Topic: What PS4 Games Are You Currently Playing?

@LtSarge Yeah Doom 3 is great and it is a shame that it received a poor reception on its initial launch.
I played it a few years back on the PS4 and recently the PSVR version which is quite scary, not least the tiny heads on the NPCs (yes there are a few issues but it plays well).

So I decided to put P4 Golden on hold for the time being. Leaving it just after the mitsuo fight is a good enough stopping point for me!

I'm keeping with Atlus though and decided to go into Soul Hackers 2 and am now about 15 hours in.

It clearly had some rushed schedule or a minsicule budget or some mixture of the two. That much is obvious when your first proper dungeon is a subway... And the second is also a subway.

Not to mention that there's the soul matrix and it's associated dungeons that linked to your three party members and their psyche... Which also look the exact same with a generic cyberspacey blocky look.

It kinda reminds me of a PS2 era Atlus game to be honest (Especially Nocturne or DDS) in terms of dungeon layout and such with it just having the more recent "Atlus flair™".

Not really a problem for me to though (Well the two subways in a row is a bit much) as it seems to encourage you doing a bit of a dungeon and then leaving, taking a breather or maybe entering the soul matrix for a bit before coming back.

The first proper boss kicked my ass and then some though. I was really quite surpised at that, especially as I'm playing on normal difficulty!

So I upgraded my weapons properly, got demons to have an extra skill slot (They only start with 4 which really took some getting used to on how your loadouts are) and fused some better mons before returning to the boss and ended up wiping the floor with them.

Oh and I adore the cast. Ringo's delightfully sassy and kind of a dork at times. Arrow's a bit bland at the moment but he could get better. Milady has some great moments but then there's Saizo.

He's the best. I love him. He has a snazzy outfit, some great portraits, and his backstory is very endearing.

The sabbath system takes a while to really click but now it's starting to get there now that I can actually combo properly and get more then a handful of stacks to really amp up the damage.

The fact there's actually a reason to use status skills in SH2 which is something worth praising. Just making them thier own element (Ruin) and that they deal damage along with poison or whatever just with a higher cost then an elemental spell makes them infinitely more useful and worthwhile then in any other Atlus game!

Overall I'm having a pretty good time with SH2 and I'm really looking forward to see where the story goes!

@RogerRoger @AgentCooper @CaptD It's crazy to me that the game had a poor initial reception. This seems like one of those games, like Halo: CE and Half-Life, that pushed the FPS genre forward. And in terms of the horror aspect, I feel like some horror series were inspired by DOOM 3, such as the FEAR series.

Granted, when I started playing the game, it didn't feel much like DOOM. But the more you play, the more it'll feel like it. I now have a wide arsenal of weapons, including the chainsaw, and I'm having a blast mowing down enemies, just like in the previous entries. It's so much fun!

I am currently playing 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim. I only managed to play it for 30 minutes so far, but I’ve heard great things about it and I’m looking forward to getting home from work tomorrow and having a good session on it.

@LtSarge Doom 3 is good, but Resident Evil 4 ruined it for me. I played the Xbox version first in 2005 and the shooting just seemed like a step back after the gunplay in Resident Evil 4. It was just amazing to me that enemies reacted realistically depending on where they were shot. In Doom 3 that wasn’t a thing.

sort of playing Kombat league for Mortal Kombat 11 since today is the last day for the Kombat League Reptile skin going on. My points were decaying a little bit so had to do 2 or 3 kombat sets to raise them back up a little bit but not much. I only had to play through the stupid kombat league previously this month for the Reptile skin for Scorpion. the other rewards i dont care for too much

I've been back on Bloodborne for a week or so (first time since 2015), and things were going smoothly, but Old Yharnam has proven to be a barrier yet again. Slogged through the Hunter gunner, now I'm back to Blood-Starved Beast kicking my butt again, despite having little issue with the first two bosses or almost any of the major bosses in Elden Ring and Dark Souls lol.

Which is funny, considering his counter windows are pretty generous with one of his attacks.

Still not a huge fan of this game, despite having a renewed appreciation for this developer's work.

I'm currently taking a break from Baldurs Gate III (in Act 3) to replay Bloodborne. Playing around with arcane this time, and went for the hunters axe for my starter weapon for the first time.

I am playing Digimon Survive. I’m impressed with how animated it is compared to most visual novels. The battle system seems decent, but I’m happy to see an auto battle option.

I lost a lot of time on ps4 in witcher 3, I really wish I had cs on ps watching the pros play this game https://bo3.gg/tools/compare/players

Alright. BSB is dusted. So is Vicar Amelia. Also gained access to the Hypogean Gaol. The boars there are amazing for farming blood vials. Now it's off to fight the witches.

Right so I have finally after some years begun to play God of War 3. It feels as such a cool and interesting game. Now as usual as is the case with me I dont expect to beat the game in a day or two as many of you here manage do to. It usually takes a little bit longer for me to finish a game. That dos however not mean that dont have a great time with the game (I really have). It feels so cool to finally play a God of War game again (a franchise which I have very found memories of playing some years ago). I really try to think and analyze things as I play and yeah might come back with a more proper review later but I can state Iam impressed with the game so far.

