T w e n t y S i d e d
In a normal year, I’ll play a few dozen games. The top few will make the “best of” list and the bottom few will make the “disappointment” list and everything in the middle will be forgotten. But this year is weird. If you stick the two lists together, you’ll have basically everything I played.
But before we talk about that, let’s talk about what I didn’t play.
The No-Show List
(I only bring this stuff up because I know someone will ask “But what about Game X?”.)
I wasn’t excited about Last of Us Part II. Shit, the last thing I wanted in 2020 was a game that wallowed in sadness and misery. I skimmed through the cutscenes on YouTube and I’m glad I skipped it. I have a very specific hatred of revenge stories that end the way this one did. Hoo boy. It would have made me miserable while I played it, and angry when I got to the end. On top of that, there was a bunch of nasty flame-war business between fans, haters, developers, and game journos over this one. Yuck.
I wasn’t excited about Ghost of Tsushima. I don’t know why. I know everyone loved it. The screenshots look amazing, it has beautiful music, wonderful atmosphere, etc etc. I just wasn’t interested. Maybe this is related to my general fatigue with fantasy settings. Yes, I’m sure the forests of this Japanese game are stylistically different from the euro-forests of Witcher 3. The peasants wear different clothes, the swords have a different shape, and the politics are different. But I’m done. No more horseback riding for a while. Let’s do something with robots and spaceships. Please.
Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales. The last Spider-Man game took my top spot in 2018. During my retrospective on it, I commented that the game had stuff I lovedThe web-swinging, the open world, the characters. and a lot of stuff I hatedThe feud between the writer and the gameplay designer where neither seemed to have respect for what the other was doing.. While I liked the game, I had a long list of things that I felt really needed to be addressed in the sequels.
Then in September Sony showed off a gameplay demo that made it clear they were going to double down on everything I hated: Quicktime events. Cutscene stupidity. Combat that focuses on the stupid overpowered weapon wheel at the expense of the brawling mechanics. Generic space marine goon villains.
Horizon: Zero Dawn came to the PC back in August. I’d heard good things about it from its Playstation launch back in 2017. I nearly picked it up, but then I saw the PC port was plagued by technical issues. There was eventually a patch and the game seems to be on solid footing now, but by the time that happened we’d already entered the end-of-year deluge and I had more new titles than I could reasonably hope to play.
It’s too bad this thing didn’t launch a little sooner, and a little better. I really could have used this one in those slow summer months when nothing was coming out.
EDIT: Forgot to mention the FF7 Remake. I own it. I just need to hook up my PS4 again.
Okay. That’s enough excuses. Let’s talk about my disappointments for 2020…
Doom Eternal
I wasn’t sure if I should put this one at the bottom of my best-of list or at the bottom of my disappointments list. This game had a few great moments. Seeing regular human beings react to our protagonist was fun. The art in the last chapter of the game really knocked my socks off. The core gameplay loop is just as strong as it was back in 2016.
On the other hand, Marauders suck. These things are a fun-killing chore and I have no desire to tangle with them ever again.
At first I thought this was a “git gud” problem. I just needed to figure out how to beat them without getting my ass kicked and I could go back to having fun. So I stuck with it until I got a feel for how you’re supposed to fight them. Now that I know what I’m doing and can kill them reliably, I can say these foes are definitively 100% hot garbage.
The trick with the Marauder is that he’s immune to EVERYTHING. Shoot him, and he ducks behind his shield. Splash rocket damage? Shield. Hitscan weapons? Shield. You don’t get to damage him until he allows it.
If you want to damage him, then you wait for his eyes to flash like he’s a Mario boss or something. So you just stand there like a turret, waiting for the light to blink so you can hurt him. It’s like playing a game of whack-a-mole, except there’s only one mole. It manages to be difficult without being interesting. There’s no depth or complexity or layers. Read the strategy guides and they all tell you the same thing: Super-shotgun. Here you’ve got this huge arsenal, a bunch of mobility options, and some special moves, and none of it matters. You just use the one weapon and the one strategy: Wait for the light to blink and knock a chip off his health bar.
Oh, maybe you want to use the BFG? This is literally what this weapon is for. You save up the BFG ammo so you can brush aside troublesome foes. But nope! He’s magically immune to that too. You HAVE to play whack-a-mole. You don’t like whack-a-mole? Then you don’t Like Doom Eternal, because once he’s introduced, there’s a Marauder on every level.
At several points last year I’d see a Doom Eternal meme, laugh, and then think, “Hey. I remember this game had some cool moments. Maybe I should give it another go.” But then I’d remember the flow-breaking tedium of Marauder fights and change my mind. I don’t have time for that kind of dumb bullshit.
On top of this were some additional out-of-game annoyances. I got the game through Bethesda’s ridiculous storefront, and that went about as well as you would expect. But what killed it for me was when Bethesda rolled out some rootkit anti-cheat bullshit that installed itself without asking. As someone who played single-player and never cared about fighting randos on the internet, I didn’t appreciate having something so dire installed on my machine without consent or even notification. That would be bad enough for a regular publisher, but allowing the people who caused Fallout 76Yes, different developer, but the same publisher. And ultimately the publisher gets the final say in whether or not something is good enough to ship. to make changes to your operating system is like putting The Illusive Man in charge of your research team.
Yes, Bethesda removed the anti-cheat a week later, but by that time I’d already uninstalled the game and the launcher. I wasn’t about to re-install all that crap just so I could bask in the tedium of more marauder fights.
Journey to the Savage Planet
This was a game with charming marketing and bland design. I liked the fun colorful trailers, but the moment-to-moment gameplay was pretty dull.
For me the game fell into the terrible abyss between Open-World Sandbox and Bespoke Linear Experience. The world is premade and you’re limited to a fixed progression, but you have to chase after that progression by running around an open-ish world. It’s not open enough to allow for creativity or setting your own goals, but it’s not directed enough to keep things interesting. After a few hours I felt like I was groping around, trying to find the developer’s hidden railroad tracks.
The reward for progress was usually a humorous little video from your outrageously irresponsible corporate employer. It was cute, but it was basically the same joke every time. And that joke was a lot funnier when Portal did it 13 years ago, slightly less funny when Satisfactory did it last year, and much less funny the third time around.
I got a few hours into it and gave up. Maybe I quit just before it got good or whatever, but there are only so many hours I’m willing to spend on a game before it needs to hold up its end of the bargain. Even in the long mid-year gaming drought of 2020, I never had any desire to go back and give this a second try.
Amnesia Rebirth
This team made one of the scariest games of all time: Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Then they followed up with SOMA. That wasn’t particularly scary, but it had a few good moments and lots of interesting ideas.
But here we are at Rebirth, a game with no scares and no interesting ideas. How did this happen? Where did it go wrong? I believe the people that made this game are smart, hardworking, and creative, and yet this game never made me feel anything beyond irritation and boredom.
It’s true that you don’t want to give away too much when you’re trying to scare the audience: Don’t show the whole monster. Don’t explain everything about how it works. Leave some room for the imagination. The best way to scare someone is to present the audience with a mysterious danger and let them scare themselves.
But Rebirth was so hands-off that it didn’t even bother to tell me to be scared in the first place. Your plane crashes in the desert at the start of the game. That might be scary in a practical sense, but the game never hinted that I was hungry or thirsty. Instead it just had me crawl through dark caves and then it told me I was afraid of the dark. My character would freak out if she lingered in the darkness for too long, but she never did anything to bring me along for the ride.
The focus on darkness as a threat was a double fail, because:
1) Darkness itself isn’t dangerous. It’s where danger can hide, sure. But the game never gave me any reason to believe there was a monster hiding in the darkness. As far as I could tell, there was nothing out there. Nothing wanted to hurt me, or hunt me, or punish me, or whatever.
2) The darkness forces the player to focus on the light mechanics, which are absurd and illogical video game contrivances.
I can only carry ten matches. I must expend matches to light the candles I find; I can’t use candles to light other candles. There are small lamps that burn forever, but I’m not allowed to pick those up. Instead I have to carry around this enormous lantern that burns fuel faster than a muscle car. You’re constantly worrying about limiting your exposure to darkness, but nothing about creating light is intuitive or reasonable.
In the end, my enemy wasn’t a monster. It was my own character. I’d spend too long in the darkness and she would throw a fit, pass out, and I’d wake up at a previous location with some of my progress un-done. Instead of being afraid of some unknown horror, I was pissed at my character for being a massive baby.
I finally gave up when I reached the building with the radio. The layout made it obvious that I needed to get into the radio room, and so I needed to blunder around in the dark to find a way up to the second floor, and then find a way from the second floor down into the radio room. Three times I found a way upstairs, and three times I found a route back down to the first. But all of the routes were one-way trips back to the start of the level. Eventually I realized I was trying to play Chutes and Ladders with a child that constantly wanted to freak out over nothing and flip the board.
I wasn’t just bored, I was restless. I was eager for something as mentally stimulating and straightforward as a monster attack.
Okay, I’m done bellyaching now. Next time we’ll talk about the stuff I liked.
Footnotes:
[1] The web-swinging, the open world, the characters.
[2] The feud between the writer and the gameplay designer where neither seemed to have respect for what the other was doing.
[3] Yes, different developer, but the same publisher. And ultimately the publisher gets the final say in whether or not something is good enough to ship.
Rage 2
The game was a dud, and I'm convinced a big part of that is due to the way the game leaned into its story. Its terrible, cringe-inducing story.
Batman: Arkham Origins
A breakdown of how this game faltered when the franchise was given to a different studio.
Bethesda’s Launcher is Everything You Expect
From the company that brought us Fallout 76 comes a storefront / Steam competitor. It's a work of perfect awfulness. This is a monument to un-usability and anti-features.
Are Lootboxes Gambling?
Obviously they are. Right? Actually, is this another one of those sneaky hard-to-define things?
Control
A wild game filled with wild ideas that features fun puzzles and mind-blowing environments. It has a great atmosphere, and one REALLY annoying flaw with its gameplay.
Todd Howard was probably behind you in his corporeal form screaming “You will install it! And you will like it! Just like you did for Skyrim!”
You’re wrong. Doom Eternal is GOTY. And so is Hades.
What? What do you mean Shamus is wrong?
He explained that an enemy type makes the game not fun for him to play, because it breaks the rhythm and only one strategy works. How can his feelings be wrong? Is there some secret strategy that would make Marauders fun to fight?
Jeez, your comment is so flippant and I’m so annoyed that I had to comment. I’ve been reading this blog for 10+ years and never felt like commenting until this stupid comment.
I’m glad you had fun with Doom. I haven’t played it and so don’t care either way. But saying someone is wrong without offering a rebuttal or other point is so tiring.
URGH!
I mean, they’re a tomato. I’m not sure you should expect a deep and complex reasoning behind their opinion.
Even worse, they’re probably in a mirror, which explains the entire comment.
Of course Shamus is wrong! Didn’t you hear that he doesn’t even like Dark Souls? That means that all of his opinions on everything are wrong! It’s science!
Welcome to the comment board.
I liked what you said and the way you said it! It’s just too bad it took ten years and a dumb tomato to hear it :)
You’re wrong, his comment was well thought out and insightful. Also he liked Hades, so there.
I think he was just messing about :D
Ah yes, Supergiant, the Blizzard of indies, serial over-polishers and under-cookers, makers of the streamlined snorefest Hades, the roguelike-like-like that (hopefully) broke the camel’s back so we can all finally move onto the next fad for a few hype-cycles.
(See how easy it is to do comment as drive-by shooting? What did either of us really add to the discussion?)
No, no, no, you’ve messed it up! You’ve insulted the game and the developer, which is OK, but you forgot to say that anybody who likes it is a stupid doo-doo-head. Now I can’t reply with an inflamatory comment that also insults you for not liking something that I like!
