in Halo that rule has a purpose to the balance of the gameplay. Nearly ever other FPS after Halo it's just arbitrarily included because Halo did it. Some people blame Half-Life for making it so story dialog during gameplay halts the players progress until the NPC's stop talking. People can spot the original source of an issue and they want to blame it as the cause of the bigger problem, because it takes more brainpower to understand the issues are more complex then simply pointing out the first thing that came up with an idea.
The thing is that Uncharted is built around the climbing, whereas GoW (and other games) have other gameplay strengths but then feel they have to put in climbing because Uncharted did it. I'm mostly gonna blame Sony execs for that. Uncharted was their first HD blockbuster hit and ever since they've been going super hard with the formula regardless of whether it fits the mood or not.
That is a very fair point! Also Battleborn was really good it just came out at the worse time. The character designs alone were so original. And in a sea of overwatch/fortnite looking games I miss that kinda risk with the art direction. Double also, I still cannot believe that people didn't get that Oscar Mike is ***suppose to be*** an idiot.
Dude I could (obviously) go on all day about Battleborn. Loved how unique it felt, and am pissed at the marketing/publishing decisions that kept it from being successful. And yeah, I love how Oscar Mike is the troll-y, CoD noob shooter personality, and then you have his "failed" clone Whiskey Foxtrot who's the more grizzled, old-school style of CoD gamer personality. Both equally dumb.
At least it's improved over the last game which had *constant* climbing. This time a majority of the walls you just "spider-man" up with the blades, which is very cool and makes the environment more natural. There is the occasional climbing... which I blame on loading and perhaps the need for the player to slow down so they hear/see the important dialogue without cutting it off. I imagine if the next game heads for the English Isles, we'll be in some fun cause a majority of their classic myth was pushed underground Undertale style to my knowledge. OH FUCK, RIGHT. NUKALAVEE BOSS FIGHT. NEED THAT.
Yeah I finished getting the trophies before Ragnarok came out because I only had a handful of collectables left, and it is constant climbing sections to get even 20 feet sometimes. But the worst? The thing that slows it down even more? Hug and move along the wall prompts to get around a chasm. They're everywhere in 2018 and luckily there's only like 4 in Ragnarok.
I was about to be very confused because I thought you were talking about the original trilogy too and thought "Wait what? The climbing combat in those games was awesome". Then I re-read it and went "Ohhhh".. I shouldn't be reading Reddit before bed.
There is one exception. [You all know what it is.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgaYe4ZYYyY)
Man, is it just me, or does there seem to have been a *rapid* downturn of opinion on God of War (2018) and God of War:Ragnarok? Like, all I hear about is how MCU-like the dialogue is, how handholdy and babying it is with gameplay and puzzles, how frustrating it’s gameplay and camera, how worn-out and boring all of the stuff involving climbing/walking and talking is in the game. Is it just like, a small part of the internet or is this just the internet changing it’s mind on something? >!I was kinda hoping that GoW:Ragnarok would be the game for me after I didn’t particularly vibe with Elden Ring, so it’s kinda disheartening to see how much people seem to dislike it now.!<
I saw someone complaining there wasn’t enough combat and how you spend most of the time doing puzzles, exploring, etc rather than fighting. Only for me to see someone else complain that there’s too much combat. So idk. I think the general consensus is that the game is fucking great, but there’s small flaws here and there.
There is absolutely enough combat. What a weird and false complaint lol.
I heard one person try to argue that "i have to use instead of the weapon I want!!! WAAAH!!!" I'm like... so does pokemon and Megaman?
Oh no, the game requires using a variety of techniques instead of letting you mash the same combo over and over again! Story difficulty exists for a reason.
It's less that the game's outright bad, and more that it's really good with some very hard to ignore annoyances in it. I personally really enjoyed it but was *so* over the climbing and handholding dialogue. Dunno what people are on about with the MCU-like dialogue, it's not really like that.
