Paul the sparky wrote:

I'd love to but I'm addicted to Astroneers.

Um, you aren't playing without me are you?

Nexx wrote:

Anyone up for some games on Xbox or PC tonight?

i can play on xbone provided kiddo doesn't wake up

Dull. Won first match 3-0, mostly because I got mixed up with the controls and kept hitting guard break and throwing the other guy off a cliff. Got him the same way three times in a row.

I only just noticed the arrow which tells you which way to block lol i was looking at their weapon before. 

Had some decent duels won quite a lot then came up against somebody untouchable.

I have a feeling skill ceiling is high, i'd probably buy this if i had the time to be good at it.

Cherry_Pez wrote:

Also you say you were struggling to block attacks as is, but to make the game better you'd make the block mechanic several times more complicated?

Now you're asking me to explain that without boring everyone's tits off... Well, okay. For the TL;DRers: if you enjoy this for what it is then of course that's absolutely fine. I think it all depends on our angles of combat perception as to whether it achieves its potential or not.

Right, so I'll try and draw some comparisons with boxing without sidetracking too much into the dull stuff on that side. I think that these are the two keys points: the first time you box it's scary as fuck, not because you might get hit — you wouldn't try it if you weren't willing to accept that — but because of how alarming your lack of experience suddenly becomes; even if the other lad's no good, it's overwhelming and surprises almost every novice. It's not lawn bowls where you can play a few crap games to get the hang of it. So OG armed combat between noobs is coming down to — all else being equal — who can manage to panic the least. You can argue that For Honor captures this. And that brings me to my other thought: that boxing can be learnt as a skill because its outcomes are very, very rarely fatal.

No-one alive today has experience of armed combat, and those ‘fighting systems’ for unarmed defence against weapons are utter bunk. Weapons are terrifying. I know this because I know that I can't react to the speed of most punches by sight alone, and most of the boxer's defence relies on the size of gloves and ability to absorb a certain amount of blunt-force trauma. If someone feints a hook and half-catches me in the liver, I mightn't be too hurt by that if I get some of my elbow in-between. But were that fist a knife then, in all likelihood, I'd be done for.

This is already spiralling unnecessarily, but to reiterate: boxing's a genuine skill because it can be practised to its highest level with an almost guaranteed survival rate. Put me in armed combat and my only transferables would be strength, fitness, and a tiny bit of technique. But the first two are givens for all soldiers of that era (they'd almost certainly be stronger and fitter than me), and technique counts for nothing if the other guy shits himself less. We've come to imagine such combat with blocking as a routine occurrence from representations on screen, but that's largely only true of one-on-one fights featuring shields and the same, short weapons. Went out with the Romans, basically.

This all relates back to blocking because, yes, I think that it's much too easy once you've mastered it with prompts. It's the gamification of vicious violence that I'm criticising, where the exciting, self-interesting variables of our reactions to panic might be enjoyed without being, y'know, killed. Except not, because those variables are systemised down to QTE prompts. I was playing without the HUD, as I feel it's just another Road Avenger otherwise, but the animations aren't detailed enough to offer a reasonable chance of blocking attacks this way. And yet at the same time, I'm endorsing this?

With the proviso that attacking itself is also much harder; that it's far more nuanced and prone to input errors. Its QTE prompts are propping-up poor animations. With better animations it'd still be hard to block, but for all the right reasons. If I decided to attempt a block I'd be putting myself at huge risk, but likewise, if I attacked and my strike was evaded or blocked, I'd also be exposing myself to that same huge risk.

So I think that it should be the ultimate high-risk, high-reward game, as that's surely its best chance of capturing the raw, frightening sensory-overload of the actual. I don't expect Tekken games to feel like real fighting because they're fantasy versions, but For Honor hits so many of the right visual notes that I find its Tic-Tac-Toe breakdown of brutality into a bitesize paradigm disappointing. I'd remove lock-on entirely; ditch as much Game as possible.

Aye, 'tis a shame that we won't be rehousing axes in each other's heads.

I'm not saying that it's a bad experience by most means, but ever since that first trailer I've been hoping for the first game to semi-capture the fear of armed violence. Not 'cause I fetishise it (I hope)! It's because I've been interested in emotional self-limitations in gaming since WipEout HD's Zone Mode schooled me. I was someway up its leaderboard once, but I didn't consider myself great at it. Similarly, the majority of those whom I felt certain were better than me didn't consider themselves elite. The common feeling was that we were all flawed players capable of special runs occasionally. And I think that that was right on the money.

My skills hit a wall after a while, and at that point I was only in the low-80s on Anulpha. But every time I reached a new zone and my excitement caused me to panic away my ship, I'd be angry at myself exclusively — not the game — for not being able to control my emotions. All of us had that in common: an ephemeral obsession with extending our limits of composure under self-created pressure. I was capable of almost reaching 120 in the end, and even then my emotions often let me down before my motor skills did. But a light creep rather than a flood.

