Immortals: Fenyx Rising Impressions Thread

Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is my favorite game, so when I found out there was going to be an Ubiclone of it I was pretty intrigued. Impressions and reviews were somewhat mixed but generally favorable, and I am probably a little too eager to have something to play on my new Series X so I picked up a late pre-order despite reservations. I've only played about an hour and a half so far, but my overall impressions are...mixed to good. It's solidly made but profoundly uninspired.

The game is a very obvious Breath of the Wild clone, from the climbing and gliding to the puzzle structure and shrines. One of the first things you get are a pair of bracers that let you lift heavy objects, as well as pull them towards yourself at range, and you are immediately tasked with using them to manipulate a bunch of rolling balls that fit into BOTW style crater switches. They're not even trying to hide anything here.

On the other hand the game is not nearly as aesthetically advanced or as mechanically intricate as BOTW. As far as I can tell there's no cooking system, which may seem like a small thing but did a lot to make BOTW's world feel like a living, breathing, thing. There are just pickups and currencies in the world. I am not deep enough to know how many physics tricks can be pulled off but so far it doesn't seem nearly as complex as BOTW. You can pick some things up and throw them and you can chop down trees, but at least in the starting area it doesn't seem like there are complex fire physics going on or any of that. It's very stripped back.

What has been added to the BOTW formula is a bunch of chatting. BOTW had characters and conversations, but this game famously has Zeus and Prometheus narrating what's going on. I can see how some people would find it obnoxious. For me personally I think it's sometimes annoying and sometimes kind of clever (especially with some of the 'unreliable narrator' elements and their bickering) though the thick accents are not great. It does, however, demolish the feeling of place and vulnerability provided by Breath of the Wild. There are cut scenes with other characters and they can kind of drag on. Fenyx is kind of a cypher (you can play male or female body and voice, and I'm playing female both and she's sort of a plucky young hero type with nothing beyond that.) The game seems much more about delivering hit and miss humor than trying to develop characters or relationships.

The game also seems much easier on its default setting than BOTW was, at least at the beginning, which is not a bad thing for me, but also interferes with atmosphere. There's no weapon breakage, which also reduces the feeling of vulnerability. If nothing else this game will help you understand what elements made BOTW so special and gave it such a sense of immersion vs. what elements were just kind of normal design tricks.

I think Fenyx Rising looks okay, but it's a bad showpiece for the new systems because its cartoony graphics aren't super detailed. I'm sure it runs better on PS5 and Series X than it does on the older systems, but it would probably be fine on them too. It's definitely not a highly detailed big budget Ubisoft extravaganza, but at least it has its own aesthetic, albeit also borrowing from BOTW there.

Combat is passable and nothing more. You have a light weapon and a heavy weapon, you can dodge and parry (and perfect dodges will result in a time slow, like in BOTW) and a bow. You can throw boulders for heavy damage. I'm sure you'll pick up more powers as the game goes on. It's definitely not BOTW level refined but it's not unfun.

The game feels polished but uninspired. It seems well made but very inessential. I personally was super in the mood for an open world low intensity podcast game right now, and this seems to fit that bill perfectly, so I don't regret my purchase so far, but I think this thing is going to drop in price very quickly (I really can't see it being a hit) so unless you're in that position I would just wait for it to get cheaper and then grab it if you're interested. Ubi seems to have left this thing to die, releasing it up against Assassin's Creed, the BOTW Musou, and even Genshin Impact, which does a similar thing but costs $0.00. For me this is so far better than Genshin Impact, but not by much. It even has a bunch of scummy currency microtransactions baked in, because of course it does, though I have no idea whether you'd ever need to buy them (I haven't really gotten to a point where currency is relevant.)

I thought I'd make a thread for people to post their impressions and views on the game so...yeah.

Man, that's kind of a bummer. I was considering giving it a shot, but a lot of the early returns seem not so hot on it. It seems to be in the same boat of a lot of recent Ubisoft games in that it is clearly aping another product, but not bringing in the spirit of what made the game its trying to replicate great.

Maybe I'll give it a try if it ever comes out on Gamepass.

