T w e n t y S i d e d
This was not a great year for me. My health took a turn for the worse in May, and things sort of spiraled out of control from there. Eventually there was some surgery that went poorly, some drugs with bad side effects, some complications, and a small but permanent downgrade to my quality of life. And then just to keep things interesting, my wife was injured this August, right when she had a ton of stuff to do at work and I needed a lot of help at home.
I turned 50 this year, and I felt every bit of it.
My wife is back on her feet now and I’ve adjusted to my new condition, but still. What a year. I had several months where I didn’t really play much in the way of games, or I played familiar low-stress “comfort-food” style games. I’m pretty sure my Factorio series was cut short by the hospitalization. I seem to remember I had more posts planned, although I can’t remember the details now.
So this was a weird year. Normally I look over the industry and try to find a trend or theme to tie the year together, but I spent most of 2021 looking inward and not paying attention to the news. Did I miss anything important? Did Half-Life 3 finally come out? Did Rockstar announce GTA VI yet? Did a new MMO displace World of Warcraft? Did EA finish rehabilitating Anthem? What’s going on? What was the big story this year? I wasn’t paying attention.
I don’t know about any of that, but I do know I’m cold all the time and I suspect my blood pressure medicine is to blame.
I suppose if I had my act together this year I could maybe make the case that this is the “Year of the Remaster”. Tony Hawk got one and it was pretty good. Grand Theft Auto III got one and it wasn’t. Modern Warfare 2 got one and it was okay. The Warcraft III Reforged debacle was last year. The pointless remaster of Grand Theft Auto V is next year.
The industry is finally waking up to the idea of re-releasing legacy games. This is being done less for conservation and more for monetization, but it’s still good that these old titles are getting a chance with a new generation.
Looking Back
At the end of my 2020 wrap-up, I listed a few games I was looking forward to. Let’s look back and see how those turned out.
Mass Effect Remaster – I just want an excuse to play through Mass Effect 1 again. That’s all I’m looking for. I’m very worried some dipshit will use the remaster as an excuse to shove a bunch of obnoxious Cerberus retcons into the first game. It’s very obvious that Cerberus is the pet villain of someone at BioWare, and that person isn’t above flagrantly self-gratifying and tone-deaf bullshit. They put Cerberus into ANDROMEDA, for crying out loud.
I don’t plan on playing through ME2 or ME3. I really have seen enough of that nonsense, and I know it all ends in frustration anyway. Like The Matrix, Mass Effect is so much more enjoyable if I can pretend it’s the only one. All I want is the original with a fresh coat of paint.
This year I spent a lot of time putting together Mess Effect. By the time I was done with that, I was pretty burned out on Mass Effect. I did buy the remaster, but I only played the first few hours.
It doesn’t help that some of the graphical upgrades were sort of questionable. They really cranked up the lighting, which was pretty subdued in the original. The remastered cutscenes often seemed to have lots of broad, soft light. That’s what you want if you’re filming a soap opera, a gameshow, or a sitcom, but it’s not really ideal for science fiction. It didn’t ruin the game or anything, but some of the mood was spoiled in the process of upgrading the game.
Manifold Garden – This is technically out now. It appeared on the Epic Store first, and I gave it a pass because I was tired of the Epic Store. It came out on Steam in October, but by that time the end-of-year deluge had begun. My plan is to play this one during the slow summer months of 2021.
Ah yes. The “slow summer months of 2021” when I was spending most of my time in the waiting rooms of various medical facilities.
The game didn’t set the world on fire. I don’t think it was bad or anything. I certainly never heard anything bad. In fact, I never heard anything at all. I just didn’t see the kind of excitement or interest I saw for The Witness, Baba is You, or Filament.
I did pick this game up around Thanksgiving, but I haven’t been able to put any real time into it. (I do like what I’ve seen so far.)
Hyperbolica – This is a game that takes place in hyperbolic space. It looks very trippy and I can’t wait to explore it for myself.
This one got pushed back to 2022.
Hitman 3 – The rebooted Hitman series is 2 for 2. Can they make three great games in a row? Probably. This one is out on the Epic Store, but I own the previous two Hitman games on Steam. They share a common pool of levels, so I don’t want to break up the set. So while this is a 2021 release, I probably won’t get to play it until 2022.
Not only did this not come to Steam in 2021, but we still don’t have a release date yet.
I’ll have more to say on the Hitman games a little later in this series.
Bloodlines 2 – I already talked about the troubled development of this game earlier in [my 2020 Dénouement]. It’ll supposedly come out this year. We’ll see how that turns out.
Nope! Delayed again. We don’t even have a release date yet, and it’s entirely possible this game is going to die in development hell.
