Kal-El814

This is a much more succinct way of saying what I wrote a novella about. I will say that even on Give Me No Mercy a lot of the gear options ultimately just don't matter much. One of them does make the combat feel different, I suspect you know which I mean, but the rest do fine tuning do a degree that the game never demands.

I think Ragnarok is better than GoW. Even though I think Ragnarok is more bloated, every other good part of GoW is here and better. For me personally, binging a game usually gives me a better impression because I stay in the zone but I know where you're coming from.

Okay fuller thoughts. I'll tag everything spoiler adjacent. The story here is generally very good. I think it pays off on just about everything hinted at in the first game and then some. Gonna talk about the plot's whole ass here, so click with caution. The characters are almost all great. All the old ones get plenty of time to shine and most of the new ones are pretty great as well. I think a few characters in particular stand out really well. There are a couple quibbles but overall I think this is one of the more solid core casts we've seen in recent years and there are a lot of memorable lines and interactions. Some thoughts about the gameplay and pacing... I think there's too much game here and some stuff feels over engineered. I know that's a weird complaint when the gameplay is generally great, but I don't think there's enough variability in the combat and the encounters for it to not get old over the course of doing everything in the game. A high class problem, but by the time I got to the second to last area before the endgame it was the story moving me forward because I just couldn't bring myself to fight in every optional encounter that the side quests were going to barf at me. The main path is longer than GoW and there's more side stuff... there's only so many times fighting higher level versions of the same mobs is engaging. I think the combat options / value ratio here isn't good. In GoW there's more nuance to the abilities and item perks than has a meaningful impact on the gameplay and that's cranked all the way to eleven in this game. It would be one thing if the granular changes to the skills really changed the gameplay, but... they don't. I never felt that changing my armor or runic attacks would have impacted a fight, and when I charged them around just to see, they didn't feel all that different. Maybe on Give Me God of War? But I dunno how many people are going to fuck with that, Give Me No Mercy is challenging already. While the camera is better, some of the encounters do not play nicely with it. You can get have enemies spawn out of sight and at a higher vertical level than you, and if the RNG doesn't have someone call out their incoming projectiles, you're dependent upon seeing the threat indicator (not always feasible given the fact that a lot of enemies and effects glow and can make them very hard to see) or scanning the environment to look for mobs that may never be there. It doesn't happen often enough to justify always looking around like that, but it does happen often enough to get annoying when you get hit by an enemy. But it's better than GoW for sure, which is nice. Some equipment and skill tree spoilers as well as a larger double tagged spoiler related to gameplay... Some last spoilers about stuff at the end of the game and after the credits roll. And one silly thought that occurred to me... What language are the characters speaking to one another in this game? Atreus speaks ancient Norse words when shooting his bow. In the first game Kratos says he can speak it but not read it, so presumably it's Ancient Norse? Even though Atreus doesn't use the "english translations" when he says Norse words? Anyway... TL;DR... it's a really great game. I think it could use more focus, could probably stand to have some fat trimmed, and the pacing left something to be desired for me personally, but these are high class problems for a generally really tremendous experience. It's wild to see how far this series and Kratos specifically have come, and I'm looking forward to seeing where the franchise goes from here.

It's kept me gainfully employed my entire adult life, so...

Most of the side content is backloaded in Ragnarok.

Just finished. I’m sleepy. It’s great. Probably a bit overstuffed with content (like 30 hours in I got to ANOTHER big ass area full of side quests with a gimmick and Jesus fucking Christ in a Target shopping cart it’s all too much) to the point that the pacing of the game suffers even if you mainline it. And there are some things set up that never really go anywhere, which might have made more sense to flesh out than the some of the unrelated side stuff. There are also some late game and optional combat encounters that are just… not good. Between the stuff they puke out at you and the stuff you puke out on them it can be impossible to tell what’s happening unless you back out of combat at the hard difficulty and that’s just less fun than being in everyone’s face with an ax. But the story is (for the most part, like I said some stuff is underdeveloped) very good and the characters really shine. The dialogue is the best part of a great game. More spoiler thoughts when I’m awake. I think the overall highs of this game and most of the gameplay additions make the best parts of this better than the best parts of the preceding game. I think Ragnarok is a better game overall, it’s just a bit too ambitious in spite of itself.

They were! But I feel like by the time I got to them I was leveled for them. Maybe that was lucky tho.

Look at this guy taking a picture of this avian graveyard.

