Ghosts of Tsushima Archives - Page 3 of 4

Regularly Playing: September 2020 Edition

September 4, 2020 by Belghast

Hey Folks! There is a thing that I occasionally do on my blog where I run down what I have been playing lately. There are games that I spend time in that don’t necessarily make it to the level of writing about. Regularly Playing has always served as a time for me to update the good ole sidebar of the blog and talk about the things that I am spending time exploring. It is also a time for me to push aside the games that for whatever reason I am just not that into right now. You have a lot of games that make their way back into the rotation, so when I say goodbye it is very rarely forever.

In theory this is a thing that I intend to do every month… but we are living in this time where it still feels like it SHOULD by all rights be March. I think this is going to go down in history as the “Lost Year” because it feels like we are all still very much on pause waiting for things to improve. I expect a significant amount of shake up given that it has been a little over two months since my last update.

To Those Remaining

Oh Diablo, my sweet Diablo… I can’t ever seem to quit you. This game probably spends the most time on this list, especially now that it exists in switch form. While I am finished with the current PC season, I do still fairly regularly pop it open from bed on the switch and chip away at the achievements there. What can I say that I have not already said a dozen times. I just hope I like Diablo IV even half as much as I love Diablo III.

Oh precious baby, you are hanging by a thread. I’ve been back a bit of late for the Yo-Kai watch event, but even that has mostly just been something to do while watching something on television. I know there is a whole new story arc that I need to play through since the 5.3 patch has landed finally. I will do that at some point but I am just not overly excited about Final Fantasy XIV right now. I wish I was because it truly is a wonderful game, but I am not sure what changed in me that struggles to latch onto the MMORPG gameplay experience for very long. I find myself being a strict soloist in the MMO space right now, and as a result I never quite fully buy into the good aspects of the culture and the gameplay offerings. I wish I could get over my fear of doing content with other human beings that I seem to have developed.

World of Warcraft – Retail and Beta – PC

I am not what you would call actively playing this game, but every so often I decide to poke my head in and work on leveling some of my alts. During this lull in the expansion I have leveled one of everything horde side by the Shaman, Priest and Rogue. I’ve been most recently working on the Shaman who is in Pandaria and I believe a few levels away from 100? This is often times the character that I play while we are podcasting, or if I am watching some show because World of Warcraft requires a bare minimum of interactivity to play it on the level I am playing it. I still get a stupid amount of enjoyment from its simple mechanics and my ability to just turn my brain off and rely entirely upon muscle memory.

To The New and Returning

I super did not expect to be playing this game right now. I had a lot of issues early on with it, but it turns out that I was more or less bit in the butt by my own shenanigans. There are still some minor issues of mouse and camera not exactly working in the way that I would prefer but it is extremely playable and the story is really solid. In fact I think at this point I am mostly playing because the story is extremely enjoyable. The game hits a deep uncanny valley at times because I think they are trying to shoot halfway between the more traditional comic appearance of the characters and that of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I’ve gotten used to it however and once I did the story being told has become pure joy.

I have been on a bit of a single player narrative game kick of late, and I have been playing a significant amount of Ghosts of Tsushima. I’ve not made it past the first part of the game, because I keep roaming around and killing baddies. I am more or less following the Samurai path where I present a challenge and then proceed to whittle down the rest of the masses after taking out their strongest. I love this game a lot, and the only thing that would have made it better is if I were playing on the PC with a Mouse and Keyboard. I’ve been a bit distracted the last week or so, but I am hoping over the extended weekend that I can return to this and keep moving forward.

I am not entirely certain that this game has ever made the list, but I have had it in my arsenal for awhile now. I have a deep love for the types of games that Supergiant creates. Even when I don’t mechanically enjoy the game like was the case with Pyre, I really appreciate the story that is being told. Hades is effectively a blend of Diablo and a Rogue Lite game and involves escaping from the underworld, and powering yourself along the way to make that possible. It is a game or repetition because you are absolutely going to die over and over and over in your journey, each time starting back at the start and each time carrying some progress along with you. This has been in early access but we are starting to near an official launch, so I have been playing it again in anticipation. Really solid game.

I’ve not participated in two test events of New World and I am super happy to finally be able to start talking about it. The last long preview event that is wrapping up I believe today had no NDA and as a result I have been able to openly discuss it on the blog. As it stands I am so ready for this game to launch and to start being able to play it in earnest. I am hoping the next event is an Open Beta so that folks who did not pre-order can give it a shot and see if it works for them. This is definitely the type of game that I am going to want to find an active company to play in, and that does not mean that I am sold on the notion of leading one. I’m good at recruiting people, but I don’t seem to be good at keeping people engaged… myself included. So more than likely I will be looking for a company to join that would be open to any friends that I have who are also interested.