Gotham Knights – Ugh. I’m pretty confident I’m not going to like this one. I hate everything the designers are doing. But I’m still waiting for someone to recreate the magic of Arkham City. I need to play this, because otherwise the internet will never let me hear the end of it. Also, you never know! It might be good! This is not a prediction. I’m just allowing for the fact that this is technically possible right now, no matter how unlikely it seems.
Looks like this is yet another game pushed back to 2022. And speaking of delayed games, back in my 2019 wrap-up I said:
System Shock Remake
Supposedly this will come out this year, more than two years past the original promised delivery date. It’s been a long road for this game. The demo released in December did not inspire confidence. It looks right. It feels right. But can they get the content done and polished before they ship it? I have no idea.
Two years ago it was already two years past its promised release date. And here at the dawn of 2022, we still don’t have a release date. Honestly, at this point it would make sense to push it all the way back to 2023 and release it as part of the System Shock 30 year anniversary.
30 years! Where did the decades go?
Let’s Get 2021 Over With
Those of you who follow the site probably know that I normally don’t start this end-of-year series until the first week of the new year. This year I’m breaking with tradition because that’s just how the schedule worked out. I finished off my Prey series last week, with just three weeks left in the year. I didn’t want to start the new series, run for 3 weeks, and then put it on hiatus for the Dénouement.
But Shamus, why not just have the two things run concurrently? You’ve done that in the past!
This next retrospective is going to be a little different. Specifically, it’s going to feature two posts every week. I didn’t want to run those two posts AND the Diecast AND the ongoing Arkham Origins collaboration AND my end-of-year stuff all at once, because that would be chaos.Also, I’m not sure I could keep up with that workload.
So instead we’re going to power through this end-of-year in the last 3 weeks of 2021, and then kick off the new year with the next retrospective.
Next week we’re going to talk about a couple of games that I spent a lot of time with in 2021 but didn’t manage to write about.
Footnotes:
[1] They put Cerberus into ANDROMEDA, for crying out loud.
[2] This is not a prediction. I’m just allowing for the fact that this is technically possible right now, no matter how unlikely it seems.
[3] Also, I’m not sure I could keep up with that workload.
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.
Project Button Masher
I teach myself music composition by imitating the style of various videogame soundtracks. How did it turn out? Listen for yourself.
Silent Hill Turbo HD II
I was trying to make fun of how Silent Hill had lost its way but I ended up making fun of fighting games. Whatever.
In Defense of Crunch
Crunch-mode game development isn't good, but sometimes it happens for good reasons.
Are Lootboxes Gambling?
Obviously they are. Right? Actually, is this another one of those sneaky hard-to-define things?
Sorry to hear about your health taking a dip. I don’t know the details and it’s not my place or business to ask. But for what it’s worth if it’s the kind of thing that can get better I hope it does and if not then I hope it doesn’t get any worse.
Shamus left a link to his write up on the issue in the first paragraph, if you’re curious, and has pretty much talked about all of it on the blog. So it’s not really a secret …
Makes me think about older games re-released with modernized graphics that would be incredibly awkward with the original gameplay. Imagine something like Ms. Pac-Man or Wizards of Wor that kept their original gameplay with current-gen graphics.
I’ve heard there’s an interesting case study for this, actually. Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/543260/Wonder_Boy_The_Dragons_Trap/
Basically it looks gorgeous, but a pretty repeating complaint I’ve heard is that it still plays exactly like the original. Same stiff jump arcs. Same weird physics. And a few other things like that.
So~ the fans loved it, but it didn’t exactly set the modern player base alight. So there’s definitively a case to be made for the remaster that is TOO faithful… but~ at the same time, you want to please that classical audience.
2021 seems like a bit of a nothing year. A lot of games have been delayed into 2022. The only things I played this year which came out this year are the Disco Elysium PS5 version, the Mass Effect remaster, the PS5 pack in game and Ratchet and Clank. Two of those are just updated versions of older games, and the best of the remaining two was the pack-in game.
I’m done with 2021. It’s a year that was waiting to be over as soon as it started. At least the horror of 2020 was novel.
(I did get married in 2021 so on a personal level it wasn’t totally a wash!)
Didn’t Diablo 2 also get a remaster this year?
Yeah. It was fine as far as I could tell, but I was never that into the original; I played it once, then stopped once I realized the higher difficulties were just more of the same. Which is exactly what I did with D2: Resurrected.
But hey, it went better than WC3: Reforged! Not that that is a high bar to clear.
Blizzard did a LOT of notable stuff this year, some good, a LOT bad…
Now that Prey is over, the “immersive sim” theme should continue. I would love to see a Retrospective on Cruelty Squad — Shamus would probably hate the game’s visuals, but that’s part of the fun!
