What would you like to see improved in an eventual sequel?

I just beat Nioh and it was great. A real step forward in the souls genre and a solid foundation for a new franchise. Although Nioh differentiates itself from other souls games in key ways and manages to remain engaging through its very long run time, it is not without flaws. Progressing through the game, I came to realize Team Ninja really has a lot to improve in an eventual sequel. Here are a few things I noticed sorted by category:

Combat:

While From Software focused on art design, level design and tone for its souls series, Team Ninja put an emphasis on combat in Nioh. With this different focus they were able to craft a game in the same genre but make it its own thing. The combat in Nioh is just deeper and more engaging then in any souls game. That being said, the combat suffers from balancing problems and other flaws that could be improved greatly for Nioh 2.

1. Craft better counters to low stance or rebalance it in some way. Low stance is just too good in this game. It's by far the fastest and most responsive stance, it is the best defensively with a very good dodge move and attacks that barely use ki. It has a ki draining attack and interrupts any move on an enemy out of ki. The only thing that effectively counters it is an enemy that blocks but even then it's not like you're punished for getting blocked so you can just chip away at the most difficult bosses in the game in low stance. Switching stances and using high stance or mid stance depending on the eb and flow of the fight might be a cool thing to do but it is rarely the best way to go when you can just kill everything in low stance with much less risk involved. They could reduce i-frames on low stance or remove the kick and other ki damaging attacks.
2. Rebalance magic and status effects. Simply put: the sloth spell is way too good. Anything that slows down your opponent (sloth, lightning status effect) is way better than almost all other spells and status effects. Why use anything other than effects that enable you to land 3 or 4 times more attacks on your enemy because he's too slow to respond?

Difficulty:

The difficulty curve is all kinds of fucked up in this game. It starts out hard as you're figuring out the combat and gets easier in the mid game as stat/enemy scaling diverge. It's mostly a cake walk by the end. I had an armor set around 40 lvls under the mission lvl for all of the end game and it was still pretty damn easy compared to the first few missions or some early/mid bosses. So yeah, a few things to improve there:

1. Fix the stat/gear/enemy scaling. Enemies near the start of the game shouldn't take way more ki to block then enemies in the end game. Same thing for health and damage.
2. They need WAY more enemy variety and more aggressive enemy variants for the late game. By the mid game you've encountered basically all enemy types and have "solved" them. Meaning all levels from that point on are much easier since you can just apply your usual strategy to defeat any enemy you come across. Like seriously? I'm in the last level and you think these dumb skeleton warriors are going to stop me or slow me down even a little bit? Late game enemies need to be more aggressive and they need to be able to punish you baiting their attacks outside of their usual attack range. Also most enemies need to be able to punish you running out of ki pretty hard.

Level design

The art and level design isn't the game strong point. They basically need more varied tile sets. I like the idea of more generic levels that enable more missions to be made and more focus be put on combat. That being said, caves, forests, temples, villages and Japanese castles are not the only interesting locations you could set your game in.

So, what do you guys think? Any other ideas on how they could improve things in Nioh 2?

I havent finished the game yet (just beat that giant skeleton thing) but I feel the difficulty curve is about in line with any action RPG. It always gets easier by the end. It still feels satisfying though, as you cut down stronger foes with little difficulty and keep getting more ridiculous gear. It's better than the alternative of never really feeling more powerful due to scaling or whatever else.

To answer your question though, level design and art design are definitely the top of the list. I dont think this game looks good. It looks fine in cutscenes, and there are a couple of sequences which look okay but they're few and far between. This could be a case of rose tinted glasses but I remember Ninja Gaiden 2 looking better and maybe even Sigma 1 on PS3.

And not to keep comparing this to Ninja Gaiden but I think a few more traversal options would be nice, maybe restricting them to more agile builds. Being able to wall run and rebound off walls would also allow for more interesting level design. (or at the very least just give me the option to jump, even the souls games have that)

I have really enjoyed this game so far though. I just have slight souls fatigue at the moment.

1. More interesting ninjutsu and magic. It feels like all the ninjutsu and magic options are items you equip as opposed to active abilities/spells, but seeing as you've got at most seven slots to equip that stuff, a lot of it goes to waste. Plus, a lot of those skill trees are really boring. It's either passive bonuses or incremental improvements like "equip more arrows" --> "equip even more arrows" --> "equip LOTS of arrows."

Like you said, you just equip the one or two totally overpowered abilities and that's it, the rest is sort of useless.

