The God of War game is what inspired me to buy a PS4 late in the game a number of years ago. I was happy to be on the sidelines and just pirate a PC game here and there at that point in my life but I had such fond memories of the original GoW games on PS1 and beyond that this one game got me to shell out what I think was $400 that fine day.
When Gow: Ragnarok appeared on the "free" section of the PS-Plus menu, I was pretty excited to get involved because I had really enjoyed the first one on PS4. I am now playing on a PS5 because I upgraded like a year ago, I don't remember.
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I kind of knew that there was going to be a long cinematic intro to this game and that is exactly what I got. No matter what the game is, I find this sort of gaming treatment to be rather annoying but since it is GoW I decided to endure it. I'll admit though, in the first hour of "play" you are probably only controlling about 20 minutes of it, the rest is stuff you are forced to watch and while you can still move around it is designed to force you to watch it.
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This isn't trying to suggest that it is poorly written, it is extremely well-done but I am the kind of person that if you take control away from me too often, I lose interest and this is why I don't enjoy a great many "story" games no matter how well they are done.
Unless I am missing something really obvious, which is always a possibility with me, I couldn't figure out how to skip any of the cutscenes either, which is really annoying. I'm not saying such an option doesn't exist, but I couldn't easily find it. Perhaps it is better that I didn't because even though it took a bunch of patience, I kind of understand what is going on in the world Kratos finds himself in with his growing-up son.
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Another thing I didn't particularly care for is that you are basically thrown to the wolves immediately. I have only been playing the game for 2 hours or so, but I have already been in 3 rather difficult boss fights. I definitely wasn't expecting to die multiple times in the first couple of hours but since there isn't any real penalty for dying, perhaps they are simply trying to force you to get better with some key controls such as parrying, which I hate but realize it is part of basically every single game these days.
I am only now, after 2 hours, starting to get into a sort of open world sort of environment because up to this point everything has been extremely linear. I am quite hopeful that this changes soon because if you want a game to be linear go ahead and to that. The original GoW games were exclusively linear and nobody had a problem with that. Be linear or be open-world, one of the two.
If it opens up completely soon, I will eat my words for sure and anyone that reads my stuff knows that I am extremely fussy when it comes to gaming: I like what I like and it is very difficult to convince me to stray from that.
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I did enjoy that one of the first tough enemies that you face is named Bjorn because the only Scandinavian real life friend that I have is named Bjorn and he is kind of annoying to me.
I can tell that this game is going to be very involved and I will admit that most of the menus confuse the shit out of me and I can only hope that I am smart enough to carry on playing it long enough to figure it all out. I can already see that this is likely going to be a game that you cannot walk away from for weeks at a time and then simply walk back in and start playing again so I am going to predict the future here and suggest that I am very unlikely to complete this game.
At the moment I am playing it on "normal" difficulty and I think that for casual gamers like myself, this is a good place to be. I am dying regularly, but just enough that I bother to change strategy. Just to check I briefly changed over to "easy" and it was ridiculously easy... do yourself a favor and don't do that.
Thus far, I am not "wowed" by this game, but because of the IP, I am going to stick with it.
I'm still in a lull at the moment though because I just played 2 games in a row that I really enjoyed so I'm quite quick to dismiss anything that I play after something like that.
If you have played this game and have some insight or encouragement to give me to keep going, I would like to hear about it.
I really want to play this game since I don't have a computer right now. When I buy one, I will definitely play this game. I like the graphics quality of this game very much.
on PC it has very high system requirements so unless you buy something amazing, you won't be able to play it haha
Yeah
The 2018 version of God Of War on Ps4 is one that I gave a fair try some time ago also when it was part of playstation plus. It's one of those games where I can see why it's so critically acclaimed with excellent visuals, nice story flow, good gameplay, ... Hovever, after some time I kind of bet bored of it so I never even got close to finishing it. I guess it's just not for me.
it finished it, but only once I started to ignore all the side missions. Sometimes the side missions can be just as fun or even "funner" because it doesn't involve long and drawn out cutscenes since there really isn't any aspect of the story involved. However, this is how these games end up being able to claim that they have 80-100 hours of gameplay and to me, that is too much time to spend on any one game.
Now a day, most of the games feels more like a movie. Play the games for 20 minutes and watch the scene for 1 hour 😵💫
its almost impossible to find a game with a large studio behind it that ISN'T like this these days as the studios, I think incorrectly, seem to think that this is what the audience wants.
I am currently playing this one in the hardest difficulty(GMGOW). Can't say I did a favour on my soul but a great test for my patience...
wow. I never play games on that level but I bet you are very good at it !
I used to skip all the cutscenes in my games whenever I could as a kid, partly because of English and partly because the story never excited me too much. I would play the game for the gameplay. Lately, it has changed a bit. I am more focused on the story, still not enough to get most things lol.
well like I said above, Unless I am just being a dummy, I don't think the cutscenes are even skippable and if that is the case, that is not a good feature of any game. Also, some of the cutscenes have certain arbitrary sections where you have to press some buttons in quicktime events and I stopped being a fan of that about 10 years ago.
After reading your post about God of War: Ragnarök, where you mention that the game starts frustratingly slowly but seems to improve over time, I have a question that could enrich the discussion:
Do you think the slow introduction and slower sections, like those featuring Atreus, add narrative depth to the game or do they simply dilute the action experience many expect from the series?
They are in there for story development but after about the 3rd one I think everyone already "gets it" that this is a story about Kratos' son turning into a man and becoming independent. They just keep this going and going and to me at least, I feel as though they kind of over-did it.