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MTZehvor on 07 July 2016
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GOWTLOZ said:
MTZehvor said:
Here's perhaps a clearer example of what defines a hack and slash, between games technically in the same franchise.

Take the Legend of Zelda and its spin off, Hyrule Warriors. Mainline Legend of Zelda games do not focus around hack and slash combat. There's no emphasis on combos, minimal variety in melee attacks, switching weapons isn't seamless, and Link generally doesn't move very fast. None of these are inherently bad things; and Zelda's combat fits a game tending more towards exploration like it is.

With that said, take Hyrule Warriors. There's a heavy emphasis on combos, a number of different attack strings you can pull off (though it's a lot less than something like DMC or Bayonetta), and characters move extremely quickly. There's a sense of flashiness to the combat that mainline Zelda titles don't focus on.

That's what really makes a hack and slash game, a hack and slash game. So far, from what we've seen (and admittedly, this could very well change if the E3 demo is unrepresentative of the finished product), God of War 4 doesn't fall into the latter category. Kratos seems pretty slow with the exception of his dodge move, and combat is far less about variety and combos and more about simply running up and mashing the attack button.

In the E3 demo of GOW we already saw axe melee, hand to hand melee, ice breaker, axe throw and lightning arrow attacks in ten minutes of gameplay. And did you see the guy with he controller mashing a single action button? I think I saw him using multiple buttons for some of the attacks.

In GOW games the first ten minutes usually do not have this much variety, as its through acquiring new weapons and upgrading your weapons that they allow for a lot of variety in attacks.

And this is where the keyword of "seamless" comes into play. The weapon switching in God of War 4, at least as it's been shown thus far, is not seamless. Plenty of games give you tons of weapons; even tons of melee weapons. Hell, the new Legend of Zelda lets you use whatever you could reasonably hit someone with as a melee weapon. That doesn't make it a hack and slash.

The question is whether the weapons can be seamlessly transitioned into each other. In something like Bayonetta 2 or DMC 3/4, if you want to switch to a different weapon, you press a button, and you are instantly wielding that weapon. In Wonderful 101, you draw a (usually) easy to draw symbol, and you're instantly wielding that weapon. Both of these styles can be used to pull off longer combos as well; you can be hitting an enemy with one weapon, change to another weapon, and continue that same combo from before. From what I've seen of GoW4, that isn't the case. Your fists can only be used after you chuck the axe, effectively discarding it as a weapon, and every combo I've seen pulled off consists entirely of one weapon.

As for the guy with the controller, assuming we're talking about the demo showed off in the press conference, I don't think the camera was ever zoomed in close enough to let us see what buttons he was pressing. Attacks don't seem to differ from each other in any discernable consistent way; it looks more like the continuation of a series of punches that you would find in a general brawler or something similar.