Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice Catch-All

So the stealth skill is pretty great. Makes sneaking easier to get up on killer chickens.

For anyone else experiencing sudden massive FPS drops for no reason.

Open Device manager
Expand the "Software Devices" section
Right click on "Microsoft Device Association Root Enumerator"
Select "Disable"
Click ok.

I've verified this fixes the problem. I'm now getting a solid buttery smooth 90 fps

So the fix was literally "From Software"?!? It now makes so much sense.

Classic. Yesterday I got to a boss that seemed nearly impossible. Really fast, super hard to read the attacks in the first phase, could barely get 25% health off while spamming healing potions.
Today he died in two tries.
It nearly felt Dark Souls like - ended up playing extremely defensive The only way I know.

I was worried, especially early on, that I couldn't compensate for my lack of skill with cheesing but after nearly 30 hrs this weekend I can report cheesing is alive and well.

Hobear wrote:

So the fix was literally "From Software"?!? It now makes so much sense.

Still get some freezes and drops.

I love it, it totally slipped my mind until my friend asked me if I was getting it about a week before it came out. From Software are one of the few developers I will pre-order a game for.

The stealth games make this game. Being able to pick off enemies like a Metal Gear solid game is such a great mix into the From formula.

I beat the first "real" boss today. Slowly getting better at it felt real good. In the end, it was a matter of being greedy at the right time.

Mechanical spoiler:

Spoiler:

Finishing this boss gets you a trophy on the PS4 (of which 42% have at this time), and also unlocks Shinobi tool upgrades.

After that, I faced another mini-boss that had the most Dark Souls trolly thing I've seen so far. Which reminds me: I'm so used to being ambushed in these games that any time I see loot out out in the open, I'm very suspicious. So far, there have not been too many ambushes.

Finally beat

Spoiler:

ghost girl

Was actually possible to stealth hit that one. Bit cheesy though. The boss that came game after was actually easier for me.

Getting that double strike skill was a game changer for me. The ability to gain posture and attack is amazing. It lets you stay on the offense way more. I've also realized shinobi tools are very useful to keep an enemy's guard from going down if they run away.

Currently fighting

Spoiler:

guardian ape

I almost got it, I think, but damn it's a pain. Fun though.

I seem unable to use ceramic pots effectively, they just seem to break and no one notices. Is there a way to aim and throw them?

Clusks wrote:

I seem unable to use ceramic pots effectively, they just seem to break and no one notices. Is there a way to aim and throw them?

I thought you were supposed to target the enemy and throw the ceramic at them to make them come to you to investigate?

JeremyK wrote:

I was worried, especially early on, that I couldn't compensate for my lack of skill with cheesing but after nearly 30 hrs this weekend I can report cheesing is alive and well. :D

Do tell! I need all the cheese I can get.

In these games, I always enjoyed the actual levels, exploring them and killing regular enemies. I always hated bosses and will need some cheesy tactics to beat them in this game.

Hedinn wrote:
Clusks wrote:

I seem unable to use ceramic pots effectively, they just seem to break and no one notices. Is there a way to aim and throw them?

I thought you were supposed to target the enemy and throw the ceramic at them to make them come to you to investigate?

This. Despite what the item description implies you need to actually hit the enemy with them.

Hedinn wrote:
Clusks wrote:

I seem unable to use ceramic pots effectively, they just seem to break and no one notices. Is there a way to aim and throw them?

I thought you were supposed to target the enemy and throw the ceramic at them to make them come to you to investigate?

JeremyK wrote:

I was worried, especially early on, that I couldn't compensate for my lack of skill with cheesing but after nearly 30 hrs this weekend I can report cheesing is alive and well. :D

Do tell! I need all the cheese I can get.

In these games, I always enjoyed the actual levels, exploring them and killing regular enemies. I always hated bosses and will need some cheesy tactics to beat them in this game.

Well an obvious one is I've found nearly every mini-boss can be sneak attacked to remove one of their two health bars. I even managed to do this early on to the chained Ogre which seemed designed not to let you do that at first.

Skill wise I've found grinding for Shadowrush makes for the ultimate cheese skill at least so far. Amazing range and retreat ability.

My proudest cheese was learning you could spam Nightjar Slash to lock down Lady Butterfly.

Plus small things like how useful throwing ash in an enemies face can be. Items in general are pretty great.

JeremyK wrote:

My proudest cheese was learning you could spam Nightjar Slash to lock down Lady Butterfly.

I know what I'm doing when I get home...

Taharka wrote:
JeremyK wrote:

My proudest cheese was learning you could spam Nightjar Slash to lock down Lady Butterfly.

I know what I'm doing when I get home...

