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pompcoco · 4 years

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Harold Mews Character Analysis

(Authors note: This essay was made for fun and to educate people more on Mews and my analysis on him. I will be stating and summarizing many facts that some people might not know about Mews because the website I will be mentioning in this essay can only be found from a link in Mews’ page in the Poptropica Wiki. He has lots of information and character to him that the team and creators of Poptropica probably might’ve given without realizing, but honestly, it was good that they did. This will be a long read, so it’s ok to skim through or just read the conclusion and TLDR at the end. Otherwise, I hope you enjoy!)

Harold Mews is the eccentric millionaire that hosts the contests on Cryptids Island and aids you during your quests to find the cryptids. But during the time on the island, you don’t get to know Mews unless if you pay attention to his dialogue or what other NPCs say about him. There are multiple things you can learn about him from his wiki, an archived website of the Mews Foundation that was created to promote Cryptids Island in the times of its release, and the Cryptids Island Book. In this essay, I will go in-depth on Mew’s character and how he is one of the most developed characters in the Poptropica universe.

(What we learn from the game)

Mews is the first main character of Cryptids the player first hear about in the game. The player also learns that he is giving one million dollars to get proof of four very well-known cryptids. And before his introduction, you learn from NPCs from the rest of the island that he hides in his mansion, and the public has not seen him in years. He saves you from Gretchen after she nearly drowns you, and comments on how she is a cheater and will do anything to get the prize money. He mentions that he’s always had a fascination for cryptids ever since he was young and wants to prove that their there. When you give him invalid evidence, he doesn’t get angry at you and still believes in you. He provides the helicopter, the motorcycle in New Jersey, and the lab for the contest. And in the end, he wants to create a shelter for Bigfoot but won’t have enough money and will be broke until the player in the script gives up the money prize. From this, we can see that he is a kind man who has a passion for monsters and the unknown to the point of trying to prove their existence, but at the same time is considerate of their safety and does not try to put them in a zoo, unlike Grimlock.

(From the Website)

Mews has a biography that can be found in his wiki, sourced from the archived Mews Foundation website. This article explains he was well raised and came from a humble, hardworking family, inherited his family company, and turned it into a big success, Mews Corporation. He had always been adventurous and spent his free time in nature and on adventures. Examples include him riding the Great Booga Shark from Shark Tooth island and challenging Hermes, a literal god, in a ski race, in which he won. Mews, in the Poptropica universe, could’ve been one of the first people to climb Mt. Everest, but left the climber party to follow tracks he believed belonged to the Yeti. He did not find anything, but it made him realize his passion for discovering and researching cryptids. This dream of his was set in mind as years after this event; he retires from Mews Corp to creating the Mews Foundation. Their goal is going beyond scientific boundaries and show proof of cryptids.

From the website itself, it gives more detail of what the Foundation does from the News section. The Foundation does not just do research and expeditions, but they also provide and help the public. They showcase this by supporting and giving hair growth products for the people who turned bald in Spy Island. Despite their charitable acts and innocent goal, Mews and his Foundation have mixed publicity. For example, Mews was accused of helping build Dr. Hare’s Rabbot because Hare had used a navigational device that was developed by Mews Corp. Despite the accusation, a spokesperson of Mews, Cheerful Spinner, defends him and his company by mentioning that they defiantly did not have any involvement with Dr. Hare as well as the fact that adventurers use Mews tech and devices in a daily bases with their blimps. And when the announcement came up for the contest, Spinner comments that it is to stop the negative publicity that the Foundation has.

(From the Book)

In the book, it shares more characteristics of Mews. He has the habit of rambling about his adventures, which the main character in the placement of the player, Anne, notes that he is known to do. At the beginning of the story, Anne’s mom adds the fact that Mews does have a negative reputation for others by mentioning he is a “reclusive nut.” More on people’s opinions of him are in the book, but he does still has the humbleness and dislike of Grimlock from the game. For example, he’s sympathy for Anne when Grimlock steals their proof of the cryptids and also tells Anne that Grimlock is the only actual monster that actions should be put in a museum and should be long extinct. (Dang he really roasted her there it’s such a good quote) He also shares his story of seeing Bigfoot at a young age that either adds or is an alternative event to the Yeti search that stricken Mews interest for cryptids.

(Analysis)

From what has been given here, Mews is a man with the lifetime passion of proving the existence of cryptids, and despite being an old eccentric millionaire, he is still very to others and is very grounded and still has an adventurous spirit. A question that still is not answered or explained is Mews’ disappearance from the public and becoming more reclusive and private. There are multiple reasons that could explain his actions. One, he could just be working from home for the Foundation and wants to keep some of his research there, for example, the Cryptid Museum that is set up in his own home, private. Or two, he’s just tired. He’s had a busy life and wants more privacy and rest, especially with his status. And to why he created the contest all of a sudden after years of not being public is unknown. It could be because of the idea of him not proving the existence of cryptids as his life goes by broke him because he had been searching for years, and he was so sure that they existed. He might’ve been scared that everything he had worked for could be for nothing, so he began the contest without hesitation because he wanted all the help he could get to prove his dream to come true, but that wouldn’t go without consequences.

