T w e n t y S i d e d
Like I said in the previous post, the Xbox show is not a double act featuring both Xbox and Bethesda. Here is the second half of the Xbox presentation…
Shredders
Link (YouTube) |
I’d wanted to play Steep back in 2016, but then decided against it when I realized I’d need to deal with UPlay. So I gave the game a hard pass.
And now we have Shredders, which offers a similar snowboarding experience without Ubisoft’s tumorous quasi-platform DRM nonsense. I’ll probably be too busy to check it out when the game launches in the overstuffed holiday season this year, but maybe I’ll find time for it next spring?
I love the aesthetic of continuous downhill movement + electronic music. Even if I don’t dig the trick-based gameplay or the time trials, I could see putting the game on easy and just zoning out while I slide down the mountain. There is something deeply satisfying about converting potential energy into forward momentum in a low-friction environment.
Replaced
Link (YouTube) |
I am reminded of The Last Night, which was previewed in 2017 and knocked my socks off with its stylish pixel art. The Last Night has since vanished into developmental delays. I honestly thought this trailer was for The Last Night until the title screen at the end.
I can’t really tell what the gameplay is like, but I’m reasonably sure this isn’t a platformer, so I’ll probably dig it.
Date: 2022
Outer Worlds 2
Link (YouTube) |
I liked the first game, but then I stopped playing it for personal reasons and I couldn’t get back into it. But I plan to get the sequel, and this is a really funny announcement trailer. Like Contraband, it has nothing to show us, but unlike Contraband it at least has the sense to be entertaining. (And also unlike Contraband, this is a sequel, so we know what to expect in terms of gameplay / tone.)
Date: TBA
Microsoft Flight Simulator
Link (YouTube) |
This game is already out on PC and last-gen consoles. This trailer is just here to flex a bit and show off some next-gen graphics.
I really enjoyed this game, but was ultimately driven away by the ludicrous loading screens. Even on my high-end PC, this game took forever to launch, and even longer to get from the menus to the gameplay.
Also, the game never let me do anything cool like they showed off in the trailer. I tried buzzing buildings and flying under bridges, but when I got too close to those real-world assets the game would cut to a black screen and act like I’d crashed. Also, this would cause a position reset that included another loading screen.
I assumed this black screen reset was Microsoft’s way of saying, “All of those cities are just to look at, please don’t try to interact with them. Also please don’t use our game to simulate or recreate 9/11. This is a serious flight simulator for grownups. Stop stunt flying around landmarks. Just fly between airports like a real pilot.”
I shrugged and gave up on the game. It was pretty, but those loading screens weren’t worth it for such a no-fun flight sim.
But now I see this trailer and they’ve got stunt planes doing loops around major landmarks, flying low, swooping under bridges, and otherwise having a good time. Did someone take the training wheels off just for this sizzle reel, or are we allowed to have fun now? Did someone add stunt planes to the game, or is that DLC?
Forza 5
Link (YouTube) |
I tried Forza 4. It’s really pretty. But the gameplay was… ugh. It was based around a story mode where you pick a character and enter some street racing malarkey. I would describe it as “plastic cringe”. It was weird, fake, and off-putting. It felt like someone my age pretending to be someone half my age. After a few minutes of cutscenes I hit Alt-F4. I just want to drive a car around, and I’m not into whatever these characters are doing.
Is Forza 5 the same? I have no idea. Once again, it looks gorgeous. I love all the different vehicles, and someone put a lot of love into designing these environments. I would love to drive around this world simulation-style, like in Grand Theft Auto V. But I don’t know if the game will let you do that.
(All of this criticism also applies to The Crew 2, which came out in 2018. I just want to drive through this huge world, but the designer thinks I’m here to play as a social-media obsessed zoomer. Come on guys. Did any of you play Burnout Paradise? It was all racing and no cringe, and it was probably way cheaper to produce since it didn’t need hours of motion-capped photoreal characters. Stop wasting your money. More importantly, stop wasting my time.)
Anyway, I’ll probably check this out if I find it on sale in 2023.
