Category: PS5

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Shelved It #9 – Assassin’s Creed Valhalla

More Info From Ubisoft

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Windows, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series S|X, Stadia, Luna

Kotaku has an article called Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Is Too Damn Long. That really is the crux of the problem, but it’s not that simple. Yes it’s too long, but for me a lot of it being too long is that this game didn’t do anything new. It’s the same as Assassin’s Creedy Origins and Odyssey. While that isn’t necessarily a bad thing – after all I really enjoyed Odyssey – Valhalla falls in a place where there’s been better in the intervening years, and that’s the biggest thing that caused me to give up. I put about 30 hours into this one and kind of didn’t feel like I needed to move on from there.

The first problem I ran into is that combat wasn’t that fun and stealth was systematically nerfed, so I didn’t feel like I had a gameplay path that really fit anything. My past tendency in AC games was always to go full stealth – sneak into places, pick guys off one by one, finish my objective, and sneak on out. However, a lot of the main storyline in Valhalla requires straight combat. There’s viking raids that force the entire area into active combat. There’s story missions that have AI buddies that cause active combat. Basically, I spent a lot of time in places that forced me to fight or do some extraordinarily annoying things to get to a point where I could try to stealth while chaos was going on around me. It actively fought how I wanted to play the game, which is not really something I want to be doing in an Assassin’s Creed title.

This would be all well and good if combat was fun, but frankly it just wasn’t. Ghost of Tsushima had its combat problems, but it felt like a logical progression in combat in this type of subgenre. Valhalla has a lot of the same core elements, but a couple main things really felt like a step backwards. For one, the lack of stances made combat feel like it lacked variety. Beyond some light defensive aspects of some shielded units, the difference between enemy weapon types or trash vs. brutes felt minimal to the point of irrelevance.

However, the AI in groups felt like the biggest oddity to me. Group combat in the AC genre has never been that great, and frankly it was the biggest downfall of Ghost of Tsushima as well. However, group AI really feels like it doesn’t do anything to divvy out who is actively going to attack. It results in a situation where the group AI feels less opportunistic and planned, and more random happenstance. Sure it’s probably more realistic, but it’s also boring. Attack avoidance becomes dodge spam as the practical option instead of better parry timing or intelligent target selection. It’s effective, but it’s boring. The lack of unique duels from Tsushima really then pulls away one of my favorite combat setups in that game, so there’s no real payoff moments, even in big story moments.

It doesn’t help that Immortals: Fenyx Rising by Ubisoft was one of my recent played titles, and despite similar combat, was simply more fun due to much better grouping tactics for AI, doing one at a time attacks with good tells, instead of seemingly random spam.

The exploration metagame was also a big disappointment here, and felt like a step back even within the series. Origin and Odyssey both had camps and towns with distinct goals – take out a leader, kill all enemies, eliminate a legendary animal. Valhalla just…..doesn’t. All of the location stuff is there, but without goals it all feels irrelevant. You’ll go to your Assassin’s Creed viewpoints and it will find a bunch of stuff, but it’s scattered everywhere. Your three main collectibles – wealth, mysteries (side quests), and artifacts – are scattered randomly around, so there never feels like a real focus to going to a location and clearing it out. You can just kind of set your sights in a direction and you’ll inevitably run into things. Going into a camp is more of a run to a dot on the map where you can ignore the enemies in the camp. Mysteries exist as one-off events instead of more interesting side quest chains. And ya, there’s longer side quest chains but they feel less present than in the last two titles, which was a big disappointment.

The collectibles themselves also just have a distinct lack of importance. Gear isn’t inherently level-based anymore, so going out and finding new armor isn’t necessarily helpful. Once you find your preferred gear and upgrade past a point, going out and finding new materials isn’t necessarily helpful anymore. It just puts a drag on the game when you get to the point where you inherently outgear an area, because it doesn’t scale as smoothly as the past couple of games – much to Valhalla’s detriment.

All of this is also not helped by the existence of Immortals. That one did such a good job of integrating cool traversal into exploration that it was simply more fun just to run around. Happening upon legendary units and animals in that one meant a really fun one on one fight. Happening upon a shrine meant a really fun puzzle segment or arena segment. All of the things you ran into in that game felt like a nice change of pace that provided a really good rhythmic flow to running between quest locations. Valhalla on the other hand feels like a huge step back where traversing for the sake of exploration feels like a hassle, and going to places for the hell of it feels like a chore.

