I'm sure it'll be good and ppl will eat it up but I find this game to be quite ugly.

When they were showing off Bloodborne, I remember thinking how awesome it looked but visually, Sekiro reminds me more of Nioh, which I also don't think is up to par in the looks department.

I'm just speaking graphically. I have no opinions on how the game will turn out, please don't kill me.

Lack of Sony backing does kick it in the visuals. Graphically it does look a a bit like a late last gen game ported to next gen. Like The Last of Us 1 HD with that grainy look to the character models. I wouldn't find it hard to believe if someone told me that Bloodborne 2 was being worked on concurrently with this game.

Gameplay looks good, but I'd need to see a proper gameplay demo before declaring it as a Souls/Bloodborne successor.

I’m bummed out that we can’t customize our character, as I wanted to make a female samurai. Guess Nioh 2 will satisfy that itch. The combat looks fun though.

Activision being the publishers sets off several alarm bells though as nothing good ever seems to come from teaming up with them.

Looks good.

Yeah I'm not in love with the game's aesthetics. Not grabbing me like the Souls games did.

Love the horror japanese samurai art slant and I liked how everything looked meaty and wet. Pure technical? Sure, not the best out there.

I hate to say this but I feel like some people would probably gravitate towards a Western aesthetic of Gothic cathedrals and dark towering castles. I don't think this is so much a graphics issue but a thematic one. It's hard to compare a gated village during the sengoku period versus the crimson towers of Bloodborne's nightmare frontier stained red by a bloodmoon. Again, just my opinion but comparing castles in nioh which are more or less modeled after a real castle is hard to compare to more fantastical sights we are treated in other soulsborne games.

Wait, Nioh 2 will have character customization? That kind of sucks, one of the things I liked about that game is it had a voiced protagonist with a backstory and the plot was actually well told and not the mess (or masterpiece depending on who you ask) that the souls games stories are.

Visually it looked a lot like Dark Souls 3 which is fine. The thing that interests me is you see what looks like stealth systems and different traversal options in the trailer, which makes it look like more of a traditional action adventure game. Which i'm all for.

Since we're getting The Surge 2, Lords of the Fallen 2, Nioh 2 and Code Vein I think it would be nice if From Software took a break (or at least diverged) from the sub genre it helped create (or popularized) and made something unique.

It looks like a FromSoft game. I expect from the full game a lot of great environments that you shouldn't stop and look too closely at individual things.

I agree it looks ugly, but when I say that I mean it as a positive.

Looks like grotesque and bloody samurai action. With Bloodborne it's ornate architecture and cosmic horrors, and with Sekiro it's straw and mud and sweat, with characters bordering on monstrous (with actual giant monster snakes for good measure).

But it's at least not completely filthy. At the beginning of the trailer I like how your scruffy-looking character faces off against a very clean and prim looking samurai.

I think it looks great, in comparison I found Dark Souls to be incredibly boring.

It's not like From Soft has been a graphical powerhouse. Compared to the Souls games it doesn't look especially bad in any way. Perhaps compared to Bloodborne, but I bet Sony helped them out a bit there.

The thing about Bloodborne though is that I think it tricks you a bit with the overall aesthetic which comes together very well but a lot of individual parts still look pretty rough.

@efesell: You're not wrong, but I think Bloodborne steps it up a few notches on the environment design. It's just so full of details compared to the souls games, which has a bunch of square brick floors and walls etc.

@boozak: Well if you ask me then the story in Bloodborne and it’s peers is cleverly told through its environment. Whereas Nioh’s plot is dull as bricks with the little plot there was in its interconnective missions and boring environments. I like having character customization, so to me it’s a major plus. Surge and Lord of the Fallen were both terrible and Code Vein veers too heavily into generic anime nonesense for me to be interested in it. Not digging its combat or atmosphere either.

@ares42: I think people mistake good graphics with good art design, and Bloodborne + Dark Souls have phenomenal art design in terms of its characters, monsters and setting etc.

Looks perfectly fine to me.

Wait, is this the FROM game that they teased last year? That quick clip of a bloody...thing?

I like it personally. It's more colorful than most other FromSoftware games but still maintains the developers' knack for grotesque art that we've seen in Dark Souls and Bloodborne.

From the brief trailer, Sekiro looks on par with FROM's output this generation and is what I'd expect out of a game set in 1500s Japan. There's some gorgeous shots in the trailer of the character jumping around the snowy castle area, and the quick portion on the rope bridge with the giant snake is also attractive. I won't be surprised if, graphically, the overall world of Sekiro is maybe less engaging than Dark Souls or Bloodborne, but I could see them crafting some pretty spectacular set pieces, especially with it being a more straightforward action game.

That trailer barely shows more than one area (I presume), so I couldn't glean what's the game's angle on this type of setting. The historical Japanese setting however hasn't been my aesthetic so far, but I'm hoping this game changes my mind. Hopefully From shows more gameplay during Gamescom?

I think it looks fantastic. I'm bias though, buy all From games at launch without question.

Yeah the look instantly sold me. I'm not saying I dislike pretty looking games, I just think too many games go for that. When I look at something like Ghosts for example from Sucker Punch I can at least applaud that even though it's pretty it's also going for it's own art style, not just "graphically pretty because."

I feel like the grotesque looking visuals in Sekiro help sell it better to me, and give it a distinct flare. It takes what was once a calm peaceful and pretty setting (visually, what with fields and farms and villages and more culture) and then applies a very gross looking monster/war torn theme on it that instantly drew me.