Despite his good intentions and character, he does have flaws. One flaw is that he has is that he is impulsive. He created the contest without any set rules or guidelines that could’ve made the contest safer and less messy. Mews also seemed to know Grimlock before this and knew her means to get what she wanted and could’ve prevented her from getting involved with the contest and hurting the other contestants. Mews is generous, but that is a flaw of his as well. His Foundation was funded from his pocket. He is a millionaire, but there is a limit to spending even with the amount he had. The Foundation website bio stated that they had been around for more than ten years, and they don’t take donations, meaning he had been providing the Foundation for years. Still, he would eventually become almost broke also as well as the Foundation because they did not earn money from their discoveries and expeditions. The inevitability of the Foundation’s lose in money is shown in a News article on the website, where it is briefly mentioned that the expedition leader of the failed Mongolian Death Worm search, Cuddly Fly, was told he would not be paid for the trip due to legal reasons. And as we all know at the end of the contest, Mews tells the player that he’d love to make a sanctuary for Bigfoot, but once he gives away the million, he’s broke due to spending everything on the contest and it being the last drop of money he has from the years of funding his Foundation.

Harold Mews is probably one of the most thought out characters in Poptropica. Even if the website was promotional for Cryptids Island, it gives a lot of details and information about Mews and his Foundation, their reputation, and slowly lose money. The book is also very good at showing his personality with his kindness, persistence, quirkiness, and rambles. Many Poptropica NPCs, especially if their not villains, are overlooked because they don’t have much lore or depth given to them due to the storyline of islands and how the player is usually given quests by NPCs and does most of the work. But Mews proves to be not just a normal NPC that makes you do all the work; he is an actual friend to the player by showing them much gratitude, patience, and really helps throughout this island.

TLDR; Mews is a cool character, and there’s a lot of things about him. He did a lot of things adventurous things in his life and threw away his life in business to go to his true calling and passion for Cryptids. He is kind and generous, but he has flaws since he started the contest without rules that led it to be pretty chaotic if you think about it as well as he ends up broke by the end because of the contest as well as the years of funding his Foundation by himself with no donations and no profit from it.

(Sourses)

Mews wiki

Mews Foundation Website on Wayback Machine (if this link doesn’t work its on the Mews wiki)

Crytpids Island Book you can get on Amazon!

#long post #cryptids island #character analysis #poptropica #harold mews

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jq37 · 5 years

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May we have a recap, please? :)

**spoilers for panic at the art show and home for the holidays**

OK people. I actually don’t have a ton of commentary on these two so I’m gonna try and keep it (relatively) short and sweet [Edit from Future Me: Failed Step 1].

Also, iirc, this is the week Dropout starts streaming new Fantasy High eps on Wednesdays which is very dope and I am very excited for. I probably won’t do full on recaps like I do for normal eps because, lbr, I don’t strictly have the time to be recapping these eps at all and it’s pure stubbornness that keeps me from making wiser time management decisions. But, rest assured, if I have an Opinion, you will hear it whether you want to or not.

Anyway, on with the show.

Last recap, I mentioned that this ep was giving me Aelwen house party vibes and now it reminds me of that ep in another way: Everyone rolled like TRASH almost the entire ep. It was so frustrating! They barely got any hits in until like halfway through the ep.

(Aw man, I just realized I’m gonna have to remember which spelling of Aelwen is correct again now that FH is coming back.)

I love how Murph is immediately like, “I need to make sure my wife doesn’t die during this fight avenging her fictional husband.”

Isabella also has Aelwen’s trick of poofing around the battlefield which is annoying as hell (ha) for the group.

Siobhan hilariously casts fear on Priya just to be spiteful. I thought she was doing it to help the evac process but no. It was a purely spiteful action. Bless.

When Kug turns into an ape he, of course, turns into *the* NY ape, King Kong.

“I roll a nat 20 on an epic shit.”

When Brennan was describing Kingston’s spectral New Yorker Guardians I was already thinking about that one part of Spiderman 2 (the OG Toby Mac version) and then he straight up said, “You mess with one of us, you mess with all of us,” and I lost it.

“Deny the stairs the pleasure of my feet.” Emily is a poet.

I want to know what makes a pigeon spicy more than anything.

The fact that Brennan killed Ox AGAIN and then immediately looked into the camera and let the audience know the dog was fine because he clearly Oracle stared into the future between eps and saw the entire internet sharpening their pitchforks was so funny.

