I was randomly browsing and filtering by flavor, when suddenly a wild WTF appeared:
Pineapple Cinnamon Cream
Sam08 truly was the best man. I still have them pics somewhere in my old misc folder lmao.
Sinistkir13
So far I'm enjoying FF16 but it's not spectacular. First off they toned down the weeabo anime shit alot. It still has a little Japanese cringe though, maybe something along the lines of RE4 Remake. The tone of the game is more mature. Story feels like a wannabe Game of Thrones with warring kingdoms. The levels are linear but they do look pretty good, lots of scenic views so far. Story is okay. Music is great, and so too are the set pieces when it comes to some of the large Eikon battles. Those are done really well.
Now to the combat. It's okay, certainly looks flashy but there's room for improvement. It is sort of DMC based but certainly not as deep or varied. Also doesn't feel as visceral.
Clive has the ability to absorb powers from Eikons. Each Eikon has 3 special moves and an ultimate. You cycle from one Eikon to another by pressing L2 but annoyingly, for each Eikon there's only TWO slots to equip each's moves. I think this is really weird as the ultimate takes up a slot. So for each Eikon you get either two regular special moves, or one regular plus an ult. If it was up to me, I'd allow players to use all four slots but let each slot share a cooldown across Eikons. That way you have access to all abilities and ultimates but have to choose carefully due to cooldowns. The final issue I have comes down to how bullet spongy enemies are which leaves alot of S, T mashing.
So yeah I'm torn on the combat. For sure the Stellar Blade combat absolutely mogs it in depth, design and how it feels.
That lines up with some of what I had read regarding the lack of depth and variation, which makes sense if they went with bullet sponges.
You could tell me better than just looking myself without prior knowledge, but it looks like there's potential to fix some of the shortcomings on PC with
mods, so that's something I'll have to consider.
Easily the bullet sponge thing is my main complaint with Monster Hunter, and I don't know if Wilds fixed it (sounds like they might have at least), but World fights could drag on to become boring slogs - at least for my tastes. Seriously, Dark Souls has gotten a disproportionate reputation for being "hardcore" when you had Monster Hunter over here with a spergoid community demanding even
longer fights, like you should be hitting the same enemy for over 15 minutes. So if from what I've read where some Wilds players are complaining about the fights being too short, that's a good thing.
It definitely feels like video game graphics have plateaued and stagnated enough to where I couldn't care less about the prospect of sequels to current gen games anymore in many cases because the age of getting excited about how much better a newer release might look is simply well behind us by now. This really hit home when I saw people trying to hype Wreckfest 2, I mean I love the original and still consider it a great game for what it is on current gen hardware, but hearing about the sequel just didn't get me excited at all because I feel like I am simply satisfied with what I already got and can't get excited about the prospect of graphics maybe being better. Heck even if the trailer manages to make it look more sophisticated, I know most of that is just trailer camera work and I would probably hardly notice any improvements while actually playing the game. It's just happens too often, they try to get you all hyped on graphics with the latest games only for me to play the games and be underwhelmed struggling to notice where it looks better than games I have already been playing.
So long as developers continue pushing visuals harder than their capacity to optimize the end result into something playable and stable, I'm tapped out on this stupid race for better and better graphics at the cost of them still being video games over interactive movies, stutter shows, or layers of interpolation, rescaling, and smearing to run at all.
What makes it worse now is in part because this generation of consoles now supports crutches developers can use on top of things like ray tracing, but instead of taking a more humble approach they're designing games to be reliant on said crutches or ray tracing. With PS4/Xbone gen games, PCs with much more available hardware headroom could push the same games to look pretty much like "next gen," or at least as close as possible with whatever the base game allowed. Now, though, you get games like the Rocksteady failed GAAS that looked far worse than Arkham Knight despite a 9 year difference.
As for the ray tracing, an example I know off the top of my head is how Final Fantasy 16 was designed with ray traced lighting as the only option, so there isn't even an option to lower that intensive requirement to get better performance or visuals elsewhere. Ray tracing might make for some really impressive youtube videos, but I will take the option to turn lighting effects and shadows down in exchange for better everything else any day because that would make little perceivable difference versus the whole image getting screwed up.
. The only boss I had some trouble with was the Wasteland version of the Gigas which took multiple attempts. Just couldn't time his attacks very well and had to use an insta-revive shot to finish him off with like two swipes left of his health
OneLegSquats
loved that section myself.
