I don’t know if we’ll ever get another Sekiro game, but FromSoftware’s 2019 ninja sim lives on in anyone who takes note. We’ve already seen fellow Soulslikes Wo Long and Lies of P adopt its signature moves, and the Resident Evil 4 remake used a Sekiro-style parry system to great effect. But it feels like entirely new territory to see RPG doyens BioWare and Obsidian pepper their upcoming games with some of Sekiro’s signature moves.
To quickly summarize what I’m talking about, I’d say Sekiro’s big innovations over Dark Souls were the emphasis on parrying over dodging, and the stagger meter running parallel to player and enemy HP. The former gave combat that wonderfully crisp, satisfying cadence (and was much more forgiving than Dark Souls’ parries), while the latter rewarded aggressiveness and precise timing by letting you wipe out one of an enemy’s health bars with a stagger break.
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Let’s start with the Veilguard, who got an 11-minute combat demo at Gamescom. Since Veilguard’s first gameplay reveal, we’ve known it would have a parry system, but this extended snippet of late-game play gives us a better idea of ​​how it works in practice. In addition to parrying moves that leave enemies vulnerable to “high-damage counterattacks,” the warrior in the gameplay video has chosen an upgrade to her build that gives her attacks a powerful fire damage buff after each successful parry.
It all depends on how things feel in hand, but marrying one of my favorite action game mechanics with BioWare’s proven affinity for buildcrafting makes me even more excited about Veilguard. According to a preview from WccfTech, Warriors will have a less generous parry window but the ability to block attacks with a shield, while Rogues will get the opposite: no shield but a more generous parry window.
While it doesn’t look like Avowed will have timed blocks in its 31-minute Gamescom demo, both games use a stagger mechanic. Your attacks fill a meter to put enemies in a weakened state where they’re more vulnerable to damage, similar to Armored Core 6, while the Veilguard also lets you perform takedown moves on staggered enemies, which reminds me of Dragon Age: Origins’ cinematic finishers.
More than anything, I’m pleased to see BioWare and Obsidian infuse their action RPGs with the secret sauce of one of the best action games around. There was a time when those studios’ ARPGs were sluggish, ponderous things – awkward middle children like Jade Empire or Alpha Protocol, made by people used to tactical, turn-based or real-time games with pauses.
BioWare hasn’t been a tactical RPG studio for years, and Obsidian still seems nervous after the initially disappointing sales of Pillars of Eternity 2: Neither of them seems inclined to follow Larian anytime soon, so I want them to make the best action RPGs possible, and to do that they need to take cues from the best pure action games out there.
Too many action games water themselves down with bad RPG mechanics – I’m looking at you, Ubisoft and Sony First Party Studios, with your +15% poison damage in the air nonsense. But I think the opposite approach, where RPG-focused studios spice up their games with action, has borne fruit and will continue to do so.
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