It can still be a little tricky in the second phase as you need to know when to back off rather than force it but it got me through in the end. Also, it helped when I realized triggering those skills is easier if you just hold down block and hit R1 rather than trying to hit both at once like I had been doing up to that point.

Taharka wrote:
JeremyK wrote:

My proudest cheese was learning you could spam Nightjar Slash to lock down Lady Butterfly.

I know what I'm doing when I get home...

I wish I had known that cheese. I think I’m very close to the end now, but she is the one boss I never really managed to feel like I learned how to beat without some luck.
Never really used the skill attacks outside of Whirlwind (which I used a lot) and Mortal Draw a few times.

And when I say near the end; I mean, there is no way I'll ever beat the boss I'm currently at. Not a fan of increasing difficulty by making the fights insanely long + chain-bosses.
The biggest difference in difficulty from the Souls games really is that Sekiro puts all the hardest bosses in the main story line. Where in the others they are optional bosses/DLC

Hobear wrote:
Hobear wrote:

So the fix was literally "From Software"?!? It now makes so much sense.

Still get some freezes and drops.

Hobear- Are you running in fullscreen or windowed? I'd suggest trying windowed and see if that helps. You'll need a borderless window application or you could use a hacked exe.

Nexus mods is starting to have some mods for Sekiro on it.
Minimal HUD is nice. It reduces the size of some of the icons. Also has options to remove some of them altogether.

Black or White Sekiro
changes the outfit color

You'll need the MOD Engine mod to insert them

Time for a check-in! I'm pretty deep in now, with 6 completed prayer bead necklaces and 5 memories under my belt. I have 8 gourd charges and all but one prosthetic tool. Judging by my upgrades and skill trees, I'd guess that I'm pretty close to the end.

I’ll get the few small gripes I've had about the game out of the way first.

  1. Why are spirit emblems a consumable that you need to have in reserve? I haven't had any issue with them because I bought about 400 early on when I didn't know what else to spend my money on, but I can't think of any reason these shouldn't just be automatically maxed when you rest.
  2. I wish there was another set of in-game shortcuts, ala the touchpad in Bloodborne. It's nice that you can pause, but it would have been even better if I could put my candies, balloons, and other items I don't need in the heat of battle on a secondary shortcut menu for ease of use. Down on the D-pad could have worked perfectly for this, since it's currently unused.
  3. I don’t think this game needed any multiplayer elements, but I also do miss the launch day rush that comes with a new Souls launch. Messages everywhere, bloodstains, and white phantoms at every corner. Every Souls launch feels like a true event. There is no communal feeling like that inside of Sekiro. I have to step away from the game to find one. Again, I don’t fault the game for this, but I miss it nonetheless.

It has been ages since I've played a Tenchu game, but knowing that this started as one is fascinating. Elements of the stealth and verticality remind me of the Tenchu games, but the speed and brutality of combat reminds me of Ninja Gaiden, and the deflection and counter attack puzzles remind me of FURI. Despite these similarities, Sekiro is unmistakably a From game.

Movement and combat is lightning fast compared to even Bloodborne, yet everything is still smoothly and deliberately animated so reading enemies is perfectly manageable with enough practice and careful observation. Even using the grappling hook is animated with a believable heft to convey that your character is exerting great strength to sling himself around.

The stealth system is simple and effective. I’ve seen complaints that enemies don’t react to their fallen comrades, but this entirely in service of the gameplay. Stealth killin’ dudes is fast. That only becomes truer as you progress through the game and unlock new skills, items, and tools to make you more effective in stealth. If you had to hide bodies to avoid alerting new foes, it would massively slow down the pace.

The verticality of the world reminds me more of Dark Souls 1 than any game since. I feared that the added mobility of the grappling hook might provide too much freedom and interfere with their creation of an interconnected world, but that is certainly not the case. The world feels so open. I’ll have to test in my next run, but it seems like I could have gone to any of the next four bosses after defeating the first if I had known where to go. The level design and world design are in a class of their own. I think they might be From’s best yet.

Overall, I am completely enamored with the game. I’m not sure how I’ll feel after a second or third run, but as a first experience, this is right up there with DeS, DkS1 and Bloodborne for me.

Dyni wrote:

It has been ages since I've played a Tenchu game, but knowing that this started as one is fascinating. Elements of the stealth and verticality remind me of the Tenchu games, but the speed and brutality of combat reminds me of Ninja Gaiden, and the deflection and counter attack puzzles remind me of FURI. Despite these similarities, Sekiro is unmistakably a From game.

Wait... what?