It’s not proper trolling until someone’s been compared to Hitler! Come on guys!
Of course someone had to be a Nazi about trolling etiquette.
I’m not trying to be Nazi, it’s just how it goes…gotta troll the Reich way ;-D
All that was wrong with Marauders and thereby Doom is a failure to properly explain them. They are a different enemy that must be combo killed, unlike the other monsters. See below links to see how to kill them in 3 seconds or less with a variety of weapons (NO the shotgun!!). This handles both of Shamus’ complaints – length of time and weapon variety.
Doom is shooter of the decade. It’s Arkham City for arena shooters. Marauders are bullshit but they are a gitgud. Once mastered they die easily.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Doom/comments/kfl3t3/this_man_violated_the_marauder_on_every_level/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Doom/comments/gcfs9c/how_to_kill_a_marauder_in_exactly_32_seconds/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=
Of all the interfaces Bethesda could have gone with, why the heck did they borrow from the look of Battle.net? Yeah, not identical. But close enough to say it’s pretty similar. Not only is it drawing from another company’s product, B.N isn’t even the best looking or functioning launcher out there. I like Steam’s small mode. The less of the interface I see, and the more I can shove it into a corner, the happier I am.
It just works
Yes, let’s dig up memes best forgotten. But does anyone have a serious answer? It’s completely baffling.
Honestly, ‘it just works’ doesn’t seem that far off to me…
It’s annoying, but not game-breaking; people complain about it, but still buy the product. Why fix what isn’t – from their perspective – broken?
To be fair, that meme is likely very close to reality. They probably just hired a cheap third party to create an interface that “just works” and never gave it any thought beyond that.
Hell, for all we know, they’re so used to gamers modding their games into a working state that they might have expected them to do the same for their store.
The reason the launcher looks like that is that it’s actually implemented in the Gamebryo engine. You can’t see from the angle they show you, but all of the buttons are, in fact, heavily customised NPC hats.
I can’t tell if you’re serious, or being facetious, and I don’t know which is worse.
That was amazing, I laughed SO HARD. Thank you!
Ha! That was a shitshow if I’ve ever seen one, internet discourse keeps devolving deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole.
As somebody who never played TLOU2 and thus missed out on whatever drama occurred, could you give a quick summary of what went down?
The game’s entire plot got leaked a month before the game’s release, a lot of outrage spawned over the game’s plot points, specifically
Joel getting violently murdered in front of Ellie and his murderer getting an entire half of the game dedicated to her as a playable character, the ending also has her get away with it living at the end. Basically it was all polarizing stuff that would divide people.What really devolved the discourse was that there were a lot of politically charged bad faith arguments, constant shit flinging, and even death threats towards a baby, making it all more volatile than it should have been.
The conflict between game journalists and the game developer was over the reporting of Naughty Dog crunching it’s employees to hell to finish the game, kind of says a lot about the games industry that this stuff is constant.
I haven’t played it either (because I don’t believe that TLOU needs a direct sequel; Joel and Ellie’s story has concluded). But I’ve heard / read about the controversy. From what I remember:
– They killed off Joel. The Killer only got the jump on Joel because he (Joel) was trusting strangers and that’s out of character for him.– About halfway through the game you have to play as Joel’s killer for an extended period so that the writer can humanize her.
– At the end of the game, once you (Ellie) have hunted down and cornered Joel’s killer (and lost a couple of fingers in the epic showdown), Ellie suddenly decides in a cutscene that revenge is not worth it after all and just leaves.
– Joel’s killer is a woman so of course the haters decided it must be the writer pushing identity politics. I don’t know what the writers were trying to do but the haters were very vocal about the politics stuff. Also, let’s not discuss (identity) politics here.
I may have forgotten a detail or two but that’s what I remember.
Details like that without context are pointless. Having played the story, for every point there’s a counter point. Most people just repeated what they heard own other hater videos and constantly got details wrong or based it off clips and random cutscenes.
-Joel did nothing out of character. He was just unlucky. Alternatively his killer was lucky and acknowledges same.
-The other bit of the story also does a good job at filling in the half of the story you miss during Ellies 3 days in Seattle and shows what Joels choice did to the Fireflies. It also shows two sides of the story totally told from that person’s POV. Neither of them know the full truth at the end only we do.
-Ellie does a lot of bad stuff in Seattle and Joel’s killer forgives her and let’s her go. In the end Ellie (about 2 years later) does the same. The reason is left open to interpretation but there’s plenty there to work on.
-You made the right call on that one.
There’s some convenient coincidences, but given it tells two parallel stories over the same time period, it has very few plot holes and the two halves fit together really well. The issue is the length of time for each main story. By the end you start to forget which side knows what and much of the criticism I see is people assuming a character knows some thing that was actually in the other persons story.
No spoilers here, but have you seen all the drama regarding Captain Marvel? Well, it was something similar.
– The story of the game was bland and uninteresting, with a few attempts at emotional manipulation, yet it was boasted by the press as something extraordinary.
– There’s the inclusion of LGBT characters, which is entirely fine for most people except (again) the press made a big deal out of it, which made some people think that the game was trying to leave interesting storytelling aside for “woke points”, so they protested. Then (guess who?) the press took this as a chance to pretend every criticism towards the game was caused by sexism.
You know what? I’m just gonna stop giving details and summarize it all here: the press is to blame, just like it was for Captain Marvel. Sure, both the creators and fans hold part of the blame for one reason or another, but the press revels in their fighting and constantly manipulates information to put them at odds with each other because gathering views by creating drama is easier than by doing honest reporting.
Well, conflict is much, much easier from a content standpoint. You usually have two parties, with points of view they readily express. All you really need to do is quote them. The points of view naturally work off of one another, so you don’t even need to comment on them, or clarify anything. The most work you ever have to do is a recap of the conflict up to this point, for people who haven’t been following the drama.
Now, compare that to what people like Shamus do, for example. They have to play through a 20-40-hour game (more than once), and do actual analysis. For that kind of work not only do you need to expend mental effort, but you have to form your own original idea.
Not only is this much, much harder, but it’s also much harder to elicit a reaction from people. You’ve probably watched this video, but for anyone who hasn’t: here.
By the way, you can do the Shamus tratment for controversial topics, as well. But if you want to do that, you need to acknowledge that most issues can’t be boiled down to two strawmen arguing with each other. And this runs into the same problem I described above – i.e. it’s harder, takes time, and it won’t elicit the same visceral reaction out of people.
Bland and uninteresting is a matter of opinion. I would note it has a story completion rate of 60% which is really high and likely a record for this type of game (the only completion rate higher in my collection was Firewatch, which was a 5-6 hour game vs this 20-25 hour game).
The leaks a few months prior to release were a bigger issue than the press. The anti-woke worriers were on that band wagon long before release making wild assumptions about characters in the game and the story. This led to the review bombing on day of release from people who hadn’t even played the game.
Criticism was handled poorly by ND but much of it was unfairly vicious and included death threats to actors. I don’t think you can just shift the blame over to the “press”. Social media perhaps, but not the press.
“TLOU2”
I haven’t had my coffee yet and am almost certain I am I wrong.
But I can’t help thinking,
“Huh? Thelma and Louise II… I wonder what they are going to do for the sequel.”
Was Ghost of Tsushima fantasy? I thought it was semi-historical or at least “grounded”.
It’s semi-historical except for the co-op more which is fantasy.
There’s one event in the single-player that isn’t explainable regarding a particular legendary weapon
(the legendary gear in the game is literally legendary, storytellers tell legends of it)
Shamus sort of considers everything where you can ride a horse and swing a sword fantasy. Going for the very broad Fantasy/RealLife/SciFi categorization, I guess.
i can see where he comes from, and as far as “game backgrounds” go it’s fine, but obviously this means a lot of games get included (because of similar gameplay feel or mechanics) that aren’t, technically, fantasy.
I don’t mind ‘sword & board atop mighty steed’ in fantasy myself… I get that it’s a common power fantasy for a lot of people, and I can respect the simplicity of wanting to pretend to be a noble knight for a few hours.
But man, am I tired it so often seems the only polished & balanced option, and doubly so in generas where knight archetypes barely make any sense. Doubly so in AAA+ games that frankly should have had the dev time & money for at least SOME more interesting and wild stuff.
So kinda get it. I wouldn’t be nearly so tired of the concept if I got to be a gunslinger wizard atop a flying carpet, or something, every now and then, you know?
I get where Shamus is coming from. I’m absolutely sick of riding horses in games in particular. It’s never ‘fun’.
And having interesting ways to travel is one of those things that used to make an open world game sing.
In most games with horses (Tsushima included) I’d almost prefer travelling on foot. At least your character doesn’t have the turning circle of the titanic
I like having horses, partly because the riding can be fun at times, mostly because I refuse to use Fast Travel. I want to be fully immersed in an open world, and Fast Travel destroys that. And yet, I don’t want to have to walk from one end of the world to the next all the time. *whistles*
There’s a happy middle ground – include means of fast travel, but make the player work to unlock/access them. I’ve seen this in the Elder Scrolls before (Morrowind) as well as the MMORPG space (Oldschool Runescape, among others). It’s also pretty common in tabletop RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons, where teleportation spells exist but are relatively high-level.
You get that initial sense of the world being big as you walk from point to point, and yet when you get to higher level content you can have world-spanning adventures without needing to spend hours of time just walking.
It’s empowering being able to travel between cities and other points in the blink of an eye that used to be an hour’s work; it gives a new kind of reward for quests and other things; it’s something for the player to aspire to; and it makes the player feel special.
Morrowind’s way is fun at first, but it means navigating the four-room path between one teleporter chain and the other happens between every single quest you do. I like Skyrim’s “walk there once first” better.
I really liked how Arcanum did that same concept. Handed it better then Morrowing or Skyrim, IMHO.
You need to travel somewhere first, AND Teleport is a high level spell. Something due to the magic vs science system of that game, a full ‘half’ of character types won’t even get access at all to as a result.
If you DO get that spell, though, then you can dance between corners of the map if you so desire. To my recall, there’s not even a cooldown or anything, but it still forces you to actually trudge a bit during the early game. Thus making that fast travel feel deeply earned and cool.
Get what TES was going for in both games, though. A handwave of ‘oh, you know how to get there already, so we’re just fading to black,’ and Morrowind’s in-universe fast travel was a neat idea, but it just got SO draining after a while actually using.
Fair, you usually arrived more “in the same town” as where you might want to go rather than directly at whatever/whoever, but the system could be helped a lot by faster/smarter load times and a bit better design on where those teleports land you. (I.E. only behind one loading-screen door)
Most of the teleport options were assorted ‘intervention’ spells, if I recall correctly, transporting one to the nearest appropriate temple. Unlocking better location-specific teleports is totally a thing that could be done.
Agreed on both parts. Mounts aren’t fun in most games, they’re just marginally faster travel with additional movement restrictions; can’t climb, can’t fit it tight spaces, and can’t turn to save their life (or yours). And they do feel like boats. I don’t know who decided horses are the land boat of nature, but no legged animal has this much trouble turning.
They should make, like, hamster mounts; something that can just turn around inside its own skin if it has to. Big old worms, where both ends can be the front if it wants to be.
Plus they have these huge cheek pouches where you can store your gear.
Onwards, Hammy!
Yeah, Sword & Sorcery is probably the poster child for the Fantasy genre. Urban Fantasy is a minor afterthought by comparison. Shame, though. I quite like a good Urban Fantasy.
I really think you should still give Horizon: Zero Dawn a chance. Actually I guess it would also make a good game to write one of your long-forms about.
Seconded, I had a delightful time playing it, but it still has kinks in story and gameplay that would benefit from Shamus’ analysis.
