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Ashen


Hendo
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Played an hour of this so far and agree with the above.

It's very Souls in combat, but if those games disagree with you due to the lack of direction, this is more like a proper action RPG with main quests, side quests and a compass type thing in the UI that shows where you need to head to do your thing.

 

I have no idea what's going on in the story as I wasn't really paying attention, but it also seems a bit intentionally vague as well.

Art style seems cool, but not sure how I feel about the lack of faces.

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I’m really interested in this game but there’s just too much to play. What happened with game publishers deciding to surprise release a tonne of games right at December. This is usually catch up month. Not now I can’t go Christmas shopping because I bought all these games month. 

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I'm not sure what happens with the multiplayer. Possibly a bit like Journey?

There's moments where an AI partner will join you, but I just fought (and lost) my first boss fight and it seemed fairly obvious that the partner with me was human as it didn't seem to act like an AI, also picked up items I was picking up, although they look just like an NPC character that will join you. So I get that it's a human taking control of the AI but I don't know how that works. Do they choose to help people? Or is it pulling people in automatically that are in the same location? 

So maybe on their screen, I was the NPC?

 

Edit:

Going from their FAQ....

Quote

 

Players you connect with appear as the NPC character you’re currently on a quest with, and likewise you will in their game too.

 

Once you’ve completed the first quest (‘Hammer and Spark’) and founded your town (known as Vagrant’s Rest), you can connect with players throughout the rest of the game.

You will need to run outside the town boundaries in order to connect as the town itself is a single player zone.

 

For two players to connect, you’ll need to be at roughly the same part of the main story. A good indication for this, is the bosses you’ve defeated. For example, a player who has defeated the first boss, can't connect with a player who hasn't defeated the first boss.

You also need to be in the same area as another player to run into each other.

 

There are two options in the ‘Multiplayer’ options menu that can change how you connect to other players:

‘Disable Multiplayer’ turns off all multiplayer connections

‘Use Multiplayer Filter’ which will allow you to only connect with someone that has set their ‘Multiplayer Filter Code’ to the same number as yours

Using the multiplayer filter is the best way to connect with your friends.

 

 

So, automatic but can be done with friends like the SoulsBorne games.

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  • 4 weeks later...
  • 5 months later...

Thanks to Gamepass I played this for a few hours this morning. It might be my favourite Sould-like game. There are things it doesn’t do as well. Map design being the initial thing that sticks out, and the general look of the game is nice but very samey. I have to keep getting up on high places and have a look around just to reoriente myself because when on the ground it’s hard to know where I am relative to everything else.

 

Thankfully the game has a map which is nice. It is not a very good map, but it’ll do. And this sort of leads in to why I like the game so much and that is because it is easy. If the thing someone like about Dark Souls is the difficulty and punishment then Ashen is unlikely to satisfy, but if like me what you like about Souls is the exploration, figuring things out, finding secret items, etc. This is the game for that. 

 

It still has all the Dark Souls like combat (And for my money feels way better than the Souls games do) but it’s just massively toned down difficulty wise. I died twice. Once very early because as easy as the game appears, if the bad guys tag you it hurts and a mob can all hit you at once. And once when I tried to jump a gap and discovered the character can’t swim. 

 

I’m not saying it’s the best one of these but it’s the one I like the most because it’s easier but still ticks most of the boxes I like about these games. 

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I think it is just luring you into a false sense of security Maf. I liked it for the same reasons and the  the first boss annoyed me and I read the difficulty ramped up after that so just gave up before it triggered my balls off. 

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Highly possible, I will say I didn’t have any issues with the first boss. But I did a bunch of side quests, found some feathers, got really good weapons and stuff. So I might have been overpowered. 

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Oof

 

So I’ve got to Sindre’s View which is like the 3rd zone, I guess, and the game is starting to bear it’s fangs a little bit. With patience it’s still not too bad but I just climbed to the top of a mountain/dilapidated castle type thing and it turns out the game is a massive fan of having things jump out at you from around corners or from the ceiling and ambushing in tight spaces. Stuff like this, not necessarily difficult, but very threatening. 

 

Eventually I ended up making it to the top and got Achievement for it but really not sure why. The only reason I went up there in the first place was because of the AI companion who I’m starting to have mixed feelings about.

 

On the one hand when he’s awesome he’s awesome. Playing a Souls-like game and having someone to tank damage, distract/Agro/kite bad guys kind of feels like a cop out, on the other hand I don’t care I’m all about that easy.