Taharka wrote:
Dyni wrote:

It has been ages since I've played a Tenchu game, but knowing that this started as one is fascinating. Elements of the stealth and verticality remind me of the Tenchu games, but the speed and brutality of combat reminds me of Ninja Gaiden, and the deflection and counter attack puzzles remind me of FURI. Despite these similarities, Sekiro is unmistakably a From game.

Wait... what?

What's your question? I didn't bother to list out the things that make it feel like a From game because so many of them seem self evident. Level design, NPC interactions, healing mechanics, animation-priority combat, cryptic branching quests, etc. I just noticed that certain elements also reminded me of other action games I've played, which is not something I have thought about any of the Souls games or Bloodborne.

If your questioning the Tenchu part the game was supposed to be another chapter in that series but that changed part way in for several reasons.

I am enjoying Sekiro but my two minor niggles are the stealth system is dumb. Having the mobs reset to their original locations after a minute of being out of sight just really makes it seem like a computer game rather than a world. They could just idly patrol the area instead.

The other niggle is the main game world doesn't really teach you how the combat works. All the minibosses and bosses you have to do at least half the fight mano-a-mano. And this means being decent at the parrying and dodging. But the game world lets you stealth kill most trash mobs, and a significant number of others can be button mashed to death (archers, riflemen). Crowds are hard to deal with so stealth killing to thin crowds is a sensible tactic. And cheap things like dive killing one and running off and waiting for the agro to silence are viable ways to progress. So the game world somewhat encourages using stealth kills. But what these tactics mean is that on your way to the bosses you're not having to practice the parrying or other sword fighting stuff. And this means the bosses seem like substantial jumps in difficulty because you've just not been practising essential skills for those fights. Compared to playing melee in a Dark Souls game, shield up and circle strafing the trashmobs is a valid/useful technique and you'll likely use some variant of that against the bosses.

In general I don't like games where the difficulty spike lies in suddenly requiring you execute something quite complex that it hasn't had you practice for the previous hours of gameplay

So I haven't played much of this game so far. Aside from having a busy weekend, I just did not feel like spending my relaxation time on a game that could easily undo all progress upon death. Last night I felt compelled to give it another go, however, and sure enough, despite making some progress, I ended up wiping out roughly an hour of gameplay that now needs to be redone. I almost felt like throwing in the towel and offering to sell the game, but a number of things happened.

The first was an indignant, confrontational outrage, reflecting on the Darksiders game club thread. "You mean to tell me that these people (as in, you, the GWJ community) sucked so bad at Darksiders they had to knock it to easy – Darksiders of all games! – but this is some mad cap of revolutionary genius?!" A juvenile, accusatory, and judgmental response, but what can I say? I'm a man-child. However! This led me to reflecting on my experience with Darksiders 3, and how I went from concern and denied disappointment to "figuring it out" and having a blast. I decided Sekiro might need more time, just as Darksiders 3 had. Plus, looking back at some of the threads I've been frequent in, Dyni and I seem to have a Venn Diagram of tastes, and if he likes it, well there's got to be something in this package for me. It's just tough because when I think about the possibility of redoing whole sections, and then look at Resident Evil 2, Devil May Cry 5, and other games on my PlayStation OS, I just... feel compelled to try those instead.

Nevertheless, a bit of experimentation this morning led me to understanding I need to adjust my approach to things, as well as also confirming that... this game's controls aren't as responsive as they need to be. Part of the problem I ran into last night was, during my flight from an enemy, leaping towards a grappling point only for L1 not to register. I pondered if I needed to hold the button or just tap it, and my experiments this morning confirmed both will work. This, on top of the option to insta-kill not always appearing when dropping onto a locked-on opponent from above, are momentary times of imprecision and inconvenience that have me wondering if the game's not responding when I tell it to deflect. Is it that my timing is off and that's why I got a sword in the gut? Or did the game just not register as it should have? Given that this tweet has been making the rounds, illustrating that the A.I. can instantly adjust 90-degrees mid-animation to your position to land a hit in... and that this is evidently nothing new for From... I mean, when this kind of crap happens in Marvel's Spider-Man it's like "Yeah, okay, it's AAA open-world meh, I don't expect them to know how to make a proper action combat game". But when this is happening in a game that's "hard but fair"... oof.

Anyway, I imagine there's going to be eight-thousand "YOU'RE WRONG!" objections to everything I say that's a negative, so instead I will note that I need to get better on using them ceramic shards (they sure give you plenty), which first means figuring out how the A.I. will respond. It seems most of the time the A.I. just wanders five feet and then reverts to their patrols, but evidently someone will occasionally explore the source. So hug walls, toss ceramic shard, wait for chump to approach to stabbity stab. Use a fistful of ash in combat to get that wonderful opening. These sorts of things. Even without using all the game's options, the stealth is easily the most enjoyable part.

