T w e n t y S i d e d
This week was once again, uneventful.
I played more Slay the Spire, and pretty much spent the whole week trying to beat the game with the Defect. Yesterday I did it with great effort and luck. And now I’m going to try to beat it as the Watcher.
I did also play a few rounds of R.E.P.O. since the monster update came out. I’ve only seen a few of the new monsters, but they have definitely spiced things up.
How’s everyone else doing this week?
Fixing Match 3
For one of the most popular casual games in existence, Match 3 is actually really broken. Until one developer fixed it.
Who Broke the In-Game Economy?
Why are RPG economies so bad? Why are shopkeepers so mercenary, why are the prices so crazy, and why do you always end up a gazillionaire by the end of the game? Can't we just have a sensible balanced economy?
The Best of 2017
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2017.
Juvenile and Proud
Yes, this game is loud, crude, childish, and stupid. But it it knows what it wants to be and nails it. And that's admirable.
Grand Theft Auto Retrospective
This series began as a cheap little 2D overhead game and grew into the most profitable entertainment product ever made. I have a love / hate relationship with the series.
Still going through Assassin’s Creed Origins. This game is long and I haven’t even touched the DLC, though I’m ignoring the main story quests unless I’m forced to do them. Surprisingly, I’m not yet bored of it. Though I’m sure I won’t play another game in the series for a long time after this one because I know it’ll feel the same.
Trying the recently launched Keeper and it’s certainly an interesting experience. I’m about halfway through it, going by the estimated playtime of 4 and a half hours. It starts very slowly. Until about the half hour mark you practically do nothing but walk. Then the puzzles start coming in, adding some much needed variety, and while they never become hard they sure increase in complexity as the game goes along. Furthermore, at a certain point it starts bleeding into other genres. Right now I’m at a puzzle platforming section, and the game feels natural for it. Visually it’s absolutely gorgeous. I’ve been playing sporadically but I’m sure I’ll be done with it in a couple days.
I had the same Idea, finish Origins and then pause. Of course, the very next day, I installed AC: Odyssey. Still playing it though, two years now :)
I heard that the next in the series is even longer.
Got to the endgame of Cyberpunk 2077 last week, once again hitting some quests in an order I did not like and took a break. Fired up Pokemon Legends: Arceus last night, finding it quite pleasant. Story, naming, and dialogue are all pretty clunky, but the gameplay is solid. Though while I support cutting down on some of the move bloat and the other move changes I’ve seen so far, the lack of both pokemon Abilities and held items is pretty significant. This returns things to a much more Red/Blue like era where it’s all about types, stats, and moves. No wacky combos, just the occasional mon with nonstandard moves and the stuff you teach them yourself. Though this also brings up the move teaching system, where TMs are gone, whether single use or infinite, and instead everything costs money (and your mons can switch between any move they have access to in the field). R/B’s single-use power moves that make certain mons Important due to either your choice or their rare access is something most people don’t seem to understand was a good thing, and the main games went and ruined the point of infinite use TMs by putting all the good moves into “Move Tutors” instead while also ruining the point of having TMs in shops. If you’re only going to do things one way, this is the way to do it: basically just shop TMs.
I will also say that while your pokemon getting xp when you catch something has been standard for a while (and xp share is actually a good idea in this game where there’s less dungeon gauntlet and more reasons to level up and evolve weak pokemon), I don’t think your team should be getting xp for what are essentially non-combat stealth takedowns for catching something without a fight. Or at least reduce it or something. On the other hand, while I was grossly overleveled, the boss I fought was still clapping my dudes left and right.
The main content for those unaware, is that in PLA you’re *actually* filling out that Pokedex (and catching them all) that the games have been going on about since the beginning. You do this by completing some combination of tasks for each and every pokemon, usually by catching and defeating several, sometimes under various conditions like from stealth or time of day or with a particular type of move, as well as observing various actions they can take. Until you’ve done this there is no Pokedex entry, because yeah you haven’t actually researched the pokemon, duh. After checking enough boxes the entry will be marked as complete and have the usual little pokedex blurb.
I can definitely see why some people don’t like it. This is not a standard pokemon game- it’s a spinoff that resembles the main games more than most other spinoffs, but it is absolutely still a spinoff. This is a game about catching and observing/”researching” pokemon, and if you don’t like checking off lists, if you’re all about hardcore battles or whatever it’s not going to hold interest. I myself often dislike list ticking games, but I’ve liked this one so far (I’ve cleared out most of the unevolved pokemon in the first area and beat the first major boss). Of course, Cyberpunk was also practically a list ticking game with all the fixers and their lists of gigs and doing a bunch of stuff in place X because you were there instead of charging straight through the main quest means ending up overleveled a lot of the time (yes I know Cyberpunk auto-levels the main quest stuff, not the rest though).
Back on Coming Deliverance Kingdom and basically nothing else due to lack of time.
There are side- and DLC-quests again, so the main quest once again went where it belongs: on the back-burner. I’ve spend some time running after the treasure maps I had to pad my wallet to be able to start the “build your own village”-DLC-line, let’s see how that goes.
I’m sad that Slay the Spire 2 isn’t coming out this year, but I trust the developers to know when it’s ready for release. Very much looking forward to that!
This week has been a lot more Avernum 4. I’m still enjoying it, but I have to admit the combat gets kind of repetitive. Casters get new abilities as you progress through the game but a lot of the mage spells are “do X damage in a cone” or “do X damage in a circle” and, while X gets bigger, the premise doesn’t change a lot. Some of the spells are more interesting like buff and debuffs but there aren’t that many of those. Melee and bow characters have it even worse, mostly you’re basic attacking with the occasional special move on a shared cooldown.
