Topic: What PS5 Games Are You Currently Playing?

@Th3solution Is this the one near the ranch?

@Voltan Yes, I think so. It’s in a underground area as part of a side quest about some lost prospectors in a mine in that first open area on the way to meet Greez for the first time. I’m only about 8 hours in. It’s the first time I’ve actually died, and I did so about 10 times trying to kill it. I might be a little too early to have taken it on, but I didn’t know what I was in for.

The difficulty is all over the place. A lot of enemies I’m one-shotting and then there’s all of a sudden a really tough swarm of enemies from time to time, and then there was this tough boss out of nowhere. Perhaps I was supposed to just go straight to the story marker but I’ve been wandering around and trying to clear the map first. (Playing on the default Jedi Knight / normal difficulty)

@Th3solution Yeah, while technically you can beat every enemy you can get to even without any upgrades, the game is definitely designed in a way that encourages going elsewhere and returning when you're stronger if you encounter something that's giving you a hard time.
That said, some bosses are pretty tough even when you're literally fully upgraded - you still need to figure out their patterns and correct answers to their unblockables.

That was the easy Rancor, btw

@Voltan Haha! Great, just great. Can’t wait for the powered-up version. I’m trying to imagine something harder than a one-hit kill even when my health is full… 😅 Well, at least I have the lower difficulty setting option in my back pocket. For this Rancor fight the merciful thing was that there was a respawn / meditation spot right next to the boss. So far the game is pretty liberal with meditation spots. That’s one difference between this and a FromSoft game. Some of the From games contain treks to the boss that are worse than the boss itself. Perhaps there will be more of that as I progress further into this game.

Comparing this to the From games, there’s less “cheap” deaths where an enemy jumps you and knocks you off a cliff, although there has been a little of that. Also, the mixture of Uncharted style platforming, climbing and puzzle solving make for a different flow to the game. And that’s where the big boss and mini-boss difficulty slaps you in the face. I’ll be moseying along decimating stormtroopers with ease and then have a 30 minute sequence with no enemies where I solve a puzzle and then wham-o! a tough enemy encounter comes out of left field. The Souls games have difficulty spikes too but they happen more frequently so as to have that constant feeling that you will die at every turn, whereas here you’re lulled into false security by a puzzle where you have to move blocks around with the Force. 😅

@RogerRoger That's a good suggestion but there aren't really any places in the vicinity that I haven't checked. I think it might've been caused by the fact that I ran into (and defeated) some of the hunters while just exploring the map, without asking Caij for their location first but I can't be sure.
Right now there doesn't seem to be any way to make them appear so I'll wait for this to be patched (there's already a 3 week old thread about this on EA's support forum).

@RogerRoger Great screenshots! Especially since there’s no photo mode. Taking them required some skilled timing and so I can see how it would result in a few deaths.

The enemy variety is impressive so far. Some of the troopers and droids are slight variations of the base unit but there’s quite a few new wrinkles already, and I’m still very early in the game. I think there’s already more enemy types in the first 8 hours than in the whole 80 hours I spent with Hogwarts Legacy.

Question for you and/or @Voltan —
Is there a recommended approach to using skill points? I’ve been dropping them in the survival tree and the double-bladed (my preferred stance so far) pathway and mostly have ignored the force stuff and other skills. It looks like respec of the skill points comes without penalty, but I haven’t tried yet.

Would you recommend clearing the map and exploring as I go, or following the story marker first and coming back later to explore? My playstyle has always been to clear as I go, but I think in a game like this I might be making life harder than it needs to be. I think my justification for obsessive map clearing stems from playing too many older games over the years where you get locked out of content if you trigger the next story section (missing collectibles in Uncharted, as an example), I suspect there’s isn’t anything that I’ll miss out on if I don’t get to it the first go around? I also do like getting secrets and power-ups early on to make the game easier for the later game’s difficult encounters. Like getting the shatter perk already is sure to be a nice boon after downing that rancor. Volt, I think you seemed to indicate maybe it’s best to follow the story markers first and come back for most of the extra content?

