T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I am still playing Risk of Rain 2. I’m currently trying to beat eclipse level 8 as artificer, other than that I’ve not played a whole lot.
What are you guys up to?
From The Archives:
What Does a Robot Want?
No, self-aware robots aren't going to turn on us, Skynet-style. Not unless we designed them to.
Games and the Fear of Death
Why killing you might be the least scary thing a game can do.
Overused Words in Game Titles
I scoured the Steam database to figure out what words were the most commonly used in game titles.
Dead Island
A stream-of-gameplay review of Dead Island. This game is a cavalcade of bugs and bad design choices.
Steam Summer Blues
This mess of dross, confusion, and terrible UI design is the storefront the big publishers couldn't beat? Amazing.
Have gotten real into Fallout 4, after finally getting my mods working. 20 hours in the last few days. I’m mostly getting into this to tide me over until Starfield comes out, but I’m actually having a lot of fun. Really should try base building more then just a rough shack in one spot, now that I have a mod that makes Junk weightless.
Started playing Rhapsody:A Musical Adventure again. It’s cute, but I’ve had to go flag-hunting several times already and I’m barely out of the prologue (turns out last time I stopped right before the plot started). And the central gimmick of characters breaking into song doesn’t work very well; at least in English, the voice actors are pretty clearly not singers. Not sure I’ll continue.
Tried out The Last Spell, which is a horde defense game (like Aegis Rim, without the plot insanity). Beaten the first two waves handily, and the thought of the third is stressing me out, so I might not have the constitution for The Last Spell.
I’ve been playing a bunch of Daggerfall: Unity, with its assorted mods. The games had a ton of good ideas, many of which should have been kept in other games, not just Bethesda’s. Money had weight, which I normally hate, but there is a robust banking system so store it, give you letter of credits. Even better you can contract a loan which is a huge boon for a new character, you can buy stuff, spells a cart and a horse and get a head start. Repaying it becomes a sort of first quest.
The world is gigantic, almost realistic. Most of it is empty/copy pasted which I also didn’t like at first but in the end the realism of it is pleasant. Yeah the city is huge, but nobody expects you to go door to door and explore everything, because it’s not how the world works. You check the shops, temple and guilds, ask around for work, and can ask random civilians where to find places and people. Whether they answer you is another story.
Daggerfall has the spell creator like Arena and Morrowind, which freaking rules. You can levitate and the dungeons often have stuff on the ceiling to reward it.
My biggest gripe is with the dungeons. They’re gigantic, but Daggerfall: Unity has an option to make the non main quest ones smaller. My issue is the lack of rewards for doing them. Killing monsters outside of the city seems to have a better value for time spent.
My second biggest gripe is with the lack of written NPCs. I just met the king of one of the provinces, and couldn’t even interview them about the main quest, I just had the same questions and answers available as with any other peasant. They really should have allocated more time fleshing out important NPCs.
Daggerfall is probably at its strongest as basically an open-world fantasy adventurer simulator (though it can get repetitive unless you’re a very particular kind of person). The story is there (what’s more it is timed, so the game kinda punishes you for faffing about too much) but its scale definitely doesn’t match the size of the world. having said that the idea that you had basically this whole area to play around in was breathtaking at the time it came out.
Still playing Resident Evil 2 Remake.
I’ve completed both Leon and Claire’s base scenario, now I’m going through Leon’s second scenario. After this, I think I’m going to be done with the game. Horror is… really not my genre (my favorite parts are the boss fights, where I can finally stop agonizing over every single bullet spent), but the nostalgia factor and the game being really good are keeping me hooked.
Managed to get another session in of Dragon Age 2, and it still has the addictive quality that there’s pretty much always something to do so I can get caught up running a quest and then hopping back to turn it in and pick up another one and so on and so forth. And I’m playing as a rogue and right now am feeling that I’m REALLY going to miss Bethany in the later acts.
Waiting on getting some expansions for the board games Arkham Horror Third Edition and Legendary. They should arrive today. I likely won’t play them any time soon, but I want to open them up and take a look at them over the next few days.
