Solving the Problem of Group Quests
Posted by Mordiceius at 12:14 pm
I like group quests. No, I love group quests. I think properly implemented group quests can give a great sense of immersion. The problem is, so few group quests are properly implemented.
I was thinking back to Lord of the Rings Online. I love the game world, but the amount of group quests was wholly depressing. It was not because there were not enough but instead too many and mostly were poorly implemented. On the other side of the coin, when Blizzard revamped some of the leveling in World of Warcraft (I think it was around patch 2.2), they removed practically all group quests from the vanilla world.
Generally, the three main problems I have seen with group quests are:
- Flow
- Enemy Saturation
- Population Density
Flow
A group quest should be a culminating event. In Lord of the Rings Online there would be multiple times when the quest flow would be Solo->Solo->Group->Solo->Solo->Group. This can create massive roadblocks for the player. If you are doing the questline with some random PUG players and a tank or healer leave half way through the quest chain, it becomes a lot harder to fill that spot.
Proper flow would hopefully go something more like Solo->Solo->Solo->Solo->Group->Group or Solo->Solo->Solo->Solo->Solo->Group. All the group quests should be at the end of the quest chain so that everyone can get up to that point together. Furthermore, I think group quests should only be the final quest in the chain. Having multiple group quests in a row can be tiresome and still create player roadblocks.
Enemy Saturation
Dol Dinen (at least how it was when I used to play) in Lord of the Rings Online is a terrible way to design an area. The area is filled with literally hundreds of enemies and all of the enemies are elite. You need to have a full group to even venture into the area. If one person gets separated, they will die and you will have to clear the way to their body to resurrect them because they will not be able to run back to you due to respawns behind you.
Areas filled with elite enemies should only be in instances where you by design will be with a full group at all times. I do not believe that any area in the open world of an MMO should be filled with elites. The best solution would be to have the area filled with normal enemies and then just have the "big bad" of the area be elite to coincide with the group quest to kill them. This way, it helps the players fill powerful themselves by being able to solo the generic trash but still make the big bad seem a powerful foe.
Population Density
This might be the biggest problem with group quests. When new content or a new expansion comes out, it is usually simple to get a group together for quests as thousands of people will be doing the content. Six months later or even years later, it is much different. When leveling in the time after the initial rush of people, most players will just skip the group quests. It is just too much work to try to find a group for it. If there is a quest reward they really want or need, they will just get a high level person to run them through the quest.
There are multiple ways you can handle this. You could just not put any group quests into the game, but I think that is a poor solution and can easily be thrown out. You could, after six to twelve months turn all the group quests into solo quests. I do not like that solution since it generally ruins the "epicness" of the quest. The third option, and my personal favorite, is to give companions.
I am not a fan of full time NPC companions. I do not want everyone having a full party of companions all day every day and forever only running around in a group of companions. Instead, a few months after a new game's release players should be given something like a "companion summoning horn" or something of that nature. When used, it would summon companions to fill out your party. The caveat is that they would only last for ten minutes and the horn would be on a one hour cooldown.
With this solution, players can still get the epic feel of the group quest even when the main mass of players has moved on to the level cap. If it had been implemented in World of Warcraft, it could have initially been usable only from levels 1-60. Six months after the Burning Crusade expansion came out, they could extend the item to work from 1-70. Six months after Wrath of the Lich King's launch, the could once more extend it to work from 1-80. People in the initial rush would be forced to group with each other, but new players to the game after the rush or even alts of players would still be able to accomplish group quests without sacrificing the integrity of the quest.
Like I said in the beginning, I think group quests are a fun and immersive part of MMORPGs, I just think the implementation needs tweaking so everyone can do them.
Gaming By Proxy
Posted by Mordiceius at 12:16 pm
I play a large amount of video games every year. After a while however, I can come to feel jaded with game. I have been gaming for so many years that I rarely get that "shiny new" feeling when I play a video game. Very few games do something that is truly new and innovative and with having gamed so much, I have seen so many of the tricks there are out there. Lately, I have been gaming by proxy.
I have really been enjoying see games through the eyes of friends and family that have never really had deep experiences with gaming before. The current target of this is my mother. While she grew up with me gaming in the household, she never really played many herself. And the game she did play were mostly throwaway games. When I moved out, I left my extra PS2 with her and she started buying games that she though she might like. One problem she had was the same problem many people new to gaming have. She thought "if the box art looks good, the game is probably good, right?"
