T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve finished Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel. I’m just going to summarize my thoughts on it: The lasers are fun, Oz Kits are very nice to have once you get used to them, I find the character Pickle really annoying, the novelty of being in space is fun for a while, I find it very weird that the events of the game are (as far as I can tell) completely ignored in Borderlands 3, and I like that Mr. Torgue is mad at the existence of laser weapons.
Speaking of Borderlands 3, that is now what I’m playing. Most of the things I have to say about the game are negative, but I’ll try to say something nice.
I hate the existence of the quest ‘Porta Prison’. Here’s a rundown: There is a guy trapped in a porta-potty, an AI is keeping him in there because he has a gun, you have to run around trying to replace the AI so he can get out. Almost every sentence in that quest has a poop joke, and the reward for the quest is a poop-themed rocket launcher. Even by Borderlands standards, the humor is juvenile.
I find that the combat feels squishy, I don’t know how else to explain it. Just, squishy.
They just add the character Typhon DeLeon as “The first Vault Hunter”. There has been no mention of him in any of the previous games, but now here’s this legendary Vault Hunter that everyone knows about, out of the blue.
And I guess the sliding and vaulting mechanics are nice.
For a small change of pace I did play the demo for Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders. Just a cute, chill game (pun unintended) about skiing. I recommend trying the demo.
Anyway, what’s everyone else playing?
D&D Campaign
WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.
Dead Island
A stream-of-gameplay review of Dead Island. This game is a cavalcade of bugs and bad design choices.
Programming Language for Games
Game developer Jon Blow is making a programming language just for games. Why is he doing this, and what will it mean for game development?
Charging More for a Worse Product
No, game prices don't "need" to go up. That's not how supply and demand works. Instead, the publishers need to be smarter about where they spend their money.
Spoiler Warning
A video Let's Play series I collaborated on from 2009 to 2017.
Replaying Rogue Trader with the new DLC. There’s pleasantly much added, with extra junior officers, a number of shipboard locations and events. Writing is still good. Deathcultist as a character is surprisingly similar to the Eldar, but still, all in all Owlcat games go, imo, solid three successes for three tries and showing they learn from their previous titles..
Started up Mount and Blade: Warband for the first time in a long while. Got it on lowest difficulty, it’s a very relaxing time. I continue to wonder why they decided to add new swing angles, which seem designed entirely to make it harder to use melee weapons. And allies stepping directly in front of me to block my attacks will never not be annoying. But it’s a very relaxing time.
I’m playing Snowrunner as well as still plugging away at Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous and Trails of Cold Steel 3. I haven’t posted for a few weeks because not much has changed.
Regarding Borderlands; I found 1 amusing and fresh, and then the series has just become worse for me. I had great hopes for the Pre-Sequel back in the day, because I looked at Athena’s skill tree and saw an opportunity to relive the “charge into more enemies” escape mechanism of the Mass Effect 2 Vanguard class, but The Pre-Sequel simply doesn’t have enough enemies on the field at once to make this viable. You only learn this after hours of play, when you have enough points to put that build together. I haven’t touched borderlands 3 and everything I’ve read about it makes me comfortable with this decision.
I didn’t know about Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders, I played a lot of Lonely Mountains: Downhill a while ago so I’ll make sure to check it out.
I started playing Aliens: Dark Descent. It’s a squad based game where you control colonial marines and you fight against, well, Aliens. Except ideally you generally avoid fighting them because they’re tough and reinforce infinitely – ideally you use your motion trackers and try to never actually encounter an Alien, which feels appropriate for the franchise. It’s pretty enjoyable so far, and I appreciate how it has these big sprawling areas where you have a bunch of things to do and don’t need to do it all in one go (but can, if you’re sneaky enough) – there’s a mechanic where the difficulty escalates the more you’re detected, which also pushes the stealth aspect of it. But sometimes you just need to shoot them. That said, I haven’t been playing this game that much because…
I’ve been playing a whole lot of Metaphor: ReFantazio. As I mentioned previously, it’s very much like Persona, but fantasy based and with some differing mechanics. It’s also a game where you can try to clear a dungeon in as few days as possible, but instead of avoiding aliens murdering you it gives you more time to hang out with your friends.
Graphically, it’s unimpressive, but that’s not a huge deal. I do like that the giant enemies you fight feel very reminiscent of Bosch paintings. They’re really weird.