If you have the courage to look past the garish surface paint, it’s a very solid game with a surprising amount to say about the modern world. That, and it has some clever level design.
While they do get a chance with a new generation it’s clear that the target audience is the original nostalgia-fueled fanbase. Very few people of the new generation of gamers will give a crap about those old games.
In any case, some of these re-releases end up being worse than the originals in one way or another, which probably hurts their chances to be properly appreciated.
This year hasn’t been fantastic for me in the gaming front. This year I bought my Switch, which is wonderful, and there have been a few excellent releases (mostly on the indie front) that I’ve really enjoyed, but I’ve been so overworked and I’ve had to deal with such extensive medical treatments that I’ve been tired all the time and I couldn’t muster much energy to play anything (or do anything really, like watching movies or work on my digital art). Thankfully it’s getting better now.
I’d actually say that this the “Year of the developers fighting against abuse”, which is a good thing, even if the abuse they’re fighting against has been going for years and it’s taken them this long to finally start doing anything about it. But I’m glad it hasn’t slowed down and, in fact, it seems to be getting stronger. On the one hand is horrifying to see how widespread this problem is, but it’s certainly a positive that people are starting to fight against it.
I somewhat disagree with this, only in that I’ve known plenty of younger players that are starting to explore older or more traditional types of games, or have parents that enjoy this kind of thing and therefore get exposed to it. What “this kind of game” is, who knows, but the Mass Effect Trilogy is a perfect example: technically, that is a recent series of games, but there’s a lot of players that never played the original trilogy before that are diving in now. A lot of them are in their early twenties, which means they were still teenagers when Mass Effect 3 released, and therefore were likely children when the trilogy had begun.
It’s easy to be skeptical of the numbers since Fortnite and Genshin Impact and other free-to-play ilk seem to be all the rage with today’s teens and younger adults, but on one hand I feel like that’s just the world as it always was: when I was a kid in the 90’s, it was all about Madden and Mortal Kombat. Then it was all about Counter-Strike. Then it was all about Call of Duty and Wii Sports. There’s always “mainstream normie” games that seem to dominate the industry, but those consumers are fickle and not hobbyists. Enthusiasts are interested in games, period, and a lot of them are still digging into the past.
I mean, Metroid: Dread beat sales records for the whole franchise despite the last proper entry in the series was what, 2010 with Other M? You can put some of that on the Switch’s marketshare, but then again, Metroid Prime 3 Corruption released on the Wii and still failed to cross the two million threshold that Metroid Prime had crossed on the GameCube. Which… only proves that sales numbers aren’t wholly reliable in terms of getting any meaning out of them, but to me also suggests a lot of folks are exploring an old-fashioned franchise they’re unfamiliar with (and evidently then leading to a huge boost in digital sales for legacy Metroid titles on digital storefronts).
So, if the idea is the mainstream of the mainstream doesn’t care, probably not, but there’s a lot of interest in legendary and legacy games by younger enthusiasts, especially with streamers being more regular viewing to a lot of younger generations than traditional television.
Jesus, man, I don’t know how to approach this conversation if you really think Mass Effect and Metroid: Other M are what qualify as “old games”.
I mean, those are the games getting remastered mostly? Some of them are older, yeah, but given the context of what Shamus was talking about I figured that’s what we were talking about. If we’re talking about Diablo 2 then I still think the point still stands that there’s a lot of younger audiences out there willing to give them a try, not just a bunch of nostalgic folks.
I mean, I don’t consider Mass Effect and Metroid: Other M old, but I’m in my mid-thirties, not early twenties. So… I dunno, as I said, I was basing my comment off the context of what Shamus brought up and I assumed you were responding to.
Honestly, I think it matters a lot how well done the remasters themselves are.
Case in point: Resident Evil 2 was so brain-meltingly good, it basically reached main-stream status for a while. I heard buzz for MONTHS about that game. Even folks that normally won’t touch horror with an eleven-foot pole and double gloves were giddy about that game.
Compare and contrast: Resident Evil 3. It was good, but cut more corners. So people mostly had a good time… and~ then they moved on.
And now Capcom has basically restarted development on the RE4 remake, to make it far closer to the original but with modern graphics and touches if rumor can be belived, so~ they at least seem to have taken careful notes on their own, accidental case study.
I draw a distinction between remakes and remasters and the new RE games firmly fall on the “remake” side of that line.
A remake is a game that reuses a title and story but otherwise is more or less a new game. “Remaster” is something I’d reserve for games that keep basically the same gameplay and structure but just modernize with QoL features, graphical updates, etc.
Yeah I’m with Chad on the distinction as well, though some remakes are far closer to their source material than others. Resident Evil 2 is a full-blown remake in ways the GameCube recreation of the first game of the franchise wasn’t, and this year we just got a remake of ActRaiser that is not too dissimilar from the original release on Super Nintendo.