Played the Stadia demo and really liked the gameplay - keen to get it, but going to wait a few weeks while I finish what I'm playing just now - knowing Ubisoft it'll be half price in a month by the time I get round to getting it 😆

I'm a bit soured on Ubisoft these days, and the humour in this is more than a bit grating on me.

So far i am having a good time. Voice acting is quite good. The World is absolutely gorgeous and dense with stuff to do.It runs well on pc and feels more polished than AC or WD recently. I am glady going to sink all my pre cyberpunk time into this game and hopefully see the ending by the 9th. Also casting Elias as promethus was a genius move.

@therealturk: I've played some more and my impressions are more positive now. I think that once you get out of the starting area the game, unsurprisingly, opens up. The graphics are simple but they look good and the draw distance is really quite spectacular on the Series X. It's not a super detailed world but you can see a lot of it. The activities are pretty varied (nothing spectacularly new but good standard open world stuff) and the puzzles in the "Shrines" get a lot better and actually do some interesting things. They are not at Zelda's "physics toy" level but they are fun and engaging and break things up well.

I was right that there's no cooking. Instead there are 4 types of plants that you can gather to make 4 kinds of potions, which is disappointing but works okay as a system, especially because you can upgrade the potions and focus on the effects that you like.

It's definitely got a good player empowerment loop where you do stuff to get stronger and that lets you do more stuff and get even stronger etc... If I'm honest it has its hooks in me pretty bad, and it's hard to be too down on a game that does that. I think I've moved from like a 7-7.5 to an 8-8.5 as I've spent some time outside the opening area.

There are lots of flaws. It's got live service stuff and cosmetics bolted in, which kind of sucks, and fighting is pretty pointless unless you're specifically trying to do something that requires killing enemies because the rewards for killing random enemies are paltry. There's not enough variety in the enemies and the world feels a lot less alive with basically no civilians (there is lots of dialogue with story characters but the random people you meet have literally no personality and I don't even know why they're there.)

But the core is stronger than it seemed at first and the game is incredibly dense with stuff to do. It's not a massive world but it feels enormous because there is so much to see and do.

It's not magical like Breath of the Wild. It doesn't have the physics, the visual inventiveness, the cleverness, the fully realized world with incredible NPCs etc... But it's also not a formulaic Ubi action game and I think it's a really solid title.

It's one of those games that while I'm playing it and enjoying it I keep thinking "man I hope this gets a sequel" because as good as it is it has even more potential. Slightly better combat, a little more personality in the world, a few more tools to vary up the puzzles and this could be a truly great game instead of just a very good one. I think it's good, and it has the potential to be great.

So I bounced pretty hard off of Breath of the Wild, mostly for the same reasons you've all heard before from people who revile what most people revere in that game. So this game kind of struck me as maybe a streamlining of that kind of experience people were getting from Breath of the Wild. Maybe even touching on some of that older Zelda feel. I'm interested in hearing what people have to say here, fingers crossed.

@doszero: It's definitely streamlined over BOTW. It gives a lot more direction than that game did. You can go basically anywhere but the game has quest markers and it will autopopulate the map for you, though you have to "find" the points of interest by using a first person view mode the same way Mad Max did it.

Weapons don't have durability and in fact weapon upgrades and armor upgrades are applied universally (all weapons of a certain type share the same damage and feel the same to use, but each individual weapon has two special bonuses, like doing more damage when your stamina is full or whatever.)

It has a pretty straightforward story with long fully voices cut scenes that explain everything.

If you have other things that you didn't like about BOTW feel free to ask about them here, but if streamlining is what you were looking for this game definitely delivers that.

@bigsocrates: This sounds encouraging. I wanted to like BoTW so much, but the weapon durability, food crafting, etc. just wore me down over time. I loved the concept of this gigantic open world you can explore.

I'm hoping to give this one a shot in time, once I knock out a few games in my backlog.

There's something about this game feels of a different time, despite BOTW and modern Ubi-isms.

Like if you plucked a PS2 game nobody had ever heard of out of a vault and did an especially robust remaster.

@efesell: I'm not really sure what you mean by that. I think this game is actually very current in that it looks and plays like a modern game and, for better and for worse, has a lot of modern game tropes in it. Having played some PS2 remasters this year (Ratchet & Clank, Prince of Persia, Ape Escape 2) I can say with a lot of confidence that this in no way feels like them.

