Dispatch is probably the highest profile demo I've played so far. It's a narrative choose-your-path Telltale-like, with what's essentially a worker-placement human resource-management game attached. It's clearly the sort of game that will add whatever mini-game fits a situation, and I'll admit to being a real sucker for that.
The premise is that the protagonist Robert is working as the resident dispatcher for a Suicide Squad-esque group of misfit superheroes, telling them where to go and what to do and occasionally helping remotely. The mechanics of it all really aren't the point though, this is all about characters and snappy writing and the demo delivers.
I was already leaning like 80% towards buying Dispatch, but the demo made that 100%. Really clean presentation, and the only reason I stopped playing was a softlock.
I got put onto this one by Egan's Not-E3 post - Formula Legends is a sort of arcade nearly-kart racer with a Formula 1 theme, but what sets it apart from other kart racers is a real commitment to the theme.
Cars understeer, oversteer, and lock-up. You can overjuice the throttle and spin out very easily, and if you try to turn while braking you will not in fact turn. You can slipstream your opponents, and in some cases deploy battery charge or active aero.
The really tasty hook is that you're not just playing with a modern Formula 1 premise. The demo has 3 eras - 1970s, 1990s, and 2020s. Only the last of these has active battery and aero deployment, and the 1970s cars in particular feel extremely temperamental to drive. Add to this multiple era-appropriate variations on each track and you have a very compelling non-sim-racer for fans of F1, and I'll be really keen to play some of this when it comes out.
(I finished 2 races, 14th and 12th out of 14. I had a great time.)
I actually played quite a few more demos, but this round was much less focused on obviously strong offerings so I'm OK with not liking the others as much. Still, across a total of 8 demos I've put 5 on the wishlist so that's a pretty good success rate. The plan is to do another pass of 3 or 4 demos this weekend before Next Fest ends. You should too!
I think there's something fundamentally weird about how game trailers will utterly misrepresent the product in order to sell a vibe, and we just accept it as part of the bargain. As long as the trailer at some point puts a little "not gameplay" caption in 10pt text somewhere, they're basically in the clear, especially if they finish the trailer with like 10s of actual gameplay. In that case it was basically a cutscene, which is technically part of the game you'd be buying.
A really annoying version of this is this kind of bait-and-switch trailer, where they'll show what appears to be an interesting setting or character or game concept, then at the end they pull out an assault rifle and start jumping around building wooden shacks because oh you didn't know? It's Fortnite again.
One of these that really stuck with me was a trailer I saw a few years ago, that had a necromancer character finding a body, doing some ritual, and taking skull as some kind of ritual object. While this is happening, a voiceover is grimly talking about the dark path and sacrifices of this magic, that to know these secrets you accept being shunned and feared - and they show this with a family cowering into their home as the character walks past.
My mind starts buzzing with this idea - this is a cool premise surely, a game where we can perhaps do some dark rituals that give us deep knowledge about the nature of the cosmos, but in doing so distance ourselves from society. Perhaps in taking this skull we can unlock new powers by tying up the victim's loose ends in a kind of Quantum Leap but for corpses, jumping from story to story and learning the dark secrets of a society while righting its wrongs despite looking incredibly wrong ourselves. Maybe there's even some kind of moral trade-off involved - letting the spirits move on or harvesting them at their fullest - that'd be exciting and distinct! To even start down the path of righting these wrongs we have to desecrate a corpse so it sets up some really interesting and unusual stakes.
Anyway if you keep up with the whole video game trailer release hype cycles, you probably already recognised that trailer as what it was - not the reveal of a new dark narrative spirit whisperer game, but basically a hype trailer for the Necromancer character in the (at that time unreleased) Diablo 4.
It was 100% flavour. None of what appeared in that part of the trailer is in the game in any meaningful way - you won't be dealing with social ostracisation, you don't unveil any particular dark truth about the univers, you even come to the adventure pre-skulled.
I'm not saying that Diablo 4 needed to have a social consequence system or a corpse-flaying minigame, but I do feel that it's a bit weak to have a whole theme of the character trailer be about being shunned, then in game you get to the major city all corpsed up and nobody particularly gives a shit - you are so visibly doing some dark bullshit and vendors are just like "yeah I can sharpen a scythe no problem." It's all so procedural and presumed that all of the character design is reduced to pure flavour.
My partner and I spend a lot of our time talking about videogames, and especially about Themes and Throughlines - where the writer's intent and intentionality become design and mechanics.
She's been doing a lot of writing in the last couple of years and is very good at it, and I have a very overinflated opinion of my ability to finish a project, so we've often discussed the idea of what kind of game we might make together. While my preference for my own writing would be something relatively breezy and low-narrative (because I balk at sincerely expressing myself), she'd be the writer and is very much into Themes and Throughlines and Arcs and Resolutions in a way that makes me think maybe my misreading of the Necromancer trailer would be a good project for us.
I think there's something fundamentally exciting in how the viewer can take in the aesthetic and thematic elements of a piece and synthesise something entirely new and distinct from it. This is pretty much the origin of fan-fiction, right? The most prolific fic communities always seem to be based on the least complete or satisfying source narratives - nothing motivates creativity like loving something but knowing it could be better.
Next Fest is back, and there's a lot of demos around. I've neglected this promotion in the past because I don't like playing games before they're finished if I plan to buy them, and I feel that's kind of how Next Fest gets treated in online circles - like a free early access snippet.
But I'm making a shift away from just following big releases, and while I'd love to just buy everything that catches my eye I'm not made of money. I'm using this Next Fest to play some demos specifically for games that I'm on the fence about - interesting ideas or smaller projects that I might like the look of but not want to buy immediately at launch otherwise (and thus immediately forget about in this market).
Here are some of the ones that I've tried so far (images are from the Steam pages unless obviously otherwise).
A really cool, tightly designed cubes and portals puzzle platformer game.
The greys-and-blue presentation really caught my eye with this so I went in very blind on the gameplay, and the initial reveal of the main mechanic was a little bit revelatory. The demo took me about 30 minutes to work through all the main puzzles (15 or so I think?), and I like how they incorporate puzzling into the overworld as well - you can't access some of the harder levels unless you figure out how to access it.
It's a game rife with interactions and "a-ha" moments, and the early levels are extremely good at presenting you with a room that makes you think "there must be some way to do this" even when it's not obvious how. Through tinkering with the limited tools available you can learn about some of the more complex interactions, or even simple ones - one of the longest stumpers I had just involved figuring out that my jump height isn't always the same, for entirely sensible reasons.
This is the kind of game that would usually languish on my wishlist because I'm rarely in the mood for puzzle-platformers these days, but it's jumped up pretty high in my view now. If they price it well this'll be a day one purchase.
A logistics game (Factorio-like, if you will) where they've shaken up the core assumptions in a few interesting ways.
The two main ones are infinite resources (I've seen a few do this now) and the way resources become "stuff" - it all starts as big cubes of voxels, and you have to slice them up and recombine them to make the pieces you need. This is a game that's 100% focused on the production lines, and doesn't want you to worry about running out of stuff to make it, or even particularly about getting finished products to where they're needed - you belt your blocks and slices around, but the finished modules get handled by drones.
It does limit the space you can use - forcing you to build on the fairly small roofs of buildings, and I think this is the more interesting puzzle. Your facilities are large and processes can become spacially inefficient very quickly - I made the monstrosity pictured above mostly to see if I could, and once it was in place I knew I was buying Modulus at launch. I'm a little worried that it may end up in Early Access hell if they take that route, but the idea is interesting enough that I'll give it a go anyway.
A tactical RPG using dice as your action pool, with a really distinct style.
This is a perfect example of a game I want to play during Next Fest: I would not buy this on a whim. TRPGs are very hit-and-miss for me, I think because they're pretty easy to make but hard to balance. I can't genuinely speak to the balance of Dice Gambit from the half hour of demo I played, but the rest of it is interesting enough that I don't really care.
The art has that sort of Cartoon Network energy, and it's clear that making the UI dynamic and distinctive was a priority here - we will forever be living in the shadow of Persona 5, and that's fine with me.
The extra hook for Dice Gambit is the recruitment system - the setting is a sort of alternate techno-renaissance Italy, and you gain fighters through marriages, with stronger fighters attracting stronger suitors. I'm not sure how much further the system goes, but this is a decent twist that pulls in that Crusader Kings "good lord look at that mess of a family tree" goodness.
I've played a couple other demos that haven't hit the spot for me, but I'm not here to talk down about projects based on a snippet of gameplay. Demos are inherently incomplete, and with how they're produces in the modern market (i.e. long before the game is finished) the gameplay is incomplete as well.
I still have a couple of demos downloaded and ready to go, and I'll do another scan this weekend if I have time, but this is the result of the first batch and I'm liking with what I'm seeing. It's cool how this demo renaissance has impacted the industry, something I think I want to write about a little more at a later date - demos are a really weird and tricky concept, and I think people tend to apply overly broad heuristics to figuring out their value.
So I recently mentioned that I was wanting to disconnect from Microsoft products and that getting away from Windows in particular seemed like too big an ask - not because I don't like or can't use Linux but because I rely on Windows too heavily for gaming.
But I've been thinking about it some more, doing a bit of searching around and scouting the ecosystem, and decided to give it a go - I have an SSD that I could easily clear out and use as a test-bed, do a dual-boot like it's 2005 again, and test the waters myself now that I have a vague understanding of the situation.
The main things to understand for this transition are:
Linux, and the preponderance of distributions.
Proton, the translation layer (that I believe just sits on top of WINE) which enables Steam-native running of Windows-only games.
The general ecosystem of highly-opinionated software branches that seem to drive both.
Linux isn't a concern to me - I dabbled with dual-booting 20 years ago, and have used half a dozen distros since in education or professional contexts. I'm far from a power-user, but I'm not afraid to use a terminal to solve problems. If the best solution was some Arch fork, I would manage fine with a bit of support from documentation.
Proton was much more of a mystery to me, and seems to have 2 main branches - the Valve operated one, and protonge which is maintained by a patreon-supported developer. Thankfully, I soon learned that switching between them is really easy with helpful software tools like Steam, Lutris, and ProtonUp-qt.