2. I think the boss design could be better. Specifically they all need to be considerably more aggressive. For the current state of the game, I think the fights could be improved if they shrunk the size of the boss arenas by a third to a half. Right now, the solution to too many boss fights is "back out of the way," which should really be a strategy of marginal utility or something you do when you really need to heal, not as a general strategy to beat the boss.

Honestly the most interesting boss fight I've had was the White Tiger Twilight fight, only because he got moves that took him all the way across the arena and was better at constantly trying to attack you.

3. I agree with the level design comments. I'd like something other than villages or caves or forests. Or villages in a forest with caves, which is what the game mostly is right now. They could do something really interesting by setting a level in the Yokai realm beyond those dumb arena missions right now. Something where the entire level is covered in corruption and you can only recover ki efficiently with a ki pulse or in very specific areas.

4. More options are needed to break a block: Right now, the only effective options available to break somethings guard is either to (a) run it out of ki or (b) wait until they stop blocking. The problem as you point out is that if you try to break someone's guard, you essentially need to be in high-stance or mid-stance to efficiently damage their ki, but a low-stance attack will always tag you out of the block before you actually hit them. And waiting for someone to drop their guard is boring.

And while there are options to move someone out of guard, they don't really work that well. There's a spear ability that whips them around (don't remember what it's called), but it does minimal damage by itself, and the recovery is so long that you get maybe one attack in before they either move or block again, and a lot of times you don't even get that. Other moves seem like they should work, but don't. For example, the spear leg sweep move seems like it should knock a blocking opponent down, but it actually gets blocked instead.

So yeah, some specific moves designed to break blocks and follow up by punishing the person would help improve combat flow. Maybe blocks could be directional? That way maneuvering behind a blocking opponent would be effective as opposed to the insta-spin you get down.

I actually reviewed Nioh recently. I talk a bit about its shortcomings. To summarize, it needs a tighter progression, more consistent difficulty, more varied enemies and much improved boss design. Side Missions also need a serious step up as pretty much all of them are terrible and re-using bosses is already shady business, let alone not even revamping their attacks and re-using them seriously 5+ times. Nioh 2 needs to be a shorter game. There is no excuse for it being as long as it is with as much re-used nonsense that it has. It worked in NGII because they didn't copy and paste like they did here.

What I want most is something with the Guardians. While my Guardian is powerful as balls, I would like something more from it. To be perfectly honest, when it said there was magic that summoned your Guardian to fight for you, I took it literally. I want something around that. It wasn't until NG+ that I started realizing the build potential around your Guardian and I would like it to be even more fleshed out. Early in NG+ I did missions over 100 levels above my own and didn't even die because of a very cool Guardian build. I'm not exaggerating here, but I activate my Living Weapon somewhere near the start of the mission and it lasts all the way through to the end with infinite Guardian summons in between, afflicting everything. It's OP as shit, but who cares, I beat the game anyway, time to have fun.

Honda's AI mostly. Level design is top notch, boss design is above average but could be better in about half the cases. The narrative (i.e. by far the best amongst Souls) is going to be tough to replicate unless they depart entirely from William as the protagonist of the next game; which'd be fine if they want a Three Kingdoms game with like 150 bosses and 40 different weapon types or something. It's Koei I bet they could make that it in 18 months.

Balance issues are largely irrelevant as long as there are never invasions; you don't have to use the OP shit and if they nerf X then Y will replace it and everyone copying each other isn't the game's fault; that's just the lameness of online communities at present. Sloth should obviously be nerfed of course but I'm sure something will be OP in the new game and everyone will bitch about that.

Chaos mode (Lv. 999 of every mission), but I suspect that will just be a DLC/free update in Nioh.

The super inconsistent difficulty definitely needs work particularly with regards to bosses.

I feel like there are more ways to slow people than you guys realize. I have not used Sloth ever, but I do use Caltraps sometimes and they basically slow people down too, as does lightning affliction. For that matter, you can negate death in several ways too, you can become invisible in several ways, you can do everything multiple ways. I don't think inducing slowness is going anywhere.

I found invisibility to be pretty OP myself. You can just stack any buff you want since they can't see you. Then get a free hit in too. Although, I don't need it anymore really, since I can cast everything instantly. I have to say, I'm enjoying Nioh in NG+ more than I thought. I'm already near the end again too.

