It’s impossible that you haven’t heard of Team Ninja’s Nioh. The Dark Souls meets Onimusha meets Bloodborne meets Diablo hack and slash adventure has been making waves in the gaming world. After garnering strong critical praise, sales have been going extremely well with the game debuting second in the UK as per Gfk Chart-Track. Nioh is a great game but if you love it and have been spending several hours with it, you’ve no doubt discovered a few things to nitpick about. If you’re a Dark Souls veteran, there are at least five things that can get you down about Nioh. Regardless, let’s take a look and you can tell us what you dislike about the game in the comments.
Co-Op Mechanics
Perhaps one of the most annoying aspects to Nioh which has changed since the alpha is the co-op. Earlier it was possible to drop in with your friends but now you have to complete a stage in order to play alongside a friend. Why the sudden change? Well, according to Team Ninja, it made the game easy and allowed higher-level players to essentially power-level you through the experience. Why wasn’t this change communicated before launch? Er, yeah, we don’t know. As it stands, we can understand the reasoning but it’s still kind of annoying that we can’t play with our friends whenever we feel like. Why not have an arena mode of sorts to allow co-op at any given time rather than gating the campaign experience?
Lots of Loot
You’re probably hearing the sub-heading and thinking, “How could that possibly be a bad thing?” Much like Diablo, Nioh lets you discover different tiers of loot. You could come across a sword with higher attack that’s rarer or has its own special abilities and that’s not a terrible thing at all. But much like Diablo 3 when it came out, Nioh currently seems more focused on the amount of loot it gives you rather than the quality. This leads to more RNG as well and feels like a waste overall. As it stands, one of the bigger issues with getting too much loot is how much of it you have to carry around. That leads us to…
Loot Management
In Dark Souls, you discover weapons and armour that have specific purposes. Some weapons and armour may be more suited for your two-handed build while others increase your ability to roll around like a madman. The point is that you never got too much loot at any one point in time and thus didn’t have to worry about managing it all. You don’t necessarily have to pick up everything you find in Nioh but you never know when something may come in handy later. This is especially so when you factor in the different types of weapons, stances, abilities, what complements your build and so on. If that weren’t enough, what if you want to pick up stuff so you can sell it later for something useful? It may sound like business as usual for a Borderlands or Diablo player but others used to the Soulsborne formula may find it annoying to deal with.
Easier (?)
One of the more subjective complaints about Nioh is that it’s easier from its previous alpha. And hey, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Not every game has to try and beat you down at every opportunity. Maybe you want to run around, hacking and slashing and making your way through the story. The thing is that some players reported the difficulty to be easier than the recent Dark Souls 3. This could come down to the controls improving since the early alpha days or the combat being more aggressive than Dark Souls. As it stands, there are Twilight Missions, tougher versions of previous story missions but with the potential for greater rewards. Again, it’s very subjective as a whole and we wouldn’t put it past Team Ninja to introduce a higher difficulty sometime in the future. Of course, it’s also very easy to get one-hit killed by most enemies so Nioh definitely doesn’t shy away from punishing you with every small mistake.
No Direct PvP
Okay, so some people may not mind it all that much – especially given how there’s already so much to do in Nioh – but the lack of direct PvP at launch is kind of a bummer. You can still discover different gravestones and battle against the revenants of other players. Major rewards can be reaped in the process as well, allowing you to gear up for your own journey. Again though, it’s not actually PvP and if you’re going to beat on AI enemies, well, why not just play the campaign? Team Ninja will give players the opportunity to fight each other in a future free update but there’s currently no ETA on the same.