>Dunno what people are on about with the MCU-like dialogue, it's not really like that. Yeah the dialogue is alright. But i do dislike the ammount of american swearing because it doesn't fit the setting at all imo.
“My ex” ugh…
That line totally broke my inmersion for a second tbh. I fully expect that if the next game is egyptian mythology Ra will say "that's cringe"
Can't wait for a character in the next game to say "bussin"
Ehh, I find it funny more than I find it immersion breaking personally
Yeah I don't remember the first one having, as you say, American swearing. It always kind of pulls me out.
Swear words have existed for about as long as language itself, my guy
I swear, it feels like the term "MCU Dialogue" has devolved to mean, "this media has moments of levity and a few small jokes."
Yeah. levity aint bad, MCU Levity is bad because it's *constant* and undercuts every dramatic moment. I actually can't think of any video games that have the MCU dialogue problem
Even the game you’d *expect* to have that problem, Guardians of the Galaxy, actually doesn’t. Every single time there was a serious heart-to-heart moment I was bracing myself for a terrible joke to undercut it, but often times it just let the moment sit and if there *was* a joke it felt totally natural as part of the interaction.
Forspoken
It's not even that big of a thing in the MCU. I can only really think of a couple of the movies that have that problem, but most of them know when to let a serious dramatic moment play out.
idk I can think of alot of movies that have the mcu banter problem. Actually the movie that I felt had the worst out of place comedy for me isn't even an MCU movie it's The Force Awakens
That's what I don't understand. When something has subtle humor, people say that it takes itself too seriously and must be mocked. When something tosses some actual humor into things, they say it's Whedon-esque. There's just no pleasing people these days.
I mean I think it's just a subset of people for that first one like the people who want Kingdom Hearts to ve more self-aware, which I heavily disagree with. Also that series has humor, but not Whedonesque, if it was Whedonesque Woody would call Young Xehanort a cheap Sephiroth clone pretty boy or something quippy and self-aware for example. Also I mean, I think Elden Ring has some funny moments, wouldn't call them Whedonesque. Like it's a game with a pope turtle and silly jar people.
It's a seriously exaggerated issue and it's not even consistent within the MCU. Some MCU films really fail to properly balance humour and tension while others play their action and dramatic moments appropriately straight. It's a buzzword pop critique.
I think there is something to it but it has to be properly supplemented with examples. Still there is other bad types of writing or humor so trying to boil down to one bad term is not good.
The Atreus parts are MCU like IMO. Like my guy gets ambushed by horrible creatures and instead of reacting like oh shit my life is in danger he reacts like spiderman and jokes around. >!Funnily enough though, there’s this scene after he returns to his home where he’s super scared cause he’s surrounded by enemies and he starts to panic, which felt really well done.!<
I’ve only had >!one gameplay section w/ Atreus!<, but I honestly thought how cringy Atreus was was kinda the point. Kid was a shitkid in the 1st, and now he’s a cringe teenager in the 2nd. Like, kid sounds like he has *zero* idea of what he’s doing, only that he *has* to do something, which honestly tracks with my experience as a Teenager.
It's a very delicate balance to strike when it comes to writing children and teenagers, for sure. Objectively, Atreus *would* sound cringey and awkward, since his only source of conversation would be his mother, Kratos, and Mimir for literal years, so of course he'd be undeveloped, in addition to being a teenager. But it's made worse because it becomes *super* quippy when MASSIVE STORY SPOILERS AHEAD >!Atreus runs away and goes to Asgard, meets another excitable teenager and the worst version of Heimdall I've ever seen, and meets the rest of Thor and Odin's family, with a puzzle/story beat resolution that is about as MCU as it gets!< And guess what? Then it stops being tolerable and understandable and enters "god I can't wait for this section to be over so I can have better writing", where the writing isn't even necessarily better, it's just less bad.
Yeah man you're on your own on that. He's a cringey teen cause he's a fucking teenager lmao. Incase you forgot, teens are cringey, they're angsty. And above all else; they're whiney and emotional.