@zevvion: I use lightning weapons and it slows enemies dramatically, it's effectively a sloth talisman that you just have to build up rather than auto apply. I don't mind the existence of slow but it certainly lasts too long whilst also slowing too much. I feel like it's a 50% flat slow or something which is kind of ridiculous. And yea, I enjoyed NG+ more than the initial run through because gear mattered, crafting mattered there were more things to engage with post mission than just going to the next mission. It hearkened back to the Souls mentality of "I'm going to make a build around these concepts/gear and see how that turns out".

Most of the things I would want to see improved in a sequel have already been said. I don't think this game has many niggling issues but some very obvious balancing flaws. It's too easy to accidentally stumble into a build that trivialises the scenarios setup by the developers. The enemies need to be drastically buffed to compensate especially in the later levels of the game. I intentionally capped myself at lvl 150 for challenge but my damage output due to gear still manages to overwhelm any encounter in the game. When I'm 160 levels below the recommended, and I can still blitz the bossfight in that mission in about 30 seconds it loses a lot of impact. It's hard to tell whether these are intended outcomes by the developers inspired by Diablo or not, but for me personally that type of gameplay is one of the reasons games like Diablo grow to bore me. I like it when optimal strategies are still challenged by the game, I like optimising but still being shown holes in my build that player execution and knowledge need to make up for.

I totally agree. Played a bit of NG+ but I don't think I'm going to go through the entire thing. Playing all missions again sounds like a huge grind when none of the enemies have been challenging since the mid game. Bosses in NG+ don't seem harder at all either. Just picked up a divine set of the lightning build I used for most of the game and destroyed the temple level and ice level. The ice lady was fun to fight again but they really did underestimate the impact of gear and stats on enemies and bosses for NG+.

There is a lot to improve there starting with the parry stat. Bosses just need more attacks with massive break stats and they need to be able to capitalize on a ki breaks. Just doing that would go a long way.

I would probably enjoy playing some of the late game missions NG+ in twilight mode but all they seem to be serving up is that godamn blob mission. Man that boss/level is the worst. I would need to play all early missions too which sounds like a pain. It's really stupid they don't unlock all missions in NG+ from the start.

@pyrodactyl: Nioh is pretty short if you mainline it and know where you are going. Clearing a region takes less than an hour in NG+ in my experience.

@ivdamke I think it is intentional for you to be able to overpower yourself. The game seems to want you to grind and grind games always allow ways to clear and take rewards quickly.

I will say though, by far the biggest complaint I have about Nioh, is that it tells you your first playthrough essentially doesn't matter. They need to revamp the way their loot works and especially the Blacksmith. Having all that be practically useless until NG+ just doesn't make sense.

Enemy variety really stuck out to me, more than anything else. They blow their load in the first 5 hours, and there is barely anything different past that. This wouldn't be a problem, but this game is looooooooong. Took me 60 hours to do everything, excluding NG+. In addition to that, I'd like to see faster enemy AI, and balance that with more iframes on the dash. Less obtuse stats on armor and weapons, it's a little bit of a mess, just too much going on. Could also maybe venture outside of Dark Souls territory and more into Ninja Gaiden by adding a jump with some air combos. Not like Bayonetta or DMC, just something light like Ninja Gaiden Black & NGII. Basically what I am saying is that Nioh 2 needs an Izuna Drop, that's all I'm saying, alright?

We should make a petition. Not just an online one a physical one and mail it to Team Ninja.

If they made Nioh more like NG, I'd be on board with that, but really I wish they make another good Ninja Gaiden game outright. Nioh is only marginally faster than Dark Souls and things like Izuna Drop shine in the fast paced action of NG.

@zevvion: If I was to take a game I wanted Nioh to blend with in a sequel it would be Tenchu Wrath of Heaven. Add more verticality to levels with a jump and grapple hook to compensate, some more stealth mechanics and open ended level design providing more reason to use the abundance of items the game has. That being said with the state of Niohs current systems you'd be looking several major overhauls to make those things work and with this games current balance state that might not be a good move.

I get what you mean with Izuna though, but I have a soft spot for it especially when doing it to specific bosses.

-Like others have said, the enemy variety was kind of disappointing. Would have been more fun to not be fighting the same 15-ish enemies throughout the entire game

-The side missions mostly being rehashed main missions was disappointing. By the halfway point every time a side mission popped up using a main mission's level I internally groaned. Some more variety in those would be nice.

