God of War (PS4): Kratos and the Dad-feels

I played the first hour tonight. Very impressive.

Yeah played 4 hours straight last night, the natural dialogue between Kratos & Arteus is outstanding (even to the point Arteus is calling out enemy attacks, talking about types of enemy, puzzles scenarios etc) & once the combat clicks it feels amazing. The setting is just so good, I like the light puzzles so far, being able to throw the axe to freeze gates in place, or destroy those little glowing blocks to open those special chests.

The throwing & recalling of the levathian axe is epic, I froze a draugr in place for a good 15-20 secs with the axe lodged right in its chest while I focused on the other enemies around me. I love the fact that certain attacks or strategies are required for different enemies, the axe does nothing against those frost type enemies so press right on the directional pad & let your fists fly. There's an enemy a couple of hours in that I literally don't think is beatable without Arteus doing his thing.

One of the boss fights was jaw dropping, starting with a war of words then some of the best battle scenarios I've seen in a long time, all while the dialogue is going back & forth in the midst of battle furthering the story.

Massively impressed thus far.

...resistance to buying game... dwindling...

I should vote with my money to encourage good practice right? Buying this game full price will really be me being altruistic and doing good for games as an industry. It's really my moral duty to play this game as soon as possible...

Ok. You've convinced me. I'll go buy it... Good talk.

This was one of my three most anticipated releases of the year (the other two being Detroid and A Way Out). I literally couldn't wait to get my hands on the game and when I found out that my amazon preorder wouldn't be here before the weekend I drove a couple of miles to get the games in my hands as soon as possible so I could start playing last night.

I haven't really been reading many previews to be honest since I didn't want to spoil anything. I'm a huge fan of the original GOW trilogy and I just knew that I would love this game to bits and pieces...

Well, I don't. The graphics are beyond aweseome, the story sets off to be incredible and I just want to be see through how it plays out but... I do not enjoy the fighting at all! In fact I hate it. This doesn't feel like GOW anymore. It's basically a more entry level and more action oriented Dark Souls.

It's still a very polished game and probably deserves all the praise it gets but I can't help feeling dissappointed.

MEATER wrote:

This was one of my three most anticipated releases of the year (the other two being Detroid and A Way Out). I literally couldn't wait to get my hands on the game and when I found out that my amazon preorder wouldn't be here before the weekend I drove a couple of miles to get the games in my hands as soon as possible so I could start playing last night.

I haven't really been reading many previews to be honest since I didn't want to spoil anything. I'm a huge fan of the original GOW trilogy and I just knew that I would love this game to bits and pieces...

Well, I don't. The graphics are beyond aweseome, the story sets off to be incredible and I just want to be see through how it plays out but... I do not enjoy the fighting at all! In fact I hate it. This doesn't feel like GOW anymore. It's basically a more entry level and more action oriented Dark Souls.

It's still a very polished game and probably deserves all the praise it gets but I can't help feeling dissappointed.

Anazon is terrible with preorders. They don’t have release day delivery at all. Best Buy on the other hand has been on too of it.

Its so good to see Cory's passion here & how much it means to him for the game to be well recieved. Chuffed for the guy & the whole Santa Monica team, they've poured 5 years of hard work into this.

I played it for a couple of hours yesterday and I am very very impressed. Spikeout said it best, so I'll just +1 his post.

That said, I was never a fan of the previous GoW games. I played the original PS2 game for a few hours and was meh on it. I can totally see how a fan like Meater can be disappointed with changes but for me, personally, these changes were necessary for me to enjoy the game.

In this sense, GoW's evolution is very similar to Assassin Creed Origins and, to an extent, Tomb Raider. For sure, there were people who loved old iterations and their mechanics but I wasn't one of them. Changing up the formula could have alienated some of the old fans (and I feel for them) but, selfishly, I am very happy with changes.

I'm about ten hours in now. Tuned the combat down to the lowest difficulty and now it's not really bothering me anymore. There are a lot of collectibles and upgrades that I also don't care about, but the story and presentation are excellent!

I also enjoy the puzzles. Throwing the axe around at stuff is a lot of fun and they really had some nice ideas how to use that mechanic outside of combat!

Looking forward to play more tomorrow.

GoW is one series I never got around to playing so I wasnt really anticipating this game at all. After a few hours though, man this is the real deal. There is some cool sh*t in this game and Ive barely scratched the surface.

Balthezor wrote:

Anazon is terrible with preorders. They don’t have release day delivery at all. Best Buy on the other hand has been on too of it.

I always preorder from Amazon and barring one item, all the games I've ordered have arrived on their release day. Including this game. So... YMMV I guess.