So really at this point the only mystery was which team was I gonna choose? Which distro was I going to install, then gaslight myself into believing was the best lest I spend the rest of my life jumping from ship to ship?
I pretty quickly settled on Bazzite, for a few reasons.
It has a pretty professional overall presentation. A lot of modern distros have this, but it was a good start - while I'm capable enough with Linux to not need something too polished, there's no reason to make extra work for myself.
It was designed for Steam Deck, which means it's both Steam-focused (where all of my performance-intensive gaming is based), and relatively lightweight.
It's built on an "immutable" Fedora branch called Atomic which essentially means that I can't just fuck up the OS with the simplest error. A gaming system is so sensitive to minor OS problems that having one I won't break by making a typo holds a lot of appeal. It also speaks to a level of confidence the developers have that there's no need to go hunting around in the CLI to change minor things - if you want it, they need to have a way to provide it.
Finding this gave me the confidence to try it out, and I've been tinkering with it for the last 6 hours or so. So far? I'm impressed.
As far as a desktop experience, it does all the desktop things. It uses Firefox by default, which I'll probably switch out eventually, but it works for now while I also wean myself off Chrome. The software manager is pretty comprehensive and the preinstalled bits are fairly intuitive. I went with the KDE version (having been a gnome kid 20 years ago) and I'm really impressed by how far it's come in this time. Multimedia stuff just works, most standard apps are available as flatpaks, and I haven't run into a problem yet that I can't at least hack a solution to.
For gaming? I haven't done much stress-testing yet. I understand that nVidia cards generally are a bit worse on Linux, and that it's normal to see around 20-30% worse performance depending on the game. My system is an AMD 5800X, NV RX3070, and 32GB of memory and I play at 1440p.
On my system I was getting 90fps with my preferred settings in Baldur's Gate 3 in Windows, down to about 50fps in Bazzite which seems like a worst-case scenario and one I'm going to investigate further.
Rocket League is my comfort-game of choice and it runs super smoothly on proton. I've been complaining about uneven frame-pacing for the last several months on Windows, and I thought it had mostly gone away but I think I'd just got used to it - as soon as I booted it on Bazzite it was like playing at 120Hz for the first time all over again. Buttery. Delightful.
I've heard this is a common upside to gaming on Linux - your FPS will be lower, but the pacing will be significantly better. With a gsync monitor (is that supported? Shit, I should check... quick google ...seems supported) it feels really decent. Honestly this is the best Rocket League has felt for me in at least 6 months, possibly longer.
So a first day conclusion? Really liking this so far. Much more positive experience than I expected.
I've got a lot more tinkering and testing to do, but I'm happy enough with this to use it as my daily driver for the near future and really learn the friction points.
I don't think I'll be able to fully remove Windows just yet, not until I can figure out what's going on with BG3, and I may just leave a vestigial Windows partition for really heavy games until I can afford a 9700XT.
I'm genuinely quite excited for the future now, and what might be possible.
I could honestly talk all day about Clair Obscur, within 10 hours I had full faith that I was going to have a good time and the 50-hour run really didn't disappoint.
It's sincere while remaining silly, heartfelt without dipping into irony.
It's original and yet its influences are worn on its sleeve.
It's clever and convoluted but allows the player to piece things together before spelling it all out.
So why not a full review?
Honestly, I don't know that I have much to say beyond what literally everyone has said. Clair Obscur fucking rules.
It's a JRPG for people who don't like JRPGs, and it's kind of a souls-like for people who don't like souls-likes?
It's extremely French in a way that's frankly weird, not because France is weird but because it's weird games aren't Frencher given how many big games are made there.
I have a handful of nitpicks - it's a little unclear when is a "good time" to go fight a boss (just go fight them), and the game is at its best when you're a little underlevelled so this can make the main bosses a little underwhelming. The only saving is via autosave, which can sometimes mean retrying a boss means a pointless sprint from A to B. It's quite unclear how much damage different attacks do, even relative to one another, so you spend a lot of time trial-and-erroring and trying to eliminate variables - this isn't so bad until you come up against a difficult boss and start to care about the margins.
But it's just nitpicks. I've done basically everything a first playthrough has to offer, and had a lovely time in the process.
I'm not a big New Game+ guy but I think I'll come back to this in a few months and play on a higher difficulty to make it a proper skillcheck rhythm game - I've pretty much hit the limit of "just scaling the numbers up" and the last megaboss fight really confirmed that for me, there are a bunch of enemy patterns that I basically just brute-forced my way through.
Anyway yeah 10/10 game. I want so much more of this stuff - passion project genre shit with clear compromises but a clearer vision.
I mentioned in my recent mini-posts post that I'd been playing AC: Shadows, and that I really didn't like it from the first few hours. Well, I've played another 6 or so hours and I'm done with it, it's just a shocking display of unchecked budgets and a complete lack of direction.
More than anything though, it's just incredibly unpleasant to interact with. Every menu has these long flourishes, you're expected to compare trousers constantly but the default pause menu is the map, so you have to tab to the inventory every time.
Gear is just relentlessly thrown in your face, but getting it out of your inventory is genuinely soul-crushing, with a 2s long "ITEM STORED/DISMANTLED/YEETED" animation every single time to make sure you know the game did what you asked using the buttons they provided.
The first "legendary" outfit I got looked really cool but had a """bonus""" ability that made me through a kunai at the nearest enemy anytime I did a stealth kill - which made stealth really fucking hard? For my shinobi????
I had to kill a guy who had 4 health segments, but my assassinations only do 3 segments of damage - then I realised I had a different hat that gives me +1 segments on all assassinations... so I stood in front of him, switched hats, then stabbed him and his friend in the neck.
| Clip misses the moment I spot that I can only take out 3/4 of his health.
I later got into a fight and sure, I know the shinobi isn't meant to be doing pitched battles, but I still expect it to be fun. Not here though.
I'm struggling with the targeting - there's no visual reference for who you're aiming best I can tell? So I'm getting my ass beat. I recognise it's getting away from me, so I try to change over to my smoke bombs for a classic escape.
I dodge and hit L1+DDown to change to smokes, L2 to aim and move the right stick... no movement. I'm still locked on, even when I try to manual aim. I click off, try again, and throw a kunai. I didn't change to smokes? I parry and dodge again, holding L1 and realise I can't change item until I have completely stopped moving. I mash DDown to change, try to throw one aaaaand I'm dead. It's all just so hideously unresponsive.
Oh, and then the game crashed.
But it's not just combat. Walking around - using Hold R3 to activate "Eagle Vision" (not lampshaded with an actual bird in this game, btw, gave up on that one already) feels terrible, the camera always feels like it's looking to the side of what I want, the objective screen is an interesting approach but tracked objectives don't auto-update to the next stage of an objective chain, so I've interacted with that screen more than I have with Yasuke 12 hours in!
The inventory stuff above sucks, but also the whole weapon idea is insane - you have 3 weapons and can only equip 2, but you can swap them mid-combat??? And they have special utility that you need them equipped to use, like special assassination methods!
It's drudgery for the sake of calling it a "mechanic". Oh, we have "loadouts" now, make sure to "share" your "build" on "social media". Great "content" to go with the "weekly objectives". Spend 2 "mastery points" for 2% more damage at night. Do it 2 more times. Now do it for 2% extra armour damage 3 times!
| Obligatory tierlist
I had a quick check and this is the 12th AC game I've played properly (i.e. not just a quick check on an emulator for the DS games), and it's only the 2nd I haven't enjoyed for what it is and finished. The previous was Origins, but I didn't necessarily dislike that game - it was just incredibly dull. It was directionless and empty and there were a bunch of ideas that were clearly there to make the game slower and less refined, to make you play more and conceivably pay more, when Ubisoft were first ramping up that approach to their games.
In between I really enjoyed Odyssey and Valhalla - still pleeeeenty of filler and drudge, but they were games with some fucking ideas - Odyssey was just delightful to explore and navigate even if the quest design was bad, and Valhalla did a lot to streamline and improve the questing! While the exploration became dull again... there's not a lot you can visually do with middle ages England.
AC:Shadows feels like a return to that Origins vapidity. The world is incredibly empty for how beautiful it is, traversal feels terrible considering this is a parkour series at its core, and quests are just... kinda thinly spread around it. But worse than Origins, it just plays like shit! And this is on the 4th iteration of this "genre" of AC game! How do you get worse at this over time???
Shadows feels like a game built from the ground up by people who can only communicate by analogy to games that have made $1B+ dollars. Like with Veilguard all the artists are absolutely killing it here, producing some excellent music and beautiful visuals for a game that barely functions.
I don't understand how anybody with a passion for game design could spend more than the 12 hours I did with it.
It confounds me to see these such resources piled onto this expansive, vapid "content".
I first heard about Eternal Strands just a few weeks before launch when they announced the demo, the first hour or so of the game, would carry progress into the full release - we can call that an early win for consumer-friendly business already. Looking into it a bit, I saw it was the first game from Mike Laidlaw's (formerly Bioware) new studio and I'll admit that this biased me towards it a bit.
Since Bioware started its weird splintering and collapse about 10 years go, we've seen the quality and general "vision" of their games deteriorate - Andromeda was extremely messy and half-baked creatively, Anthem was a bland disaster, and with Veilguard it became clear that this wasn't just a rough patch, but a complete implosion of quality from a writing and indescribable vibes perspective. Seeing their old guard writing leadership leave created this weird opportunity to watch them all do their own thing and get an insight into who's departure was "to blame" for this decline - who can still make a game without EA money? *
So yeah I see Laidlaw's making a game, lead designer and creative director on the first couple of Dragon Age games, so this is a chance to see if it was just "good writers" or an environment that lets good writers thrive - this is a really interesting test-case. I then see that it's a relatively small AA-scale game and that it'll cost £33 at launch - this is insane to me, I've gotta give this a look.
Already committed intellectually I played the demo anyway to figure out how soon I wanted to play it - and it was like getting hit in the face with my dream game.
