Definitely I appreciate that. I’ll see how the ending goes and maybe give NG+ a shot. Just have a lot of other patient games on the list ya know? Either way thanks for your input!
It’s possible my perspective may change for sure. It’s happened before to me with the souls series. I initially didn’t like bloodborne but it grew on me so we’ll see how the ending works out.
Also, I only found that fight because of a walkthrough. Normally I don’t use walkthroughs but I got the game stuck to where I needed to converse with an NPC before the game would progress. It wasn’t one of the main ones so I got very confused and had to look it up and I read too much lol. I do have a lot of other games to play though so I wanted to experience the harder optional route while I could in case I never came back to it.
Don’t get me wrong, I knew that the steps you take to even just find the owl memory were not something intended for first time players to do but since I found his first fight so easy I wanted to explore it. Not judging the whole game on that fight either for obvious reasons but it did solidify some of these things for me.
Either way we’ll see how I get on and what I think of the final boss, thanks for the comments
Oh no worries, I should clarify that I’m not finding the game to be too difficult. If anything, it’s been kind of easy because I got the combat down pretty quickly. I haven’t been dying to bosses very often at all until I hit that second Owl fight.
As crazy as NG+ 13 is, I don’t think I’m going to go through it again for NG+. Even with the higher difficulty enemies, I just think the combat is almost too straightforward.
I agree 100%, parrying is the way to go with combat like this though I wish for a bit more of a balance between parrying and other things that this game doesn’t quite hit. Still when it works, it works well.
As for difficulty it’s not that I find the enemies easy per se, it’s that I find the game loop easy and kind of dull. Those problems I don’t expect a harder difficulty to fix. For instance I fought Owl for the second time and the tedium of that with his high damage convinced me pretty well that the difficulty wasn’t the issue. Enemies in this game are already extremely deadly so harder must be like playing a no hit run right? Lol
That is indeed a decent boss battle. But I do think the game has a wide range of battles. Most of the sword battles are great, I really liked the first Owl fight. But the other fights? They kind of feel like filler at times.
I will say that the game is mostly fair but I’ve died a fair bit to some things beyond my control. The camera in particular is a real struggle at times particularly when fighting indoors.
As for me being too good, I actually think that’s probably fair. The Genichiro fight I think I cleared on my first or second attempt. The other bosses mostly were 10 attempts or less. The only one that has given me trouble so far is the second Owl fight that took me dozens on dozens of attempts. And the fire demon doesn’t seem so easy.
Even then though maybe I’ve played too many souls games. They don’t feel as fresh anymore. Like being honest I don’t think the world design is all that great in Sekiro when comparing to bloodborne or DS3. Same with enemies. I can’t really name too many places from Sekiro that have stuck with me or feel different. Whereas with dark souls; Anor Londo will be seared into my brain along with various swamps and boss arenas. But hey, at least the story is great in sekiro so it’s got that in spades.
I’ll be honest, that may be one of the issues. I found about 90% of Sekiro to be easy for a souls game. Most bosses I attempted 10 times or less. Until the last few bosses I had no issues so maybe I just find it boring because I don’t die very often?
But even the hard fights didn’t feel like huge achievements because I knew the very next boss was 5 minutes away. Maybe the game is a bit too boss heavy for my tastes, I don’t know.
Appreciate the detailed response. I think there are merits to what you’re saying about the combat being very tight but it’s extremely demanding of the player on those specific skills and that’s exactly what I find incredibly boring about it actually.
Sekiro is at its best for me when there are sparks flying and I’m fending off a flurry of blades left and right, getting those perfect timings and sussing out the beat to which the enemy is coming at me with. Even some of the regular enemies do a great job at showcasing what’s possible with the system.
But then I hit the second Owl fight. In this fight you are fending off attacks that it does not matter if you fend off or not. You will spend minutes fending off attacks for a one or two hit window to chip at damage. You will do this over and over again for 15 minutes. It’s boring. And if you get clipped by a hitbox or dodge at the wrong time, instant death. It makes all of the flaws of the game including the camera and lock on system just come out in full force.
