Star Wars Outlaws, Vader 3 Pro, Black Myth

Star Wars Outlaws

• I subscribed to Ubisoft+ for $18 to play the game instead of purchasing so I've been able to play since Monday night. 
• It's a Star Wars game from Ubisoft.  
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• Now that I gave you some time to reflect, here are my impressions.
• The setting of the game is the best part as you do feel that you are in a Star Wars world.  
• The graphics look great but there are some performance issues once you reach the first open world planet.  I initially used FrameGen with DLSS set to performance but the image was too soft.  I turned off the RTGI Ray tracing and FrameGen and was able to set DLSS to quality and the game looked and performed much better.
• So far the gameplay is okay.  Not bad but not great either. 
• The melee combat is kind of stiff and the gunplay is pretty basic.  The enemy AI is better than Starfield, but it's not really challenging even when turning up the difficulty to challenging.  I did have one interesting fight when the enemies had grenade launchers. 
• I've crawled through 25 vents and knocked out enemies with helmets from behind with just my hand.  A couple of missions you can't be seen and if you are you start over.  ugh.
• The lockpicking and hacking mini-games are terrible and luckily you can turn them off.  Lockpicking is a type of rhythm game, but the animations don't really match up to the sounds so it just feels off.  
• Nix, your animal companion, is pretty cool but so far the actions you can have them do are basic.  Flip this switch, open this door, distract this enemy, hopefully those interactions become more varied.
• The reputation system is the only innovative thing I've encountered so far. I've only started getting into missions where I have to pick sides so we will see where that goes.

Vader Pro 3

• Not related to Star Wars Outlaws. 
• I love the Xbox Elite V2 controller but the build quality is atrocious.  I've been through 3 of these expensive controllers so I decided to try out something different.
• I've been using the FLYDIGI Vader 3 Pro for a couple of months and I really like it.  
• The sticks use HALL sensors so stick drift should hopefully be eliminated.
• It has two extra face buttons and 4 back buttons but two of them are placed rather poorly so they can be a bit tough to activate which is my only gripe with the controller.  
• It has an on/off switch so I can quickly turn off the controller.
• The software that comes with it isn't the greatest so I'm glad Rewasd supports the controller so I can use that to remap the buttons. 
• It has a similar shape to the Elite V2 so it feels good in your hands, but it's all plastic instead of the nice rubber material on the V2.  $65 vs $120 so that's expected. 

Black Myth

• I finally reached Chapter 3 after spending about 3 hours trying to defeat the ending boss of Chapter 2.  
• After 2 hours I finally caved and looked up some tips which I don't like to do.  I found that I had missed some quests that would have given me items to make that fight easier. 
• I was wrong in my last blog about there not being a parry.  It's not explained well in the game, but if you are executing light attacks and have 1 focus point, you can hit the heavy attack as the enemy is attacking and that will parry his blow.  
• The game is still awesome, but it is getting harder so we will see how my reflexes hold up. 

Black Myth: Wukong

 Black Myth: Wukong

• A third person action game that is a mixture of God of War and Dark Souls. 
• I thought God of War 3 had the best opening in any 3rd person action game and this game somehow tops that experience.  It's also the developers first game so that really makes it impressive. 
• There isn't a difficulty setting and some of the early bosses can be a bit difficult, but you don't lose anything when you die, no corpse runs. The enemies do respawn when you rest or die at a "bonfire". 
• You can reassign your skills at any time with no cost which allows you to try different strategies.  I believe there are 178 different skill points with 3 different combat stances.  Sometimes when you defeat a mini-boss or boss you will receive one of their powers so your arsenal continues to expand which really opens up the combat customizations. 
• The combat does take a bit to get used to.  It's not a button masher game so you need to plan your attacks.  You build up focus by using light attacks and other methods and then you can do a heavy attack that will do major damage, but the move takes some time so you can miss if not timed correctly.  There isn't a block/parry button so you will be dodging around the enemies.  With all the skills and powers there can be a lot of button presses to remember.  
• It's not quite a boss rush game as there are areas to explore with secret areas and basic enemies to fight, but there are times where you will go from one boss fight to the next.  So far all the bosses have been amazing.  
  
• All the enemies are well animated and they will taunt you as you walk up to them and during the fight which adds a nice touch. 
• The game is using new tech so the graphics look amazing but it does require a hefty PC to run with everything maxed which requires Frame Generation to get 4k60. The default graphics have too much sharpening for me so I got a mod that removes all the smoothing and I think it looks much better.  
• I've put in about 6 hours and reached Chapter 2.  One boss took me about two hours to defeat, but the other bosses were 1-3 tries so the difficulty varies. 
• The game is based on the book, Journey to the West, which I'm currently reading, only 2000 pages.  
• The game has a lot of lore in the codex if you care to read it.  Every enemy you find will have a lengthy codex entry with some beautiful artwork with it.