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[Flying Dice]

I played DaS through entirely with a gamepad (for obvious reasons). Controllers are just dogshit for anything resembling precise movement. There's a reason console shooters have heavy autoaim and console third-person fighters have lockon systems. e: to show what I mean, in DaS III I executed the BKGS freeaim three-hit stunlock the first time I ever attempted it using M&K. I still haven't been able to do it reliably with a controller.

I'm also really not a fan of how they tried to mimic the Souls "different stats increase the damage of different weapon types" and totally fucked it up. It works in DaS and bludsouls because there are only two melee stats and two magic stats, on a limited-level character you're only ever going to level maybe 2-3 damage stats, leaving you enough room for utility. In Nioh instead of a simple dex/str division they were dumb enough to split it by weapon classes... which kinda sucks dick when most of the stats are exclusive-increasers of various attributes. Just glad I wanted spears and single-swords, since their stats level HP and stamina.

I hope it does get harder, but I'm not confident that it actually will, especially from what I've heard about being able to just straight up overlevel weaker mobs.

As for the plunge... that's what I did. Walked off the cliff right above the mob, hit strong attack, character flailed around, landed awkwardly, executed an attack after landing, and by the time I got control back the camera was fucked.

And I have to repeat it: it's fucking atrocious what they did with the lighting. Bad enough that they have mid-2000s graphics, but they tried to hide it by making everything incredibly dark. I've turned brightness to 80% and half the areas are still barely visible.

[Ygdrad]

What you're talking about is camera control, not movement. Controllers are more accurate with movement, camera controls are much better with mouse. There's a reason twin-stick/top-down shooter games control orientation with the mouse and not the keyboard, keyboard's bad for accurate movement. Now, getting around in a lot of games is a combination of movement and camera controls and in those it's really up to preference, pick your poison, both have issues.

The stats are weird, but early on the stats don't have a huge effect on weapon damage and later on you get loads of stats to use and can put special effects on weapons that give them scaling on other stats to make up for it. Not saying it's a convenient stat system, but at least it remains functional. Nioh might have more weapon damage stats, but it also has a lot more stat points available and weapons scale on 3 different stats to start with so most builds can use most weapons effectively either way.

I've found the difficulty to be ok although inconsistent and I know from watching others that it gets pretty crazy down the line. Overleveling mobs could only be a problem if you go out of your way to grind without progressing and that one's entirely on you, just like in dark souls.

Not sure why your game is so dark, could be a graphics bug. I do know that some of the lower res textures are cause by a LoD bug that will hopefully be fixed. It basically makes the game mistakenly load lower res textures thinking you're further away than you actually are. A hilariously bad example of this is the corpse the second boss(vampire lady) is hugging which ends up being much lower res than anything around in the scene. https://i.imgur.com/TxDV0VF.jpg

[Flying Dice]

That argument is made a lot. It's false.

In third-person action games your camera is your movement. WASD controls movement independent of your character's orientation in the environment: forward/backward, strafing left/right, which is directly tied to the perspective of the camera. Precise movement (that is, any movement made relative to the environment) is done with the camera--either the mouse, or the right joystick. Things that require a high degree of accuracy (jumping to small ledges, landing blows with narrow hitboxes, &c.) rely on being able to orient the camera with a high degree of speed and accuracy.

Most people don't play, say, Touhou with keyboard controls... because keyboard alone doesn't give good fine movement. What the keyboard is good for is fast and responsive basic movement + hotkeys. What people do do is play it with mouse control, because mouse is more precise and faster than a joystick.

When you're playing an FPS, what is your crosshair? It's the focal point of your camera. FPS gameplay is vastly better with M&K because the mouse affords far greater control over the camera. The principle doesn't change just because you're in third person and have no crosshair-hell, you can see the exact same application of it when you try to use the bow or musket with a controller!

[Ygdrad]

I mean there's a difference between a game like Nioh and a FPS game, you can move around and fight fairly accurately without using the camera is you want to. Hell, due to the ridiculously uncomfortable camera controls of the early portable monster hunter games without lock-on, the only times I touched the camera was during long motions that took control away like slow attacks, dodges, and item usage for general re-orientation. You don't need to use the camera for accurate movement and attacks if you use a thumbstick. First/third person shooters can't decouple camera from movement and neither can KB and mouse in action games if you want fine movement. Fortunately/unfortunately, the ranged weapons in Nioh are mostly for firing at things that haven't noticed you as pulling one out in combat is dangerous and gets you 1-shotted unless the enemy was far away. The ranged weapons take a fair while to put away and you seem to take extra damage when they're out. There are two autoaim skills to improve their use in combat though. One autoaims at center of mass and is mostly useless and the other one autoaims at the enemy weak spot.