Date: This November
Redfall
Link (YouTube) |
Between this, Anacrusis, and Back 4 Blood, it looks like this is the year for the next-gen Left 4 Dead wannabes. The hook with this one is that you’re fighting vampires instead of zombies.
This is a five minute cinematic trailer. I sat there thinking, “This is much too long.” For comparison, I brought up the The original Left 4 Dead trailer from 12 years ago. I was going to use it an an example of a trailer done right and show how L4D told a little story in much less time. But when I looked it up I discovered that the old L4D trailer is only ~15 seconds shorter. So this isn’t a problem with length.
For me the L4D trailer feels like a masterwork. It sets the tone, teaches you about the gameplay, and introduces the characters.
The Redfall is trying to do the same thing, but it doesn’t work nearly as well for me. I can’t tell if this is because the Redfall trailer is using its time poorly, or if I’m just burned out after so many back-to-back trailers. I think one problem with the Redfall Trailer is the weird flashback-within-a-flashback structure. That’s a really odd thing to do in the context of a 5 minute movie.
I’m not saying Redfall is going to be horrible. It actually looks really impressive. I like how colorful it is, and I like how much personality the characters have. I’m just nitpicking the trailer because I thought it could have used its 5 minutes a little better.
Hey! Where is Death Loop?
If I had my wish, then Arkane would be making a sequel to Prey 2017. Not a story sequel, mind you. I’d want a new world and a new setting with new characters, but the same basic premise of being trapped in space with a cosmic spook. That’s my jam.
But instead they’re making Death Loop.
It’s bad enough that Arkane isn’t making the game I need them to make, but it’s even worse that this other game seems to have been forgotten. The game is supposedly coming out this September, but they didn’t even give the game a little 5 second nod in their big montage at the end.
Weird.
Date: September, supposedly.
But Shamus, What About X?
Here are a few smaller / less interestingTo me. games I skipped over. Some of these don’t have proper websites yet, so all of these links just go to the trailer on YouTube…
A Plague Tale: Requiem: Eh. I wasn’t really interested in the original, so I’m not excited about this follow-up.
Far Cry 6: Already discussed this in the Ubisoft post.
Slime Rancher 2: I had the original in my Steam wishlist for two years before I realized I was never going to buy it. It looks cute, but I guess I’m just not a rancher at heart.
Atomic Heart: This thing looks bonkers. No release date yet, so it’s probably a long way off. We probably don’t need to think about this one until next year. Still. I want to know more about this weird first-person robot-hacking shooter game.
Grounded Shroom & Doom Update: It’s cute, and it’s from Obsidian. But I’m just not into it. Is anyone playing this thing? I never hear anyone discuss it, not even the die-hard Obsidian fans I know.
Eiyuuden Chronicle Whatever: Not my thing at all, but this is a really interesting art style, with the 2D sprites in 3D environments. It looked a bit weird and bad at first, but then I sort of remembered when this rendering style was A Thing in the 90s. By the end of the trailer I was sorta into it. I have no interest in the game itself, but I wouldn’t mind seeing this hybrid 2D / 3D art style crop up again.
The Ascent: Okay, I dig the cyberpunk aesthetic and all, but you need to tell me more about your game. It’s coming out next month, so it’s not like we’re waiting for the game to take shape. It looks like a team game. Do I need a team like in Left 4 Dead, or is the team optional? Is this a bullet hell game? A Diablo-style looter? A button-smashy actioner? Your trailer got my attention, but then you didn’t tell me what I need to know to make the sale. (I did a search. It’s apparently a Diablo-style looter with twin-stick gameplay. That sounds pretty cool.)
That’s it for the Xbox show. We’ll wrap up the rest of E3 tomorrow.
Footnotes:
[1] To me.
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A Telltale Autopsy
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D&D Campaign
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Denuvo and the "Death" of Piracy
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Wolfenstein II
This is a massive step down in story, gameplay, and art design when compared to the 2014 soft reboot. Yet critics rated this one much higher. What's going on here?
Well it is kind of a spiritual successor to Prey 2017: Mooncrash.
I find it really perplexing (and disappointing) that Mooncrash left my cold while Prey was easily my GOTY.