-Pre-NG+ loot. Holy crap you just get avalanches of stuff. I should have just put on whatever armor had the highest level in my first play through and ignored min-maxing. Instead I tried to keep my set bonuses going throughout and that got frustrating with how quickly you outlevel stuff. Unique armor losing out to some piddly non-unique after two missions was a pain in the butt. I think the loot system needs a major overhaul because it's really the main issue I have with the game.

-Stats are ridiculous. Half the stuff needs to be renamed to represent what it actually means. Like the might stat on your guardian is, if I remember, how little enemy attacks eat into your living weapon meter. But then you have living weapon durability which I think is the same damn thing? I can't even tell. It's like monster hunter with how vague some of the names are.

-The skill trees are a mess. It needs some differentiation between skills like a symbol showing high stance on high stance only skills.

Enemy variety is definitely something worth striving for. They do have it in this game but you're lucky if you get one new enemy type per area. The skill tree should be something you invest in constantly. I've had what I needed since maybe a third of the way through things and there's very little else for me to feel like putting points into.

I haven't played in a few days as i felt i got fixated on grinding rather than getting through the story and then i found out it doesnt really matter till new game+. I guess i would make upgrading gear more meaningful, maybe add abilities tied to weapons like aoe procs and what have you. Maybe have each gear stat be one type like one for damage, one for defense or health regen etc so its a bit less random when reforging.

It should be mentioned that part of the greatness of Nioh is the general lack of stupid design decisions; which are an absolute staple, a must in every Souls game; but somehow they actually managed to avoid that problem. There's no Valley of Defilement, no Tomb of the Giants, no Great Hollow, no Ancient Dragon, no Laurence and Ludwig, no Twin Princes, no Unicorns from Salt and Sanctuary, no NG+ Last Boss in Lords of the Fallen and there's actually a story; not only that a pretty damn good one. You take a universal zero and turn it into a + or a ++ and you take away almost every negative and that's the blend of success. A big reason why Valkyrie Profile 2 is so good is the lack of badness, the absence of flaws as it were; Nioh is the same.

First and foremost they need to work on level design. Not sure if this is because they had no time, no talent or no know-how, but the levels in Nioh are very bland and tend to run together after a while.

The structure of having individual "missions" is good, but they don't capitalize on the strength of having individually presented episodes. The single world that Dark Souls introduced has always been both exaggerated in its complexity and overstated in its importance. Having to link very different areas to one another brings about "transition zones" that are ultimately uninteresting filler until you reach the next bonfire where an area starts proper. Nioh uses the map to great success letting you quickly access all the options you would otherwise need to address NPCs for. That stuff is novel and does well in terms of world building, but ultimately becomes a chore and then a nuisance the longer you play the game.

They basically have the formula down pretty well so far. The mechanics of it anyway - you start at A and then explore in order to find B and subsequently open the shortcut from B back to A. They do this well but the wrapper is dull and uninspired. Woods, woods, woods, caves, caves, caves.. Even when you get to the castles which are a nice change of pace and offer a bit more verticality to the level design it quickly starts to get old as the tile set begins to repeat itself.

I've just defeated the giant skeleton "puzzle boss" (one of the worst in the game so far in my opinion) and honestly I'm kind of winded. I was under the impression the game was coming to an end an entire region ago and looking up a FAQ to find out I have one more region left AND an epilogue is deflating rather than exciting. In a Souls game I would usually reach a point of exhaustion near the end, but the aesthetic design of the levels would reinvigorate me anew each time I reached that new bonfire - well unless it was a swamp or a cave. In Nioh each new area has begun feeling like a grind rather than an exciting new chapter to explore, and this is mostly because I know the area I'll be exploring next will be as mundane as the one that came before it. Despite being incredibly frustrating to fight in at times due to annoying deaths by drop off, the half sunken temple early on was one of the more inspired and interesting looking locations in the game.

Honestly if they only worked on the level design in the sequel and left everything else unchanged I wouldn't be too upset.

Also I really hope there is a sequel. This game is really great in many ways, a complete surprise for me as the alpha tests turned me away more than anything, but I don't really hear anyone talking about it.

By the sounds of things there will be. The game has broken 1m copies sold and they've released a 1.05 patch with a set of armour to celebrate. 1m within a couple weeks for a game with little to no marketing or fanfare is a pretty good number. Especially when you consider how scarce copies of the games seemed to be worldwide.

@humanity: @fredchuckdave: I think Nioh has more than a couple of problems, but I generally like its level design. There are some missions where the design isn't all that, but I really liked how most of them are somewhat unique, like Ninja Fortress. I don't mind 'totally fucked' area's in Souls games though. I kind of like them.