If you're interested in free-aiming, Nioh lets you do that while locked on unlike Dark souls(although some heavy weapons could) and there's a setting to control it. A thumbstick is really all you need for that, but I agree that a fast flick of the mouse and just pressing forward is easier and takes less finesse.

Anyways, the kb+m vs controller argument has gone on too long. Both have annoying issues and it's really up to you which you choose to deal with, but when a game is designed entirely around one control scheme you're really only giving yourself more trouble by being stubborn about using the other. I wouldn't use a controller for a first/third-person shooter and I wouldn't use a mouse and keyboard for action/arcade games. Fortunately keypads and the steam controller can be fair middle grounds, but i doubt they're very widespread.


Back on a lighter game topic though, what weapons did everyone pick? I picked tonfas for their ability to animation-cancel out of moves with i-frames and dual swords for their draw-attack+finisher combo since tonfa finishers felt weaker.

[umiman]

I started out with odachi but after realizing no good odachis drop during the main campaign, I just gave it up.

So when I was forced to restart I went with katana and spear. My plan was to focus on katana with the spear as a backup when I need range, but I ended up just maining spear except in really hard 1v1 situations. Spear is so strong and spear skills are crazy powerful. So many ways to down an opponent. Also not to mention during the main story there are so many good spears and swords so I'm spoiled for loot options.

[Flying Dice]

Back on the topic of bad AI and artificial difficulty, the first real boss (in the ship's hold) is an excellent example.

The first phase is actually kinda difficult, I had to chug an off-brand Sunny D once. Buuuut, it's only difficult because the dual flail has really big hitboxes and good range. Once that's gone it's just 3 really telegraphed moves that leave massive openings for you to get multiple free hits, plus the bit where you can bait him into picking up and throwing the big metal spheres. Don't think I took a single hit in the second phase because: dumb AI, limited moveset, massive openings in virtually every move.

To put it another way, I died more times to the first Lothric Knight on High Wall than I have to every single enemy in Nioh combined so far, and I felt more accomplished when I got gud enough to kill it without being hit than I did from clearing the first area in Nioh.

There's a decent game there, but it feels like Team Ninja thought that aping the superficial elements of DaS was enough.

I will at least happily admit that the stat leveling is a bit more nuanced than it looks early on.

[Ygdrad]

The first boss can be really easy once you figure him out. Once I did, the spinning ball attack which was the main threat, was no longer a problem because I knew all the triggers for it. Enemies will react to your positioning and actions which can be very punishing until you figure those out and then you can abuse them in some cases. I've noticed that a lot of enemies and bosses have alternate combos they pull out when the normal one fails to work. In the case of the first boss in the ship I'd stand in front of him so he did a downward smash, dodge to the side and then back to my original spot, hit him a few times, he'd smash down with his other ball and I'd once again dodge and come back. The next time he'd change it up with the second attack being a spin. I don't think the first boss was meant to be overly hard but a lesson in positioning and making proper use of openings. The second boss seems to teach you to time dodges properly and when to block vs when to dodge. Third boss was a joke for some reason, probably as an introduction to armed human bosses which can get fairly nasty later.

Funnily-enough I had more issues with the first boss' second phase than the first due to seeing the first a bunch while trying to figure him out. The range and hitbox of the flails wasn't artificial difficulty, it was just about proper positioning. What was getting me with the second phase was the perfect tracking of the ball throw which isn't a problem at range with the travel time, but at close range the attack would just suddenly hit you so using I-frames was the only way to not get it up close, there was no getting out of the way. That was my bad for being too aggressive though.

Difficulty in this game can be what you make of it though there are things you can use to cheese enemies like in the souls games and you'd be doing yourself a disservice by using them to get through the game. I saw a streamer who abused the odachi's high stance heavy attack and obstacles to bait enemies pretty much all game and then he raged and called bullsh!t as he was completely unprepared and unable to fight some of the more brutal human bosses later on.

I like to think of the difficulty in Nioh like Monster Hunter's, you have access to a lot of attacks and a lot of support tools that can potentially make a mission easy if you opt to use them all the time. It's on you to choose how much of it you want to use. It gives you the option of having speedy boss fights if all you want to do is farm something while still having a challenge if you want to enjoy a fun fight.

[Flying Dice]

Eh. Second real boss, the spider-demon woman, pretty much sticks to the same formula, except in a more annoying way.

