T w e n t y S i d e d
This week is more Borderlands 3.
Not anything new with the base game. I still think the main story sucks, and the combat feels squishy. But, I started some of the DLCs, and so far I’ve been pleasantly surprised.
I played through Moxxi’s Heist of the Handsome Jackpot fully expecting the villain to just be some AI version of Handsome Jack, but was happy to find out that the only version of Jack you find is one of his Doppelgangers that’s been trapped and doesn’t want to kill you. The writing is good enough; I didn’t even watch something on my other screen just to make it through.
I also started the Guns, Love, and Tentacles DLC. I’ve only played a little bit, but so far it’s looking good. You even get to see Gaige return which is delightful.
So, what’s everyone else doing?
What is Vulkan?
There's a new graphics API in town. What does that mean, and why do we need it?
Wolfenstein II
This is a massive step down in story, gameplay, and art design when compared to the 2014 soft reboot. Yet critics rated this one much higher. What's going on here?
Overthinking Zombies
Let's ruin everyone's fun by listing all the ways in which zombies can't work, couldn't happen, and don't make sense.
Game at the Bottom
Why spend millions on visuals that are just a distraction from the REAL game of hotbar-watching?
Do It Again, Stupid
One of the highest-rated games of all time has some of the least interesting gameplay.
Depending on how many people get on Discord, we’re either gaming it up in Dawn of War 2 (2 player) Space Marine 2(3 player), Helldivers 2(4 player) or Mechwarrior 5: Clans (5 player)
Well, in the spirit of Halloween I’ve been in a mood for horror. Usually I dedicate this month to Halloween-themed events in games that have them but I’ve gone for creepy or horror games this time.
So I played through the main story of Resident Evil VII/Biohazard. Despite my enjoyment of it I had only played through it once before. Good times all along. I still maintain Shamus would have probably liked this one had he ever tried it despite his general disdain for the franchise. This game did away with most of the goofy elements of the previous ones, particularly the excessive focus on action of the later titles up to that point.
I have also retaken my playthrough of Little Nightmares II, which I had abandoned a while ago for a number of external reasons. Save for a few minutes remembering how the controls worked I had no issue coming back. I do love the atmosphere of this game, but I am occasionally put off by its lack of polish. It was an issue with the first game too, where the game would lock you out of progress due to something not working properly and you’d be forced to reload the latest save to restart the section. Depending on where you are with the game this could mean a couple minutes of progress lost or several, and it’s always frustrating. A shame, because if it wasn’t for those issues these games would be absolutely fantastic.
Nothing else on the gaming front for now. I still haven’t decided what big game will follow after RE7. I don’t wanna just jump into another RE. We’ll see.
I’ve been continuing Metaphor: ReFantazio. Still enjoying it. Game is big, I’m pretty late game now. I’ve been able to predict a whole lot of plot points but there have been things that didn’t go the way I expected.
One thing I predicted that happened in the late game is
losing a lot of popularity near the end. Honestly the actual numbers they use for it really don’t make sense, they put you in 1000th place but genuinely you should still be way up there, you still have a bunch of supporters and there’s very little actual competition.I’ve also been playing FTL. It’s still awesome. It’s a real hard game, though. And it is funny to play a roguelike where, when you are given a choice to do a thing or not do a thing, it’s often correct to not do the thing (unless the thing is blue). Modern game design would give you more input on what the options actually do, I think. I’m also realizing that I didn’t actually play the enhanced edition, so there’s content I never experienced in my many hours of playing it.
I’ve now played enough of Fire Emblem: Three Houses that I can confidently say game good. Just finished chapter 7 or 8, the big inter-house scrum and looks like the plot’s about to get going. I actually got a relationship *down* point from Edelgard for assuming the various goings on are all connected, where she says they could just be different actors with different goals. Normally everything would come back to a single point because video games, but I suppose with the three houses we could also have say, three villains working at cross-purposes, I’m intrigued.
Before the mechanics, one thing I very much like about this game which I realized just after posting last week, is it’s core-team philosophy. In most FE games, you face a callous calculus: some characters just suck, and some get a string of bad levels in a row: eventually unless your favorites all happen to be the most OP, you’re gonna have to start benching characters you like. Particularly when certain uber characters show up later. Which usually annoys me quite a bit, because you just made me play through 1/3 or 1/2 the game with these characters and I’m supposed to care about them, not dump them in a box. It doesn’t bug me quite as much in Radiant Dawn, where the disconnected chapters and massive two-game cast by the end means you really do have to work with what you’ve got where you’ve got it. . . until you hint the final endgame and oh by the way you have like 4 beast kings you should be using so cut like 1/3 of the team you were using before now for the ubers.
