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Ryse: Son of Rome |OT| Are You Not Entertained?!

Dueck

Banned
Game looks so cinematic. I'm really interested, but I'm concerned but the talk of repetitiveness. What say you, GAF?

Of the 7 Xbox One titles I own, it is my favorite so far. I sank 4 hours into it after the midnight launch and didn't even play anything else that night. The combat is challenging enough when confronted with certain enemies that it stays fun. If you like the fighting in the Arkham games, it's fun!
 

The Goat

Member
Just got to the forest level. I said God damn. If launch games like Ryse and Killzone are looking this good already, I can't wait for the 2nd and 3rd gen games.

I'm actually not 100% disliking the combat. It can flow pretty well at times, but it just needs more variety. I think might actually finish the game in one sitting.
 

Tomcat

Member
I would chalk this one up to politics. It's beautiful and fun, but I think the reviews were already scored before the game came out.

from what have seen I believe that too. It seems that ryse was the easy target for many reviewers to seem as they have high standards and have a sacrificial lamb for their launch reviews.
 

hawk2025

Member
Well... I can't say I agree at all with some of you guys.

I've now completed 3 out of 8 chapters.
It's terrible, simply terrible. I'm playing on the hardest difficulty available, and here's how you win:


Y,X,X. Y,X,X. Hold R. QTE.

Y,X,X. Y,X,X. Maybe press A to counter. Hold R. QTE.


...that's it. For almost half the game, the best way to dispatch enemies is to break their defense, get two hits in, break the defense again, then go for the kill. Literally the only variation from this strategy needed on the highest difficulty is countering every now and then.

There is a roll attack, though, which I'm assuming means that somewhere on the halfway point of the game, enemies with unblockable attacks will show up, and I'll finally have one other command to add to the game.
 

Servbot24

Banned
I dunno. I haven't played Ryse, but if a game were nothing but pretty graphics and Batman melee combat it would get a low score from me too.

Also it's pretty unfair to accuse reviewers of having unfair opinions. One could just as easily say "You guys just like Ryse cuz you're trying to justify your new console!" and that would be just as bad of a statement.

It's not even close to Batman's combat.

I was just going off an above posters comment. Seemed from the trailers to be quite a bit simpler but I wasn't sure.
 

YuShtink

Member
Well... I can't say I agree at all with some of you guys.

I've now completed 3 out of 8 chapters.
It's terrible, simply terrible. I'm playing on the hardest difficulty available, and here's how you win:


Y,X,X. Y,X,X. Hold R. QTE.

Y,X,X. Y,X,X. Maybe press A to counter. Hold R. QTE.


...that's it. For almost half the game, the best way to dispatch enemies is to break their defense, get two hits in, break the defense again, then go for the kill. Literally the only variation from this strategy needed on the highest difficulty is countering every now and then.

There is a roll attack, though, which I'm assuming means that somewhere on the halfway point of the game, enemies with unblockable attacks will show up, and I'll finally have one other command to add to the game.

I don't know I'm not even playing on hard and I have to counter enemies constantly. But yes there are enemy attacks you can only avoid by rolling. And yes its pretty easy, but it's not just about winning, it's also about trying to perform executions as well as possible and setting up double executions.

There's also perk switching, focus and burning eagle, pilum throwing, and volley commands to mix things up a little bit too. It's not exactly complex but it's not terrible either imo. It feels pretty good to boot, a nice sense of impact and momentum in the flow of combat. And of course being absolutely gorgeous in motion doesn't hurt.
 

Anfony O

Member
On the last chapter 38 percent in. Really surprised on how much I enjoyed the game. Story was great in my opinion. Definitely repetitive combat wise but still fun nonetheless. Definitely doesn't deserve the scores it received.
 
from what have seen I believe that too. It seems that ryse was the easy target for many reviewers to seem as they have high standards and have a sacrificial lamb for their launch reviews.

Is it really a problem that reviewers set a high standard for games? Doesn't that actually help us?
 

hwateber

Member
Yeah, Sessler's review was weird. He spent half of it ripping into the story before getting to anything else. It seemed really pretentious in an "Oh, I have an English Literature degree" kind of way. Hey, we both do, buddy. Except I'm not going to be dumb enough to call GTA V the Dickens of our time. Eesh. Actually, after he said that, I kind of just blocked out all his ramblings about story and plot. The thing that would annoy me, if anything, is probably that it apparently compresses all of Roman history into a single lifetime.
Yeah pretty much everything Sessler says has to accentuate the fact that he thinks he's better at this stuff than the reader. I'm really not a fan
 