Then there’s the Final Fantasy VII Remake which, outside of character designs and the most basic of plot points, really is just a whole new game that’s pretty much nothing like the original.
How do we define “old game” anyway? I’m partial to “anything released no later than 2005,” but I’m willing to go as new as 2012.
I think a good baseline is, “Can you run it on windows without going through compatibility-settings-Hell?”
Seems as good a threshold as any.
Another good one is ‘supports wide screen resolutions like 1080p’.
Not to say that 1080p is not a good cutoff in general, but I’m just amazed by the first Age of Wonders. It does any resolution you throw at it without stretching any pictures. You just might need a magnifying glass for the text.
I wouldn’t say that. All there’s been is a lawsuit that saw a lot of people scrambling to put distance between themselves and the allegations, and a strike that seems to have gone absolutely nowhere.
Ross Scott was talking about this recently. He was sceptical about the ratio of remasters which could be considered definitive improvements over their originals, excepting that they can be played on modern hardware. I’m inclined to agree with him that the best approach for a remaster might be to change as little as possible – just supporting bigger resolutions/higher framerates, up-ressing original textures, adding better anti-aliasing, fixing bugs etc. Making changes beyond this just seems to leave room for subjective dissatisfaction in comparison to the originals.
I get that there’s often a bunch of technical, under-the-hood reasons why changes have to be made, but I wonder whether other times it’s a case of changes being chosen to be made, and not infrequently with Lucas-esque results.
I agree a remaster should mostly leave the main story and mechanics alone*, but I really like them adding optional content; superbosses and such.
*(Except for obvious problems like the camera controls being inverted and unchangeable.)
Ironic that Lucas Arts adventures like Monkey Island let you toggle old and new graphics.
If 2021 was the year of anything, it surely must be large publishers finally beginning to receive public pushback for fostering a horribly abusive work culture.
I dunno if it helps much, but the System Shock remake has a publisher now, which at least means they have someone to oversee schedules and milestones and such. I’m not overly familiar with Prime Matter, though, other than they’re a Koch Media publisher. Ah, and as memory had served, that’s because they only appeared this summer at E3, and most of the games they’ve published were already well in development or already released on select platforms. So, it’s too early to tell what to expect from them as a publisher.
In regards to remasters, I’d been somewhat miffed that EA bothered to release a trilogy remaster of Mass Effect but instead decided to just remake Dead Space rather than giving it a similar treatment. It would be overkill for PC since you’d just need to fix the port, but that’s sort of when I realized that the closing of Visceral Games might have also meant the loss of documentation or resources that would make a remaster viable. Granted, I have no doubt Mass Effect Remastered was mostly outsourced and most of the original programmers and developers were gone, but with Bioware still intact you may have enough documentation (how naive of me) and other resources that would allow for more assistance to porting the games. So perhaps it was more economical to just remake the first game than attempt a port of all three.
This is just guess work, of course. In the end, I know I’d be more comfortable with a remastered trilogy than a remake, but, well, we’ll see what we can get, and at least the Xbox One and Xbox Series can still play the original trilogy’s 360 discs or download them via EA Play on Game Pass with some increased performance.
Still busted on PC, though.
You just need to fiddle around with Vsync when it comes to Dead Space on PC, it’s one of the few games where everything goes to shit when it’s *enabled*. There’s maybe one scene in the entire game that you’d actually get screen tearing in the original, outside of that it usually runs in the 100s of frames per second.
Since the first two are Steam games from before Origin existed, there’s less bullshit than usual associated with them than your average EA ports. They still play pretty well and look damn good, to the point that they’re really having to go all-out justifying a remake of Dead Space so early in development. I’m looking forward to it, right now it almost feels like EA are entering another experimental phase like the 2008 era that heralded Dead Space, Mirrors Edge, etc. They’ve involved fans in remaking titles a lot recently and have seemed to be on an apology tour the past year or so for Mass Effect Andromeda.
So … you took your Denouement 2020 post and … remastered it?
Sorry to hear about your health issues this year. Hope you’ll figure something out that works for you!
I’m always grateful at the end of the year that I’m not a games journalist or a games blogger and I don’t have to think deep end-of-the-year thoughts about games or the games industry. I’d be really bad at it. I think Loop Hero is the only game I played this year that actually released in 2021. I have zero clue what this year’s games were like overall. I have no thoughts about the state of the industry except that I hope that Activision-Blizzard and all the other publishers and developers with similarly rotten workplace cultures and practices change for the better in 2022.
Hell, I specifically made it a point earlier this year to play more new games, but even then I think the only this-year (2021) release I played was Subnautica: Below Zero. A few more that were less than a year old from 2020, but yeah. Riding the bleeding edge of multiple games is for people that get paid to ride the bleeding edge of multiple games (if at all).
