Topic: What PS4 Games Are You Currently Playing?

@JohnnyShoulder @Gremio108 Yeah, I’m going back and forth in how to approach the Handsome Collection. I have a level 35 Maya character to port in and finish of the DLC with from 3 years ago, or I can start BL2 with a new character and experience it’s core greatness from scratch with an new style of play, or I can just go straight to the Pre-Sequel which I’ve never played. I think I’m leaning toward resurrecting Maya and just dinking around BL2 and mopping up DLC for 5-10 hours or so and then play Pre-Sequel. Maybe. If I ever get a few spare minutes with my PS4 again.

@Ralizah I’m happy that you’ve enjoyed HZD so much. It’s been fun to read your experiences on the games thread. Keep ‘em coming!

@Th3solution If I was you I would probs just continue with your BL2 playthrough and then The Pre-Sequel. Are you planning on getting the third game and will you realistically get through all that before it comes out?

@JohnnyShoulder @Th3solution With the new DLC, there is the option of creating a lvl30 character in BL2 in order to jump straight into the DLC but it’s also handy if you fancy giving another class a go.

I’m currently replaying BL2 after getting up to UVHM on PS3. I’ve gone for a Commando play through this time though. I’m enjoying it again but it’s crazy how much of the game I remember. The bosses are also so easy on normal mode; Wilhelm causes me no ends of bother previously but I breezed through him.

I also have over 120 golden keys but am refraining from using them too infrequently as the guns are invariably way more powerful than anything else you have.

On that note, https://twitter.com/dgshiftcodes is great for giving you codes to keys for all the games. I think you got a load for the Pre-Sequel if you have played the Telltale game too.

@JohnnyShoulder I have not been planning on buying BL3. I’ll probably wait on reviews and a price drop. After Battleborn, I’m a little skeptical. And yeah, with how busy things have been and how big the backlog is, I’m not really buying many games this year, comparatively speaking. And it is very unlikely I would finish off BL2 DLC and the Pre-Sequel before mid September at the rate I’m going lately. But it appears the Pre-Sequel is quite a bit shorter than the first two games. The internet says about 30 hours, which I could certainly do in 3 months if I put my mind to it and focused. But I’m too ADD probably to do that. 😄

@Thrillho Thanks for the info. Didn’t know about the quick leveling option. It might be a fun option to try that. I seem to remember I had some golden keys stashed as well, but I’ll have to check. I did play (and quite enjoy) Tales from the BL so that’s good to hear I might get a little perk there too.

@Th3solution It’s not immediately obvious the “quick start” is there but if you select “create new character” on the main screen (rather than start new game) then it gives you the option of creating a lvl1 or lvl30 character.

And I found the Pre-Sequel to be a little shorter but had no inclination to play it a second (or more!) time like I did with BL2.

@Th3solution One thing that has struck me from playing the Handsome Collection is how hefty the DLCs are. It's going to take me ages to get through BL2, especially since I like to take my time.

@Thrillho Cool, cheers for the heads up on the level 30 character selection. I never did play the dlc when I had BL2 on the 360.

Just beat Tales of Zestiria.

Pros:

• The action based combat is easy to grasp, and despite some tweaks is a familiar setup if you've played past Tales games.
• I ended up quite liking the fusion mechanic (certain characters can fuse for a huge boost in stats, but it has it's drawbacks, as you're special attack meter replenishes much more slowly while fused, and of course if you die while fused, that takes out both characters).
• I liked that it actually had largish, to scale, field areas (think XC2 or DQXI) rather than an overworld that looks like you're a giant walking around tiny continents (that more old school JRPGs, including Tales of Abyss & Vesperia used).
• Not my favorite bunch of characters in a JRPG, or even in a Tales game (personality or design wise), but I liked them enough by game's end.

Cons:

• The equipment system was a confusing mess, IMO, and I never got deeply into it.
• It felt mostly quite generic. It had a more standard medieval vibe to it's world (no fantasy/tech mix that Abyss & Vesperia had), so you just had a couple of standard castletowns & villages. Dungeons too weren't very memorable (other than the final dungeon & maybe a couple of the Elemental Trial dungeons), as they didn't seem to have any charm or distinguishing characteristics (like DQ games, Tales games usually hit all the cliches when it comes to dungeon themes, but in a charming way). There were a ton of optional dungeons on offer too, but they were all pallet swaps of the same three forest, cave, and ruin themes (particularly the ruin theme).
• The game is completely stripped of any of the minigames that Abyss or Vesperia (or other JRPGs) tend to have. No resort/casino town, no races, and not even that waitressing minigame. In fact, most of it's side content revolves around optional "Mutant Hellion" bosses. There's almost always one in every field area, always one at the end of an optional dungeon, and 90% of sidequests involve fighting one. This isn't bad in iteslf (in fact I kept up on these pretty well so I could stay levelled), but it's a tad disappointing that there's very little variety in side content, and due to how many of these bosses there are (and they're all roughly only about 10 levels higher than the rest of the enemies in the area), they're not as exciting as optional bosses tend to be.
• Not much alternate costume variety. Tales games usually have quite a bit of cool/silly costumes you can unlock (sometimes connected to the absent minigames), but here it's limited to pallet swaps and other outfits they wore at some point during the story. The cooler/sillier costumes are reserved as DLC. This isn't a terrible flaw, but a tad disappointing.

Overall it's a perfectly fine game, but just a bit of a letdown based on series entries I've played before (Abyss & Vesperia).

BTW, the only "Games You Recently Beat?" thread I could find was in Other Gaming. I used the search function but couldn't find a similar thread in the PS4 section.