Valhalla feels like an inflection point for the series overall. AC3 felt like a stale experience after the Ezio games, and that led to Black Flag. Unity and Syndicate felt like games that ran out of ideas, which led to the series reinvention in Origins. This feels similar. While Valhalla is a far better game than either of the last two problem areas, it feels similarly stale. This is a game that feels like a retread, instead of a game that feels like a step forward. Other games in the interim have done it far better. Immortals did a much better job of making exploration fun. Ghost of Tsushima did a far better job integrating stealth and combat in a way that both paths were interesting and worth playing. This series is ready for that next step forward, and it’s got some great examples to look at if they’re ready to make that push.

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Game Ramblings #127 – Immortals: Fenyx Rising

More Info from Ubisoft

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Stadia, Switch, PC

It’s pretty easy to look at this game and consider it a ripoff on Breath of the Wild, and frankly that isn’t necessarily the most wrong thing. It definitely shares a general metagame with BOTW, and it has the obvious gameplay hook of stamina while climbing. However, that’s taking an overly simple look at things. Immortals takes some steps in interesting directions that give it some unique legs – and quite frankly shows some good iteration on the general style beyond BOTW.

If there’s one way I’d really describe the overall metagame of Breath of the Wild it would be exploration supported by combat. Combat wasn’t the focus, and for the most part you could get through the game without fighting just about anything. The meat of that game was exploring to find shrines, and finishing the puzzles within. Immortals feels like a very different approach to me – combat supported by exploration. There’s definitely not a lack of puzzle dungeons, and the overall game flow is similar, but so much more of this game is based on combat, and that’s really the first bulk of differences from BOTW.

I suppose what’s important here is that their combat is really a lot of fun. There’s definitely a very Assassin’s Creed approach here, which isn’t that surprising. At its core you’ve got a similar approach of watching for enemy tells so you can parry or dodge attacks. There’s definite lessons learned here from their other series because the tells are extremely well done. Even with short timing, the enemy will have some obvious windup tick or some flash of particles or some full-body emissive effect to tell you that an attack is coming. For me it hit that nice line where the tells are fair, but still require good timing. Simply dodging or parrying is effective on its own, but nailing the timing gives you things like slow motion to get in some quick hits so there’s a certain level of benefit that makes being effective at these moves worthwhile.

There’s a secondary layer to combat that really worked out well in the integration of a stun system. This feels pulled right out of Final Fantasy 15, but the short version is that damaging an enemy enough can cause it to go into a stun state, opening up the enemy for some real big damage. Where this is really well integrated is that your best use of stuns is a slower attack axe, where the real damage potential is in a fast attack sword. This hugely encouraged me to be switching between the two weapons a lot, which really prevented combat from becoming boring. This also provided some interesting potential for larger group fights. Stunning a few enemies would allow me to then shift my attention elsewhere, rather than being overwhelmed by a bunch of enemies. In both group and larger solo fights, the system is extremely effective in a way that feels completely unique to this title, and really provides a direction for how improved combat mechanics could improve BOTW2.

That’s not to say that the game is all combat all the time. There’s definitely a lot of cool puzzle shrines here, and in a lot of cases they’re similarly silly and physics based like BOTW. However, there’s a lot more traversal mechanics at play that really give another sort of +1 to this iteration of the overall gameplay. BOTW had a lot of incidental secondary ways to solve shrines through clever or weird use of mechanics. Immortals feels a lot more direct. It’s got things like vertical and forward dashes to really push traversal. It’s got a magnetic-style ability that can push and pull objects around to set off weight plates. And ya, BOTW had some of this stuff, but Immortals separates itself out by having everything more easily accessible.

Immortals has everything on hotkeys. L1 plus a face button will activate one of these abilities, so they’re always there. You don’t have to switch between abilities in a slowing menu, which is a huge benefit for general speed of use. The other benefit is that all of these abilities use the shared stamina pool, rather than individual cooldowns, so they’re available all the time and can be chained back to back. The net result of this change is that puzzles are often less about doing a sequence of steps one at a time, and more often executing a fast series of steps rapidly. It’s an interesting dynamic shift from some of the more logic-based puzzles of BOTW and instead really reinforces the heavy physics-based puzzles that were some of my favorites.

When I did my ramblings for Breath of the Wild, it was pretty clear how special that game was. Even with four years gone, that’s still apparent. However, I think Immortals is at this point the better game. It clearly took the metagame and general physics fun of BOTW, but added in a lot of iterations in combat and ability use. Having the combat iteration in place added so much variety to what you’re doing, which is never a bad thing. Instead of going from spot to spot looking for a shrine ping, I was now going from spot to spot sometimes doing puzzles, but just as often fighting epic bosses and creatures of legend. It’s those kinds of changes that really push games forward, and in doing so it’s pretty clearly shown that there’s a lot of room for iteration in the sort of exploration-based open world ARPG subgenre.