My Amazon Stone Mason edition preorder doesn't come until next week. Not pleased, but I'll wait.

I am so impressed with this game. It is spectacular to see the series grow up in so many ways. The story so far is amazing and the connection between story and gameplay is so tight. So many small, beautiful story moments and I’m only a few hours in. They have managed to change glorified teenage violence into a mature treatment of violence and rage. I know the combat has changed a ton but I welcome the changes. It is still brutal and challenging and there seems to be so many ways to jump into a combat scenario. I can’t wait to jump into the next fight. I think I might be in the perfect demographic for this game though having begun the series as a teenager/young adult and am now married with two kids of my own.

I like how the codex/bestiary is written by the boy. I almost always ignore this feature in games but here I find myself taking the time to read each new entry.

Also very impressed with this game in every aspect. The kid started as pretty irritating but he's getting better now (I imagine that's intentional). I'm on hard/challenging difficulty and it's very challenging. Most fights take me 3 or 4 attempts. I'm considering bumping it down but I heard it gets more forgiving once you get some gear and upgrades.

AcidCat wrote:

I like how the codex/bestiary is written by the boy. I almost always ignore this feature in games but here I find myself taking the time to read each new entry.

I like it too, but the text size is so small, I have to stand up and walk closer to the screen to see it. I have a 60" TV.

It's sad that so many people have had problems with Amazon preorders. I preorder from them a lot for the 20% discount, and I think I've gotten the game on release day every time. Hell, I got Persona 5 a day or two early.

Eleven hours in and with some of the combos unlocked in the combat started to click with me and I dialed the difficulty back up to challenging. It also did help a lot that at some point two old "friends" from previous games showed up.

I'm still hopelessly outranked in the encounters that have some enemies shooting from above. I just can't aim well enough with a gamepad under pressure. Though I think the puzzles have trained me to some extend in that regard. In some fights there's still too much going on for me to keep track of everything which was one of the strengths of previous GoW games that didn't require you to handle the camera on top of everything else.

Since I had no other plans I started playing around noon and basically played until the controller ran out of juice. The story took some nice turns though around 20 hours in I think I have an idea where it might be headed. I'm actually surprised that the game is this long and still manages to keep things fresh by adding new enemies and encounter setups to the mix.

The game is also the best showcase for HDR TVs. Makes me feel sorry I played Uncharted 4 on my old tv and the non-pro PS4.

I'm quite liking the game, but I wish it had a bit less combat. I've reached the lake.

Came across a game breaking bug while doing a side quest:

I was able to load a recent save and fix it, but still...

The combat is so layered in GOW, it literally gets better & better the more you progress, utterly outstanding.

One of the many cool things in the advanced combat video by the developers is 'partition dodge' which means that if you dart (left stick + x) rather than roll (left stick + double tap x) you can keep your combo going (where as the roll breaks it), so neat!

Game duly purchased.

I've done my first throw out and delayed call back of the axe. I'm excited to play on.

So far I’m having a lot of fun playing Terrible Dad Simulator.

It’s kinda funny how Atreus often acts as a sort of “quest marker” in the game, showing where you should go next. So naturally, my immediate inclination is to abandon him and run off in the opposite direction to look for secrets.

First major fight aaaaand I love this game.

muttonchop wrote:

So far I’m having a lot of fun playing Terrible Dad Simulator.

It’s kinda funny how Atreus often acts as a sort of “quest marker” in the game, showing where you should go next. So naturally, my immediate inclination is to abandon him and run off in the opposite direction to look for secrets.

Hah, yeah same. I think the game teaches you very early to go the opposite way sometimes, poke around, the exploration feels natural and the levels aren't so big that you're getting lost, and these detours are always rewarded. I really like the structure so far.

Finished the game today. I guess it took me something like 25 hours but 10 of those were on easy difficulty.

Excellent game! Loved how they managed to keep the story interesting and since I wasn't too fond of the fighting I was also glad they didn't stuff the game with a fight around every corner which they could have easily used to extend the game beyond 40 hours.

In the end I have only some minor things to nitpick about:

Overall the game feels like Sony told Santa Monica to give God of War the Uncharted/Last of Us treatment. You have all of the typical walking around listening to conversations, cinematic ingame cut scenes etc. Of course the combat is different but still. The game also took a lot of inspiration from other games like the recent Tomb Raiders. So overall it felt less original to me than the first three GoW games. But whatever the overall experience was so stunningly beatiful and polished that I didn't care much.

