God of War (PS4)

Is there any chance this ever comes to pc? I’m not allowed to buy consoles anymore after using my (thankfully used) 360 for a grand total of about 20 hours.

Dunno, this just looks super cool and I’d love to stare at it longingly in my Steam library for the next few years until I forget about it entirely.

Zero chance.

Ah well. There’s always streams I’ll forget to pay attention to and eventually lose my place in, instead, then!

We live in the same world. High five.

Played for about an hour, up until the first boss, which took me four tries to beat until I figured out the obvious thing I was missing. From anyone else who’s played more, QUESTIONS AND REQUEST FOR ADVICE:

What difficulty are you playing on? I started on the second from the top, but wonder if the third is more appropriate. I have played all of the SoulsBorne games, if that helps.

Also, there are two HUD options, a regular, and an “immersive” option. I generally think I would prefer the immersive option, but wonder what you all think.

Initial impressions: Very impressive. Looks great. Not impressed with the combat so far, but wouldn’t expect to be. The menus are… daunting.

I went for normal (‘balanced’) but it is a bit easy. As long as you didn’t pick the highest one you can change whenever (you’ll just go back to the last checkpoint, so probably do it right after a fight).

I ended up going custom. I usually prefer minimal HUDs but not when I lose information. For example, in Souls games I don’t need the weapon display at the bottom left because I can clearly see which weapons I have equipped. However, in this game if you have immersive set and you pick something up you’ll have no idea what it was. You also won’t be able to see your health or enemy health. I can live without the compass, enemy direction indicators and attack warnings, though.

The combat starts out very bare bones. The beginning of the game is a slow ramp up of gameplay mechanics while they build the story, which is pretty different for a God of War game. However, by the time you finish the first major quest line you should start to see some pretty cool depth to the combat.

Almost forgot: if you are a Souls fan you might want to go into the gameplay settings and flip interact and dodge. It threw me off a lot early because I’ve been playing a lot of DS1 this week.

Yeah, that was an amazing sequence, too. (assuming you’re talking about the actual first boss and not the troll)

The combat is definitely challenging. There’s a lot to learn about how to manage encounters each time they introduce a new enemy type. I died a lot on that first troll fight because I wasn’t using my ranged options enough. I’ve also been playing so much Ni No Kuni 2 lately I’ve got to resist the urge to press sqaure and triangle to attack accidentally.

Yeah, and here’s where GoW is more Dark Souls than GoW. You didn’t have to do this shit in the past games. You had your Blades of Chaos and they just wrecked shit.

Not a fan of how they changed combat.

I’m sorry, but I don’t know how anyone can stand listening to that kid during the fights.

Doesn’t bug me at all.

Why, what’s wrong with him?

I like the kid

So I started again on the third difficulty level and it’s made the combat much more interesting. Even trash combat requires a lot more patience attention and timing. I got to the actual first boss ( not what I thought was the first boss) and thought it was a great fight. So far is living up to the hype less than 2 hours in. Good exploration. Kratos so grumpy!

Yeah, it seems you really do need to use the ranged attack on many enemies. I resisted it at first because it didn’t feel very God of War, but that troll would have been almost impossible without it, and there are lots of grunts that are much more vulnerable to ranged.

I think @tomchick would love this because it’s so similar to Darksiders.

Yeah, Darksiders is actually a better comparison than Dark Souls.

Maybe I should play Darksiders again.

Kratos has a bow in GoW 2 and 3, though. Also the blades are kinda ranged to begin with.

Is there a trick to getting the PS4 Pro to not sound like an airplane engine while playing this game? It’s a bit distracting, to put it mildly.

Sure, but other than the occasional archer, you never really needed to use the bow, is my recollection. I basically just dived in the fray and fucked things up with the chains. Whereas with this game, half the enemies so far, including several melee ones, are better handled at range.

And between fights, if you’re taking too long to solve a puzzle, he’ll say things like, “maybe you should check that gate up there”. Shut up, kid. Let me explore at my own pace. I had the same beef about Tomb Raider and Lara blurting out puzzle hints. I might be alone in this opinion and maybe most gamers need the spoilers.

I’ve been playing this more and i must say, it’s really good.

Some of you guys are going to get a kick it off the interaction between Kratos and his son, I think.

When it starts off, Kratos is easily the worst dad in the world. But the interesting thing is that their interactions actually evolve as you play.

Not just the bits in the cutscenes, but all aspects of their interactions with each other. Their banter back and forth while you are sailing around, even what they say during and after combat. It’s interesting, going beyond what was done in “the last of us”.

The kid himself evolves as you play, and does some interesting stuff. His skills improve and he starts don’t more in combat, but the way he acts changes. At one point he gets pissed off at kratos for something, and then his verbal responses get pissy for a while. He doesn’t follow as closely.

Also, he provides some assistance in finding stuff, although it is subtle… Hell periodically say, “huh, what’s that?” Or something along those lines, and stop briefly to look at something. It doesn’t force you to look at it, and he’s generally not in front of you. So when you hear it, you sometimes need to figure out where he’s gotten to, and then go walk over to him, look in the direction he’s facing… And there’s usually something there. I say usually because there’s been one case where i couldn’t tell what he was looking at.

It’s a good mechanic, and it sometimes kicks in after you’ve been in an area searching for a rune for a while, and you are starting to get frustrated.

Anyway, the kids is well done, and is probably one of the highlights of a game with a lot of highlights.