NieR: Automata

A hardcore player actually agrees with you! I don’t think your percentages will be right for the final game. The camera should usually be moveable.

Oh man, check out 23:02 in the video. If you try to look up 2B’s skirt, she actually slaps the camera away from you. That’s funny.

This might get a PC release March 10th. It’s hard to tell because there is conflicting information in trailers. They said there’d be a short delay earlier this week. But I was thinking it’d be 6 months after the PS4 release, so anytime this spring is fine.

[EDIT] Looks like this was wrong, but it’s still promising.

March 17 on PC. For super real this time.

Glad i decided against buying on ps4.

Pretty gutsy releasing right before Mass Effect, even if the new one doesn’t look very good.

I’d rather skip Mass Effect Andromeda than Nier Automata at this point. I haven’t been this excited about a game in a looong time.

Okay, fine, I guess there are combos.

Getting a solid 89 at Metacritic. Looks like all systems are go. I’m preordered at Steam. Dear God, that’s less than 2 weeks away.

Preordered on Steam as well. No idea how well it will run though, as I have a GTX 760, but I hope those minimum requirements are somewhat inflated. :)

A very helpful overview of how the game’s multiple endings work for those of us who didn’t play Nier. No spoilers.

Amazon decided to be awesome and deliver my copy earlier today. Played about 4 and a half hours so far and have been having a blast. The beginning was a bit rough for me, it’s basically the same as the demo, complete with the lack of saving. Got to the boss and ended up dying suddenly, I guess it only auto uses the large health pick-ups or something because I had plenty of the small ones. Wasn’t too pleased about losing a half an hour of progress, but after that section saving exists and it’s much better.

Loving the feel of the combat and have gotten a couple new weapons to toy with. Putting in chips to tweak your stats is cool, got one that heals me 20% every time I kill an enemy. Loving the environments and the music, sliding around on dunes in the desert and hopping around on buildings searching for loot in an overgrown area feels great. So happy this has lived up to the expectations I had for it so far.

I’m hearing the checkpoints are pretty brutal. The difficulty balance is off a bit too: normal is too easy, but in hard difficulty you still get 1 or 2 shot, even though they have a very hard difficulty where you die to a single hit.

You can switch difficulty on the fly so I guess we’ll have to play around with it. One option is to play normal but skip the overpowered combat boosts you can equip. Something to keep in mind even though it’s kind of lame to have to balance the difficulty yourself.

You can also use the overpowered combat boosts on hard difficulty to make it more reasonable, but… well, you’ll see.

I bumped it up to hard myself and you’re right about getting 1 or 2-shotted. You’re meant to take advantage of the plug-in chip system, but even then you’ll still die fast if you aren’t careful. You get some cool abilities through it though. I also love how HUD elements like the minimap, life bar, text log, and other little things all take up space and you can strip them out if you want. I usually have that stuff in, but I switch to a stripped down version for the boss fights.

There aren’t really checkpoints except for the shmup sections. The regular game you just have to manually save in certain save areas.

I still feel I’m pretty early, but there are a few things that have been really annoying. A couple major bosses I fought were both in the 2.5D perspective with a locked camera that was zoomed out. Seeing multiple characters on-screen that are all wearing black and fighting at such a fast pace makes me lose track of where I am often. Also, while the cinematic cutscenes are skippable, there are dialogue scenes before bosses that aren’t skippable. They also talk during the fight so good luck trying to understand anything they say when trying not to die. There is also a corpse retrieval system where when you die you lose all your plug-in chips until you get your body back, but if you die again before you get it, your chips are gone forever…provided you don’t just reload your last save. Guess they were going for some half-assed Dark Souls thing with that. Lastly, I went past a point in the story and it auto-failed a bunch of sidequests. I think some are meant to be completed on later playthroughs, but that is still pretty annoying.

Despite all that, I’m still loving the hell out of the game and I hope more people give it the chance it deserves.

This game is amazing. Very sad how it will get overshadowed by Mass Effect. I’m not used to this style(s?) of combat so I’ve started on normal. I will be quite happy to bump that up to hard once I’ve built some literacy.

It’s very difficult to talk about how awesome this game is without spoilers. I think it’s safe to say, however, that I managed to reach my first “ending” 3 minutes into the game; and that I did so because I can’t remember the last time I played a twin-stick shooter.

Just a heads up for any Internet slowpokes that the Steam preload is available. It says it will unlock in 13 hours, but we’ll see.

I haven’t been following this too closely, but why is this in doubt?

I’m just a grizzled cynic about Steam release times. They’ve gotten better over the years though.

Fucking christ, already died twice now in the first section with no autosave. I guess I’ll set it to normal until I get past this trash.

Performance is decent. There are some zone-loading hitches. People on the Steam forums are complaining about a lot of crashes, which doesn’t help with the lack of a save in the prologue area.

But be sure to avoid public forums due to spoilers.

I’m really surprised at how much I’m enjoying this, despite generally being terrible at these sorts of action games and not a particular fan of the “anime” vibe. I was looking for something big to play after my second attempt at Fallout 4 sputtered out, and I was intrigued by how positive Giant Bomb and Waypoint have been towards it, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

There have been a couple of really cool setpieces I’ve come across in about 8 hours with the game, and so far Normal is feeling pretty comfortable.

One question: is there a way of knowing what level a side quest is intended for before activating? I’ve had a couple instances where, at level 10 or so, I ended up on a quest filled with enemies level 35 or above and was promptly slaughtered.

that prologue area drove me nuts. i crashed twice after the first boss fight so i had to replay the whole thing almost 3 times before i had a save. still crashing and having to replay bits every now and then.