Oh, Loop Hero was this year? That means I played two 2021 games; Loop Hero and Tales of Arise (all the way to the first boss, go me!)
…does The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles count? It released in Japan in 2017 and in the English-speaking world in 2021.
It counts in any way that matters. Great game(s).
I’m pessimistic for both System Shock and Bloodlines.
Ditto, the demo Bloodlines showed (I think at E3?) a while ago looked really janky for a controlled demo, and that was before all the development hell stuff hit. At this point I think there’s every reason to expect it to go badly.
At this point, if it comes out at all, it probably won’t include anything from that demo. It’s not officially cancelled but apparently Paradox threw out everything, changed developers, and got rid of all the existing writers.
FWIW I thought the demo looked pretty good considering it was pre-Alpha. Though not a graphical powerhouse and without very polished animations,it looked very playable and interesting in concept with a solid system for relationships, conversation, and skullduggery. That said, it’s unclear if Hardsuit was the right pick for making this, but that’s a long story on tis own.
Bloodlines 2? Oh right, VtMB2. Whenever I see “Bloodlines 2” I do a double take because I think they’re making a sequel to Blood Lines (Radical Entertainment, 1999), the game so popular it doesn’t have a Wikipedia OR TVTropes page.
While I suppose remasters are nice, usually I just end up replaying the originals. Although if the “remaster” is basically an entirely new game (Exile -> Avernum, for example), that does prickle my interest.
It was a 2019 remaster but WoW: Classic provided a very solid experience. Blizzard invested extensive work into a release that ended up looking and playing almost exactly as I remember it from 2005. Their explanation of the process:
https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/news/22646759/restoring-history-creating-wow-classic-panel-recap
I played through it from release in autumn 2019 up until TBC: Classic expansion in spring of 2021 and quit because it was clear that things were going to deviate harshly from the intent of staying true to the original. Paid store mounts and paid level boosts were added to TBC: Classic. Huge no-nos, glaringly so since the one change I thought was badly needed (maintain faction balance on PvP servers) didn’t happen. More Horde than Alliance on PvP servers was a negative issue throughout Classic and the writing on the wall spelled disaster for TBC: Classic. It has predictably become almost exclusively Horde-dominated PvP servers, with Blizzard collecting payments from server refugees as players pay $25/per character to escape bad situations. Perhaps it was profitable to not maintain faction balance on PvP servers.
In the end, WoW: Classic was a pretty great experience both in game and in a meta sense. The game was so solved that there was very little challenge to raiding in comparison to how it used to be, though average players seemed to take at least a few weeks if not a few months to clear AQ40 and Naxx. I was in a top 15 world guild which means that we were doing entire raids in 20-70 minutes and doing first clears within hours of release. The PvE gameplay loop ended up being spending an IRL hour or two per raiding character to collect world buffs (buffs from various places in the game world that make your character hit harder or have a larger health pool, etc.) to then blow through raid night as fast as possible. The two main arenas of PvE competition were a.)speed running the raids and, when a new raid was released, b.) seeing which guilds could clear it first. We practiced on private servers for about a month.
Another interesting development was that, since raiding with world buffs was so vital, there was a lot of PvP and drama around the process of buffing a character. Buffs are time limited (usually 60 or 120 minutes counting down) and are lost with death so it was dangerous to collect buffs out in the open world where you might be attacked by another player. But it was very interesting. A major source of open world PvP was trying to kill players with world buffs.
An unfortunate solved element was in farming. The game world was so polluted by bots and farmers collecting resources that it basically wasn’t worth doing as a regular player. That is perhaps the biggest change of all. I really missed that feeling of roaming the game world and collecting profitable things that would be useful to my character. Instead, I just had a raider alt that I effectively got paid to raid with (GDKP runs) and purchased all the resources that I needed from said bots and farmers.
All that said about how the player habits changed, the raw game world was almost exactly the same as it was in 2005. I loved that element of it. There was no chance of it being as interesting or difficult as it used to be but I’ll forever thank Blizzard for providing almost the exact same game world to let us have a second run through and see how we, and the meta, changed.
That’s the real value of a remaster to me.
“Did I miss anything important? Did Half-Life 3 finally come out? Did Rockstar announce GTA VI yet? Did a new MMO displace World of Warcraft? Did EA finish rehabilitating Anthem? What’s going on? What was the big story this year? I wasn’t paying attention.”
In order: No, No, Maybe, it’s “no” for now, but only time will tell if FF14 is kicking WoW’s butt. No. A lot, a little, nothing new. Scandal, but best not delve any more than to say “Scandal” and move along. Neither was I really, but I wasn’t in the hospital all year either so I dont have a good excuse.
