Topic: What PS4 Games Are You Currently Playing?

@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy Maybe they should give them all zimmerframes or something. 😂

I wanna give Wasteland 3 a go at some point, as a friend has played and was singing its praises.

@Th3solution Were my previous posts too heavily spoiler-tagged for you to read it? Sorry if you haven't played through the whole of RDR2 already, I assumed you had.

@TheBrandedSwordsman No it was fine, I just had forgotten that I read your post the day before. I’ve played through the entire story, although some of the details are fuzzy now 2 years later. I think the best is yet to come on the game for you. It’s a slow burn, but the story is fantastic. I love a couple of the musical pieces and Arthur is one of the great protagonists on PS4. His voice actor is phenomenal, imo.
Since you haven’t played the first game, it will be interesting to see what you make of the ending, but you have a ways to go.

Not sure if you saw any of my early FF7R thoughts; although I’ve not posted much. I’m about 5-6 hours into it and I do like it. I’ve been able to meet more new characters and that has helped. Overall I am liking the combat more and more, especially the materia system which involves attaching these magical orbs to your equipment. It was a huge part of the original game, so it’s great to see them carry it over yet still update the combat to have more action.

Mass Effect 2. I was planning on playing this sooner after finishing Mass Effect I think a couple of months ago, but a couple of PS5 games got bumped ahead. I didn't want to go through them one after the other anyways since then playing through these again would be over too quickly for me, but regardless it's great to be revisiting one of my favorite RPGs of all time.

So I was planning on getting a proper session in on The Division 2 today but the servers went down for three hours so rather than twiddle my thumbs, I checked through my library for something ‘light’ as I just needed a stop-gap. Found Undertale, so have started that… not my usual cup of tea but is an interesting diversion.

@JechtUltima I’ll be curious what you think. Just dropped a review of the game over on yonder thread and explained the reasons in more detail but in short, I quite liked it. It’s a pleasant surprise.

I started God of War yesterday. Probably 3 - 5 hours in. I just arrived at a lake of some sort when I stopped. Playing on the "Give Me a Challenge" difficulty, which... has certainly been living up to its name.

I'm not really feeling the hype thus far, since combat feels a tad clunky, and I detest how close the camera is to Kratos' back in battle, which makes battles artificially more difficult than they otherwise would be. But it's like virtually every other AAA game these days where your best abilities are hidden behind a skill tree unlocked by XP, I imagine, so I'm going to guess combat is going to get more fun as it goes on. Also not liking the idea that Atreus is going to keep getting grabbed in battle and forcing me to babysit him like Ashley in RE4.

So far, it feels like God of War by way of The Last of Us: a serious, cinematic dad game where you spend most of your play time either hacking down hordes of murderous baddies in setpiece sequences or trying to get your partner to drop you ropes/chains so that you can slowly scale walls while the game loads in. Except for that ten-minute superhero-esque boss fight with "the stranger" near the start of the game that goes on way too long.

Oh, and I kinda hate the in-game map. It's better than not having one at all, obviously, but it doesn't zoom in far enough and is designed in such a way that it's not very helpful for getting a sense of how the environment is laid out. Which especially sucks considering this is an Uncharted/TLoU-style game where Kratos can only navigate on specific parts of the environment and is unable to jump.

That was... pretty negative, looking back on it. I'm definitely going to keep playing, though, and see if it becomes more my thing. Let's finish with some positive impressions:

• Performance is great on the base PS4 considering the visual fidelity of the game itself. Santa Monica Studio did a great job optimizing this for the hardware, which is clearly punching above its weight here.
• Seamlessly structuring an entire game so that it never cuts away is probably a pretty impressive technical achievement. It was interesting how the game just... starts after you get to the opening screen.
• Considering all this, load times are pretty darn reasonable on PS4. Of course, I imagine this is because of how much loading the game does in the background at any one time, but the cinematic stylings do a better job of hiding this than something like FF7R, where you could instantly tell the game was loading in assets when it made you squeeze through an absurdly tight space for several seconds. AND that game still managed to have painful load times when you re-loaded a save anyway.
• I really like this chilled out iteration of Kratos. The character was almost obnoxiously angry in previous games. He's certainly not a cuddly fellow, but he feels much more like a person now and less like an edgelordy personification of toxic masculinity.
• Not a lot of games deal frankly with father/son relationships. This one does, and fairly well thus far.

With that said, I kinda... expected it to be good in those respects. Sony has a high bar for how their flagship exclusives perform on their consoles, after all.

Hopefully it gets better. I'll keep plugging away at it.

@Ralizah I feel like that's the kind of impression I'd get from playing PS exclusives today. Back when God of War came out, it was one of the best games I've played on PS4. But as Sony keeps releasing more third-person action games like Horizon, God of War, Spider-Man, Ghost of Tsushima, The Last of Us etc., they do start losing their appeal over time. The games are still really good, they just don't feel that unique anymore. I'm sure that if I returned to God of War today, I probably wouldn't like it as much as I did three years ago.