Thirded, H:ZD is a surprisingly smart implementation of a fairly generic story. Shame about the voice acting, though.
I did smile when Shamus said ‘I’m done riding about on horses, give me a game with robots’, then puts up a picture of Horizion Zero Dawn with a robot horse and a ‘maybe [I’ll play this] next year’ caption.
I See What You Did Thar, Mr Young.
What’s wrong with the voice acting? Ashly Burch is excellent as always.
It’s all pretty flat, IMO. People complained about the “stand there and occasionally twitch” conversation animations, but I think the lack of expression in the vocal performances is what made it really stand out. Inappropriate voice direction might well be the issue. Lance Reddick is OK, but as usual he sounds like he’s trying to work out whether the cramp in his leg is a charley horse or the early stages of tetanus.
As for Ashly Burch; I’m afraid I’m not a huge fan of hers at the best of times, but she really doesn’t show any acting range in H:ZD at all. Everything from idle conversations in town to fighting giant robots comes across with the same very low level of intensity. Couple that with all of the incidental “I should pick that up” open-world muttering and she sounds like she’s on heavy sedation the entire time.
I actually preferred the much-criticised open-world crazy-person muttering in Days Gone, which perfectly suited the protagonist’s characterisation as a sociopathic jerk who’s spent the last few years stuck in the wilderness with nobody to talk to but survival nuts and zombies.
I think a long-form would be good for HoZeD, though I’d probably go on at least one semi-political rant about it.
Yes and yes.
It was my favourite game of 2020 and I just picked it up not really knowing what it was cause I was bored one day. You don’t want to miss this, it’s still the best RPG I’ve seen since Witcher 3.
And yes there’s definite long form article potential in the story.
I haven’t played any of the mentioned games except Horizon on PS4. A good collect-a-ton with a nice world design and a descent story. But if you hate AssCreed for its gameplay loop, give it a pass.
Final Fantasy 7 Remake isn’t on this not played list, so your Brother handed the PS4 back to you with the game and it is on your best list?
I had two major disappointments this year. Rebel Galaxy Outlaw escaped Epics claws. The music was great (in my taste), the graphics was okay but the gameplay was frustatingly unfair. 8 hours in I gave it a full stop.
The other is the Yakuza 5 remaster. Side content and world design where great. The story and the characters, new and known ones, where awful goldun riiter award attendants. Five hours before the end the story broke even for the very forgiving me. But I already was 130 hours in and after two month of theeth grinding I forced myself to finish the damn thing. The end didn’t make anything better.
I guess Kiwami 1 goes on here. The gameplay and sidequests were fun, but the story meanders and some of the bossfights were flat-out atrocious. The final-ish fight had three guys with guns who each had a ton of health and would dodge your attacks besides. I finished the game, but that fight convinced me I never want to play the game again.
While I usually dislike prequels Yakuza is, so far, the one case where I recommend starting with one. 0 is just gold, and it’s actually the very rare case where the prequel, rather than overexplain things that nobody wanted explained, makes 1 better, particularly by establishing the characters. My best guess is that 1 was before the series settled on what it wants to be and many of the Kiwami additions to the original game help liven it up. Having now played 0, 1 and 2 I still find 0 hands down the best and while I’ve found the other two games okay they did not reach that leve.
Yeah, I got into the series at Yakuza 0 after watching TieTuesday play it, and I’ve since completed it and watched five other people play through it. 0 is fantastic. A big part of why I don’t want to play Kiwami again is because I could be playing 0 instead.
Barely gotten into Kiwami 2, got beaten in the first rival fight; not digging the combat system so far, though taking streetfights inside buildings is fun. I probably won’t get back to it until I’m done with Like A Dragon.
I don’t remember the terminology but if “rivals” are the skullmarked street encounters that you get notified about by phone they’re entirely optional. Also, if you’re having trouble with combat weapons are really, really strong and spamming healing items is a valid approach.
I mean the second main quest boss fight. I’ve heard you fight that boss a few times.
The main story of Kiwami 2 is worse than the one of Kiwami 1 and entry no. 5 tops it all by a landslide. I liked the storys of 3, 4, 0 and Judgement. Best so far is Like a Dragon (Haven’t finished it yet. 1 or 2 chapters are missing).
I really, really would not expect Final Fantasy VII Remake to even be on Shamus’ radar. Maybe he’d like the combat, but I have a feeling he’d bounce off of it really hard, especially as it’s a bunch of meta-nonsense in terms of its story. It is effectively a game made for people that unquestioningly love all things with Cloud or Sephiroth on the tin, while giving those of us that thought Advent Children was expensive fan-fiction garbage an even greater headache.
The combat is the best thing going for it, but it’s this weird blend of Japanese character-action with JRPG and uh… I’d honestly recommend Yakuza: Like a Dragon before I recommended Final Fantasy VII Remake.
My old D&D group were HUGE FF7 fans, so they ended up shoving me through the game. I played it about 10 years late. I was 35-ish at the time, while they were mid-teens when they played the game at launch.
It obviously didn’t resonate with me in the same way, but I’ve been press ganged into the fandom.
It’s possible you’d be more open to it, then, and I am also admittedly forgetting you did a whole series on FFX that I missed because I wanted to try something similar and wanted to go in with just my own opinions on the game. I should go back and read that series, now that I think about it.
I’m still hesitant, but it’d be interesting to read the perspective of someone that was never huge into it but was exposed to the franchise nonetheless.
The combat is what really surprised me because it’s genuinely really good and probably the best example of that kind of gameplay that I’ve ever seen. 10 years ago I might have hoped for a potential remake to be almost exactly the same but “better graphics” but I don’t know that I would really have been interested in that in 2020 so it was a pleasant surprise what they ended up doing with it.
I even liked most of the story changes and extra stuff added, except for the last couple of hours or so.
I’m actually surprised to hear that. I didn’t play the game, but I watched quite a lot of other people playing, and the combat looked awfully grindy, like every enemy had millions of HP and all you really did was attack over and over. What in particular worked well for you, if I may ask?
I started out playing on easy for a bit since I hadn’t played that kind of game for a while, and on that it does get a bit boring (especially early on I guess when you don’t have a lot else to do) because you rarely need to engage with the systems. Normal only increases the HP of monsters (I think at least?) so it doesn’t make the game that much harder, but it does seem to be the way the game was tuned to play, and it does mean fights go on for a bit longer which in turn means you need to actually learn how to play more effectively. Once I got going with multiple characters there’s really quite a lot to do, with Tifa especially if you’re controlling her it’s almost like playing a fighting game with setting up combos, certain moves lead into others in a more effective way and you can build up to strong finishers. This isn’t always strictly necessary when fighting regular monsters, but for some of the stronger ones and definitely on bosses you really need to think about what you’re doing. You CAN probably brute force your way through some of these encounters by just chugging potions (unless you’re playing on Hard, which removes item usage entirely), but in my experience that’s not really a strategy that’s going to last. Learning how to increase stagger in an effective way so that you can unleash your strongest attacks at the most opportune moment is key, and I had a lot of fun with that. I still haven’t tried hard mode because not having access to items at all makes for a very different game, but I want to try it out at some point.
I did watch a friend stream himself playing on Classic since it’s described as as similar to the original or whatever, and I think playing on that especially is a mistake because it removes both guarding and staggering which makes both attacking & defending a lot less interesting.
I think the combat, boss fights in particular, are designed strongly around phases and the stagger mechanic that it reminds me of boss fights in Destiny, which has me wondering if it’s an MMO inspiration altogether. For each phase of the fight, your focus isn’t really on doing damage so much as building the stagger gauge, and once that opponent is staggered you go full DPS. This is where Tifa comes in, as she’s able to boost damage multipliers. So save certain attacks or limit breaks for this phase and after Tifa boosts that damage multipler, and then unleash the full might of this battle station… I mean, your party.
Whether you’re down for this or not is going to depend on person to person. Some people will probably eat it up. I know that I started to really dig it when I had the optional fight against Leviathan, and was what made the final stretch of game a good time. It was effectively a boss rush that was equal parts spectacle and mechanically rich. I’ve been wanting to replay the game, and am hoping Sony only had a one-year exclusivity deal so that we’ll be hearing about a PC port soon. We’ll see. Regardless, fights were long, and when I first saw the E3 demonstration of the Scorpion Tank, I was concerned that it’d be a problem. I actually think that might be one of the weaker boss fights, but many of them are long, but in a good way. The bosses will change their tactics, you’ll have to be wary of super powerful attacks, and exploiting enemy weaknesses in order to best boost their stagger.
Which, again, sounds like they took the MMO boss model and applied it to a single-player game, but with a wholly unique combat system.
I haven’t played the game and I’ve tried not to watch it in case I want to later but the description of the stagger mechanics kinda sorta sound a bit like FF XIII?
I was specifically planning to ask this, so I second the point of inquiry. You could technically replicate a guard function with a Sentinel/Medic paradigm, too.
As someone who really dug FFXIII’s combat (once I finally figured out how to do things with style), this has me more excited for the remake than at any point to date. My only remaining doubt is that by design, my favorite character should only barely factor into the first game. Heck, I’m not even sure Red XIII is in the remake!
I’ve not actually played FFXIII beyond giving it a test run on my (old) PC, so I couldn’t tell ya if the combat is similar or not. I have heard people mention that FFVII-Remake’s combat is like the culmination of XIII and XV, so it’s possible it’s the best version of both those worlds.
From what I understand, Red XIII is in the remake, but not as a playable character. Since the remake only covers the events of Midgar, he shows up pretty late in the story.
I played probably 2/3s of the way through the remake before losing interest, so I didn’t personally encounter him.
You should at least watch the Demo, that’s what it’s for. I had no interest in the game until I saw the demo. (Still haven’t played it, but it looks like it’s got a couple mechanics from 13, greatly improved by being able to move and dodge and switch characters.)
I had missed the existence of a demo. I’ll have to check it out; thanks for the information!
I perhaps sounded more dismissive than I intended. I’ll probably want to play it but a) have to wait for the PC version, b) will probably wait until the entire series is released, c) generally I never buy AAA titles at release prices as I just find them too expensive and I have a backlog. In light of this I don’t think researching the game too closely now would be a good idea as I might get too “into it” and feel bad for not being able to play it now.
Funny thing, I never really wanted a remake of FFVII. Partially because I didn’t trust what they’d do with a remake, especially after Advent Children, and then seeing the awful backstory they gave Golbez in the FFIV remake. All I want is an updated translation of the original game.
Sadly, I don’t think we’ll ever get that.
Let’s hope they never touch VI.
I agree. on the plus side, for the most part the squinix developers don’t draw too heavily on products prior to ff7, in part because something about bad blood between the current squenix management and one guy (I think it was Yoshitaka Amano, who left the company in 2006 to work at mistwalker) who was largely responsible for character designs in ff6, among other games.
They might remake the game, but if they do I fear they’d change a bunch of things, possibly to spite him; but in doing so, how much would the fanbase for that game actually want such a project? I’m neither interested nor particularly hopeful that they’d get it right, even before that… but if you search ff6 remake, there’s apparently some fools drumming up interest. *sigh*
Are you sure you’re not talking about Hironobu Sakaguchi? Yoshitaka Amano is, I believe, freelance, just as Nobuo Uematsu has gone. Hironobu Sakaguchi was the founder of Final Fantasy, but sort of got pseudo-demoted after the colossal failure of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. They didn’t want to get rid of the guy, but for that one expensive mistake they figuratively shoved him into a corner office where he could “do no further damage”. The last game he had any real input on was Final Fantasy IX (I believe Final Fantasy VIII was the first he had no major involvement in).