What I will say is that it does have a bit of a B-game vibe, which can be associated with that era, and you can make an argument that the combat has a bit of PS2 flavor in that it's very simple 3D combat with no complex or interesting combos and no variation between the weapons, which, yeah, has some echoes of the PS2 era. But most of what you do in the game isn't really combat, it's traversal and open world puzzle solving. Just the sheer size and scope of the world mean that there is no PS2 vibe to those parts of the game whatsoever.

I guess you could also argue that the use of bickering narrators is a little PS2-like and I can see that, though I actually think it's more of a PS3 era vibe, especially because there's just so much dialog, and so much of it is context specific.

It definitely does have a bit of a B-game vibe, except that the world is so massive and full of stuff that you can tell that the game had a pretty big budget. Maybe not an Assassin's Creed budget, but pretty big.

@bigsocrates: I mean I think that covers a lot of it. B game is fair too but there’s just something about it that evokes a different time and place to me.

It’s just vibe and trappings though, mechanically you’re right it’s extremely modern Ubi game with that coat of BOTW.

I was curious about this game but I lost all interest when I saw how the first person location scoping works. I hope there's an option to remove that or change how it works - it's quite a bizarre design decision. Why show markers for so many unimportant items and secrets instead of letting you discover them yourself? And WHY can you see through walls?? I really like the BOTW approach where you can mark things on the map as a destination but you have to find it yourself. It made you feel like you were really exploring instead of just checking things off a list. Why would Ubi decide to recreate so much of BOTW but leave off its best idea?

I do really love the art style though. It's prettier than BOTW for sure. I hope to see more AAA games move from realistic to more stylized graphics.

This game screams average everywhere. I would say the puzzles are below average. I'm not a fan of the puzzles in this game. Some enemies are kind of sponges and soak up more damage than they should IMO before dying. Overall the world is gorgeous, but the character voices are very annoying and their faces look atrocious.

@wollywoo: I don't think there's an option to turn it off but you don't have to use the automarkers. You can just use pins if you want to. It is, as far as I know beyond like the first time it is tutorialized, totally optional. I think things will populate on the map if you get super close to them, but by that point you have done your exploration.

As for why they did it that way...it's Ubisoft. For one thing there's a lot more...stuff...on the map than in BOTW. BOTW had shrines (which did autopopulate) and then the rest of the locations were relatively rare things that you only needed to mark a few times. There were Kurok puzzles and important NPCs and fairy fountains, but there weren't miles upon miles of collectables. Fenyx features just a ton of different stuff. And because it's a lot more focused on building your character than BOTW was you're going to need to get a lot more of that stuff from one off locations (as opposed to BOTW where you might have areas you farm or whatever but you don't need to keep track of a hundred different chests that you can only open once.)

This game is also pretty easy. I have died once so far and that was just from slipping and falling into an abyss in the overworld. It wasn't even a tough situation, I was just playing a bit sloppy because in the shrines if you fall you get respawned with one health bar depleted, but in this specific place you die if you fall. Other than that it hasn't really been close. There's also a power you can get pretty early that absolutely shreds almost everything and kind of trivializes a lot of combat.

The game is designed for a mass audience as Ubisoft conceives of it. It's mechanically similar to Breath of the Wild in many ways, but philosophically it's very different. I mean can you imagine Breath of the Wild with a couple wisecracking narrators? What about with daily and weekly challenges that give you small amounts of premium currency you can use to buy cosmetic items?

You can do the map thing yourself if you want, but it's not going to turn this game into Breath of the Wild. You can tell the difference right from the intro area, where Breath of the Wild gives you only a small amount of guidance and basically tells you to figure things out, and Fenyx gives you a carefully guided tour with quest markers and narration.

The release of this game and Genshin Impact (which I'm currently addicted to) makes me wonder something: BotW came out in 2017 so we are just at the tip of the iceberg on games that are inspired by it. How many BotW inspired games are going to come out before someone actually understands what made BotW a masterpiece. Or, maybe a more apt question, will anyone?