The whole upgrading part seemed a little pointless even on hard. I did quite some exploring to upgrade stuff even though I ignored the side missions and realms that seemed too far off the main story path. It never really worth it since you usually got better armor more or less automatically as the story progresses. Again I prefered the upgrading system in previous GoW games. Here it feels like it's basically needed to justify the open world stuff. I did enjoy exploring the world though so I guess that's fine. You can keep playing and the hardest enemy I encountered was about 2 levels above the level I had when I finished the game so it might be worth it for the "endgame".

The game looks like it was build with DLC in mind. There are some obvious gaps left open that would easily justify either DLC or maybe a follow up like Lost Legacy. Again I wouldn't mind if they made a sequel sooner than 5 another years. Overall the game also made me curious about nordic mythology as some of the stuff was different from what I know from other popcultural usage of this material.

My only real disappointment was with a story twist towards the last third of the game:

Spoiler:

After Atreus finds out about his heritage his demenor changes quite drastically. I loved how they actually manged to portray this in game not just via voice overs, eg. by him becoming much more reckless and less supportive - I even think he did stop healing Kratos. The whole thing just stops to suddenly. They missed a great opportunity here to add more layers to the father-son relationship. The resolution of this either was meant to hint something that might happen in a sequel or DLC or they just didn't find a good way to bring Atreus around again.

Anyways: Awesome game! Definite Game of the Year material. Shows what Microsoft is failing to deliver this console generation. The only thing that got near it was Quantum Break.

I've played a few hours so far and while I am enjoying the overall experience of the game I don't like the combat.

One issue I have is that I think that playing Monster Hunter World is confusing my brain when it comes to the controls. My main issue is that on anything other than the easiest difficulty I dislike how much damage Kratos takes compared to how much damage Kratos can dish out.

I've got a question about game progression.

Spoiler:

When you first meet Brok there are two paths that seem like story progression paths. One path is reached by climbing down a chain and going under a small bridge to an area that says "Path to the Mountain". The other path is has a puzzle that I did to get a runic chest.
Is the game open world to the point I'm not going to be locked out of areas after progressing through story sections?

Feel free to spoil anything related to game progression thresholds.

Gimpy_Butzke wrote:

I've played a few hours so far and while I am enjoying the overall experience of the game I don't like the combat.

One issue I have is that I think that playing Monster Hunter World is confusing my brain when it comes to the controls. My main issue is that on anything other than the easiest difficulty I dislike how much damage Kratos takes compared to how much damage Kratos can dish out.

I've got a question about game progression.

Spoiler:

When you first meet Brok there are two paths that seem like story progression paths. One path is reached by climbing down a chain and going under a small bridge to an area that says "Path to the Mountain". The other path is has a puzzle that I did to get a runic chest.
Is the game open world to the point I'm not going to be locked out of areas after progressing through story sections?

Feel free to spoil anything related to game progression thresholds.

You can always go back to older areas. In fact, you are locked out of certain areas/chests until you progress the story far enough. so it is expected you will circle back.

I have put about 15 or so hours in so far and WOW. I was NOT expecting this from a GoW entry. Easily up there with Horizon Zero Dawn. Fantastic story, really satisfying combat (the dang axe even makes the same sound Thor's hammer does in the MCU when you are calling it back), and it is beeeautiful.

I have spent far too much time just throwing my axe around and calling it back. One of the best mechanics ever. OH so satisfying as you can damage things with the axe on the way BACK as much on the way out.

Also....Teal'c!!!

Loving the game. But one thing I wish was different. Camera more like Dark Souls rather than over the shoulder. I feel like the camera is annoying when fighting multiple enemies. I wonder why they chose that camera angle.

Balthezor wrote:

Loving the game. But one thing I wish was different. Camera more like Dark Souls rather than over the shoulder. I feel like the camera is annoying when fighting multiple enemies. I wonder why they chose that camera angle.

Agreed. The camera is way too close in fine console FoV tradition.

Nearly everything else us outstanding but does anyone else feel that Kratos (and the boats) feel a little floaty and disconnected from the environment?

Gimpy_Butzke wrote:

I've played a few hours so far and while I am enjoying the overall experience of the game I don't like the combat.

One issue I have is that I think that playing Monster Hunter World is confusing my brain when it comes to the controls. My main issue is that on anything other than the easiest difficulty I dislike how much damage Kratos takes compared to how much damage Kratos can dish out.

I felt the same early on but once I got a health upgrade and a few new moves and weapon upgrades the combat became much less frustrating. I’ve gone from feeling like I would have to tolerate the combat to really enjoying it.

Get every rune chest you come across. Also, upgrade the boy’s skills and use him in combat. He becomes a huge help.