Retro Games – Retro Freak Console, PC, and Switch

This is going to be a bit of a generic heading because I have been poking around in a lot of “retro games”. The thing is… I find it weird calling these game retro, because they are from my childhood. It is moments like this that I remember just how damned old I am at this point. Whatever you want to call them I have been back on a kick of trying to get my closet full of older systems and cartridges up and running on modern display technology. I’ve also purchased a Retro Freak console, which allows me to do a bunch of nifty things including dump rom and save games from cartridges and apply translation patches on the fly. The next project is to try and get my Neo Geo CD system up and running again and maybe apply the mod that replaces the very slow CD Rom with an SD Card interface.

To Those Departing

I am not sure where we went wrong boo, I’m just not playing you. I have no clue what is up but for whatever reason I just haven’t been interested in playing Destiny 2 in this current season. I am not sure if it is the impending gear sunset or the fact that they are “vaulting” content to remove it from the game, but whatever the case I am just turned off right now. I think games should get larger over time not shrink constantly, and I hate the FOMO aspect of seasonal play. The truth however is just that I have not been interested in playing a shooter lately, and this last few months has been largely marked by me playing more single player and narrative driven content. I am sure I will be back when the expansion launches in November and have a grand ole time.

You know that mission that AggroChat folks have been on about playing Guild Wars 2 and getting others to play it as well? For whatever reason it never sunk its hooks properly into me. I still don’t fully understand why this game that on paper should be something I am deeply into… never quite seems to work for me. There is just something about the gameplay loop that I don’t find as enjoyable as I should. The story content also never really hooked me, so while I keep trying to revisit this game… it never really does it for me. I am sure I will be back at some point because I am a glutton for punishment with a very short memory.

I can’t fully explain what happened here and why I stopped playing this game, but it happened. I am not even sure what distracted me. I just know that I have not logged in for a long while other than to convert to the Steam client. I am sure I will return because I was having quite a bit of fun with it. I also know that I was only a few levels away from hitting the cap at the time, and that there is a raised cap now that we have entered Chapter 4. I think I mostly got distracted by a string of single player experiences like Death Stranding.

I really do want to like this game, but I have not been all that into of it late. I think the core problem I have with the third iteration is that there just isn’t really a class that I enjoy. In Torchlight there was the Destroyer that I played a ton of, and in Torchlight II it was the Engineer. Both were big and bashy melee characters and right now in the third game there are two characters that CAN be played that way… but they both sorta feel fiddly. So I have been splitting my time between the Forge and the Railmaster…. and to be truthful neither of them feel the way that I want them to feel. I know Torchlight is a game that tries to cast aside the traditional Mage, Rogue, Warrior, and Cleric blend of classes… but I mostly just wish they had proper representation of those archetypes. My preference is to play something akin to the Diablo Barbarian or Crusader and they just don’t really have that represented.

Ships Passing in the Night

Death Stranding was a phenomenal experience. I legit get emotional just thinking about it. This is the game that I needed to play at the time in which I played it. It has become this extremely relevant allegory for the time that we are living in. I am not sure this is a game that everyone would enjoy, because the whole courier aspect of it that I found enjoyable could be pure tedium for someone else. The story being told though is really good and if nothing else you should probably watch a play through of it at some point.

I had been anxiously awaiting the release of Horizon Zero Dawn for the PC, and when it came out I burned through it like wildfire. I think I put in a solid 50 hours in a very short period of time and cracking this open and revisiting it all was truly magical. I love Aloy and the world of Horizon, and I am anxiously awaiting the sequel. This is pretty much the reason why I will be buying a PlayStation 5 as soon as the pre-orders open. If you have never played Horizon Zero Dawn, you owe it to yourself to experience the game and the bow combat just works so much better with a Mouse and Keyboard.

Summary

I guess this is what happens when I wait almost three months between updates, there is a lot of change. I’ve bounced a few things off the list that I am almost certain I will revisit. Hell to be truthful what usually happens is just writing about them ends up making me want to log back in again. I know we have the launch of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2 that will be eating some of my time, and I would really like to restart Jedi Fallen Order but this time play it with Mouse and Keyboard. Additionally I really want to play through Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, which has been on my list for awhile. In between those I will be wrapping up Avengers main story and seeing if I like the group content or not, and probably poking my head into New World each time a new test event opens. All the while the backlog continues to grow, but I have gotten fairly used to knowing I will never quite conquer it.