I just hate those one-on-one encounters with the multi-barred guys. I tried to flee one and see if I could get the second bar of health after his patrol reset, but he had both bars of health again. Next time I experiment, it'll be to see if he restores it when I leave "the combat zone" or whether it's once he's back to patrol.

Something else that frustrated me is that I tend to find pellets whenever I'm full of 'em, and when I need a refill they're nowhere to be found. Given you can only carry a maximum amount of pellets, this means most of the pellets I find are completely wasted. This is one of those moments where "tough but fair" is a complete lie, because the game should tell me I can't pick them up, give me the option to leave them on the ground, or indicate what the item is before I pick it up. Instead, all I know is that there is an item of sorts on the ground. It could be money. It could be ash. It could be oil. It could be one of these balloon things that there are a million of. It could be pellets. But there's no way to tell just by looking at it, and if it happens to be something I'm maxed out on, I immediately waste that item. Thanks game.

I dunno. I'm not very far in. I saw the chump that's chained up in the distance, teleported back to the shrine, and went into the bell memory. That's where I am now, and maybe I ought to just teleport back out and get the guy to give me the fire capability. That way I can potentially roast the shinobi hunter (or jump ahead and roast the chained monstrosity).

I think my biggest issue is I like the stealth, but I don't like the combat. That's the biggest difference between this and Darksiders 3. I'm more interested in faster combat than slow and considered, though primarily because I can never get a good sense of the timing in this. There's enough evidence to inform me that it could be the game and not me, which means I never know what to do in order to improve. I unlocked an ability to step on a spear when someone lunges, but I don't trust that I'll be able to get the timing right.

I'll keep trying, but I have yet to be impressed.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/nKjgTia.jpg)

ccesarano wrote:

this game's controls aren't as responsive as they need to be. Part of the problem I ran into last night was, during my flight from an enemy, leaping towards a grappling point only for L1 not to register. I pondered if I needed to hold the button or just tap it, and my experiments this morning confirmed both will work. This, on top of the option to insta-kill not always appearing when dropping onto a locked-on opponent from above, are momentary times of imprecision and inconvenience that have me wondering if the game's not responding when I tell it to deflect. Is it that my timing is off and that's why I got a sword in the gut? Or did the game just not register as it should have?

Yeah, I have been experiencing some of this feeling. For now I assume it is my timing that's off. And I've definitely noticed that some of the later deflect/parry windows are absurdly narrow, especially when on the receiving end of multiple strikes.

Some of this is certainly that you can't block-cancel some of your animations/moves once they get past a certain point. Light strike can only be cancelled if you press block almost instantaneously after you press attack. The heavy strike animation can be cancelled anytime during the animation up to the flash of light getting halfway along the kitana blade. Once an animation is past the point of no return there are still some vulnerable frames before the strike happens and you can be hit or interrupted by enemy action during that vulnerable period. I haven't looked at where in the dodge/roll and jump animations you can block cancel those actions. I'd guess somewhat the light strike but I'll check it out next time I play

ccesarano wrote:

Something else that frustrated me is that I tend to find pellets whenever I'm full of 'em, and when I need a refill they're nowhere to be found. Given you can only carry a maximum amount of pellets, this means most of the pellets I find are completely wasted. This is one of those moments where "tough but fair" is a complete lie, because the game should tell me I can't pick them up, give me the option to leave them on the ground, or indicate what the item is before I pick it up. Instead, all I know is that there is an item of sorts on the ground. It could be money. It could be ash. It could be oil. It could be one of these balloon things that there are a million of. It could be pellets. But there's no way to tell just by looking at it, and if it happens to be something I'm maxed out on, I immediately waste that item. Thanks game.

Items aren't wasted when your carried amount is full. They go into your inventory and refill what you're carrying automatically during rest when they're on your quick item list. It's similar to Bloodborne with blood vials/bullets.

DanB wrote:

I am enjoying Sekiro but my two minor niggles are the stealth system is dumb. Having the mobs reset to their original locations after a minute of being out of sight just really makes it seem like a computer game rather than a world. They could just idly patrol the area instead.

But that part where you die and resurrect yourself, that totally doesn't feel like a game mechanic.

JeremyK wrote:
ccesarano wrote:

Thanks game.

Items aren't wasted when your carried amount is full. They go into your inventory and refill what you're carrying automatically during rest when they're on your quick item list. It's similar to Bloodborne with blood vials/bullets.

And the game does tell you this. I'm pretty sure that the pick-up message when you get something you can't carry is literally that extra items have been placed in storage.

I'll have to double check again. It looked like the same message as always, but I was probably skimming. That would certainly explain why, post-death, I had full pellets again.