Halfmunch

Member
After playing I'm not sure what reviewers wanted out of Ryse. Fun and amazing graphics~ The swamp level has awesome atmosphere. Yea combat could be more robust, but it's not as bad as some reviews are saying.
 

golem

Member
the text/bar in the top right of the screen goes way off the screen. I don't think it's an overscan issue because too much of it is cut off. Anyone else have this problem? I'll post a picture in a few

I found some overscan adjustments in the Ryse settings menu… look at the bottom of the Ryse home screen, there is a button for settings
 
From reading this thread, it seems like the general consensus is "it's not that bad." Is it actually worth $60 though?
On the last chapter, playing on hard. I feel it's a fun game with some outstanding visuals. It's a bit on the shallow side but with a few moments to break up the pace, and enemy encounters that keep you on your toes it reminds me of a high production arcade brawler.It really isn't the most in depth game and it def has lots of room for improvement but I think for the setting and for Crytek first shot at anything NOT FPS, it's a good yet limited start. If they get a chance to do a sequel, this is where I would expect much more from them.
 

Bond007

Member
I want this but dunno if i can cough up the $60...i bet i buy this and it drops a few weeks later.
Gonna hold off as long as i can.
 

Tsukumo

Member
yes, its pretty obvious that ryse is an old-school brawler. I mean, anybody with even one semi-working eye can see that.

my only worry was that the fight mechanics were FLAWED and BROKEN as it was tooted thousands of times. you saying <<I don't think anyone was criticizing the combat mechanics>> means you where not reading these boards the past few months....
watching various videos I could never find it to agree to that, but Tsukumo above just puts the things about where I expected them to be.

next week is going to be so low on productivity, its not even funny 8)

Happy to do this game some good :D
I'll try and break it down to a few bullet points:

- speed.
People who saw the difference between City and Origins in terms of enemy speed know this very well, but to put it simply City uses an attack speed which is basically the same for both Batman and the thugs. This means that if you read the enemy movements and you start the attack first, the attack will connect no matter what: in Origins this didn't apply and the result was that unless the enemy was 10 feet away, his attack would connect first every single time. In Origins even the batarangs, which took precedence on every single type of attack in City, sometimes would get anticipated.
Here when you get hit it's your fault, because the enemies give you ample time to react and "announce" they are about to attack with visual and vocal cues. So the difficulty of the game isn't based on the enemies being faster then you. This ties to the next point.

-rhythm.
There is an intelligible rhythm to the Arkham games. The fights have a characteristic "flow" and somehow all the timing in the attacks and the counters feels right. Same thing happens in Ryse: when you get hit it's because you were spamming buttons instead of timing your hits.
You want the other guy's blood and you rush the pure sob with attacks and guard breaks, at which point the A.I does this: 1- starts to evade every single attack until you mix attacks up 2-while you focus on one single enemy to get to the damn execution, one of the others rushes for you and goes for your ass. At this point you are in a bind because you can keep hitting your target to make the white skull appear before you get hit, or you can parry the attack and loose the chance to get the execution invicibility frames, its bonuses and, let's face it, the non-quantifiable pleasure to smash the head of a guy who a couple of minutes before interrupted your 60+ combo.
It's a wonderful bait and switch system that pushes you to manage a group of enemies in the most organized way possible. It's a great satisfaction when you keep a combo going and then you get an entire mob of white skulls and you perform two double executions in a row.
It only gets messed up by the co-op system because the enemy A.I clearly wasn't structured to deal with two players attacking at the same time.

-enemy aggro
much like the Arkham games, once you get hit the game forces you to recover with evades and parries. If you get hit and you keep spamming the attack buttons, you get hit again.
Also, different from City, there's the fact that you basically can't parry two enemies at the same time, so when you get rushed by two enemies YOU HAVE to dodge. The A.I. again punishes you mercilessly when you don't mix up everything: attacks, dodging and parrying. It may not seem like much, but it requires spotless coordination and the satisfaction in watching clips of you taken from the upload app is massive.
"QTE fest" my ass

-enemy placement
in City you could put yourself in the middle of a group and survive with well-timed counters. It was (and still is) awesome because you feel like the bad-ass you know Batman to be.
In Ryse you can do the same and it's extremely satisfying to manage a group of ten enemies with timed attacks, dodges and parries without giving up an inch of ground. In Ryse it's also more challenging because while parrying/deflecting has the same large window of effectiveness that counters have in the Arkham games, the latter gets you hits for your combo and damages the enemy while the first only rescues you from an attack and it's up to you to make it count before another enemy rushes you.
The only problem I see here is the fact that you really don't have any crowd-control tactic outside of the focus attacks, and the focus attacks are clearly a massive advantage over enemy units (only bosses are somewhat resistant, and even they are not completely safe from focus effects) so they dampen the sophistication of the fighting system a bit.
In the end you always have to push an enemy away from the others and you have to evade repeatedly to mess up their formation and get yourself some room to breathe. Another reason why I say the game is more difficult and that difficulty is legitimate and fair.

