Returnal (PS5) (April 30th)
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Voldeth
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Just going to jump on the bandwagon and echo that the difficulty here is greatly exaggerated. I am neither an avid console gamer nor particularly good at FPS' in general. I beat this without ever hitting a wall. It's been awhile but if memory serves it's also erroneous that you don't passively upgrade (your weapons get some increases?) which makes the game easier as you go along.
ShakyJake
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Correct, you'll unlock traits on weapons the more you use it. And, since traits are randomly assigned, you'll occasionally get a weapon with a combination of traits that make it totally OP.
Hateyou
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No one really said it was super hard except
Utnayan
’s old ass couldn’t beat the first boss. Oh and I guess Rajaah said he felt other people thought it was hard. I didn’t think it was hard I was just confused/lost. I didn’t find a key to open the red door, and it looked like I had cleared the entire level. After running around an empty level for a while I just got disinterested and quit playing it is all. I just wasn’t in the mood to play it I guess.
Utnayan
’s old ass couldn’t beat the first boss. Oh and I guess Rajaah said he felt other people thought it was hard. I didn’t think it was hard I was just confused/lost. I didn’t find a key to open the red door, and it looked like I had cleared the entire level. After running around an empty level for a while I just got disinterested and quit playing it is all. I just wasn’t in the mood to play it I guess.- 1
Rajaah
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Y'all are crazy. There was nothing excessively difficult or prohibiting in this. Especially given how pervasive the rogue-lite and Souls genre is these days. I only played it this year so maybe subsequent patches changed the fundamentals of the game over the years. Getting past the 1st boss was the first barrier and it didn't take too long. After that it isn't specifically linear since you can always skip him and move forward. Whether that is a good strat is up to you. But asShakyJake mentions the areas after the 1st are progressively easier.
More seriously though the presentation of the story was the cool thing for me here. But I get in to all that dumb stuff like reading all the notes in Control and geeking out over figuring out what's going on. So pushing ahead to find the next recording, flashback, story element motivated me.
For the average person on here who goes hard and pushes through, it wasn't excessively difficult or prohibiting, no.
For the average non-hardcore person just looking for something enjoyable to play in their 4 hours of time off every week, it's a different story.
Thus I can't recommend it to anybody.
I'm no advocate for easy modes (it'd ruin Elden Ring IMO) but Returnal needed, at the very least, some checkpoints. Absolutely no reason each world couldn't have had one at the start. Or save points, maybe one at the start of worlds and another midway and another before the boss. Die and you have the option to restart at the last save, start of the biome, or start of the game (for trying to get a better layout as you go). For a long time it didn't even have a suspend / temporary save function.
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ShakyJake
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The lack of a 'suspend' or 'pause' was a massive oversight. But in no way does there need to be checkpoints. Returnal works in a very similar manner to Dark Souls: you work your way through an area, finally reaching a shortcut which opens up quick access to new areas. Returnal is the same way.
Intrinsic
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The Astronaut Figurine and the other devices are good placeholders for a "checkpoint" system. They aren't 100% available every run in every spot you'd want them but they're there and able to give you a do over if you need it.
Chimney
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Saw on sale for PC and a had some space in the backlog so I bought Friday and beat it today.
Was expecting it to be much more difficult from all the talk, but the bosses were 1 shots. Think I had around 10 deaths total.
You can suspend and come back now if that was an issue for some of you.
Ran great for me on PC all juiced up in 4k and atmos.
Was expecting it to be much more difficult from all the talk, but the bosses were 1 shots. Think I had around 10 deaths total.
You can suspend and come back now if that was an issue for some of you.
Ran great for me on PC all juiced up in 4k and atmos.
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Rajaah
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Since the hardest part is the beginning, here's a protip: Since they added a suspend function to it, you can quit out and back up your save to PS Plus pretty much whenever (namely, when reaching a new area, or right outside a boss room, don't think you need any more than that). This way, having no idea what a boss' patterns are gonna be isn't an instant start over. The bosses of area 1 and 3 are the main times when this is useful. Area 1 boss is actually fairly easy, but doesn't seem so at all the first couple times for most people, and that's a lot of repeating area 1. Area 3 boss took me 2 or 3 tries and I would have probably tapped out if I had to start back at the beginning each time. After that, the rest isn't bad.
So yeah, I don't recommend abusing the save backup, but it's there if you need it. Also works in some games that have really bad boss run backs. DS2 Scholar of the First Sin is probably another one, would have been great go know this when I spent a tedious amount of time trying to deal with the Frigid Outskirts just to have a chance to die at Lud and Zallen again.
So yeah, I don't recommend abusing the save backup, but it's there if you need it. Also works in some games that have really bad boss run backs. DS2 Scholar of the First Sin is probably another one, would have been great go know this when I spent a tedious amount of time trying to deal with the Frigid Outskirts just to have a chance to die at Lud and Zallen again.