Eternal Strands is set in the Mayda Basin, a fantasy continent made up of several conflicting and cooperating territories containing a handful of different humanoid species. Magic is performed by people called Weavers, who are in the current day ostracised due to a disaster 50 years ago in which all magic basically exploded, and the political home of Weavers - a state called The Enclave - locked itself behind a magical Veil. Brynn is the newest member of a travelling band of weavers investigating a possible entry into the Enclave, which would be the first since the veil went up.
To do the very quick summary of what it is as a game, it's a semi-open-world action adventure game with combat mechanics focusing on a physics-based magic system, climbable bosses and environments, and a gathering/extraction/crafting mechanic. It's also heavily built around dialogue in an RPG style, but without the consequences for your choices you'd expect from a company like Bioware - your dialogue choices characterise the player character, not the outcomes.
In practice a lot of this ends up a bit janky, especially in the early game while I was still finding my feet with the physics system, and throughout the early game I was reminded of the PS2 era where off-budget games exploring unusual gameplay mechanics were much more the norm. It brought to mind games like 2004's Second Sight by Free Radical, a game which existed almost exclusively in bargain-buckets at my local Gamestation but which holds a very special place in my heart. **
I played Strands pretty leisurely over a week and a half, finishing it in a sprint of about 10 hours last weekend because it had me totally hooked. All the mechanics really clicked together, the story had my attention, and I was really enjoying the characters and new areas I'd unlocked. Despite the tranche of words above, I'm not going to go into great detail here on the game's specifics - I'm planning to write a bit more about those things in dedicated posts.
Suffice to say that I have almost exclusively praise for Eternal Strands. Where it fails to excel it succeeds in sufficiency - there are definite lows to go with the highs, but they feel like choices and compromises for the sake of the collective vision.
The visuals are really lovely - extremely Fortnitey in that "that's what Unreal Engine's made for" kind of way, but characterful with it and well optimised to the scale of game being presented - the edges of the map are consciously artificial ("a bubble of safety" for the protagonist's explorations), but they do a great job of keeping the out of bounds area lush with detail and landmarks. Dialogue occurs between 2D avatars like a visual novel, and this is a clearly economical choice - but also a very characterful one I think? It really worked for me, regardless.
It's hard to escape the knowledge of Bioware's DNA in this team though - "the veil", magical living rock, poison in the earth, and extremely geth-coded constructs (as well as some late game stuff I won't go into) all paint a picture of a team working through ideas still lingering in their minds. It's not in itself a problem, but in the introduction it does feel as thought they could have worked harder filing the serial numbers off this particular boilerplate.
The gameplay is really what makes Eternal Strands shine in my view. You start off finding great satisfaction throwing little fire flowers at enemies to kill them instantly or tentatively freezing a path through a raging fire, in the midgame temperature swings are entirely in your control and you can confidently sling enemies out of your way to get from A to B, and by the endgame you will be, if you so desire, hurtling yourself around the map at 100mph and paying no heed to your surroundings. The pacing plays so nicely with the mechanics, making backtracking stay interesting as the areas develop along with your toolkit for dealing with them.
The magic system really does deliver on the promise my nostalgia-ridden heart made to me - there are only 9 "spells" to choose from but by the time I'd unlocked 6 I was unsure what more ground they could cover - of the last three, two were both hilarious and extremely useful to me in clearing the lategame quests. The bosses remain fun into the endgame as you figure out new and better ways to undermine them, or in some cases give up on being clever and just tear them to pieces. In Eternal Strands, the numbers don't go up by a massive amount, but the ability to affect the world is exponential.
The resource/crafting stuff is possibly the biggest risk the game takes - you have a limited inventory, and lose resources on death, so the potential for frustration is high. It took me longer than I'd like to realise that the intended response to this is to do lots of small focused excursions, then deaths are less impactful and, narratively, Brynn gets plenty of rest. But it interacts with another much lighter system - there are 3 times of day (morning, afternoon, night) and each excursion uses up one of them. The game keeps track of the days and mixes things up between day and night, but really none of it matters. But there was a number going up, and I could make it go up slower - learning to not care and let it rise was a real lightbulb moment for me coming to love Eternal Strands.
The weaver band Brynn is a part of is a particularly charming part of the experience for me. It was just really refreshing to get so much done with my in-game friends in a (by modern RPG standards) very short game at <30 hours. They interact with each other in ways that feel real and they respond to dialogue choices in ways that are, while entirely superficial, incredibly satisfying as the player. At one point I made a rousing speech, and rather than just say "nice speech" a character kept repeating a particular line Brynn said, both highlighting the choice we made while also telling us what resonated with them specifically. I don't know, it feels like such a trivial bit of writing but it embedded me in the story - stuff like that is what's going to stick with me weeks, months, years later when I think about this game, more than any approval meter I've ever filled in the past.
The overall story is really solid - well paced, nice rising and falling tension, some fun non-weaverband characters with their own priorities, and a really great "mannnn, fuck this guy" antagonist. I don't want to talk about it too much here, but a good amount of time is spent establishing motivations, good or ill, and letting the player talk to various actors about what matters to them. It felt complete.
And that's the real feeling I had walking away from Eternal Strands - it's a complete experience. They explore their mechanics fully, tell a well rounded story, and don't leave much on the table. I'm sure they could come up with a sequel if they wanted, but they didn't purposely leave massive narrative gaps to be filled in case it sold well enough to justify more games. The setting is pretty fertile though, with lots of room to work with there - the story takes place in a very small area of what is a very rich cultural and political landscape, something I'd be really keen to see them explore more with an expanded - or focused - version of the same mechanics.
I said earlier Eternal Strands put me in mind of Second Sight, but it also makes me think of Mass Effect 2 - a game that was so good at telling a story that it got a whole generation of turn-based narrative RPG fans into a third-person action shooter franchise. I feel like pitching Eternal Strands on the physicsy combat or breezy traversal would be a problem for that audience, but the storytelling really gets to flourish here in a way that I'd hope draws that same audience.
We need more games like Eternal Strands. It takes a little while to get going, but never bores - I stopped sessions because I was done for the day, and then was looking forward to starting it up again tomorrow. I enjoyed wandering around camp talking to my party as much as I enjoyed climbing colossi and yeeting myself and others across the sky.
I wholeheartedly recommend Eternal Strands.
* Please understand I'm being facetious about blame here - any such problems are Bioware/EA's fault, and leaving that company seems to have been a universally good idea. ↩︎
** And the hearts of many others apparently - there's a steam port with 80% positive reviews, and the 20% negative one are almost exclusively "what a shitty port of a great game." ↩︎
This is a continuation of Gaming, Pricing, and CEO Hegemony, but this time I'm more focused on some specific ideas and less focused on structuring an argument
CEO-brain also extends to the players, by the way. There's this confidence that by being able to frame something as hard-nosed financial decisions, they are by default speaking some kind of truth rather than buying into corporate propaganda.
"With inflation, and the larger amount of content than ever before, the base game is an incredible value."
This is simply not a conclusion one can draw before the release of a game. This assumption leads to the rest of the argument - if this is a great deal, they've got to make up the money elsewhere (do they???) so they really are forced to hook their whales up to the DLC machine.
"But how do you charge those people $130 for the "first year of Civ", but not price out the casual players, the new players, the players in emerging countries, and other price sensitive players?
You continue to offer the base Civ for $70, an incredible value. But for everything discretionary, you increase the price.
...
I believe in their hearts, they really want everyone to have that content."
I don't mean to single out this person. I don't wish them any ill, I was just looking to see if there's a consensus on this topic and whether we knew the game's total development budget (best I can tell, no?) and stumbled across it.
Modern corporate culture has society impressed and dazzled by the concept of the CEO, these business-brained geniuses helming behemoth companies through stormy financial seas. But they're mostly just MBAs with survivorship bias. They see a number with a dollar sign before it and tell someone to make it bigger, or make more of them.
EA's CEO Andrew Wilson recently said that he thinks Veilguard would have been more successful if it had been a live-service game. This is an argument entirely contingent on the listener knowing nothing about the development of Veilguard - it had an extremely troubled decade of development, caused by higher-ups (like Wilson) insisting they pivot to a live-service model*. After huge difficulty, and failure of Anthem and 90% of other live-service games, they pivoted back to Veilguard.**
To suggest a repeat is to execute a lie, and to manufacture consent for the inevitable - Mass Effect 4 (5?) is gonna be fucking horrible live-service slop, and Veilguard failing was all the justification they needed.
This is what CEOs do - it was worth more money to them to get Veilguard out the door in a bad state, see it make less than their fucking insane targets, and use that to justify the next few years of horrific decisions.
Civ 7 isn't as obviously bad as this, it's more of a subtle iteration of what 2K has been doing for years - increasing prices while offering less, but so much of the less that it looks like more. Because that's just what CEOs do.
Footnotes
* Fun sidenote, but Mike Laidlaw all but confirmed this is why he left Bioware in 2017. I'm currently playing his studio's new game Eternal Strands and enjoying it! I have a lot to say about it, but will wait til I'm finished with my pretty leisurely playthrough.
** Hard sources on this are hard to come by, and I'm not doing journalism here. Will update if I find 'em.
You can pre-order Civ7 with the first few DLCs for £120.
CEO-brain is a pretty well-established problem in the games industry. It's pretty simple really - games make a lot of money from their core audience as high-cost high-enthusiasm items, but as the people in charge of the major companies become more and more "business people" the instinct is to get those numbers up.
To elaborate a bit more on what makes games interesting as a product:
High Price - £50+ for a single product of any kind is high. You wouldn't pay that to watch a movie or listen to an album, though you might to see a play, a concert, or own a collectors edition - these are not "standard" prices though, they're upsells to fans.
Long Term Usage - like music, fans of a game might play it for weeks or even months without any pushing from external reward systems. Unlike music, where concerts are viewed as the actual revenue stream for artists, games don't natively have any way for that long-term usage to translate into increased revenue - the software was paid for up-front, and is the extent of the product.
Social Pressure - game purchases can be strongly motivated by pressure from friends or public figures. This cuts both ways - an unexpected promotional YouTube video can give life to a struggling project, or an arbitrary social-media campaign can stunt its potential.
