Recensioni recenti di CharlesBaa_

This writing in this game is so good that it actually sures up some plot elements of Ichiban's previous adventure. Kiryu's story arc in learning to rely on his party members is touching and extremely well written. I had initially lost faith that the main story for the latest entries in the series could even be well-written after Yakuza 6 and Yakuza: Like A Dragon. And it's clear that the writing team has finally understood the qualities that actually make Ichiban a great character, his optimism and heartfeltness, bordering on naivete, is precisely what makes him so charming and lovable.

The gameplay in this is a huge step forward from Yakuza: Like A Dragon. The changes they've made to it compared to the previous are incredibly useful for quality of life as well as adding strategy and depth to how the combat plays, whereas before it was pure luck whether you would happen to find yourself standing near a weapon to attack with or that enemies would align themselves in a way that's beneficial for your special attacks, now with the ability to reposition your units in a radius around where they decide to stand, the gameplay is much more tactical and rewarding. Which is precisely the change I wanted to see and even noted in my review of the previous entry.

The changes to the job system are also very welcome, in the previous entry you had specific skills you could acquire from each job, now you're able to customise exactly which skills you would like from each job that you've levelled. It's a small change but one that makes a big difference to the things you decide to level and when you decide to switch jobs.

Kiryu spends a lot of time in this game reminiscing about the events from prior games, and when I look back over the series with him, it seems like roughly every 4th entry knocks it out of the park. 0, 4, and Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth are all, in my opinion, shoulder-to-shoulder for the best that the series has to offer.

I slept on this game for so long.

payday 3 if it was good:

REFLECT ON LOSS

The further I play
Framerate loss, inevitable
Oops, that line had eight

The first few chapters of the game have really strong writing, characters are great, their motivations are clear. Nanba (and his return) in particular was very well written. The payoff to the story isn't rewarding in the least. It's not that I can't handle a bittersweet ending, just at least give it some meaning. To go through all of that just to have the game end where it does was.. strange. And there are plot holes, in addition to nonsensical character writing.

The gameplay and combat are better than I thought. Real-time combat on the dragon engine sucked anyways. Although I wish you could reposition your characters in a small area around where they decide to stand so you could more easily catch enemies with your special attacks.

At some points in the main story the game presents a difficulty spike which hits like a wall, forcing players to go back and grind. And there's only one place in the game to grind XP with any reasonable efficiency. It's boring and gets tedious quickly when you're forced to do so.

TL;DR: It's worth playing this game, checking it out, spending time in Yokohama and getting to know this band of lovable misfits, doing lots of wacky side activities and quests. They're all great. The main story is alright up until about halfway through where the writers weren't quite sure what direction to take the game. So you spend a lot of time chasing your own tail, interacting with people who don't ultimately end up mattering. And by the end of the story it was a complete letdown compared to the quality of previous entries in the series.

The PS1 original plays better, has more care and attention to detail.

A few terrible decisions combine to make Payday 3 a really rough game on an extremely solid foundation. The gameplay is great, exceptionally refined, stealth is incredibly rewarding. The progression is awful, the content is lacking, the servers are broken, the forced online-only is a death sentence for the game, the DLC schedule is foreboding, the UI design is serviceable at best.

As others have said, there's not much that needs to be tweaked in order to sure up most of the damage here.

1. Having the amount of loot bags actually give you more XP to everything; infamy and equipped weapons, would already do a lot for the progression.

2. Weapon menu needs to make primary weapons and secondary weapons distinct so that you know what you're actually purchasing. This is so basic I can't believe they didn't receive any feedback about this during the beta.

3. The option to play locally/solo with bots. If you had this, the launch wouldn't have been so catastrophic, at least people would be able to play the game they paid for. You can lag out of a solo game that you're playing on your own if you lose connection to the server partway through a match. Having this option would also mean the game retains functionality come end-of-life. If the infrastructure depends on central servers; it's on life support. Someday in the future they will pull the plug and murder this videogame.

That's it, there's only 3 simple changes that need to be made to have the game flourish and get back to positive reviews. You're welcome. They are so basic and previous entries in the series got them correct, it's hard to picture what went wrong here.

I'm looking forward to any upcoming updates that address these aspects of the game.

EDIT: 9 months on from when I wrote this, and only 1 of these issues has been addressed.

Having just completed the game, I can say with certainty that Death Stranding is a game that would be a lot better with less in it. There are 3 or 4 different stories presented here and they all seem to be written on top of one another. The story to this game is an absolute mess. The broad strokes usually connect but later plot reveals or twists will directly contradict earlier information presented to the player. It feels as if it was made up in a single chain of thought, like Kojima didn't have any time to go back and change the earlier story beats to be consistent.

The only story this game needed was the story of the loner delivery man who shuns people, thinks the apocalypse was the end, unwillingly goes on the journey to reconnect people, and over the course of his journey learns the value of human connection. This is where Death Stranding is most effective, when it's telling this story and being this game. But even this story is undermined; at the very final chapter of the game, by the main character stating he feels the same way he did at the beginning of the journey as he does now that he has connected the continent and become entangled in the lives of the people he meets.

I watched every cutscene but stopped expecting things to make sense, just enjoying the gameplay for what it is. I liked building structures that would help other players and engaging with the community that way. I left hundreds of thousands of likes on other player's structures during my playthrough. Built roads to make delivery easier for all of the other players. I engaged with the meta-narrative of rebuilding.

Which is why I'm so disappointed that the story does such a poor job at effectively telling the story I wanted to see most. This game feels like a lot less than the sum of it's parts. People in this game can come back to life when they die, teleport anywhere, summon giant monsters, bring about the final extinction to return the universe to how it was before the big bang. When the stakes are so vaguely defined, how do I know what I'm supposed to actually care about?

All of these different things going on with beaches, powers, BT's, the other side, terorrists, the extinction entity, these make the story of death stranding more unique but also distract from what should have been a simpler story of human connection. The only story that has ludo-narrative synchronicity with the gameplay is the journey to reconnect humanity and have Sam regain his humanity. That's all the game needs and should have had.

Pros: Peppino Spaghetti

Cons: None

If I could give a mixed review, I would.

The game's actual mysteries and puzzles are great. But the presentation is not. I'm not talking about the black and white visuals; I mean the insistence on the diagetic UI with the book and the pretentious nature of how the player is exposed to scenes on first discovery.

Firstly, while you're still uncovering every different scene, the game forces you to watch each one for a fixed amount of time, and then leads you around very slowly to the next with a guiding light that floats around the ship. I found this incredibly pretentious and time-wasting. The amount of time you're forced to spend watching these scenes is almost always too short to get a good look at large scenes or far too long to stare at small ones.

Once you've viewed each scene at least once, you're into the proper investigation portion and will need to revisit certain scenes to look for more information and piece together a story of what happened between all of them. Details such as where people were going or coming from become more important. Except the game has no capacity to easily allow you to go forward to the next scene in sequence or backwards to the previous. I understand it's intentional to obfuscate the story but it is still annoying and again, doesn't respect the player's time. If you want to go to the next scene you need to flip forwards in the book, look at where the corpse is for the next scene, leave the current scene, walk (no running) to the corpse, and enter the scene with the watch. And that's *if* you're lucky and the scene you want isn't one that's only able to be reached from inside another scene.

The diagetic UI of the book gets in the way where it would be faster and more convenient to have a button to go to the next scene. Or alternatively have multiple doors, one leading out of the scene, one to the next scene and one to the previous scene.

TL;DR: I would prefer to be frustrated by a really tough mystery than I would by a lack of convenience features and QoL.