I feel like Genshin got slightly closer than Immortals, but obviously is a much different beast being a gacha and all. Will we see another developer attempt to do the "Destroy Ganon" moment that was so perfectly executed? That moment you see the apocalyptic land spread out before you atop the temple of time after being given the paraglider, that sense of wanderlust, spirit of adventure and call of the unknown, I wonder if we'll ever see it done again. Hell, I wonder if BotW2 will even manage it.

@doctordonkey: What made Zelda such a masterpiece was its level of polish and craft. Both in terms of the world and the way it played. It wasn't just that they showed you Ganon and told you to go handle business however you wanted, it was that every corner of that world had something new and exciting in it and it all made sense and sort of worked. From the first part in the intro where there are a number of ways to get your cold resistance up to all the tricks people are still mastering today with the physics, that game rewarded you for experimentation, even if sometimes it was just through a funny death.

The world was incredible. You'd just be wandering around and find a village and suddenly a hilarious dude is trying to sell you a house. Or, if you didn't get the quest first, you'd just stumble on a giant horse. Or talk to a random dude on the road and BAM, Ninja time. It was consistently surprising and delightful.

It's really hard to copy that. It takes a lot of budget, skill, and time. BOTW was iterated and developed for a very long time because it had to be polished to a sheen for it to work.

Other companies just don't do that. I would bet that earlier in development Fenyx was much more like BOTW, but they realized how long it would take to actually build the systems and world they needed and so they just focused on the things that were easier to copy (flight mechanic, puzzle shrines, certain combat mechanics, enemy camps with chests) and did not do the stuff that made it great, not because they didn't understand them but because they are hard and expensive to do.

Personally Fenyx comes closer to BOTW for me than Genshin Impact. At least in Fenyx there's a greater variety of encounters and enemies, and for me the climbing feels way better etc... It's also less of an outright RPG than Genshin Impact, with its focus on character and story (that I did not like.) Genshin Impact is less directed, for sure, but you always find the same things in that game and the things you find are useless anyway because of the Gacha system. So I got really bored of exploring only to find copy pasted enemy camps and the occasional semi-interesting thing that didn't have substantial rewards. Also the puzzles in that game are barely puzzles. Fenyx doesn't have enough interesting stuff to find, and its map marking system takes a lot of the excitement of exploration out of it, but at least it does consistently surprise me with polished little set pieces, and weird stuff from time to time.

But neither game has anything to compare with that moment when you find the Korok village, or when you unlock certain powers and it totally changes how you navigate the world after dozens of hours. Those things take a huge amount of time to put into a game and a lot of polishing to get right.

@bigsocrates: True, time and budget constraints will likely hinder any developer besides Nintendo from making something like that again, even if they did have the creative chops for it. Definitely one of those games that is impossible to emulate fully and only comes by once in a blue moon.

As far as why I enjoyed (well, there's only 2 of the 7 regions released, so more to come I guess) Genshin's exploration was a few things. The soundtrack is maybe the most surprising thing I've heard this year, it's absolutely fantastic and was not expecting that coming from a game like this. That combined with the visuals made taking in the vistas always enjoyable. Another reason is that finding chests was constantly rewarding, because you need absolutely everything a chest contains at all times, so the reward incentives stayed constant from the beginning of Mondstadt to the end of Liyue. This is obviously very intently designed in a almost insidious way, but I found it enjoyable non the less.

I do think Genshin does "Can I?" exploration elements decently as well. A lot of times I would stumble upon something suspicious, and would see if I could do something with the environment, and a lot of the time it would be a cleverly hidden chest. That's something BotW did a ton of with Korok seeds that I haven't seen from Immortals, but I could be wrong. There's also an unmarked secret quest called "Time and the Wind" that is found very organically and can only be solved by actually finding and reading buried journal entries on a distant island off the coast, an island which is actually pretty hard to get to. Stumbling upon and doing that quest was probably the most BotW vibes I got from Genshin.

I haven't played Immortals so I really cannot say, but from what I've seen and heard from people I'd wager Genshin actually manages to strike that BotW vibe a little closer. Both games are still lightyears away of course, but that's how I feel.