Storywise, it has some interesting things going on, some predictable twists so far, and the ending of the main dungeon for the second town in the game upset me. Lots of spoilers for that ahead.
The game tries to draw an equivalency between two people’s bad coping mechanisms. One of them went to be a hermit in the middle of nowhere. The other murdered dozens of people. The game comparing the two and going “welp, we’re pretty similar” filled me with rage. Also, I think we’re supposed to respect Bardon, which… is really hard when he had no idea he had been betrayed by his boss, his second in command, and several of his other underlings. He couldn’t find evidence of their misdeeds in a castle he was in charge of securing, and he posted a bounty for kidnapping on someone who lived what I can only assume is weeks away by foot travel past dangerous monsters based on a single bit of hearsay which apparently included the target’s name and address but not species. Not the game’s finest moment, IMOI still really like the concept of magically enforced Democracy. Truly the best way to do succession in a monarchy.
Heheh. I remember at least one amusing thread on the GitP boards about basically that, magically enforced democracy in 3.x. Basically came down to custom magic item, which does whatever you says it does as well as you say it does because you wrote the thing (the item is intelligent, can be made with unimpeachable dedication to its purpose by mechanical definition, and cannot be mind controlled, boom done), or publicly spoken Wish, if I remember right. Something like, “transport here the person whom the people of this country would elect if we held an election as defined etc etc.” The funny thing was people trying to complain about verifying the Wish when that’s the easiest part: 0th level Detect Magic does in fact confirm whether or not the person in question cast the spell (the only thing that would register the same to Detect Magic would be Limited Wish, which would fail to do perform the task). I remember people arguing about “well what about non-casters not believing the inspectors” which is more a problem with the people than the method. The biggest thing was possible faking by substituting a false candidate, and because there is no way to fake a spell under Detect Magic, the 0th level spell is unstoppable (barring escalation of shenanigans, obviously). Either they did in fact cast Wish (which is assumed by the premise to be able to work from a publicly spoken statement), or they did not.
Of course, rather than using that Wish to bring the person the people would elect, you’d probably be better off using it to instead bring the objectively best candidate under X conditions instead, but then you get arguing over whether that’s actually fair and who picks the conditions etc etc.
I’ve been playing Star Trucker. It’s American Truck Simulator… IN SPAAAAACE, right down to CB radios and the cabs looking like American trucks rather than European style or, you know, spaceships. The extra dimension adds extra options in travelling, but if you go off the prescribed routes you run the risk of getting hit by space debris. Still early on but it’s quite engaging so far
Well, to no one’s surprise, I’m still consumed by Balatro. My free 3-month Apple Arcade subscription ends in a couple days and I’ve made the decision not to renew it for two reasons. One, it’s pointless to keep a whole subscription for one game, considering I’m not touching anything else. And two, I hope that not having the game available will push me to try playing something else. I’ll obviously at some point break down and buy the game directly but it’ll be the PC version, so I don’t have it with me all the time.
Anyway, that aside I’ve been trying a few demos from Steam’s Next Fest event. Couple of interesting games, couple of disappointing ones, and one particularly irritating one which I’m going to vent about here because it honestly pissed me off.
It’s a graphic adventure called Love me or die, which started testing my patience from the very start with an unskippable cutscene where nothing happens. Then the game does this thing that so many games do these days that I hate, which is showing dialogue as if it was being typewritten, with no option to fast forward or skip it. It’s already annoying when this is done with a normal typewriter sound, but this game chooses the most obnoxious high-pitched sound instead. “OK”, I thought, “Maybe there’s an option to turn it off” but guess what? There’s no way to get to the options/main menu from the game. I had to Alt+F4 out of it and then relaunch to discover that there was indeed no way to turn the typewriting thing off, and you can’t even turn off that particular sound without turning all sound off.
Look, I get that this is just a demo but for God’s sake, those are basic gameplay features. It would have been unthinkable to release a demo like that two decades ago. What are we doing here? Sorry for the rant, but my feedback on the Steam Discussion of the game remains unread by the developer so you all get to hear me complain instead.
I finished Mass Effect 2, getting through the suicide mission without losing anyone. I had Miranda lead the fire teams both times, had Kasumi do the vents and also escort the crew back, and had Samara keep the swarms back. The team I took to the Human Reaper was Miranda and Tali, the team I’d been using most of the time. And while there were comments about Miranda’s odd reaction to the Illusive Man’s demand to have the Collector Base turned over to him, here it worked well: I said I was destroying it, the Illusive Man told her to stop me, and my completely loyal Miranda told him to take a hike.