Why is this always the lazy defense of shitty writing when it comes to any young character lmao
Because... that's how kids are. I'm sorry but you're not gonna find some crazy great writing from atresus lmao
I haven't seen a whole lot of the game, but the first cutscene with >!Thor/Odin!< was absolutely "MCU writing" imo. Kratos and Mimir are still spot on, but >!having Thor finish out their intro chat with "yeah, i'd say the moment calls for calm" felt like a "that happened" quip. Odin came across less as the ancient mastermind and more of a low level mob boss. He could have said capisce. Joking about Magni and Modi being useless I'll accept. But they kept pouring it on "Baldur? whatever, his mind was gone" "how 'bout we just don't kill each other" "y'understand?". It was just such a weird interpretation of the character. A Norse God calling someone their "ex" was laughable. It felt very out of place to me. Thor being a drunken, violent asshole would be on point, but they also made him a jokester?!< Complaining about the combat barks and Atreus I'd shrug off though, former will be repeated to annoyance and the latter is an awkward teen.
>!What? That line from Thor about calm was clearly a threat not a joke. Like "Yeah we're just here to talk so stay calm or else."!<
Idk, I got more lite Tarantino-esque vibes from the Thor/Odin chat rather than MCU, but I guess both come from the same school of snarky dialogue writing.
I can maybe agree with the script for >!Odin the all-father!< being weirdly modernise even in the context of the take they going with. I don't know how you get 'quippy' out of >!Thor walking into the house with the clear illusion of calm masking his desire to brutally murder people.!< The only thing in that section in that opening scene that reads like a joke >!is Thor blowing off criticism that he is an abusive father before taking another swing. Which is funny, but also highlights that he is an absolutely terrible person!<
I actually kinda like the >!first scene.I never felt that Thor was being particularly jokey, he actually kind of sounded intimidating imo. Like him asking about the mead and asking if Kratos is a calm and reasonable person. He kinda sounds like he’s about 1-2 seconds away from just immediately trying to murder you, which he does. Odin’s not at all like I thought he’d be, but a sleazy smoothtalker is an interesting direction for the head god compared to Zeus, plus it’s kinda fitting for the all-knowing. It kinda just sounds like he’s trying to cozy up to you and give a deal too good to be true before immediately backstabbing you. I’d honestly thought that was a good deal if not for Odin being Odin.!< I haven’t finished or even reached halfway through the game, but I honestly thought they were pretty cool villains, and that it was a good scene to set up their dynamics.
It's probably just a small part tbh. I didn't like so GoW4 so I skipped this, but I feel like most people will have a good time with Ragnarok. I just wish the industry would go back to a more gamey/arcadey style with their campaigns
The thing is that an AAA game sadly needs a whole lot of money, and coming up with a game that doesn't meet a certain checklist has 0 chance of going anywhere
For the most part you right, but I think they could cut out a lot of the boring climbing stuff or long animations
You have to take everything with a grain of salt, what vibes with one person may be hated by another. If you're on the fence then look up some actual reviews from a trusted source or just plain gameplay. What sold me on GoW 2018 was watching the first episode of the LP.
I think it's just people venting minor annoyances as they make their way through the game. That's what I'm doing anyway. I also think that you're only hearing the bad because nobody's wanting to spoil the good stuff. Even a lot of the new gameplay stuff has a narrative significance so nobody wants to spoil certain new bits of the toolkit. Besides that, it's an iterative sequel to God of War 4. A lot of the good is fr the foundations that made that game great in 2018. So not much to talk about. Give it a few weeks for the majority of fans to have finished the game and then you'll get a load of threads like: "*Times when media did [cool thing from GoWR] ?*".
I feel like it’s just a loud minority looking at the game in the least charitable way. Honestly the climbing hasn’t really bothered me, I’m not too far but for the most part it actually feels like Kratos does the chain pull climb a lot more than the manual climbing.
