Impressions: Nioh Beta Demo (PS4)
If the Alpha demo was a good game, player feedback has turned the Beta into a great one.
Storming back onto the Playstation Network with a few new links in its chain and an overall polish of the rest, Team Ninja has released its monster of a game to the public to dissect and mutilate for another two weeks following the alpha demo that released and charmed the pants off me back in April.
Since I’ve previously given impressions of Nioh overall in my review of the alpha, (which you can find here) and theoretically following this beta’s round of feedback collection a full game which I can actually review as a finished product will come out, I’ll take this opportunity to primarily focus in on the changes from alpha and the new aspects we’ve seen with this beta demo.
For comparison’s sake I started a new game with the beta demo, although apparently my previous save from the alpha’s second level would still have remained if I’d chosen to brazenly leap back into the abyss. I was greeted by an offer to visit a tutorial level before I jumped into the main game, something I was confident I didn’t actually need but which curiosity compelled me to check out anyway. Gotta verify they’re teaching new players the right stuff, right?
Well, the simple explanation of the game’s core mechanics does a good job of giving a new player a basic gist of how things should work out of the gate, which is helpful because a few of the game’s core systems were hidden in tutorial messages that you’d only get to after killing a small collection of enemies — in any other game that wouldn’t be a big deal, but Nioh’s initial steps have got teeth. Enemies deal a lot of damage, and failing to understand how important the ki system is will result in being totally slaughtered. Something to help players familiarise themselves without immediately meeting that gruesome death screen is definitely a welcome addition.
Fiddling around with the shrine’s settings revealed a bit of a retool to the guardian spirits made available at the outset of the game. In the beta players start off with three, with at least one that can be unlocked as they progress, and I have to say I’m really loving the guardian spirit and living weapon system in this game. I’ll admit during the alpha it felt like it took so long to charge that I should never use it — which of course usually meant I’d die without unleashing it, and thus waste it altogether, and when I did use it was gone in moments, especially if I mistimed and ate an Oni’s sword to the face. I can’t say for sure whether it was some fixes made in the beta or me being more confident with the game, but unleashing the living weapon power now feels great. When I die I’m holding out to see my chosen guardian spirit hanging about my sword-marked grave so I can pick it up and get back to tearing things to bits with mythic superpowers.
Getting into the meat and potatoes of the game, the control scheme has been tightened and worked into something sleek and efficient. Taking note of the sheer number of consumable items that the player can gradually acquire, the devs have opted to give them the d-pad all to themselves for general gameplay, with a full second set available at the tap of L2. Melee combat remains as it was for the most part, which is far from a bad thing, though now the player is able to swap between two ranged and two melee weapons by holding the stance button (R1) and tapping a d-pad prompt. Left or right for melee weapons, up and down for ranged weapons. Ranged weapons themselves haven’t had much done to change them, nor did they really need it, but the use of different ammunition types on X, square, triangle etc means you don’t need to re-equip the ammunition types when going between them. As of the demo each ranged weapon only featured two ammunition types however, and if that’s all they’re sticking to I think there are probably better ways to lay out the controls.
All of these improvements serve the greater functionality of gameplay. Everything’s smoothed out and unless you’ve forgotten to equip something before getting into a fight then nearly every aspect and functionality of William’s mighty arsenal is at the player’s fingers with an absolute minimum time spent fiddling around. Nioh got compared to Dark Souls a lot when the alpha came out, not just because it came out around the same time, but right now I think I honestly enjoy Nioh’s control scheme more, regardless of the greater game itself.
Sallying forth and cutting my teeth for a second time on the combat systems I endeavoured to use more than just the katana style of weaponry with my newest hack at things. The beta’s release brought with it a bevy of new weapon types to further round out the arsenal, giving people a lot of choice in how to play. Joining the katana, spear and axe fighting styles of melee in the alpha, the beta introduced dual katana for a lighter-hitting fighting style and great big chunky hammers for when axes aren’t heavy duty enough. Ranged weapons, previously home only to the bow, also grew a couple of new weapon categories, the first being rifles and the second being friggin’ cannons, because Mondays in 1600s demon-infested Japan are still Mondays, dammit. Both function similarly enough to the bow, although they have a longer windup and reload times to balance out the increase they do in damage, with the hand cannon taking the longest to simply go from zero to aiming but being capable of firing crowd-control explosive shots to really mess up a cluster of enemies.