Thus I’m feeling a bit pessimistic about Deathloop, in spite of it looking incredibly stylish.
Haven’t played Mooncrash, but it’s not hard to see why one would interest you and the other wouldn’t. Prey (2017) is a slow game of exploration and environmental mastery with a singular character. Mooncrash is a Rashoman tale with different design sensibilities and a shorter, less invested journey for each character, both figuratively and literally.
The devs of Prey 2017 are Arkane Austin, an offshoot of the original studio in Lyon, France, who are making Death Loop.
Arkane/Bethesda have a launch window exclusivity deal with Sony so with that context I’m not surprised that it’s absent at an Xbox event, “Coming Soon The Chance To Spend Money with Not Us!”. This is where the MS/Bethesda tie up starts to show it’s platform consequences and not for the first time even at this event as Starfield confirmed Xbox exclusivity right at the start
This sort of style has been showing up for quite a while lately. Octopath Traveler is probably the most famous example, but certainly not the only one.
A good number JRPGs and SRPGs from the PS1 days used the look. The system was well suited for pulling it off, really. Take advantage of the higher palette and sprite size availability, all while saving a good number of polygons for the environment. The alternative was to either strain the system with full 3D, or use 3D on pre-rendered backgrounds, and honestly I think the 2D on 3D creates a much better look in the end.
Given the majority of the artists they had did 2D work up until that point, it was a smoother transition there as well.
The revival is sort of being used as a retro-throwback while still looking better than your average indie team can pull off. As Dreadjaws noted, recently popularized with Octopath Traveler, and being used for Square Enix’s upcoming remake of Dragon Quest III (they call it “HD 2D” because of course they do). Eiyuuden Chronicle is a spiritual successor to Suikoden built by many of the key staff (so basically another ex-Konami group who decided to make a sequel on their own terms through Kickstarter), and as it’s based on a PlayStation game it looks like they’re using higher resolution sprites and reducing the pixelization. I really dig it.
It’s funny, because Replaced is implementing a very similar visual style as well. It’s honestly not a bad look, if you do it right.
For some series, the technique persisted into at least the PS2 era. I never owned a PS2 myself so I couldn’t say how well the technique worked in practice back then. I suspect it varied from game to to game. I also suspect that the televisions of the day concealed a multitude of sins. My introduction to 2D sprites on 3D backgrounds was Disgaea 2 for PC, which appears to use the same models and sprites as the original PS2 release. The sprites are still good, if a little chunky when viewed at 1080p, but the 3D backgrounds are awful, mostly because of the low-res textures. The contrast between the sprites and the backgrounds is jarring. I’m a little sorry that I never got to see the game at the resolution and on the sorts of displays for which it was originally designed.
The low-res textures are definitely my biggest memory of this sorta thing, besides some Capcom action titles. Specifically Marvel VS Capcom 2 I remember using this stuff.
It’s kinda not my thing since it’s such a clash between gorgeous 2D sprites and simple polygons, I’d rather just have all sprites(like, say, Marvel VS Capcom 1). but I do think this HD 2D thing looks a bit more appealing than that thanks to all the post-processing and just a higher resolution. Also allows Eiyuuden to do all these fun camera shots for the action.
I’m a backer, so this is a game I’m sorta trying to forget about until it’s out lol. Game dev takes time, and they won’t dev any faster just because they had to show it early for the campaign.
Based on what little I’ve played of it, Grounded seems like an explicit attempt to see if they can leverage their assets and talent to branch out beyond their usual audience. I played a very early release and noticed that a striking amount of stuff seemed lifted directly from The Outer Worlds, even including things like the background music. I suspect someone realized that they already had this first-person engine with survival mechanics and could make a spinoff that didn’t feel too similar by changing up the aesthetic.
The really clever bit, is that they’re minimizing overlap in the target audiences with these two fairly different types of games. Sure, Outer Worlds has some comedy elements and a cartoon-ish aesthetic, but Grounded is a game you could sit down and play with your neice and nephew on a Saturday, like Honey I Shrunk The Kids turned into a team game. That’s a pretty different experience from a single-player, mission- and story-based space-cowboy adventure. :)
I think most people on this website are not the target audience for Grounded, but the concept is hilariously awesome. Hard-core Obsidian fans are kind of besides the point.