About midway through the ep, Pete tries and fails to send Isabella back to hell and Isabella starts monologing about her plans and connection with Robert Moses (she stole the list from Santa and is/was gonna marry Moses apparently). I wonder if Brennan was like, “These players are for sure gonna murder her without getting any useful info out of her unless she goes full Bond Villain right now.”

And, proving my point, Emily immediately does 56 points of damage, royally f-ing Isabella up.

This is a really civilian heavy fight which feels weird in a way the FH fights never did. Like, these aren’t even civilians who live in an adventuring town in a fantasy world. These are just normal ass civilians in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Pete fails a wild magic roll after failing to teleport into the building and then gets a choice of getting really strong (which prob would have let him bust down the door) or to teleport in (which is what he does and exactly what he wanted). Very clutch when the dice rolls play into the story like that.

Kingston lightning bolts Isabella’s hair off which is just malicious but also totally called for.

On her next turn, Sophie gets hurt on purpose to get low enough to activate her ring, lets her hair burn for long enough to shorten it to a cute bob, insults Isabella, then knocks her tf out.

I love that Emily took one of her teeth (a seemingly crazy move) and when called out by Lou was like, “It’s a link to Robert Moses” (a completely reasonable answer). That’s the Axford one-two punch.

I didn’t mention it before but, Willie the golem is here, first immobile but then brought back by Misty. Post fight, he says he was somehow brought here by one of the evil factions of the city and says they’ll talk about it later. Also, Misty makes out with him (DON’T KINKSHAME HER).

With a high insight roll, Kingston is able to deduce that the group was ambushed (though not by Priya) and that their victory was a really important one for the fate of the city.

(Sidenote: The amount that Pete is Over Priya in this ep is so funny.)

Back at Wally’s (which is where Kug is now staying) Wally has gotten Kug a dog bed to sleep in and fancy charcuterie cheese because he and Ricky are the only pure-hearted people in NYC.

At the same time, Pete and Kingston have a very sweet heart to heart and then settle down at Kingston’s place to chill and listen to jazz. Idk how else we expected this to resolve, considering this is a Brennan Lee Mulligan DM’d show where the sacred pillars are Teamwork, Friendship, Communication, and Making up an NPC on the Fly Because One of Your PC’s Decided to do an Insane Thing.

Next up is the Christmas ep and Brennan, Emily, and Zac are in sweaters for the occasion.

Well,actually it’s the 21st and Emily immediately clocks that that’s the solstice.

Are cookies the good carb?/Absolutely not. But have fun with your life. (I love Ricky’s soft jock energy.)

“I run deliveries,” Pete says to Kingston’s parents, not technically lying but also not being completely truthful. Misty would be proud.

Going over to Misty, it seems pretty clear at this point (and it’s confirmed in the promo for next ep) that Misty’s fairy business is some kind of de-aging/reincarnation for herself. I wonder how many of these she’s done so far. She said she’s been around for, what? 200, 300 years? Assuming she’s been doing then reincarnations at about 65-70 years old and she reincarnates to around 25? Maybe 6 times? Idk. Just spitballing.

Saucer of milk to keep the faeries from stealing her (non-existing) children. Faerie lore is wild y'all.

Did you take another level of warlock?/Yeah bitch.

The fact that since Sophie has joined a monastery, she’s only taken Warlock levels and no Monk levels is very funny from a story perspective. It’s like, she finally comes to this sacred place to be trained to her full potential and she’s just spending what should be her sparring time playing with her cat in exchange for spells. Wild.

Emily’s cat-like, self-satisfied grin when Brennan is like, “So you just jerry-rigged yourself clairvoyance powers, huh?” is so good.

And she did it on the fly because Emily Axford is winning D&D. There are no points but she’s winning.

So, uh, Emily does, two things, very in character right after the other:

Thing number one: She send her unseen servant to spy on her family. Her dad seems hardline, “F, Dale. Whatever. Family first. She needs to get over it.” On the other side of the spectrum is her mom who is very upset about the whole affair with her siblings falling in the middle.

The second thing she does, very casually I might add, is have her unseen servant BURN DOWN HER HOUSE SO SHE CAN COMMIT INSURANCE FRAUD.

EMILY

Everyone loses their minds and rightfully so. What a wild-ass swing that no one could have seen coming. I love it.

“I look in my backpack which is now my home[…]"

I almost forgot that Ricky was a fire fighter who would not abide that nonsense until Brennan decided to cut to him.

Ricky just dolphin swims across the Hudson in 2.5 mins to go put out the fire that Sophie set. Amazing.

Ally mocking Emily/Sophie: Truthfully, I don’t know what happened.

"I love John McClane, because he loves his wife.” WALLY

Wally: Oh we’re gonna tell a lie on Christmas.

“This is what winning looks like.”

I would really like to know what trace stuff what on the drugs Pete got from 7 but Ally rolled too low to figure it out.