One thing that I would point out that Nioh did incredibly well over the Souls games is the "backstab" mechanic. When you stagger someone into the red, grappling works extremely reliably. In stark comparison the Souls games have always had an incredibly finicky window for executing the backstab and Bloodborne would also have weird issues with the parry. Nothing more aggrevating than properly parrying a boss or enemy in Bloodborne have them drop onto a knee, and then instead of executing the animation your character simply slashes at them because for some reason you weren't lined up just right.

Now the only thing these games need to get right is fighting on hills or stairs, which is still a huge problem.

The game is too long imo, at least considering the lack of enemy variety (Why am I still fighting fucking fiends?!?). That's probably because I've been playing the side missions all the way through, but that's only because youliterally have to if you don't want to be crazy underleveled (or grind forever). I'm like 30 levels below the recommended mission levels even despite playing through most of the side content.

@nevergameover: turns out level doesn't matter past the mid game. I just did a mission like 90 lvls under in NG+. Like I said in the OP, the difficulty curve is completely messed up in this game. I had armor 40 lvls under and was 40 lvls under myself for the last mission and it was way easier than the early-mid game.

So yeah, mainline the story when you start getting tired of side missions. They mostly don't matter at all

I agree with you on liking it. Part of it is how Nioh has that stamina system always in play so that they make you work for the vulnerability. That's the kind of stuff Nioh is willing to lay bare that I really enjoy as well. I feel like the game is willing to give the player the win when they earn it in a satisfying way.

The more I've played Nioh, the more I have issues with so many things about it. Don't get me wrong, I still love the game. The combat is incredibly well designed and satisfying, and the Ki system is an awesome mechanic. Also I've only beat 12 of the main missions so I could be proven wrong about some of this stuff, but...

• You fight the same enemies over and over and over...and they have the same attacks. Like seriously you fight the same yokai in the first hour of the game that you do in the 30th hour of the game and it has the same exact attack patterns. For being a tight mission based experience, they didn't really craft enough unique enemies to match the length of the game.
• The level design gets predictable and boring. The tight corridors just feel so artificial and restrictive. Finding all the Kodama can be fun but they aren't hidden that well most of the time, and there's no real "secrets". The way you just run around looping corridors/mountain-side paths until you find the opening to a shortcut makes the game feel like a weak attempt at Dark Souls level design. They don't play around with the environments enough or add enough interesting mechanics to make each level feel different. I honestly feel like the early levels are much better designed than stuff later in the game.
• There is way too much loot. It's insane. 90% of it isn't useful. I get they want a big economy for crafting and reforging, but most of that isn't useful either. There's way too many rare crafting parts you need to grind for, but there's no real reason to do it. You easily get good enough gear from random drops, and the game isn't hard enough to warrant repeated crafted, soul matching (especially because it's expensive as all hell) and grinding. Managing the inventory becomes so tiresome, but maybe that's my own fault for picking up every single thing that drops.
• The bosses are too easy. I struggled with the second boss in the cave mission and was excited about how difficult the game felt. Beating that boss felt challenging and rewarding like a Dark Souls game. The rest of the bosses not so much. I've beaten 5 or 6 bosses on my first try which is just disappointing.
• Living weapon is ridiculously OP and turns tough fights into button mashing.
• The game gets difficult and the combat becomes more satisfying when they force you to fight multiple enemies at once, yet they hardly ever do that. Generally it's always 1 fiend at a time, one skeleton at a time, 1 one-eyed oni at a time, over and over again. And the level design hardly ever forces you into tough fighting spots. In a sequel they need to force you to fight 3 or 4 ninjas at once, not 1 at a time.

Once again I haven't finished the game yet, so maybe most of my points get proven wrong, but the game feels like a huge game with a bunch of small pieces restricting it. And maybe I'm just comparing the game to Dark Souls way too much and need to just accept for what it is rather than comparing it to Dark Souls. In most ways the games are completely different and maybe the developers intent with Nioh wasn't to make a ridiculously challenging game and more of a mechanically deep, loot filled ARPG.

@pyrodactyl: what would you call mid game vs end game? I just entered the fifth region after beating your girlfriend (or whatever) okatsu in the corrupted (shit stained) fortress.