I watched the Redfall trailer without the associated barrage of E3 and can confirm that I didn’t like it either. The flashbacks make it feel jumpy without adding much over the exact same scenes arranged linearly. Compared to L4D it also feels much more focused on showing off quirky character moments: “trying too hard” is subjective but it’s certainly trying harder. Finally, I think I just don’t like its aesthetic. The grounded urban environment and “normal dudes with rifles” enemy composition really clash with freeze rays and magic purple elevators. I’d be up for either of those but the decision to put them in the same game is weird, it feels like their design doc said “Overwatch plus Left 4 Dead” so they just copied each game’s style and mashed them together.
I think the ‘normal dudes with rifles’ were all actually player characters fighting the vampires, but it took me re-watching the trailer just now to figure that out. I originally got the same impression as you, but I think it was just some poorly-executed scenes that made it confusing as to who was on what team. In a slower-paced trailer I think it would have worked better, but here in this cut-cut-cut style, you really need to make sure everything’s readable quickly – it’s going by in a flash. It also doesn’t help that the sniper (and I think one other?) guy is dressed in more grey colors. That’s realistic for someone who’d want to be hidden on a rooftop, but he visually looks about half-way between the dark-clothed vampires and team neon. :)
No, the opening definitely had regular enemies with guns mixed in with the vampires, and I imagine most of the game will be about fighting those dudes with actual vampires showing up as elites.
Well, that just makes this game even more confusing and muddled. Team vampire shouldn’t be using guns. RIP :|
OK wait, I’m a dummy. They’re cultists, so they need guns. The visual style of the sniper dude definitely still has me confusing them for him, though. ^^;
The Redfall trailer fails to sell us on a clear premise. It is set in a world where there are vampires who have attracted cultists. Sure. But where do the protagonists come in? How did they get together? And most importantly, what are they after? Are they trying to eradicate the vampires? Prove their existence to a skeptical world? Crack wise and have a good time in a doomed post-apocalypse? We’re very far from the elegant simplicity of Left 4 Dead.
I’ve never heard of this, I should check it out. *clicks link* Ohhhh, I saw that game! That was by Obsidian!?
Obsidian isn’t Klei, they make one kind of game and I have no expectation that they would be good at making a radically different sort of game. It’s not impossible that Grounded is good, I like both Obsidian and weird survival crafting things, but this is a bizarre combination that does not excite me.
If Grounded was a bit cheaper, or if I knew for sure my friends would play it, I’d probably get it. Would be a fun set of summer afternoons, killing bugs and building stuff like we’re kids playing in a sandbox. :)
Didn’t Obsidian also get contracted to make a World of Tanks knockoff?
Yes, it is called Armored Warfare. They were on it until 2017 when Mail.ru took over continued support.
Replaced looks really great! If you pause the video, you can still see where the seams are, but I’m tickled pink that someone’s making a 3D game that’s got (what looks like) 2D sprites moving around in it. (And possibly also a shader to make the 3D stuff look more pixellated? Might have been some hand-work there, but still!) Wishlisted! :)
EDIT: You say the game’s not a platformer, but it’s at least got some platforming sections in it – the trailer shows your guy jumping off a platform onto a sign, on the side of a tall building. Seems like it’d be like the fighting of Double Dragon / Final Fight / etc, mixed with light platforming and lots of story from Another World / Prince of Persia, like how Blackthorne mixed those together back in the day. (Of course, modern machiens can handle a lot more stuff happening, so it looks like the platforming and number of enemies will be a lot more complex! :)
A more modern example of a brawler/platformer would be Shank and its sequel
Slime Rancher: It was on my wishlist for ages, I kept putting it off, it finally went on sale during the right phase of the moon or whatever to make me decide to pull the trigger, I played it… twice? Then never touched it again. I know some people who loved the game but for me, mixing Stardew Valley with a FPS didn’t gel at all.