Age Diversity - the people most directly enthusiastic about games are young and lack the funds to spend high purchasing prices on them, while those that have the purchasing power tend to be more skeptical of new or unorthodox products. That the latter group are often just the same people as the former, plus time, makes this dynamic a bit more complicated.
What this means for the CEO-brained is that they have a bunch of levers they can pull to make games both worse and more profitable.
Crank the price up - maybe your player base is older and wealthier now, so they won't say no even if they complain. They're going to play this game for hundreds of hours, so really they should have always been paying more surely.
Drip-feed the substance of the game over a longer period of time - If new DLC/expansions are coming out every 3 months, that's basically a quarterly opportunity to upsell your player on the other stuff they haven't bought.*
Move cosmetic content into a Recurrent Revenue Model, with a custom in-game currency to abstract away the cost. Look, this stuff is entirely optional, that's why it's only in the game if you pay extra, and keeping it separate keeps the cost of the base game down (just don't ask why this stuff used to be included by default, perfectly profitably).
Give Early Access to Premium Buyers - if they willing to pay that much, they're probably easy to manipulate into paying even extra-er for a few days extra playing. This one is genuinely disgraceful to me for a couple or reasons. Primarily, I just hate FOMO marketing, but it also gives such an insane amount of cover for bad practice. Bad reviews flowing in? "Early" build of the game, time to fix it. Official reviews are either absent due to embargo or based on an even "early"-er version of the game, so it circumvents their consumer protection power.
Pre-order Exclusive "Content" - Same as above, just weenier.
Seasonal Events - these only make sense in the context of the other post-launch upsells, but they add this weird social pressure to not be missing out on some arbitrary giveaway.
Look I hate to be an old man about this stuff** but almost none of this is necessary. Civ7 might have these monetisation strategies to offset the increased cost of development, but nobody asked for them to increase the cost of development - it's a strategy game, it's about rules and interactions. There is no technical reason that Civ7 would be so much more a money pit than Civ 5 or 6.
2K and Firaxis made decisions that caused Civ7 to be disastrously expensive to make, and now they're passing those costs on to the consumer as if they're owed a profit for their hard work by default. Worse, they've tricked us into doing that work for them.
* From experience if you're release your (e.g.) 5th DLC, putting a small discount on older DLC massively improves their uptake at essentially no cost to you. It might feel like you're robbing yourself of future sales (something I'm a big critic of doing) but with no discount those sales don't tend to happen. Obviously, YMMV, but it's worth trying it both ways.
This is a bit of a strange turn in the opening paragraph of a review, but I want to use Dungeons of Hinterberg as a jumping off point for how we (collectively) talk about, recommend, encourage, proselytise indie games.
Recommending Indie Games
In the world of videogame commentary, the material intended to get readers to buy and play any given game tends to fall into one of two categories -
Here is a list of genres whose conventions the game hits, and how competently it hits them.
This game will take you on a specific type journey you can't get from a AAA or live-service game.
The former is kind of working on the converted - the writer takes the reader to be knowledgable and engaged with the Good Work of "play more indie games" - and as a result can feel quite cold and reductive to me?
Alternatively, the latter often feels like it oversells the experience. If expectations are set wrong, a game which already struggles for exposure can end up appealing to an audience that won't promote it.
In that vein, I'm thinking about how to talk about Dungeons of Hinterberg and neither feels fair or sufficient.
The Review
I could say it's a Zelda-lite narrative action-adventure game, that uses a Persona-like passage-of-time system to pace out the experience as you explore the village of Hinterberg's 25 magical dungeons and meet other prospective adventurers in an alternative present day setting.
I might say it's a nostalgic exploration of millenial burnout, opening ourselves up to new experiences and getting out of a funk, expressed through a blend of systems with fun characters, snappy dialogue, carefully crafted puzzles and combat to ensure a satisfying but approachable challenge. Well-balanced and cozy in its sense of progression, it doesn't hold the player to a need for perfection.
Both of these are accurate, but neither really gets at why I'd recommend DoH outside the usual circle of "people I know who like indie games". Both together also don't really get to the point of why I really enjoyed it myself.
The groundwork first - in Dungeons of Hinterberg, you're exploring a set of magical dungeons spread across 4 distinct zones each with its own set of magical abilities - analogous to the dungeon items one might find in a Legend of Zelda game. These magical abilities inform the kinds of puzzles found in an area's dungeons, and also how the player can approach combat. Some abilities might be largely useless in a fight but makes for some interesting puzzles or non-combat gameplay, where others might make combat significanly easier to the point where you miss them in other areas.
On top of this, the game is split into days, where each day has a Morning, Afternoon, Evening, and Night. Mornings for dialogue mostly, Afternoons for Exploration of the 4 areas, Evening for Socialisation, and Night for some additional minor actions to affect stats. Afternoon and Evening are the meat of the game, and the game clearly borrows a lot from the Persona games - there are a number of other people in Hinterberg who you can form friendships with, and as you progress those friendships you learn about their stories and gain bonus abilities or items. It's a very tidy system, and I'm very keen to see more devs use and experiment with it.
I found DoH to be an entirely competent experience for the first 5 hours or so, with some strikingly attractive visuals and a really dramatic and lovely sense of place. I don't think I've ever played a game set in the Austrian Alps before, and I've certainly never played a game that looked quite like DoH does either - I assume that's related, and the Alps go nice and pastel in Austria? Other than that, it had a minor sense of clunkiness to it, but never so bad that it frustrated me or got in the way - they might have polished it further, but I think the devs focused on other areas I think that was probably wise.
I played half a dozen short sessions last week, clearing the first half of the game or so, then just sat down on Saturday got totally hooked in. I played for a solid 6 hours and cleared nearly the whole game, only really stopping to have dinner. I finished it this morning in a breezy 1 hour session and honestly had a better and better time with it as I played more.
Dungeons of Hinterberg deals with the dilemma of "fully explore your mechanics" vs "don't overstay your welcome" by saying "fuck it - every dungeon explores 1 gimmick, and we're just gonna end the dungeon when we've run out of ideas." As a result the dungeons vary greatly in length, and not simply "longer towards the end", while all feeling quite complete. The rule of 3 is in play most of the time, but it feels like there's no limit on how many 3s they might cram into a single dungeon.
In particular, the third area - Hinterwald - ends with a real victory lap. There's a very cool boss fight and a final dungeon that contains my favourite little puzzles in the whole game. They could have made 10 of these things, but one was enough for me to have a great time as I was clearing up the end of the game.
Right, the end of the game. So another clever little trick DoH pulls is that you can explore all 4 areas from very early in the game - dungeons have difficulty levels entirely defined by "how tanky and cannony are the enemies" in an exponential fashion, and the difficulties aren't in the order of the areas. As such you end up bouncing around between the areas, and by extension the abilities, quite frequently and this keeps it incredibly fresh.
This allowed me to get a sense of mastery with the 4 ability-sets in parallel, and prevented me feeling like I was bogged down for 3 hours just using a set I didn't like. I think this combined with the longer term goals of the social relationships gave a really nicely tuned sense of progress and goals, but also player freedom. I'd call this one of the coziest games I've played in years, not because it doesn't challenge but because of how much control the player is in of that challenge. Time is passing, days are ticking by, but there's no obligation to use a small number of days. They just pace out the actions you can take, there's no deadline and that's kind of magical in my opinion.
In the end, I didn't attempt to 100% Dungeons of Hinterberg - it felt not in the game's spirit of letting go and finding your own things to enjoy. I completed a few friendship tracks, got my gear to a comfortable power level, and played through the end of the story - which culminates in a very satisfying and mercifully brief finale.
I wholeheartedly recommend Dungeons of Hinterberg. It has a lot to say about work, burnout, self-actualisation, selfishness, the creative economy, and the various exploitations inherent capitalism, but it lets the player interact with those themes through their own understanding of the dialogue. I think a player could get through this with strong feelings about who's right or wrong about things, without ever clocking it as "about politics" in that tiresome way. This is a tricky task, and while I like it when games are more full-bodied about their politics I respect that they managed it pretty deftly.
My goal here is to discuss Veilguard as a whole without talking much about specific plot-beats or decisions, after completing my own playthrough. I wouldn't mind reading this before playing, and I'm very spoiler-averse.
I wrote a big, 5000 word draft talking about specific things I felt fell flat with Veilguard last weekend - I had a good time writing it, I got a lot out of my head, and came to understand a lot better why my opinion on the game was souring over time. The draft itself is nigh-unreadable, but the process was valuable. It got me thinking about the relationship we have to media, and specifically the ways we analyse media that isn't necessarily made for deep analysis.
I know I'm not the only one who loves to watch "trash" and pick it apart for themes, ideas, some kind of thesis statement. I understand this to be something of a core tenet of Tumblr fandom - we're still thinking about this thing we like, and as a result we have worked out a character's whole inner world from a dozen lines of dialogue. I respect that shit. There's a lot of satisfaction in taking a piece of pop media, treating it like any work of literature, and figuring out how it all fits together.
So I played Veilguard, I enjoyed it a great deal, probably the most 7/10 game ever made - extremely competent, fun to play, hard to put down.
So I tried to think about it. Pick it apart. Find themes.
And I struggled?
I'm not saying there's nothing - there are clearly themes about trauma, and fear, and acceptance, there's this pervading sense that there's a millenial work-life balance depersonalisation thing going on. There's a big running theme around feeling the weight of our own decisions.
But to actually play around with, rotate in my mind so to speak... there really just isn't much to work with. It's very thin on the ol' narrative backbone. I think the most obvious lack is that the companions don't really have blindspots. They have A Problem and A Quirk, sometimes related, and not much more. There's no "Sten killed a family" or "Solas is clearly racist" or "" The thing about feeling our decisions, that just isn't reflected in the companions and if you pick a certain type of dialogue option consistently it falls incredibly flat.