@Th3solution I also did the "explore as I go" thing but it resulted in coming back to the same places multiple times because you will be missing some abilities needed for traversal, which you only get through story progression.
That said, doing side stuff can grant you health and force upgrades as well as additional skill points, which could be useful during the story missions (as some of the hardest encounters are within story missions), so it's probably best to find a balance that works for you.
As for skill trees, I'd say just put the points into whatever you find you like using. Don't ignore the telekinesis tree though, the skills that let you affect larger enemies become very useful - to a point where you'll be basically able to skip some miniboss fights by pushing them off a cliff

@Voltan Thanks, that sounds like a good approach. I’ll just go with the flow. I don’t know what future planets and areas will be like but for large open hubs I’m thinking about just starting with a straight-line to any obvious meditation points, pick up what I can along the way, and then once I’ve unlocked some of the main meditation spots shift focus on the story. That might make for an easier time later due to the very convenient fast travel system.

And that’s good to know about the telekinesis since I’ve completely left it alone since that tree’s opening skill of pulling multiple enemies together seemed unhelpful since I’d like to keep the melee enemies far apart and pick them off one by one.

@RogerRoger Is it on by default? If so, it's so brutal I didn't even notice it
Otherwise I didn't have it on as the only setting I ever touched was performance mode on/off

@RogerRoger Oh man, I completely missed the photo mode! I guess I need to enable that. I’ve been going into settings, disabling the HUD, and then taking static photos of the gameplay screen. 😅

As for the dismemberment, I think I do have it enabled, but I can’t remember anything off the top of my head. There is copious slicing up of the creatures like the (apologies for not knowing the names —) little caterpillar creatures and the big beasty gorilla like creatures. When you do a finisher on them it will slice the worms in half and slice off one of the beast’s arms. It is pretty cool if you’ve not seen it and not terribly gruesome since the saber cauterizes the limb with no bleeding.

Interestingly I noticed that when rancor grabbed me and chomped down on Cal’s body with the death animation that just before it bites down the camera pans up so as not to show the actual crushing motion. Probably an effort to keep the game rated T.

@RogerRoger Yeah, it is surprising that games like Uncharted have it be so simple, but yet Guerrilla has yet to figure it out with Horizon. They need to just strip it down to the simplicity of something like the open world Assassin's Creed games and let you climb almost anything and not have to worry about extra commands to jump backwards, along with the gliding and flying of course. As big of a fan of Horizon as I am and the sequel being my favorite game of the generation so far, that was my one major complaint with Forbidden West.

Playing warzone 1 / 2 and Final Fantasy XII.

Football Manager 2023 and COD

@RogerRoger My only gripe with the controls was during hairy moments Aloy would sometimes grip onto something to climb on. Not what you need when a huge beasty or a group of smaller ones are breathing down your neck!

@Kidfried Yep, we got my mum that one for her birthday and played it together over a week or two. I thought it was pretty good, darker than expected too! There was a little bit of ‘what now’ during the asylum section and wandering around was very confusing but it was great overall.

@RogerRoger @Kidfried Complaints about traversal aside, I'd say the controls are still better than Breath of the Wild's. It's not so much the controls themselves, aside from having Circle be used for jumping behind yourself.. It's the fact that they made the process of climbing and jumping overly complicated, as if you could just climb everything like you can in open world Assassin's Creed, things would be easier. It's incredibly annoying at times to be climbing up something, but then not be able to climb all the way to the top just because Guerrilla said so even though Aloy could easily keep going.

In Breath of the Wild, you can sometimes have to hold onto buttons and move around menus just to go through your weapons and ammo. I can only imagine how absurd that would be with the joy-cons as opposed to the Pro controller. Things that should be simple to do aren't, and it's made even worse when you are in the middle of a battle with things breaking on you. Immortals Fenyx Rising is so much easier to play than Breath of the Wild (talking about gameplay, not difficulty).

I'm glad that you are having so much fun with Forbidden West in spite of a few issues. My score would be roughly the same, as it is still clearly my game of the console generation so far.

I've just finished playing Ys IX and I need to start a new digital game from PS + (because I cannot be bothered swapping out my Prodeus disc every time I want to swap games.)

For some reason Bus Simulator 21 is calling to me. Can anyone recommend or give thoughts on it? Feel free to @ me in replies so I get alert.

Nb. if you haven't played a Ys game before, start with VIII, even though most stories are self contained, IX is a real let down compared to VIII

Diablo IV.

@KAIRU Somebody just snuck back onto the forums...

@KilloWertz
Shhhh. Stay calm and act natural, we don't want to startle them.