@Th3solution I'm enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would. It really does get better and better as you play further in. It has a couple of issues, most of which I've made a point of mentioning, but it does a LOT of things right. Really impressive show for a brand new IP. Hopefully Guerrilla Games is done with the Killzone games and devotes their time to ambitious original properties like this.

Rise of the Tomb Raider, Fist of the North Star, and Dead or Alive 6.

Crash Team Racing Nitro Fueled. The controls are a bit more complex than Mario Kart (especially the drift boosts), but I'm slowly getting the hang of it.

It's been fun so far. Winning a race can be challenging at first (I'm playing on normal difficulty) , but victory doesn't feel out of reach either. Losing a race isn't a big problem, you can just try again and do a little better each time until you get the hang of the course and win.

The only big annoyance I've had with it so far is with the power ups. Mostly it's fine, but there's been a couple of races where I've gotten unlucky and keep getting targeted with the homing rockets over and over again.

The shop in this game might also be a problem. Currently I'm getting about 40 coins per win. The shop generally needs many thousands of coins to purchase items. Maybe we can get drastically more coins later on in the game, but if not then it'll be tedious to get enough coins to buy things.

The race tracks have all been rather good so far, and the actual racing is very fun now after getting the hang of the controls.

@crimsontadpoles The rolling bombs can be fired backwards to take out homing rockets so they’re useful to hold onto if you’re out front.

You could do this on the original so I assume it’s still the case.

@Ralizah Your impressions are really good, because it just takes me back to two years ago and how I felt about my time with this game - even though it's very clear you're playing this game completely different from me.

I started playing The Handsome Collection today and opened up with a revisitation of Borderlands 2. I have a level 35 Siren character from PS3/Vita that I ported over via cross-save. I had already finished the main story missions and stopped playing somewhere in the midst of working on post game side quests. Based on my save data time stamp, the last time I played this game was over 4 years ago. It’s a very surreal experience to pick up a game where you left off so many years later. My Maya character is fully loaded with awesome rare weapons, upgraded skills and health, and some very fetching goth outfitting of her appearance to boot.

I spent the first hour or so just trying to figure out how to control her and interact with the world. I was throwing grenades in non-combat situations, meleeing when I meant to sprint, and dropping my best weapons out of my inventory when I intended to equip them. It was pretty frustrating. Not to mention the the first difficult enemy encounter I had — I died against a tough but routine enemy because I was hitting the wrong buttons and had completely forgot how to use my special power. It was a mess. But after an hour or two, it’s a blast. This game is great. It is so huge too, the amount of content is enormous.

I won’t derail this thread with detailed comment about the game itself, I’ll take that over to the Borderlands thread, but I did want to share my experience with trying to jump into end game mechanics with all the complex abilities when you’re basically a noob again. I came close to just giving up and starting a new character where I could go through tutorials and have the mechanics spoon fed gradually back to me again. But it’s amazing how quickly the muscle memory comes back, as well as the memory of the maps and how they work. I’ve played dozens and dozens of games over the last 4 years since BL2 (and very, very few have been FPS with the similar playstyle and commonality of prompts) but it’s interesting how it comes back remarkably quick.

One other comment of interest - I decided to play a little of the game on the Vita since I was double checking that I have the most recent save date uploaded to the cross-save cloud, and the Vita version runs extremely slow in comparison. I played nearly the whole storyline on Vita the first time with only a few short sessions on PS3, and at the time I remember thinking the Vita version played fine. But going back to it now it seems really clunky. Just the load times for starting the game are a test of patience. I’m not sure if the portable version is really that bad, or if my Vita is dying. I hope it’s the former.

@Th3solution Borderlands on Vita was notoriously bad. It's not your Vita.

@Kidfried Thanks. <3 It's fun talking about it with y'all.

You mention playing the game differently: I imagine you tend to gravitate toward main story missions, whereas I mainly just ignore them. Am I correct in that assumption?

@Th3solution Yeah, as I said in the HZD thread, I couldn't get into the DLC for the game at all as the combat mechanics felt so alien going back to the game and as my save was in the post-game all the enemies were pretty high level and wiped me out.

Similarly, going back to Witcher 3 for all the DLC a good while later was a struggle to start with but this was because they'd introduced enemy scaling. So the packs of wolves I was easily dispatching by coughing in their general direction were now ripping me to shreds.

It's one of the reasons I don't like story DLC; I'm normally done with a game once I've finished it and that's it. TW3 DLC was worth the hassle though.

@Thrillho That's why I'll be incorporating the DLC content into my base playthrough. And also why I tend to pass on games when I know they'll have story DLC releasing for them. I'd prefer to get the whole experience in one go, y'know?

@Ralizah Yeah I hope so (referring to my Vita). I’m paranoid about it dying. It is an original phat 3G OLED model so it’s got a lot of mileage. And now since they stopped manufacturing the Vita I’m scared to death that mine will die and I’ll be left scouring the internet for a second-hand scratched up and soiled Vita so I can play my backlog.

@Ralizah Yes, but also our fighting style sounds different. I hardly used the booby trap arrows at all for instance.

@Kidfried Oh yeah. I find that the entire arsenal has some utility. Blast wires are great for both offensive (traps) and defensive (spacing, especially when you string them along choke points) purposes. The elemental sling is OK when I want to freeze or shock an enemy. I don't see much use for shock or frost arrows when I can just use the vastly superior slings, but fire arrows are amazing. Put a few 40%+ fire element mods on your bow and you can set pretty much anything on fire quickly. It's amazing for tough human enemies.

Even the piddly spear has its uses, as running up and stabbing an enemy when they've fallen is an amazing way of inflicting damage.