God of War Ragnarok

[The Roofdog]

I was slightly let down by the overall level design, mainly the narrowness of so many spaces.

It's quite weird when you first arrive at the edge of that

Spoiler alert

massive crater in Vanaheim

[close]

and go "ooo, it looks like an open world game" but it still isn't really.

I'm grinding the fuck out of all the side missions & loot on this but I'm still not levelling up very quickly at all. I wouldn't mind but it's making those naughty Berserker chaps impossible. I don't really understand how levelling up works in this game, does it help if I upgrade stuff I don't even have equipped? Help me GamesMaster.

[brat-sampson]

It's quite weird when you first arrive at the edge of that

Spoiler alert

massive crater in Vanaheim

[close]

and go "ooo, it looks like an open world game" but it still isn't really.

I'm grinding the fuck out of all the side missions & loot on this but I'm still not levelling up very quickly at all. I wouldn't mind but it's making those naughty Berserker chaps impossible. I don't really understand how levelling up works in this game, does it help if I upgrade stuff I don't even have equipped? Help me GamesMaster.

Your overall Number/Level is just the average Level of the gear you have equipped. The way upgrade materials and loot are spread through the game heavily gates how high you can reach at any given point as the materials for each couple of levels are entirely different, e.g. if you grind you can get pretty much any number of different shoes and cloaks and badges and whatever up to say Level 5 before you get a single material needed to get anything to Level 6. This means that generally *any* higher Level equipment is better than *any* lower Level equipment regardless of what it does to your actual stats. 9 is the max and yeah, it makes a pretty big difference because literal Level difference will change whether enemies are seen as Pushovers, Approachable, Challenging or Gonna Fuck you Up, as indicated by the colour of their health bar. You can be right on the brink of the next level, but the difference between an enemy being 1 level above you vs 2 or 3 is real, often regardless of where you are *within* your level.

Basically, choose gear based on Perks / extra features rather than levels then just level it up as much as you can. Any gear is viable at endgame, which I think is a really nice system.

[AngryGazelle]

It's quite weird when you first arrive at the edge of that

Spoiler alert

massive crater in Vanaheim

[close]

and go "ooo, it looks like an open world game" but it still isn't really.

Yeah, tbh, I think they may as well have just made the game entirely linear and scrapped the semi-open world stuff - it didn't really add anything to the game.

[C_Larence]

It's quite weird when you first arrive at the edge of that

Spoiler alert

massive crater in Vanaheim

[close]

and go "ooo, it looks like an open world game" but it still isn't really.

I got to this part yesterday and was a little overwhelmed, I've never seen a game suddenly open up like that before the post-game. Ended up 100%ing it except for defeating the Centaur huntress who I couldn't get to spawn.

[C_Larence]

Finally finished the main story yesterday. Didn't see the

Spoiler alert

Tyr

[close]

twist coming at all. The pacing immediately goes to shit after that moment though.

Spoiler alert

brok dies

[close]

and then suddenly you're off hunting a deer, but actually no you're not hunting a deer you just walked all that way for nothing and now you have to walk back. There were a few weird choices like that towards the end that sullied the experience a little for me.

I don't really understand what happened with Ragnarok (the monster) but maybe that's explained post story, or I missed it during the Neon Genesis Evangelion style "Congratulations" part which I spent just walking up to people and looking at my phone until they stopped talking.

[The Roofdog]

I've done everything except the Muspelheim challenges now but they can fuck off, I'm not *repeating* previous challenges in specific orders to unlock the remaining challenges, whose idea was that

[Magnum Valentino]

Playing this inspired me to finally read the Penguin Book of Norse Myths and I'm after learning that Odin made Midgard out of eyebrows.

[AngryGazelle]

Free DLC for this out now and it's decent, too.

[AngryGazelle]

I've 'finished' the DLC now and am not quite sure how this was put out for free when they could have easily charged a tenner for it.

If you like the Norse saga games then you should really play this, it's fantastic; they definitely undersold it, there is a lot of story here and it's not just a new gameplay mode.