@KratosMD@Octane Thank you! Both excellent insight. I’m a little on the fence still but I will probably go ahead and try it. Good story and accessible gameplay is the main requirements. I do like JRPGs a lot (although Uncharted and Horizon are among my favs).
One of my turn offs is if the difficulty spike is too sharp, then I don’t want to have to replay something over and over to “get used to it” before I can progress. I need to feel a natural progression and evolution of the difficulty so that I never feel overwhelmed. One of the design flaws that I dislike is when a game dumps you into a world with a bunch of deep settings and elements that don’t necessarily apply to you early in the game and it makes it hard to know where to spend your XP or what mechanics to master first. In those games you may get 5-10 hours into it before you feel like you have completely played the game wrong and really need to just start over but are too frustrated at that point so you just quit. Sounds like this game is not like that.
Edit - and the game not being very long is a plus in my book. Sold! I need more medium to short length games.
@Th3solution I do believe there there four ''chapters'', and the game requires four playthroughs if you intend on playing everything. The game changes with every playthrough. I never got that far, but that's how I understand it.
@Octane Yeah, when I look at howlongtobeat.com it has main story play time at 19 hrs, but the average play time is 34.5 hrs and the completionist play time is 59.5 hrs according to them. I guess the multiple endings account for the large discrepancy.
At least it seems attainable. I can’t add another Persona 5 to my back log where you can’t even sniff any form of an ending in under 100 hours. Love the game, but I can only have so many of those in my library at a time.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
Real excited to try this as soon as I finish Shadow of Mordor.
Just a quick question out of curiosity ... as I said on the other thread, I did go ahead and buy this after all, so I’m already committed, but I was wondering... have they patched some of the issues I saw people having early on like the frequent game crashes, the studdering frame rate, etc?
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
@Th3solution I played it a few months ago and didn't experience any notable problems. I envy you getting to play for the first time. One of the best games I have ever played.
Also, just looking at the previous conversation, I would highly recommend playing the full story. It's technically 3 playthroughs but they're each different so it isn't playing the same game three times. My total time was under 50 hours and I did all the side quests and found all the weapons. IMO, only playing the first part is like watching Episode IV and walking away. It's good but you haven't even gotten close to the great stuff!
The frame rate appears to skip slightly in the open world areas, it was a little worse at launch by my reckoning and improved with a patch. It's not bad at all though and it doesn't happen in the smaller areas. You might not even notice it really.
I got 2-3 crashes during my 50-60 hour play through. Again, maybe that's been fixed now.
The game has no autosave so it can be a bummer when this happens.
Finally playing this today and ... man, my first impression is really positive. Not sure why I didn’t like the demo, because playing it again and being more invested in it are helping me really enjoy it. The combat is so smooth. Of course I’m only a couple hours in, but I’m feeling the hype. The music and presentation are very familiar “Square Enixy,” even though the gameplay, characters, and setting are very unique. After playing Shadow of Mordor, a game that is good but does nothing to be really all that creative or push the genre, this is a breath of fresh air so far. Thanks for the recommendation all. I’ll be posting more impressions as I get further in.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
@kyleforrester87 Yes, 2B moves so elegant, yet powerful. Loving the artistic aspect of the characters and world.
I’m about 5 hours or so into it now and it just gets better and better. I wasn’t expecting open world exploration like this. And graphically it is very nice. I had heard mixed things about the graphics but I think they look great. I did have a little texture pop-in once so far that froze the screen for about 2 seconds while the desert area was drawn in. Only other complaint is the map is not as helpful as I’d like. It’s taking me forever just to figure out how to get to a waypoint. The dilapidated world is wonderfully rendered but some areas that look like you can enter or jump to are invisible walls, while the pathways to another area of the city sometimes require climbing up a fallen structure or tree branch that is not immediately obvious. Now that I know to look up for pathways it has become a little easier, but the map doesn’t do you any favors really.
The combat is great, as many have said. Very stylized also but it can get a little difficult in a few spots. I’m still trying to learn it and how to utilize the chips and upgrades and where to spend my limited money.
Otherwise, it is fantastic so far.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
I mean certainly, I've always liked drinking a lot, but I remember when I was writing the previous games' scenarios and the stories for them, I noticed a [recurring theme] that all the stuff I had written when I was really out of it was actually the stuff that everyone really liked. And I thought, "Why the hell should that be?" It worked out. If I drink, I become a bit tipsy and a bit of a fool, and I lose my inhibitions. That kind of uninhibited story writing only comes out when I'm drinking, so I definitely try to drink a lot more whenever I'm writing now.