I think I wouldn’t mind the FPS part, but the fact that I was only farming generic blobs is what made me ignore it on Steam. If I was building up a terrarium of strange and varied aliens like a vagabond Samus Aran turned Flight of the Navigator, that would be a lot cooler. :)
What put me off was mixing in finicky physics into the micromanagment. It feels like I spend more time trying to get each slime in a pen to eat whatever I’m shooting in it, then trying to painstakingly vacuum around the slimes to try to pick up the gems they produce than actually doing farming sim stuff. Having to manually water everything every day in Stardew Valley or Rune Factory (and probably Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons, which I’ve not tried) is a bit of a brainless timewaster, but it always works first time, it encourages you to think about how much you plant so that you have time and energy to get other stuff done each day, and makes getting sprinklers all the sweeter (plus, I personally find it really relaxing). Getting annoyed at the physics engine in Slime Rancher just felt like an annoyance, and it made me unwilling to play long enough to see if there are ways to automate it away (I would guess there is).
There are and the basic ones such as the automatic food dispenser and automatic plort vacuuming become available very quickly. A later update expanded the automation further with drones that can actually carry items between different plots of land but that is a more advanced feature.
I’m going to assume you specifically mean Forza Horizon 4. Forza Motorsport 4 was a different game and released in 2011. I thought they were going back and forth with these things, which… looking at release years they might still be. So I dunno. Either way, I dunno what to expect because I don’t race car, just thought it might be worth specifying. I doubt the 2011 game would have had you playing a social media influencer yet, though, so hopefully Horizon 5 is less story and more gameplay.
I had completely forgotten about Replaced, which is weird because it really grabbed my attention with its visual style while I watched the presentation.
On the whole, nothing in the Xbox presentation lit my fire. The closest was Eiyuuden Chronicle, but 1) I’m a Kickstarter backer so I’ll be getting that anyway, and 2) 2023 is a long time coming. Still, the aesthetic of it had me feeling like I invested in something good.
Regarding A Plague Tale, several months after I’d played it I had forgotten all about it. “The best game I forgot I played this year” is how I described it. It’s not bad, and it does quite a number of things well, but it doesn’t really accel at anything. Not even its story. I don’t know if I’d purchase a sequel since it didn’t really feel as if it needed one, but on Game Pass? Sure, why not.
You’re completely right, the Left 4 Dead cinematic is far better, though in some ways we can only know in hindsight. The audio cues for all the monsters are there. The music for the Witch even plays in the background. You get to see the Hunter’s perspective, which matches how Versus players will see it. The trailer is more cinematic (the Tank busting down the fire escape stairs up to the building’s roof, and I don’t recall if you can shut a door on a Witch and it be that effective), but it’s using the majority of its time to effectively introduce key parts of the game and how things behave through the cinematic itself. What’s more, the personalities are enough to separate the characters (sort of, Zoey just kind of comes off as “token female”), but none of them are incredibly in-your-face about it. Redfall is clearly going for the Overwatch Effect, which is to appeal to a younger audience that are going to make fan-art, fan-fiction, and OC’s in this world and I’m just too old for that (evidently the late-Millennial/Gen-Z protagonist that’s a streamer or influencer thing is going to be a new trend and I hate it).
At best, it demonstrates roughly how some abilities work like that weird hover ability, and that characters seem to have different gun types for dealing with vampires versus their thralls/indentured humans. Are these anti-Vampire weapons character specific? Can you one-hit kill if you stake a vampire in the heart in the game? Can a vampire catch a stake or is that just cinematic junk going on?
Perhaps, when looking back in hindsight, we’ll have a better idea, but I get the feeling that Left 4 Dead trailer should have set a standard in that it adheres really closely to the way the game plays. Instead, I feel like this trailer is more about a bunch of kids on Twitter picking their favorite character that they’re going to play as before any gameplay is even shown (even though there’s only much time dedicated to the obnoxious social media streamer and elevator magic girl, with falcon sniper brood guy literally having no personality beyond “I’m brooding and that makes me cool” and engineer girl just… uh… having a robot).