“I disassociate fully."

Well it took him a long ass time but glad to have Pete on the selling drugs to kids is bad train. Choo-choo, dude.

7 saying you can hack in real life in reference to his AK-47 has the same energy as Hardison using the word hack in literally any semi-weird episode of Leverage.

SOCIAL MEDIA IS VOLUNTARY PANOPTICON

So Kug goes with Wally to David’s house disguised as a dog and, despite that, blurts out that he’s his dad immediately. Well, he tries to. The Umbral Arcana stops him, unfortunately.

"I lick my son’s face.” KUUUUG.

Sophie showing up with a raw goose and hellish rebuking it is so metal and it’s a shame no one got to appreciate it.

Me when Sophie’s Mom changes into black top in solidarity for Sophie’s mourning: F EVERY OTHER NON-SOPHIE BICICLETA. I RESPECT YOU.

Kingston is hustling very hard to get his man Pete a job which is a very Kingston move. That’s how guys like that show affection.

Didn’t mention it before but Kingston’s parents and Mom specifically adopting Pete is very cute.

Sidenote: Idk what 7 was talking about Pete trying to stay low profile. He wears a cowboy hat (now a ZEBRA STRIPED one, courtesy of Kingston). I think the subtlety train has sailed my guy.

Esther shows up at the firehouse, carrying presents for her mom and grandma and looking for Ricky. The says that she’s kinda dealing with something and it feels good to be around him (beat) magically speaking. Sure. I’m gonna keep my Hercules soundtrack on hand just in case anyway.

I think Ricky is the only person who, with no pretense, could give his crush a sexy calendar featuring him.

Anyway, turns out Esther’s mom and grandma are the furies of Tompkins Square and she’s fated to join them or something.

Esther causally: I defy you, I defy the prophecy.

The fury thing would explain why Esther’s mom would have cursed Kug. They are famously magical punishers.

Ricky is a magically certified Good Boy but we been knew.

Zac’s restraint to respect Esther’s personal boundaries in lieu of getting a lore drop to stay true to Ricky’s character is amazing. Mad props.

So we slide over to Misty’s Christmas party which Stephen Sondhein is attending and him having a character card kinda killed me.

There’s a post on tumblr somewhere about playing faerie incapability for impoliteness against a vampires need to be invited in and that’s what I thought about when Moses and his vamp friends showed up at Misty’s house.

Robert tries to talk Misty into striking a deal with him for protection from Titania. She’s very much not having it.

“You know Robert, I love a comedy and I love a farce. I’d like to remind you of who it is that started this and it’s not me and it’s not my friends but I can assure you Robert Moses that we will be the ones to end it if you do not. Do you understand me?” Damn. That’s a mic drop from Misty.

[As I’m editing this, I’m realizing I somehow lost a BIG chunk of text. I’m not gonna write it all up again but the Cliffnotes are as follows:

Between the Solstice and Christmas, the gang goes Grand Central Station to see the clockwork gnomes that live there because trouble is apparently afoot. Some size changing nonsense happens and Pete shoots a dog (with mini bullets, the dog is fine). Lou is enchanted even though Kingston is not (a common theme with him). Ally and Emily are on the same nonsense wavelength (as usual).

There are dope magical dragon trains under Grand Central Station that go to the shadow realm which is a place I’d like to know about. Kingston has never seen these trains before even though you’d really think he would have.

Murph says Gnome Rights which is wild if you know what Naddpod is like.

Anyway, the high priestess of the gnomes passed out the other day and they figure out it was due to pixie magic which is suspicious. They also know they pixies have access to a “time stone” which leads me to believe that it’s Brennan and not Aguefort who thinks that Chronomancy is the most powerful magic of all.

Sophie and Jackson go to Dale’s grave on Christmas. Jackson explains that the Order of the Concrete Fist is basically a literal school of hard knocks. A counterbalance to all the reach for the stars dreaminess that comes with NYC.

Dale was their chosen one who was supposed to stop the monastery from falling when some unspecified badness crossed over to this side, but when he went to the place where he was supposed to get guidance, there was no one there (clearly tying in to what Dale said to Sophie last time they talked. I wonder what she needs to get to the top of? Empire State maybe?).

Watching Murph watching Emily, his real life spouse, play at grief for her fictional husband and do some truly insane things is so funny because you can clearly see him thinking, “I am married to this woman,” which, in fairness, is probably the main thing he’s thinking when he’s playing D&D with Emily.

I’m probably missing something but that’s all I remember. Back to post-Christmas!]

So it’s opening night at Misty’s show and, somehow, Ricky’s first show ever.

I love that Don Confetti is there because of Siobhan’s offhanded comment for a handful of eps ago about him being a supporter of the arts.

Anyway, everything is going great until the second act when Titania busts in through the mirror which is *not* is storage as Misty requested but on stage. It’s a theater fight, y'all! And not the West Side Story kind although if that doesn’t come up I will be very surprised.

