God of War: Ragnarök (PS4) - miscellaneous glitch tech pt. 2

Some remaining observations from GoW: Ragnarök that I thought were worth sharing.

0:00 - mixed-up shield glitch. If you buffer a parry and quickly switch shields, Kratos will do the parry using a wrong shield (among other effects).

Switching to/from certain shields will also cause additional long-term effects, most notably with Stone Wall and Dauntless shields. The game seems to get confused as to which shield Kratos is currently using, and trying to parry causes Kratos to alternate between the parry of his current shield or the Stone Wall/Dauntless parry. Poor Guardian shield's parry has such a low priority that it becomes all but replaced by the other shield's parry.

As another subtle effect, the unique block of Shatter Star shield looks a bit wonky during this glitch. This is seen at 0:12.

0:37 - gigantic shield bug. If you switch shields during the cooldown frames of a parry (it might be only Dauntless parry), the shield may stay passively retracted or even grow comically large. This is a pretty rare effect, and I've only gotten something like this happen a few times overall.

1:18 - some advancements to Runic Slide tech. It turns out you can start a Runic Slide after an air attack since you can buffer a Runic-attack during the landing phase. The speed you get afterwards depends on the air attack: Spear air attack gives the best speed. Still, no matter what your average speed will be much slower than if you start a Runic Slide from a small climb.

2:04 - just out of curiosity, I tried doing a Runic Slide during a combined air attack + Flame Whiplash. No real benefit, but it looks unique?

2:29 - I wanted to verify if additional vertical momentum given by level collision gets stuck on Kratos during a Runic Slide, but apparently this isn't the case. Pity, it would've been fun to float infinitely high in air.

Thanks to Pico for this alternative (currently third) method of starting Runic Slide. To do this, you buffer a Runic-attack during the light finisher of Flame Whiplash, then quickly switch Runic-attacks. However, you don't get any speed afterwards, so it isn't going to result in a very impressive slide.

2:49 - rope break-outs.

The same input for doing grapple break-outs works for breaking out of ropes as well (i.e. buffer an attack to occur after a weapon switch, then use a prompt simultaneously as the attack is about to start). As a result, your ally gets stuck riding the rope over and over again indefinitely. The rope prompt stays visible on the screen regardless of your distance to it, and also all navigation prompts become disabled (as per usual). Using a generic prompt or retrying fixes things. This has no known use so far.

3:50 - Rampaging Ibex break-out.

You can break out of this Runic summon by doing it into a climbing wall with the traversal assist loophole. A redundant Ibex model stays on the map after the attack ends, which looks slightly funny. The Ibex lacks collision, but it will still block projectiles. You can do this a total of two times - a third Ibex you try to summon makes the first one disappear.

4:44 - breaking out of a ceiling grapple is also possible! The input is the same as for the other grapple break-outs. But it's not useful at all. The prompt simply disappears, causing you to get stuck.

5:10 - in the unpatched version it was possible to Recall during a roll, causing what me and Kazooie dubbed the "buggy roll" effect on our first playthrough. Spamming the respective inputs fast enough, you could cancel out of a roll into a new roll and chain them together. However, this was really hard to do consistently while also steering, so it isn't really a viable movement tech. Plus it's probably impossible to do on current version.

To note: Kazooie is the player in this clip.

5:26 - you can do an attack to displace Kratos as you simultaneously use a prompt with L-stick. In the unpatched version (using infini-Rage v2) you could displace quite a long distance using one of the Rage-attacks - this clip shows an example. Maybe this would do something unique if there was a cutscene trigger right next to a traversal prompt somewhere... although in hindsight, I'm not sure if such a spot exists anywhere in the game.

This idea should still be possible on the current version, but you can't displace such a large distance since Rage-attacks are not available outside Rage any longer.

5:39 - I managed to break out of a grapple point in v. 1.0. with the simple input of trying to evade, buffer attack, use grapple point. This only happened once and I could never recreate the effect, so it's a total mystery.

5:51 - messing with an Ormr from out of bounds. It seems the creature is invincible while it's underground.

6:54 - reading a lore tablet while underneath one.

7:11 - if you fall out of bounds for long enough, Kratos turns into a mess of pixels. This is some photo mode-footage of it.

7:38 - a clip from my auto-walk glitch testing of yore. Stylish enough to close off this video!