Also, there was another one of those odd moments in the final conversation with him, when he berated me for destroying the Collector Base and said that if we had kept it it could have ensured human domination of the galaxy, which my character — in my head — responded to with “Yeah, see, that’s exactly WHY I didn’t give it to you, as I figured you’d pull something like that”. I didn’t really get a chance to tell that to him in game, however.
I enjoyed the end of the game more as I was running recruitment and loyalty missions and didn’t have much mining to do, but it also ended up being the case that I enjoyed the game more the less I interacted with the Illusive Man. That’s probably not a coincidence.
I took a break from gaming after that, but soon it will be back to The Old Republic and my Smuggler and Mass Effect 3.
Ah, all conversations with TIM end up like this. I wanted to berate him about his hubris here, given that he’d already caused dozens of deaths trying to ‘control’ Reaper tech. But of course you can’t, and thus you spend vast amounts of the third game dealing with the consequences of his inevitable indoctrination. Bah.
But! The Mass Effect series is an easy target for this sort of thing. It does remind me of a more nuanced situation that arose in Wasteland 3:
The area of the game is surrounded by a perpetual snowstorm. Most of the area relies on an oilfield to fuel heaters and life support, and the oilfield is run by a seperate faction called the Gippers. (Bear with me, the humour is stupid.)You’re under orders to retrieve the son of the Patriarch from the Gippers – which is going to upset them Gippers, because they have drawn him away explicitly to try and increase their power in the region. If they’re offended, they have the threat of – oh, I don’t know – cutting of everyone’s fuel, maybe?So you have to kill them all to acheive your mission. That’s fine, becaues they’re corrupt and incompetent, and there’s a friendly faction of robots next door who can take over from them! Good stuff……except you can never bring up the subject of the oilfields with the robots. It’s such an obvious thing to worry about in a very nuanced situation, and you just never get the option to ask them if they’ll keep the fuel everyone needs flowing.So: you can kill all the Gippers and hope it works out, submit to their demands and enrage your employer, or (for some reason) blackmail both the Gippers and the robots, ensuring no-one put the Patriarch gets what they want and now both factions hate you (an option that pops up out of nowhere).In a way, it’s not a problem because the game doesn’t mention the oilfields again, even at the end, which kind of solves the problem,but I think it’s a good example of the limits of a computer game. The more nuanced the situation, the more complex the responses, but there’s only so much you can program into a game. You’ll never satisfy everyone.Then again, apparently the game gives you the option to
find a literal cannibal raider called Fishlips and give him control of the oilfields once the Gippers are dead, so who knows.I think this does fall into the criticism that the game lets you make choices, but doesn’t let you express your reasons for them, but then includes dialogue that seems to assume your reasons or just flat-out ignores them when your response should be giving them. My entire reason for not giving it to TIM was because I figured he’d use it to grab control, and I was quite surprised that he just flat-out admitted it as if I was supposed to agree with it (I was less surprised that the game didn’t let me point that out to him).
In the Wasteland case, it sounds more like an issue of not being able to explore all the consequences of your actions, which is indeed something that computer games are limited by. As long as they make it clear — ie the game tells you that faction is friendly and will solve the problem for you — then that’s not really an issue, although it can make for some fun picky analysis later (“But what do they eat?”).
I definitely remember stuff like this from when I played ME2, though in my case I just attributed the Illusive Man thinking I might actually agree with the human supremacy stuff to some combination of that kind of dedicated ideologue and just clueless. Like, if being with Liara since the first game doesn’t give a clue I don’t know what will.
Short version: Fire Emblem Three Houses is, a lot. After I’d said they basically reached their final iteration with Fates, they decided to flip the table. And I’m not convinced that was a good idea. Longer version tonight when I have time.
Okay, longer version. So my first thought is wow, these opening cinematics kinda suck. It becomes clear why as you get to the monastery and find that they’re using these models for everything from combat to dialogue, but even so. My second thought is wow, after that crossover game they just decided to go full Persona on my ass. Not really what I was looking for, but it does fit with trying to get even more character focused, and it could work. My third is huh, looks like a freeform sort of build your own class system, well sure that could be fun: instead of trying to “breed” the perfect unit just train exactly what you want.