I’m pretty sure Square has continued to work with Yoshitaka Amano, and the Dissidia franchise draws heavily from his original character designs. I’m also not sure if there’s much “bad blood”, seeing as Yoshinori Kitase (director of FFVII, current producer of the Remake, and one of the top producers at Square Enix) continues to regularly meet with and speak with Hironobu Sakaguchi. Plus, the remake of Final Fantasy III and IV came well after that time frame.
If anything, I would expect a remake of FFV because it was quite beloved in Japan, but I think, on the whole, there’s just not as much nostalgia/demand compared to the constant belly-aching of fans for a remake of FFVII, which is the game that launched the franchise (and JRPG genre) into the mainstream attention. I think the most we’ll get are the mobile/Steam versions of FFV and FFVI, which… sadly, they redid the art to, and somehow made it look worse. If you can mod FFVI, though, you’ll have the best translation of the game available in the US (I think, assuming it’s based off the GBA translation). I think the FFV translation ought to be better as well? I’m not sure, I’d have to double-check.
Yeah Amano hasn’t done character design for them since the SNES games but he still did concept art and designed the logos and stuff up until FF12 (not sure about after that, but I guess there hasn’t been much since then anyway).
Oh no . . . dare I ask what backstory they gave him?
I know in the original US game, Golbez has no backstory at all until the end of the game. That was a plot hole I always thought needed filling, but . . . dang, if they made a mess of it, that would be severely disappointing.
Oh, man, that movie. Even now, thinking about Rufus and his damned wheelchair makes me angry.
Advent Children is hardly high art, yeah. That plot definitively needed a pass or fifteen more before rendering started.
But man, oh man, those fight scenes! I’m still glad I watched that movie for those alone, even if the plot & characters left me outright bored.
The remix of “One-Winged Angel” is pretty fucking metal too
I’m willing to put up with a whole lot of stupid if it means two people have a swordfight while motorcycling down a cliff face.
Yeah, but have you watched the behind-the-scenes video included in the DVD/Blu-Ray? The plot had the potential to be even dumber. The best way to watch that film is with the audio off. Make up your own plot while looking at the gorgeous action scenes.
As someone who was a Senior in High School when it was released, I’m in the FF VI camp and would love an expansive remake (if it’s done well). I think there was all kind of room there to expand upon the story, especially with the huge number of main characters. Back then, character storage limit was still a real constraint so dialogue was always chopped down, and stories simplified. It would be neat to see a game that didn’t have this limitation.
HZD has a much, much more involved combat system than AC. There’s actually skill, knowledge and preparation required.
I don’t usually remember games that have disappointed me, but last year, one that definitely did was The Messenger. I usually like Devolver’s games, and had high hopes for this one, but boy was I disappointed! The gameplay was nothing special, but the story was definitely not for me. Don’t get me wrong, I like humour, and characters that poke fun at the game’s world, but in this game EVERY. SINGLE. CHARACTER. is like that. And the problem with this is that if none of the characters are taking this world seriously, then… Why should I? Combined with the fact that the humour was of the low-effort-meme style, I dropped the game about halfway through.
Another game I was kinda disappointed by was Blasphemous. Liked the art style, but the controls were way too floaty, and the story was a bit too vague and incoherent for my tastes. The fighting system also didn’t feel as good or varied as something like Hollow Knight, for example.
There are probably other games that disappointed me last year, but I tend to forget these things rather quickly :D
Yeah, Blasphemous was a game whose aesthetics I really enjoyed, but the story telling didn’t resonate with me. It’s one of those games where you get a coherent story . . . if you piece together the random bits of lore scattered across all the different items in the game. (And even then, you probably have to check the wiki to really get it.)
This is the exact problem I have with the latter MCU films. At the start, Tony Stark was the jokester and most other characters were serious. But now? Every goddamn character is a wise-cracker that doesn’t take anything seriously. Why should I, then?
Even though no one’s gonna read this, I was also very disappointed with Brigador. The music was amazing (and for someone who’s not the biggest EDM fan that’s saying something), and the cyberpunk-banana-republic aesthetic was great. But I hated the heavy-handed tutorial, the control scheme (both the default and the tank controls), and the lack of an actual story. I found the little lore tidbits very boring and disjointed. I also hated how difficult it was to discern what could blow up and what couldn’t. Which lead to some very frustrating game over’s.
Also, and this is a very “me” sort of problem, I just couldn’t in good consciousness enjoy the destructible environments. Yes, they made a proprietary engine that lets you destroy every single thing in the environment, but those environments were cities filled with civilians who hadn’t done anything wrong. And I could never find enjoyment out of wrecking people’s houses just for the lulz of it.
Ah, like the old point-and-click adventure games. Or the more modern Hitman games. Try to guess what the game designers THOUGHT you should do, that’s the way to win!
‘Searching for invisible rails’ is a pretty good way of explaing quite a few games I’ve played recently.
Don’t know if you tabletop, but this was pretty much how I felt about some of the recent D&D 5E published adventures, especially Waterdeep:Dragon Heist. There are numerous plot checkpoints where you have to choose (or successfully roll!) the right action, but sometimes it’s not entirely obvious. It has all of the worst aspects of a railroaded adventure and a sandbox: the rails are there but are invisible, so there’s only one way to do something and there’s a good chance you won’t know what it is.
At least (thank goodness) in a tabletop game your DM can decide not to mercilessly railroad you like that. For video games… well, you’re gonna have to do whatever the developers think you should.
None of the 5E published modules I’ve looked into have been truly bad but there’s a few chronic flaws I’ve found in many adventures. Lame Final Boss Syndrome, surprisingly murderous random fight somewhere else, and occasionally dull villains…. plus the fact that WotC doesn’t seem to know how to carry adventures past 12th level or so.
Man I had the exact opposite experience with last year. Not that there were a ton of amazing games specifically, but I keep track of games I beat (or spend a significant time with, in case of games that you don’t really “beat”), and I played more games last year than I’ve done in any year in at least a decade. Like, a LOT more, twice as many games as 2019-more. Going from commuting to an office job to working from home for most of the year and also not really having a lot of opportunities to do activities outside of the house gave me a lot of time for gaming (and I gotta say, while I’m not crazy about this whole pandemic thing I could certainly get used to this part of it).
I’m not sure what my fav from last year would be though, a lot of the games that I had the most fun with also had some glaring problems. FF7R, Bannerlord, Persona 5 Royal & Cyberpunk in some kind of order I guess even if none of them were perfect.
The only game mentioned by Shamus that I actually played some of this year is Doom Eternal, and I don’t think I’ll finish that or ever go back to it because while I thought the last one was alright this one just took all the parts i disliked and pumped them up to 11.
I’m still waiting for Bannerlord to come out of early access, I was actually disappointed to learn it was releasing like that since it was in development for like a decade.
Has it had any major updates so far?
I haven’t checked it out in months but they’ve done a fair amount of bugfixes at least. The perks are actually mostly working now, it only took them like 4-5 months! (well not all perks, but like 95% of them are working now rather than 10% which was the case up until like October)
Incidentally on the topic of perks I saw a thread on reddit last week on Cyberpunk about something I’ve suspected ever since launch, that a whole lot of the perks & armor mods don’t actually do anything.
I wouldn’t hold my breath for a “full version” of Bannerlord tbh, the first game was in alpha for what, four years? And that was before having game in early access was a thing really. With how common it is to just have games in early access forever and ever now I’m sure it’ll be at least as long for this.
I always get envious when people say this, because I had a lot LESS time to play games this past year and WISH that I was one of the people who suddenly had to fill in extra free time due to this. But the reason is that for me not much changed. I worked from home but my work schedule didn’t really change, and my hobbies were inside anyway so nothing freed up there, but I added needing to cook and clean more and to more schedule, say, when I went to get things like groceries, so my free time evaporated. Sundays went from being a pretty relaxed day to being overstuffed with things.
The one nice thing about working from home for me is that if I NEED to do something during the day — get groceries, cut the lawn, paint the shed — I can stop in the middle of the day, do it, and then come back to work afterwards, which is much harder when your work is a half hour commute from your workplace.
Yeah I get that, I used to cook and bring my own meals and stuff even before so I didn’t really lose any extra spare time to that, and meanwhile I get an extra hour after work every day (and also generally about an extra hour at night since I stay up later now that I don’t have to get up very early). That right there is already 10 hours/week, which admittedly I probably don’t end up spending even half of that time on average playing games, but it definitely adds up to a lot over the course of a year. Add to that how I’ve also spent most weekends at home and I guess it only makes sense that I’ve been able to play so many games. I even took up playing Final Fantasy XIV last year and spent probably a few hundred hours on that on top of all the other games I played.
I used to cook ahead for the week if I could, and since I started extremely early often could come home early and cook some quick things in the evening. However, if I was really busy then I could always say screw it and just buy something, which is more difficult now, and trying to cook in the middle of the day while working is problematic. So cooking on the weekends actually relieves some time pressure and stress for me, but it makes my Sundays pretty packed. Add in the extra time errands take me and having to do more and a lot of my time gets eaten up by those sorts of things, including the normal time wasters of shoveling snow and cutting the lawn.
Then again, I DID manage to play more board games on my own this year than I have any other year except for when I was starting out with them, but that’s more due to my getting a folding table than having more spare time.
Hm. I don’t know. I think by the end of Idol of Sin mission, I got a hang of Marauders and caught what devs were striving for (this, almost cat and mouse game, or blink and you’re dead). So I don’t hate them. If there were more of them, I’d probably had fun playing against them. The final boss though… Him, I hated.
There are some arguments to defend the inclusion of Marauder as an enemy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmzAo7uM8Jo
My relationship with Marauders in Doom Eternal went from loathing to total acceptance somewhere in the last third of the game. I truly thought id had fucked up their game after my first couple dances with them. Maybe I developed enough muscle memory for them to suddenly ‘click’ with me, but after a certain point I found I was able to take them out quite speedily (the one-two-punch of the Super Shotgun and Railgun/Crossbow thingy became reflexive).
I’d grant that they can still be frustrating given that they seem to operate on a ruleset unique from everything else in the game. But I found it to be just the right level of frustration, like holding off on orgasming for a few seconds longer (I am so so sorry). The payoff of demolishing them was sweet every time.
YMMV of course, and I don’t think anybody is “wrong” in their assessment of Maurauders, positive or negative. But if you do ever get around to replaying Eternal again after a passage of time, I’d be curious if you end up feeling differently (or at least less hard on them).
Same here. Nothing that makes me more annoyed than the Naughty Dog devs boasting about how they “don’t make fun games” as if that’s something to be proud of. I happen to play games to have fun. If I wanted to be miserable, I’d just take a look at my bank account. Leaving that aside, I think the first game had a perfect ending, and anything a sequel did would only diminish it. A spin-off set in the same universe? Sure, count me in (assuming you didn’t make it miserable like this one), but a direct sequel? I was never going to be interested in the first place. And then of course they had to go all Captain Marvel between creators, reviewers and audience. No thanks, I’m staying far away.
This is precisely why I absolutely despise the Deathstroke boss fight in Arkham Origins, and it boils my blood when people call it “one of the best boss fights in existence”. Like, why? It barely counts as gameplay. You have literally no agency in it. You can only attack when they let you, and you can only do it they exact way they allow you to. It’s nothing but a glorified cutscene, yet it keeps making “top boss fights” lists everywhere. I just don’t get it.
As for my own list of disappointing titles, well, the obvious one is Cyberpunk 2077. See, the thing is that I just played a few hours and then I completely forgot about the game. Granted, my PC isn’t good enough to run it well, so it’s not like I have a gorgeous world to look forward to, but it runs well enough to be playable at least. I haven’t experienced any bugs (save for the CPU thing, which was already patched out), so it’s still kinda telling that I haven’t felt the need to keep engaging with the game. Granted, I bought myself a Nintendo Switch at the start of this year, and I’ve been playing that like crazy, but still. It’s not like I don’t use the PC. Hell, I’m achievement hunting in Defense Grid right now, and I’ve got hundreds of hours in that game already. I have Cyberpunk right there and I still prefer to spend a few hours in a 13-year old game.