I can’t dislike the game yet since there’s no gameplay yet, but I’m uh… can’t say I’m interested.
On a separate note, Microsoft has an “Extended Showcase” in less than an hour (1pm ET) that’s supposed to have looks at games both from the show and also not included. For example, Hellblade 2 will be present in some fashion, though no clue if it’s new gameplay or not (rather, actual gameplay). I actually really dug Hellblade, and thinking on it, it might actually be in your interest range concerning “perfectable combat”. Took me some adjustment, but thinking on it, I might need to go replay it again just for the fun of it to prep for the sequel. Regardless, maybe we’ll see something there that would have engaged you more.
I sure hope they switch their plagues up, and don’t just end up doing ratnadoes again. Coming this fall! Plague Tale 2: Dysentery.
As for Hellblade; was the combat perfectible? It was incredibly rubber-bandy, but IIRC I accidentally got too good at it, and ended up taking about half an hour longer to finish the game than intended because I kept failing to lose a battle.
I think that right there kind of indicates it is. Then again, I’m basing it off of Shamus’ perception of whether it is possible to complete combat without getting hurt, and what the punishment is if you fail, that sort of thing… and I just realized I don’t remember what happens if you die in Hellblade. They tell you the game will end if you die too often, but I’ve heard that was a lie and that it was true, so I dunno. Regardless, I had a similar situation where I kept going for far longer than it seemed I should towards the end. It will change its behavior based on how well you’re doing (though you can shut that adjustment on or off), but it has limitations as to how difficult it will become.
IIRC all of that stuff about dying too often was a lie, and the effect on Senua that’s supposed to be the consequence of too many player deaths was entirely plot-gated.
I wouldn’t call the combat perfectable, per se, because the skill ceiling is set so incredibly low that even a complete scrub like me is essentially invincible by halfway through the game and the game compensates by giving the mooks ludicrous amounts of hit points.
The thing that really annoyed me about that part at the end of Hellblade was that the earlier battles
in Hel, especiallygo on for absolutely ages if the player gets too good at fighting. So the game teaches the player to expect these endlessly drawn out and not terribly interesting fights which feel like they’re supposed to be unwinnable,and then punishes the player for learning that exact lesson.When you die, the black infection on Senua’s arm has an animation where it “spreads” a little, and it’s explicitly stated that when it reaches her head, it’s game over.
In practice, if you have some idea how game design works and you pay attention, it’s easy to notice that dying repeatedly doesn’t actually move the infection, but the infection does seem to progress with the story even if you don’t die.
Okay, so the message was written to the player as if to communicate it’s an actual mechanic, but instead it’s a narrative tool that has nothing to do with the player’s performance.
Yeah that was a pretty bad decision on their part.
Nah, it mostly works if you don’t think about it too hard. Kind of like a DM cheating on a dice roll: it’s not the purist thing to do, but sometimes it makes for a better story.
The problem with these kinds of tricks is that they don’t work if the player has a good understanding of what is and isn’t a viable game design.
My main complaint with the Redfall trailer is that the sound mixing is terrible. I had to rewind it a few times because I didn’t understand what someone was saying.
Otherwise, it’s interesting to see other people complaining about eg the trailer structure or the mix of magic supertech and AK47s, because for me these are exactly the kind of elements that hit the spot.
I liked that it made artistic choices, instead of following a checklist. The nested flashbacks were a little jarring, but they were definitely telling a story with a logic to it. I don’t think the trailer would have worked as well for me if it started with the characters sneaking into town.
What I really liked was the cultists. You only get a glimpse of them, but the trailer manage to pack a lot into these glimpses. They’re not just mind-controlled puppets, they actually show deference to the vampires, and they sound kind of scared of them. There’s a lot of potential there, maybe with moments that humanize them, or with ex-cultist characters that go “I know what I did was awful, but it was obey or die”, or go the other direction and go full “these are complete monsters” with scenes of them being cruel to innocent civilians, etc.
Also, the stone ray and the purple elevator look like they’d make for great gameplay, so I’m really interested to see how they pan out.