You are indeed told to pick a faction with little to go on, but I did not find the time given to be sufficient. Because I didn’t like any of them- I liked the leader of one, the mechanical build of another, and (thought) I liked the actual characters of the third. The Red Eagle (empire) is mostly bland with some overbearing quirks, but they have a decent leader. The Blue Lion (knights) have just a bog standard Fire Emblem team: tank, thief, healer, future cavalry, troop leader/lone wolf, etc, but their leader is a little too stuffy and they really are just the standard archetypes. The Golden Deer (alliance) seems to be mostly merchant’s daughters which is kinda funny, with the more smooth guy leader, and no one too overbearing in their quirks. Or so it seemed, as I return to the game and pick the alliance and. . . their welcome scene immediately puts me back off of them, the character quirks immediately moving to insufferable. Also this gives access to the support menu where I can see that there are no female S rank supports to go with the female player character, and I was told this game actually let you go gay dammit.
So that means my choices are the empire or the knights. I run through the welcome scene with both- I still find the Blue Lion leader annoyingly stuffy, the healer girl’s voice is a little too breathy and while the characters are all mechanically well defined, that feels more like a straightjacket when this looks like it’s supposed to be freeform. Meanwhile the overbearing quirk on the empire team (timid girl never leaves her room and freaks out at the slightest attention) actually manages to hit hard enough to wrap back around to a stock archetype I can deal with (helps that she hard carried a mission later), and the lack of serious direction means I’m working with what I’ve got instead of a straightjacket. So, Red Eagles it is.
Much walking around talking to everyone, reading stat screens, etc commences. The monastery stuff is dandy, but the first month of game time “free time” is a lie, since what you’re actually allowed to do is forced (so you experience all the options), which is annoying. Looking up the “three star” mark on a skill for some characters tells me that these are unlockable bonus abilities which sounds great, and I look no further ’cause spoilers. The game finally lets me start instructing the students and progress on these unlocks is extremely slow, whilst the game starts giving me more information about upgrading classes. Naturally you have to qualify for these things, which means you need to build for them in advance, but the game barely tells you what they do.
Oh wait, classes? Yeah, it’s not a freeform system. In fact, what they’ve done is add a massive amount of faffing about training skills in order to. . . qualify for standard Fire Emblem classes. And not even the massive list where you can combine just about any two things which we had in Fates, no this seems to be a cut down list. Well, except there’s a section that’s not unlocked yet, which I haven’t looked up specifically as a group (though I’ve seen some names). So, this is a game all about training to meet requirements, to get certain abilities, where you don’t know the requirements or the abilities. That’s. . . pretty damn terrible actually. I went ahead and checked those three star unlockable skills that I spent a full game month grinding (reaching only 1/3), and it turns out most of them are actually useless? As far as the game has shown me, there is no class that does both black and white magic, so getting a white magic only skill on a black magic user is only useful if you plan to convert them fully into a white mage- which will put them massively far behind. Same with Edelgard’s black magic bonus ability, the game has given me no evidence of an axe black, or even any other weapon black class (hitting the first skill rank she hasn’t even learn a spell). Not that it’s even told me what these abilities are: just implying that it would be a good idea to unlock them, when most of them no it’s not.
So I’ve wasted an in game month of training getting 1/3 of the way to a number of abilities that will be useless, when I should have been grinding on main weapons instead.
As for the combat mechanics: well what they’ve done with magic is something. The idea of learning magic innately instead of wielding limited use tomes is something the series hasn’t done before. Normally mages start out as uber because they bypass defense and have versatile range at all times. In this game, your “mage” characters start with a pitifully low number of spells per combat, and are terrible with backup weapons. Those spells are free, whereas weapons still cost money and have gone back to limited durability (to allow a durability-cost on-demand special attack system), which seems useful, but it’s just so, so few uses. And this is where the training problem comes in: my white mage just got a second healing spell, nearly doubling their heals per fight, but my black mage wast trying to unlock an apparently useless bonus ability, and they had fewer casts to begin with, and are now massively behind on ranking up their magic skill to get a new spell going. Compared to this, the weapon skills are fairly meh- they cost a huge amount of durability so you only ever want to use them when absolutely necessary. It’s nice to have them on command I suppose, and the increasing passive bonuses as well as attack abilities makes actually leveling up weapon skills more important. . . which means even if those promoted classes do allow multiple weapon types, you’re still going to be penalized for diversifying.