Half her moveset is really heavily telegraphed, easily baited, and easily avoided. The other half is wide-area chainable ranged/high-reach stuns that either have her out of reach, 360 degree coverage on the hurtboxes, or lock you into a cinematic semi-finisher. Literally the only difficulty in the fight is that if you ever get tagged by them you'll be stunned for 3-4 seconds. Past that point it's just RNG to see whether she chains more stuns (and probably 100-0s you) or flails around like an idiot long enough for you to wake up. Whenever she's not spamming those she appears to have the exact same enemy AI as everything else in the game: walk straight at you, use attacks whenever you dip inside her range.

So yeah, I stand by artificial difficulty. What it reminds me of is the second stage of the Nameless King fight when you're at range: AoE ranged attack spam with uncertain hurtboxes... except that if you get hit once and the game decides to fuck you, you'll get hit two more times and die before you ever stand back up.

Also not helped by easily the worst design decision of making healing items consumables rather than just ripping estus off exactly. I mean jesus fuck that's a stupid idea when you want people to die over and over at the same places in progression so that they learn, since it means that they have to stop playing there and go farm healing items somewhere else.

e: Yeh, as expected, it took three tries to get the timing down on the dodge and she turned into an absolute joke because of the lack of depth in every other aspect of her kit.

On the flipside, the third mission in that location that concludes in the big Doom-like battle with a ton of yokai in the circular chamber until the yokai lute spawns a player revenant you can kill for the exit key, that was a fun goddamn fight. Having so many enemies with different abilities and the constant respawning made it actually a bit tough, and it was a total laugh seeing the scores (not kidding) of bloodstains.

[Ygdrad]

That fight with the lute player has a hilariously horrible finish if you don't realize you got the key and need to go upstairs to kill the lute player. It happened to me and he started summoning every grave at the same time, like all 20+ of them. fortunately I rushed to him and shut that down in time.

[Cthulhu]

Complaining about artificial difficulty in a souls game should be illegal.  That's like getting mad that your curry is spicy.  Unless you think three monsters in a two-monster closet, run up the stairs and jump off three times, is a tightly choreographed battle.

[ukulele]

I didnt felt the "artificial difficulty" thing, at least no more than in a DS game for example. What i did found is that the 2 first bosses where at least in my opinion a lot harder than quite a few of the ones that follow them. The exception being the last "optional" mission in the fist area, that honestly i couldnt complete, i was underleveled and my skills where not up to it to be honest.

[Flying Dice]

Complaining about artificial difficulty in a souls game should be illegal.  That's like getting mad that your curry is spicy.  Unless you think three monsters in a two-monster closet, run up the stairs and jump off three times, is a tightly choreographed battle.

Nah. At least in my mind, it's the distinction between "it's difficult because you lack the knowledge, experience, and mechanical skills" and "it's difficult because the game requires you to do this one specific thing in this one specific way".

Hino-enma falls under the latter in my book because her fight entirely orients around you doing two things: staying at long range and dodging sideways until she uses one of her moves that isn't an unpunishable stun, and carrying a full stack of acupuncture needles to spam when you mess up a dodge while doing that. I went back and ran her a couple more times--the first playthrough I relied solely on prediction dodging and proper spacing in close combat, which is in retrospect the sole reason it took more than one try.

The second time I used blocks in the good ol' turtle-behind-the-100-absorption standard that I detest. Fight was dead simple, most of her dangerous attacks are nullified, all you have to do is run away and side-dodge when she uses the ranged stun and charge.

The third time I used acupuncture needles. Fight was trivial, didn't have to heal once. I was also better at dodging the stuns, it's worth noting, but I only got hit one time vs. three in my original first attempt. As an aside, I really take issue with Nioh's approach to items. Consumable-only healing is shit. My two locked weapons have heal on-hit and heal on-kill because fuck that noise I'll just slaughter revenants instead. It's also bad design to make consumables affect success that strongly IMO. They should be an option that can help, not an EZ-mode win button. Same deal with ranged weapons, a lot of missions seem to have strong enemies stuck on different Z-levels where you can snipe-cheese them with impunity... made easier by the incredibly strong gunpowder weapons. Which I use anyways because they'll make my revenant more of a pain in the ass for other players.

The fourth time, I summoned. The fight was a joke. Neither of us ever got hit, and her AI was apparently completely broken because she spent the whole fight switching aggro and missing the 2 and 3-hit combos. I think she only pulled out the ranged stun once, the spin kick twice, and never went airborne at all.


Just IMO ofc, but the best Souls bosses are the ones that beat the stuffing out of you to varying degrees when you first fight them (depending on your general familiarity with core game mechanics, usually) and gradually become "easier" in your perception as you learn their moves, ranges, behavior, &c. Not the ones that just have arbitrary bullshit that forces you to use obscure and narrow approaches to the fight.