“Mass Effect Remaster – I just want an excuse to play through Mass Effect 1 again.”
Did they change the way combat plays out? That was my only real fear (we all know they’re cramming more “Cerberus is the real good guys” nonsense in).
“System Shock 30 year anniversary”
I am dead. This is a skelington sitting here reading and responding. Am so old… (but I’m only 47 so I’m not officially ‘Old’ yet, old man)
[EDIT]
“Manifold Garden”
This looks really good. I really like these sorts of puzzle games, I’ll have to pick it up when I have a computer that handle it (or pick it up first so i don’t forget about it).
[/EDIT]
Regarding the Mass Effect 1 changes, they did have an impact on the combat.
They did basic stuff like allowing you to aim with untrained weapons with reasonable accuracy, giving headshots a damage multiplier and reducing how often enemies will use the Immunity (damage reduction) ability on higher difficulties which reduces the bullet sponge problems against humanoid enemies. They also gave weapon damage abilities like Overkill and Marksman a damage increase, which is kind of odd since using Marksman on a pistol had the highest DPS of anything in the original version.
Unfortunately they didn’t really make up for any of this by increasing the difficulty in other ways, so the game is much easier than originally. I remember being proud of completing Mass Effect 1 and most of the side quests on Insanity as an Engineer class back in the day, but that wouldn’t be much of a challenge in the remaster.
On the plus side, my favourite thing about it though is how they gave different weapons different characteristics. So unlike how all the weapons in a class would feel exactly the same in the original version, now for example there are auto sniper rifles, burst fire pistols shotguns that fire a single high damage slug etc. which makes the weapon selection more interesting.
Overall it’s an improvement, I’d say, except the difficulty decreasing. Thankfully the higher difficulties are all unlocked from the start so you’re not forced into breezing past everything without breaking a sweat unless that’s what you want.
Thankfully no story changes apart from a side quest Turian being an actual Turian instead of a Turian with a human head. So that means Cerberus are their same, completely useless and idiotic selves as before.
Ya know, I’m really tired of headshots. Particularly in games with rpg elements that should meet or even exceed player aim in importance, and foes that should clearly have non-head based weakspots.
In ME1, you can’t really snipe unless you have a sniper character, and that makes perfect sense because range increases the difficulty of a shot exponentially and big long guns are unwieldy and your character has a bunch of skills that determine what they know how to do. But with the sniper character, headshots don’t matter, because the gun deals so much damage that you aim center of mass to ensure the hit (I didn’t even know headshots in ME1 had no effect because there was no need!).
Watching an LP of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, hey look at all these people with metal arms and legs, I wonder if tranq’ing them in the wrong spot will fail? Oh, turns out the player’s been headshotting because the effing tranq rifle instantly nonlethally downs people if you shoot them in the head with a giant metal dart. Seems like the game has a very mild “oh some enemies have helmets!” thing, but that’s not the problem when they’ve made it so good use of the main non-lethal weapon requires the most-lethal possible shots. Because “headshots.”
And of course there’s always the 3d Fallouts, where the fankenstein mishmash of shooter and rpg mechanics means you can use the most powerful of both, sniping with pistols on player skill and then freezing time to switch weapons and perfectly headshot something literally below arm’s reach as base character traits.
The phrase “clicking on heads” is used as a prejoragive for 1st person shooter viewpoints, and it’s not wrong. Only in magical video game land can anyone just reliably shoot at heads, and it’s ridiculous for that to be plan A even in games where your character is supposed to have zero ability at it, even for methods where aiming at the head should be explicitly counterproductive.
The only solution is to bring back glowing red weakpoints in the center of the chest.
Or make headless enemies. Like… crabs. Giant enemy crabs are the answer.
Yeah, we could have them lurking around in swampy, mire-like areas. Maybe call them Mirelurks? And instead of headshots being effective, their weak spot is their face!
Giant enemy crabs is the entire reason why Dark Souls 3 is the best Dark Souls.
*Puts down Metroid* What do you mean, “bring back”?
Never mind, you were talking about first-person games and FPS Metroids are quite old.
If the game allows me, the player, to aim, I expect to do much more damage to any kind of enemy with a head, if I shoot them in that head. Conversely, in a game that allows me to aim, if I aim at the ground, I don’t expect that to damage the enemy. Should player skill not matter there either? At a certain point, why is it first person?
Some games just let you pick a target, and then it’s up to RNG. Like fallout 2. That’s fine, for a 3rd person isometric game. But if it looks like a FPS I expect to be rewarded for good aim, the same way I’m punished for bad aim.
In the borderlands games, some enemies have different weakpoints than just the head. That’s a bit more on the FPS side than the RPG side though.