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Game Ramblings #124 – Yakuza: Like a Dragon

More Info from Sega

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS4 / PS5
  • Also Available On: Xbox One / Series, Steam

It shouldn’t be a surprise that this series successfully moved into the JRPG genre, but it kind of is. The previous titles had a lot of things typical of the genre already in place – great story, characters, and settings, your typical array of shops for items and gear, a strong levelling system, lots of things to do on the side. However, they were always first and foremost an action game, and since they moved to a new engine on the PS4 they were perhaps the BEST action-focused series out there. Despite it all, they changed to a JRPG and still ended up with something that feels straight up fantastic.

Given the change, I guess combat is the place to start. The thing to really know is that the entire genre switch and the fact that I’m up there fighting a 7 foot tall pirate all comes down to one thing – the lead character is a huge fan of Dragon Quest and has delusions of leading a party of heroes throughout Japan, just like in the game.

How fucking perfect is that?

It sets your expectations of what combat should be – purely turn based. Now, it’s not exactly as classic as Dragon Quest, and that’s a good thing. It’s got a timing-based defense mechanic similar to games like Super Mario RPG. It’s got a D&D-style opportunity attack where enemies can interrupt you if you try to run past them to attack someone else. It’s got a strong job system with job-based skills, leveling, and permanent stat gains. It’s got weaknesses and resists to different types of weapons. Basically, it takes a bunch of features from a bunch of JRPGs, and wraps it all into a combat system that feels classic, but with a modern touch. And it works really well.

I think more than anything, the reason it feels good is that everything still feels impactful. There’s a clear sense here that they’re bringing their action knowledge to this genre in how things react to combat. Big hits don’t just throw a big number, they cause knock downs. Knockdowns don’t just cause an animation – they put enemies in a weak state that causes them to take increased damage. When characters go flying, they don’t just fly, they also hit and damage anyone else they hit (including knocking down your own friends if you aren’t careful). If there’s something in the environment, your attacks can take advantage of that and use it instead of your weapon. It’s everything that made sense and worked well in an action combat system, but now just turn-based. It’s a bit slower, it’s a bit more strategic, it’s a big less reactionary, but it all feels fantastic.

That’s not to say that they completely converted over well to a JRPG-style. This game’s biggest issue is really around grinding, and that happens in two places.

The first is really around equipment. you hit a point fairly early in the power curve of the game where you just can’t buy better equipment. I hit it around the 60% mark of the game. From that point on, you have to craft better equipment to improve gear stats. Crafting is fine on its own, but the crafting building requires significant investment to upgrade it far enough to craft the end game gear. From there, the gear then also costs a ton of money and crafting items to put together. I did one stretch to do an armor upgrade pass, and it required me to do about 4 million yen in investments, 2 million yen per-piece of armor, and approximately another half million yen in crafting item value. Keeping in mind that normal fights were dropping 3-5 thousand yen, you can see the issue.

Around the same time, I started needing to do XP grinding because the bosses were jumping 5-10 levels ahead of me. At this point I was probably needing to get around 100 thousand XP per-level and only getting around 1000 XP per fight. Again, you can see the issue. I could get some more permanent stat boosts by switching jobs, and taking advantage of the quick early job levels when switching, but it was a pretty slow process overall.

At this point in the game it basically resulted in me using one specific spot, floors 16-18 of the Sotenbori battle arena. That could net me about 300 thousand yen and about 150 thousand XP. It was fast, it was efficient, and it was boring. It was clearly what was intended for fast leveling, but it felt awkward compared to just having a higher XP/money curve in the wild and letting the player more naturally level.

On the other hand, the side content is both plentiful and a lot of fun if I needed a distraction. Some of it is just side quests where I get some entertaining side story content. Some of it is your standard item collection faire. However, there’s also things like the Mario Kart inspired mode above to keep me distracted. There’s also a really deep management simulation worth noting as another good distraction (and source of money later on in it). I knew I could fall back on these things when I needed a break, and it allowed me to fall off of doing the same content grind on repeat while still having some benefit to my team in the long run.

Ultimately this isn’t a perfect transition from ARPG to JRPG, but as a first-try at the genre I was super impressed with the game. It kept things that worked really well in the series in the past, gave a pretty entertaining reason to switch genres, and ran with it. If they felt they had reached the peak of what they thought they could do as an action title, this certainly gives them a strong reset. It also puts them in a place where they still have room to improve. If the next title is still a JRPG, they could do a much better job of managing their power and XP curves to make the experience more linear and less prone to slow grinds when power jumps occur. However, as a first-pass this is still one of the best JRPGs of the year and is definitely worth checking out if you’re a fan of the genre.