In the original Nier, there was the story of the wolf and the people with the masks. I remember crying along with the story as I was writing it while I was completely wasted.
The way I ordered the music there is that I look on YouTube for music clips, and I'll get one and I'll paste it and send it over to [Mr. Okabe], and say, "Right, I want something like this; this kind of tempo, this kind of pace, and [then] there's 15 frames in here like at the 45 second mark that the bass turns up, so we're going to have to make it very high-tempo, very exciting, you've got to bring the pace up there." That's normally the kind of thing I send to him, and I think he really hates that. If you tried that with a regular composer and you made that kind of request, most of them would just turn around and say, "Alright then, you ask the guy that made that to make one for you!" But Mr. Okabe, you see, he quite likes money, so he'll do anything you ask him to. The theme on the overall Nier team, though, is if you'll give us money, we'll basically do whatever you want.
@kyleforrester87 Ha, ha! Man, he sounds like such and interesting person! And so refreshingly honest and uninhibited. I guess creative geniuses are often that way. They just think way out there and they say what’s on their mind.
As far as NA, I’m still very much enjoying the game although I’m not that far in still. I spent quite a bit of time just roaming around the first city.
A few questions — is it best to hold onto all these trinket items I’m collecting, or sell them? My style has been usually in other games to not sell these random items since often they are needed for creating upgrades. Some of the items are labeled as “can be sold for a decent price,” or something like that, which suggests that their only value is to be sold. The other question is related, but is there any point to fishing? I know there is a trophy and the “fish” can be sold as well, but do I need to spend time doing this now? I just didn’t want to miss something that I may not be able to catch later or might be of use now. While fishing in the underground sewer, by chance I pulled out an iron pipe which serves as a weak melee weapon, so now I’m wondering if there is some good stuff in these waters, but I don’t want to waste hours fishing when I can be slaying robots in acrobatic style.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
@Th3solution Yeah sell them. In particular the power cores I think are worth like 25000, sell them. You'll have more money than you know what to do with in the end and the upgrade/chip system unfortunately falls a bit flat in the end. I kind of wish the game was a bit stronger in this area.
As for fishing I didn't bother with it, I will do it for the trophy one day and you can get a Pod upgrade too so it is worth it to that extent. As for pulling out extra weapons that's pretty cool and I never tried it myself. Would like to see the old pipe lol.
@kyleforrester87 Yeah, the old pipe had lower stats that the default sword and cheapest early weapons, so I probably won’t ever use it, but at least it wasn’t just junk like the old tire and car batteries I was fishing out before that. 😆
As far as chip management, did you delve into the intricacies of customizing your build yourself, or just use the games optimization system for your builds? I’m a little overwhelmed with the chips so I just let the game do it for me so far, but I don’t know if I should worry about slogging through the customization.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
Yes it's better to customise the build but to be honest you can get by easily enough by levelling up a bit and spamming healing items. I can't remember exactly what I focused on generally but i think it was the slow time ability on dodge/gain health on enemy kill and shock wave.
The combat is always involving but for reasons I mentioned above your build isn't really going to hinder your progress if it's not tuned to perfection. But experimenting to see the differences is always going to be fun, too.
@KratosMD Lol yeah the endings are fun. I cleared my first play through in one sitting on launch day and went straight into the second one.
A gap between play is good in one sense, but also forgetting key parts from the first play through could mean some impact is lost in the second.
i would say, perhaps, that saying the subsequent play throughs have you controlling anyone other than 2b might be a bit spoilery. I can't remember if it was really mentioned in the reviews. I know I didn't really know for sure I'd be playing as 9S on my second run.
@KratosMD Dunno buddy I'm confused now. I thought in your post #185 you didn't have spoiler tags over that particular part, which is what I commented on in #186. Either way, it doesn't really matter if you use tags or not for that aspect since the games been out a while.
More than anything I was trying to reflect on my own expectations and I remember wondering exactly how the second and third sections would play out, back when I got it at launch.
Anyway I'm not about telling people what to do and how to act online so you're all good with me my friend
@KratosMD It's a tough game to discuss without verging on spoiler territory to be fair since there's so much weird stuff going on! Where are you up to now?
@kyleforrester87@KratosMD No worries here. I have seen nothing spoilery so far on this thread that hasn’t been blocked. The article from gameinformer on Taro did start to tread into what looked like spoiler territory toward the end so I quickly stopped reading
By the way, I did stream and listen to some of the music last night while I was relaxing before bed, it was so chill. I haven’t listened to game music outside of actual play time in a while.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
Forums
Topic: Nier: Automata
Posts 121 to 140 of 313
This topic has been archived, no further posts can be added.