Most of the gaming experiences my mother has had involve movie tie-in games. She has played games like some Nightmare Before Christmas games, some Shrek games, a Wall-E game. She would become frustrated with games since first of all she has never really worked on her gaming twitch reflexes and secondly, movie tie in games are mostly garbage that are overly punishing. Since she is a pretty new gamer, she has a tendency t0 panic in games. When a monsters come at her, while any average gamer would shrug it off, she panics. This causes many additional deaths. She also is not that good at jumping and platforming.
About six months ago, she picked herself up a Wii and WiiFit Plus. When she asked me if there were any good Wii games out there, I had to give her the unfortunate news that 99% of Wii games are pure garbage and the few that are of quality are mainly the first party games like Mario and Zelda and involve a good deal of fighting and platforming. She recently picked up a Nancy Drew game and a game that is a puzzle mystery on the Titanic and has been enjoying both of those. It warms my heart to say this, but her genre of choice is essentially point and click adventure games. Unfortunately, not many ones of quality exist on the Wii. I would get her to play some of the Telltale games on the Wii but she would not enjoy Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People or the Sam and Max games. I might try to talk her into getting the Tales of Monkey Island from Wiiware.
There is one game of substance I did get her to start playing recently. After hearing high praises about it on the Game of the Year Giant Bomb podcast, I purchased Silent Hill: Shattered Memories for her. My mother loves horror movies. She has probably watched more horror movies than total movies I have watched. She uses Netflix and was at one point getting 8+ movies a week. To this day, I think she has over 15,000 movies rated on Netflix (whereas I am at around 2000). One problem for her was most horror movies do not really scare her anymore. Just as very few video games 'wow' me every year, very very few horror movies ever scare her.
I figured Silent Hill: Shattered Memories would be a perfect game for her because it had deep story, fun puzzles and there was no combat. Unlike previous Silent Hill games where you are given a gun and often have to shoot enemies, in this one you just ran away from them. At this point, she has had the game for about a week and a half and has not progressed more than about a half hour in the game. She has not even reached the point where she can save her game for the first time. She has played the game about six different times now, but she says every time she starts playing she is completely paralyzed with fear. She talks about how this is a kind of terror she has never felt from a horror movie and after about a half hour she is so completely terrified that she just turns the game off. She goes back to the game almost every day and every day progresses maybe five minutes deeper into the game but still has not reached the point where she can save (which is only a little more than a half hour into the game).
Talking to her on the phone about the games she has been playing is one of my new favorite things. I know not everyone enjoys listening to the the stories of other people playing video games (but if that is the case, why are you reading a blog? 
) but I am an often jaded gamer and she is still so new to gaming. Hearing her talk about the games with such passion and vigor helps me remember a time when it was all new to me.
Nostalgia Shattered
Posted by Mordiceius at 12:54 pm
If there is one thing playing these new alts in WoW has done, it is make me want Cataclysm more. I do not play alts often so I often forget how mind-numbing the old content can be. I think fondly back of leveling when I first started playing WoW and since the game was so new and fresh, everything seemed awesome. With each expansion, the questing content has gotten better and better.
Going back and playing the old content really makes me excited for when it is all destroyed. I am glad Blizzard optimized questing with each expansion. So many quests are so spread out with little to no reward. It takes me more time to run to the quest giver to get the quest than it actually takes to do the quest. Having to run from zone to zone just to talk to one person for a single quest is terrible design.
We hit level 23 last night and I was working on my "Call of Water" quest for my shaman. In this quest, you go from Thunderbluff or Orgrimmar to the central Barrens to the southern Barrens to Tarren Mill in the Eastern Kingdoms and back to the southern Barrens in Kalimdor and then to Ashenvale and back to the southern Barrens and then to Silverpine Forest in the Eastern Kingdoms and back to the southern Barrens and lastly back to the central Barrens. This is all for the ability to drop the water totem, a central skill of the class.
Having to take an hour and transition continents five times for one quest is terrible design, especially for a low level quest. I can understand having option epic questlines like this at the level caps. There are many leftover epic quests at 60 and 70 as well as some great ones at 80, but having a quest like this for an essential class ability at level 20 is ludicrous. I am glad they moved mounts to level 20 or else it would have been unbearable. I am hoping Cataclysm rewrites this quest to something along the lines of "go collect water from each Oasis in the Barrens, okay here is your totem". That is something more along the line of what a quest for that level should be.