“Let’s kill Titania!” –Misty in the promo

Just going straight to 11, huh Misty?

See y'all then!

#dimension 20 #the unsleeping city #d20 #asks #kickmuncher3

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dysphoric-affect · 5 years

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The Unrecognized Potential Of Voice Recognition In Games

Imagine, for a moment, you are playing an RPG - perhaps the next Elder Scrolls, for example - and you go into a weapons shop. Inside, you approach the shopkeeper. The usual prompt to press “A” or “X” to interact pops up on the screen...but there’s another way. Your headset is on, microphone at the ready, and instead you say “Hello.” The game recognizes you are targeting that NPC and recognizes the word you said as an expression of greeting. “Hey there. Welcome to the Broken Shield, home of the finest weapons in the city. What can I interest you in?” You are interested in getting a new weapon, but, as is often the case with characters in RPG’s, there is a specific focus to your character’s playstyle: in this case, let’s say they only use axes. “Show me your axes,” you speak into the mic. The game recognizes you are wanting to buy from saying “show me,” then recognizes “axes” as a specific search interest, such that you are taken to a screen showing the shops available wares to buy, but pre-filtered to only show you the axes they have in stock, eliminating the visual clutter of searching through every other item they have. You spot an “Axe of the Tempest” which does some solid lightning damage with every hit. You have enough coin and decide to buy it, so you tell the shopkeeper “I’ll take the Axe of the Tempest.” “Take” is recognized as meaning you want to purchase something, and “Axe of the Tempest” clarifies the object of interest. With the game understanding this, the screen clears to a confirmation screen with just the Axe of the Tempest displayed and to the sound of jingling coin as you pay the shopkeeper replies, “Alright, here you are. Spill some worthy blood with it, eh?”

Intrigued yet?

Voice recognition to me has the greatest untapped potential of all the existing forms of immersion tech, yet confusingly has been largely disregarded in favor of motion controls and virtual reality. If you find my supporting immersion tech like this seemingly contradictory after my last article, allow me to clarify here: I do support the development of immersion tech and their implementation, I only caution developers and gamers against unrealistic expectations of what they can accomplish and in the case of developers specifically, ask that they show restraint in spite of whatever hype surrounds a technology and implement it intelligently.

As long as expectations are grounded and immersion tech is integrated intelligently where it can truly enhance the experience, however, I strongly support development in immersion tech. There is one addendum I should add to that, though, which is I also feel too much stock has been put into motion controls and virtual reality at the expense of ignoring voice recognition, which has more to recommend it as an area for focus when it comes to immersion tech in gaming. That is the point I’m here to make today.

There are three different costs imposed on gamers when it comes to any form of immersion tech which create barriers to such forms of immersion being embraced. The first is the “acquisition cost.” This is the literal cost to buy whatever hardware it is necessary to have in order to be able to use the tech in the first place. The second is the “effort cost.” This is the sacrifice that is imposed on the gamer in the process of using the tech, from the energy needed to use it, to the limitations on what they can do while using it. The last cost is the “training cost.” This is the time that has to be spent using the tech before using it becomes second nature, at which point the first two costs become more justified in the minds of players. In each of these, voice recognition is in a superior position to motion controls and VR.

The acquisition cost for voice recognition is the cost of a gaming headset, or a more basic set of headphones that has a built in mic. While there are more expensive gaming headsets one can get, that is just an option among many more cost-effective ones. This is a sharp contrast to motion controls and VR - the latter especially - where the hardware cost is in the hundreds and for a singular option. Notably, headsets and headphones are typically hardware agnostic as well, so a set acquired could be used across all the various gaming consoles, giving them a more diverse utility that makes their cost of acquisition a better deal. Further, while headsets may be used for voice recognition, this isn’t the only or even the primary function they stand to be useful for, as they are an indispensable tool for voice communication between gaming friends and for coordination while engaged in online multiplayer gaming. This connects directly to the last and most significant point: cost is relative, because many gamers already possess the hardware anyway. That means for a gamer considering playing a game using voice recognition, the perceived cost will often be that it is free, as they are simply repurposing something they already owned and used for something else in a different way; this is a stark contrast to the other forms of immersion tech for which you most certainly won’t have the hardware you need laying around, making for an unavoidable perceived cost to engage with them.

While more open to debate than the other two types of cost, I believe the effort cost is most agreeable with voice recognition over the other forms of immersion tech. With motion controls, the demand for physical action from players to engage with it can be a turn-off for those who are looking to game after an exhaustive day and looking to physically relax; this isn’t purely speculative, as we’ve seen precisely that be born out in the past with the Wii and PlayStation Move and Kinect. Virtual reality presents a different kind of problem but a problem nonetheless: the sense of constraint. When engaged in VR, because of its fundamental nature you are visually locked in and unable to do anything else unless you disengage from the experience entirely. This is what makes it so dynamic, to be sure, though it does also present a level of necessary disconnection from everything else around them that players don’t always want to have.