Not so in this game, or so it seems: Three Houses gives you a core team, and that’s your core team for the whole game. You can eventually get some more recruits, but the supports and specializations you’ll get to put on your starting group, the effort it takes to recruit extras, and the way that (so far at least) you barely have any more deploy amount than those starting characters, you can’t afford to just bench people. You’ve gotta use what you’ve got. And even if you do end up with a total dud, they’ve also added the “adjutant” system where you *can* effectively make use of some number of extras beyond your deploy limit. Particularly those that have high relationship support values with each other, as in, those core team members you’ve had since the beginning. Of course this may be about to be put to the test, as the guy I was building for cavarly got so many bad levels he sucks even as I’ve been ensuring he’s got at least str or spd each level since (he’ll never catch up unless he gets both 2-3 times), and my main archer just had three levels without str, and the peg knight I recruited has *also* just gone like three levels without str. . .
In my looking stuff up I heard that it would be very easy to over-level yourself and make the game too easy, so I was trying to avoid that. . . but it’s kind of impossible unless you deliberately skip doing any side missions. Even so, the inter-house fight (on Hard, which again I’d heard is actually kinda easy for series veterans) would have been quite threatening: suddenly the enemies have bogus extra abilities and gear I’m not even allowed to craft yet, the bosses well capable of one-rounding anyone but my best. But this caused me to finally take advantage of and truly realize the game-upending power of. . . the prediction line.
One of the big things in FE challenge runs, like any other challenge run, is knowing how the AI works so you can work around it or force it to do what you want. This game, which to be fair has also added a rewind mechanic, gives you that sort of power innately. You can see exactly who each enemy in range is going to attack, even getting a preview of where the lines will be after you move someone but before you take an action locking it in. This means that I can test and see that oh, that boss is not going to change targets if I move up X, they’re safe. In the inter-house fight the other two factions will attack each other, and one boss locked onto one of the other enemy targets, and just did not change even when I moved up squishies: I had the data that I could literally just walk my thief or cleric right past him. Most of the time there are not third parties to distract foes, but even so, knowing for sure that X person is the target and that moving Y/Z/etc does not affect it, means you can plan based on where the enemy is going to be. Rather than hoping a bait maneuver will work to save someone, you know instantly, before even locking in the action. These are normally things you have to learn about the AI of a particular game and a more casual player will never quite be sure, having to play defensively. This game gives you build in prediction lines at all times. Even without rewind that’s a huge advantage, and together, well even the most threatening of foes are only as threatening as you let them be.
It remains weird how I basically can’t upgrade anyone to steel weapons full time because of the weight. I feel like the game is meant to be balanced so that double attacks are rare and only on certain matchups, while most people are supposed to single swing/counter and be done. This would be more in line with the weapon art system that charges extra durability for big single attacks, which is only ever good if you can’t double. The problem is between my MC, house leader, fist weapons always doubling and being so light that they double that doubling, and another characters or two, possibly due in part to being overleveled, I’ve got enough double-attackers that the whole weapon art system seems like a draining crutch to support weaklings most of the time.
I’ll also mention how the whole FE series has this weirdly not-quite-polished problem. Like, 7 and 8 on the GBA seemed basically perfect, but 7 at least was already a remake, and 8 was using the same engine.
-You get to 9, Path of Radiance, and suddenly things are 3d, which is fine. . . but the models appear on these weirdly huge and empty bits of terrain, and the classic “two sprites stand there and swing weapons” looks far more awkward in 3d, with the units on horses being especially weird (running forward then turning so you can stab sideways at the target). -Then we get to Awakening and the 3d combat looks so much more fluid, it’s great! (okay the horses might have still been dumb it’s been a while) . . . except it takes place on these zones that don’t match the terrain and are massively jarring to dive in and out of, and they add this cool new teamup mechanic. . . which is awkward and overpowered.
-But Fates has the same good combat animation now with properly immersive terrain! And the 3d is gorgeous! And they fixed the team-up mechanic! And they even removed weapon durability in a way that makes all weapons significant, removing the curse of javelin/hand axe or nothing, and added new throwing knife weapons! . . . And they shoved in the ship-everyone to breed super soldier mechanics from the last game and bring into question the entire balance of the half of the game which is meant to have a set number of fights with no grinding.
And now finally we’re at Three Houses. The 3d combat has gone more back to Path of Radiance, for a big screen rather than the 3DS, but just like in Fates the terrain in-combat properly reflects the terrain, which is good! And the addition of battalion troops makes it look less empty! So why, oh why, do we still have horses walking up then turning sideways for stupid looking pokes? You actually get a more appropriate straight-on attack with a *sword*, clipping through your horse’s head, than you do with a *lance*. Why do I have battalions with gambits like “random shot,” which are not attacking with ranged weapons? Why are there there only two melee battalion attack animations, charge straight or charge from both sides- and why are there straight line attacks that come in from the side and lateral attacks that charge straight forward? This game barely has any classes compared to Fates, so why do we have characters’ hair clipping through their outfits on multiple classes?
