God of War Ragnarok - Released

God of War on PC a few years ago was a revelation, very good. I've very much enjoyed, much more than I expected, several of these ports from PS to PC: God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, Horizon Forbidden West, Marvel's Spider-Man, and Ghost of Tsushima.
 
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God of War on PC a few years ago was a revelation, very good. I've very much enjoyed, much more than I expected, several of these ports from PS to PC: God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, Horizon Forbidden West, Marvel's Spider-Man, and Ghost of Tsushima.
Ragnarok is also a very solid port from what it seems. Runs very smooth.
 
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Previous God of War game was not able to keep my attention for long. Clearly not target audience here, so I passed on Ragnarok.
It seems Im skipping more and more AAA releases these days.
 
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Previous God of War game was not able to keep my attention for long. Clearly not target audience here, so I passed on Ragnarok.
It seems Im skipping more and more AAA releases these days.
It was pretty good for an action-adventure title. I played through that twice. Once just now before Ragnarok.
For a while Ragnarok seemed like it lost direction but the story point I'm at now recently picked back up again.

I like the story in both games (as much as I got through Ragnarok) but probably the worst part of the game is the combat. It's very repetitive and even on the second to easiest difficulty enemies have too much health.
Maybe if I were in the mood and played on a higher difficulty I'd be forced to mix it up and use various abilities in various situations, but I'm so over it. I just want to get through the combat as fast as possible.
The combat system is also way too rigid to be so skill-based as they're trying to get it to be.

So basically I'm playing for the story and little puzzles and exploration. Still, even as it is, the combat is much improved over how it was in the original series, before the reboot. Now that was a spamfest of a game.
With almost nothing too interesting narrative-wise. At least if you're more than a teenager looking for epic and cool shit happening. I might be exagerating, and I also didn't play them all. Only finished the first original God of War game. And lost my mind on the final boss against Ares.
 
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Ragnarok is also a very solid port from what it seems. Runs very smooth.
Steam user reviews currently have a 'Mixed' rating (67%), mostly due to bugs. The forums are also filled with posts describing a myriad of issues (along with many complaints about needing a PlayStation Network account for a single-player game).

I'll wait a year until they patch it and the game goes on sale.
 
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Haven't played a single game in this series since the PS 2 versions.

The amount of HD space required to install is a massive turnoff as well.
 
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Steam user reviews currently have a 'Mixed' rating (67%), mostly due to bugs. The forums are also filled with posts describing a myriad of issues (along with many complaints about needing a PlayStation Network account for a single-player game).

I'll wait a year until they patch it and the game goes on sale.
Not sure what bugs or issues. Haven’t encountered any. Not one. From what I saw most negatives were about the PSN requirement.
 
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190 GB is a bit excessive.
The latest Final Fantasy PC port is the same. Don't know if it's because textures are 2-4K now, or with all the cutscenes as well. Good thing I have two 4GB SSDs.

Still their full with other games that take 90 -100+ GBs.
 
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Not sure what bugs or issues. Haven’t encountered any. Not one. From what I saw most negatives were about the PSN requirement.
The fact that they’ve released three patches within two days of the game’s launch doesn’t inspire much confidence in the state of the initial release.

One of the challenges with bugs, especially on PC, is that not everyone experiences them in the same way, if at all, largely due to the vast differences in hardware configurations and software environments.
 
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The fact that they’ve released three patches within two days of the game’s launch doesn’t inspire much confidence in the state of the initial release.
True, but it also shows that they're serious about their post-release support and making sure those bugs get ironed out. Seeing as how nearly every game has at least some bugs on release, I'd be more concerned if there were no patches.
 
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Sure, I agree that having post-release support is preferable to developers simply ignoring the bugs. However, speaking in general terms and not about any specific game, what bothers me is how this affects early buyers. Customers who support a game from the beginning, paying full price, often end up with a worse experience than those who wait and buy it later at a discount. Essentially, early buyers become unpaid beta testers, and I’m not even referring to games released as "early access."

I've had several experiences where I encountered game/quest-breaking bugs, even if it just side quests (I am a normally a completionist), that forced me to stop playing until a patch was released. By the time these issues were fixed—sometimes several months later—I had already moved on to other games. When I eventually considered returning to finish the game, I'd forgotten the controls, the gameplay, and even the plot of most quests. This created a mental barrier that made me delay playing even further until, eventually, I just uninstalled the game altogether.

