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MTZehvor on 08 July 2016
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GOWTLOZ said:
MTZehvor said:

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.

There was more than just punching and swiping his axe. There was that ice breaker move we saw, the axe throw, and the arrow and it was in ten minutes of the game, there will be more attacks than shown here.

Again, I never said that there wouldn't be more attacks. That's not the point. A game can have 20 billion different attack moves, and as long as they can't be seamlessly stuck into combos, it isn't any more of a hack and slash than Cooking Mama. The point is whether or not these various moves can be put into combos, and as far as combos are concerned, we have only see various unabadated axe slices and punching after the axe has been thrown. The axe throw, the arrows, and the ground pound "ice breaker" move don't seem to be implementable into combos at all.

To put it another way; Skyrim probably has far more ways to simply attack an enemy than something like Devil May Cry 1. Inbetween magic, axes, swords, arrows, maces, knives, war hammers, and whatever else, there's far more "moves" than the limited arsenal of attacks avaliable at Dante's command in the original DMC. Yet DMC is classified as a hack and slash while Skyrim is not; because DMC's smaller variety of attacks can chain into each other and allow for combos, while the closest you can come to anything vaguely resembling a combo in Skyrim is running up to a person and mashing the primary attack button.

As a disclaimer, this isn't to say that Skyrim's style of gameplay is inherently worse. Not all games benefit from having combos. But in terms of hack and slash gameplay, if you don't have room for complex combos, especially today when on the fly weapon switching is basically the bare minimum in the genre, then chances are you're just not part of the genre. Nothing I've seen from God of War 4 makes it look like it's in that genre.