Voice recognition imposes no such constraint and the physical effort is merely using your voice, which isn’t perceived as demanding in the first place to the extent the other forms are. Some of this is the inherent amount of effort required in speaking, but part of the equation is familiarity those playing games have with the process involved. Most are used to using headsets in their online play already, as many are also now familiar with using smart devices that utilize voice recognition as well, whether as simple as using the speech recognition option of the Google app on their phone or something more comprehensive, such as an Amazon Echo; there is some cross-over between the two things already even, as Xbox has some capability for voice control built in with the Cortana digital assistant and more recently the addition of support for Amazon’s Alexa. Collectively, these facts mean there is a sense of ease of approachability to using this tech that creates a solid foundation of support to be able to build integration into gameplay mechanics off of and be confident they will be embraced, if designed properly.

All that remains to consider is the training cost as it applies to voice recognition and we hardly need to consider it long, because as alluded to in examining both the acquisition and effort costs, the majority of gamers have both already adopted the hardware necessary and are well versed in using it, which even in the first instance is never a very difficult thing to learn to make use of. With that being the case, there is no training cost at all for most, but in what few cases there are those interested in using such tech in gaming who don’t already make use of a headset, the training cost that they stand to face is so minimal as to be an irrelevant factor in speculation on the adoption rate of games which were to make use of voice recognition.

What I’ve presented should make it evident, if it wasn’t self-evident enough already, that the costs of voice recognition as an immersion tech are low where they can be said to exist at all, and therefore that there is strong reason to consider focusing on integrating this kind of immersion tech into our gaming experiences more as far as consideration for how likely it would be to be supported is concerned.

What I’ve addressed thus far only addresses the question of whether the tech can be justifiably supported for development. The question remains, I grant, “What can we do with it in gaming?” I’ve given an example at the beginning, but let’s take a deeper look at the potential now.

As I see it, there are three different levels of sophistication voice recognition in gaming stands to achieve. The first would be what I call the scripted level. At this tier, player interaction would consist of reciting predetermined words, phrases and statements. For example, if multiple dialogue options were available, you could read off the one you wished to say and the game would register it; the option would still remain to press a button to select a highlighted option traditionally, though. This would further the feeling of roleplaying as the player character, with players being free to “act out” the delivery of the lines as they read them, though that wouldn’t be necessary and wouldn’t affect the nature of responses given by the NPC’s spoken to. Options like mentioned in the example at the start would be possible at this level, though in more simplified form than that. For instance, saying “filter” while shopping would trigger the filter option among the items, then saying a category to filter for among the limited pool of potential options in the game would narrow it down further still. Though this level could greatly increase a sense of immersion and ease of access to game features, it is also conceptually the most limited.

Next, there would be the dynamic level. At this level, there would be a large pool of keywords in the game’s voice recognition library and it would be able to pick these specific words out of any larger statements the player made to understand their intent and respond appropriately. Words of greeting would be known to be used to start dialogue, names of specific characters, places and items would be understood to initiate quest-associated dialogue and in bartering scenarios, words expressing intent to buy or sell would engage the appropriate transaction type and further descriptions would quickly engage transacting on the appropriate specific items. They key concept to understand with this level is that players would be free to improvise their own lines of dialogue. This level is the kind referenced in the beginning example.

In the case of quest-associated dialogue, which isn’t discussed in that example, let’s suppose you are given a quest by an NPC to kill a troll outside the city for a sum of gold and are told you can meet with their friend, an elf named Tolund, before doing so and he’ll aid you in the task. At this point there are many questions you could ask. The critical aspect here is that the game is only going to focus on key words and phrases, not everything you say, so you’re free to express yourself how you like in terms of the specific wording. So if you are wanting an exact location of Tolund or the troll, it will look for “where” being in your question, then look for one of those two subjects being said. If you say “where and “troll” in whatever statement you make, it will understand the player is wanting an exact location of the troll, and the NPC will respond appropriately in conversation as well as give you a quest marker on your map; similar results will occur if you named Tolund. If you want to know what the reward will be exactly, saying “how much” along with another word like ”gold” or “worth” will confer your intention to the game, and the NPC will respond by giving you an exact answer.

Let’s say you then go and meet Tolund. He’ll otherwise treat you as a regular passerby, but if you mention the quest-giver’s specific name, the game will recognize you are wanting to trigger the quest-associated behavior from him and he’ll greet you accordingly, which will trigger new dialogue options with him and will trigger his following behavior in turn when you conclude the conversation with him. The possibilities beyond this are many, but would all use the same basic key terms framework to understand player intent. This is where the potential of the tech becomes much more fully realized and very immersive, as it takes away constraints on dialogue performance and allows players to speak more naturally.