@LtStrage Its cool that you found Doom 3 to be good. I think I will pick up a copy of the game myself soon. That being said, I feel like Wolfenstein deserves some attention as well. I mean it often feels like people tend to focus more on Doom and forgot about the Wolfenstein franchise these days. Not sure if it is because of the 30 years anniversary that Doom and not Wolfenstein have gotten so much attention as of late. I do think in retrospect that Wolfenstein must also have been an influential franchise. Its a franchise which I think are cool at least and somewhat unique.

Went back to Bloodborne today and have played a good deal. No idea how far in I am.

I don't know who Mergo is, but her Wet Nurse can bite me. I lost 30,000 souls to that thing. Although at least it's a real boss fight. That Micolash one was just pathetic. Weird ninny with a cage on his head runs around howling, and it seems random as to when he decides to run toward the room in that first area.

Still my least favorite Soulslike game from From Software to date.

edit: Wait... it's over?

That was anti-climactic.

Not as bad as the last bit of Elden Ring, at least. From Software can't end a game to save its life.

Couldn't have uninstalled it faster if I tried.

Depending on the choice you made and the ending you took @Ralizah there's at least 2 other fights, some bonus ones as well as a bunch of boss encounters in the chalice dungeons.

It's my least favourite FromSoft game as well actually

@HallowMoonshadow The old dude decapitated me in the garden, and I woke up in town again. So... happy... ending...?

Yeah, I'm sure there's more content, but are all the endings just sort of abrupt like this? That's been my experience with all From Software games to date.

Oh, good, so I'm not the only one.

Boring environments. Limited customization. Way too many things that exist just to be a nuisance (like the gunner in Old Yharnam, or that building that kept shooting spikes at me in the Nightmare of Mensis). The game has decent music during some boss fights, but there's almost nothing otherwise musically.

I'm better at it in the sense that I wasn't continually getting lost like I did the first time, but it's still not particularly fun.

Performance and image quality are terrible. Dark Souls Remastered on Switch, of all things, looked so much better than this.

Like Super Mario 64 and the original Xenoblade Chronicles, I'm glad I finally beat it. But also like those games, I never want to play it again.

I'm not kinda sure myself if that's a good ending or not @Ralizah. Bloodborne is all about dreams and nightmares & it reminds me of that old chinese philosophical question of the butterfly.

Were you an ordinary human dreaming you were a hunter? Or a hunter dreaming you were ordinary? The cosmic horror elements of the second half don't help things

Saying no to Gerhman would've netted a fight against him which has some wonderful music and I really enjoyed the fight too.

The third end involves you needing all 3 umbilcal cords which then involves a fight against the "True?" antagonist??

I haven't played Elden Ring but I of the FS games I've played most are on the abrupt side though.

I'm not really fond of the weapons and the lack of build variety myself. Loved the art direction even if it is messy technically (Which FS aren't exactly great at)

@Ralizah @HallowMoonshadow Yeah, narratively speaking, FromSoft games are very cryptic and minimalist, in my limited experience. I’m not necessarily a Lovecraftian horror fan, but I did find Bloodborne’s storyline and ending better than Dark Souls and Demon’s Souls. I save scummed to get all three endings and they all had merit, but all ended rather abruptly, to be frank.

@HallowMoonshadow @Th3solution IMO there's a line where cryptic and minimalistic becomes underdeveloped, and FS games tend to fall on the wrong side of that for me (Elden Ring was actually a little better in that regard, at least).

I think something like SMT: Nocturne is a better example of an RPG that doesn't spoonfeed the plot to you, but gives you enough to go off of.

I dunno. I've found multiple aspects of these games I enjoy (ER and Dark Souls Remastered were both pretty good experiences for me overall), but I feel like From gets such a pass on basic aspects of game design that anyone else would get torched for messing up. There's a lot of potential for a really cool horror yarn in Bloodborne, but it never seems to materialize into anything.

Guess I should have chosen the other ending option, but I didn't backup my save so eh.

@Ralizah It’s a good point. There’s been cryptic game plots that felt more satisfying. I’d go with one of my all-timers, Shadow of the Colossus as an example.

Part of it boils down to lack of any meaningful character development. The background narrative in these Souls games depends upon having some emotional investment in NPC and boss characters which honestly don’t have any real expansive portrayal. The games rely on exquisite art design to make boss characters feel menacing, but there’s not much writing to back it up. At least not without looking up their backstory online. The important NPC’s also tend to feel bland and usually one-note.

That said, the atmosphere and level design do keep me engaged, even if I can’t recount the actual plot lines of any of the From games I’ve played. 😅 A solid crescendo ending is so key to a good narrative, and the From games tend to rather go for frequent smaller climax moments and then end without much subsequent exposition. (I still have really enjoyed the From games I’ve played though, to be clear)

@Ralizah With all the Souls games I’ve ended up looking at a guide to get the “best” ending as some of them are so convoluted.

DS3 had some ludicrous thing involving speaking to hidden characters, getting married at an altar or something etc that o have no idea how anyone could discover for themselves.