Tennmuerti

There are 4 endings all told. The choice handles the main straightforward break point. However there are still 2 optional endings you can do after that (if selecting the traditional main story path) for which most people will either need to be very thorough/lucky or more likely use a guide/wiki.

Kind of like Darksouls 3 also had two other optional endings for which you needed to jump through some hoops through.

@soulcake I guess I kinda didn't except much from him, coming right on the heels of a main boss fight. The bull is also a "miniboss" of a sort if I recall right, it's not got a big boss "soul" to upgrade with and is sandwiched very closely between the two major area bosses.

Also hey that reminds me, Sekiro uses (and reuses) those minibosses fairly frequently throughout, which can repeat, but i did find it refreshing of still having that "tough fight" combat challenge sprinkled through ought the game without having to rely on major boss battle set pieces, so from that perspective I think the minibosses were a success, for my money. (ironic when some of them kill you (me) more then a boss on the easy side, cough cough lol)

The main true "lazy" design option is the reuse of a boss (with only minor tweaks if any). Which Sekiro maintains the tradition of doing at least once (tho i do believe it's optional)

"Bad" boss design gets incredibly subjective incredibly quickly.

(like the Bull for example, as it can be handled by either just sprinting, or plus firecrackers, or parrying/blocking surprisingly effectively too, all work fine, just that I know of; which imo actually makes it quite an alright boss all told, if a bit on the easy side for Sekiro specifically)

I was banging my head against the game initially (and it never quite went away tbh). Between having to break years of ingrained Soulslike habits, occasional traditional soulslike bullshitery of cramped quarter fights with bad camera getting stuck and largely my own stubbornness of playing for too long int the night and being obstinate about trying to crack a deliberately hard boss while tired. The salt got going, let me tell you.

But now, where I am in the game now, looking back I realise what Fromsoft has done is told me the "Souls" "veteran" to "get good" again. The game said: "look fucker, either you learn, learn the mechanics and learn the patience and the enemy timings and the parry/strike rhythms, learn the counters, or you're gonna have a bad time". Simply put the game said "learn" in unequivocal simple terms. And learn I did, through the salt through the rage and through many many deaths and getting stuck for dozens of boss attempts at a time, eventually it got through my thick skull and all my bad habits i've picked up playing souls games that all became too easy in recent years. Eventually I learned (ever so slowly and in tiny chunks and never fully). Fromsoft has done it again, and to someone who all but forgot what that initial Demons Souls experience was like, this felt great!

The point of this little story is that I do fully believe that without it's difficulty, without putting up those severe barriers up, it would not be the same game at all, not even close; I would have brute forced most of bosses (as I already did to some) instead of learning; and learning nothing from those walls, I would have been less prepared for the gameplay ahead, less interested in this game, less engaged, it would have become a yet another been there done there slog. So I am kinda appreciative of what Sekiro did for me as a player again, something I did not expect, kicked my comfortable little ass and told me to learn again. In fact that kinda did happen for a time, I did brute force the game for a bit, I did stop learning and then later on when I started coming up on elite enemies for which I refused to actually learn how to "fight" instead of just beat on like everything else, I got punished hard for said laziness and brute forcing of fights, by not having that core part of the gameplay down, those fights felt ridiculous; even tho had I took my time earlier those same fights would have been totally manageable I am sure (as I have seen them done much easier by people who did learn the patience and the rhythms of Sekiro's combat). And I'm still paying back for said lack of learning in the later half of the game, still. Those are also the reasons why I don't think a tweak up to your dmg or enemy dmg down, would work, it would be detrimental to what the game is, as it would literally enable more of said laziness and never learning and just becoming yet another generic slog. At which point you just have fundamentally different game experiences. Is that ok? Sure in a lot of cases it will be for many, myself included, that's why most games do have difficulty settings in them after all. But in this particular case where the difficulty is such a large, core part of the whole work, I don't begrudge the developers from not including an easy option, and am honestly kind of grateful for it, speaking just for myself as selfish as that may be.

Not everything needs to be for everyone at all times, it's fine for games to have specific niches that limit their overall audience at times on purpose (I have bounced off many game genres too because of their inherent difficulties to me as well). Otherwise we might as well have gruel all around (something the industry danced real close to at a point many years ago).

PS: I know it may sound real dumb and I wouldn't blame anyone for rolling their eyes and telling me to fuck off. But. People say that games are art; or at least large parts of them can be; and we know it's not just about the art assets in the games or the audio/visual aspect of them, game design itself is at times an artistic form imo, so expand this just a tiny bit further, difficulty can be used as part of that artistic intent too. Obviously not every game needs to do it, nor is it even healthy for every game to do so. Occasionally however it's great that it can be.

As other have already mentioned they are very different games all told with the main similarities being laregely superficial, being technically shooters and "persistent" game. That's pretty much it.

Warframe is not really a "looter" game either, like a Diablo or Destiny or Anthem or Borderlands, not in the same sense, you're not after random gear drops with stats. 99% of the time you are just collecting very abundant resources with little to no randomness involved, and then using said farmed resources to craft your gear from blueprints that can be just gotten for a pittance from the main marketplace, or copied from a clan or obtained some other way. There is some randomness to the drops but for the gear that you use it's very limited, like say a boss will drop parts of a frame and he always drops one of the three required pieces. All weapons and frames and gear is static, they are the same for all players (there is one exception to this tbf), the difference is in how you mod them.