Slime Rancher was an excellent game in my book. Cute, colorful, and the gameplay loop of explore -> find new slimes -> figure out how to safely raise them -> use the money to upgrade and repeat was solid.
But I wonder what they’re going to do for a sequel. The original game was already pretty stuffed with content (I didn’t even come close to finishing all the sidequests) and I’m not sure I’d play it again just to get a new map and a new list of slime types. The only new mechanic I saw in the trailer was that your water gun can now fire a sort of grenade blast to deal with Tarrs, which I guess looked cool.
Still no Combat Flight Simulator? Come on Microsoft! Flying an aircraft simulation is so much more interesting if your plane can be shot down.
Contrast that with the biggest risk in normal flight simulator: windows update starting during your 8-hour realtime flight.
After the credits, they tease a Topgun tie in, but A: Nothing on the pylons & B: F18s & some future thing (2:07), rather than F14s, in case you thought they might be trying for nostalgia or a dynamic flight-model (swing wings).
MSFS has never been about that. It’s (a) a training tool for pilots and (b) a way for ordinary people to vicariously experience being a pilot in as much detail as they can handle. And once you’ve turned off the aids all sorts of things can go wrong, including:
* Straying off course
* Losing track of radio stations if you’re flying by VORs or NDBs (if you don’t know what those are, it’s complicated and involves more three-letter acronyms than the US government)
* Getting slammed into the ground by wind shear
* Wandering into bad weather and being unable to see (unless you know how to fly by instruments and how high the terrain ahead)
* Losing your situational awareness while tuning radios, monitoring gauges, managing systems, etc. which can cause all the above problems and more
And then you have to land the plane…
Personally I like that it’s one of the rare games that is neither “kid-friendly” (though I suppose a VERY patient and dedicated kid) nor about killing people. It’s complicated, technical, cerebral, and when you’ve got the plane leveled out and on course and are watching the world go by, refreshingly meditative. It’s a deeper rabbit hole than any other game I’ve ever played, because the “game mechanics” are like 0.5% of learning to fly and the rest is aviation itself (not to mention the infinity of tools and add-ons). You might start buzzing over cities and trying to find your house but the real rewards are in complex flight plans, elegant landings, getting a handle on massively complex aircraft where almost everything works, reading real-world books on real-world flying and applying them to the sim, etc.
In fact it’s kind of replaced other video games for me for the most part, which I guess is good because once you get into flight sim controls and payware mods, you can’t afford other games anymore. ?
Outer Worlds 1 had a similarly slick, witty, light on details trailer that, together with its pedigree, made me giddy for its release. Then it came out, to high praise. It was such a letdown when I finally got to play it that I refuse to even consider playing the sequel. Extremely bland game play I could have lived with, but not coupled with an equally bland story. The humor was nowhere near as clever as they thought. And the branching? One Good Ending(TM) and one Evil Ending(TM). Really? No one cared enough to even have a lazy twist late in the Third Act? I expected more from Obsidian! I’d rather play something that I actively dislike or something too flawed to succeed than playing this, the ghost of past good games, bereft of life and just going through the motions.
(To be fair, I remember the companions as nicely written and their dialogue flowing well, but that didn’t feel like it was nearly enough to save the whole thing.)
To be fair, they did have a lazy twist in the epilogue.
I agree with you on finding the whole thing disappointingly bland. I didn’t even get to experience companions because there was a perk which rewarded you for playing solo and a 25% damage bonus felt better than the mediocre DPS and terrible AI of another party member.
The one complaint I have to add is that the tone was confused. Parts of it clearly want to be serious, but then most of the corporate behaviour feels like a Simpsons gag.
I tend to agree, and can even name the exact sequence that made me come to this conclusion: the video in the capital when you find out about the plan to
put people into cryogenic storage to combat the dwindling food supplyThis was a moment when the game could have taken a hard turn into “whoa maybe the board has a point” but instead they use it to tell jokes and make it clear that, nah, The Board is “the evil faction”. The saddest part is that, in the moment, the jokes simultaneously worked and also made it clear that I wouldn’t be able to take the game seriously after that.