AggroChat #312 – A Whole New World

August 30, 2020 by Belghast

Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

Tonight we are back after having a week off due to scheduling. Bel is super excited to talk about Amazon’s New World, which finally leaves NDA. He goes into a deep dive of his experiences so far with the assorted systems of the game. From there we have a reasonable segue into a discussion about Guild Wars 2 and getting used to the WvW pvp system. We also talk a bit about other games like Final Fantasy XIV and how it handles PVP. We have a random aside where Bel talks about how he tends to avoid using mounts in Open World games, and finally Ash talks about how he has come to peace with the Blue Mage in FFXIV.

Topics Discussed:

Amazon’s New World
- Deep Dive into Systems
Guild Wars 2 WvW System
- Final Fantasy XIV PVP modes
Frog Fractions ???
- When a DLC is a new game
Bel Ignores Mounts in Open World Games
- Ghosts of Tsushima
- Horizon Zero Dawn
Making Peace with the Blue Mage
- How Ash Learns to Accept the Systems

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

The Goodest Foxxo

August 19, 2020 by Belghast

It has to be terribly jarring to read this blog for any length of time. I end up hyper-fixating on a game for a number of days, weeks or months and then toss it aside to embrace whatever my new thing is. When a new Diablo or Destiny season starts… you are probably going to be reading a lot about those games. When I am playing a narrative adventure, you are going to get nothing but that until I either tire of it or finish the story. In theory you probably should have seen more posts about Horizon Zero Dawn but I had other things that I wanted to talk about apparently during the days I was actively playing it.

Right now I am hyper-fixated on Ghosts of Tsushima, and pretty much spending every available gaming moment playing it. I don’t love playing with a controller, but I can manage and I am happy that I did find the very comfortable Nacon Revolution controller. I am not terribly certain exactly which model I have, given that I purchased mine from Ebay. Mine is the one without interchangeable thumbsticks and with a BNC style connection on the cable. Mostly the big benefit is that it is large hand friendly and my pinky doesn’t fall asleep when I am gripping it in quite the same way that it does with a base PS4 since I am having to contort my hand slightly to get them all to fit comfortably on the grip. I’ve never gotten used to a “pinky out” grip, which probably would solve that particular problem.

There are a bunch of elements in this game that are just charming. Firstly there are no doggos to pet that I have found, but you can in fact pet a good number of the foxes to tell them how good they are for leading you to another shrine. The map of the world seems smallish to me, but in practice the world itself seems very large because of the density. You don’t move around for very long without encountering something to draw your attention away and pull you off your mission. It might be a scream on the wind that leads you to intercept a patrol of Mongols that are just about to kill some civilians, or it might be a golden bird trying to lead you to something important.

While I talked yesterday about not really using the horse, I think it is important to show off what Pete was talking about. After you finish a story mission, you are often times presented with a little vignette of you and your very good horse bonding. You are given the choice of three names for your horse.. Nobu (Trust), Kaze (Wind) and Kage (Shadow). I named mine Nobu and went with the deluxe appearance for him. One of the weirdest aspects I have experienced is that if you accidentally mount another horse… it will start responding to your call instead of your official special Samurai horse. This got real annoying last night and I had to get a sufficient distance away from the camp in question before Nobu would respond. I personally internalized this as him having a spat with me for trying to mount another horse.

It is such a beautiful game, but anytime I am presented with a scene like this… it is admittedly a little bittersweet. It would have looked so much better on my PC or if I had a PS4 Pro. While you are in the flow of the game you don’t notice the softness to the detail, but when you stop and take a still frame it is there. I am not sure what it is about the Straw hat, but as soon as I was able to buy one I adopted that as part of my official appearance. I also am not terribly fond of the look of the masks in practice so I have decided to go around without one. The other thing that I have noticed and find interesting, is how little I find myself sneaking around now that I have become more accustomed to the controls. I pretty much begin every fight now by storming into the camp and imitating a showdown.

There are just so many things that Ghosts of Tsushima does well, and considering I am not even close to finishing the first little area of the game… I expect to have it in rotation for awhile. That is at least until some new shiny object distracts me and makes me forget about it for a bit. Another thing that I am really wanting to do at some point is restart Jedi Fallen Order with a Keyboard and Mouse. I opted for a controller because the game strongly insinuate that is how you should be playing. That said the little bit that I have played with KbM, it felt completely natural and fluid. My thought is restarting from the beginning would allow me to learn the abilities organically rather than trying to play catch up. Additionally there is the problem that I am in the middle of Kashyyyk and have no clue at all what I was doing when I was last playing.

