Nioh 3 Demo Thoughts
A picture says the most so far. I think it took me 4 hours to finish the demo and I've been just running around collecting stuff for the last 8. I mostly wrote about my experience playing the demo on my bluesky. But I wanted to type something up that was a bit less constrained by 240 character paragraphs.
Upfront, the open world is going to be the reason I burn out and don't finish this game. That open world icon vomit is that nasty game design to "encourage" you to constantly explore. I never really felt like I was missing anything if I skipped some loot or didn't even know what I was missing if it was a rare drop. But now that I basically end up unlocking a checklist of stuff, that urge to just check all of the boxes will take over for the dopamine hit. Skills are spread throught the world on corpses or chests, so the requirement to hunt for the goodies isn't as optional as it felt in Nioh 2.
I am 30 or 40 years old and I am so tired of open world games. The design so far is like every other open world game. In that the many angles you can approach a problem tends to be like 3. Go in the front, just fuckin leave, or go around the back. Just instead of a more linear world with less wasted space, you have large expanses of just "well i gotta check over there, it might be a goodie, oh nevermind its just a random pockmark of bandits or yokai in the middle of the road. The most enjoyable part of the level design was the Crucible at the end of the demo and the mission you unlock that you teleport into.
Which is a shame, because gameplay wise I do still adore Nioh. There's some weird odditys of making you unlock your different stances in Samurai form, which slows down the initial game, and the tutorial ripping control out of your hands for some real stupid shit. I thought I wanted to play with the Burst Counter/Stance Switch set to tap/hold, but playing with the initial intention of swapping between forms for burst counters feels way more fluid. I have enough Nioh 2 experience that I'm not struggling with learning new movesets, so that may be my opinion.
The main drawback I had due to past Nioh experience was not being able to swap stances/flux in the initial couple of hours, which made Ninja Form way stronger. That and them swapping dodge to O instead of X, and making X jump. I jumped into so many fuckin Mezuki command grabs, its not funny.
Performance wise, I didn't have a big issue. But I've also got a 9070XT and 9800X3D, so I'm kinda pushing the top end of things. I have a hunch that nvidia capping a lot of their cards at 8GB VRAM is the major problem and a drawback of our capitalist society of keeping things just slightly faster so you need to buy the fancy new version to get that extra bit of time.
Anyway, now I need to not play through the demo again so I don't burn out. Or maybe I do, but use my Sworl that I paid for and barely use. My dissapointment in the first batch I got with the build quality is probably its own article.