-enemy variety
enemies are more mixed then the Arkham games (with the only exception being the last chapter of Arkham Origins). Pure and simple. Reviewers who said the opposite must have played on normal. As soon as the second chapter you are already at a point where you realized you simply cannot push the attack button more then once: you have to keep an eye on which type of unit is about to attack, since each one requires a specific type of action both in terms of defensive tactics and aggressive tactics. YOU JUST CANNOT MASH.
 
Just got to the forest level. I said God damn. If launch games like Ryse and Killzone are looking this good already, I can't wait for the 2nd and 3rd gen games.

That level and the one after looked amazing and had great atmosphere. I am waiting for them to turn up in the screenshot thread.
 

Raide

Member
Had a weird dream about Ryse 2 last night. They announced it and it turned into a Diablo style loot game...


...now I want that for reals.
 

Leonsito

Member
I'm having fun so far, it's a 7 game, I hope we see a sequel with a more elaborated fight system, the rest is fantastic.
 

Delt31

Member
From reading this thread, it seems like the general consensus is "it's not that bad." Is it actually worth $60 though?

It's def worth 60 up front and ebay for 40 down the road. Seriously though, it's been a fun game and worth the experience. It falls into the, hey it's launch and let me show myself what this thing can run. I build in some tolerance for games like this when a system launches b/c although it prob isn't worth 60 when compared to other games, it is worth 60 on launch week as it constantly impresses with visuals and it's actually fun. If it was just tech, I would say no but the story and atmosphere really does keep you going. Combat although repetitive does feel fun too.
 

ElTorro

I wanted to dominate the living room. Then I took an ESRAM in the knee.
I'm hearing mixed reactions on the story. I've heard some say they enjoyed it, but Sessler seemed really agitated with it. Going as far to say "it's as if it was written by a 12 year old." That's pretty harsh, especially considering what I've seen looks pretty interesting.

Yeah, but the story admittedly shits all over real roman history and mythology; as do many movies, so that is not something specific to Ryse. I loved the production value, but the characters themselves were often on the cheesy side, especially the villains. Marius and his allies, however, were enjoyable. My biggest beef with the story is that it copied way too much from movies like Gladiator; some scenes are just rip-offs of scenes in Gladiator. Nevertheless, the game has some good moments
like the scene where Marius defends the bridge as last man standing, or the final scene.

I'm having fun so far, it's a 7 game, I hope we see a sequel with a more elaborated fight system, the rest is fantastic.

I must be an anomaly, I am actually enjoying the fighting, lol. Granted, the game is too short for the fighting to get too boring. So far, the multiplayer is not bad, either.
 

pixlexic

Banned
Just beat RYSE . Game is a solid 8.5 I liked the story. I liked the combat.

Combat and animation were not clunky or glitchy at all for me.
All that FUD was nonsense.
 

Glip_Glop

Member
I'm enjoying eviscerating people, the game does feel like a glorified tech demo, but that doesn't mean that its not fun. With Amazon price matching the $49 deal, the $60 sting isn't so bad anymore.
 

ChrisV

Member
I hate this this thread. It caused me to go out and pick this up. Will be checking it out after football today.
 

mhayze

Member
Had a weird dream about Ryse 2 last night. They announced it and it turned into a Diablo style loot game...


...now I want that for reals.

That's brilliant - I want that too. Of course, I don't see Crytek doing that, but maybe one of the other studios.. or maybe get ActivisionBlizzard to develop
j/k - if announced, I'd like to see this game this decade
 

Enlil

Member
I was watching some let's plays on yt and I must admit this game is really interesting. To bad I won't be getting a xbox, but I do see why people buy a xbox for this game. the facial expression are very well done, the atmosphere and voice acting with the graphics really makes a difference compared to last gen.

in previous games on ps3 and x360 the realism would be destroyed by the (ugly) graphics, with next gen realism might be achieved because of physics and graphics. Ryse: Son of Rome does a fine job for a first title with next gen just being released.
 
The two aren't mutually exclusive.



People like bad games all the time. People also dislike good games all the time. It happens.

Stephen King's novels aren't necessarily fantastic pieces of literature. Somewhere along the line he decided to not seek to push genres and make stories that warrant large critical discussion.

Does that mean his novels are bad? No. It's quite fine to enjoy his books for what they are. Ryse is the equivalent of a Stephen King novel to me.
 
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