As for gameplay, it's shooting is serviceable it's not stellar like Destiny and it's not bad either, varying wildly depending on the types of weapons and mod setups you use. With a lot of preference on area of effect weapon currently that can wipe out hordes of eneies at a time. Oh ye, WF is a horde shooter most of the time, ie you are killing enemies by bucket loads, in that way it's closer to the Diablo way of thinking, to make a player feel powerful make them able to kill billions with little to no effort at extreme speeds and then occasional fight bosses.

Shooting is also just one of the parts of WF (there is a fairly robust melee system as well). It's a much more ability focused game. It does not use cooldowns to limit your ability use, unlike games like Destiny or Anthem, instead it uses energy, think Diablo mana, if you have it you can spend it how you wish as much as you wish. Someone once said: Warframe is kinda like Destiny if you were using your ultimate all the time. Which is very much true with most semi competent builds and frames, you are constantly using your powers that are laying waste to areas, all the time. A frame like say Mesa for example has an ability that is like a directional version of Overwatch Reaper's ultimate, except she can turn it on/off at will, keep doing it for minutes at a time, at a massive range. It's kinda left up to the player how much you want to rely on your shooty wepons your melee or your abilities.

It's also can be very fast paced game as the stream has shown, and in all honesty Mark (who did a great job btw) is kinda still starting out. So ye it gets faster and crazier, both in terms of numbers of enemies, pace of movement you can achieve and the amount of things going on. But sometimes you're also just sitting around guarding an objective for minutes at a time, killing enemeis streaming at your from all directions.

Speaking of fast pace, it's movement systems is one of it's most universally praised features by anyone who got into it. But you do need to get the hang of it in order to enjoy. The "floatiness" that Jeff talks about is definitely there, but it's there for a purpose, because it enables sliding and transitioning smoothly from animation to animation, keeping up a constant flow without stopping or uncomfortably stuttering your character. Watching a player proficient with this movement system traverse levels with varying obstacles and terrain at breakneck speeds is a a thing all on its own and there are many extra methods to this madness too. It's also unfotunately not well tutorial by the game, and outside sources are kinda required to figure it all out.

Actually this is applicable to most of the game too, it's not gonna hold your hand and eventually it will get harder and you will start feeling squishier and enemies spongier, at which point it's usually time to start learning how it's more indepth mechanics work that aren't well explained by the game itself at all. Which is where all the streamers and youtubers come into play. It's rough on boarding is one of it's glaring weaknesses (but also in a way weirdly it's strengths, but i'm not gonna get into that design philosophy here). Part of it is because it's a city build on the ruins of an older city that was built on the ruins of an older city still, to be poetic about it. A lot of systems go layer on over time.

There is also no "leveling" progression in a sense, you aren't really leveling your character up at least not on an overall scale. Frames and weapons do have levels but they aren't traditionally done, weapons for example only get more mod capacity slots they dont gain any power in and of themselves when leveling up. These "levels" of items are also only a familiar sense of progression early on, later a frame or weapon can be leveled up from 0 to max in one mission. There is no ilevel, or power level, or light level, or gearscore. You are what mods you put in and combine on your weapon/frame. Because of the way it does things it a system that encourages you to "level up" as much of a variety of items as possible, going from one to another. This is why there are so many frames, you aren't expected to stick to one all the time, rather trying out new ones constantly and then selecting a suite of them comfortable to you and the tasks required of them. You do have an overall MR (mastery rank) but it gives no inherent statistic benefits, rather quality of life ones, as it is essentially a measure of how many frames/weapons/items you have used overall.

It's very much a what you put into it kind of game, kind of like Path of Exile in that way. You put in a lot you get a lot. You put in very little and you'e gonna get very little out of it. You can fiddle around with it level up a couple frames do some missions try a few weapons and think it's bland and bounce off, totally understandable. Or dive deep and loose a few thousand hours, being a biomechanical space ninja that spreads the plague to a whole zone while traveling at mach 5 while killing a dozen or so enemies at a time with a weapon swing while doing cool slides, glides, flips and spins.

The load times have definitely improved on my SSD, went from being egregious on a level I have not seen in a long long time to acceptable.

Like a lot of others I have noticed a performance decrease, with the game now occasionally dipping below 60 on ultra at 1440p where before it was rock solid (on a 2080ti) and butter smooth.

Maaan, this prompted me to try and find out what the hell happened to rights to such classic IPs how come this lucrative nugget hasn't been scooped up by some bigger industry player; and that opened a whole can of worms of rights transfers and licenses between Bioware, Interplay, Atari, Hasbro, WotC, Beamdog. You could make friggin flow chart out of this along with a timeline.

@therealturk: That sucks, but it also seems abnormally long for that boss. Last run that I joined in to help someone else do it (on hard, so double enemy hp and dmg), there were just two of us (after host DC'd) and it died in probably less then 3-4 mins? (To be fair we both seemed to know the boss, ignored the elites, spammed ability combos, dodged all his stuff and I at least went for maximum weak point crit dmg with a sniper rifle.) But even starting out i haven't rly seen pugs have that much trouble with it.

The encounters feel kind of designed around people already knowing how to use their abilities a little bit, maybe even combo, since we are dropped in at level 10 in the demo, and a lot of people playing it aren't doing much of that (being their first time) and can just be standing there in one spot shooting, so when most of the squad is doing that the missions can indeed become a pain. With at least one or two people who know how to combo abilities, use their ultimate, how crits work and dodge/fly/hover their way across the fight they kind of become cakewalks.

The M&K controls can be improved massively by adjusting both the "precision" and "responsiveness" of mouse flight way down (as weird as that sounds yes) and it matters a great deal in how they feel btw. The developers also already outlined how the flying has been further tuned in several ways in the main release, in a post (the demo is an old build).