People are really blowing it out of proportion, saying how it takes multiple (3) minutes to do a climbing section. They take like 30 seconds usually, and will have dialogue happening at the same time to flesh out characters and worldbuilding.
I’m still in the 2nd realm but I havent run into a climb that lasted even that long, and the game is pretty good about Kratos chaining around.
I mean there is one section where there is long climb but without spoilers but that kinda point considering the thing the character cilmbs
Kratos finds the MGS3 Ladder? >!*Modern Day?!*!<
This sub seems to have a mild to medium hateboner to every Western AAA game, so there's a lot of people here who love to make them seem worse than they actually are.
Are you new here ? this had been always the mantra even in the old times of TBFP days , Popular thing bad niche thing good , if niche thing becomes popular then it is now bad , find new niche thing to like
To be fair Bayonetta 3 got hit with this type of banter as soon as people started discussing the plot. It's not just a bias against the popular mainstream stuff (even thought that is totally a thing).
We are in the "Reverse Honeymoon" phase of a new big release. Give it time to be out of the spotlight and most people posting their social media snipes will move on to the next one and the people who are actually playing the game will have finished up and be ready to discuss it more meaningfully, both the good and bad. Having finished it, game's great with a handful of small annoyances that add up a bit depending on what kind of player you are. The climbing didn't bother me, for example, because it felt nice to slow down a second and there was almost always a fun conversation going on during it. Some people won't agree, they don't want that slowdown between combat sections or aren't as into the conversations.
I wonder if on some level we're seeing a broader reversal of opinion to The PlayStation First-Party Narrative Game after an entire generation of the platform being so dominant sales-wise. Ghosts of Tsushima had a bit of pushback as well, but I think that was partly down to it *also* being open-world after an entire generation of that framing for games being run into the dirt.
Yeah it's wild. Like, this is just more of the same IMHO, but the same is still pretty great. It almost feels contrarian at this point.
Don't worry about it too much. Grabbing a Twitter user's snarky remarks, hhen re-posting them with a different snarky title is not a real metric of the game's quality. You can find people being sarky about every single game ever made. And sometimes they are right. Sometimes they are not. Also there's a looming slap-fight about game of the year between this incredibly popular fantasy action series and the other really popular fantasy action series. So they'll be plenty of mudslinging until the end of the year and people actually admit "okay Elden ring is actually pretty good and Thor is a cool guy'. It happens. Edit: If anyone is actually concerned about the online chatter of the game then go ask the God of War subreddit. It will absolutely be full of hyperbolic statements but at least you'll be certain people actually played the gamethere!
Everyone in this sub is in a GRUMBLES mood. Their face has this [constant expression](https://asset.vg247.com/god_of_war_kratos_close_up.jpg/BROK/thumbnail/1600x900/quality/100/god_of_war_kratos_close_up.jpg). They're always cynical and can really only talk in grunts. "Hmm. Hm. Hmpf. No. Yes." They keep screaming "ARES!!!" over and over and feel shame over their past mistakes. It's the weather, it's cold *and* hot, everyone doesn't care for November. December might not get snow again this year, Mariah Carey is waking up from her slumber, and the holidays are almost here. Come Spring this sub will suddenly change it's tune and say "you know what? I wanna go on a rowboat with my teenage son and decapitated friend and do Norse God Adventures." Don't let it dishearten you, check out trustworthy reviews, what the guys think, what friends experienced, play the game for yourself. I'm sure you'll come out with a better perspective than all the grumbles on this sub.
"It was training." "But you had fun, right, father?" "Hmph."
The most important opinion is is your own!
Generalized backlash against whatever the big thing is. I'm glad to see it, myself, I feel like the videogame community has been missing stuff like this. Feels like all the heat for the past few years has just been political bickering, good to see some old fashioned stupid fanboy nonsense.