The combat mechanic and class system changes are significant so I expect some loss there. But you’ve got that gacha money now, right? Why do we have these last remaining simple visual problems? Why do lancers not lance? Why do battalions make no sense? Why does one of your three main story characters have their hair clipping through their cape on a class exclusive to those main characters?
A fun (?) fact about mechanics: the cavalry classes actually make your Speed growth worse. In general there’s a few different hidden growth mechanics like that, such as Mortal Savant (the level 30+ sword/magic class) also having a Speed growth problem and the enemy version of Pegasus Knight having better growths than yours. For some reason, out of house characters use the enemy versions also until you recruit them, which makes a late-recruited Ingrid possibly better than if you started with her in your house.
Also, do you do Explore and do monastery stuff and talk to people every month? I’ve heard a good bit of variance on that, so I’m curious.
Did the first Citadel part in Mass Effect 3. Still a lot of cutscene type things and not a lot of freedom, but then I also spent a lot of time talking to everyone. Traynor is still the most interesting of the characters, and so if my character was going to take on a love interest, it would probably be her, but I think she might appeal more to the player than the character, so I’m leaning towards avoiding a romantic interest for this run. After this, I’m free to start shooting things again, but that also means having to do the exploration things again, which I didn’t like the first time around and am not sure how I’m going to handle them this time around. But I DO need to pick up some war assets, because I already had Chakwas come aboard the Normandy, because she pretty much pleaded for that, and my character couldn’t say no.
Strangers of Paradise is completed. I’d watched a playthrough of it, but apparently spaced out for most of that, because the plot was even weaker than I remembered. But the gameplay is really very good, the weapons all feel like their own thing and the enemies all feel different and everything can kill you quickly if you let it. Which I did, because I’m bad at action games. But despite the incessant dying, the game stayed fun until the end.
I then immediately ran through the game again on the postgame difficulty, which removed the “stayed fun” part. Suddenly several enemies and all the bosses have one-shot capabilities; mostly they can’t hit hard enough to kill you with one hit, but several of them can just stunlock you to death. I ended up cheesing things by going to one of the late levels and grabbing equipment from there; turns out equipment mainly effects the Break meter, which is a neat way to do things. So if you’re overleveled you can deplete an enemy’s Break bar very quickly and kill them that way, and if you’re vastly underleveled you’re still capable of doing comfortable health damage, which is how I managed to get the high level gear. The downside is, it works the other way too; I went into a level when I was eighty levels over the recommendation, and the boss could still stunlock one-shot me because my normal health had not been improved.
So this pass made me focus on all the things I don’t like about the gameplay. The first is the defensive options. The game has too many; there’s a button for blocking, and a separate button for evading, and a third button for superblocking. I played through the whole game and postgame with, like, one use for the normal block, and it turned out it didn’t even work. I vastly prefer the Tales games’ block setup; you have a button to block, and if you move while blocking you’ll evade.
The game has a bunch of different classes, but they’re mostly separated by their weapons. The big exception are the magic classes, which are highly overpowered. I really like the fist weapon, but end up fighting nearly everything with the mace, because the magic classes can only use the mace and having instant Cure access is too good to give up.
The postgame fights made me realize a whole lot of fights are also fights against the camera. If you get too close to the edge of an area, the camera will push ahead of you and you won’t know where you are anymore. Enemy attacks have nice helpful names that pop up before they swing, but some enemies are big enough that text is offscreen, and some bosses are big enough their animations are offscreen too. Quite a lot of Behemoth fights ended with the camera shoved into a corner staring at pure purple as the big oaf parked itself on top of me and did things apparently best left to the imagination because the camera sure wasn’t gonna say.
A lot of late-game fights are against three or more enemies with fast ranged attacks that can stun you upon hit, and quite a few of them can fly out of your weapon range. It’s quite annoying to fight them legitimately, I ended up cheesing the majority of them with the Wind spell which just sweeps all the enemies into a big tumbling pile of surrender. It’s a very cheap tactic that works on everything from bats (this game features the goddamnest of bats) to Tonberries (recurring miniboss, there’s one somewhere in every level).
I ran through both game runs without doing a single sidequest*, because the game features a really bad World Map UI. Side Missions don’t show up on the World Map, you see. They instead show up as Page 2 of the Main Missions, so to do a Side Mission you open up the Main Mission screen, and then press R1, displayed in the most “this is windowdressing ignore it” display they could manage. The tutorials don’t cover this, or the bit with the Smithy being another tab over from the pause menu. (They do, however, cover mechanics that you can only unlock by completing side missions, which I didn’t get access to until after postgame.) And then today I was trying to play through all the side missions I missed, and discovered the three postgame difficulty options, aren’t actually limited to three; they scroll all the way up to the level max. I found that out by accident because I pressed the wrong button trying to pull up a side mission. This UI is Not Good.