One thing I have noticed, however, is that while the questing is incredibly boring and monotonous, it is still on par or better than most quests in any other triple-A MMO release recently. Burning Crusade did some great things with quests and Wrath of the Lich King just continued that to make questing more fun and enjoyable. I hope that the changes Cataclysm brings are sweeping and hit all these sore low level areas.
Bring on the beta already!
New Beginnings
Posted by Mordiceius at 9:46 am
I have never been a fan of alts. They always seemed like such a waste of time for me. Whenever I would get the urge to create an alt, I would always think how I would much rather spend that time either doing more to enhance my main character or spending time in another game for some variety. In the past, I created alts when I needed something from them. For example, I created a warlock alt when Rynala started playing so that we could level together. We leveled from 1-70 together so she could be ready for Wrath of the Lich King. When the expansion came out, I leveled from 70-80 with her on my paladin. To this day, that warlock is still level 70.
Well, this week her and I both created new alts. This is her first real alt ever. She wanted to be able to try something different. Being a hunter, the new Dungeon Finder tool always took a while to pair her up into groups. She would see how I would get 1 minute queues when I played and did random dungeons, but when she played it would take 15 minutes. She wanted to create a new character to try something different.
So as of this week her and I are leveling new characters together. She is leveling a feral druid and I am leveling a shaman. At 80, she will use the druid to tank and I will use the shaman to heal (yes, I use my paladin to heal too - I just don't like DPSing). In the past, I have always burned out on alts at low levels because I have done the 1-70 content so many times now. But, things are always better when experiencing it with others and I am really enjoying leveling with Rynala. I can understand why people form "leveling groups" with friends.
Bioshock 2: Better Gameplay, Lesser Experience
Posted by Mordiceius at 2:05 pm
I managed to wrap up Bioshock 2 a few nights ago and I have finally compiled my thoughts on it. Overall, I am left feeling lukewarm. I guess it was a flaw on my part to hope this game would capture the magic of the first game again. I am a story freak. I love good stories. The game play can be terrible and I will still play it if it has a compelling narrative. I struggled through Bioshock 2.
In the end, the game is roughly 10 hours long. I started playing on launch day and only played 30 or so minutes a day because I just did not find myself interested in what was going on. The other night, I sat down and marathoned through the last half of the game to just get it done with.
The game play has been tightened quite a bit since Bioshock 1. Plasmids can be upgraded to have more effects and they can be dual wielded with guns. The gun upgrade stations are still in the game and I actually found them to be a lot more centrally located. In Bioshock 2, it was no challenge to find all 14 upgrade stations. I maybe had found half in the first Bioshock.
The story in the game is really what left me so lukewarm. It just feels... unnecessary. It is not bad, but just not necessary either. The most apt description is a "straight to video" sequel. Another way it has been describe is having an "expansion pack feel". It is like Half-Life: Opposing Force or Half-Life: Blue Shift. That is what the plot of this game feels like. The villain is ret-conned into the game and does not seem that threatening in the first place. There are quite a few massive plot holes that tend to stick out as well. The story of the first game was not perfect, but the Andrew Ryan "would you kindly" twist was one of the most memorable moments in video games for me. This... did not pack any punch.
The game is not bad. The game play is much improved over the first, but for me good story is always more important than good game play. I am probably in the minority in this, but I am more willing to play a flawed game with fantastic story than a game with improved game play with an inferior story. I am more about the immersion and experience than the game play. Bioshock 2 is not bad, it was just a story that did not need to be created.
My Auction House Addiction
Posted by Mordiceius at 10:08 am
I had quit playing World of Warcraft for the most part around April of last year. I had been heavily raiding and my guild was working on 25man Yogg-Saron in Ulduar. We were probably the 2nd or 3rd guild for Horde on our server. Though that is not saying much because Bleeding Hollow, while populated, is still a back water server. The #1 guild on our server was only about #500 in the US and they had the top players so that the drop off between them and all other guilds was quite significant.
I just could not taking committing to raiding so much each week. Between 25mans and 10mans and working on getting the raiding achievements, I burned out. After four years of heavy raiding, I burned out hard. I am honestly surprised I lasted that long. I had taken a couple month long breaks in the past, but I always jumped head first back into raiding. I never closed my WoW subscription since I liked to occasionally pop on and talk to people and see if anything interesting was going on, but I never really played much. When patch 3.2 was released, I did the dailies for the coliseum so that I could get the Crusader title, but then I stopped playing again. In my time off, I explored many games. I went back to LotRO and I played Wizard 101, Aion, as well as spending a little time in some single player games.