I'll look over my partner's shoulder at her feed and there's just screeds and galleries trying to find the seeds of a half-decent romance in the most obvious male love interest, dissecting a 1-second animation and trying to build an entire unspoken character around it, nestled somewhere in his hours of voiced dialogue. Meanwhile I rewatched Buffy Season 2 recently and in Spike's first hour on screen he sets up himself, his beautiful wife, the central conflict, and a thesis statement about Buffy that the viewer can dissect.
I just don't think there's much meat on this bone, to be honest.
I wrote 10x this many words picking it apart, and after doing so I just don't care to edit and post it.
I decided to stash that post and write this one this morning when I had a shower thought - Dragon Age isn't better off with this game's release. I think rushing this out and setting a bunch of answers in stone, while rushing the writing (thus undercutting the foundation of the series - the writers are the core, the characters are the glue) and vindicating every bad instinct their parent company had that got them here. "Oh your single player action game did poorly? Maybe you should try that live-service thing again."
I think they should have taken the core of a game they had here, gutted the writing and setting and plonked the exact same gameplay on some new IP, to let Dragon Age stay the slightly-plodding but endlessly-permutative mine of headcanons and personal preferences it was for the 15 years leading up to it. Bioware get all their "return to form" reviews and folks like me who feel we can't pick it apart get to justify it with "Well at least it's not Dragon Age."
Instead, my review is just "Well, it's not Dragon Age."
Back when I was starting out as a self-motivated capital-PCG PC Gamer, the most exciting thing in the universe was modding Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.
I spent entire days installing massive overhauls, fixing my load order, and forgetting important steps in the install-guide - only to play 10 hours of a new file and feel the urge to change more. I had friends making utterly broken items and calling them "necessary fixes", or recommending a sword with 40,000 polygons in 2007. It's become a running joke at this point, but modding really was more of a hobby than actually playing the game.
| Pictured - absolute crack for 16-year-old me
I just kind of assumed that replays of PC games, especially RPGs, required mods to be interesting - surely I'd already exhausted what the base game had to offer on my first playthrough?
Reader, it's important on occasion to understand oneself to be a dipshit.
About a decade later, I was planning a third Witcher 3 playthrough - this time, I was gonna mod it to hell and back. HD textures, UI Fixes, Skill Tree Reworks, ReShade, Visual Effect mods, Combat Tweaks... I spent the best part of a day putting together 2 lists of mods - one for MUST HAVES, one for mods I wasn't going to do any hard work to install. And very quickly, I realised a decade of modding had caused my opinion on what "MUST HAVE" looked like - that list was all minor Quality of Life stuff, or removing trendy nonsense - Hiding the UI, no Minimap, Inventory Limit removers. The "maybe later" list contained all the stuff I used to consider utterly necessary but now considered a bit unnecessary.
This was, it must be said, a cause for some introspection.
I've come to the conclusion that Modding is, for the most part, an attempt to apply one's own design sensibilities onto someone else's work. "I think combat should be harder", "I think fights should be bloodier", "I think every woman in this game should have flawless hair", etc. Scan popular mods for major games of the last decade and almost every game has a "make your protag look like an Instagram influencer" mod in the top 20, because that's what people what their protagonist to look like - an extension of their own desired self-image and presence.
I think what's happened over the years is that my own preference has skewed hugely towards "let the game developers decide what's in the game" - Bethesda might have consistently terrible hair options but that doesn't mean I want to mod in hairspray and curling irons, there was a decision in there somewhere and I no longer feel the need to overrule them. Maybe I'll have some irritations with a game's design but I'm a bit more willing to stick with it and try things on their terms now. This isn't about me feeling superior - I just don't want the headache of adding instability to a game just to fix what may be a working system.
Not to say I don't still find mods interesting. A nice little insight into a very engaged corner of the player-base.
So I started playing Dragon Age 2 again recently, and had my usual "let's see what mods there are" scan of Nexusmods Most Endorsed mods and... Oh. Oh no.
Once you get past the 150 hours of RPG, the ill-health, ill-mental-health, working full-time, and the associated fatigue of all those things, there's still quite a lot of hours not accounted for by simple living.
So what did I do with that time?
Oh you know, just a [normal amount of solitaire].(https://criminallyvulgar.dev/the-zachtronics-solitaire-collection-is-really-good/).
Veilguard has loot, but I feel like it bucks the trend of the last decade or so of RPG design (I wonder if there's something deeper there...) in that it's not about filling your inventory and comparing trousers. I don't know if they cribbed it from somewhere else, I haven't played every game, but I really like their implementation - with some caveats.
There are really two inventories in Veilguard - Equipment and Junk, and both are improved over its predecessors.
Junk
| Vital flavour text
Junk is not new, and has been in the series since since DA2 I think - there are items you can pick up that exist solely for flavour and to be sold to vendors. In DA2 and DA:I they also take up valuable inventory slots, which I think is intended to encourage the player to "return to base" and sell stuff, interact with shops more. The problem is that it's a massive ball-ache.
Nobody likes finding a nice new pair of trousers and having to drop something to make room for it - it's a fundamentally irritating system. So Veilguard bins the inventory limit like a player installing their first mod, but this leaves a problem - the junk no longer serves any mechanical purpose beyond trading it for cash, so why not simply give the player cash? Ok you'd lose some flavour-text, but junk items rarely make good use of that anyway.
Veilguard solves it in 2 ways, both using the Faction System.
I won't go into detail, but Veilguard contains a handful of factions the player can curry favour with, and one of the ways you can do that is by selling your junk to them. This immediately removes the no-brainer aspect of immediately selling all your junk at the first shop - sure you'll have cash, but maybe you could get some favour elsewhere if you sell with a bit more care?
They also have certain items be worth more to certain factions - they'll pay much better for trophies of their enemies, and the like.
This strikes me as a super elegant way to solve the no-brainer junk-selling problem, keep junk relevant, and also soften the harshness of a faction-system that does require a bit of care to keep favour high. It's very video-gamey, but it works cleanly and kept me thinking about my selling decisions all game, right to the very end.
Equipment
This one might be a bit more controversial - in Veilguard, they've done away with the traditional loot system altogether, and instead each class has a pool of a dozen or 2 of each item type - a bunch of swords, shields, staves, robes, hats, boots, etc. to choose from that stay broadly the same in purpose throughout the game, but they have 2 power tracks - Level and Rarity. Level is just how big the numbers are, Rarity has 5 levels that unlock traits - special effects like "does 40 points of fire damage" or "enemies drop more gold". After a while, you stop picking up new gear and "finding loot" just upgrades the rarity of the stuff you already have, unlocking extra powers.
This drastically reduces trouser-comparison, because when I see I just picked up "Fire Sword -> Epic - Now it makes folk explode" and I'm doing some kind of Ice thing, I both don't need to consider it or remember to sell it later - it's just in my inventory if I ever decide to do the firey-explodey thing later.
There are some Unique items around to break the rule, but I generally found them to be fun gimmicks that you might be want to build an entire character around if you're some kind of sicko, nothing I was super keen to use myself.
Getting to just settle into a build is SO MUCH nicer than having to weigh up "28 damage, +15 attack, +2% attack speed" against "25 damage, +4 fire damage, +5% fire damage" every time you loot a corpse - can you tell I've been playing DA2?.
| WHO CARES?
The Downside
I'll be honest, I barely touched my equipment between hours 40 and 70. I pretty much found a build I liked, took perks that improved it, and used the same sword+shield+abilities for the entire mid-late-end game. This isn't a massive problem with the game balance, I really enjoyed the build I made, but there's a certain euphoria in the RPG experience of End-Game Loot - finding a staff that automatically melts undead or a shield that has a magical explosive shield-bash skill attached. That shit's fun, y'know? In a sense, I had fully explored Veilguard's combat system half-way through, and was just executing on it for the next 30 hours.
I beat an end-game boss at the 40-hour mark because the numbers were only really going to go up so much from there - I had all the mechanics unlocked. That felt good, but it was quite a grindy fight with such bad numbers. There was no point waiting to do it later, because I knew nothing major was going to change about my combat options and I had a winning strategy.
Overall though, this system is a massive improvement over the old way of doing things. They just need to get a bit zanier with the Unique drops - they seemed extremely balanced by all having massive downsides, and I don't know that it's necessary to do that with RPG gear. Not that this is an RPG, really.
My goal here is to discuss Veilguard as a whole without talking much about specific plot-beats or decisions, after completing my own playthrough. I wouldn't mind reading this before playing, and I'm very spoiler-averse.
If you want the short version - I recommend it, but not as a Dragon Age fan.
I feel a game like Veilguard encourages the formation of hot takes more than most - it's a big-budget, long-awaited sequel from a company that has... a poor recent track record. They've released 2 new games in the decade since the previous entry and they were, respectively, a let down and a disaster.
Mass Effect: Andromeda had all the hallmarks of an under-resourced over-pressured development, with grand ideas and limited experience behind it. Disregarding a launch rife with meme-able glitches, it still fell extremely short of the expectations of a Mass Effect fan looking to dive back into a world they loved. It was Mass Effect flavoured videogame rather than more Mass Effect. It's lucky they set it in another galaxy centuries removed from the main series, because that means they can ignore it entirely as they make ME4 - and they'll lose nothing of value in the process. The inverse is probably why they did it that way - they didn't need to port your Shepard's decisions into the game because they were irrelevant details in Andromeda, no matter how much they mattered to you.
Anthem was a complete flop of a concept, sharing enough of Mass Effect's aesthetic (suits of armour and double knees, primarily) to invite the comparison while being a clear attempt to claim an early-and-yet-too-late share of the live-service squad-shooter market. I never played it, you never played it, but it sets the scene for our main topic.
Veilguard shares a lot of the same problems as its predecessors - word is they had to broadly restart development after starting down a live-service path, and you can really feel the scars of that process. It feels insubstantial. The character relationships feel extremely of-a-procedure, encounters respawn very quickly so revisiting areas can add up to a massive amount of time, and almost nothing happens off the beaten path - you may think you've left the beaten path, but you're actually just warming it up for when you beat it later. On top of all this, Veilguard relies extremely heavily on the player having done their reading.