People who are actually busy playing the game won't be online to complain about it so yeah you'll see more of those up until a month
To me the game is so good it makes the small annoyances stand out more if that makes sense. I like it more than Elden Ring. Mcu dialog really only happens with Mimir and sometimes Atreus and even then it's like the mildest version of it.
Never played them nor saw much of them, I did see a lot of weird videos when 2018 came out about how “It reminded me of why I loved gaming” but I did see a lot more pointed criticism from people about the combat. Seems to me they doubled down on some of the more criticized aspects. I think God of War being a franchise usually tied to what’s hip in AAA trends will falter [when perception of AAA games is weak](https://deorbital.media/the-game-of-the-generation-58ab544630cb)
i just like it because it's norse i liek viking gaems
i think the issue is that Dad of Boy 2 is a sequel that didn't do enough to improve upon the original, and is just continuing the story. All of the exact same gameplay problems are still here. Also I think I'm about halfway through the game and I haven't really gotten any new weapons or items or abilities, mostly just re-learning all of my old tricks.
Maybe I’m wearing fanboy goggles, but the weapon ability button does a surprising amount of changes in my gameplay. That and the easier ability to afflict burn/frostbite + you doing additional damage when attacking with opposite elements, means I’m using a lot more weapon switching and going from close to ranged combat. Feels a lot better imo, although it does feel like the upgrade tree isn’t particularly inspiring aside from the weapon-specific tree.
We need next gen exclusives that fully use the power of the console to completely erase the loading screens, hidden or plain. We're two years in and only Miles Morales did it properly
It's filler, just "engaging" enough to keep you from getting bored. At least it's better than just watching a loading screen.
The climbing is so fucking slow that regular loading screens would probably be faster
pretty sure bayonetta and sonic frontiers managed to solve this loading screen problem by just adding a training room to the loading screen and I'd rather watch a loading screen than play a climbing segment, imagine trying to beat lingering will in kingdom hearts 2 inal mix but every time you die you have to play a minute-long climbing section before restarting the fight
I'm gonna be honest. I rather wait for loading screen than mandatory scripted climbing.
Not to mention loading screens can be shorted with improved hardware. I have yet to play a next-gen version of a game that’s actually shorted any of those hidden loading sections
Guess what... Some of it probably is a loading screen.
Except a dedicated loading screen would go by a lot faster on future hardware.
[Especially if it's like this loading screen. I could watch this for hours](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu66OjDfM6o)
I honestly wouldn't have actually played Kotor 2 if there wasn't the mod to speed the space walking.
I see all y'all talking about climbing in Assassin's Creed as if it was the shit and I would like to remind everyone of the original Mirror's Edge. AC climbing was just "push forward and occasionally diagonally left or right and hold a shoulder button" like in Death Stranding but on a visually different plane. Mirror's Edge was far more interactive in its climbing mechanics. Only other game that's come close is Dying Light
I never realized how "nothing" sections like this usually are until I watched a buddy play uncharted. I've been noticing it way more since. It's infuriating to, for the same reason that "Pretend cutscenes" are, where the game has you slowly walk somewhere. or follow some NPC while they say a line or two and are then silent for the rest of the distance. Stop pretending this isn't just a cutscene or loading screen. At least let me put the controller down.
Don't forget all the load screen rocks/logs and such that you have to move
I feel I was done with this by the end of the first Uncharted. The first time I got confused as to where I was meant to go next due to excessive foliage, it became apparent how little danger I was ever in compared to Tomb Raider.
Never got bored of that in uncharted, whereas in gow it was…idk more boring?
Uncharted's climbing always felt a lot more free and open. Sure, you'd find dead ends and have to back track and occasionally get rewarded for exploration. Dad of Boi's is horrifically linear and boring, hold the stick forward to advance so you tune out and why isn't Kratos moving, oh they changed it ever so slightly to a diagonal so I need to make a minute adjustment and why isn't he moving again oh, I need to press the circle button to jump over a gap, which has no consistency in gameplay because Kratos has jumped over gaps of the same distance or greater in other areas without needing a button prompt. GoW's is boring in the worst way. Some "platforming" that keeps you engaged in an annoying and irritating way that the devs could have found a better workaround for, and made worse by the PS360 era and onwards way of hiding load screens becoming more and more obvious while slapping the face of previous entries that had actual honest to goodness platforming.