I was also let down by TOW on release but recently picked up the DLC on sale and all I can say is that Peril on Gorgon is everything I wanted the base game to be. It still has dark humor but doesn’t shy away from showing how dysfunctional its corporatist society is and really leans into the horror of a society in which “life time contract” means the company kills you if they don’t want to keep you hired anymore. It is much better written, much tighter in tone and all around just a general improvement of the main game. Which makes me cautiously optimistic that TOW2 will be better in the story and tone department.
You know, I never did finish Outer Worlds. I ran into a bug in a prison where the game kept crashing when I tried to enter a room and start a conversation. Since I’d bought the game from the Windows store instead of waiting for it to come out on Steam, there was no embedded means to communicate with the developer or other customers about the problem. So I just waited for a bug fix. By the time it did, I didn’t care anymore. I learned a bit about the endings second hand from other players. Apparently I didn’t miss much.
From the majority of it that I did play, it seemed to have a very conservative mindset about its design. Nothing was very risky or imaginative, but everything was competently crafted and worked well enough. The story was serviceable, the dialogue efficient, the plot as interesting as it needed to be. The combat mechanics were decent combining light shooter gameplay with some ability management. Equipment customization was more than a bit meh. The dressup minigame for passing skill checks was a mistake. My personal biggest gripe was there was no way to play a character with business acumen or skill at navigating bureaucracy, which was very strange considering the setting. All in all though, I suppose it was a reasonable way to start a franchise. I can see Obsidian taking the feedback and foundation from OW1 and using it to make something much better in OW2.
Frankly, though, the Alterra Corporation and Trans-System Federation portrayed in the original Subnautica was a far more interesting science fiction concept than the Halcyon Worlds. Space exploration and colonization done by whatever interested party wants to do it, from business entities to cultural separatists. They can do as they like, but they have to follow rules in their charter, and the police and courts remain operated by the federal government. It’s a great setup for having a space adventure with mundane morality and behavioral norms (as opposed to being called a hero for single handedly killing thousands of mooks). I hope Unknown Worlds actually makes one in this setting some day. Currently the only games in it are a team PvP shooter and two survival games.
I also thought Replaced was The Last Night until the title drop. It seems pretty shameless, though it’s hard to know without looking up the devs. I watched Dunkey’s E3 summary today and apparently the reason there’s a game that looks like Inside there but is not made by Playdead is because those devs had a falling out and split up.
It’s not the exact same style that those games have got going on, but atm my 2d/3d hybrid cyberpunk game of choice is Anno Mutationem. It doesn’t exactly have the noir mood going for it like these games do, but that’s fine. Neither of them have anime girls doing lightsaber combos.
It’s definitely interesting how “L4D-like” (or co-op zombie shooter if you prefer) seems to be on the rise as a genre, like how battle royale games were a thing for a while and social deception games seems to be big now. The strangest upcoming genre I’ve seen (while I was browsing the demos for Steam Next Fest yesterday) seems to be “terraforming Mars”, as there are at least two or three games on the topic coming out soon-ish (along with Surviving Mars and Per Aspera already out).
Re: Forza Horizon 4
Yep, the first hour kinda sucks. It’s like a tutorial mission in countless games though, where getting through it is absolutely worth the time. After that it’s fully open world, you can do whatever, go wherever, etc.
I’ve been playing racing games for 20+ years, and it’s by far my favourite, still come back to it every week. It’s on Xbox Game Pass (and FH5 will be too) so I’d really recommend giving it another go if you’re after a driving game!
Shamus: My understanding is the “Forza” games are the “serious racing games” and the “Forza Horizon” games are the open-world, cringy-story, social-obsessed, street racing games.
Assuming that is true, I’d expect Forza Horizon 5 to be just as bad, in terms of having to pretend someone half your age (speaking as someone two years your junior), as Forza Horizon 4 was.
My exact experience with Need for Speed: Recent. A little while of trying to skip awful cutscenes of grown adults behaving like 13 year olds in 2000, a bit of driving in a straight route apparently being chased or racing or something story related, more cutscenes, then hitting Alt-F4 from boredom. Thank goodness it was free on EA Access.