I want to harp on a bit about this last part. The main plot contains a handful of revelations that rely heavily on knowledge of Inquisition's DLC which started releasing months after the game's initial release - the only people who played those DLC are die-hard fans doing multiple playthroughs, or late-comers to the series who bought some kind of "Ultimate Edition" or some such. I assume the majority of DA:I players never played these DLC because I never did, and also I have professional experience that would indicate it. This is something of a pattern for Bioware, to the point where it's beyond a theory for me -
Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening (that's the official punctuation, I checked) sets up the primary conflict in DA2
Dragon Age 2: Legacy sets up Inquisition entirely.
Mass Effect didn't have Batarians until they added them in the Bring Down the Sky DLC
Mass Effect 2: Arrival is a must-play piece of context for Mass Effect 3.
At this point, I am about 95% certain that Mass Effect 4 is going to build directly on the Leviathan DLC, because that's the only reason I could ever think of to leave it out of the base game. This is me making my prediction explicit.
Anyway, back to Veilguard.
There are a handful of moments throughout where Veilguard absolutely sings as an action-adventure game, namely the big action set-pieces and their associated cutscenes, and the first 1/3 or so of the game when you just get to run around solving puzzles and doing sidequests. Seeing a treasure chest you can't get to, relating it to a nearby puzzle, and mapping out a solution is very satisfying during this period of the game. Each hub area in the game has its own kind of theme, but honestly the first one is by far the best - really well conceived, nicely executed, and doesn't overstay its welcome. Returning to it always feels nice. I wish I could say the same for the last couple, which are at best a slog when you're clearing them up in the mid-late game.
I diverted away from the set-pieces - they fuck. The finale is extremely cool, but throughout the game there are these critical missions that always feel great, getting the crew together and seeing non-party team-members scurrying around the periphery from time to time - it's crack to me. Add that to some truly spectacular visual work, art, and music, and you have a formula for some of the best action-adventure gameplay I've experienced in years.
It's just not Dragon Age, to me. Dragon Age is about characters, stories, and grey morality - poring over contradictory lore and trying to figure out who's got the better of it - there's some massive supernatural threat but the real problem you face is People and their shitty little schemes. "I won't help you save the world until you help me screw over my business partner" is such pathetic bullshit but that's Dragon Age! These people are pathetic! "Oh we'd love to help you prevent our extinction but there's an election on, see" so you're the only sane person in Thedas, crawling through mud and blood and spit and shit, not necessarily doing the right thing but doing the things that need done - at least you think they need done? Surely they need done.
This game lacks that spirit. Our protagonist has it to an extent, but Veilguard doesn't - Veilguard has all the answers, and it's happy to tell you them.
After getting in deep with the Zachtronics Solitaire Collection, I got it into my head that it must be easy enough to solve with a bit of recursive programming - Try a move, check if it's good, see what moves are possible, etc, etc.
So after work today I gave it a crack, and now 6 hours later I have a Python script that... just kind of works? I don't really know what to do with this.
I've got dozens of these "how hard could it be?" coding projects sitting on my hard drive, all of them started with the best of intentions and left hanging like my head, disheartened. I genuinely stopped expecting these things to do what I tell them, fully expecting them to collapse in a sea of complexity.
I think this one worked because I approached it starting from the idea that I knew it'd be hard to debug, so I'd best start with the ability to visualise things. I wrote a couple of tidying functions to show the board state (in colour!) without any of the cruft my algorithm relies on - just the letters. This meant I could spot weird looping behaviour just by watching it solve, and this let me stamp out a couple of bugs in minutes rather than hours.
| This is not the code of an organised mind
Not to say this is good code! It's trash, and absolute mess. The last problem I had to solve - a deep recursion of not-quite-identical states the algorithm kept trying - was put to bed by just randomising the order of the moves it tries. This took it from an infinite loop that couldn't move forward to an extremely messy process that kind of can't miss if a solution is possible.
It solves randomly generated deals (if they can be solved) in a minute or so, and the one board from the game that I tried solves in under a second - I suspect they ranked the random seeds they made in difficulty and only put the easiest ones in the game.
I have a couple of other things I want to do with this before I post about the code itself:
Process screenshots for input using an OCR library
Come up with some heuristics to estimate difficulty, then test them against the algorithm's solve time.
I'd like a way to visualise all the different moves the model tried, and attempt to show depth and "richness" of solutions with it. I have some ideas, but that's a ways off for now.
I'm extremely late to the game on this one, but the mobile version of the solitaire collection was released recently and it's really good? I played and beat each of the "minigame" solitaires once, liked a couple enough to play them again (Shenzhen Solitaire in particular really interested me), but then I got to the Fortune's Foundation, the Hard-Mode Tarot Solitaire and, uhhhhh... let's just say it got a hold of me.
I spent a week or so playing it occasionally, struggling and resetting early a bunch. I got about 8 wins over that time but didn't really understand it.
Then on Thursday it just clicked. 15 wins. 20 wins. 29, 36, 40...
This shit is goooooooood.
I played a bunch of solitaire when I was younger, but it's fair to say I've never thought about a solitaire as much as this one. It just hits the sweet spot of requiring attention but occasionally just being an easy deal. You can still screw up the easy ones, but once you learn to spot the standard pitfalls - overconsolidating, creating knotted piles, throwing away empty spaces - it becomes very natural while remaining a challenge on less perfect deals. I'm typically not a fan of move-1-card solitaire modes, but I'm very glad I didn't hit the settings option for "move stacks" because I think it would have ruined this game for me.
My 39th win had no cards put away for the first 10 minutes or so - this was a shot at my first 3-win-streak, so I agonised over the moves only making a few dozen in this time. Everything was tied up under their partner cards. Eventually, I had a couple of large stacks primed to go, but almost all of the trigger cards (2s, 3s, high and low major arcana) were at the bottom of the piles. For a good 15 further minutes, I painstakingly untied this gordian knot, moving 3-4 cards at a time just to get access to more space, then before I was aware it was happening, the knot fell to pieces as if Alexander the Great had got his sword involved, all the hard parts cleanly severed and it was a formality to finish.
I'm talking like this about a Solitaire game.
Anyway I highly recommend the Zachtronics Solitaire Collection if you enjoy puzzles, or just have ever enjoyed solitaire. It's much better to chill out to than a clicker or match-3, and there's a real sense of satisfaction in learning to spot the core patterns that make them up. Even if the hardest game mode doesn't appeal, there are many other easier (and shorter!) modes.
I don't think he has any aspirations of making "the best game ever", but he has a real talent for finding a tight conceptual space and exploring it fully and concisely.
So many of the figures from my early indiegame culture days have gone on to massive corporate positions, become programming purists, or given up the job. I started following Tom's work and writing during a very formative time in the development of my taste in games, and was on the beta-testing list of Gunpoint over a decade ago. He is, entirely without his knowledge, a link I have to my younger self. Browsing pentadact.com again for the first time in years feels like revisiting the internet we all yearn for in the 3-websites-but-theyre-actually-apps era. Then I went to check out my first indie-game central repository in tigsource.com, and now I'm sad again.
I don't think he'd take it as negative when I say his games still have that same feel as a decade ago. His voice is still present in all his projects, as is his love of lobbing cunts out windows - a love I share. They've increased in scale over the years but never in a way that felt like stepping outside of the space Gunpoint occupied. I've played 6 hours of Tactical Breach Wizards since yesterday, in 5 sessions, and I'm loving it. I keep sending my partner screenshots - I'm sure she loves that! It's funny and sharp, the tactics are crunchy but forgiving, the difficulty is interesting and optional. A slam-dunk really.
I've struggled to connect with smaller games lately. Something about the extremely finite quality of time I have outside of work means I confusingly want BIG games with BIG narratives that MATTER. I don't want to "waste" an evening or weekend playing a game that isn't going to "do" something. This is a flawed perspective on many levels, but we're not talking about rational thoughts here, just the ennui that means I end up rewatching an old youtube series rather than doing something I actually enjoy.
An aspect missing from a lot of the "powerful computers vs game development" conversation is like...
I would like to run games in a way that doesn't cause my room to hit 40C in summer. I don't know that we need >200W constant energy consumption in The Current Climate, let alone the 600W+ PC gaming typically approaches.
"Our job is so much easier now" is nice but making games with the tools available is "your job" while playing them is a hobby that is getting prohibitively expensive to keep up with year on year while wasting a collosal amount of energy - and by extension, fossil fuels.
I'm loving what better tools have meant for the industry in that sub-AAA space, the results speak for themselves, but it's kind of tiresome to see people just list the points that support their main view while neglecting that upsides for one group are usually a compromise for the rest.
If you sell 100k copies of a game, and the average player puts 10 hours into it, optimisations that save 10W make for a megawatt-hour of energy - that's quite a lot? Thousands of miles in a typical electric car. It's also less air-con to counter the extra heat produced, possibly less demand so weaker/cheaper/older GPUs can be used at less environmental cost.
I know these aren't the considerations that developers typically make, it's all too distributed and driven by how players choose to play, but thinking about it has been my job lately, and it's hard to appreciate how much damage our games are doing, entirely passively.
A dragon and gryphon both on hind legs roaring, with a cool and sexy protagonist in the foreground looking cool and sexy and slightly off-balance in the foreground.
I took a bunch of screenshots during my playthrough, as I did in the first game. Mostly action stuff, but this is the last one I took because honestly I felt like there was nowhere to go from here. It occurred at a perfect moment in the game, at the end of a series of events nobody is interested in hearing, and I think it looks neat.
Kaze understands the N64 better than pretty much anyone currently active, and has been working on a complete engine rewrite of SM64 and a commensurate game with it, and answers the questions most of us had after watching pannenkoek's video: How hard would it be to patch the SM64 ROM to fix these?
Video here, but long story short (I'm not an expert, just tangentially aware of goings on):
The Super Mario Maker servers are getting shut down (just for the first game) on April 8th - a bunch of SMM players are on a campaign to make sure that no levels are left without a successful clear on the record books before "zero day".
There's 1 level left, a 10 second level from 2017 called Trimming The Herbs by a well known and liked SMM player/streamer who no longer has an online presence - naming them doesn't seem all that valuable to the story. Thus far nobody has beat it, with a few of the best players clocking 10s of hours so far.