World of Warcraft's patch 3.3 changed everything for me. It hooked me hard. I absolutely love the three new 5mans and have had a blast with the dungeon finder. I still have not formally returned to raiding. I have done the Coliseum once in 25man and once in 10man, the same goes for Onyxia. I still have not even stepped foot in the Icecrown Citadel raid. One thing that caught my eye like never before has been the Auction House.
I have never been good at making money in WoW. In vanilla WoW, I had my epic mount but I never really had more than a couple hundred gold at a time. I remember having 500g and staying at that for a while made me quite proud. In Burning Crusade, I bought epic flying for 5000g as well as paid 4000g for a Sunwell engineering goggles recipe. Other than that, I stayed around 1000g most the time. In WotLK, I have most of the time just hovered around 1500g. I did get addicted to dailies for one month and made the 13000g+ needed to make the motorcycle mount, but after that I burned out on dailies and never went above 1500g again. When I came back in patch 3.3, I had about 5g to my name. I have no idea what I ever did with all my gold, but it was gone.
When returning with patch 3.3, I decided to give the Auction House a shot. In my 5 years of playing WoW, I had never put a major focus on the auction house but now, I finally get it. I got up to about 500g from using the dungeon finder and used that as my base capital. Between ammo, enchanting mats, and enchanting scrolls, I was up to 4000g in about a week and a half. I then realized I had a level 70 warlock alt that I could be utilizing. The warlock was at 375 herbalism but nothing else. I spent 4500g (I had to borrow 500g from Rynala) and power leveled my warlock to 450 in Alchemy. I sold the potions, flasks, and gems that I had made while leveling alchemy as well as continuing in my other markets and was back to 5000g within a week.
In under one month of the patch, I had essentially made 10k gold (though the 4.5k was spent on alchemy) and it did not take nearly the work that the relentless daily farming did. By the time Christmas rolled around, I had 15k between both characters. Visiting family in early January stopped me from being able to log on to WoW and when I came back, I put a bit of time into Darksiders and Mass Effect 2. I spent a bit of time playing with the auction house, but it was not my focus.
As of this post, I have 25k gold between my two characters. I know it is not a lot since so many people are at the gold cap nowadays, but this amount makes me proud. It is more money than I have ever had at one time and though the economy in game has slowed down after the post patch rush died out, I still have a steady cash flow coming in every day.
My loftiest goal would be to reach the gold cap by Cataclysm, but I do not think that will happen. Even if I just reach 50k or even 100k gold, I will be happy. I am tempted to start buying things that I could never afford before like one of the Dalaran rings or one of the 3-person mammoths.
I know the real money is in Jewelcrafting and Inscription, but I do not have the patience for either of those. I have seen people like Gevlon or Tobold using inscription and listing thousands of glyphs a day. It gives me a headache just thinking about it. As for now, I am happy with the business I have and I am addicted to getting more gold.
Mass Effect 2: Post Game Review
Posted by Mordiceius at 1:33 pm
Disclaimer: This post contains mid and endgame spoilers from Mass Effect 2.
I finally wrapped up Mass Effect 2 this past weekend and I am really happy with the experience. This game is what a sequel should be. Bioware took what they did with the first game and refined it into an even better experience. It is very obvious that they took to heart a lot of the fan criticisms of the first game (mainly the mako exploration and the inventory managing). Had this game come out a month earlier, it would have been a toss up between this and Dragon Age for my 2009 game of the year.
I finished as a paragon male Shepard and am already itching to start up as a renegade female Shepard. Between waiting to see if they put out any DLC and this week's release of Bioshock 2 however, I think I am going to put my second play through of Mass Effect 2 on the back burner.
My problems with Mass Effect 2 are really minor nit picks in the grand scheme of things.
I thought there were too many characters. It was not that the characters were not interesting. The only character I did not ever really use was Jacob. The problem was that I liked so many of the characters and you could only take two with you at any given time.
After being spoiled on party interaction in Dragon Age, I wish there was more banter between characters. I also wish the characters would also interact more in conversation with NPCs. Most the time, characters will only have conversation points if you are doing a quest for them or are talking to directly to them on the ship. But, I can understand that this game is supposed to be the story of Commander Shepard so he should have the focus.
I also thought it was very unfortunate that by the time you got Legion into your party, there was a time limit put on your character. Once you get Legion, your ship is attacked by Collectors and all of your crew is taken. The more time you spend running around the galaxy doing side quests at this point, the more of your crew dies. Legion is a Geth and so having him on your side makes for some very interesting interactions. I would love to take him to more of the character and loyalty missions, but I do not want to end with my crew being wiped out.
