Nodima

@marino: if Rousey beats Fox, it’s only because her role is much more prominent. Fox isn’t just flat, she sounds like an American overdub of a Chinese action movie. Except she’s in an American action movie.

Like others have said, I don’t feel that she’s primarily let only solely to blame for her performance. The whole of it hangs her out to dry, almost like NRS was attempting to allude to said bad dubs of foreign action films but assigned it to a character with very little to do in the story and almost no connection to the fan base.

I'm nearly halfway through the Invasions maps and I still don't really understand the Kameo system at all, honestly, and I only just realized that I probably should've been swapping characters a little more often than I have been. Not only because it turns out your "Invasions level" is separate from your character level, so everyone is leveling up whether you use them or not, but also because in the Tarkatan Colony you face a lot of enemies that are weak to Ice damage and I am absolutely shredding through it in a way that's very, very satisfying. In that sense it's nice that I have my go-to flow with Sub-Zero, but it makes me look back on some of the more frustrating parts of the other maps and wonder if they would've been just as easily shredded up if I'd paid more attention to the element system.

The game has its fair share of problems, namely that Invasions has some pretty stupid gimmicks meant to spice things up but really just make it intermittently more frustrating than it deserves to be.

But the combat just has such a nice crunch to it that even though I can tell I've barely scratched the surface of its more complicated juggles (and likely never will), I'm definitely gonna clear all the Towers for the epilogue chapters of each character's story and I look forward to the DLC characters.

Online is already a nightmare, though, which is a bummer since SFVI was pretty fun in the Battle Hub for about a month before it got loaded mostly with killers.

On the downer side, this game seems to remain capable of producing some pretty remarkable glitches from innocuous sources. I've had the visual glitch caused by Silverhand's first attempt to bumrush your skull for about 2 hours now, and since my original experience with this game was an impressionist's oil painting interpretation of it, I'd been rolling with it and assuming I just needed to keep pushing the story forward.

Turns out, I called Johnny a "psycho" during a dialogue tree and, direct from CDPR themselves, it's a known issue that this response locks the visual effect in and it's a priority investigation for aan upcoming patch. I can't help but be a little impressed - and happy I don't have any visual issues that make this as utterly unbearable as I'm sure it would be for plenty of other players.

So heads up - don't diss Johnny!

I'm going Cool for...whatever reason. I want to be Cool, I guess? From my memory of the original version of the game, Normal difficulty is hilariously stupid so I'm not too worried about my attribute choices mattering no matter what I do, really. At some point I'll find a pistol that auto-aims at headshots and also lights its bullets on fire and every combat encounter will be an amusement park bonfire.

So far what I'm most fascinated by is just seeing the game that some people had already seen in it way before it got Actually Good. I was one of the rubes that bought it on PS4, though I had read it'd probably be a rough go and can admit I bought the game partially because, as a non-PC gamer, I just wanted to see what it looked and felt like to play a game that's ugly as sin because the hardware just can't deliver it properly. Somehow, I squeezed 20 hours out of that particular nut before getting my refund.

For $30, it's nice to finally see how impressive this game can look, I already knew it had great sound design. I'm also not intentionally trying to ruin it this time so I've got the female V instead of the male. It's already been said a bazillion times but it's truly absurd how much better her performance is. I can't believe the same company that brought us Geralt was cool with...whatever male V was going for.

I thought I couldn't just turn around and leave the dungeon I thought I was stuck in from my last post, but once I remembered I needed to wear a mask to go back through the door it didn't really matter because my character seemed to go insane the moment I crossed the barrier and the game insisted on playing along, losing all interactivity without hard locking every time. Yuck.

...That being said, I've also re-rolled as a githyanki monk (of my own volition, swear!) and A) have really enjoyed the subtle differences in a lot of the dialogue between this and my half-orc bard character but also B) way, way, way, way prefer playing this game on "easy" mode. The enemies still hit like brick shithouses but at least my characters can take a punch like the heroes they're purported to be.

It's also been weirdly entertaining to play Act 1 while knowing what I'm in for, as I'm not only able to purposely mix things up and see how/if the game accounts for it, but am also moving along much more quickly overall while stumbling onto several small side quests I missed. Plus I didn't accidentally kill Halsin this time, so I didn't go all in and massacre the druid camp, so I've not lost half my party with the snap of a finger. I won't lie and say I wish that old save didn't seem so borked so I could compare how the game progresses with or without, but the gamer-hoarder in me sure does feel more complete with all the homies in tow.

I've got no good excuse for pummeling the story into submission in a single sitting, none at all. All I can say is that it's significantly convoluted and I needed breaks during the others.

Fun game.

In case this might be considered a spoiler I figured I'd make a small little follow up comment during a break, but it's worth acknowledging that some of the story mode's early friction compared to past Netherrealms hits owes a lot to the, both obvious and novel, idea to disable all but the most fundamental skills of your fighter, presumably until they have their Super Saiyan moments. Even one of the fundamental buttons doesn't do what you'd expect. It's a decision that masterfully improves on their narrative ambitions, eases players into their brand of 2D combat while in either case gives the player something to look forward to.

It's simply dope, in other words.

Which made me think, back in the abstraction of a goof off mode like the classic Arcade tower, maybe I just needed to adapt to a subtly different rhythm, the way baseball batters spend spring training learning the latest pitching fads. But no, the third tier of a Novice Arcade tower juggled me to shame all the same. This game seems admirably adamant that you see it as it sees itself.