For me the big question with this game is going to be, is it just another one of their games? If so, fine, but it'd be nice to see them take some changes, especially on the narrative front. If it's just another loosely told story through the world ala Souls/Borne, while I'm still likely to check it out it doesn't really hit any other boxes for me. And it's a good thing in that case that it has an aesthic I want to dig into because as has been said in this thread if From doesn't start doing a bit more, maybe they need to take a breather? It's not entirely on them, tons of people are marking Soulslikes and the amount of games we saw at this years E3 that were going for or nailing some of that stuff is beginning to pile up. But fatigue will eventually wear, especially if it's just part and parcel similar experiences. Even in new skins/aesthetic it still can begin to grind on you. Here's hoping Sekiro has a bit more going on than usual From games.

Miyazaki did a Famitsu interview that goes into a bit more detail about the game. It definitely sounds like it's veering away from being just another Souls game. They were originally even toying with the idea of calling it Tenchu.

@breq: Yeah, the clip of the bloody thing was his wooden arm. (apparently "Sekiro" translates to "one-armed-wolf" which is pretty cool)

To each his own, while i'll admit the atmosphere in the souls games are great, a lot of the world building is done mostly through item descriptions which is almost as bad Destiny's grimoire cards. (at least they're in the game I guess) In Nioh there is a cast of characters that have their motivations told through stylised movies as you aquire their guardian spirits.

Yes the main motivation of William is to get revenge and get his guardian spirit back which isnt too riveting but the supporting characters make the story more interesting to me and if you dont have a voiced protagonist with a backstory (you know an actual character, not a blank slate) to interact with them the experience can feel a little hollow.

The Surge and Lords of the Fallen werent great but I think "terrible" is going a bit far. I dont really know enough about Code Vein to know if it's "generic anime nonsense". My point was that there are a lot of these games being made and I think it would be healthy for From Software to make something different. I'm glad Sekiro seems to be doing some other things to set it apart from the last 5 games they've made. I'm looking forward to see what they do next.

I think so far this looks exactly like "hey, let's make a game in our wheel house, but not the actual same game again". You know Mizuguchi is going to feature music and graphics together in crazy new and different ways, but not all of his games play like Rez. That kind of thing.

Just to put it out there, as I understood, sekiro doesnt mean 'one armed wolf' it literally means 'half wolf' as in 'wolf who only has one half'. It doesn't only refer to the arm. Like, his existence is defined by the things he is missing.

Curious that some people think it looks worse than souls, I just watched an ENB video where Marcus tried to reason how Sekiro could look so much better than the souls games on a technical level haha.(He thought activision might be tossing them some money or that they maybe had more money themselves than he'd expected.)

Fromsoftware games always look simultaneously gorgeous and outdated to me.This looked like a normal modern good looking video game. I hope they wont have to tone down the particle effects for the final release, those did look exceptionally good for a console game.

PS: the story wont be told much differently to the souls games according to miyazaki, do not expect lots of cutscenes/talking like in other games.

From everything I've seen, which isn't much so far, it looks really cool.

I'm excited to see some straight up 10 minute gameplay looks to see how the world and characters function. Also man am I a sucker for cybernetic/gimmick arms in video games. Ever since Bionic Commando, I love me a bionic arm.

I don't know what people are talking about to be honest - I agree with you that it looks like a normal modern day game.

Besides, I kinda like the rusty grim look - FromSoftware's choice of aesthetics have always been beautiful in my opinion, and it helps with the horror aspect of their games. For all it's great content, Nioh never once scared me or filled me with dread. The demons in the game always looked cartoony, which of course is fine, because they were clearly going for the more vibrant, anime oriented style, but I'm glad Sekiro is keeping the soulsborne rusty looks. Hell, even the humans look monstrous.

And I'm happy to hear that they are keeping the style of storytelling. The best thing about From Software games is that they quite literally communicate through the gameplay.

@boozak: Item descriptions, as well as the monsters, their dialogue, the NPCs, the corpses, the left behind scars in the architecture. There are a lot of things that adds to said series storytelling, it’s not for everyone though. The problem with Nioh’s “storytelling” is that it doesn’t really jam with the kind of game it wants to be.

Especially when you actually get to Japan.

I swiftly lost track of what the fuck was going on; some names would be thrown at me in a narration over still images, there would be a cutscene of William looking confused in yet another house of some important Japanese bloke, and then we get dumped on a forest path to kill a round of gits.

Making the whole gam very mission based also kinda kills the pacing a lot, it feels like the story exists in a dimension alternate to the gameplay.

I’ve played both LotF and Surge and they simply weren’t fun, and couldn’t capture what was great about the series that inspired them.

The latest story trailer for Code Vein has every anime cliche chucked into it, like on one hand it wants to be a world that is cold and unforgiving, hollow like Dark Souls, and on the other hand it wants to be a generic JRPG. The music also has that peppy, upbeat orchestral tone to it that feels more at home in a game like Valkyria Chronicles. I believe it was in a gameplay trailer from E3 that showed that. Safe to say, I don’t think it looks good.

Ah, well...that is kind of a bummer for me, but I am a tad bit burnt out on souls games for the time being. With this and the PSVR game, I'm glad FROM is able to branch out a little bit.

Having said that....WHERE IS MY DEMONS SOULS REMASTER?