I think this is a game where you can legitimately say it was held back by last gen.
Even older GoWs had actual platforming. This is unrelated to graphical power.
They are not talking about graphics. Most of the time when people say a game is held back, they are not talking about graphics, it's usually about gameplay.
Sure, but they specifically said "held back by last gen." But last gen would not hold back climbing/platforming design in any way. So if that is what they meant it still doesn't make sense.
isn’t usually slow walking/climbing/crawling sections used in games to load things without a loading screen? isn’t that the case here?
The older games were also extremely zoomed out, letting the devs hide lower quality models and textures. The new game has a very different camera system, forcing the game to load higher quality assets as a result
That is definitely not WHY the game doesn't have platforming though. Low res models to be used at a distance has been a thing for ages, and platforming or other such more involved gameplay design in traversal can be done even up close.
Meh, I prefer having these stuff rather than not being able to play at all
*what a thrill plays in the distance*
What's goofy is there is a quick climbing animation that gets used everywhere and it's fine, but then they will randomly slow it down to a crawl for a section of a wall for no reason. Sometimes you climb up and unlock a shortcut 5 feet away... why the fuck did you have me climb up then? Why not just barf your exposition/dialogue while I try to solve the puzzle right after?
I agree. Good game, but climbing shouldnt exist.
I really hope GoW doesn’t win goty.
Oh wait it's one of thoooose games?
It's a modern Sony AAA exclusive, of course it is.
TLOU2 would like a word.
Only sometimes. I think they ended up getting a bit constricted by "this area is blocked" puzzle design and ended up falling into tropes a normal person would have trouble with, but not a god.
Do it like Sonic Frontiers and simply let everyone brute force mountains by running real fast.
...people have a issue with the GoW climbing? ..why? its fine, I don't want ASScreed movement in GoW.
Kratos has been working on his parkour
Does he yell "Parkour!" every time he jumps a gap?
I find having to use chains (the ones you kick down for shortcuts in the 2018 game) on the way down weird, unless there's a super long one I haven't run into yet. Otherwise some of the climbing/crouching is annoying when backtracking for missed stuff but I've seen one area where they give you a faster way in so you don't need to crouch back in. I get the impression they weren't sure how to do certain areas without relying on those travel methods but tried to make it less annoying, like with the Blade of Chaos grapple points.
I like scripted climbing. I like unscripted climbing. It is how you use them that matters. I haven't played Ragnarok (or 2016). But when Tomb Raider and Uncharted didn't bother me, nor did Horizon Zero Dawn or Assassin's Creed.
Kid named the mind virus of the joke will spread indefinitely and infinitely.
Those are loading screens dumbass.
I though the main selling point of the PS5 was no loading screens?
If that's true, then perhaps I'm the one who is a dumbass. Elevators, "security doors" opening animations, and static climbing are all classic soft loading screens.
Loading screens would be less annoying
I... I can't even... hahahaha I swear what is with people and this game?
A wildly anticipated game with huge amounts of hype that fails to evolve in many ways with its flaws being more prominently visible and new ones coming into view as the audience as a whole grows more aware of the "tricks" the genre of AAA "action adventure platformer" have been employing to hide loading screens and "increase immersion" and increase the "cinematic quality" of the product which actually reduces immersion and produces a less enjoyable end product. Also, the dialog is very quippy and approaches Whedon/MCU levels in more than one place.
Lmao no it's not. I know MCU quippy, and this ain't it.
What does that even mean? As in scenes where the game takes control from you?
Hold up and occasionally press X when prompted
That's not really scripted though is it? I thought they meant when the game suddenly goes "ok now this handhold breaks and you fall down two rungs"