There's some highly circumstantial suspicion that this may have been cheated, primarily from the player who's put the most recent time into attempting to clear it - the most damning detail comes at 3:07 in the linked video - the run is shown as if it is the first attempt after loading the level from the menu. This was standard practice at the time, but there would be a clear cut in the video where they removed failed attempts. This clear video contains 0 evidence of any cuts, implying that it was the first attempt after loading from the menu.
It's just incredibly hard to imagine how that would happen on a level that would have likely required 10,000s of attempts to complete in 2017, if not more.
The logistics of how cheating could have been executed are unclear at the moment - there are some known methods but none line up tremendously well with the existence of the clear video. As the linked video states, it's known that a hacked WiiU can be used to upload a level without actually beating it legit, but that wouldn't produce a clear video like we know exists for TTH. WiiU TAS tools weren't available in 2017 (quick google... they still aren't I think?). The player had AutoHotkey installed, but that's almost anti-evidence - it sucks at TASing because of inconsistency in its timings. My best bet if cheating were confirmed would be some kind of slow-down to record the clear vid, combined with a WiiU hack to get the level uploaded - i.e. two separate clears - one for the video, one for the upload. It doesn't look like slowdown is easy/doable on 2017 emulators, but it's my strongest guess.
It's all highly circumstantial (including a bunch of other individually weak components mentioned in the video, like "idk he kind of wasn't that good at SMM") but for me the story vaguely clicks together as - if you were looking to cheat in a game with no, what's the first thing you'd try? Tell me it's not AHK with an emulator lmao. When that doesn't work you move onto something else and maybe that works, idk. Like I say, all extremely circumstantial, and probably moot if they end up clearing the level in the next few weeks - which I suspect they will.
This is all wooly and unclear enough that I won't be tagging it at all, no interest in discoverability here, just thought the kind of people following me might be interested.
It makes sense, to him it doesn't seem like he thought too much of it beyond wanting to make cool hard levels - he couldn't have foreseen it becoming a massive community-wide problem, and given that he pretty much vanished from the scene after posting it, I don't think you can call it a clout thing. Just an unfortunate result of seemingly harmless sleight-of-hand.
I'm calling this a win for expert opinion because the comments on every post/video about it being faked are rife with "evidence is flimsy, come back with hard evidence" comments, and this happens every time someone opens their mouth about their suspicions - it's hard to get hard evidence if nobody acknowledges the possibility, and it's usually very easy to disprove once the question is in the air if a person is being falsely accused. See this Trackmania case, where someone got too gung-ho with accusations and just talked to the person in question to resolve it.
Openly raising a question without malice is the easiest way to resolve it once harder evidence becomes impossible to gather. Just don't be weird about it.
I'm so glad random encounters are mostly dead. I know this is actually an extremely lukewarm take (misled you with the title, to be honest I feel terrible about it) but it bears reiterating how nice it is to be at least partially responsible for the decision to get into a fight in these games.
I'm sure SMT3 is very good, but trying to play it immediately after SMTV was utterly unbearable. I've been playing Tales of Arise and it also takes the "dodgeable overworld entities" approach and it's just so fucking nice. To be able to sprint through areas. I've already been through. Without losing my train of thought.
I'm not enough of an aficionado on JRPGs to know how much the ratio of random/non-random encounters in them has changed over the years, but it feels very much like a throwback stylistic choice for a modern game to do it, rather than a pure genre expectation like it was 20 years ago.
Sure, exceptions have always existed - been a hot minute but I'm pretty sure Chrono Trigger has non-random encounters - but I can't describe how unpleasant I find walking down an empty corridor and having 3 battles that all trigger with some loud noise and a movie-maker transition. It's a trope worth killing imo.
Sometimes I'm just grateful for the arrow of time, yknow?
But I took one look at the gameplay loop and knew it wasn't for me. Not sure if it's the reset-heavy nature of the scaling, or the lack of look-ahead info, or the way it favours plays that feel bad over plays that feel good, or...
Well it's probably all of that, but odd that I could see that without playing it myself and was able to dodge buying it. A rare moment of self-restraint.
Watching a Persona challenge run video and... look, I'm just interested how you went about doing something I have no interest in doing myself. You whined about failing fights a bunch with your ruleset, but fuck it man, you did the work I didn't so I'm not about to give you shit, armchair quarterbacking your decisions.
But buddy, when you look at dozens of articles by queer people disappointed in how P4 handles queer themes and say they're getting it all wrong - buddy. I'm gonna vague-post about you, and you're gonna have to live with that shame.
The whole fucking persona thing is literally bookended with "Thou are I, and I am thou". There's no ambiguity there. The shadow versions of them are reflections of their true selves, not exclusively other people's perspectives of them. They have to live with those aspects of themselves whether they want to or not, because that's who they are. Kanji alone disproves the idea that it's external pressures driving their self-denial.
That's so incredibly core to the theming of the first 99% of Persona 4. That's why the epilogue is a kick in the face to queer folk - every queer narrative is resolved with "ah, but it's so much easier being normal with my complementary gender romantic interest."
Look, I love P4, it's the first one I played and it still scratches the same itch it did in 2009 - but you've got to reckon with how that biases your reading of it if you're gonna post about it in your video.
Buddy, I was gonna follow you until you decided to bring your "I could write an essay" shithead analysis into your unrelated challenge video. You didn't have to say shit about it, but here we are.
I know it's cringe to enjoy things with sincerity, but the pacing and arrangement of these clips works extremely well, made me genuinely emotional having so many classic early RLCS goals where I knew the exact movements ahead of time, against the utterly disgusting mechanics of the modern game.
Garrett's fake while Fireburner gets the demo, I did a little hop in my seat right as Garrett does the double jump - it was just a move to make sure the ball stayed clear of his teammate, but it's a genuinely iconic button-press embedded in my psyche.
Really recommend the whole thing even if you're not wild about RL, it's a great video.
thinking about how the sequel to one of the tightest, simplest platformers of the 3D era was a story heavy, open-world prequel crammed with side-nonsense and backtracking
thinking about how if they'd just implemented the (good) mechanical improvements and made another 6-hour parkour game, it'd probably be one of my favourite games of all time as Mirrors Edge is already
thinking about how the AAA need to make everything bigger and more complicated and open-world robbed us of what could have been a mainstay modern franchise with like 6 games by now. tight, clearly scoped, fun games
thinking about how the big western developer/publishers so rarely are willing to iterate on an idea naturally, and will simply cram every successful new idea into the existing highest-revenue mould
thinking about how they kill genres before they have a chance to become idioms
genuinely wild to me that nobody took that concept and ran with it
the just cause games superficially ape the aesthetic of destruction and hugely amp-up the mayhem aspect, but there's no room for the careful planning of RF:G
teardown is the most obvious comparison, but it's just on a completely different scale. I don't need full voxel-level destruction, I just want structures that can collapse in a way that my CPU finds taxing
hardspace shipbreaker honestly scratches a similar itch, but it's a shade too controlled and the lack of gravity is a real let down (he he he)
in my view a true successor would be of a similar or greater world scale, with larger and more intricately constructed buildings, and a plot that gave you reason not to simply use a rocket launcher from 100m away. the tools RF:G had were honestly great, I don't know that you'd need to go too far beyond what they offer. further simulated chaos would be great (visions of turning a building into a wrecking-ball swinging from another building...) but not necessary I think.
idk I can't be tripping here, it feels like this should be more doable in 2024 than it was in 2009
nobody has ever chosen the mimic out of desperation before, gotta be a good sign
For real though, this was my 2nd win for the Hard winstreak achievement and it was a clusterfuck from start to finish.
Had the dragon as the final boss and he rolled the 15 attack every turn, killing one party member at a time until the mimic was all that was left and he rolled the smaller attack. Mimic blocked and let the single point of poison finish the job.
Basic attack Yellow is goated though, carried the run doing chunky damage every turn.
I'm not about to recount the whole thing because that's not really the point, but it's resulted in one of the best videos around on statistics and the idea of comparing ones own performance in a videogame to that of others.
Related to my last post, I've been wondering about the idea of modelling a speedrun as a markov chain or some other stochastic model.
It's always been how I think about them, a series of steps with a few possible (sometimes recursive) outcomes and a set amount of time associate with each.
The idea may have legs as an educational tool at best, but honestly I'm really interested in the idea of comparing high and low-risk strategies across many attempts.
Razbuten has a lot to say here, and kind of comes to the "idk man there's no perfect answer" conclusion, entirely fair imo. I've never really bought into the "just add difficulty settings to Dark Souls" idea because like, cool, now you have 3 games to balance, that'll be fun to make.
I think it's fine and also good for some games to require more from the player than they initially want to give, and I also think it's fine for players to bounce off of that. "Not everything should be made for everyone" is a bit trite, but if games are on any level an artistic expression it should be acceptable to design them in a way that repels some portion of its potential audience.
What I really want to get into though is the way this always centres around real-time combat mechanics as difficulty - that makes sense, it's the most obvious thing that will stop a player continuing with a game they otherwise enjoy - but there are other barriers to entry that don't get the same kind of attention.
My brother is on his 3rd playthrough of Disco Elysium. I cannot play that game. I know it's a masterpiece, I love the aesthetic, and the writing is frankly delicious. But each of the 4 times I've tried to get into it, I've got an hour in and my brain is melting from all the text. There's just so much writing. And you have to read all of it or you're not really playing Disco Elysium. I'm enjoying what's written, but after a couple thousands words of text-on-screen I have a near-medical need to do something purely mechanical like play Rocket League before I'll even consider going back to read some more, and that could take days to recover.
This isn't a dyslexia thing, it's maybe something of an attention disorder thing, but it is nonetheless a barrier to entry that I could only overcome by playing the game in a way that's either not fun or antithetical to the design.
Responding to nex3's Wildfrost review on backloggd
That trinity of deckbuilder roguelikes is the three games that I've tried, enjoyed, and recommended to my partner with great success. Other games have been interesting to her, but those three have all racked up dozens or hundreds of hours for both of us. I really love these games.