The difficulty goes downhill hard after the ice boss. I had a bit of trouble with the guy with the spear and the wind sword dude (late game, not end game bosses) but not really. With a decent weapon you can trash any boss even if you or your armor are way underleveled.

I got excited when the "Izuna" guardian spirit did that move to me because I thought I could unleash it on others but alas that would just be too cool.

After beating the game it kind of just made me want to play NGB. Not because Nioh was bad, if anything that's high praise.

@pyrodactyl: haha welp I just got my ass handed to me for two hours by the flying asshole with the rifle and the teleport move. First time I've felt any level of frustration at all in this game. Teleport breaks lock on --I can't find the guy -- grab attack and thrown into fire -one shot kill. Happened to me something like 25 times. I don't even think the guy was hard tbh, I just inevitably got one shoted every time I got him down low. This was also the first time I felt like I was playing a true souls game and fighting the camera more than the actual boss. And then I was too lazy to kill mobs and refill my spirit. Infuriating but I finally beat him.

Here's a request: Please auto recall the fucking spirit if I die to a boss!

@nevergameover: You can use a Summoner's Candle to bring your spirit back to you, with amrita intact.

Personally, the world building really isn't doing it for me. A lot of the charm for me in the Souls series is the incredible feel the world has. The current mission select and lack of connectivity between areas isn't really my thing. I would be really curious how well they could pull off a more interconnected world. Also the bosses are incredibly hit or miss in my opinion. Some bosses seem really well designed with some tight design behind them. I would love to see a stronger focus on boss fight design in the future.

I have recently started playing Dark Souls III again and I have to say that game is much, much more challenging than Nioh is. That is because it is more deliberate. Nioh is designed as a Souls game in terms of combat and the encounters thereof, but it doesn't seem to adhere to the same rules. You can cancel out of stuff and you are so much faster than your opponents are. For example, I haven't played DSIII that much at all yet so I didn't remember enemy placement. I was caught by a guy standing around a corner. Dead. In Nioh there are plenty of guys standing around corners all the time, trying for the same trick. Nope, I'm too fast. Also, the block in Nioh is soooooooooooo powerful. I tried to block in DSIII like some idiot and was guard broken immediately, out of stamina to dodge or attack and basically had to use two Estus flasks to get back to an acceptable health total. In Nioh you just block and that's that. Even if you do get hit, you have 10 Elixirs which heal you to full health in my case and on top of that a bunch of healing spells that can be applied instantly. In DSIII there is a shitlong animation for healing spells.

It feels like Nioh is a Souls game on a hidden 'Highly Forgiving' difficulty setting. Nioh 2 should choose a direction. Either Souls game or Ninja Gaiden game and adjust its difficulty accordingly. This Souls approach with some NG elements peppered here and there doesn't work to its advantage in terms of challenging the player.

I really liked Nioh, but if I had to pick one of its issues to fix then enemy variety would be the big one. The game runs out of fun encounter options well before the finish line. Level design could be hit-or-miss, but I really didn't enjoy when the game wanted you to replay levels. If I'm going to revisit a level, add something significant to change it up. Don't just throw another bird demon or two in it.

Other than that, I actually liked the amount of detail put into a lot of the game's side characters and monsters, and I spent a decent amount of time reading the entries about them. But the main story and main characters are all pretty forgettable. So maybe a sequel could do more with its story.

Oh, and they should do something about the god damn menus. Those skill trees are a mess.

@zevvion: I think it just takes some adjusting, you're probably still tuned a bit to Nioh's frequency if that makes sense. I found DS3 to be real easy after playing a bunch of souls games.

@boozak: Probably, but it's hard to argue Nioh isn't easier than all of them. You don't even have to spec into a certain skill to have blocking only take up a small amount of Ki for instance. In any Souls game you'll guard get broken if you block too much, not to mention you need a shield to do it.

I really do like Nioh, but I think I was looking only at its good innovations in my first few hours with it, thinking it might be the best Souls game ever made. The more I think about it, the more I realize it isn't. Another example is that I have already seen more varied enemies in my new DSIII playthrough after 3 hours than in Nioh's entirety.

@zevvion: Last nights debacle aside, I totally agree. I saw people like Colin moriarty saying that nioh (he never beat the first boss) was unequivocally more difficult than dark souls (He's never actually even come close to beating one). I find this legitimately baffling.

