Remnant: From the Ashes (Souls Shooter)

Huh? The release date says August 20th:

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Early Access weekend perk for pre-orders. A soft launch to hopefully iron out connection issues, most likely.

So early access people, how is it?

Yeah let’s hear some impressions!

This looks cool.

I won’t get a chance to try it until this evening at the earliest. This will be fighting for time with Age of Wonders: Planetfall and Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, but I plan to do some co-op on Saturday for sure. Will report back once I have spent a little time with it.

Picked this up and played 15 minutes, just to check some things that are key points for me:

  • Character customization is OK. There aren’t many choices, but it’s a lot better than most games in this genre. The classes are not gender-locked.

  • The obnoxious head-bob can be turned off. There is no FOV slider, but the default FOV is pretty generous. As someone who often gets nauseous with narrow FOV and head bobbing, this game should not be a problem.

  • It ran really well at 3440x1440, and the UI looked fine

I don’t know when I’ll have time to really dig in to this – Anthem is good now, and WoW Classic is imminent. But the feature list for this is pretty much “stuff Oghier likes in a game,” so I know I’ll play the heck out of it soon :)

By customization are your referring to builds or appearance? If the former, I believe the devs have stated that a lot of it is done through items you find throughout the game.

Appearance.

I vastly prefer games where I can make my own character instead, with his own looks. RFTA has that.

This actually looks kind of interesting to me, which is saying a lot since I don’t care for third person shooters and I don’t have a co-op buddy to play it with.

I can see it, though, it has a “Dark Souls but with guns” vibe as opposed to usual third person shooters.

And although the world is slightly generic I guess, it’s still more interesting to me than The Division or Destiny.

So far I am very impressed. Feels like a very smooth controlling Dark Souls coop with guns. Melee is a bit weird and the game is hard but both of those are ‘me’ problems.

Looking at a few streams and it does seem to be paced very much like Dark Souls

Got thru the tutorial area and so far it looks like a Mad Max/Cthulhu shooter that will quickly turn into a loot shooter. I like that the controls are minimal in that you don’t have to memorize an insane amount of keys (m/kb) to get thru the game. I feel like the walking speed is super slow. Running is fine, but my stamina drops pretty quickly. Certainly possible that as I level my stamina drop won’t be so bad. You go up and down stairs in the tutorial but in the first area after that I can see loot thru a hole in the floor above me but can’t get to it. And never found a way to go up or down to different levels, but this is with only about 20 min into the first area outside the tutorial before I got killed.
I got my cool ass class gear handed to me during the tutorial which seems kinda cheesy, so I hope the stuff I can find looks equally as cool (I went with the anti-cultist dude who looks like he stepped out of a spaghetti western). The voice acting in the tutorial was pretty good and the story such as it is it fine and the world seems very interesting. So far a tentative thumbs up which would be an easy thumbs up if they pace of movement was a little more Division’ish and less early Resident Evil in terms of speed.

I would like to make a prediction that some of you will come to despise this game for the simple fact that the boss fights are basically all RNG.

This means you may get lucky and get all the easy bosses early on, OR you may get the super hard ones at low levels. Compounding this is that unlike Dark Souls it is not just a matter of learning the boss pattern. These developers decided it would be really fun to spawn endless waves of adds (other monsters for you non-MMO types) while trying to fight difficult bosses.

So you are essentially being mercilessly pummeled by peons while trying to already deal with a difficult enemy. I predict at least half a dozen ragequits given what I know about the readership on this forum. If you’d like more info on this you can go see the ResetEra thread about it. I am an above average fast twitch gamer and I had to simply walk away from it and turn it off because it was so comically unfair. Gorefist, wait until you meet him and you will understand precisely what I mean. Nothing like trying to simply keep away from a boss that can kill you in a few hits while also having to dodge kamikaze exploding minions that drop status effects on you too. Good times!

This is the problem with procedural generation of any type, if not done well it can turn a decent game into a very bad one quite rapidly. Each campaign and area is procedurally generated Diablo style so you could get the opposite and get a cakewalk too.

Could this be alleviated by taking on those bosses in co-op, or is it equally as frustrating even with backup?

My very first Boss.

I’ve gotten him pretty low twice (Well into the last segment), amidst maybe 15 failures of significant to epic proportion.

Two blobby explosions can kill me.

Two Gorefist hits can kill me.

Anything that happens to me if I am, say, <70% health is probably a death. Most of my failures are not “well I got him to half way again”. In fact, most of them probably don’t get nearly that far.

The area was obviously designed to fuck with people kiting big time.

Using +2 weapons, and have the SMg which supposedly is key to defeating him. May do some more upgrading, but the fight takes a long time right now - I always run out of SMG ammo well before I get him to near death. Even with the occasional pickup (which I often miss because, you know, kinda busy).

I don’t feel like this fight design is very interesting or fun. Weirdly I have been using M+K and finally decided I’ll switch over to controller. But I’m not exactly stoked about playing it right now. I could always do a world regen and see what happens.

This definitely seems like a strange design choice concerning random bosses. After watching Tom playing last night my interest was peaked but now I’ll wait for it to be in a humble bundle in a year or so.

The world design wasn’t doing much for me. Did Tom make it to any other areas besides the city street / buildings area and the sewers?

I am watching someone stream it right now and he is playing in what I guess I would describe as an unsual swamp. It’s fairly open, the water is a peculiar brownish red (it brings to mind blood and tree sap to me), there’s lots of flora, and a strange wooden village.

The level is very appealing visually, to me.