Hey~, Dragon Age 2 fan! REPRESENT!
That game gets way too much hate. Still my favorite in the entire series.
The first time through I had some problems with the story but really liked the way quests were generated and done, by being tracked across the three areas and you hopping from area to area to do them. And then when I watched Chuck Sonnenberg’s review of it I felt that he was being unfair to it despite my having similar criticisms when I wrote about it, so I replayed it and found that the plot works a lot better if you pay a lot of attention to it and recognize it as a tragedy instead of as a standard RPG plot, so I liked it a lot better after that, even though it does still have flaws. So I like it better than I used to and, again, the way of running quests and the rogue’s gameplay of leaping around the battlefield is really cool.
DA2 is the only one in the series I still look fondly back on. The departure from saving the world makes it feel a lot more distinct and interesting in my memory. It also helps that it’s the shortest—the others are just smears of dungeons to me by now.
I like DAO for how it allows you to act as your character would and have the world impact that, along with the different starting points which play into things later. I like DA2 for the way it does quests and the rogue’s gameplay, and can appreciate the tragic aspects of it. DAI is the only one where I said after playing it that if I never played it again it would be too soon, and shortly after played Persona 5 which took about the same amount of time and yet I IMMEDIATELY started playing it again.
Of course, DAI is up next because my goal for this year is to play through all three games again …
I’ve been playing Borderlands 2 in VR. It’s not like I haven’t completed the game more than once already, but the VR experience makes it a lot different; having to actually aim a (virtual) gun with your arm movements instead of just wiggle a mouse is a big deal. I’m really sorry they didn’t do a VR version of Wonderlands, so I’m looking forward to Assault on Dragon Keep which will be as close as I get to that.
I’ve been playing Tears of the Kingdom for a while, I’d say it improves on Breath of the Wild in a lot of ways that makes it less satisfying for me personally
Like the building mechanics are a cool enhancement to magnesis, and the vehicles are great, but the limitations the game puts on them mean that using the bare minimum number of parts is more efficient and often more effective than a more complex and interesting build
The addition of sky islands and depths makes the world bigger in a cool way but… in botw i would often get to the top of a hill and just stop and look out over the landscape. I don’t think I’ve done that a single time in totk, and I’m not really sure why it’s less appealing to me on that front
Pretty much everyone who talks about fusion has already complained about arrows having to be fused individually
Dungeon design in totk is a definitive step backwards in my book: botw already had less satisfying dungeons than more traditional zelda games, because instead of a series of increasingly complex puzzles intermixed with fights against unique monsters and minibosses, they were just a few disconnected puzzles with some small guardians thrown in, but at least being able to manipulate some portion of the dungeon architecture was a cool idea that made for some unique moments, and the bosses could get some hits in on you if you weren’t deliberately cheesing them (at least if you’re as mediocre at flurry rushing as me; I’m sure more skilled players could get through without damage even when they’re not just spamming bomb arrows from a lynel bow, but i feel like you’ve also got to practice a fair amount to get to that point). Totk cuts out the dungeon manipulation, makes two of the dungeons borderline linear without really increasing the complexity, and has some extremely easy bosses to boot. I don’t think the fire or water temple bosses even managed to hit me, and I’m not a particularly skilled player. I guess the fire temple was fun to navigate, and the wind temple boss is cool enough to make up for the lack of difficulty, but overall the dungeons have been a pretty unsatisfying experience
… but it is pretty fun to send a flamethrower drone into a monster camp, so hey, I’ll still play it until I’ve beaten it
I do find that the addition of the sky islands, plus the upgrades to the towers, plus the ability to throw together a glider plane makes most of the overworld into literal “flyover country”, which I find a bit of a shame – it feels like the most efficient way to get anywhere is almost always to go to a tower and glide from there – I could climb to the top of a mountain like I would in BoTW… or I could just fly there, so why bother?
I can’t speak a ton to the dungeons because I haven’t actually played any of them yet – (though I’ve watched chunks of them be played by others). I will say I really like that these actually feel like traditional dungeons; and I’ve heard a lot of people say the non-sky-based dungeons *do* feel a lot more like traditional Zelda dungeons than BoTW: a lot of that may be superficial, but I do think it’s a good change.