Again, you can block 99% of attacks, including all elemental damage and almost all boss attacks in nioh without a shield. They have never made a shield in dark souls that has 100% vs all attack types -- and any shield that even comes close weights like 40 lbs and kills your encumbrance. In fact I found one in S&S and decided that I would refuse to use it because it broke the game

@nevergameover: Difference is enemies recover a lot faster after rebounding from your block. In Dark Souls you have enough time to backstab an enemy after a block.

The games just have a different pace, the gear is what might make Nioh easier in the long run but the overall flow of combat makes the blocking comparison a bit silly.

PC Version

@boozak: You can be 150 levels underleveled with common gear in Nioh and it will still be easy, it only takes longer.

Perhaps doing one on one distilled comparisons are indeed silly, but what it boils down to for me is that Nioh is absolutely, 100%, structured and designed as a Souls game in terms of combat prerequisites and balance. But it does nothing to maintain the structure so that a challenge remains. The player doesn't have to engage with the Ki bar, barely at all. Dodging takes up such a small amount of Ki that you can literally dodge forever and then still have enough left over to counter attack. You don't have to engage with Ki Pulses if you do not want to. In Dark Souls, you can and will be punished if you spam anything at any time, including dodge rolls. In Nioh, you can never be punished really. Aside from a couple of bosses, there is nothing in that game that demands you to overcome it, let alone master it.

I think the point of Nioh is that, similar to Diablo, you can become so proficient, that everything is a joke to beat and the challenge becomes how quickly you can beat something. That's totally fine, I do enjoy that, it is a fresh change of pace. But it is what it is: not very challenging. That's not necessarily a flaw in game design, but I enjoy it less than I do a Dark Souls game.

It doesn't matter what level me or my gear is. Hino-Emna will still cause me problems. The challenge is uneven but, with a sequel, they have a blueprint to tinker with and have a combat system they now have an understanding of. They can design to those strengths. To their credit, the final mission throws everything at you.

@zevvion: In as much as deeper combat tactics are concerned it's true that you don't really have to engage with that stuff unless you want to, but as far as dodging and attacking goes you are incorrect. In fact even when wearing the red demon armor set with all its ki related bonuses it is still very easy to dodge your way into the red and get winded if you're not careful. Similarly some people claimed that you can block indefinitely, even for bosses, but that is absolutely not true as heavier attacks will completely deplete your ki bar in no time.

The biggest problem with Nioh is that they introduce all these systems that become entirely useless or I'll advised in boss encounters or against most Yokai. Souls give you two basic attacks (so to speak I realize there are more than two moves) and you engage regular fodder enemies the same way you engage bosses - look for opening and get a poke in. In Nioh bosses often don't stagger and attack with such frequency as to make most combos impossible and most ki techniques more risky than simply dodging and getting a hit in. This makes boss encounters seem like a chore because their unique nature dramatically reduce your offensive options and reduce you to that simple Souls formula of dodging and poking.

This is a weird thing to want from a game, but LESS LOOT!

I feel like I'm drowning in it and even with a max of 500 gear items, I still have to take 5 minutes to sell stuff every few missions

@shadow: I totally agree. At the endgame, sorting through my loot has become more of a chore than any kind of carrot dangling.

That is mostly false. Sure, (most) bosses don't stagger but draining their ki so you can perform a long string of attacks and combo multiple stances together is definitely still a great strategy as enemy out of ki stagger on any attack. That's how I fight dudes, yokai and bosses.

It's just that by the end game bosse attacks or any enemy attack drain so little of your ki that you can pretty much block most things. They don't find a good way to oppose the strategy of baiting out their attacks outside of range either. Their attacks don't do that much damage, they don't punish ki breaks consistently and they don't have that much HP. The gear/stat and enemy scaling curves are just way off and diverge severely past the mid game.