My other disappointment was the remake of Sam & Max. Graphically the game is great, and gameplay has been streamlined to be less clunky. But it’s censored. I don’t care if it’s just a few lines of dialogue (and, to be clear, it’s more than just a few), it’s freaking Sam & Max we’re talking about here. You don’t censor Sam & Max. You just don’t. Their political incorrectness is part of their identity. Imagine if they cut Lord of the Rings to remove all scenes with pipe smoking because smoking is bad. Sure, smoking is bad, but your censorship is messing with a work’s personality, and that is not good at all. This would already be bad enough on its own, but the developers actually had promised before release that they wouldn’t change any dialogue. I actually refunded that game because I was so pissed. I had never refunded a game in my entire life. Not even Cyberpunk, which is sitting there unplayed despite being far more expensive.
Ironically, I thought The Last of Us 2 was pretty fun, at least on the gameplay side. Areas are way more open, combat feels good, and movement is fluid. It’s an improvement over the first game in that front.
I’ve found Naughty Dogs to be highly overrated developers who get in their own way. They make pretty good feeling gameplay (shooting, traversal) and quite well acted cutscenes, but they get in the way of each other.
Happy go lucky Nathan Drake in cutscenes combined with murdering a bunch of people in gameplay.
Scaling a tall building to reach your designation during gameplay combined with cutscenes where it is setback after setback. Nonstop setbacks in cutscenes for the purpose of creating “exciting gameplay” is not particularly good level design.
The original TLOU had a great synthesis of gameplay, character, and plot.
TLOU2 in contrast have the gameplay not supporting the characters and not supporting the plot.
The best boss fight in Batman: Arkham Origins is undoubtedly Electrocutioner, as it is the shortest. Most of the boss fights in Origins are awful. The least bad are those that most closely resemble normal gameplay, like Copperhead or Lady Shiva.
I never got that sorta advertisement.
“Our game isn’t fun, engaging, entertaining and will constantly drag down the gameplay for story purposes! Doesn’t that make you wanna pay full price for it?”
Though, I will admit, as much as a terrible character Abby is, being able to play as someone who just rushes into the zombie horde and beats the shit out of them was the most fun the game gave me. “Put up your dukes, Zombies!”
It’s essentially a sort of counter to “games are shallow wish fulfillment”. So if our game is dark and everything is awful that makes it deep, right? And deep means good, worthy of praise, games are art, art only springs forth from suffering and so on and so forth. To be fair this is not unique to games, a lot of books or movies (and their critics) confuse misery porn for depth.
I think that’s the idea, but the problem is that no one seems to be interested in finding a middle ground. For instance, take my list of games I am willing to put forth as Art: Shadow of the Colossus, and . . . er, did I mention Shadow of the Colossus?
That game does its darnedest to inspire awe in you as you proceed, while simultaneously telling you what you are doing is capital-letter Wrong. There’s a reason I describe it as the greatest game I’ll never play again.
I’d argue that at least Odin’s Sphere should be on that list, too, for similar reasons.
(Plus that actual 2D art. Even the PS2 version still looks jaw dropping.)
The entire plot could have been avoided, if ONE person in power wasn’t a prideful arsehat with more magic and/or muscles then sense. And the six player characters, for their own often rather noble ends, push on. Fulfilling prophecies that will end with the End of the World, one by one, all for the right reasons, until… well, guess.
It’s a very classical tragedy. Inspired heavily by Wagner’s Ring Cycle. One of the few games where I’ve gotten that sense that this world would be better if I STOPPED interacting with it and walked away from the console. A very odd and disconcerting sensation I haven’t really gotten from any other story since.
…I will admit I have a personal grudge against considering only tragedies ‘true art,’ but hey, that’s another discussion.
I think Omori is in the running.
Or maybe it’s what people are complaining about.
But it’s in the category of “a captivating game I never want to play.”
They say that and pat themselves on the back for not being eight years old, but being insufferable fourteen year olds isn’t any better.
People call the Deathstroke fight anything other than a glorified QTE? I’ve never heard a word of praise for it. It’s just arbitrary “do exactly the thing we told you to” gameplay.
You’ve been lucky. Everywhere I go on the internet, people go nuts for it.
I barely even remember what I played this year.
Disappointments were Yakuza Kiwami 1, the Halo Collection on Steam, and Trails of Cold Steel 2.
Kiwami 1 had some miserable bossfights. Gun guys in a brawler are both a staple and a pain in the ass, but this game has multiple gun bosses and the last one is three at once. I expected the story’s bad pacing issues, I didn’t expect the gameplay to follow suit.
Halo Collection was a real fast disappointment; I bought it and found out I had to log into Xbox Live, which meant the games were online only. Quick refund, heavy frustration. Those games are childhood, I really wanted to play them again, but I’m not doing online-only.
Trails of Cold Steel 2 shouldn’t have surprised me considering the only Trails game I really liked was Sky 1, but it started with promise; a single cutscene establishes thirteen separate villains to take down. Then the Act 1 and 2 bossfights end with cutscene bullshit and getting rescued by a new party member while the villains leave. Even that would have been okay if my initial impression had been right: see, I lost the Act 1 fight, and the game still advanced. If all the Act Bosses had been optional fights, I would have actually been impressed. But then I went back and deliberately lost to the Act 2 boss, and nope, Game Over. Terrible.
Regarding Halo:MCC, I think I had an internet connection most times I played, but it seems it’s not required, I just tested it with Halo 4. And losing your internet connection while playing solo doesn’t stop you from playing either.
Oh, Deadly Premonition 2 was this year, huh. I didn’t play that one, but was disappointed when I watched Pat play it. A big step down from 1.
Yakuza Kiwami was enjoyable for me, but not as good as Yakuza Zero, which I played first (although I now know that Zero released later).
Really, 4 big things disappointed me in that game:
The combat system which manages to be bad at both one-on-one fights and multiple enemies. It’s fine when it clicks, but when it doesn’t (which is very often), you feel like the system itself is another enemy you have to fight.
The Dragon Style being interesting but gated behind so many Majima fights. Why would I bother maxing out the Dragon Style when it needs like 50 more Majima encounters, when I can just use my maxed-out Brawler style instead?
Speaking of Majima… I know he’s a fan favourite character and everything but I got tired of him well before the end of the game. Both his antics and his fights. And while I definitely believe the events of Yakuza Zero would change him, I don’t buy that he went from where he was in Zero to where he ended up in Kiwami. That’s not just changing his character, that’s becoming a different person altogether.
And (spoilers from here on out) Reina. Her death was the first major story misstep in the series, IMO. In Zero, she felt like a port in the storm that is Japan’s nightlife, dominated by its criminals. She felt savvy and too intelligent to do what she did in Kiwami. For her to betray Kiryu to Nishiki really annoyed me, for 5 reasons (yep, got a numbered list within a numbered list)
1. The woman betraying the protagonist out of love is a cliche for noir stories.
2. Her death is treated as an afterthought. Compare how her death is treated after the fact to Shinji’s. Yeah, she betrayed them, but even then. She died trying to undo her mistake.
3. The only other important adult female character, Yumi, also dies. I would maybe accept the theme of the criminal underworld taking good women and ruining their lives if Reina’s death wasn’t self-inflicted. Neither death feels necessary. Reina dies to provide a cheap twist. Yumi dies to prevent Kiryu from being tied down in any sequels.
4. She waits until it’s most dramatic to betray Kiryu. If she was with Nishiki all along, then she should have betrayed them far earlier in the story.
5. It would actually be better for the story if, rather than Reina betraying Kiryu, if Nishiki just figured out that Shinji was Kazama’s mole and went after him himself. It would make Nishiki seem smarter and villains who act rather than react feel much more threatening and capable. And, honestly, it’s kind of obvious that Shinji’s Kazam’s mole. He’s been in contact with Kiryu, face to face.
Still, as a remake of an old game, I did enjoy it.
I don’t buy a lot of games. I bought four new games this year, which is probably more than my annual average. Only one of them, Egypt: Old Kingdom, was a disappointment. It’s less that Old Kingdom is a bad game and more that its mechanics didn’t particularly appeal to me. Old Kingdom is a worker-placement game rather than the ancient Egypt simulator that it’s sometimes made out to be. I should have done a little more research before I bought it but, well, it was my birthday and the game was extremely cheap. So I was disappointed, but given how little I spent not too disappointed. All in all I had a pretty good video-game year.
In retrospect, the thing about this year that surprises me is that all of the new games I bought were released within the last three years. They may have all been semi-obscure indies, but that’s nevertheless astonishingly up to date for me.
Fair enough about the mechanics of Egypt: Old Kingdom not working for you, I got it back in maybe 2018 or 2019 and personally enjoyed it enough to both play through it a few times so far and buy the earlier game (Predynastic Egypt, I think).
I played Old Kingdom just enough to beat it–sort of–once on the default settings. I mean, I think I won. I’m not sure. I sort of failed that final political and social reforms challenge, but I think you’re supposed to fail that one for historical reasons. (The game’s history-on-rails approach is, however educational it might be, one of the things I don’t like about it.) At any rate, I didn’t get a “You Lose” message, so I’m calling it a win.
Ghost of Tsushima
As much as I enjoyed the game, it’s honestly just a good execution of Ubisoft ideas. Which, admittedly, is what Sucker Punch has been with their inFamous games for me. They’re never the best games I’ve played, though there’s something in there that drives me to really appreciate it. Ghost of Tsushima is certainly greater than the sum of its parts, but it’s at best a B+ grade. I imagine it could make for a decent write-up for you, but it might be better for you to focus on something you’d be properly passionate about.
Which is why I find Horizon: Zero Dawn an interesting choice. I found the fights with the giant robo-monsters fun, but aside from that I just was not a fan. I had played and put 90 hours into Breath of the Wild earlier that year, and to this day open-world games compare unfavorably for me in comparison. Ghost of Tsushima only did as kindly as it did as it allowed a surprising number of ways throughout its environments and cliffs. If you had to go the long way around something, it’s probably because it was important to the main quest rather than …I dunno, reasons. So going from climbing any surface possible in Breath of the Wild to having so many cliffs and crags you couldn’t do anything about, or chest high walls you couldn’t somehow climb and clamber over, in Horizon Zero Dawn… well, it was frustrating.
I’m also not a fan of the story, but I seem to be in the minority on that one, and some of my issues would probably be considered unpopular or extremist in some regard. Nonetheless, if you play it and decide it’s worth a series, I’d gladly read through it.
DOOM Eternal
This was a disappointment of mine as well. Of course, being the console gamer I am, the first Doom game I ever invested a lot of hours into was Doom 3. I really liked that game, save for the fact that it overstayed its welcome. I didn’t like DOOM 2016 as much, but definitely thought it was doing a lot of neat things. It, too, overstayed its welcome, causing me to wonder if Id has some old-fashioned sense of “just make as much game as you can”.