The result? I ended up wasting both my time and money. Ironically, if I had waited for a year or more, I could’ve enjoyed a fully patched, polished experience and even saved money buying it at a discounted price. Unfortunately, this kind of situation is becoming more and more common, and it’s frustrating for those of us who are early supporters of these games.

The gaming industry has become far too comfortable with the idea that it’s acceptable to release a game riddled with bugs, under the assumption that they can simply patch it later. This approach shifts the burden of quality control onto the consumer, eroding trust between developers and their most loyal customers—those who buy games at launch. Rather than prioritizing a polished and complete experience from day one, studios rely on post-release updates to address critical issues, leaving early buyers frustrated with a subpar product.
 
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I’m sure those patches were meant to fix things, but it does sound like it might be either situational or for certain hw specs.

As I said for me it’s been very smooth. Absolutely no issues, bugs, crashes. Similar to the first one.

I did notice some peaks and valleys in how much it taxed my gpu. But otherwise smooth sailing.

Actually, I just realized I forgot about one single bug. I keep having to remap my axe retrieval ability. On every new game start it reverts back to a previous value. Not even the default one. Which is weird.

Anyway, I hope thet iron things out for the rest of the people.
 
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The review bombing due to the PSN requirement has been noticed. ;)
Apparently you can't even play it offline?

Do people really review bomb games on Steam?

To leave a review on Steam, you must have launched the game via the platform, meaning that you either own it or have played it during a Free Weekend event. Since this game is new, the latter option isn't possible, so the only way to review it is by owning it.

It's technically possible to buy the game, play it for a few minutes (as long as it's under two hours), and then request a refund, allowing you to leave a review despite no longer owning the game. But I'd like to believe people aren't that petty.

Of course, users can also leave negative comments in the forums, but those don't affect the overall user review score. And you can check if a poster owns the game by looking for a mouse icon next to their name.
 
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Do people really review bomb games on Steam?

To leave a review on Steam, you must have launched the game via the platform, meaning that you either own it or have played it during a Free Weekend event. Since this game is new, the latter option isn't possible, so the only way to review it is by owning it.

It's technically possible to buy the game, play it for a few minutes (as long as it's under two hours), and then request a refund, allowing you to leave a review despite no longer owning the game. But I'd like to believe people aren't that petty.

Of course, users can also leave negative comments in the forums, but those don't affect the overall user review score. And you can check if a poster owns the game by looking for a mouse icon next to their name.
It's not uncommon.

It's often from owners who played for a little while and either refunded or not. It was the case for Metro: Exodus when the publisher decided to make it an Epic exclusive, to Helldivers 2 when Sony started to require the players to register to a PSN account, and this one, for example. There must have been many others.

That's the problem with the binary nature of Steam reviews. I've seen quite a few reviews that weren't necessarily negative, but it was voted down for the principle (like PSN).
 
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It's often from owners who played for a little while and either refunded or not.
If you buy a product and leave a bad review based on your genuine experience with it, that's not considered review bombing.

If someone buys the game, tries to launch it, and fails due to issues with the launcher or crashes, those are valid reasons to leave a negative review, even if you only "played" for a little while.

However, in most cases, it's because people don’t check the minimum system requirements or ignore Steam's notice that a third-party launcher is required.
 
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The only painful thing about review bombing, is that developers do use review scores of popular platforms such as Steam or Metacritic when it comes to awarding incentives to employees or meeting staff milestones, and that can impact the income and stability of the people who do their dutiful work day after day, while impacting very little the company itself (thinking giants like Activision, Bethesda or Ubisoft), as their games are going to sell millions of copies regardless based only on pedigree and marketing.

Sometimes people do engage in malicious review bombing too, I don't know much about God of War, but I remember Dragon Dogma 2 getting a good amount of review bombing too due to fabricated claims like the game being predatory pay-to-win or having no ability to save outside of the inn (whith the implication that you would have to play sessions of hours at a time, or lose that much progress if you didn't visit the inn often) both of which were absolutely false, and when these things were called out they started to make a huge gamebreaking deal out of getting some FPS rate drops while being in the main city, a place where you don't spend 1% of your playtime.

For the most part, reviews give a good "general idea" of how well perceived the game is, but what to some people are negatives, to others it doesn't matter, or can even be a positive.
 
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If you buy a product and leave a bad review based on your genuine experience with it, that's not considered review bombing.
That's only if you've actually played it for a fair amount of time. Review bombing isn't that rare on Steam. You can see it in the time played. When someone leaves a review after playing a game for 0.3 hours, it's pretty obvious they're just pissed off about something in particular.
 
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