Okay one of the optional fights in this game... it's complete bullshit. I have no idea how you're supposed to do this. I appreciate I'm not at max level and maybe there's more game to go and grind gear than I'd anticipated but... I have absolutely no idea how to handle it. I've beat most of GoW on Give Me God of War and while I haven't cruised through every fight on hard in this game, I can normally handle them after bouncing off them a handful of times tops. This I can't even really make progress, I just die horribly. I guess I'm just way under leveled for it. Weird. EDIT - okay I'm under leveled, lol. I dropped the difficulty to Give Me Storytime or whatever and I still got kicked in the groin so hard I puked up my balls, but at least I didn't explode into giblets

Yeah the side quests are really good here, too. It's not a complaint that there's so many of them here per se? I feel like I got out of GoW wanting more, unless something changes I think I'll get out of this one wanting to put it down for a while. My bias is always toward the former, but that's just me. It's a high class "problem" regardless.

Anytime a CEO talks about how hard they're working, 100% of the time the "work" they're doing is the equivalent of trying to put out a fire with kerosene.

How long have you been running? There was one time in that area for me where it look probably 4 minutes for the thing to do the thing.

Please don't edit that typo, lol

I'm close to what feels like the endgame push and... there may be too much in this game? Not in a bad way per se, but it feels like no idea got trimmed during development. I've cleared just about everything as soon as I have the option to do it, and a whole bunch of stuff got barfed back onto the map in places that were previously cleaned up. Oh you thought you were done? Here are a dozen skullfuckers, a half dozen gizmos, etc. Unlike a Bethesda game, most of these things end up giving you insight into something or someone interesting so it's hard to walk away from them. Also the camera and arenas are in general better than the last game; there's way less of the camera being mashed against the wall while you're fighting nightmares. But there's one enemy type that the camera just straight up cannot keep up with. Most of the time I don't mind, but I'm playing on "give it to me raw" or whatever the hardest default difficulty available from jump is... and there's a boss type of this enemy that can 2 hit KO me and I get railed by offscreen attacks that the POV just cannot manage. I don't mind dying when It's me that can't hang, this one miniboss feels super bad. I could drop the difficulty I guess but that seems cheap. I thought I had a sense as to where the story was going but I'm less confident now after the last couple beats; I'm really psyched to see what's next. One question... if you have your block broken and the game goes slo mo for a second... is there a way to recover from that? I'm fighting mini bosses now that triple attack and if I fail the parry on the first shot, I'm absolutely taking the next one in the face unless I'm missing a way to recover?

Wife out of town at a conference? We binge. About 20 hours in. Some quick hit vibes: Environments in terms of looks and engagement? Great Story and characters? Great Gameplay and progression? Varies from great to not interesting at al, more context in the spoilers below Pacing? Not good Spoiler context for the stuff I'm not in love with below. No huge plot beats or anything but some gameplay stuff that people would like to have kept secret will be included below. In any event, looking forward to playing more today, the game grabs you by the balls and is, for the most past, unlikely to loosen its grip. I have to say that they've done a really great job with Kratos in this game. I feel like it would have been easy to really fumble the ball after the events of GoW and lean too hard in a couple potential directions but he's really well characterized here for the most part. Still wild to me that this series has gone from "fuck women until they cum health orbs" to where it is now. What a pivot.

An actual messianic figure would be able to drum up enough votes to beat a stroke victim who almost mrec’d a black kid. I’m not saying Trump is a pushover, there’s just a lot of real estate between what Trump actually is and this pedestal he’s put on.

We love to see it.

Trump is popular but I don’t know where the impression that he’s an unstoppable force is coming from other than fear. He lost the popular vote in 2016. He lost in 2020. His blessing didn’t create and likely prevented the red wave just now. He’s still the presumptive GOP front runner in 2024 but I genuinely don’t think he’s got enough juice to drag the entire Republican machine along with him if they decide the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. He’s already getting relegated to news networks that people don’t watch and social media platforms that people don’t use. Would Biden just cruise against him in 2024? No I don’t think so. But again we just saw this happen with the Tea Party. Fox and the Republican engine we re happy to pump them up and bring them into the fold and then as soon as it became clear that Tea Party candidates weren’t viable in general elections they all bailed immediately. Some of those people are still around but they’re a lost cause, Fox knows it, and they’re ignored.

No. This is Tea Party 2: Election Boogaloo.

How do you write that? Ryan Gosling doesn't look like your typical movie star. Tall, chiseled, and perfectly symmetrical, he sat down with us in some of the rare time he spends outside of Eva Mendes

Truly one of the most delusional opening paragraphs ever written.

When it's in the upper 40s leading into the fall in Mass, I'm still in shorts

66, damn.

I wish Control grabbed me as much as it seemed to for other people. Nice that fans won't have to wait a billion years like they have for Alan Wake.