Won’t be surprised if they’re all pretty easy – BoTW’s were too, I think these games are designed to be too wide-appeal for them to be really willing to put much difficulty anywhere on the ‘main questline’. At least this game has far more interesting shrines compared to BoTW.
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As for bosses, I can speak to those (haven’t done the dungeons but did do the ‘boss rush’ ending in both games): again, it’s nice that they *feel* more like Zelda bosses than just having four different Whateverblight Ganons. I’d say they’re a little bit easier than the blights, on the whole, but not significantly: Thunderblight is still the hardest, and the Wind Temple boss here is the easiest, but I’d probably put Fireblight as easier than most of the bosses in this game.
Granted, the mechanics make it a lot easier to cheese these bosses: when you can basically always jump into bullet time with a flint, wood, and pine cone (or various shield tricks), a lot of the bosses can get pretty trivialized.
I agree that they feel more traditional, especially the fire and lightning temples, but that mostly comes down to having a unique aesthetic for each dungeon – an improvement over botw, yes, but a superficial one. Ultimately each dungeon is still just ‘solve these simple disconnected puzzles in whatever order you want,’ although the non-sky dungeons also have a pretty clear ‘most convenient path’ – i would say that kind of feels like it’s getting the worst of both worlds between botw design and traditional designs. Like, in a linear dungeon, you can have the later puzzles build on the earlier ones in terms of complexity, so the player gets an escalating series of challenges but isn’t completely lost, while in a non-linearv dungeon the player can do the puzzles in whatever order they want; with the fire and lightning temples, you don’t get the escalation, and you technically can do the puzzles in any order, but most possible orders result in a lot of backtracking so there’s basically one order most players will do them in.
For bosses, i would put Fireblight as harder than both the wind and water temple bosses, but i think that comes down to fighting it in the dungeon rather than the boss rush; botw’s fire dungeon will set off bomb arrows in your face, so your best source of easy damage is off limits there. Other than that, yeah that one isn’t particularly challenging. I agree on why they’re easy, although i also think the ease of getting healing items in both games could justify making them a little harder; maybe not quite to thinderblight territory, but i feel like the dungeon bosses should be able to make me actually use some healing items
I dunno, i don’t think we’re going to get more traditional dungeons while the focus of the games is giving the players tools to approach things however we want, so even if you get the feel of them it’ll never recapture the experience as well as just playing the old zelda games. I guess if i had to say how I’d prefer they make the dungeons, it’d be to take the current design where there’s a few simple, mandatory puzzles before the boss, and add in some optional puzzles that are harder versions of the mandatory ones, and if you complete them the boss is a bit harder: moves a little faster, attacks more often, gets new attacks, whatever. And then also up the reward for doing the hard fights: maybe there’s extra story details, or upgrades for link’s abilities, that aren’t necessary to beat the game but are nice to have
Definitely keep giving each dungeon a unique look though, that is a good change from botw
And yeah, the shrines are generally more interesting in totk, you’re right about that
I have finished Vampire: the Masquerade – Swansong. I should have a lot of bad things to say about this game. As I’ve mentioned it’s a bit janky in terms of production values: voice acting is uneven, character animations are limited and repetitive. The very structure of the game involves investing in skills and disciplines without knowing in advance what you’re going to need and in a few cases it may be possible to lock yourself out of the ability to “win” a conversation (though ultimately not out of game progression). Furthermore now that I’ve finished it I can tell that many of the choices have much consequence and only extremely few affect the very limited set of endings.
