God of War [PS4, PC]

Kratos is the definition of tough love. First hour and if I were the little boy I’d have left home by now in search of validation.

Be quiet, boy.

Yeah Kratos does come across as dickish a lot in the first hour or two but there were a bunch of subtle moments in the first 90 minutes where his vocal tone, or body language betrayed his wanting to be different for his son but just not knowing how. It's great voice acting by Christopher Judge and sometimes it's difficult to listen to this actor not imagine his Stargate SG-1 character Teal'c having an equally challenging time with that character's son.

I am expecting the relationship to change a little, ala The Last of Us.

Oh, well to go Thor on monster's arse. The Leviathan axe is now my favourite weapon of all video games. :yes:
 
Now I'm pretty sure my game is bugged. I keep seeing low results textures and they are pretty jarring because they are surrounded by high resolution textures.

I should not let my cat comes near me when I purchased it...
If I were you I would probably slide a 500 ton boulder on your cat for ruining the texture res;).
I am playing using resolution mode on pro. what about you guys ? someone playing with performance mode ? that game is pushing the pro hard, can almost hear my pro fans kicking in.
PLayed from 10 pm to 4 am....couldn't put down the controller...Oh my that first boss fight was incredibly nice. I just had some difficulty remembering the name of some characters outside 2 or 3.
Also subtitles size is a bit tiny and small for me. Had to put light background for the subtitles to read them properly.
I love thet combat system ! It's not a simple hack n slash...I already died 2 or 3 times on normal difficulty.
Pro res mode without a shadow of doubt. A warrior from the ps360 era is a warrior who can endure any low framerate.
 
I am gonna get that artbook : https://www.polygon.com/2018/4/20/17261724/art-of-god-of-war-ps4-book-preview
AOGWAR_PG_12_13.jpg


I wish the actual boxart was based on this artwork
https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/n49.../chorus_asset/file/10688015/9781506705743.jpg

I think that it was a day one edition print in some countries. Usually I always took the special steelbook edition of every GOW but that's the first one since GOW Ascension that i took the regular version.
Can't wait for photo mode to be available for my new game +

Also just downloaded the new profile content of GOW for the platinum headset. I m gonna give it a try. Never used it before. I ll probably gonna try to use it for Horizon too later this summer.
 
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Lovely game, love the soulsborne like gameplay. It takes the good things about souls and does its own original spin on top of them. I started playing on "Give me a challenge" difficulty and I really have to pay attention in each fight :)
 
I am gonna get that artbook : https://www.polygon.com/2018/4/20/17261724/art-of-god-of-war-ps4-book-preview
AOGWAR_PG_12_13.jpg


I wish the actual boxart was based on this artwork
https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/n49.../chorus_asset/file/10688015/9781506705743.jpg

I think that it was a day one edition print in some countries. Usually I always took the special steelbook edition of every GOW but that's the first one since GOW Ascension that i took the regular version.
Can't wait for photo mode to be available for my new game +

Also just downloaded the new profile content of GOW for the platinum headset. I m gonna give it a try. Never used it before. I ll probably gonna try to use it for Horizon too later this summer.
I wish the game gives you that full fur coat as an upgrade later on, looks so menacing especially in the snow.
 
Cory Barlog reacts to the review scores. Guy seems like such a good dude.


You can just tell they put their heart and soul into this game.

This game is gonna be a monster. All the praise and success is well deserved.

Congrats SSM.

My buddy paid $100CAD for an early copy and describes it as a non stop orgasm and maybe the best game he has ever played. He isn't even a big PS guy... he owned a 360 before.

My copy probably won't arrive until next week; can't wait to jump in.
.
Wow, I can't even imagine the roller coaster from the stress waiting for reviews, and then he gets those insanely high reviews.

Finished installing the massive day one patch, here we go...
 
Today was a good day.
Four Valkyres brought down, and I died only once. Here is one of my battles, my first fight against Geirdriful.
Having nice gear is nice. :)
 
Today was a good day.
Four Valkyres brought down, and I died only once. Here is one of my battles, my first fight against Geirdriful.
Having nice gear is nice. :)
I just got inside the
Mountain with that deer statue and about to explore the cave now
, felt like an eternity making up to this point :) but I have been doing whatever side quests I encountered so far. How far would you say I'm at now?
 
After looking at the video comparisons between the E3 trailer and the final build a little bit carefully I am pretty sure now that there was indeed a downgrade mostly in the lighting which was what gave the game a very CG distinctive look. It is not a simple matter of changing the warmth of the colors.
 
Oh my i just played like 6 hours straight today on my day off...so difficult to put the pad down and just love those games without interrupting cinematics all the time and gameplay just resuming in real time.
Already put 22 hours in it and probably did some side quests but guess i have at least 15 more hours. Only thing i don't like so far is the " fast travelling " that is not that fast. but allows you to admire the art , design and environment.
 
I wonder how God of War would look like if it was strictly designed on Pro hardware/SDK? I'm pretty sure geometry, lighting and shader complexity from a 4.2TF machine would be drastically different than 1.8TF machine. Things such as texture size/quality, resolution (CB), and frame-rate would more than likely be the same (not change). However, geometry, lighting and shader complexity would have benefited more from Pro's beefier specs.
 
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So, after now finishing the game co-op with a friend, here are my comments. BTW - co-op meaning I handled most of the boss fights while he did the exploration sections. Oh and when saying boss fights that includes and mostly was the purple side bosses (the story bosses were generally pretty easy) that were multiple levels higher than us that he'd run across while exploring.