All of that's to say that I'd like For Honor to be more psychologically arresting through severity. I'd like to die 100 times in a row because I'd cracked, loving that it had the tools to make me beyond rote feints. Dying feels very oh; combat very learned mechanical. Games that recognisably test our mental limitations are potentially the most rewarding. I didn't like Dark Souls because I felt that one of its main demands was endurance for the repetition of previously proven successes. A Sisyphean shunning of my known capacity.

Escape wrote:

to reiterate: boxing's a genuine skill because it can be practised to its highest level with an almost guaranteed survival rate.

Good post and good points but.. wooden swords? Pretty sure that all soldiers spent a large amount of their time practising with wooden weapons and if they got hit they lost without dying. It's not exactly the same as boxing because they were doing it because they had too and the fear of death wouldn't be there but getting hit with a wooden sword still fucking hurts. (Source: did Kendo for a bit therefore am expert.)

Anyway i like your ideas for the game. They must be considering a hardcore mode.

Interesting back and forth between Pez and Scape there (unlike their SF matches eyooo) and although I can see the goodness in For Honor, the beta hasn't done much to warm me to it. There's a lot of stuff that's BS but they've done a poor job of helping you understand a lot of it.

I think the core conceit and the core combat are great, really unlike anything else out there right now, but it's buried under a fucking Ubisoft game. Precious seconds of my life sapping away holding A to skip bullshit I don't need to know. Endless screens of options and texts and stats and little exclamation marks reminding me I haven't scrolled over every single piece of inventory in the last 30 seconds. Icons that don't let you parse an ability quickly and instead make you try and remember the information you were overloaded with in the minute before a match started. Surprisingly in depth tutorial videos that you can't rewind or fast forward, you can only stop or pause? Move list screens that mean absolutely nothing. A stamina gauge that is tiny and insignificant compared to the rest of the HUD mess and overly suffused visual style, which also doesn't alert you to low stamina until you're buggered for breath anyway.

There's so much feature weight on it, and i've barely mentioned half of it there. Rainbow Six: Seige seems to me a good touchpoint. It's high stakes gameplay in small bursts that has a solid mechanical core. Lethality is high in both, you can get torn up in FH in seconds by a good player, and i'm R6 a single headshot that's angled through a obtuse line of sight can end your life in a second, but there's plenty of room for competition with asymmetrical skill sets and positioning being a huge component in the road to success. R6 has the good grace to leave much of its kipple in an ottoman that is perhaps slightly too large for the room, but can be ignored safely for parlour games. For Honour is opening cabinets and drawers and bags and just letting it all pour in and drown you in cruft all the while obscuring your view of what seems to be a pretty thrilling game of charades.

So yeah, a very solid and interesting game, that seems to delight in actively putting me off at every step of the way. Didn't help that the network was atrocious whilst I was playing it. I can only hope it gets looked after as well as R6:S was, because that game is going strong as fuck despite launching in a broken state.

Fuck Ubisoft and their club you need to log into. It told me three of the email addresses I tried were already in use for Ubisoft accounts (which is an indication of the bullshit they add to their games) but none of them succeeded in sending me an email to reset the password.

You're playing as that guy? Dirty bastard.

If we're talking real world issues, I'm miffed that my Warlord can't just step inside the range of spear bitch after a successful shield block/parry and stick her with the pointy end a couple of times to be done with her. But then again I'm benefitting from being able to block a two handed great axe overhead without breaking my arm, so there's that.

In a hardcore mode, what's to stop it descending into a sprinting trade off at the beginning? How did Bushido Blade get round that?

Ah the 1v1 areas are pretty damn pokey. Only opens up at the 2v2 and up. Had some Orochi guy frantically trying to claw his way out of the room we found ourselves in after the first two rounds were a totally one sided affair.

Again Scape, I must be viewing this from a totally different angle, you can end some of the more nimble characters with three heavy attacks and then the executions are fully visceral. Or they do the trick for me, the Raider plants his axe head in to their shoulder, they slump to their knees, he casually walks over and snaps their neck. Glorious stuff.

Paul, after a parry you should have enough time for a forward dash and then at least a light or a GB. Off a straight block you'll still be eating the pokes though, her keep away game is fairly ridiculous.

Good points again, Escape. So you are saying you would like a mode where an Ax to the chest is instant death? That seems reasonable unless you have plate armour on. Fights would be terrifying basically first hit wins.

Does blocking decrease stamina in this? It really should. And your shield/weapon should degrade with it.  What do i know, i don't buy shit all games anyway!

Nexx wrote:

I'm in deep, looking forward to trying out the final 3 characters on release.   Just had what felt like the longest round of Brawl ever due to my slow reactions to a revive

I enjoyed how once victory has been snatched there's no emote. Just your character's idle animation casually kicking the dirt like it ain't no thang.

I'm loving the discussion, and scapes contribution, even if I think asking for more hardcore/better solutions in a triple A ubi game is beautifully wishful.

Did you not jump some sort of shark for games commentary complaining about the gamification of a game though?

FWIW, I'm of the opinion we all ask for hardcore but never really want it all the time.

I had dirt rally and forza horizon 3 in my goty list. I love dirt rally, but I've put more hours into fh3. Because consequential fail states aren't always what folks are in the mood for.