And yet for some reason I have greatly enjoyed it. To be clear, I’m sure my fondness for VtM setting, which I have played tabletop for many, many years but haven’t had a chance to in about a decade, was a big factor here, but the game has also been clearly made by people who know the setting and how to use it. There is good background depth and a lot of intrigue with the characters, I said you don’t know what skills you’ll need but there are almost always several ways of getting what you want, and ways to progress the game without getting it. Expending willpower (for using skills) and blood (for disciplines) is very often a shortcut, bruteforce way. You can hack the phone, or pick a lock, or dominate someone to force them to open a door; but you can also figure out the password, find the key, find a way around the door or convince that person to open it through knowledge you’ve obtained by reading various files or listening in on a conversation. I do wish there were more ending slides with more detailed epilogues but still the places where I put the three protagonists in the end felt satisfying and the choices, even if they had little mechanical consequences, felt good roleplaying wise.
Also played Grime. 2D soulslike metroidvania, it was fun, I do like me a big boss. It’s also doing that “vague on the story” thing and I’d love to see someone specializing in Freudian literary analysis take a good look at the game because I think it’s ripe for that kind of approach.
Esentially big chunks of the game map are themed around body components like bones, nerves or flesh. There is a whole progression from primitively chiseled stone humanoids to smooth mannequin-like ‘almost human’ beings in the shining cities at the top. The deeper parts of the map are devoted to things like “feasters” which… well they want to eat everything and are largely made of teeth, or creatures mixed between flesh and plant with weird tentacles writhing in the background of the levels. The top is a shining city where they create art all devoted to the all consuming avatar of destruction (player character). So yeah, I can tell there’s a lot of superego and ID here but also the “death drive” features prominently but I’m not versed enough to even attempt to tacklet it without doing some serious research.I played and completed Gravity Circuit over the course of a few days. Available on everything but Xbox, it is most clearly and obviously inspired by the Mega Man franchise, and yet does so many of its own things as to scratch the same itch while setting itself apart. You play as Kai, a.k.a. Gravity Circuit, and must hunt down your eight former comrades in order to restore peace to the city, all while a greater mystery is poked, prodded, and revealed. Unlike Mega Man, Kai is a melee ninja fighter that can dash and use a grapple hook to traverse and toss projectiles and enemies around.
This is probably the key ingredient to the game being a great title of its own and not just a Mega Man clone. With customizeable movesets and chips, you’ve got a limited window as to when defeated enemies can be grabbed with the grapple hook and thrown. It can also be used to carefully dispatch foes from a distance, carry them forward, and make quick work of another foe. It’s so capable that there’s an achievement for completing any stage using just the hookshot. Needless to say, dashing around the final boss arena, busting up adds just so I could snag and toss them into the final boss to put the pain on was an incredibly satisfying experience.
The combat is certainly the most satisfying part of the game, but, just like Mega Man, it’s also filled with obstacle courses, especially if you want to try and unlock everything. Enemies drop currencies and energy, with the currency used to purchase new attacks and passive abilities. These are what allow the customization, though it’d be nice if the player could save some pre-set “builds” for certain situations. For example, I would regularly swap some abilities for certain obstacle courses, then swap out again for bosses. Additionally, the order in which you can tackle the bosses is more free than Mega Man, as there’s no weakness system here (that I could determine, at least). Instead, each enemy defeated unlocks two potential strong attacks that cost energy to use and purchased from a vendor. This means the order in which you face the different robots can be determined by factors such as favorite movesets or which have the health or energy upgrades you’d prefer.
All in all it was an excellent experience and may be one of the most enjoyable games I’ve played all year. An easy recommendation to any Mega Man fan, but also to anyone that likes challenging and fast-action side-scrolling games.
I’ve also been playing Exoprimal on Game Pass, which has been surprisingly enjoyable despite being unable to play with any of my friends. It makes me lament the loss of a regular co-op group like I had over ten years ago, when we grouped up for Left 4 Dead, Gears 2 Horde, and Halo Reach Firefight on the regular, as well as any other odd co-op game we felt like. Exoprimal is some solid fun, though there’s reasons why, if you look at Steam reviews, the positive ones tend to be 10 or 20+ hours and the negative ones are on the lower end, sometimes less than even 2 hours. Capcom is really leaning not just on the Dino Survival mode, but on the steady drip feed of new enemies and game types over time. With about 6-7 hours clocked I only just completed a mission that changed things up and started adding dinosaurs I hadn’t seen before. I think there’s a desire to both let players get comfortable before introducing new challenges, and also a desire to stretch the content out best they can.