I played Wildfrost a few months ago, so it's possible there were some changes, but while it's easily a top 3 of the genre, it sits in third for me because it's much harder to read than the other two. I posted about this on the other site when playing:
"Man I really enjoy Wildfrost but it really needs that Monster Train "you're gonna fucking die if you end your turn like this" UI element.
A game with this many interactions really needs to help the player out imo"
I found myself leaning heavily towards simple non-chaotic strategies in Wildfrost because of this, and that frankly made the game less fun. Monster Train is a much more complicated game at its core, but the UI gives incredible feedback on what different moves will do, and that really elevates it imo.
I'll be taking another look at it to see if this has improved, but if losing hour-long run to a third-iteration interaction you didn't see coming sounds like a bad time, I'd recommend you play this game pretty safe.
I'm always fascinated by "Guy who plays [GENRE] games for a living reviews [GENRE] game" stuff, because it offers an interesting window into why people might choose to do that for a living, but also why most people don't.
A few months ago when Age of Wonders 4 launched this happened - I follow a lot of strategy game youtubers so I saw a lot of talk about it, but when I came to play it myself I found I just don't have the depth of experience in the genre to really access what they were talking about as a new pinnacle. It's very good, but I'm just not getting why it's amazing - I need to sink a few thousand more hours into strategy games before I can really appreciate the multitude of choices without massive decision fatigue.
Lies of P looks like it might be a similar sort of deal. IronPineapple is concerned that the wider gaming press may be engaging with it poorly, giving it praise while still approaching it as just another soulslike a la Mortal Shell, and attempting to squeeze it into the boxes they already understand - playing it like Sekiro and getting frustrated with parry timing, or like Bloodborne and getting frustrated at how punishing health-loss is. He makes the case that it's a synthesis of the two that requires the player to really engage with all the game's mechanics and consider options at all times and, well...
That's a really "Guy who plays [GENRE] games for a living" kind of thing to praise.
But also, maybe major outlets should recognise this limitation when reviewing niche genre pieces like Lies of P? Elden Ring might have sold 10s of millions of copies, but it's wildly accessible compared to the rest of the Soulslike genre, and a big evolution in something From has been doing well since Dark Souls - it lets you fuck around. Elden Ring is happy for you to become an expert on one stupid game mechanic and just ride that mechanic through to the ending, just having fun in the various glass-filled sandboxes they lay out for you. Sure, it's hard, and learning attack patterns helps, but you can also just go grab one of the dozens of massively OP weapons and adjust your build to fit if you want to cruise for a bit. Or call in some help. Or spam jars, or aromatics, or...
Anyway Lies of P isn't that game. This is the best justification for dropping the Soulslike genre tag I've seen to date, because it's mechanically similar, but the design is totally different. It doesn't want you to perfect the one mechanic it's built around - it wants you to learn every one of the dozen mechanics they put into it, and they've designed the boss encounters to keep exploiting any potential weaknesses you might have in that knowledge. It's 80% parry 20% dodge/roll, and you need to fucking study if you want to pass that test. You will need to be aggressive to recover health, you will need to understand how blocking aids health recovery, you will need to learn charge attack timing, boss attack windows, item exploitation...
The whole Soulslike genre is built on ideas like this, and it's just not very like Dark Souls. If you love From games there's just no guarantee this is going to appeal, because you probably cheese your way through them, and these genre games are made for the freaks who don't. A normal person who sunk a hundred hours into DS3 isn't going to suddenly click into a non-From Soulslike game like they did Elden Ring.
I think reviewing them in the same breath is just the wrong approach - the audience just isn't the same. Lies of P outwardly appeals to people who loved Elden Ring and just assumed a high-quality Soulslike would be a similar experience, and while the coverage is probably better than they could have expected if they hadn't leaned on that reference, it's not going to do wonders for their review metrics.
From what I can tell Lies of P is really good, but only if you're that particular kind of freak.
I've been happy to give Starfield a fair shake so far - it's a Bethesda game, and people expecting some kind of Red Dead Redemption Man's Sky ultra-game were deluding themselves into disappointment.
I had clear expectations - some chunky combat, interesting systems, make-your-own-fun, and mostly terrible companions. And it delivered on that nicely in the first 20 or so hours.
But since then it's been a bunch of roadblocks. Mostly mechanical stuff and systems nonsense that I've been able to trudge through and find my own fun (nailed the third tenet there, Todd!)
But I just did a mission that actually made me put down the controller, lean back in my seat, and sigh "dude this game suuuuuuucks"
Minimised: Description of a mission that suuuuuuucks (it's... a long one)
So I have to Aqcuire an item from an eccentric's collection, deep within his lair.
Alright, this setup fucking rules, I love this bullshit.
You can fight or talk your way in, love that for me. My mandatory companion can chime in and "ruin" things, but you can just talk your way around that as if it didn't happen. Ok fair enough.
Once inside, you can fight or talk your way further in. Alright, there's layers, we're still cooking.
You can talk to some unscrupulous guards, who offer information about a distraction and a hidden way into the vault. FUCK. YES. We are cooking. What's more, I can bribe them to join me should a fight happen to break out. This rules.
Then you meet the big guy and can fight or talk your way all the way in... or let the mandatory companion talk you in? Ok that kind of sucks though, if the companion can do this in an unmissable way, why not just make that the whole plan? Or like a fun missable option if you don't bring them along when they ask to be brought? I'm just not allowed to miss anything, ok. After Baldur's Gate 3, that feels very jarring but hey, different game, different goals, we roll with these.
He walks us the long way down after we sweet-talk him, and shows us the item and refuses to sell. So we have 2 options - grab it and fight him, or fight him and grab it. That's all the game presents.
Ok so I back out of the conversation and walk away, go find the hidden way into the vault and... he's just standing there by the item in the vault. With nobody to talk to, just... looking at the item.
Ok, clearly I was supposed to do this without walking with him to the vault - his guards seem chill with me, so I reload a save, don't talk to him, wander down 90% of the way to the hidden way into the vault, where a guard suddenly goes hostile. Oh shit, so this area is off limits. It's a vault I suppose? Figures.
But this guard is posted staring at the only door you can use, so I cannot get past without a distraction. OH FUCK THE DISTRACTION!
So I set of the distraction, people are fighting and dying all over the place but they haven't gone hostile to me! BINGO! I save-scum sneak past the guard, through the hidden way into the vault, gently open the case, pick up the item...
And everyone goes hostile, magically recognises that I've stolen it, and all the exits are being watched like the previous one so I'm forced to fight my way out through his dozens of guards.
What was the fucking point of any of that?
So I fight my way out, it's a fucking massacre, I one-shot like 20 guards and decide "in for a penny, in for a pound" so I might as well go kill the captain. 20 more guards later, I shoot him a bunch and when he hits 0HP he surrenders... and I can tell him to make his guards stand down.
And my brain goes into overdrive. Hold the fuck on a second.
I reload my save where I'm standing in front of him, about to speak to him for the first time. I pull out my hand cannon, and I blast him in the fucking face. He immediately surrenders, no other shots are fired. He tells his crew to stand down. And I get to grab the item with only a minor bounty that you get with ANY of the possible options.
That's the cleanest solution to this quest, in terms of body-count and time.
So the top-level summary here (this is how I make you go back and read that screed, because there's just no way this is true, right?):
They set up and demonstrate the idea of multiple paths through.
They set up multiple avenues of attack beyond simple brute force.
None of those options work.
You have to fight.
The pacifist solution is to shoot the boss in the face without speaking to him.
I had a feeling after watching a youtuber play it that I wouldnt like it much, and was pretty sure of the reasons why - I've played a lot of different idle games over the years, and the was VS manages progression is just pure idle game mobile design.
That doesn't make it bad by my standards, it's just kind of an uninteresting puzzle to me these days. That is, there's basically no puzzle, the numbers will be going up, and we have a schedule to keep to.
This relates to my "managed progression in roguelites" thing but honestly is so much more distilled - there's really not much game outside the progression here.
I feel like I could talk in excessive rambling length about this but the pursuit of balanced, consistent meta-progression in roguelites really has stifled the genre for me, and has me continually going back to the GOATs like Isaac and Slay the Spire.
Hades was the first one to really hit me with the Pokemon-game realisation ("the numbers just get bigger no matter what I do") that usually precedes me losing motivation and dropping a game, but it's definitely becoming more common with stuff like Vampire Survivors getting impassioned "GOTY snubbed" calls.
These games are clearly great and I'm glad people are enjoying them, but it does feel like it's getting hard to find a solid roguelite with a new idea that actually wants me to play it for myself.
I finally got round to finishing Forbidden West this weekend, after dropping off of it for 80% through the main story about 8 months ago.
It's a cool game, but one where it feels like they backed themselves into a corner with the scope - they made a really big map and progress through it really falters.
The opening area (maybe 10% of the map) is packed and took days to get through. The 2nd major zone feels really nicely laid out - I happily chugged through this, doing meaningful exploration and learning without feeling like I was letting the END OF THE WORLD main quest stall out.
But that third major bit, far West of the main base, when you're hunting down the last pieces of the puzzle... there's just so much ground to cover and so little reason to take your time because you need to STOP THE END OF THE WORLD. Which is IN PROGRESS BY THE WAY. That last chunk of the game before the true endgame was a real slog.
The endgame itself is very cool though, honestly wish the game had been more focused on those set-pieces than the vast array of crafting, tiered-gear, and minigames. This game needed 10x more "the crew ride off on a mission" cutscenes.
It's a really cool game and one I have a lot of affection for, but the scope and pacing seem entirely off - it was a 50 hour playthrough of a game I really like with systems I enjoy, and it felt significantly longer.
| Obligatory tierlist
| Pictured - absolute crack for 16-year-old me
| Vital flavour text
| WHO CARES?
| This is not the code of an organised mind
| The final boss
A dragon and gryphon both on hind legs roaring, with a cool and sexy protagonist in the foreground looking cool and sexy and slightly off-balance in the foreground.
not even close
cowardice or discretion, who can say?