DOOM Eternal has a lot of ideas I like, and theoretically the combination of platforming and more options in combat should have made this one of my favorite games of the year. But to summarize thoughts I’ve gone into greater detail on elsewhere, DOOM Eternal isn’t just made for a mouse and keyboard, it’s made for super-amazing-zomg-twitch-shooter-PC-master-race gamers. The game is possible on a controller, which is my preference due to comfort. But the indulgence of a keyboard having a crap ton of keys regardless of comfort or usability stands out when you realize you can’t swap the jump button to a bumper without sacrificing an ability that is far more valuable in combat to a face button. I restarted the game on a lower difficulty to see if maybe I’d have a better time, and while I had a huge stock of extra lives after maybe 1/3rd of the game (or 1/4th? I think I was one level away from meeting the Marauder), I realized that nothing I could do would make me feel good at the game. I loved the flamethrower, I loved the ice grenades, and on paper I like having to focus on weakpoints in order to reduce an enemy’s arsenal. But demanding so much precision while constantly moving with enemies flanking at all times…
At its core, I never felt like I was the monster under the demons’ beds. What DOOM 2016 did so well, Eternal seemed to combat at every turn. Reading the description of the Marauder, it almost feels like whoever was responsible for 2016 was gone. Couple this with the sudden emphasis on lore – absolutely ridiculous lore that did nothing but detract from the whole “rip and tear” atmosphere the prior game had – and I just… don’t know what they were thinking.
It’s a shame, because 50% of this game would have been the best shooter campaign since Titanfall 2. Instead, I just sit here wondering when we’re getting Titanfall 3, if ever.
Amnesia: Rebirth
I did not play this one, but I wonder if it might have worked better if the character you were playing as had a phobia of the dark and you, the player, were unaware of it until the end. Granted, I have no clue how a real phobia of the dark manifests, and I doubt it does so with illusions of monsters or imagining every little sound to be that of a beast prowling for you. Nonetheless, using audio and visual cues to convince the player that something is there, perhaps getting them to move about in a panic, etc. seems like it’d be effective, despite also being a one-trick pony. You’d effectively need to use the dark as a “sanity meter” where the illusions increase in intensity, and then rely on the player making mistakes to create horror.
Curious if there’s a way to take the idea from paper and into execution, but once you beat the game and no it was all in the character’s head, well, any replay just becomes nothing.
I watched most of Amnesia: Rebirth on LRR’s Let’s Nope. It takes a weirdly long time to get to the actual spoops part, and I get the feeling Shamus never got that far. They start the game with the fear mechanics active when they really shouldn’t, but when things finally take a left turn into Weird Shit, it seemed fine (there were hints of weird shit from the beginning of course, but not overtly enough for fear mechanics to seem reasonable).
No, that’s too long to wait for an answer to matter. Horizon Zero Dawn waited twenty hours to explain the biggest problems I had with it, and it wasn’t enough to overcome the frustration it had created.
If you’re pulling something like that, it has to be a huge revelation. Like, endgame the game reveals you’re some kind of night demon and entering the darkness begins the apocalypse. A phobia’s not enough scale.
Well, a comment that I had made about horror in general got stuffed into the spam filter when I corrected the blockquoting, but here I can talk about the games that disappointed me this year:
Late Shift and Tender Loving Care, both interactive movie type things that seemed to promise more but really ended up being standard interactive movies with much less interactivity than I’d hoped. Tender Loving Care is particularly bad since it has an interesting framing device that it completely drops at the end for what ends up being a fairly mediocre story.
I’d count Elsinore but I didn’t really have high hopes for it from the start. It deleting all your progress and making you start over if you actually finished a story, though, pretty much killed the one interesting thing about it and made me decide that I wouldn’t play it again.
Also, probably technically Knights of Pen and Paper, mostly because the dungeons are so much harder than the encounters in the world and it ends on a difficult dungeon, which meant that I technically didn’t quite finish it.
Doom Eternal disappointed me as well, though it didn’t really have anything to do with the marauder (though yeah, those guys are tedious to fight). The core gameplay loop was just too… busy. Like, in the first game, you just shot dudes, did finishers to get health, and you could choose to chainsaw a dude to get some ammo and/or delete 1 troublesome foe (a baron of hell, say). It was just complex enough to make fights interesting, but simple enough to not get in the way of mowing down dudes at a frantic pace.
Then Eternal added in the blood punch, and the flamethrower, and the ice bomb, and later on you get the crucible, and it all just turns into a juggling act. Get glory kills until you can do a big super-punch! Remember to flamethrower dudes for armor! Ice bomb dudes to freeze them and get health! Use the crucible to insta-kill really bad dudes (except for *sigh* the marauder)! It all just really slowed the pace of the game to have to remember all this shit in the middle of a huge fight. Add in that there seemed to be more demons to fight, and that it feels like they take more shots to bring down, and the whole thing was just a tedious, exhausting slog.
I also remember finally getting the secret super-weapon that requires you to do all the ridiculously hard key challenges, only to be massively dis-appointed. The damage just isn’t that great, *and* it uses your precious BFG ammo. Lame lame lame.
Also, not only was the final boss an incredible chore to fight, but the game crashed in the middle of it and, somehow, that sent me back all the way to the beginning of the final level.
Suffice to say that I think Doom 2016 is by far the superior game.
I enjoyed Doom Eternal but agree that Doom 2016 was better and that the business is a problem. The chainsaw renewing itself is cool in concept and means I actually use it ever (unlike in Doom 2016), but it also means that Doom Eternal combat is all about resource management, because you will definitely run out of ammo. Resource management can be a fun combat system but it’s not what I really loved about the previous one.
Similarly, they added extra mobility, and that’s sweet… except of course that means they had to increase enemy accuracy. So in Doom 2016 you could avoid enemy shots by running around a lot, while in Eternal you need to jump, dash, take a bounce pad, then go through a teleporter, or else you will absolutely get hit and die. One of those has a lot more going on, but that’s not always the same as being more fun.
Oh god, I was so hyped for Amnesia. I loved the first one, was meh on the second one, but overall still had hope for the series. Then this one comes in, guts most of the mechanics, breaks the illusion of danger, sticks me with a shallow, annoying protagonist and uses a baby as a cheap prop so people can pretend it’s deep.
On the mechanics, the first Amnesia was a lot of smoke and mirrors. The cost of failure was being sent back a few minutes and, if you died enough times, the game took pity on you and fucked off. The sanity metre contributed to this by adding more fake scares throughout the levels that, admittedly, you kinda had to be intentionally getting your sanity low to experience. But it at least still felt like, well, a game. When you encountered a monster, you had to consider what to do, which way to run and consider managing your resources. When your sanity got low, the game would start adjusting it’s sound design and setting up fake encounters to up your paranoia. The levels gave you a sense of freedom and were a wonder to explore. The player felt like an active participant, at the very least.
In Rebirth, when you encounter a monster, there’s nothing to really consider. You’re usually stuck in a hallway with one direction to run, or in a wide room with one exit and plenty of cover to easily sneak by. You don’t have to think about resources, because they’re abundant and useless. The Sanity mechanic has been reduced to ‘flash scary images’, meaning that, again, the mechanic has been made pointless. And the levels have mostly been reduced to a string of set pieces. You die once and the monster will disappear. The Player isn’t participating, they’re just along for the ride.
The monsters themselves are basically ‘Generic Zombie’ and ‘Generic Skinny Monster’, with none of the build up and atmosphere that made the creatures in the first game more memorable. In the first game, there was so much dread when we finally get to the first actual encounter, while in this game by the time you get to the first chase, it just feels so underdeveloped.
Then again, a lot of the game feels underdeveloped. The setting feels empty, the notes are bland and the story relies heavily on their cheap baby prop. eah, I’m sorry, I don’t care about this unborn baby. It’s included in such a cheap and rather lazy manner where instead of actually trying to develop anything interesting or try to build an emotional connection, they just have the main character constantly waffle about how they love their baby. Maybe I’m just desensitized to games just throwing children/pet characters at the player and just expecting an inherent connection just because they’re children/pet characters, but by the end of this game, I wanted to throw that baby over a cliff. If the sanity mechanic wasn’t such a non-factor in this game, then linking you soothing the baby to healing your fear would actually have been a good way to develop that connection through gameplay by tying the baby to helping you, as the player, survive.
I know The Dark Descent’s story is mostly seen as decent at best, but I definitely enjoyed it much more than this. In that game, it was paced so well (and wasn’t plagued with constant “so close, but suddenly teleport/crash/fall into another dimension”), it was immediately grabbing, it told you what you needed to know without feeling like it was oversharing or holding too much back, the notes were interesting to read, the flashbacks were impactful and without the ability to constantly narrate Daniel still feels like a much more fleshed out and engaging character than Tasi. We learned a lot about his journey from an emotional standpoint in a way that added to the atmosphere and helped put us in Daniel’s shoes, reading about his fear, how he was easily manipulated, how he justified his terrible actions, how he became disillusioned, how he tried to ignore his doubts and how his guilt consumed him, making the amnesia potion his one last act of redemption. With Tasi, it feels like we’re not learning much, just reinforcing the few major points we got in the first hour: She lost her previous baby, she loves her husband and she loves her new baby. It just comes across as rather shallow.
And to cap off my disappointment: I will never not be annoyed by the common defence of “You’re just playing the game wrong! It’s not the game’s fault for failing to immerse or engage you, it’s your fault for not being immersed or engaged.”
I played a lot of games I’d already beaten and dabbled in a few early access games (I also played Tecmo Super Bowl on NES, which I skipped back when I was a kid. I give it a 9/10). I started Red Dead Redemption 2 and was bored to death within two hours. I don’t think I’ll have the patience to ever make it to the world opening up. The only new thing I really played in 2020 was Cyberpunk. It was an odd game in that it was pretty much what I expected it to be yet still disappointing. The gameplay systems don’t quite come together, and the story isn’t as good as I figured it would be. I think it’s the heavy focus on Keanu that makes the story feel like something happening to the player instead of engaging him. I wish they’d gone with almost any other narrative hook. The ending also feels incredibly rushed. On the gameplay, I wish they’d delayed release until they could tighten up the gameplay and attained better balancing. There are some pretty good nuts and bolts there.
For me, 2020 was essentially The Year Of Falcom. I played or replayed all of the Trails games released in the west, plus fan translations of the Crossbell duology (so Sky FC, Sky SC, Sky Third, Zero, Azure, Cold Steel 1-4), plus Tokyo Xanadu eX+. Somewhere in there I also managed to finally knock off Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Pillars of Eternity 2.
The two new games I played this year were ARK: Survival Evolved and Genshin Impact, neither of which were disappointing. ARK I don’t have that much to say about. I logged about 200 hours according to Steam, which is quite good for the price I paid. Honestly I barely scratched the surface of the game’s content, but I got kinda bored of the core gameplay loop. I may have made the game too easy. It’s one I intend to revisit at some point, probably with different settings (you can fine tune the difficulty to a pretty ridiculous degree if you are playing solo/running your own server, which is all I did; plus there’s tons of mods).
Genshin, on the other hand, I could talk about for awhile. It was… surprising. I tried playing it initially only because most of my friends were. I thought looked like yet another entry in a certain genre I describe as “anime waifu games”, which I tend to strongly dislike. I bounced off right away because you couldn’t change the keybinds, which is an immediate dealbreaker for me. I have zero interest in retraining all my gaming reflexes. But then the game finally added the ability to change the bindings, so I gave it another shot, fully expecting to hate it, and… ended up loving it.
Don’t get me wrong, there are things about it I dislike. But overall I love the open feeling of the world, the way it seems to reward wandering around, the daily activities I can do but don’t feel like I *have* to do, etc. The game has been very good so far about letting me more or less do my own thing. Sometimes the main story quests can be pretty annoying, and honestly I don’t like the writing for the most part, but I don’t really HATE it and I don’t feel pressured to do the story anyways.
As for the aforementioned “waifu-ness” of the game, I was rolling my eyes pretty hard at the female character outfits, until I saw the male character outfits. What bothers me in these games is more about the disparity of the way female chars are presented vs. male chars, and this game…. does not have that issue to the degree I expected. >.>
Now, a lot of the girls’ outfits are pretty dumb still, but it is obvious they put effort into making the guys visually appealing as well, and that goes a long way to fixing my issues with the situation. Partly that is because I find the guys far more appealing than the girls, but mostly it is just that I hate when a game/piece of media treats its characters wildly differently depending on their gender. Genshin does still have issues with the camera getting stuck in awkward places on female anatomy, but I haven’t noticed it TOO often. (Though to be fair I tend to skip/ignore the cutscenes and conversations.)