Artificial difficulty isn't bad because it makes fights unfairly hard, it's bad because it makes fights gimmick battles that usually become trivial once you figure out the gimmick or an effective cheese method. High Lord Wolnir is incredibly emblematic of this problem: watch blind playthroughs of DaS III. When people get to that fight, one of two things happens: they figure out the bracelets fairly quickly (either by being a tiny bit perceptive or by accidentally hitting them) and the fight turns into a joke, or they don't figure out the bracelets and the fight is intensely frustrating.

It's binary and arbitrary in a type of game that revolves around tying difficulty to gradual improvements in player skill.

Nioh possesses that same sort of development of the player in lieu of development of the statblock, but the low skill ceiling of a lot of the content (at least from what I've seen thus far) and the fact that it also has more traditional RPG gear outscaling hurts it. That's pretty much Nioh in a nutshell, they got a lot right, but they missed the mark on some of the core concepts that made Souls games satisfying.

For that matter, the lack of invasions also hurts. I dipped back into DaS III to make sure I wasn't being unfair in the comparison. Decided to check out the Ringed City since I hadn't actually run it yet. Got invaded about three minutes in, and fought the red on that tiny little courtyard right after the first angel. I was rusty as shit, but they were using a kinda gimmicky demon fist build, so it evened out. The fight lasted for about four minutes and I eventually scraped out a win when I baited him into trying to parry with a 1H R1 and swapped back into a full 2H UGS combo... and my heart was racing. That four minute fight was a bigger rush than anything I've had from Nioh, that tension and fear that comes with fighting a thinking, human opponent, and even the residual awareness that another invader might show up at any time.

Instead, I get almost exclusively deaths of the "What? What kind of bullshit was that?" variety rather than the "Shit, I deserved that," that I've come to expect from Souls.


Long story short: Nioh's not bad. The stance system is a lot of fun. I love having a game that has a proper range of spear attacks and spears that aren't garbage or reskinned staves/axes. I'm enjoying it quite a bit in its own right. But as a competitor to Souls, it really missed the mark. I might have been more charitable if it had launched in 2012 or 2013 and was comparing it to DeS or the DaS PC port, but for a game less than a year old, that launched post-DaS III and post-bludsouls (not to mention post-slashy souls), it just feels like Team Ninja wasn't really paying attention to the core aspects of why Souls is so well-loved when they tried to capture that essence.

Also, the parrying has a terrible animation, is incredibly unintuitive to use, and is locked behind a skill tree. A game that encourages you to block-cheese, gives everyone automatic perfect absorption blocks, and makes parrying wonky and awkward can suck it. :V

[umiman]

I didnt felt the "artificial difficulty" thing, at least no more than in a DS game for example. What i did found is that the 2 first bosses where at least in my opinion a lot harder than quite a few of the ones that follow them. The exception being the last "optional" mission in the fist area, that honestly i couldnt complete, i was underleveled and my skills where not up to it to be honest.

Yeah you're right. They frontloaded a huge chunk of the difficulty in my mind.

What I did to beat Tachibana was to throw every single bomb, kunai, shuriken, and summon I had in my inventory at him.

I think the only problematic boss that comes after is Frosslass. She's so absurdly strong in melee after about 10 tries I just ended up fighting her by throwing my entire inventory at her.

That being said, some of the side missions feature some really brutal bosses. There's a super Onryoki you get to fight later. He's a fun and bullshit fight. There's a Benkei battle with you and a monk with gigatonnes of HP on a bridge. That's a fun battle. And where I am in the game (basically the end of the regular game), there's this one particular mob that's in my mind worse than any boss I've faced so far. It's a tengu. I fucking hate tengus. I hate them so much. I hate how they're considered as a regular mob in so many places so they frigging respawn when you die. It's such bullshit.

They're really awful to fight on their own, but then the game just loves to make you fight like... multiple of them. Or Tengu + some other boss or some shit. It's so cunty. I've died more times to Tengu than to anything else in the entire game.

----

Oh and I never really had any problems with Nue despite a lot of people seeming too. But there's a side mission I'm stuck at right now where I have to fight a tongue ogre and a Nue with a fucking wooden stick and I'm getting my ass beat. It's because it takes so bloody long and I don't have enough patience to take my time.

[Ygdrad]

Complaining about artificial difficulty in a souls game should be illegal.  That's like getting mad that your curry is spicy.  Unless you think three monsters in a two-monster closet, run up the stairs and jump off three times, is a tightly choreographed battle.