There would remain one limitation in the dynamic system, however: word choice would be recognized, but tone would not. This is where the emotive level would be different. At this level, not only would key terms be understood to trigger responses organically, how you spoke to someone would matter. This would coincide undoubtedly with a greater pool of words that would be recognized, including derogatory terms and names or terms of endearment. The simplest example of where this would make a difference would be in expression of sarcasm. Anything said sarcastically would be misunderstood if interpreted only based on the words in the statement. For example, if you told a guard “Thanks for everything you do” and only the words were understood, he’d have a positive reaction every time. In a dynamic system, it’s the only kind of response he would know how to have. In an emotive system, though, the intonation of the statement would be interpreted as well. If spoken sincerely, there you’d get the aforementioned positive reaction, maybe a “Thanks, hero” if your deeds were well known. If the game understood you meant the statement sarcastically, however, the guard would react negatively, maybe saying something like “The people may love you, but that doesn’t mean I do. I’ve got my eye on you.”

Volume of tone is something else that would be interpreted and accounted for in this highest level system. If you were moving through a market and called “out of the way” normally, the first person in front of you might respond, but if you shouted it urgently or aggressively a whole swatch of people in front of you would turn to take notice and then part way for you. In a scenario dealing with an enemy encampment of some kind, you could lie in wait past the perimeter tree-line and call out to get a patrol’s curiosity up and lead him away to your position where you could take him out secretly. Or, if out wandering and not looking to have any surprises attack you without their approach being noticed, you could call out and instigate anything in the area to come attack. The possibilities for more realistic NPC interactions and new organic sound-based gameplay elements are only as limited as developers’ imaginations. Combined with the existing and improved upon elements of a dynamic system, these elements stand to collectively deepen immersion in a truly profound way well worth the effort to develop and support such systems.

It should be noted, for the record, that though I only mention RPG’s as the backdrop for imagining the execution of these concepts, they certainly aren’t only applicable there; I mention that genre just because that’s where the greatest variety and depth achievable with such systems is possible in my estimation. There is great potential elsewhere, however. Imagine playing a future God of War, for those familiar with the latest entry in that series, and being able to issue a command to your son yourself, capped with your own grisly enunciation of “...BOY” and seeing that command be followed, furthering the sense of being Kratos. Any game with a strong component of interaction, whether with an ally in combat gameplay or NPC’s in “society” gameplay could benefit from its inclusion. It’s also not difficult to see the potential for stealth games with this, particularly where the volume of voice element is concerned. That alone could provide entirely new ways of approaching encounters that wouldn’t exist otherwise, or even in cases where they could, making them feel far more engaging and intense.

With everything I’ve mentioned considered, I think the merits are readily apparent to why voice recognition is a form of immersion tech that deserves further development. What I’ve mentioned as examples above scarcely scratch the surface of what is surely possible if explored deeper. I say it’s time we start digging.

#voice recognition #scripting #dynamic #emotive #rpg #immersion #gaming #video games #vr #motion control #elder scrolls #god of war

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less-than-hash · 5 years

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Holes in the Firmament

Every dev I know has at least one dream game - stuff that they'd love to be able to make some day. The more ambitious these get - the more complex or long - the less likely they are to get made. And in a collaborative medium like games, the more people (and the more money!) involved in a project, the less control any given individual has over it.

This isn't intrinsically bad. (It can also be wildly valuable to a project and rewarding personally.)

But we devs still dream of those games we'd make if we had, say, the resources of a two hundred person studio, the backing of a major publisher, and absolute freedom.

Three of mine are behind the cut.

As a note, none of these reflect upcoming Obsidian projects. Nor are they projects Obsidian would likely ever make. They don't fit the studio's brand. Which is why I'm dreaming about them here, and not pitching them internally.

So, first up!

A Squad-Based 1st-Person Firefighting Game with a Robust Relationship System and a Branching Narrative

I don't understand why there aren't more games about firefighting - though if I had to guess it's largely because making fire look good in-game is extraordinarily difficult. As is making an environment decay over time (though I suspect there are probably some pretty good, easy solutions for this using dev sleight-of-hand).

There are actually a Iot of interactive sim games about firefighting for training purposes. Much like war and flight, firefighting is something best trained without risking real life and limb.

Firefighting appeals to me as a gameplay space because it's actively protective - it's about limiting destruction and saving lives. But it can very easily be modeled with similar gameplay loops to shooters - ultimately both are about emptying rooms of danger - here it's just with water instead of bullets.

I could be water!

In short, firefighters engage in almost unequivocal good. They're heroic. They’re human. They’re flawed. And they brave dangers every day. But our industry basically ignores them.