Let me put it this way: I feel like a speed runner trying to execute what I know are the exact right moves over and over again for 10-15 minutes without making minor mistakes. As opposed to other souls games where the combat would ebb and flow, this game is one speed and you must approach enemies a few ways at most. That’s the part that gets boring is that I can’t go in going “I’m going to try to dodge this differently” and instead I’m going back in thinking “I sure hope I hit jump at this one part faster” or “don’t miss that one parry or you die” or “how do I avoid that broken hitbox?”
Specifically I had to take a break after fighting the fire demon and seeing it about to charge forward so I dodge behind it, only to die from it charging away from me despite have multiple feet of distance between us. This isn’t the first fight this type of thing has happened in either. The sumo dude in the memory is pretty bad for this as well.
Have you ever noticed that about these games? Maybe I’m off base but I feel like FromSoft is almost like Bethesda in the way that they have some rough edges to a game demanding perfection from you but a lot of people just say it adds to the difficulty or that it’s expected. It’s not massive issues but I’ve lost many fights in this game to stuff that wasn’t my fault at all.
That was my impression. Not only was it shorter but I also didn’t feel like playing it twice so it just felt like I missed out on the story with Roche. I enjoy branching paths the way that W3 does it where you get different dialog and occasionally different events but having it be split down the middle is just annoying.
They use a hybrid system now and only use peer to peer when dedicated servers aren’t enough, so they could just swap to purely dedicated servers.
However ignoring that, even a peer to peer system can do similar tricks if you don’t isolate the host peer to just one machine. That can even be done by spot checking with a company owned server. You use the server as a verification peer and have it as a backup host to the assigned peer. If your verification peer gets different ram values or what not, you shut the server down at the very least and place that peer on a suspicion list.
But even if they went the cheap route, just distribute the peer network. Let’s say that you have a game of 12 people. You could make it so that each peer is only assigned a certain part of the simulation and players (with overlap on assignments) and cannot track the entire simulation. It’s more complicated than a single server hiding info from you, but they could at least make it to where you’d need multiple infected peers to take over a lobby.
I don’t mean individual servers. What I more meant was let’s say a game uses a standardized anti-cheat. Like EasyAntiCheat or Battleye or similar. And whoever runs your game service (Steam, PSN, Xbox) can vet these anti cheat programs and allow them to create a record on your account of cheating.
And obviously these things get false flags so you can account for that, give people strikes and allow appeals. And games would have the option of banning you for: having too many strikes total, violating only a specific anti-cheat X times, or ignoring this system except to place extra suspicion and resources on those already having strikes.
Also having an account tied to hardware is a no brainer and I’m surprised that this doesn’t get employed often. I know IDs can be spoofed but that’s another barrier potentially.
Consumers don’t relate low inflation to bad inflation but as you can see the fed wasn’t able to hit its target all of 2020. That’s a really bad sign by itself, the US is very lucky that it never got a true recession/depression.
I think the best thing I’ve heard for long term solutions is to fix a lot of the cheating using server side solutions. In a game like CoD, that means the server doesn’t send you player positions unless you absolutely need to know them.
The other thing honestly is just increasing the investment required to cheat. That could mean that in order to play competitive game modes, you need to have signed in at least once for 4 weeks straight and played the game. Or you need to be a certain level. Issue hardware bans and IP bans to people. Require phone number verification.
What those things do as barriers is actually increase the potency of current detection methods. This should also carry over to accounts. I’m not sure why steams VAC ban system isn’t more popular. As in accounts need to be flagged as a whole when cheating in just one game is found.
There are many solutions but it’s just not a big deal for companies as the prior person said. Plenty could be done to at least make cheating harder and cost more time/money. But that won’t happen
What’s funny about that part is I don’t disagree with the fundamentals of the mission. It’s an interactive cutscene which is fine. With better writing it could’ve been interesting but at the very least it should have an option to skip sections of it.
Looks like they use Easy Anti Cheat services which run at the kernel level on windows but not on Linux, that leaves a huge loophole available for Linux which I actually believe will increase cheating dramatically.
As for the software development, that’s on EAC to fix. And in fairness it doesn’t make sense for them financially to do so. Cheating already costs these companies a ton of money to fix as is.
Definitely I appreciate that. I’ll see how the ending goes and maybe give NG+ a shot. Just have a lot of other patient games on the list ya know? Either way thanks for your input!