Nioh 3 “is less punishing” than Nioh 1 and Nioh 2, according to our reviewer Jeremy Blum. In a fine example of the Duality of Man, this observation forms part of a sentence in which Jeremy also confesses to smashing a hole in his desk with his controller. I can only imagine the destruction if he’d run into one particular “very rare” Nioh 3 bug, recently patched out, which causes the game to corrupt your save data if you end the game while praying at shrines.
Similar to bonfires in the Souls games, shrines are where you’ll recover your health, replenish your elixirs, and checkpoint progress, at the cost of respawning enemies in the region. There are no autosaves – a source of ire among Soulslikers on Reddit – so you’ll want to make a habit of checkpointing at shrines. Now, imagine that you’ve just felled the Bloodedge Demon on the 31st attempt. You kneel in relief at the nearest Shrine, thanking the gods for their guidance, and your save file promptly farts itself inside out. Thank you, Nioh 3. Sayonara, beloved IKEA computer table.
I do think screwing with the player’s save data could be an amazing source of the vaunted Real Emotions videogames are said to inspire. How about a curse that gave you a powerful combo finisher but created a 1/50 risk of the game mangling your data for every completed combo? Or a Lovecraftian game in which the same risk applied to looking at Cthulhu for too long?
Yeah, maybe it’s not that great an idea. It’d be fun to write about, though. I would have fun, is what I’m saying, and what is a videogame, if not a thing created to amuse me specifically and at the expense of everybody else.
This bug is one of many fixed in the Nioh 3 game update that went out over the weekend. Nioh 3 doesn’t appear to be an especially buggy game, though developers Team Ninja have made plenty of tweaks, mostly for the sake of gear and ability balancing and to stamp out some outlandish exploits.
Amongst other things, you will no longer fall through the map when ending multiplayer sessions, crash the game when selecting Become A Visitor, or be able to access certain forbidden paths. As regards combat exploits, you won’t be able “to perform the Martial Art Tornado Edge multiple times in a row by continually pressing the button for Strong Attacks just after successfully performing the Martial Art Spinning Slide for the Samurai weapon the axe.” Nor will you be able to do a second aerial jump while performing various moves and martial arts while equipped with the tonfa. Tarnation! Both of those sound like very effective cheese or speedrunning strats.
On the boss front, they’ve nixed an issue that caused Jakotsu-baba to jump outside the boss area. As for Ippon-Datara, you won’t be able to do two consecutive grapples on this boss any longer, you big bully.
Lastly, they’ve “partially fixed an issue where water surfaces would occasionally radiate purple light”. Will puddles radiate purple light less often, or radiate less purple light? An enigma for Jeremy to pursue once he’s patched that hole in his desk. Catch the full patch notes here.