Which sucks, in other words. But I get the feeling it only sucks because I suck. So, to bring this Johnny Cage-ism full circle, it doesn't suck nearly as much as the AI is gonna suck once I don't suck and the AI is forced to eat my...uh...accolades?

I've only had my hands on this game for about thirty minutes so the post that kicks this thread off is gonna basically start and stop at the subject line: this game insists that you play along from the word go in a way the previous trilogy often refused to. Aside from the handful of two-one-one single life story fights, last generation's MKs were pretty content to let casual players with a hint of ingenuity fumble their way through the story and arcade modes on Medium difficulty as though it were insisting you see what happens next. Canonical story beat or hypothetical character triumph, non-competitive MK hasn't really stood up for itself in a long time. As a definitively non-competitive fighting game player without local rivals to scrum with since the heyday of SFIV: AE, I'd wager that felt like a significant chuck of the "we've got a narrative, but also skull deformation tech" pitch that makes MK unique among fighters.

SF VI's World Tour, as hilarious and wonderful as it is, does hit a point where you've either built the right fighter, gotten the right amount of good or, in my case, found some moves you like but can't quite deploy appropriately and increasingly rely on healing items and damage buffs to progress, which distorts any misguided comparisons to the Yakuza franchise into unfortunate reminders that items are equally if not more important than mastery.

I've already said more than I thought I'd say, but the deal is this: even the Novice Towers think you know what you're doing. On Medium difficulty, I died on the second story mode fight. If I hadn't literally hit credits on MK11 Aftermath for the first time right before launch MK1, I might attribute this idea to rust. But unless there's some very subtle systematic shift I've yet to grasp here (which seems unlikely, given the only time I knew what MK11's meters were meant for was whenever Jeff would explain them to someone else) this game isn't afraid to show off its combo strings, demand that you quickly assess your matchup and engage with its balance.

Again, if I hadn't literally just plowed through the MK11 DLC and found its Medium difficulty pretty acquiescent until the AI insisted otherwise I'd probably not have hurried to write a quick thought about it that once again ballooned into a full idea. It feels silly I let that happen considering I'm literally in the first chapter of the story mode anyway. From where I'm sitting though, plowing through 4 hours of MK11 DLC years after being familiar with the base game and immediately finding this game to not be fucking around...it felt significant enough to comment on.

In large part because, honestly...this game might be flagrantly incredible. Maybe.

XBox doesn’t have the same Spotify integration PlayStation does? It’s not always ideal, as some games fully mute their soundtracks rather than allow you to render them subtle beds for your chats of choice while a select few (Death Stranding most explicitly) disallow playback entirely “for the experience” but I am or would be surprised to learn XBox doesn’t have the same kind of function

Because the current conversation here is about the difficulty, I'll just say: personally, while I enjoyed about 10 hours of the medium difficulty, by the time I was discovering mini-bosses, let alone groups of multi-attack gnolls and whatnot, I dropped the game down to easy and still found a lot of the combat encounters quite punishing. Which invites the usual caveat that I'm a bit of a brute force dolt who probably isn't considering party composition or skill acquisition even remotely as comprehensively as I should be.

Additionally, those of you who found my stubborn position regarding save scumming may or may not be satisfied to learn I've learned my lesson. My party is stuck in a dungeon it can't fast travel out of and seems ill-equipped to complete due to, hilariously, a lack of junk to toss. There have been even been multiple brief sessions I've loaded up the game only for all 4 of my characters' perception checks to fail, meaning I can't even toss junk where it's needed to begin with. I've also wound up here after an attempt at cleverness led to murdering one potential party member before an attempt at mischief led to another two party members rejecting my gamesmanship and also choosing the losing side, ie. also dead.

So not only do I find myself stuck in a spot I'm not sure I'm capable of getting out of, but my four person party is literally all my party can be anymore. We've quickly clarified our band of merry pansexual misfits into a classic Warriors of, er, Dark scenario and as curious as I am to see how this whole thing might play out...

I'll circle back to my first statement and say I've felt stuck at level 4 forever, and that warning before entering the Mountain Pass that I'd have a hard as hell time hanging (on both normal and easy) had me desperate for XP opportunities that brought me here...and while I also understand that walking my game back to its most obviously open ended (but still post mutiny) state loses 2 hours of gameplay...that's also my cue to admit while I've had a pretty good time with this game, After 20+ hours I'm feeling more and more like I should've taken a long hard look at my Gerstmann School of Class Dunces diploma and taken a more brutish class because I feel like I'm rarely goofing my way through this game as the aging, opportunistic Bard I imagined in the character creator.

I'm just another Video Game Guy, murdering everything in my path. Which I think one or two people have responded to previous posts of mine explaining this isn't an infinite playground, which I accept and grasp the reasons for...but this deep in the game I've found myself in combat so often I can't help but wonder whether I really am too dense to play the sort of character I'd envisioned (or, even worse, make the most of this type of game) or even more worse, that despite the intensely significant variables I mentioned above that I could see clear alternatives for as they unfolded...the fact that I seem actually trapped somewhere with no escape other rolling back to an earlier save might be obviating the idea that not every D&D campaign allows idiots to finish them but also has me contemplating whether this level of player choice is not actually that kind of a gesture.

I do really like this game, and I hope I find a solution for the sorry state I find myself in (or eventually get over the idea of rolling back a couple hours) but I can't imagine I've find myself in that uncommon a predicament, much less how the game's not at least equally to blame as my own foolhardy approach.