Leaderboard

I played the opening last night, took a few encampments, and did the first few parts of the main story. The combat is simple and fun. Since I don't have any stances yet, I must dodge and parry before attacking, I may beable to get an opening strike kill on the first guy in a group. After that you'll just get killed recklessly massing heavy and light attack. Shield bearers will strike twice and then you must break their guard with heavy strikes followed by a killing blow with the regular attack. Standard enemies without shields can be instakilled outside of a standoff if you time your held down heavy attack right. Spear carriers cannot be blocked and you must parry their attacks. They go down fast, but they hurt if you get hit. And the brute I encountered is like a spear enemy but he swings his massive weapon 3 times before you can strike him. He doesn't go down quite as easily. I did my first camp infiltration as a "ghost" and it was pretty fun. You press the touch pad to get enhanced hearing. This will spot every enemy within range through walls. You move much slower in this mode but you can toggle it seamlessly. Since it was the intro to assassinations, I'm sure it was much easier than it will be later down the road. None of the enemies were really crossing paths to where they could see a dead body yet. I'm not sure the extent to how punishing dying is yet. I died once when I got too confident at the first encampment. I took down several grunts, a brute that kicked my ass because I hadn't grasped his 3 strike attack pattern yet, and then I killed the leader only to get taken out by a grunt that was still around. It made me do the whole encampment again. But I did it with easy the second time since I knew what to look for. I got my first few talent points and I'm going to invest in the blocking tree where I can auto block arrows by holding down the guard button. That seems to be pretty important to my play style. I don't need the dodge roll just yet since the standard parry seems to be very good as is.

There isn't really anything to see. Its just some NPCs walking around and a claw of jormag looking thing.

Yeah I'm def going full ghost. From someone that slaughters everyone loud and proud in MGS games, this game actually makes assassinations look fun. I have 80 hours of vacation I need to burn and I just haven't been able to without good conscience since the whole madness with COVID. Now that its died down I'm taking the week off for this.

I seriously can't wait until Friday. Hell I'm even considering calling in just so I can get more time with this (upside is I am off all weekend). Well that or just not sleeping at all and playing it until I go into work (this is one of the few times I've pre-ordered a digital copy, it's been sitting on my PS4 pre-installed since last week and taunting me daily). I had to laugh when Yong said it does Assassin's Creed better than Assassin's Creed Can't wait to see if there's truth in that statement since I'm pretty much going to be going full Ghost mode for this (I love Samurai and everything but you don't shoot off Tenchu vibes like this and not expect me to play it like a Ninja).