@LtSarge For me, it depends, I think, on how much the game opens up. I had similar reservations with the pacing of Horizon early on, but the game eventually comes into its own with expansive dungeons, tactical robot fights, and a compelling core gameplay loop that kept me glued to my PS4 for hours on end. There are the cinematic, setpiece-y main story bits as well, but they don't define the experience. Most of the game leaves the player alone to figure things out on their own and make their own path through the world.

I'm in the ringed temple now in God of War, and while combat is a bit more fun after unlocking some extra skills, I still feel like I'm on a guided tour of this world. I can almost feel the developers hurrying me along throughout the game, urging me not to fall behind the group. The streamlined level design and inability to navigate off the rails of your environments also add to this.

@Ralizah There comes a point where it opens up. I know exactly what you’re talking about it being on rails, which is basically what the originals felt like too. I enjoyed wandering around the world looking for collectibles more than the main story to be honest.

My main problem with God of War wasn't the fact that it seemed like Sony forced them to make it be like a lot of their other exclusives. Or at least they chose to, but anyways, it was his son. He was incredibly annoying to me, and I almost stopped playing it when he basically betrays Kratos. It still makes me wonder to this day how people were able to stomach the son enough to think it was one of the best games ever made.

Taking him out of the equation, the game was obviously incredibly well made. Like what has already been stated, it runs great and overall is one of the most technologically impressive games on the PS4 (behind only The Last of Us Part II and maybe a couple of others). I just wish they didn't make his son so obnoxious.

@Ralizah I think GoW strikes a nice balance between open world and linear. The hub area you eventually reach gives you a lot of freedom but the game keeps you going at a nice pace. There are plenty of optional places to explore and some places you certainly won't be able to beat until later on.

@KilloWertz Yep. Even with a game I strongly disliked like The Last of Us, I was still really impressed with the technical side of it. Sony's tentpole first-party games are, as tech showcases, a clear cut above their competitors.

@nessisonett I'm really glad the QTE-driven boss fights don't seem to be a thing here.

It's good to hear they loosen the narrative leash at some point. Although I do wonder how much of a pain it is going to be to backtrack through these environments. We'll see.

@Thrillho So, is it the sort of game where you need to hit a certain point in the main story before particular collectibles will become available to you? Because I've noticed certain chests have some sort of tentacles wrapped around them and just don't seem to be accessible.

Finished Iki Island DLC on Ghost. I didn't opt for the PS5 upgrade as I honestly didn't see the need to pay the extra money for a few extra hours content.

Loved the DLC though overall. Great story and character building for Jin. Feel the DLC with some of the extra side content was well worth the money.

I’ve been playing Resonance of Fate, specifically the 4K remaster. It’s legitimately good and has aged wonderfully considering it’s over 10 years old now. The art style feels like they’ve actually somehow managed to make a pretty game using the standard beige and brown PS3 palette. The combat’s unique and engaging and the plot’s not bad at all and rises above expected tropes. The only weird thing is hearing Nolan North’s voice in a JRPG!

@JechtUltima There’s an extensive optional tutorial available from the start of the game that goes through basically everything you need to know about the combat. I’d say if you do that then it’s not hard at all to get stuck into.

Yeah. And you gain certain abilities which will allow to get past these obstacles. I thought the way it was done was quite neat and ties into the game world really well.

@Th3solution @Jimmer-jammer In RDR2 I just completed the mission entitled A Quiet Time, wherein you have a "quiet" drink with Lenny which leads to a couple of searches for Lenny where you can, as you get progressively more drunk, gives you the option to 'grate' or 'great' other customers, then you get into a drunken brawl, end up running from the law and then wake up in jail in the morning, pay a ten dollar fine and get out short but sweet mission and really adds to the life sim quality of the game that you mentioned, sol. How are your games going?

@TheBrandedSwordsman I remember that mission and it was a really funny bit of content. What I really love and appreciate about RDR2 from the narrative standpoint is how these little bits of story and character development make you really bond with these characters. It adds so much depth and texture to the narrative.

In fact, on that subject, my gaming time with FF7R has been limited this week to one play session so far but I hope to enjoy a bit of time with it over the next few days. I mentioned on another thread how one of my few gripes with the game so far has to do with that issue of bonding to the characters and feeling like they are real people. Arthur and company felt very real to me. So far Cloud and company are less relatable. But they are growing on me. And I admit that it’s ridiculous that I would even compare the two games as RDR2 is a gritty simulation based rpg that takes place in the American Wild West, and FF7 is a fictional JRPG that sometimes embraces the whimsical and illogical as part of its charm. Nevertheless, I’ve not yet started to care about the plight of the protagonist to the degree that I had hoped. But I’m still in the early chapters and I expect that to change over time.

And it’s not necessarily that Japanese written characters can’t be extremely well conceived and performed to be relevant to a Western gamer. Kiryu from Yakuza was one of my favorite characters and just fantastic in how he was portrayed and relatable.

But the real fun of FF7R so far has been with the flashy combat and RPG aspects with shifting equipment around and learning new spells.

@Th3solution I get what you mean, I am definitely beginning to feel a sense of bonding, kinship and simpatico with Arthur and the rest of the gang. It's a shame you can't glean the same sense of those things from FF7R, but, to put a spin on your words, only time will tell if you can do that.How far have you made it % wise in that game? Are you going for the plat?