Yeah, in magic video game land you can do a lot of things that aren’t necessarily realistic or likely in the real world. That’s a lot of the reason why they’re fun. Guns being easy to aim isn’t one of those things though.
Go play counterstrike and let me see how easily you “click on heads”. You make it sound so effortless and simple. It’s a lot harder when the enemy is trying to do it to you as well. Much like in real life, it’s a lot harder to aim while you’re being shot at.
But it’s fine with me if single player FPS viewpoint type games implement the option to make it so it doesn’t matter where you aim. A version of fallout 4 where you don’t have a crosshair and just pull the trigger when an enemy is onscreen sounds bad to me, but I just wouldn’t use that option.
Counterstrike is the central example of gameplay that’s “nothing but clicking on heads,” because so many weapons are pixel-precise on their first shot and can do one or two-shot kills when they hit the head.
Like, I’ve literally watched a tutorial video that said “train your aim by only allowing yourself to get headshots with the AK – if you miss the headshot just let yourself get killed.” That’s how important clicking on heads is in that game. Positioning, buy strategy, grenade tricks, spray control, none of that will make as much of a difference as being able to put your first shot in someone’s head as opposed to their chest.
This isn’t necessarily un-fun – some people like the quick-draw style of gameplay, people like it when a bullet to the head does realistic damage, it encourages people to stay out of sight and advance more carefully. But it’s extremely centralizing – if you aren’t good at aiming, Counterstrike has basically nothing else to offer you. If you don’t have a reasonable ability to hold a position and click on heads when the terrorists try to push through, you’re a liability. Contrast that with, say, Overwatch, where if you’re not good at aiming you could pick up Reinhardt or Mercy and still contribute.
It’s also unrealistic, since real soldiers don’t have the ability to land precision headshots in 0.5 seconds from the hip, which is a problem for games that market themselves as “realistic shooters.” Things like “short bursts to the center of mass” or “peek out from behind cover” don’t really work in CS because you’ll just die to a headshot.
I’m not sure why people call Counter Strike a first person shooter. It’s obviously a head based point and click adventure game.
Thanks! Great answer… but I didn’t expect all that, my fear for the combat was they’d change the way the ammo worked, overheating versus needing to ‘reload’. So did the ammo system remain the same from the original Mass Effect? If so, it might not be bad to pick up the remaster (who am I kidding, I won’t ever do that).
I hope things get better for you and you can at least work out these medication side effects.
It wasn’t a great year for gaming or Shamus. May 2021 be an improvement.
I guess there are still a few days left. :P
(Seconded though. I’ve been really enjoying reading this site lately, even if I seldom have anything to say. I’m sure a lot of people are invested in Shamus’ wellbeing.)
Got a feeling ’21 is gonna be a good year.
They’re was a lot of HR issues within studios this year. It seemed like more than normal.
And the whole Cyberpunk disaster.
This year would fall into “True Suck” if it were placed on some sort of D&D alignment scale of suckiness.
Here’s to hoping 2022 is better for you, and most importantly – your health. Other than that, really looking to the next entries!
You missed the Diablo 2 remaster, which was done exceptionally well and received very well.
For me, the biggest release of the year was, of course, our own Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. It’s a pity isometric RPGs are not a genre Shamus takes interest in – I would love to see him take our story apart and comment on every aspect of it!
Aside from the game I worked on, my favourite this year was, of course, another isometric RPG with turn-based combat – Geneforge 1: Mutagen. Sure, it’s a remake. But that game deserved a remake with less horrible UI than the original (Jeff Vogel was still learning how to make UI that doesn’t cause pain when he first released it). And the stories in Vogel’s games are far more in my taste than anything in AAA games – they’re less cliched, and focused on ideas, not characters.
Thank you for that great game. I’ve been spending most of my free hours with it since it was released in September.
If I would criticise one thing of the story that peeved me it’s the disconnect from player character ability for certain quests.
Would it have been so bad to be able to heal or raise certain dying characters or break curses of others in side quests? It would not have affected the main story much, but it would have been the logical solution within the ruleset of the world.
It’s been discussed at length internally and in other places, but the gist of it is that if you allow healing/resurrection in some places – you have to allow it everywhere for the sake of consistency, and then it begins to break the main plot really badly. Without the control and adaptability of a DM, it’s really hard to make a game which allows this, but since Patfinder system needs healing and resurrection for combat purposes, it’s impossible to throw these spells out.
In my own opinion, this is the difference between “Baldur’s Gate” and “Fallout/Arcanum” approach to story: BG-like story have more powerful moments, but allows for less freedom, while Fallout/Arcanum-like is more sandbox-y, you can do fun stuff like killing plot-important NPCs and getting enemies addicted to drugs. The later approach also generates a bit more nonsense, since the designers have to contrive various workarounds (from the basic “critical information can be had in conversation, or in a note on the dead body” to much more complex things) to avoid getting a player stuck in “walking dead” situation where he can’t win the game anymore, but doesn’t know it yet.