Nah. At least in my mind, it's the distinction between "it's difficult because you lack the knowledge, experience, and mechanical skills" and "it's difficult because the game requires you to do this one specific thing in this one specific way".

*rest cut out to avoid gigantic post, scroll up for rest of post*

But according to you your problem with the Hino-enma fight WAS your lack of knowledge, experience and and mechanical skill, not artificial difficulty. You eventually got around to using acupuncture needles to deal with failure to avoid the stuns, you got better at dodging them, and if you had spent some time at various ranges and paid attention you might have discovered that she almost never does her stun attack if you stay at close-ish range. My fight with her for the most part was a flurry of back and forth attacks and dodges in close quarter combat. If distance opened up, I always rushed back in to avoid having her use the stun. In my case blocking wasn't an option since I was wearing light armor and toughness dictates your ability to block, it was only used to break out of a chain of attack to dodge or block her charge if i messed spacing up, which guard-broke me in the process. YOU went with a block cheese build, it's not necessarily the game encouraging you to do so, it's like going full havels with a tower shield and then complaining that the game is easy and about turtling. If figuring out the gimmick of a fight makes it artificial difficulty then I guess the majority of DS2 was artificial difficulty because I learned that most boss attacks were unable to deal with a player constantly circling to the left or right. With the potential exception of double bosses which retain some degree of unpredictability, all the souls bosses become easy once you figure them out, the same is true of Nioh and THIS is how you know it's not artificial difficulty, they can be figured out.

"Artificial difficulty" doesn't mean anything, it's just a term people use when they're not happy about the difficulty for one reason or another without necessarily explaining the issue. You prefer souls, and that's alright, I prefer the souls world, but the Nioh combat. Nioh doesn't leave me thinking "what kind of bullshit was that", it is a case of "shit I deserved that" until I prove it wrong by exhausting the tools and strategies available to me. Most players new to the soul series and unfamiliar with its combat would probably say exactly that, "what kind of bullshit was that?" it's just down to how you approach the game and your mindset.

*snip*

I actually liked the frostlass/yuki-onna fight, in a masochist-for-game-difficulty kind of way. I forced myself to do it at close range(with short tonfas, ouch) until I figured that out and even then it kept me on my toes because my light armor meant I was dead if I blocked any of her stuff or got caught by her aoe blast and some other attacks. Benkei/tanky-boi was a pretty nasty fight I had issues with due to his superior stamina/ki. My first victory against him was weird, one of my attacks sent him flying off the bridge's edge(must not be meant to happen because I couldn't replicate it), and that felt so cheap I went back in to fight him properly... that took a while to win. Going to admit I still need to get good at fighting tengus. Only ran into one so far, in that side mission taking place in the umi-bozu stage and due to time constraints I had to eventually delete him with the guardian spirit, which I usually only reserve for farming or speedrunning things. Nue is a fun, albeit easy fight once you get to know him, reminds me of a monster hunter mix between Kirin, Rajang, and teostra attack-wise. Too bad he's killed the host in all but one co-op fights that took me there.

Edit: so many typos, probably so many more

[Draignean]

Nue isn't too bad if you get into the sweet spot behind his elbow, where his claw attacks don't hit, you can hit his weak point while he's still standing, and he'll occasionally throw out a lightning beam despite it being totally unable to hit you. Still died to him a couple times.

Let's see, bosses that I actually remember... Tonfa actually have a really good combo for dealing with human bosses in that if you do a one strike light and follow with a heavy you can do a slam to deplete ki absurdly quickly. It's what I used to cathartically kick Tachibana repeatedly in the face, and also what I used to get the Yuki-Onna (who has shockingly low stamina) into something manageable. Only true boss fight I had real trouble with was the Ogress, and that was just something about her slashing hitbox that I couldn't deal with. Ended up chaining weapon ignitions to bring her down.

The only fight that I've been seriously annoyed about so far has been the Tengu+Flying Bolt combo in the bath house. The Tengu is so goddamned tanky, and the flying bolt has the annoying tendency to position herself so that she can shoot through the Tengu and you can't see her attack wind-up. Died so many times to a ribbon emerging from inside the Tengu's eyeball chest.

I am salty on the design of the level with the Umi-Bozu. I will stand by assessment that that level was unnecessary bullshit, and it was petty and silly unnecessary bullshit. Blight town is a horrifying sprawl of poison and death that captures so much atmosphere and really good, if truly hateful, level design. The Umi-Bozu level is just a bunch of planks stuck together for no good reason, and water that insta-gibs you if you set a toe in. Yes, it's an added layer of difficulty, but it's not the fun kind of difficulty. It's the kind of difficulty you add when you're out of ideas and have just watched your kids play the Floor is Lava.