 

But he also has a tendency to just run off and pick treasure up for himself, or run by a wall and nudge me to help him climb, or run straight into a group of bad guys and get himself killed and then the only way to get him back is to get to him and revive him. That’s when he becomes a pain and I wish I had a ‘stay’ command. 

 

But, took down a side cave, got to the top of the castle. Need to go back to the zone and clear up a few missions but also scour the place and look for secrets and items. The zone is in a perpetual sandstorm which even though not too bad for visibility is making it even harder to navigate the place and find stuff.

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Oh, really? I had no idea about that. Honestly I wouldn’t be surprised because I kept thinking he was moving like a real player. But I thought maybe the AI was just really aggressive 

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I’m trying to do the 2nd darkness dungeon and am getting really aggravated by the AI companion who somehow manages to fall off a ledge every single time. The dungeon has sections where it’s primarily fairly skinny walkways and somehow, even outside of fights, the AI disappears because it fell off an edge. The dungeon itself isn’t all that bad, really, except for what looks like the very final leg is just monsters upon monsters in the way and I could really do with the help. On my 2nd to last try I almost managed to take them all down by myself, on my last try I ran to my corpse and homeward bone’d outta there because I had 39 thousand souls on the line (To use DS terms).

 

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Got to the 2nd to last zone today and feel like I blew this game apart. I still really like it, but the simplicity of it is really holding it back, I think. One of the things I love about Dark Souls is figuring things out and this game doesn’t really have anything like that. Everything you pick up in this game is a key item, weapon/armour, crafting material and relic (Basically like rings in DS) and it’s also super explicit about what they all do. 

 

Also the best weapons I’ve found so far I got hours ago and haven’t changed since. I’ve found a couple of weapons that hit a bit harder than my main small weapon, but the one I currently use has a 23% crit chance while the others have 0%. 

 

Also because you can’t level up through souls, only through upgrading gear and completing quests, when you don’t have any new weapons to upgrade you end up with 50,000 souls and nothing to do with them. You can upgrade flasks and buy spears (No spoilers this has become really important) but also a lot of the time you just sit on them. There’s an odd ‘banking’ system where you can spend the actual souls you have for consumable ones for 80% of the value. This feels like a design choice to accommodate the fact they want this continue to be an easy and palatable Souls-like experience, but to leave the player where they can’t spend or save souls isn’t that, what do you do? You sell them for 80% of their value so you can put them in the chest for later. 

 

The map is also super simple which is another thing I miss from Souls games. Despite some of the later areas in DS1 that core design of how everything fits together is amazing and combined with the challenge makes exploration really rewarding. But this game isn’t as hard or complicated. I really like the level of challenge, but they really needed the map to be great and compensate for difficulty through exploration and not just combat. But the map is really lacking in variety and complexity and after 9 hours or whatever and you have outlevelled the enemies you really feel that need for something else to keep interested when going through previous zones.

 

The other days I described Darksiders as junior level Zelda and I think I would say the same about this except for Dark Souls. It has a really good philosophy and idea behind it, but all the systems and design doesn’t gel together as completely as Dark Souls does. Having things like excess souls, lack of environmental puzzles and almost literal straight forward direction of the game you really are just left with cool combat, art style and atmosphere. I go to completion because I still really like it but the more I’ve played of it the more it’s short comings have become really apparent. 

 

I’m all right with a game trying to do Dark Souls but easier, but this game misses the mark and just does Dark Souls but lesser. 

 

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And complete. Man, F that S, how annoying is the end boss

 

Oh, so turns out the last achievement to get is for beating it on hard mode.

 

<sigh>

 

I don’t think I have it in me

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Yeah, fuck this. I beat the first boss on hard but it’s not going to get any easier. On normal mode, by the end, the boss’s were taking half my health bar in one attack. Which I think is bullshit. The game obviously compensates for this somewhat because you have AI help and plenty of flasks.

 

But in hard mode, the AI is still there, but you just don’t rack up enough souls to get more flasks. So knowing the damage that is coming my way, the reduced health bar and reduced upgrade to the health bar of completetion of quests, and knowing I’m always going to be struggling for flasks, I just don’t see this as being doable for me. I mean, it probably totally is if I just wanted to grind certain enemies forever so I could buy everything I need, but I’ve not go the time or patience 

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So somehow I have managed to get through the pitch black fall-y down dungeon and beat the 3rd boss on hard mode. I really don’t know why I’m even trying. It’s not because I care about achievement score it’s because I care about leaving things undone. It’s not the overall points value that matters to me it’s the 30/31 or the 96%. Drives me up the wall.

 

But I really would like to play other stuff and not this over and over. Particularly because playing on hard up to now has already been very annoying and it only gets more real from here ?

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