Funny thing is that I decided to skip this one, because I'd watched and enjoyed a number of these, but didn't really have time for it ATM. Also, there is no indication in the video description that she actually, ya know, did it.
Then I saw Abby's tweet to the Rolling Stone article and was like, "Hey, wait a minute, she actually did the thing?"
I loved the first The Surge and ended up playing it through many times (you can beat the game in two to three hours once you know where you're going), and really wanted to like The Surge 2. But sadly I found it kind of obnoxious. It seems fond of ambushing you with multiple enemies in tight spaces, and also presents you with ranged attackers somewhat frequently (some of which are firing at you from towers far away), for which your options at fighting back are very limited or nonexistent. In short, the difficulty often struck me as cheap and contrived compared to the first game. I was hoping it would be an evolution, but it felt like a step back.
@neocalypso: I mean, honestly, the DLC is kinda boring anyway. It's just a string of dungeons with tough battles. It has all the subtlety and grace of sledgehammer. The final boss of Bitterblack is neat, but mostly it's just retreads of stuff you've fought a bunch already. Not sure how much Jason would really be missing by skipping it, IMO.
Oh man, I can't wait for Jason to finish this game and see the ending. It is seriously one of the most bonkers endings to a video game I've ever experienced.
I didn't know about Cainhurst on my first playthrough, and only did it on my second playthrough, which was a Skill-build. This dude killed me a lot. He's the hardest boss that I actually beat in Bloodborne. (I never beat the first boss of the DLC.)
My point being to not get too discouraged if the next episode is a bunch of failed boss runs. Then again, you're also the guy who beat Amygdala on their first run of the day so I'm probably worried over nothing. Good luck, Jan!
I'm right with you on Martyr Logarius. I played Hunter's Axe in two-handed mode for the whole game, so he tripped me up bad because parrying was basically required.
I also found a couple of the DLC bosses quite hard, but I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that I had beaten the game by the time the DLC came out so I played it for the first time on NG+... not ideal, really.
Though I'm not sure anything is actually as hard as some of the chalice dungeon content...
Glad you guys are playing this some, was wondering when something might be done with it given the whole epidemic situation.
Been playing this hard since it came out last week. My physical copy actually came a day early from Amazon, first time that's ever happened to me. Finished the first playthrough, just starting the NG+ mode.
I'm pleased so far about some of the quality of life changes. For instance, you can now check how many hot springs and locks of hair you've collected for each mission, so there's no more ambiguity there. They also added a scaling option at end-game so that you need not worry about sub-par loot dropping from lower-level missions.
And of course the burst counter and yokai powers stuff is cool. It really changes the overall feel of the gameplay in what I think is a good way.
Just watched this and came on here to defend Hollow Knight only to find that everyone and their mother had already done that for me. :-P Jeff and Ben are definitely in the minority if they didn't like that game. It's friggin' amazing. Best metroidvania I'd played in years.
I own the first Ori on Steam but only played for an hour or two, years ago, just had other things going on. I need to get back to that one, then maybe get into this one if I like it well enough.
The loot was my least favourite part of Nioh. I'm partial to the way the souls game deal with gear upgrades and adquisition, but it's OK they tried something different with Nioh.
I agree that having a set number of weapons that can be upgraded a set amount is a good system that seems like it would work fine for Nioh. I've been playing a lot of Remnant: From the Ashes recently, which does the same sort of thing. There's definitely a grind there if you want to find all the gear, much less upgrade it all to max, plenty of incentive to keep going without the randomized color-coded loot aspect.
Having to constantly be changing your gear or consuming tons of useless gear and money to keep the gear you like up to date gets old fast for me. I just don't see the appeal, like the jackpot kind of feel of watching countless pieces of gear spawning from corpses and chest.
I've played a lot of these types of loot games, and I do get the appeal, but man, they could be doing it so much better.
For instance, speaking of "countless pieces of gear," the now-defunct Marvel Heroes (a Diablo-like) eventually created a system that would automatically convert dropped gear below a certain rarity to money/materials. You would see the items spawn, then promptly disappear as they were changed to currency. You could set what rarity levels got treated this way for each individual gear slot, giving you full control of how drops were treated. It meant that you got the excitement of seeing the good stuff drop without all the hassle of picking up and selling or breaking down low-tier stuff that wasn't good for anything else. I'm not sure why more loot games haven't done something like this.
@arbitrarywater: Yep, obviously at 600+ hours I stuck it out longer than you did, but all that grinding could've been so much more impactful and satisfying than it actually was.
One other little detail I didn't mention is that if you wanted to be really completionist about beating all the missions, then you'd have to consider that each time a new act/region got added with a new DLC, it also got added to all the previous difficulty settings. So even if you were playing the DLCs as they came out, when the Siege of Osaka got released with the final DLC, to be truly completionist you'd have to beat it five times. Oof. It wasn't truly necessary, but some of the missions on lower-level difficulties would have first-time completion rewards that give you things like Onmyo Mage's Locks that permanent increased your stats, and couldn't be gotten any other way. In short, they actually did incentivize playing content that was in difficulty tiers you'd already cleared. Why, Team Ninja? What made you think that was a good idea?
I'd like to think they've learned something from all that, but honestly, my expectation is that most of this stuff will end up being the same for Nioh 2. I'd love to be wrong!
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