I was reading an interview with some of the Mass Effect 2 developers and apparently usage statistics are from people playing are getting sent back to Bioware so they can see which characters people use the most. They are going to take this information to give the more used characters bigger roles in Mass Effect 3.
The only other minor nit pick I have is that if you do 100% of the quests in game and hack and loot every locker and safe and body, you will still not have enough money to buy all of the games upgrades. I was using an imported character so I started with a bonus of 150k credits and by the time I reached the point of no return, I was still about 300k credits shy of being able to afford everything.
Nonetheless, these are relatively minor things. They are nothing like the glaring problems of the first game. Word in the pipeline is that they are going to put out some decent DLC for this game (unlike ME1) and that we could see ME3 as early as first quarter of next year. Between the top notch gaming experiences I have had with Dragon Age and Mass Effect, my confidence in Bioware to put out a great game has never been higher. It makes me wonder if The Old Republic could actually turn out to be the "Next Big Thing" in the MMO sphere.
Relics of RPGs Past
Posted by Mordiceius at 2:00 pm
I am about 80% done with Mass Effect 2 now. Rynala wrapped up the game on her character yesterday. Being a bit of a completionist myself, I have been doing every little side quest possible before moving forward with the story. For Rynala, she was lukewarm on the first game. She saw the game as "good, but flawed". She was originally reluctant to event start playing ME2. Now, she loves the game so much that she just started her second play through. She is probably even more excited than me for Mass Effect 3.
Many of my friends have finished the game as well and while most are giving it nothing but praise, there are some that think the game has drifted too far from the RPG roots. You can see this sentiment echoed in various places on the internet. Personally, I feel this game is just as much of an RPG as the original and the areas of the game that were changed were areas that did not enhance the game originally.
One friend of mine complained about the lack of inventory. He wanted more guns to drop and more variety. Personally, I do not see the point. In ME2, there are 2-6 different weapons for each slot. Each weapon has different pros and cons. One weapon may have higher damage but another may have higher accuracy while another may hold more ammunition. You are allowed to pick a gun that fits your style and go with it. In Mass Effect 1, people just kept upgrading to the best guns until they got the Spectre weapons and then they would never upgrade their guns again. Now, you pick the gun you like and that will always be the best gun. You can still upgrade its damage and accuracy through the tech lab but you do not have to spend half the game dealing with an inventory full of guns you will never use anyway.
To me, an RPG is not about constantly fiddling with the inventory or allocating stat points. To me, a role playing game is about playing a role. It is playing the personality of the character and changing the world around me. So many of the things that were trimmed off Mass Effect 1 make sense. They are shackles of the past that are just busy work. Streamlining role playing games is not a bad thing. I would much prefer more time playing the character out in the world and less time having to check spreadsheets and min-max characters. When playing games, we need to ask ourselves: "Is this really enhancing the game or is this just busy work?"
Mid-Game Review: Mass Effect 2
Posted by Mordiceius at 1:33 pm
I am currently about 20 hours into Mass Effect 2. I would have been further but between, work class, and getting new furniture this week, my gaming time has not been where I would like it.
So far, I think Mass Effect 2 improves on the foundation of Mass Effect 1 in every way possible. The action is better, the character interactions are more cinematic, and the monotony has been reduced.
From what I have read, I am just around half way through the game. I am going a bit slow and being a completionist though, so I may take longer than most people will. Some friends of mine have already beat the game and clocked in 30-35 hours. I am expecting to get in 40+ with doing all the side quests.
Gone is the planet exploration with the Mako and the relentless gun and armor drops (that would always just get reduced to omni-gel) and replacing it is a streamlined game. I have seen complaints from people that they think Bioware toned down the RPG and dialed up the shooter parts too much but I could not disagree more. I think this game delivers a perfect balance between shooter and RPG, but this is something I will probably deconstruct more in another post this week.
The best quality of the game is hands down the cinematography. I believe that the directing in this game is a huge step forward for video games as a genre and will go far to show the kind of personality and emotional response that games can invoke. The characters are not just flatly delivering lines, their faces and bodies give the visual cues that real people give.
This was more eloquently described by CharlieFoxtrot on the SomethingAwful forums:
"I might be flaring up the discussion about ME2's writing again, but I thought there were some interesting points brought up earlier. Basically, it boils down to this: complaining that ME2 isn't up to Planescape: Torment's standards is like complaining that that Steven Spielberg can't write novels like J.D. Salinger. They're trying to accomplish two different things.