Which is no doubt a combination of modern gaming culture and the live-service model. People will plug dozens upon dozens of hours into a game in a weekend and gripe about there being not enough content, even though they’re the vocal minority of players. Most players are probably like me, maybe getting an hour or two in if they even log time into it at all.
Regardless of quantity of content, as I’m playing on Game Pass I do not get the season pass, nor have I sprung for it. Yet there’s still a lot of rewards you can earn via leveling up the different mechs and increasing your player level. I don’t know if the player level will reset every season, but as it is I’m reminded of unlocking content in Halo Reach, before all this season pass stuff kicked in. If you ignore the season pass, then Exoprimal feels no different than the games I’d have been playing with my friends over a decade ago. Even if you can only log in once a week, it’s still fun to play.
There’s definitely Overwatch influence here, and just like in Overwatch, one of the biggest headaches are the other players. I don’t voice chat publicly so that’s not the issue, no clue about any toxicity or whatever, and from what I can gather most other players aren’t on voice chat either. Maybe I ought to start getting on it, though, because every so often I get stuck in a match with nothing but players in Assault classes, meaning you have four DPS players and it’s up to me to be either tank or healer. Sometimes they’re newbies still getting used to things, but that stubborn attitude to stick to the class you want guarantees a match lost. A lot of times, though, it’s just typical inability to adventure out of the DPS classes, and the worst are the Zephyr players. As a melee class it has to get up close and personal, but these players just ignore any recovery or defensive options provided by healers and tanks and try to play like it’s Dynasty Warriors. These are the players that die the most often.
So, maybe I’ll get on voice chat just so I can try and say “Yo, you’re almost dead, get back here to the group so I can heal you.” Or so I can say “Alright, if no one’s gonna switch to Tank or Healing then we’re probably gonna lose this match. Don’t be surprised.” Or even worse, “Guys, can one of you grab the dominator? I’m the healer. I need to heal. I shouldn’t be grabbing the dominator. Whelp, I guess we’re losing this match…”
Those players will probably leave after a while, getting bored, but my concern is that what players will remain will rely on a meta. There was definitely one in the first Open Beta, and it got frustrating. Granted, Capcom allows players to choose whether they want to conclude matches in PvP modes or PvE (or, Random, which will slot you into either and net you bonus experience. This is what I choose). So if that happens I can stick to PvE. Currently, however, I’ve found most matches to be filled with more balanced players and those are the rare exception.
Still obsessively fighting off an alien invasion in Terra Invicta. I’ve learned from my first two restarts, and think I might actually have a viable shot at winning this time. It’s still hard as nails, though, and this is on the recommended-for-first-time-players, second-of-four difficulty level. I will say that it’s hard but fair: the aliens seem overwhelmingly powerful at first, but but they’re not getting magical stat buffs or anything: they play by the same rules as you, they just have a huge technological lead.
A big part of the game is figuring out how to survive long enough to close that lead, by not attracting too much alien attention and getting singled-out for attack*. At first it felt like I was just losing no matter how well I played, but having stuck with it I think I’m finally starting to see an inflection point: I recently attacked an alien army — which was around 300% stronger than an army of the most militarily-advanced Earth nation — and utterly destroyed it by ganging up on it with multiple US and EU armies. It was a huge relief seeing it go down, and felt like taking down a boss, since before that those armies were terrifying unstoppable behemoths capable of laying waste to any single army they encountered. But now I know the aliens bleed…and if I can just fly under the radar long enough to get my fledgling space navy built up enough to have a chance at taking them on before they go total war and bombard us back into the Stone Age, I just might have a chance at fighting back.
*One thing I’ve learned is not to fight all the other human factions equally, as letting the extremist faction that wants to destroy the aliens get more powerful has deflected alien military action away from me towards their fleets and stations.
I picked up an emulated copy of Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn. Having enjoyed Three Houses’ gameplay but less so the story, I’m enjoying what all my friends tell me is the only well-written FE game. I can see some of the other entries in the series aping the plot beats without understanding what made them land in this one. (That said, I definitely wouldn’t still be playing without save scumming. It is just unreasonably mean in the gameplay sometimes!)