My three issues so far are these

1. The combat/enemy balance seems off. The game gives you tons and tons of moves and options, but most enemies are so trivial that these options (including most stances) are completely unnecessary. The enemies or bosses that do provide some difficulty, however, prevent most of your flashy moves or combos by either blocking the second hit of any strain and rapidly regenerating their stamina (I'm looking at you, revenants) or just armouring through your attacks. The point being, for as deep as the combat system is, it feels like there's either little reason to use all these options, or I'm actively discouraged from it. Similarly, the game is easy enough that I feel like I don't have a character build. I've just dumped points into everything to try a bit of everything and haven't suffered for it.
2. I know people like loot games, but this goes too far. You get so, so many useless drops, and you have to spend so much time cleaning inventory. Then, engaging with the smithing and upgrade systems seems mostly pointless, at least on the first playthrough, since anything you upgrade is quickly made obsolete. Also, the weapons you get from mission awards are almost always significantly better than what you get from drops, which they should be, but that just makes the drops all the worse.
3. The story is very poorly told. The problem here is that the game feels pieced together. There are cutscenes that come out of nowhere, and do little to introduce you to the next phase of the story. All of a sudden the next main mission text is from a dude you've never heard of, asking you to do something you have no context for. Hell, sometimes the mission text doesn't even tell you why you're going on the mission, or what you're doing. A good example of this is the second area, the cutscene has nothing to do with the mission text, which has nothing to do with the mission, and none of it has anything to do with the next mission. This just keeps happening. I'm sure that the continuity between missions, cutscenes, and story text makes more sense if you take some leaps and fill in the gaps with pre-existing knowledge of the time period, but the gaps are too frequent, too big and too jarring. Add to that the fact that you have to grind some bosses for their lore entries, ugh. The cutscenes are pretty great at least, and I like the way they handle language, but it feels like a script that got butchered.

Overall, the game definitely feels like what it is: a project that has gone through over a decade in development, multiple developers and numerous changes of identity. It tries a number of things, and bar the basic combat mechanics feeling great, none of them feel fully developed, and none of them really mesh well together. Don't get me wrong, I think the game is very good, but it's very messy. A sequel could easily solve most of this game's problems.

Loot's not useless when you can trash it for gold or amrita.

It's not false at all, it's just that my experience was completely different than yours and I think I was overleveled for most fights. Enemy attacks consistently drained at least 1/3 of my entire Ki bar with a single hit and if I didn't block it was usually half my lifebar gone. I was using light armor, so maybe thats part of it, but I definitely did not experience this phenomenon of boss attacks doing very little damage. In fact, that Yokai with the large axe would quite literally one hit kill me if I got caught by his heavy overhead swipe and smash with anything but a completely full lifebar.

My main point was that Nioh introduces complex combat systems but all you really have time to do is a slash and a kick on most bosses. They retaliate very quickly so I would rarely have time to dable in the fancier animations that took time. The bosses are basically immune to a lot of the "fun" systems they built in, but ironically are completely susceptible to talismans which at their worst feel like cheating and at best just feel cheap.

AS anecdotal evidence, here is me fighting the Obsidian Samurai. I wasn't underleveled or anything yet take notice how much ki his attacks drain when I block and how much health I lose from his regular attacks when I miss a roll - I am wearing a full red demon set (I simply refashioned it to look different) and it was the highest level I could farm at that point in the game.

@humanity: I'm not lying, I don't run out of Ki when dodging. I am currently playing DSIII which has received lots of criticism for its poor balance. One of which is that dodging is too inexpensive in stamina consumption in relation to enemy attack patterns. At 30 Stamina, Dark Souls II gave you 5 rolls with the 6th being shorter as it drained your bar completely, then be induced with prolonged delay. Dark Souls III gives you 11, with no drain cap roll at the end. In Nioh, I can easily dodge 20 times and then still continue to dodge indefinitely as long as I pace it to the attacks of the enemies.

I think that becomes a flaw because while Nioh, in relation to a Souls game, expands the possibility space of the player, it still has comparable enemy aggression, attack rates and capacity. You just don't get punished for panic moves in Nioh like you do in Souls. While we can all agree Nioh is a hybrid between Diablo, Ninja Gaiden and Dark Souls, the core combat is very much Dark Souls and doesn't have enough Ninja Gaiden influences. They should have made a significant step in that direction when designing the enemies, or taken a step back when developing the combat sandbox. But it currently feels like you're fighting on two different plains.

And yes, some bosses do break your guard after two hits. In a 60-hour game, that's not really a bullet point to raise I don't think. The vast majority of attacks can be blocked without fear. I was still tuned a bit to Nioh in my first hour of returning to Dark Souls III and you literally cannot block anything without a shield, as I found out when I instinctive pressed the 'deny-the-punish' button. And even with one, most large creatures destroy your guard with a single hit and any flurry attack will also break it. I have finished various Dark Souls games many, many times, most often with builds that dodge and never block. I did not develop a gut-reaction to hit L1 in Nioh because it is a bad move to pull off in that game.

@zevvion: I was mostly referring to bosses here but the majority of bigger Yokai will also drain your stamina, as do tougher human enemies. Of course I do agree in that saying fodder grunts aren't difficult shouldnt be a bullet point on the box.