I’ve been a fan of using L3 to trigger running in games, but I also hadn’t played a game where you’re starting and stopping movement this routinely. Quite a lot of boss fights end because I just can’t hit L3 properly to get my character past a walk speed. Of course, this brings up the question of why the character has a walk speed. In Dark Souls running took stamina, but it doesn’t take it here, so… just cut the run button and raise the walk speed to running speed.
I’m fairly sure the game has been dropping inputs. I can’t say for sure because I’m bad at action games and have trouble hitting some of the buttons like L3, but very often it feels like I pressed the button to do a thing and then died because the thing didn’t do.
I’ll say, while the postgame run has mostly been a masochistic exercise, there are still bossfights that feel fun, namely the penultimate bossfight which took me probably ten hours to beat again. And a couple of bossfights that really annoyed me the first time through, don’t seem so bad anymore, having seen what follows them. (Of course they still kill me. Even the first boss can still kill me. It’s kind of astonishing how much of my progress was just faceplanting until I got lucky.)
…all that to say, I really like this game and am glad to have finally gotten back to it.
Based on Shamus’ love of the franchise, I’m finally playing through the System Shock remake. I played Prey a first, so it’s interesting to see where all the genre touch stones really come from
Finished The Evil Within, minus the DLCs. Thank goodness I played on casual because some sequences were an exercise in frustration, also the finale was very cheesy. Having said that when the game worked it worked and I think it used its premise rather well to create mechanical and level variance as well as make the narrative interesting even if it doesn’t answer all the questions and you can definitely poke some holes into it with a bit of scrutiny. I’ve heard people talk about the sequel as both significantly better and significantly worse than the original so I’m kinda looking forward to playing it… next year. The jury is still somewhat out on doing the DLCs right off the bat because, while I think the game was overall good, it was also somewhat exhausting and I’m not sure I have it in me to dive straight back into it.
COVEN is a horror FPS that entered Early Access not long ago. The plot is pretty simply; you are a young woman living in 1600’s France, who has been falsely accused of witchcraft and killing several children, for which you are duly burnt at the stake.
Shortly afterwards, you are resurrected by a mysterious force as an undead, cannibalistic monster with a natural affinity for both magic and guns and set loose to take your revenge on the priest who killed you and also anyone else who happens to stand in your way.
I’m not calling her a cannibal just because, either; your main source of health throughout the game consists of the corpses of your enemies… or anyone else you happen to find laying about, really, she’s not picky. Armed with lethal magic, a double-barreled shotgun, and an insatiable hunger for human flesh, you set about your quest. It quickly turns out that the priest is the one who killed all those children, and he gets worse from there.
It’s very edgy, and being in Early Access means that it’s pretty buggy as well, but I’m finding it pretty enjoyable to play. Dead enemies doubling as health packs or mana refills is an interesting dynamic, and the game introducing
time traveling Nazisand then relegating them to a minor side plot is something I’d like to see more often because it’s pretty crazy.I’m also playing Total Warhammer 3, with my ongoing Oxyotl campaign slowly approaching its end. I own most of Lustria, the Antarctic, and southern Naggarond, and am pushing into Ulthuan because the Dark Elves and the Orcs took out the High Elves. After that, I’m split on whether I should drive Markus and Alberic de Bordelaux out of the parts of Lustria that they control so that the whole continent can be returned to the Lizardmen as is proper, or whether I should go directly to taking out the Wood Elves (who’ve turned into the Crisis Faction) and formally ending the campaign.
I’m on Mario+Rabbids Sparks of Hope. The story is of the level of a Pokémon game, it’s difficult to imagine anyone caring a jot about it. And it feels really quite padded to be honest, a lot of repetitive side missions. Puts me in mind of a lot of PS2-era games somehow, not that that constitutes any criticism. When the combat clicks, with the main storyline missions where the level design is clearly intentional and not a randomly generated dungeon, and your teammates sync well, it feels great. But as I say it’s diluted with the very pedestrian randomly generated battles.
Factorio: Space Age continues to devour my free time. I have a small space science platform assembled and I’m slowly putting together my first proper spaceship, but back on Nauvis I’m running into a major resource crunch. Space platforms eat massive amounts of steel for each tile you build on, my red circuits are draining the last of my copper and oil patches, and my coal is running low so I want to get nuclear but that costs even more steel and red circuits to get started. So I’m hastily spinning up some new mining outposts to supply all that, and then I’ll be ready to leave for Vulcanus.
Also, I’ve discovered that you can drive tanks remotely now, and this is really useful for defending a sprawling base. You can keep tanks parked near the front lines, and if the biters break through you can use the tank to defend instead of running there in person. Fill the trunk with repair supplies and give it a roboport in the new equipment grid, and it’s basically a low-budget spidertron.