So, that’s a pretty poor impression overall so far. And yet, the game just finally unlocked something positive after my last mission: the battalion shop. See, ’cause they added this whole new kinda sorta leading troops but not really mechanic. At varying times it has been suggested that one might consider the handful of named characters you’re fighting with isn’t really your whole army, for “realism” purposes one can assume they’re leading groups or just acting as the vanguard (or spec ops) as narrative handwaving. But this game has that as an actual mechanic. Battalions are a freakish hybrid of weapon, passive equipment, and leveling NPC. They require their own “weapon” skill and governing stat and can be equipped and moved around between characters, but not during combat. They attack like a weapon, but don’t allow counterattacks. They hit areas, but that range can’t be used as range, you can only target them at melee range- yet they apply a no-movement effect would would be hugely useful for locking down troublesome foes at range. They’re super inaccurate, but the game is also leaning on an “intimidation” (read: flanking) bonus from allies that also threaten your target. They have extremely limited per battle uses, but can go on anyone. They give passive bonuses, but appear to take some damage every time you do and can be exhausted for the combat. And finally, in the game that seems to be all about grinding activities: they gain xp while the character they’re attached to fights. Which means fight where you don’t have a battalion attached, is a fight you’re missing out on permanent power gains.
This would mostly be an annoying curiosity, except now that the shop is finally open, it turns out there are a bunch of battalions that actually do other things. Oh, all these basic classes have garbage move and you’re not allowed cavalry until level 10 so you can’t actually get people in range to attack? There’s a battalion that gives a giant area move speed buff for a turn. Oh you don’t have enough heals and the AI actually advances so you can’t just pull them one at a time and thus take damage more often whilst your healers have like 5 uses compared to “as many as you can afford” in previous games? Here’s a battalion with a six square area heal to help out. And there’s one with an area magic attack. And there’s one with a ridiculous area cone attack that apparently also sets terrain on fire?
Oh, and just for maximum lulz: on this, the Fire Emblem game where I’ve finally decided to respect my time and set it to “casual” no-permadeath mode (with hard combat because I should know what I’m doing), *this* is the game where they’ve gone and put in a rewind mechanic. So I didn’t actually have to do that.
So yeah. Fire Emblem: Three Houses is all over the damn place. It looks like a freeform game, but actually is forcing you to train to meet requirements for class changes without actually telling you what all those classes do, where you’d be best off just specializing in one weapon forever except many middle tier classes using X weapon do not have an advanced counterpart with the same weapon. It’s a game where weapon durability is back, except for magic, but magic has so few uses it’s a pain in the ass getting mages to 5th level so they can take the basic class to get them more magic uses and basic spells seem to be determined entirely by character. It’s a game where they’ve added a mechanic to cover the metatextual narrative conceit that there are actually whole troops of soldiers, except those soldiers can only make extremely limited attacks under special conditions so no all the fighting really is being done by a group of teenagers. It is a weird game. We’ll see how far I get.
Let’s see if this wall of text posts.
I agree with most of your assessment on the game, though it does get better as you play. I feel they expanded on all the busywork while reducing gameplay and character choices (coming from Fates, where you could pair up most of your troops to this where the only romance option available is to your main character is painful). Characters do become more likable as time goes on and a few more mechanics improve the gameplay. Still one of my least favorite games in the series, but I did enjoy it for the most part.
I wish I could say the same for Engage. I abandoned that game months ago not even before halfway (unless it’s a very short game of this ilk) and have never felt the need to return.
I was late to the Diablo IV party and am still enjoying it. I succumbed to the pressure and bought the Vessel of Hatred expansion, which is… pretty good? Well, it’s certainly more Diablo IV, so if you’re down with the core gameplay loop, then it’s more of the same but more polished.
I’m a recent reader and I’ve been reading about the previous issues with updating the website, and I wonder if Blogger would be a good option for you guys? Transferring to Blogger may or may not keep the comments depending on whether your end has a dedicated Export function, but Blogger lets you set release dates and times to whenever, has a search and an archive already included, allows you to filter by post labels (I just link my page links to specific labels), and – as of my writing this – doesn’t require me to really do a whole lot with storage. Tbh, I have zero clue how Blogger is run by Google except that it runs without a hitch.
Of course, y’all may have already explored that and decided it wasn’t for you. I just thought I’d mention it, as Blogger has worked for me going on five years now.
Have a good day, y’all :)