Oh yeah. God of War Ragnorak was so much worse than TLOU2 in this regard. I played that game 3 times back to back and it broke me. Everyone talks about the ironwood level, but the entire game was like this.. I was playing it on the hardest difficulty and the hardest thing was the constant walking sections with atreus, with kratos and his wife, and unskippable fucking cutscenes.
The worst thing were loading realm sections that have long 1 minute dialogues to mask PS4s long load times but on PS5, it loads in seconds so you would just have wait for the dialogue to end before the realm door appeared. I was shocked to see almost instant loading times in the loading realm after the game ended and I had exhausted all the dialogues.
God of war is even worse. See above.
Oh wow. I found the constant chatter in Ragnarok absolutely exhausting and felt it ruined the gameplay pacing but I only played through it once. I can't imagine going through all that unskippable walk n' talk 3 times!
- Breakable knife. Some people will tell me this isn't a big deal to which I will respond if it's not a big deal, why put it in the game? The majority of the combat is built around parrying so just have a knife that works and be done with it. It's a pointless/slightly tedious mechanic. It's an action game, let's keep it fast paced and action paced.
It is a big deal. I think the problem with that is the knife has many great uses.
Parries, attacks, stealth kills, stopping a dead convulsing villager from spawning a big plaga head, and escaping after getting grabbed, the knife does all that and if you can just use it infinitely the game isn't ever gonna feel scary or tense, you'd just be a dark souls kang parryin' everythang.
The way the knife loses different amounts of durability in different situations is quite well thought out. Stealth kills, attacks and parries hardly do anything (except if u parry a chainsaw or something crazy) as if to encourage those actions, but if you get grabbed it costs a lot of durability to escape, which is fair because you should be dead, maybe u messed up to get grabbed in the first place, and you can often shake your way out while taking some damage as an alternative by mashing a button if you really want to keep your knife undamaged. Furthermore you can escape most grabs
by crouching and then backing up. I tried running sideways but it didn't always work.
As for finishing a villager or cultist who is convulsing to stop them going full plaga, it costs more durability than attacks and parries, but not as much as escaping after getting caught, and it seems to cost less durability all the time as plagas become more common alongside your knife getting upgraded as you progress. It's great design to put the player in that situation where they have a tense moment as a villager or cultist has a seizure on the ground and you have to decide whether it's worth expending your knife durability to make this problem go away or if you have the movement space and firepower to handle it.
Yes it is an action game, or an action horror game, but just like how your gun running out of ammo and you having to reload or change guns while enemies charge at you is part of the action, so too is your knife running out of durability. Because what is durability except ammo for your knife? If it's gonna be so powerful and handy, it needs some kind of limitations or it will be OP and break the game.
I do understand the desire to just be able to use your knife the way you do in the Gamecube original, because the game is a stone cold classic. But I'd say a lot of testing and balancing went in to determining the way the knife works in Rem4ke, and it is very good game design, even if it is different from the original.
Spainkiller
you're doing the PU review?