Wait! Seirra style dead man walking is a bad thing now? How times change.
It was always bad, but modern trends have made it worse. It was more tolerable back when you could “just” reload a save from a few hours ago, but it’s another when the game is 40+ hours long and you may be limited on number of saves due to console limitations (even on the PC version of a game.
I don’t know if I would agree with ‘Always’. I am sort of partial to the nethack method. “If you are bound and determined to kill duke-nice-guy being locked out the rest of the game is probably fair.”
You’re missing the part where the player “doesn’t know it yet”, which is what REALLY wrong with this design. If you were forewarned that your actions will break the game forever, but did it anyway – that’s on you. If you did something that seemed sensible at the time, but ended up preventing you from completing the game 40 hours later – that should never happen in a modern game, imo.
A size of font in that forewarning could be discussed: some would say that a player needs a big honking fullscreen message saying “this will end badly”, others would say that if it seems like a critical plot NPC to any sane person, than it should follow you shouldn’t kill him. I’m in the first camp, personally, because “everybody should easily understand that…” is underestimating differences in people’s thinking. If there is a chance I can break your game for myself and not know it, please say so and don’t waste my time – I don’t have that much of it.
Yeah, I suppose it’s worth clarifying what “Sierra-style” means but I’m thinking of the situations where you can’t know what you did was game ruining before or after the fact. stuff where you’re obviously tempting fate is different, as is the Morrowind “you done messed up” popup.
Related: the adventure game Cruelty Scale.
I’m still irritated by killing a random woman in Morrowind and getting Fate Severed because that particular woman had a bit part in a questline fifteen steps later in the chain.
The gold standard for classic Sierra is, “You are in act V and can’t win the game form your current save because you didn’t use a fish-hook (itself missable in act III) to steal cheese from a tiny unassuming mouse hole in act IV.”
Wrath was my game of the year, after Kingmaker being my game of the last several years. I won’t lie, getting to see my name in the credits makes me so happy it’s not even funny. Thank you so much for so many great hours/days/months of gaming!
It’s kind of interesting. I feel like more people had a worse 2021 than 2020 than the other way around. And yet all of these reasons are personal. I personally think a lot of people got a chance to take a break in 2020 with the lockdowns, but then the actual stress and problems caused by COVID related things really started to hit in 2021, just in different ways for everyone.
I’m really looking forward to two retrospective posts a week though.
In 2020 things were new, and there were goals you could put yourself towards and a chance to reassess your life. In 2021 the goals are gone, you’ve done the new things and now wish you could do the old things and realised there’s no point in reassessing your life if the world won’t let you put that into action.
And 2021 is when it really hits home that there’s never going to be a clean break when it’s all over in one go. Papers in the UK declared that the end of the first lockdown in 2020 was freedom day. With the knowledge of this year that’s just naive.
It turns out hindsight is 2021
Badum-Tish!
You, sir, have 2020-won my appreciation.
I wish the title picture had the “Pills, here”, caption
Hitman 3 was released at the end of January if I remember correctly, so a steam release will at least have to wait until then when the 1 year exclusivity deal ist over. Them not releasing any info about that date is probably part of that deal.
It is a great game, and I’m looking forward to new the levels they announced for “year 2” a few weeks back.
Also hoping for good PC VR support.
It takes two is one of two 2021 games I played more than a just bit, in fact I finished it once with a friend and am about half way through with another, and it’s lovely.
The other is Psychonauts 2, which I also completed, and I love it as well. I’m not even a fan of jump’n’runs.
Oh, and there’s Sniper Elite VR, it’s… fine. Had to wait a few patches and until what I now consider basic control and configuration options were added (hand-/ head-oriented movement, ), but now it’s pretty fun. Something about manually cycling a bolt-action in VR is very satisfying to me. Haven’t finished it yet.
Other than that it has been mostly updates to “older” games that got the most playtime.
Satisfactory Update 5 and the dedicated server for it was kind of the “proper release” for me and my friends.
Arma 3 got a pretty great new Vietnam CDLC (Community DLC, another team doing a kind of half-official/not official addon)
Insurgency Sandstorm had some smaller updates with new maps and we’re playing it more, but that is now really stretching it and I could include most other old games I play…
I do own Far Cry 6 because of my CPU purchase last year, but haven’t played it. Waiting for a coop partner, he didn’t upgrade :D
We also both got a gamepass and have now started playing what’s on there, only 2021 release I can think of right now is the new Forza Horizon 5, which will probably be as good as the predecessors, we just haven’t started it.