Sony Santa Monica actually did what I thought would be impossible, they made me eventually actually care about what happened to Kratos. I went from starting the game hoping that this would be some kind of Greek Tragedy where Kratos' son killed him as he killed his father Zeus. By the end, I was hoping that Kratos would be able to live with his son.

Let me repeat that. I HATED Kratos as a character. I wanted to see him die before I started to play the game. By the end I liked Kratos and was hoping he wouldn't die. That's massive.

This game is like a coming of age for the development studio. You can see this in their far more considered, involved, and grown up story. You can see this is their not relying on teenage angst or nudity to drive sales. In the same way as the studio has grown up, so has Kratos. No longer is he the ill tempered angsty teenage twat (I know he wasn't a teenager by the of the previous series but he sure acted like one) that blamed everyone but himself that he was in the previous games. This is a mature Kratos that learns from his past, learns from his child, learns from others, and most importantly of all takes responsibility of what he did when he was younger.

Some of the story segments are a bit heavy handed WRT the evolving emotions and mental fortitude of the child, but I think any gamer who is also a parent will go through these sections and go, yup, been there. :) You eventually get to a point in the game where the child becomes far more mature than Kratos and Kratos ends up learning from the child. It's a fantastic moment.

Combat (2nd hardest difficulty was used, should have done God of War difficulty, oh well) seems to be a bit of a change from earlier games. If you have good tactical awareness and enemy awareness the combat is very easy. Even fighting purple bar enemies isn't all that difficult as long as you think about everything you are doing. And this iteration of God of War gives you plenty of time to think about things except in some rare cases (wolves, dual axe berserkers require more twitch reactions but combat with hordes of them is relatively rare). Past games felt far more twitchy and action oriented and were also more difficult for me than this one.

My friend is more a twitch reaction type of player and he found the difficulty to be rather high. On the other hand I always approach combat tactically and only commit after assessing the situation and combat for me was rather easy. Hence I ended up being the boss combat guy on our run. :p Which is a bit of a switch as he's far better at the previous games than I ever was. A LOT better.

If I hadn't done this co-op, I would have stopped way before the end of the game even though I found the story absolutely riveting. Metroid style backtracking is something I don't really enjoy to put it lightly (I really don't like it), so having him do all of the exploration and traveling while I just paid attention to the story and lore and worked on work stuff otherwise was great. That's saying a lot as I've never been tempted to do something like this with any other game. Not the Witcher, not HZD, or any other game.

Some disappointments. There seems to be a lot less executions in the game and executions (even with appropriate runes) aren't as rewarding or satisfying as the previous games. After seeing them a few times, there was no incentive to want to do them ever again, except for the Ogre, as you can do a lot of damage by riding him and having him pound enemies for you.

Outside of boss fights with the Stranger (avoiding any spoilers here), none of the other boss fights made me go WOW.

For example, the mandatory Dragon fight when coming out of the mines while impressive in scale, was very stilted and poorly animated, IMO. It felt very much like a poor man's MMORPG boss fight. Meaning very simplistic boss mechanics.

This is more of just a weird oddity to me than a disappointment. But I found it strange that when asking the son to read something it could take a long time before he'll start to do it as he runs there. This could be a very long time if he's in another room (it once took over half a minute before he started to read when prompted). However, if you start climbing, he'll warp to your back.

Some really nice things. Multi-key QTEs are gone. It's either 1 prompt or multiple prompts using only 1 button.

Being able to dodge out of light attacks is great. Makes sense that you can't do it out of heavy attacks. Parrying is hugely OP in the game, and incredibly easy to do if you use the associated rune (I didn't need to use it the parry window is already pretty forgiving).

Also, it's really not an open world game which I found great, but it's a Metroid style game with hubs which I dislike almost as much as open world games. Seeing things in areas I can't access until I get an unlocked ability later in the game is just infuriating for me, mostly because I know I'll forget where most of them were and I hate missing things.

Regards,
SB
 
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I wonder how God of War would look like if it was strictly designed on Pro hardware/SDK? I'm pretty sure geometry, lighting and shader complexity from a 4.2TF machine would be drastically different than 1.8TF machine. Things such as texture size/quality, resolution (CB), and frame-rate would more than likely be the same (not change). However, geometry, lighting and shader complexity would have benefited more from Pro's beefier specs.

I think the difference in framerate between Pro and Regular, with the latter being fixed at 30, where on PS3 frame rates were between 45-60, and the Pro version being similar to that, mostly 60, suggests that the optimisation has been at the very least for between those two systems, and I don’t really think that much was left on the table for Pro to be honest.
 
I think the difference in framerate between Pro and Regular, with the latter being fixed at 30, where on PS3 frame rates were between 45-60, and the Pro version being similar to that, mostly 60, suggests that the optimisation has been at the very least for between those two systems, and I don’t really think that much was left on the table for Pro to be honest.

Hum, I dunno. I would think a capped 30fps CB-4K Pro, would still offer developers enough headroom for more complex shaders, geometry and lighting from 4TF GPU (if base PS4 wasn't in the picture). And given that CB isn't severly penalizing the GPU for processing needs (see quote), I would think God of War Pro would look more complex in terms of geometry, shading and lighting. We're talking about SMS here...

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-three-hours-with-playstation-4-pro
Speaking to developers on site, several aspects of the checkerboard technology came into focus. Up until now, we've seen it as a software post-process upscale, but in actual fact, it's one of a number of new custom features backed into the PS4 Pro's GPU and as such comes with zero cost to game developers.

Actually you gave me an idea on some upcoming benchmarking test, such as poly/LOD scaling and shader complexity across an entry level GPU and Mid-level GPU similar to PS4 & Pro.
 
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