Ghosts of Tsushima Impressions

August 18, 2020 by Belghast

It feels like this year I am going through another one of my phases where I play a bunch of single player games, and additionally I seem like I am already going to have trouble short listing my games for the eventual AggroChat games of the year show. Ghosts right now is on that list even though I have not made it terribly far into the game. I am still exploring what is I believe the first major area of the game, and I would probably be going faster were it not for my allergy to horses. What I mean by that is that I ultimately feel more comfortable roaming around on foot than I ever do on a horse in a game like this. I spent most of my play through of Witcher 3 for example ignoring the fact that I had access to Roach, and for now at least I am mostly ignoring poor Nobu.

At it’s core, Ghosts of Tsushima is what you get when you lovingly translate an Akira Kurosawa film to video game form. In practice Tsushima is to swordplay what Horizon Zero Dawn is to bowplay, and combat feels deeply engaging and fluid. I can play super aggressively or defensively and both feel like I am having a meaningful experience. For awhile I thought I had screwed something up and triggered some morality clause in the game, because a Samurai scolded me for not fighting with honor… but in truth it seems like I can flip between being sneaky and striding into the center of an encampment and challenging the leader without much recourse.

I’ve got to admit, it is the later that I enjoy the most. I really love triggering a showdown, and this is the one time that I feel like a Quick Time Event feels purposeful and engaging. Essentially when you stand off against someone it is a game of chicken with you holding the triangle button until after your opponent has begun their strike. If successful you dispatch your foe in a single hit, and then proceed to enter open melee with everyone else in the camp. If you fail… that opponent decimates your health bar making the brawl significantly harder than it would have been otherwise. Initially these stand offs are pretty simple, but I am noticing that the mobs that I am encountering are starting to fake me out and try and get me to attack early.

The quest advisement is pure genius and absolutely the best system in the game that I would love to see other games adapt. Essentially in the story you are being guided by the wind to your destiny, and how this plays out in game is that things will blow in a specific direction that you need to go. You can swipe up on your touch pad and will get a visible wind burst that you can see on the edges of the screen. However EVERYTHING is impacted by this… so you can just follow the direction the leaves or blow or that the pampas grass is bending. The wind direction adjusts constantly to give you a sort of zeroing in on your target, but it is so subtle that it just sorta blends into the rest of the game.

Another really nice touch is that when you accept a major quest, you get this cinematic title card which makes the entire encounter feel like a chapter in a movie. While I have not made it terribly far into the game, I am already starting to reap the benefits of the random people that I save along the road. I am spending a lot of time engaging roaming Mongol patrols and often times end up saving a civilian or two. These fairly regularly end up showing up later at one of the major hubs and call out to me, which triggers a little back and forth about how thankful they are. This gives the feeling that you really are in fact saving your people that you have been given stewardship over.

The only problem that I see initially… is the same problem that I seem to have with all open world games. I know what events will trigger the storyline moving forward and as a result I end up avoiding them like the plague. I spend my time roaming around and knocking out the minor events with the thought process that I will make a pass to wrap up the story elements later. It sorta feels bad when you cross paths with one of the NPCs that are waiting for you to finish the next phase of their story, while you are instead chasing whispers in the woods at night. The game tries to install a sense of urgency that doesn’t actually seem to exist other than in story beats. It feels like I have all the time in the world to roam freely which is a fairly good thing for my natural play style.

I originally was wanting to wait until the launch of the PlayStation 5 to play this game… and I admit there is part of me that wishes I had. I own a baseline PS4 and never upgraded to the pro, and while the game looks pretty… it could look so much better and I am absolutely certain it does on a Pro. Maybe this is a side effect of having played Death Stranding and Horizon Zero Dawn back to back which are both jawdroppingly gorgeous PC games that I played in 4k. So when I look at Ghosts of Tsushima, I mourn slightly at how much better this would have looked on the PC or on Next Gen hardware. I am too hooked now to pause the game and revisit later, but it does make the experience a little bittersweet. It makes no sense at all to get a Pro now when we are on the theoretical cusp of the PS5 release.

If you have a PS4, especially if you have a PS4 Pro… then I highly suggest checking out this game. So far it definitely seems like it might be my favorite game that was released this year. I am including HZD and Death Stranding PC in my games of the year list because they got PC releases this year, but I fully expect that Tsushima is going to take all the honors at the Game Awards. It truly is a masterpiece of cinematic gameplay.