As for the gameplay, I have long since lost track of how many hours I have spent on this game, and I still feel excited about playing. I love the elemental reactions, and the different playstyles of the various characters. I am having a lot of fun slowly grinding my way up in levels, working on upgrading gear, and fine-tuning my party. It feels really rewarding when your efforts pay off and let you just shred previously difficult enemies. The gacha mechanics are new to me, as I have never played that type of game before, but Genshin gives me enough currency via gameplay that I have never felt a need to spend money on getting more of it. I do “sub” to the game for $5/mo and pay for the battle pass upgrade, and I really don’t mind at all given how much value I get out of the game. There are some frustrations (such as swimming) that I hope get addressed, but overall Genshin is the most fun new game I have picked up in ages, and has been really welcome in these times.
I just got into ARK thanks to the GamePass sale, and yeah, I’m finding the same thing. Main gameplay loop is fine, but meh. There’s no story like Subnautica or NMS to drive you to explore, so you’re left crafting your own drive to do more than just poop on the beach.
I don’t have a ton of disappointments for 2020, but I also didn’t play much new.
Honestly, the most disappointing thing I can come up with off-hand is Astroneer. It wasn’t a bad game, per se – but it just feels like a game that could be so much more, hence “disappointing”.
I found it to be a great set of mechanics looking for a game – the base building and vehicle design was interesting, the “universal plugin” system was really interesting… but just couldn’t find any driving motivation to keep playing the game after a certain point.
There’s research, but it’s boring “get generic research points from doing generic stuff to spend on any technology you want”, and there’s exploration, but… once you’ve spent 10 minutes on a planet, you’ve seen 90% of what it offers. You can spend a bunch of time activating a warp gate to the other side of the planet[1]… but the other half of the planet has the exact same stuff as this side, so why bother?
It’s a survival, crafting, research, exploration game, where there’s nothing to explore, research is boring, little reason to craft most stuff, and the only interesting survival bits were the parts where I did something stupid, like driving my rover into a hole or the time I stranded myself on the moon.
[1] Or a bunch less time by just strapping a ginormous tower of small batteries onto a trailer[2].
[2] On the one hand, I felt really clever for that solution, on the other hand I do feel it makes the game more boring once you realize that lots of small components are more or less strictly better than large ones. A medium slot’s worth of small wind turbines is 12x more effective than a medium turbine, and only a little more expensive, in a game where resources are found in mass quantities.
I managed to strand myself in the first planet’s core accidentally while driving a large rover. Thankfully the rover provides infinite oxygen and has a wind turbine on it so I can keep it powered-up indefinitely (if slowly, from all that intermittant underground wind), but it was still a pretty traumatic experience getting lost in the center of the planet. I haven’t actually been back to dig/find my way back to the surface yet.
Oh then by Retsam’s criteria I want to add Starsector to the disappointing list. I really liked it and still continue to like it. But the UI is extremely disappointing. It desperately needs a rework. Like there are three separate map/navigation interfaces that all do the same thing but all with slightly different controls. The whole UI is full of madness like that. Still like it a lot though.
I was disappointed by Destiny 2. After removing over half of the existing content of the game, as well as introducing the disastrous sunsetting policy which sees all loot drop with an expiry date, and much of the existing loot, including the loot that the last 2 expansions were built around, already expired, it went from the perfect quarantine game that I could kill time in to a shell of its former self. Never mind how the broken new freeze mechanics have ruined competitive. It’s easily the biggest disappointment because it went from a game I was enjoying to one I just can’t any more. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a game ruining itself quite like this, and I doubt I ever will for a long, long time.
I finally got round to playing Dark Souls 3 last year and my issues with the game can be pretty quickly summed up with ‘there’s too much Bloodborne in it’. Or, Matthewmatosis’ video on ‘the Lost Souls Arts of Demon’s Souls’. It’s faster, lighter, more reactive and more mobile but those things were never what I liked in the souls combat systems. And the game has far too many multi-stage boss fights, recycled ideas from previous games (did we really need another poison swamp?) and bullshit mechanics. It’s a shame because there are things that I genuinely really liked about the game: the Old Demon King boss fight was exactly the kind of thing the game needed more of, the Untended Graves is a cool idea, the Ancient Wyvern is probably the best environmental boss they’ve ever done, and alternate endings based on player choices are great. But there’s so much that’s just meh, or that seems to proritise being a cool action game in a series that was always supposed to be more than that.
And finally, Pokemon Y. The biggest problem is that, in moving to a 3D style on a platform as limited as the 3DS, the environments couldn’t have anywhere near the complexity the previous generation did. So everything looks shiny and new, but there’s a lot less to explore, and weird 3D sections like Lumiose city are more difficult to navigate. I also generally don’t particularly love the chibi art style. The villains and rivals don’t hold a candle to Team Plasma or Cheren and Bianca and there’s not really much of a plot to speak of. It also included the disastrous exp share change, which, rather than splitting experience across your entire team like Gen 1, or giving half of the experience to the pokemon holding the item and half to whichever pokemon battled, now sees each pokemon in your party get 50% experience from battles each in addition to the 100% the pokemon that battled gets. Not only that, but this is given to you after the first gym, not as some postgame or endgame item for grinding for the Elite Four. It completely removes the interesting decision making of which pokemon you let fight and which you don’t, or if you prioritise raising many pokemon early in the game for more type coverage and flexibility, or if you prioritise having fewer, stronger pokemon in the early game. And the worst thing is that I know I have the option of turning it off, but I have no idea if the rest of the game is balanced around the assumption that players won’t or not.
Wait, what? So, all the cool items you’ve spent ages grinding for – which is the main selling point for most players – are just… gone after a set amount of time? Or is it just the non-legendary loot drops (or whatever the highest level is called – never played Destiny)?
The old drops max at an arbitrary power level. In any kind of PVE content that means they will do little to no damage and you will receive more. They still work in PVP modes where the level is disabled. Additionally, if they removed the like 250 weapons from max level use, they only added like 6 back in. The random strike list lost 7 and gained 2. Gambit is down to 1 mode and only 3 maps. They shit on their player base even more than Shadowkeep did
This is how it works:
All gear has a max power level. Excluding exotics, but you can only have one exotic weapon (out of 3) and one exotic armour piece (out of 5) equipped on your character at once.
There are 4 seasons per year. Each season, the max power level rises by 50, and the power level of endgame activities rises with it.
There are two power limits for gear: the seasonal power limit (which is the max power level for all gear this season), and the max infusion level (which is the max power level for the specific item in question in all seasons). No weapon or armour pieces will be higher than the seasonal power limit but all will one day reach the point where their max infusion level is lower than the seasonal power limit.
So if I get a weapon now, it might say ‘seasonal power limit: 1260’, meaning that 1260 is the max power level for now. But it might also say ‘max infusion level: 1410’, meaning that in 3 seasons, it’ll reach its limit, and in when the 4th season begins after that, it’ll be max level 1410 in a season where the new top power level is 1460. So loot that drops now has under a year of viability for anything other than the most casual play or certain competitive modes where power level advantages are nullified. Whereas in the past, you could always infuse your weapons and armour to the max limit, which made investing materials into masterworking them feel much less awful than it does now.
Now, you may think that’s not too bad, but sunsetting has been implemented terribly on many levels.
The first is that way, way more was sunset than was added even with the recent expansion. So, while a lot of the meta defining weapons have gone, there are also holes in the loot pool. A lot of what was sunset wasn’t problematic, and a lot of unique and fun weapons are unusable. As many in the community will tell you: weapons are not just ‘stat sticks’. The way they function affects your entire playstyle, so the lack of weapons or the sunsetting of unique ones has made entire playstyles nonviable.
The second is that gear that is already sunset, as in has already reached a max power level of 1060 in a season where the max power level is 1260, is still dropping, which is essentially useless as a reward. Not only that, but that included the majority of the loot of both the Dreaming City and the Moon, which are paid DLC locations. The entirety of those locations are essentially built around perfecting the unique gear sets that drop there so sunsetting has made two of the most unique and fun locations completely pointless in a season where literally over half the game was removed. They’ve decided to reissue those armour sets but not all of the loot from those locations, and any currently sunset Reverie Dawn or Dreambane (the armour sets from the Dreaming City and the Moon respectively) won’t be un-sunset, meaning that all players will have to start from scratch all over again.
The third is that there are power level requirements, both hard and soft. There are activities that you literally can’t queue into if you’re below the power level and using even one piece of currently sunset gear drags your power level down significantly. And because power averages out (so, in that scenario, if I have a sunset weapon, I can’t just holster it and do normal damage with another: the effectiveness of all my weapons and armour will be dragged down) using sunset weapons is basically completely non-feasible.
When you add this to the decision to cut over half of the game (and, honestly, the better half) in the ‘Destiny content Vault’, and the new freezing subclass which is absolutely broken running rampant in PVP, and the way they ruined one of the more fun core activities in Gambit (I could write an essay on how the original gambit was great game design, and how it’s been completely gutted) I really am not exaggerating when I say the game has been ruined, at least for me as a player.
Wow, I’d heard people saying they had ruined the game, but this is just sad. Even though I never got into it, I’ve always thought Destiny’s shooting mechanics were the best in the genre. Too bad they’re tied to such a horrible system :/
It’s a stunningly bad unforced error.
Apparently, the cited reasons behind it were to:
1. Make sure players who have fully masterworked endgame level gear still have something to chase. However, it doesn’t give them something to chase. It just ruins everything they’ve been chasing all along.
2. Prevent situations where very popular weapons like Mountaintop or Recluse dominate the meta for too long. This would have been solved by sunsetting only a handful of the most overpowered weapons each season.
It’s a shame because last season had so much content, a great seasonal activity, and thhe aforementioned great mechanics. I finally understand those Nostalrius guys who wanted WoW classic. If I could play in a Nostalrius server for the last season, I would take that over what we have now in a heartbeat.
Now that I stop to look back, I think the only 2020 release I played last year is Fall Guys. I can only recall buying three games at all: Vampyr (still unplayed — see below), Overwatch, and Dark Souls Remastered (which shouldn’t count, since I didn’t get it until this month). Anything else I played I either already owned (New Vegas, Dark Souls II), was free to play (Dauntless, Fantasy Strike), or I got through PS+ (Fall Guys, Street Fighter V, Hollow Knight).
My biggest disappointment is probably how restricted my list of played games became. While in theory, I had more time to play games thanks to lockdown (after wrestling through my remote learning workflow), the fact that my ten-year-old was pretty much always in the room with me altered what I was willing to play. New Vegas skirted the line; my tendency to role-play as a paladin is likely the only reason I didn’t quit. That’s why Vampyr still isn’t even installed, and I’m honestly not sure when it ever will be.
I know the feeling there. My wife worked from home, my child couldn’t go to day care, so my video game time was actually a bit less then last year. And since my kid is 3, if I could play a game with her in the room, it sure as hell wasn’t gonna be Dark Souls, so anything the wasn’t G rated/Child friendly had to wait till after kid went to bed or before she got up.
The “hard” play through in Vampyr is to do it without eating anyone. That doesn’t condone the combat, but you play without camping anyone
My disappointment last year would have to be Per Aspera, a game which released in December about being a new AI in charge of terraforming Mars. It’s got the most beautiful Mars globe I’ve seen in a game, and is a decent (if not amazing) city-builder/logistics game, but the story has some…problems.