Horizon Zero Dawn here. I’m at 60 hours and definitely hitting that open world wall where I just want to finish the game, but I can’t help but complete all sidequests and tasks. I am enjoying it though. I have the Frozen Wilds DLC also, but I think I will have to take a break before jumping into the DLC.
I’ve been playing Gloomhaven, the 1-to-1 adaptation of the legacy boardgame of the same name.
Legacy boardgames are boardgames that are kinda designed to play once. Because you make permanent changes to the boardgame as you play it. They usually also have a more story focus and, more importantly, cannot be played in a single session, having a “save state” like videogames.
Also, they are expensive. VERY expensive. Gloomhaven in particular costs 6 monthly minimum wages in my country. But I’ve had some limited success playing it in boardgame simulator for free with friends. Until the macros and script spazzed out and soft-corrupted the save state (that is, the save loads, but it is in a nearly-unplayable state).
The game is the next-best thing, as far as I’m concerned, but it is unfeasable to play with friends.
The system is kinda like a card-game D&D. The beauty of the boardgame is that you can play a session regardless of how many players you have at hand and the level of the characters, since the dungeon-crawls self-balance based on the number of players (1-4) and their level. Not realistic, but every DM also balances their dungeons, so meh. And the classes are very esoteric. You have a “rogue” (scoundrel, actually, but same thing) and a “bard”, but then you have things like “mindthief” and “cragheart”.
The system is equipment-based, level based and kinda of a deck-builder, as each class has an ability deck with 2 abilities in each card. Every turn you select two cards and then, when it gets to your initiative (also based on the cards) you select which ability you will use from each card, with the limitation you have to use the top ability of one card (the attack ability, generally) and the bottom of the other (the movement or support ability). Then you discard both cards. You can perform a rest during your turns to recover all the discarded cards, but you have to select one to burn (or one at random if you do a “short rest”). Once you have no more cards to burn (or gets to zero hit points, which also only happen when you have no cards to burn), you are “exhausted” and out of the dungeon crawl, but you never die and lose your character. Also, if you are exhausted and the other players complete the objective, you are considered to have completed it as well.
Each class can only take so many cards in a mission, with tanky classes usually having more cards. When a class levels up they both select one of two new cards from the new level and also a “perk” which customizes their “hit” deck, which stands in for the “attack roll” in D&D. Every class starts out with the hit deck having 1 critical hit and 1 miss cards, 6 +0 cards (the number you add to the damage you do with your abilities), 5 +1 and 5 -1 cards, and finally 1 +2 and 1 -2 card. Which means the combat is more or less deterministic and easy to plan around, since if you plan for a -1 damage penalty most of the time you will know exactly what will happen with occasionally a -2 or miss wrecking your plans. The “perks” you gain leveling up allows you to either remove cards from the hit deck to make it more consistent (though you can never remove the “miss” card) or add cards to increase the chances of better outcomes or add effects to your attacks. One interesting perk is the dust one, which removes 4 +0 cards, making your deck much more inconsistent in order to increase the chances to also draw the good cards.
Finally, one of the main mechanics from the game is “retirement”, because the one consistent character from the game is the town hub, which also “increases” in level with a “prosperity” stat, which increases with your party actions and missions. One of the ways to increase prosperity is retiring characters, which is achieved by completing a random long-term goal you draw at character creation. As you retire characters you also advance the plot. Then you can start anew with a new class (though nothing stops you from just starting over with the same class if you liked it, then it is a new character, just from the same class). The retired characters become part of the town and you can have some random events with them.
Anyway, the game involves a lot of planning and there is a rule that stops you from discussing specifics with your party turn by turn, so when you control all the characters at the same time it is kinda broken. On the other hand, since each class has over a dozen abilities to use, it is also overwhelming and difficult to keep track of everything, so when you have more characters to keep track of you make much more mistakes.
Still, the game has been a cool experience. Still wish I was playing it with my friends.