The stance system has been revised slightly and with the second round of gameplay I made a more concentrated effort to make use of the different stances, experimenting with all three and slipping between them as the situation demanded. Each feels like its own monster, with the aggressive high stance utilising slower strikes for higher damage and rewarding aggressive play, mid stance’s regenerating ki while blocking designed around defensive play and counterstrikes, and low stance’s quick, light strikes and quickstep dodges allowing a veritable death by 1000 cuts (although so far nothing’s taken that long to kill).
Added to the HUD now and personally another welcome addition as far as I’m concerned is a small notification on the bottom of the screen when the player has points they can spend in the available tech trees that form part of levelling up. This is nice because in addition to acquiring them as part of levelling up now players acquire some points simply by being awesome in battle. I don’t know the exact specifics — it might be simply killing X enemies, dealing a certain amount of damage without taking any yourself, I dunno, but when I get a notification that I’ve got another samurai skill point to pop into new techniques I feel much more like William’s growing as a warrior than I do when I feed Amrita to a shrine and level up my heart.
Finally, the equipment throughout the game has had a fine-tune, removing the irritating durability stat and thereby allowing me to get a better look at the more prominent familiarity system in the process. Simply enough, familiarity builds on a weapon the longer it’s equipped, and at certain intervals it can push its stats higher as well. Both of those things together mean if you find a weapon you like, it can grow with you — just a little, but that goes a long way. The Diablo-style loot of steadily better weapons with a randomised collection of bonuses on type means you’re constantly looking out for the next step up from what you’re using, while at the same time what you’re using gets better up to a cap as well. Without durability this stretches the loop of acquiring better gear and cycling out old stuff, which in the alpha was aggressively tight. I was swapping weapons out almost every time I hit a checkpoint, and to me that was too often. Now I can run a level and only find one better weapon the whole time without feeling like I’m being shortchanged. That’s a much better feeling.
Now one niggling worry I had about the game when the alpha released was what degree of story would be found in Nioh. Was William just a heroic mime destined to wander from place to place with some text at the beginning and end of missions explaining the plot? I knew that was unlikely to be the extent of things, the plot was probably just under wraps since it was only an alpha. Sure enough, after finishing my replay through the game’s first level I was treated to a scene I certainly don’t recall being in the alpha that expanded a little more on events. My fears were allayed when William proved the reason he hadn’t bothered to speak in any of the other short cutscenes was because he doesn’t waste words on demons. Enchanted by that delicious accent of his, I was happily satisfied that even if it turned out to be crap, the game indeed had a storyline and William wasn’t another tongue-less muppet to play samurai dress-up with.
Further expanded upon in the level select screen afterwards however were the new features of the temple one could visit between missions. Namely the blacksmith function, which brought me to a screen that explained the finer points of forging weapons, offering the ability to consume higher level weapons to increase the power of lower level ones, the power to spend resources reforging weapons by removing their secondary effect bonuses and replacing them randomly with others (which the game assures will always be a higher level, if not necessarily what you’re hoping for). With careful manipulation this lovely one-eyed lass could be the gateway to a grand metagame for Nioh, between its loot mechanics and the ability to tool around with weaponry by reforging, soulbinding and the like. I could see people spending a lot of time finding one particular weapon they like the look of and carefully crafting it up to be a truly awe-inspiring monster. There’s a depth there that I’m going to be excited to delve into for the full release.
All in all I think the beta’s pushed Nioh from good to great, with an excellent and satisfying combat system. It’s not above reproach, but I rarely feel any game can boast that, and it rides the line well where it can feel extremely unfair at first, but at a closer glance and with a bit of practice a player can find themselves dancing around mighty foes in impressive displays of swordsmanship.
