Topic: What PS4 Games Are You Currently Playing?

@JohnnyShoulder I dunno. Probably. I didn't get that far. It's just not my typa lol funny. I just find the characters really grating. It's like what I always assumed Sunset Overdrive was like.

@johncalmc Yeah it was pretty annoying and I quickly become bored of most of the stuff you did in the game after the humour out stayed its welcome.

@johncalmc @JohnnyShoulder I find your comments interesting because so many people have been hating on the Saints Row reboot because "it's not like the older SR games" but this is exactly how the games were, at least from Saints Row 3 and onward. I just find it funny how all these people who only played the first two Saints Row games have come out of hiding and are now complaining that the series has lost its touch. It's been like this for a long time!

It's fine to not like these games because the humour doesn't appeal to you, but to say that the reboot has ruined the franchise is so off the mark (I'm not saying this to you guys, I'm just generally speaking).

@LtSarge Yeah totally, I get what you are saying. I've not even seen anything from the new game as I'm not interested in it and I'm not gonna complain that the developers change it just for me. Not every game is for everyone, and you are never gonna please everyone all of the time.

I suppose if Elden Ring turned out to be a visual novel or something I would be proper bummed, annoyed and stuff. Doubt I would do anything like start or sign a petition though. Maybe in my younger years, but these days there are so many games out there, I can just move onto something else.

My younger brother and I have been playing Borderlands 2 in split-screen the past few days. Basically everything about it is proper cringe but the gunplay’s decent and the structure’s fun so we’ll probably stick at it. It’s something to actually play in split-screen at least.

I finally made some significant progress in Pathfinder: Kingmaker which I'd put on the backburner having played through all of Uncharted 2 and some of 3.

There's a LOT of companions you can have in this.

Divinity Original Sin 2 only gave you three other party members and a total party of 4 whereas in Pathfinder it's a party of six I'm up to eleven members now I think and I'm almost certain there's a couple more waiting in the wings! 😄

No doubt this is because of the character classes (So you can have a nice and well balanced party that compliments one another), the allignment system so you can bring people you're less likely to cheese off or so you can bring the character's with you that you like.

I'm on the cusp of an allignment shift from Chaotic Neutral to Chaotic Good now and I think that means some of the more evil dialogue options are gonna start to get cut off?

Not too sure exactly what will happen beacuse of it but it's neat either way in how my dialogue options are slowly affecting my chatacter and her morals.

The kingdom management system is reslly starting to kick in now too with events starting to appear and needing to assign party members/advisors with vary rates of success and what they strive to do in the position they're in...

You have to keep going back to your newly formed Barony/Kingdom every few days and it gives it a nice Risk/Reward factor of how far your willing want to go out and explore, get loot or follow your next objective/point of interest & whether you should head back as quick as you can or head out further and risk missing valuable opportunities or problems cropping up in your wake and not having enough time to settle them 😁

As for the current story beat I'm in the midst of a troll invasion and the one vital piece of D&D/Pathfinder knowledge I knew of trolls having regenerative powers and can ressurect unless you use Fire or Acid to finish them is being tested thanks to these branded trolls being immune to fire.

... And I don't have much attacking options in the way of Acid as I went for fire based spells with my magic using characters. I desperately need that sweet sweet level up and pronto!

Not Elden Ring but a new souls-like… and one that at least tries to add new features to the genre… gunplay balanced with the deliberate melee of souls. Yes Immortal: Unchained was a souls-like shooter but at the expense of melee being not worthwhile at all:

I’ll be interested to find out whether they can find the right equilibrium here, one that has a right time for guns and a right time for melee.

Luckily I was only away from it for about 4/5 days @RogerRoger so it wasn't too bad to get back into the swing of things! 😄

Also luckily (from my quick little hour session earlier) I was only a few portions of exp away from level six so I was quickly able to slap an acid attack on both my main magic users to cover my bases!

Of course though that meant I had to give something else to learn those spells... 😥

Pathfinder's a bit hard to recommend as your first CRPG I think @TraCuz-. Truth be told this is only my second CRPG with Divinity Original Sin 2 being my first over the 2019-2020 christmas hols so I'm not that well versed in the genre.

The main thing about Pathfinder is that it's an adaptation of the pen & paper Pathfinder game (D&D basically) so it's a bit more complicated then Divinity I feel as it follows that ruleset fairly closely.

https://www.pushsquare.com/forums/retro_and_other_gaming/user...

I wrote a hefty impressions piece there of my first 20 hours of the game if you're interested.

But for a quicker conclusion I'd say no. Start off with Divinity Original Sin 2 out the two.

It's fully voice acted for one unlike Pathfinder (And there's a LOT of text in both games), combat I feel is a bit easier to get to grips with? It was also pretty much bug free from what I recall (Pathfinder Kingmaker being the first effort of a new studio's first game and the consoles release wasn't so good)

I really enjoyed my time with D:OS2, pouring 130+ hours into it and would easily play it through again at some point.

I know @JohnnyShoulder was playing the first Divinity Original Sin a few weeks back and I think that might've been his first CRPG? (Not 100% sure on that)

So he might be able to give some additional insight on how that was to get into? 😄

@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy Thanks for the info Foxy! I'm gonna look into Divinity impressions and stuff on YouTube, gonna get a glance and see if I find the gameplay enjoyable.

Btw I was thinking of putting my thoughts on FFXIV on the user impressions thread, is it easy to put photos in threads?

Yeah that was one of my first CRPG's @Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy, think I played Torment on PS4 a few back but only briefly.

I've not played it for a few weeks, not sure exactly why but was playing a couple of other games at the same time and drifted away from it. Was enjoying it though and do plan to go back to it at some point.

Don't think I had any problems getting into it and used to all systems. It did a good job of teaching with the pop up tutorials that came up. My main issue was the slow movement of the characters which made getting around a bit of a chore.

I’ve persevered with The Division 2 over the course of the week and it’s a strange one for me. I still wouldn’t say that I ‘particularly’ like it but I am now feeling the draw to boot it up, which I definitely wasn’t during my first two or three sessions.

It’s still repetitive but have now found a level of ‘comfort’ in the repetition and I definitely want to see it through to the end.

No worries @TraCuz-. Happy to help as best I can

All you have to do for an image is put the url of the image link between (img) (/img) (But with square brackets like how you do spoiler tags) and it's good to go.

Like this photo mode shot of Uncharted 2 with the skelly skin I just now uploaded to twitter.

It's fairly easy to do 😄

I think a bit of slow movement speeds comes with territory @JohnnyShoulder as Pathfinder's characters don't seem to move any faster

Though if I recall correctly one of the free DLC/mod packs Larian did for D:OS 2 included a faster movement speed. Not sure if that disabled trophies though 😮

Hopefully you get back into it! D:OS 1'll probably be the next CRPG I play unless Baldurs Gate 3 by Larian drops on consoles by the time I'm ready for another CRPG.

@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.