@doctordonkey: I remain hopeful for BOTW 2. It obviously won't be as mind blowing as the first but they've had like 4 years with an engine already in place and a map and a lot of systems to build stuff out and create surprises. I think it's taking so long because they're polishing it to a perfect sheen.

In terms of Genshin vs Immortals...I think if you're talking about "vibe" then Genshin might win. I agree the music is great and I think that some of the environmental puzzles were interesting, though they were very repetitive and because Genshin has a lot less physics stuff going on than Zelda does I don't think the solutions were nearly as creative or interesting. But at its best Genshin does find some of the Zelda vibe in the world exploration stuff.

I do think that the "hidden" quests tended to be disappointing in implementation at least to me. Part of that is because I hate Genshin's writing, but also just because the things you actually do in the game are pretty limited. It is very "traditional video game" in the way you interact with it, except for some of the elemental stuff, which is admittedly cool at times.

Immortals does have some hidden quests but they are also pretty disappointing. All its puzzles tend to be broadcast in some way so it doesn't really have the element of scanning your environment looking for stuff to do. I think that it is more successful in many of the ways it borrows Zelda mechanics, but its tone is completely different.

I'm about 10 hours in and super super liking this. If you're coming in looking for breath of the wild 2, it's not that. but if you're a big breath of the wild stand and are a little bit tired of the copying paste environments that assassin's Creed has been using, then this really might be for you. I recommend anyone that place this that likes breath of the wild immediately disable compass with the top of the screen and really limit the HUD features to just your powers and your inventory items. After doing that I started forcing myself to play it like breath of the wild and say"those trees look kind of fucked up I wonder what's over there"and so far there's always something there. It's a beautiful world and and while the narrators are not funny at all, the other characters are written decently and honestly it's just such a fun light-hearted and dense world that I haven't really seen before.

Watching the QL I can't get over how ugly the main character is and their animation and well, all the animation is. It looks like an early 360 game. BOTW meanwhile has very good animation so I'm not sure what they are going for...

I just finished the prologue Island, and really enjoying it so far. Sure, it's unashamedly a Breath of the Wild clone, but that's not a bad thing. At this point, a Ubisoft game that is a copy of another studios thing is still a breath (no pun intended) of fresh air considering most of their games are usually a copy and paste of their own games.

Also I have played so many super gritty, and serious games back to back this year, that the super lighthearted and goofy humour it is going for is really doing it for me. I even chuckled outloud a few times.

Again, only just finished the first area, and maybe I'll get bored/have a different opinion as I go on. But so far, so good.

I just finished the main story after blitzing it this weekend when I had nothing else to do. It's probably between 30-40 hours long if you do a moderate amount of side content, way longer if you try to do everything (though I can't imagine actually wanting to do that.)

I definitely burned on out on it well before the end, though a lot of that is my fault for blasting through it when it's clearly a game that will go down better if you play it a few hours a day for at least a few weeks. It just doesn't have enough variety or a strong enough narrative hook to support marathoning.

The end sequence is very long and the final boss fight is just a massive slog. He's very slow and I found a helmet that restores health with every head shot from the bow so it was easy to stand back and pepper him in the face with arrows, using guided arrows to heal when necessary, but even with doing that and dashing in to do additional damage the fight took so long. I did not use a single health potion on him but it just seemed to sprawl on and on and on.

The final boss fight in this is literally more self indulgent than the final boss in Final Fantasy VII Remake, and that blows my mind.

The sequence before you get to the final boss and make your pre-boss save is probably the best part of the game but is also very long and gets kind of tiring if you try to do it all in one session.

Overall I think it's a decent game and I'd like to see a sequel, but I also think that there's too much main plot for a story that just isn't very good and doesn't come together well, and it's too easy to get distracted by a bunch of side stuff and become overpowered. I'll post more thoughts in a blog entry at some point but I think this game is kind of interesting in its choices and how its Ubi DNA interacts with its influences.

If the puzzles were a little more varied and better, the combat a little tighter, the narrative stronger, and just more custom content and less cookie cutter stuff this could have been a great game. Instead it's a mostly good one with some problems. Don't regret the purchase but I'd probably recommend most people wait for a sale or a big lull in their gaming schedule at least.