Because games are still relatively young as form of expression, they have to borrow their narrative grammar from other forms. P:T chose a novelistic style, full of dense prose, reflection, and introspection. Technology has reached a point where ME2 can choose a cinematic style and use the grammar of film. And it does it so, so well.
It's helpful to compare it to Dragon Age, a game made by the same company but also trying to accomplish something slightly different. For all the amazing stuff Dragon Age pulls off, they did not put as much energy into cutscene presentation. The camera angles tend to be flat and workmanlike, purely designed to convey the necessary information, and the world and its characters are not expressive enough to stand alone without little parenthetical descriptions from time to time.
ME2 spends so much energy making the game's presentation as flawless and emotionally charged as possible. It's all composed of the little things, like that you can see Shepard smirk a little after making a one-liner, or that people walk around and shift positions when having a conversation instead of standing perfectly still, or that the characters' eyes are articulated enough that you can follow what they're looking at like an audience does a thousand times when they watch real people in a real movie.
It really hit me in Miranda's loyalty quest, in the scene where she looks at her sister and her family and the camera drifts from over her shoulder and racks focus into the distance, and then it cuts away and has Miranda step away towards the camera so that you can read every nuance of her expression. Any film buff can tell you that that is a cinematic technique to get us closer to a character's perspective and get us to relate to them better. But most game designers either aren't sophisticated enough or don't care enough to make use of techniques like that.
Of course it would all be for naught if that kind of detail didn't carry over through to everything; it would be like the FMV craze of the late nineties where everyone was saying "It's like a movie and you're the star!" when in reality you were playing a discrete gameplay segment, then watching an FMV, then playing the game some more. Everything BioWare has done in ME2 is about streamlining and perfecting -- not just the gameplay but the story as well. The main directive in ME2 seems to be never to break the flow, and to make every part of the game as seamless and immersive as possible. Rejiggering the systems so that you're not shuffling through an inventory screen or a level up screen every few minutes not only streamlines the gameplay, but also prevents as many jarring immersion breaks from the narrative as possible."
Darksiders – Think like Link, Fight like Kratos
Posted by Mordiceius at 12:53 pm
Due to my old standard definition TV going out about a week ago I have finally updated myself to the HD world and as such, I have been having a mini Xbox360 revival. My game of choice currently is Darksiders.
I had heard about Darksiders a few months ago on the Gamers With Jobs Conference Call. It was described as something along the lines of "you go around as one of the horsemen of the apocalypse and kill angels and demons". The concept sounded neat but that was the last I heard of it. When it released earlier this month, from the screen shots it looked like another God of War clone. Luckily, it is not.
Anyone who tells you that this game is most influenced by God of War is a liar. This game is essentially the new Legend of Zelda. Instead of Link, you play as the apocalyptic horseman War who looks like he stepped right out of World of Warcraft character designer meeting. Instead of the kingdom of Hyrule, you find yourself on post apocalyptic Earth. An apocalypse YOU were tricked into starting and there are very many unhappy individuals that want you dead.
The combat, however, feels a bit more polished than a Zelda game. Instead of just your standard two or three attacks, you have a multitude of combos on a variety of weapons that you can buy and upgrade. Enemies drop souls that are used as currency, replenish your health, and replenish your rage. This is where the God of War comparison comes in. But in the end, this game feels like 20% God of War and 80% Legend of Zelda.
The gameplay is incredibly solid. I am playing on apocalyptic difficulty since I was told the normal difficulty was a bit easy. Early in the game it was not unheard of to get two or three shot by enemies. Combat was fast paced and unforgiving and dodging was essential. Now that I have upgraded my health quite a few times the game feels a bit easier though dodging is still very important. Apocalyptic difficulty definitely keeps you on your toes and I would expect nothing less.
A good deal of time is spent dungeon diving. So far, I have been through two proper dungeons: an evil cathedral that was essentially a fire temple and a section of subway and sewers that was essentially a water temple. In each temple you get a new item or weapon to help you solve the puzzles of the stage. Within the fire temple equivalent, I received an item that works the same way as the boomerang in Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.
At the end of each dungeon, you face a boss that requires you to often show mastery of your weapon and the gimmick of the dungeon. I found the fire temple boss to be much harder than the water temple boss but both were enjoyable.
Overall, I have found Darksiders to be a really fun game. It does not do anything new but I think what it does, it does well. A lot of people scream for innovation nowadays, but personally I am just happy to be playing another Legend of Zelda game.