One thing about the Avernum series that makes it a good fit for this site: it absolutely answers the question “what do they eat?” There are a lot of farms, there’s backstory about mages engineering mushrooms and glowing moss and stuff to make the caves livable (yes, “a wizard did it” is genuinely good world building here), there’s places that grow and places that need to trade for food, etc.
I also played the demo for Dinoblade. It’s a soulslike game in which you are playing as a dinosaur holding a sword in their mouth. All of the enemies are also dinosaurs with melee weapons held in their mouths. The gameplay is pretty dreadful but the absurd premise carries this pretty hard. Hopefully by release they make it, y’know, fun.
Man, I remember playing Avernum back when it was “Exile.” You’re right that there’s not a huge library of different moves and things to do in combat… looking back, the only example of combat that really stands out in my memory was the brutal gauntlet of the golem tower with its conveyor belts and such at (I think it was) the end of the third game. I guess that the primary levers you had to pull when it came to the combat were positioning and resource management?
That said, the real thing that got me hooked was the exploration and the slowly-unfolding worldbuilding/story. I played one game on a recommendation from my roommate at the time and have been a fan of Spiderweb Software games ever since.
I didn’t play The Old Republic this week, but did get in some more time with Suikoden. Again, the plot is moving really, really quickly, as at the end of the last session I had found out about the superweapon and in this session it had destroyed a village and was going to be used again but the dwarves built a weapon to counter and destroy it, which worked, and then in sparing the general who was going to use it found out that he was being somewhat controlled by a special type of rune. Then one of the leaders of the Resistance from the beginning returned to find out that the original leader was dead and didn’t want to associate with us because of the lie that she was still alive, and then I made a quick hop back to the mainland and he was on our side again, told us about how we needed to liberate a new area, and then was made a permanent member of my party. I had a couple of battles that I won but the last one was stopped by some sort of poison, so we need to find a cure for that. That was all in about an hour or so of playtime.
The game is also pretty bad at explaining things. Here, we get two of the staples of the Suikoden series: battles and duels. Both of them are based on a kind of rock-paper-scissors type of thing, where there are three types of units in the battle and three options in the duel, and you need to select which one will match up best against what the other side is doing. In the battles, I first select a charge and had the enemy charge, which cost me some men, and then chose magic and they charged again with gave me the win. In the next battle, I chose magic again but they chose bow which hurt the party selected to attack and killed off Luc who was leading it — yes, in a game where collecting every available character is crucial, they can die which means they no longer count — but I reloaded because Luc was crucial to Suikoden III and so it just felt wrong and then they charged, so I hit a charge vs charge again, reloaded again, selected magic and won easily. I’m not sure how it picks these things.
But at least the battles had an explanation of what each option did. In the duels, that was there as well, but the key to duels in Suikoden is to listen to what the opponent has to say and guess what move they are going to make based on that. The game did not mention that at all, and I only knew about it because I had gone through them in Suikoden III and V. Knowing that, the duel was pretty easy because his statements were pretty obvious, but to someone who didn’t know that it might have been more of a struggle.
Anyway, I still enjoy it and on Easy difficulty I will probably finish it, but it still really, really makes me want to play Suikoden III.
Brotato got an update from the new developers, which added some graphical tweaks and some items but also made the shop much uglier. Probably a slight improvement once I get over the look of it, but also I don’t much care if games get continuous updates so it all feels unnecessary.
Clair Obscur Initial Equipment is already hitting a wall before I’m even out of Act 1. Turns out those skills and stat-ups kind of matter a whole lot. Also attempting a dodge-heavy playthrough kind of requires one to be good at dodging, which I am only fair at. This might see compromises soon.
Metaphor? I started a new game of Metaphor, and cleared the first screen and nothing else. What a weird opening; the turn-based RPG starts you in a field of enemies too powerful for you to fight, and you have to sneak around them like a semi-stealth. It’s possible that section is there just to show off the Game Over screen early.
IMO the weirder thing about the opening of Metaphor is that it goes out of its way to canonically establish that the soundtrack is music being telepathically projected into the protagonists head by his fairy companion, and I think that may be, without exaggeration the Least Necessary Worldbuilding Detail Ever.
I am always a fan of games shoehorning in an in-world explanation for a gameplay feature. The dumber the better. And man, does Metaphor get dumb.
Watcher Knights have been Soul Shamaned to death. Soul
Tyrantdone. Maybe it’s time to do the Queen’s Garden. Or maybe it’s time to go and see Failed Champion and then awaken theDreamnailso I can do what I actually intended to do and get back into the Path of Pain. Or what about the Hive. Hmm.Started playing Master of Command, an operations-level XVIII century wargame.
One wanders with one’s Prussian/Russian/Austrian/British/French army around the procgen countryside in order to loot/reinforce a given set of points and occasionally clashing with enemy patrols or armies for a set of rewards (equipment, occasionally better unit or doctrines (“army feats”), the whole time miserly counting every coin, shot, morsel and replacement body while pondering important questions like “do I give my men haversacks for improved morale, or do I sell them to get money for few extra shots and perhaps some food on the wagons?”
Enemy algorithm is, from what am seeing so far, among the bluntest examples available and will oblige into ill-conceived frontal attacks (especially when player has range advantage), but makes up for it with near complete lack of peripheral vision, allowing micromanaging the occasional horse into repeated flank atacks.
Still, the game is mostly about managing supplies anyway, and the overal effect is, imo, an absolute delight.
Been playing Final Fantasy Tactics on Xbox, classic edition. Going for a very tanky run where all of my characters are super durable. Mostly fun, also looking forward to kingdom of night on Steam.