Now, I’ve played through the game three times to get all the endings, so I realize that the fact that your mission control is gas-lighting and lying to you is in fact an intended aspect of the story, but I always get a bit hot under the collar when I—the most advanced AI ever created, in a story set ~200 years in the future—cannot think of something so basic as to record the threatening message I received (which is confirmed to have played on the loudspeakers for all the colonists to hear) when it comes time to try to convince mission control that I’m not going crazy. Enemy drones attacking my base which mission control insists are mine?* Could I maybe get one or two of the literally hundreds or even thousands of colonists on Mars at the time to corroborate my story?† Play some video clips of what happened? Nope, decisions about the mental health of the 200-years-in-the-future AI in charge of the flagship mission of a multi-national coalition to establish a human presence on Mars through terraforming all come down to a “he-said, she-said” exchange. I get—from a having-completed-the-story perspective—that mission control is going to find a way to discredit any evidence I present to keep up the facade on their end, but at least let me present it instead of limp-wristedly asserting what I saw and heard. It’s just beyond frustrating. By the time I did the “take over Mars for myself” third ending I was so done with all the humans the story, that at least it felt cathartic to kick everyone off the planet and tell ’em off. (I will say that the voice acting, in general, is quite high quality, even if there are some bugs that occasionally result in people repeating lines, or saying something completely different to the subtitles on-screen.)
I could go on (why is the position of “leader of the Martian colony” hereditary, exactly?), but that’s the big annoyance of the game for me.
*
They’re technically correct, in a really unsatisfying way because it involves hiding information from the player.† In fact, the commander of the expedition always dies in one of the attacks, no matter if you flawlessly destroyed every drone before they could reach your base.
Doom was one of my disappointments too. Just about everything in the game changed for the worse. Watching the hodgepodge mess of features grabbed from other games shown off before launch put me in the mood of ‘well if the combat stays the same they can’t screw that up’. And then they did. The core design of combat in Doom Eternal is an MMO hotbar rotation in first person. To top it all off they even managed to burn their bridges with Mick Gordon as well.
A friend and I discussed (well ranted to each other) to death just how much of a mess all the changes were and how badly we felt compounded. I’d make a huge wall of text. It’s the least Doom feeling game in the mainline series. I’d rather play Doom 3 and 3 was awful. At least I can be happy classic modding is still alive and well and that it got 1 good reboot.
Edit: The genre I prefer is having a renaissance at the moment though which is nice. Dubbed ‘boomer shooters’, there’s a solid few of them around by smaller devs. New Blood in particular has grabbed quite a few.
I’m really glad for the rebirth of ’90s-style shooters. Although, after Dusk and Amid Evil, I sort of got my fill. I tried playing some others like Warlock and Ion Fury, among others, but after a certain point, they started to drag on and feel kinda same-y.
I guess I’ll have to wait for the Renaissance of the more story-driven shooters like Half-Life (“millennial” shooters, if you will). That’s the game I have the fondest memories of, along with the Jedi Knight games. The only real “boomer shooters” I played back in the day were the demos for Doom, Blood, Heretic, and a couple of others that escape me. But I never played any of them all the way through.
In terms of shooters, Half-Life was definitely the most formative for me, and the one I’m most nostalgic for. But those types of games are much harder for indies. Not only do you need great shooting mechanics and excellent level design, but you also need a story and voice acting. But one can hope, can’t he :D
Doom Eternal seems to have suffered the same problem as Wolfenstein: The New Colossus. Both were sequels to surprisingly good reboots of old FPS games and both successfully adapted the pace and flow of late-90’s FPS games to modern sensibilities. Then the developers didn’t really seem to understand what made their initial games such hits and introduced mechanics that didn’t mesh with or outright contradicted great mechanics from the previous games. In the case of TNC the storytelling also took a nosedive since the writers failed to realize that what made TNO work was how incredibly earnest it was and how making BJ war-weary and tired also made him a relatable protagonist. Instead they doubled down on how cool it was to kill nazis and it all fell flat.
Perhaps it is a coincidence that all four games were made by Bethesda studios. Perhaps it is saying something of the kind of pressure Bethesda applies as a publisher.
I think the only really disappointing game I played this year was Prey Mooncrash, which is a game that lots of people seem to rave about. For me it was just too stressful with the combination of time pressure and no saving. I absolutely adored the base game, and only spent a few hours with the DLC before sadly giving up.
I don’t care how many times people say the time constraints in Mooncrash are easy to circumvent and you don’t even need to worry about it after a certain point.
I don’t care! Mooncrash sounds great, and I will never ever play it because I have an intense, deep, averse psychological reaction to timers in any game I play. This is also why I’ve never played through a classic Super Mario game, lost all interest in Pikmin 3 when I learned it was evaluating playtime, and look for mods that disable quest timers in games like Daggerfall.
It’s not really Mooncrash’s fault, since all that baggage is mine. But I was definitely disappointed to not see any kind of ‘traditional’ DLC for Prey. Something like Bioshock’s Minerva’s Den would have been right up my alley.
Agreed!
And I’m sad that Arkane’s next game (Deathloop) appears to be going down the same route.
Man if there’s a pet hate I could never have foreseen it’s clicking on a game shortcut only for an EA multiplayer progression focussed webpage to open that turns out to be the game launcher.
I didn’t actually play any games made in 2020. My disappointment of the year is definitely Fallout 4. The controls and UI are just… bad. Overloaded controls, not having a separate inventory tab for notes, not listing notes chronologically(or marking them as read)… And unlike most severe problems with Bethesda games, a lot of it can’t be fixed with mods.
I ended up giving DOOM ETERNAL a miss after hearing about the assorted… what’s the term, “forced mechanics”? That your ammunition supply is intentionally crippled so that you’ll use the chainsaw more to refill it, that you need to flamethrower things to get armor, etc… it sounded as forced as the laugh track on your least favorite sitcom. I recall hearing that it was intentionally done to disrupt players from ‘getting comfortable’ or something by having a few guns they lean towards, and if true that’s dumb. Let players play favorites and have a style: that’s a form of player expression in and of itself.
I tried CIVILIZATION 6 this year but found I didn’t enjoy it as much as 5. Is this what happens to all older Civilization fans? I know 5 tended to favour ‘tall’ play with ‘wide’ being a more dubious possibility, but 6 seems to overcorrect. Now you can’t help but try and blitz out more cities and I just didn’t enjoy that style.
Not much else disappointed me this year. I guess I had a good year?
If you do want to try a “tall” style in Civ 6, you can give the Maya a try. They get a large bonus to cities within 6 tiles of their capital and a large penalty to those outside. It’s not *as* tall as a Civ 5 equivalent, the “ideal” Maya setup is 13 densely packed cities – but more realistic is 8-10.
Eight-to-ten cities (with thirteen being ideal?) is getting into my definition of “Wide”. I rather liked four-to-six-city “tall”, with that range being decided mostly on how many good spots you get.
Of course there’s always the option of trying to annex a neighbor later (or at least part of one) but five-ish being viable means that you’re not always in a forced land rush against everyone else on the map. Hell, you can pull off even less if you have to, albeit generally only against AI.
I did a little research and it looks like I played around 21-22 games this year. I bought 10 of them, 3-4 were replays of older games I already owned and 8 of them were from Xbox GamePass for PC. I actually tried a lot more than that on Game Pass, but I’m only counting the ones I spent some real time time with
Disappointments
I’m going to jump on the “disappointed by Doom Eternal” train. I’m not going to go into why, plenty of other commenters outlined it really well, mostly the ammo/resource management issues.
Star Wars Squadrons was a bit of a disappointment for me as well. I liked the game, but considering Xwing vs. Tie Fighter is one of my favorite games of all time and a formative one of my youth, I expected to LOVE this game, but it just didn’t click in the right way. Wish I could say why. Something about the momentum and flying, shooting, and targeting just didn’t work for me. I never felt like an ace pilot.
Deep Rock Galactic was a bit of a disappointment for me as well. I thought I was going to get this super fun hectic gameplay experience, but you just spend 75% of the time stumbling around in the dark, smacking walls and getting lost. When you finally do get some combat, it’s not that engaging. I bounced off this one.
Iron Harvest is a game I loved during the beta but didn’t care for upon release. I wasn’t a backer of this kickstarter or anything, but I LOVE RTS games and heard about this one so I bought it. The campaign levels in the latter 2/3rds of the game are just a SLOG though and I wasn’t having any fun so I stopped playing. Made me sad. The PvP was pretty fun, but I’m just not a big PvP guy so ultimately I gave up on this one as well
I really enjoyed Horizon: Zero Dawn, but I think it’s a much better game if you just stick to the main plot and treat the side activities as “things I can do to level up if I start having trouble with the stuff I have to kill”. It’s NOT a game where everything levels with you. The only problems I had with the unpatched PC version was that some of the ultra-high-def cut scenes would crash, but that was resolved very quickly. Everything else worked fine.
The gameplay honestly could have gone completely without the RPG mechanics, which really didn’t add much mechanically to the game. It was very difficult with many of them to even tell if they were doing anything.
The tough part is that the sequel, Horizon: Forbidden West, has, as yet, no planned PC release. I don’t mind if it’s a PS4/PS5 exclusive for a while. Sure, you gotta make your bread for Papa Sony, but after a year or so, why not put it out on PC and get another nice chunk of sales?
I mostly played Battletech this year (there are some great mods out now,) and just finished up HZD, and mostly enjoyed it. I would say my biggest disappointment this year was Metro Exodus. Loved the first two Metro games for what they were (fun atmospheric linear shooters) and this one just felt like they were trying way too hard to turn it into an open world Fallout clone, and on top of that the requirements to get the good ending basically means never killing anyone. Even if they trap you and send a bunch of guys to kill you, somehow you are the asshole for shooting your way out of an ambush? I think I got partway through the first real mission and just couldn’t be bothered anymore.
While I can certainly understand why fans of the previous games (like myself) were disappointed by Metro Exodus, I personally loved that game. The open world felt dangerous, every encounter is life threatening or at the very least a serious drain on your resources. Like you needed to do everything you could just to survive. It’s nearly a survival game without all the stupid hunger and thirst meters. It’s very fitting with prior games thematically and tonally (though clearly not structurally). It’s also exceedingly well written (if not always well acted).
Aside from it being open-world first person, it bears literally no resemblance to Fallout in any significant way.
Also, I got the good ending and I killed a LOT of people in the game. There are specific groups that specific sympathetic NPCs will ask you not to kill, usually some brainwashed church people or slaves. Also, don’t murder people who surrender to you. That’s pretty much it. Though that first mission definitely sets the expectation you seemed to pick up, that isn’t the case throughout the game.
Yeah, I have real-world issues with cults so that first mission really rubbed me the wrong way. I keep thinking that maybe I’ll try again to play through it but I just haven’t worked up the effort.
Give it another shot. That first mission is EASILY the worst one in the game, and you never encounter that group again so your issue with cults becomes a lot less relevant. It really is a fantastic game so long as you’re willing to go with the structural change.
Of note; there IS a way to shortcut Marauder fights in Doom Eternal. As it turns out they can be faltered by dashing into them with the chaingun’s energy shield, allowing you to burn them down with impunity. However, the point still stands because the way the devs have patched out previous shortcuts (there was one exploiting their ice bomb behaviour a while back) makes it clear that they regard these as exploits, and that any time a Marauder turns up you are SUPPOSED to put the rest of the encounter on hold to play Simon Says with him. Blech.
Typo I think? “or at the bottom of my disappointments list” I think you meant the top of the disappointments, since that’s where it ended up.
I think the idea is that he’s counting down to his biggest disappointment, so the first entry is actually the bottom of the list. I may be wrong, of course.
Numbering the entries might clear this up, but it could also be overkill given the brevity of the list.