Firefighting would give us the opportunity to set games in the modern world with people who, during their off hours, experience much more relatable struggles than your average freedom fighter, super spy, or elite soldier - relationship difficulties, debt, children, and the like.

So what would this game actually look and play like? It would likely be mission-based (calls come in of their own accord, after all), make use of movement and environmental hazards (not unlike a cover-based shooter), and have simple companion-direction mechanics similar to the Mass Effect trilogy or Spec Ops: The Line.

(Alternatively, the action could be dialed down a bit to focus on positioning a la Valkyria Chronicles.)

The gameplay would be focused on keeping your squad alive while saving as many people as possible.

Between missions you hang out at the station, or the bar, or at home - or try to balance all three, a la Catherine. You build relationships, helping your squad perform better together. You never recruit anyone, but your companions, your fellow firefighters, can die in missions, altering the narrative in both tone and content.

tl;dr: Mass Effect 2 meets Rescue Me with some dashes of Catherine

Next!

Narrative-Focused Urban Fantasy RPG/Immersive Sim

How does this not exist yet? Where's our Dresden Files or Hellblazer inspired RPGs? Or even The Magicians or Harry Potter, for that matter?

Where my Chilling Adventures of Sabrina RPG?

There's Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, which, while fantastic, is 13 years old.

While I'm looking forward to Necrobarista, that seems like a pretty tight, focused experience.

We've plenty of games with magicians in fantasy realms or in space - AKA BioWare's entire oeuvre - but few in the AAA space set in the modern world.

Unless you count superhero magicians.

Wait. Did Dr. Strange even get a game? Google suggests no. What’s going on here, videogame industry? Why won’t you suffer a witch to live?!

Honestly, I get to an extent why this is. There's a reason there've been Vampire: The Masquerade and Werewolf: The Apocalypse games, but no Mage games, either for Ascension or Awakening. Magic is broad, and often (especially in games) wildly destructive, which can be at odds with a modern setting (or rather what makes a modern setting interesting).

Art by Jason Chan, from Reign of the Exarchs by White Wolf.

But it doesn't have to be.

The flexibility of magic actually allows for a lot of different gameplay styles. You can do straight up first-person action like The Darkness or stealth survival like Last of Us. If I were to adapt Phonogram, a comic I love deeply, you can bet your ass there'd be beatmatch spellcasting.

A lot of gameplay mechanics we take for granted are actually damned-near magical.

Maps that point you where to go and tell you where your enemies are?

Dropping from a second story window without difficulty?

Regenerating health?

Items that make you smarter, stronger, or more likable?

Bullet time?

Rewinding to an earlier point in time to avoid death or a bad decision?

So that's another question a developer has to answer: if magic comes in so many shades, what color is yours? What are you hoping to accomplish?

For me, the presence of magic in the modern world demands a layer of secrecy that implies other layers of secrets. A modern world in which magic functions immediately deepens. What else lurks out there? Where are the other magicians? How are they using their abilities?

Additionally, magic is surreal. Bend and twist reality, and you're forced to look at it from new angles. If you can tweak people's emotional responses to you, how do you know the relationships around you are real?

And that's before you realize your dreams literally might come true - especially the nightmares. Is the face in the mirror a reflection, or something sinister and jealous? Is the ghost haunting you your literal past reaching out to reclaim you?

My dream modern magician game is an open-world immersive sim in an urban setting. Drop Prey, Dishonored, or BioShock style gameplay into a sprawling city filled with physics objects ripe for transmutation and NPCs waiting to be enchanted. Add an otherworld accessed by stepping through mirrors (the entire map within is reversed).

It's about what power can accomplish, what justifies its use, and what its limits are.

Populate the world with a few powerful magician NPCs with their own agendas; dozens of NPCs to chat up, learn more about, seduce, and manipulate; and a threat that could consume reality's very soul if someone doesn't step up to deal with it. Shake. Serve.

tl;dr: Dishonored meets Vampyr by way of Hellblazer and Hellboy

And finally!

Friendship Simulator 2019

My favorite parts of the Persona games and Catherine are the things outside of the core gameplay loops. The bits where you're hanging out with your friends, chatting with them, finding out more about them, and guiding and supporting them (or tearing them down).

Or hiding in the toilet to text your significant other.

One of the things I love about Persona 5: Dancing Star Night in Starlight is that the narrative is almost solely in this mode. It's entirely about learning more about your fellow Phantom Thieves.

Lest you think I uncritically and unabashedly love it, P5D has some major narrative problems - it entirely fails to pay off its initial premise, for example, and there's no persistence to the player choices or (player-driven) reactivity within the narrative.

Nor does the way the player "progresses" the narrative make a tremendous amount of sense within the fiction of the world.

Sorry I got distracted.

Point is, from a narrative perspective it's a game about getting to know people better - literally exploring their lives - and then supporting (or undermining, if you're terrible) them.

Similarly, nothing the player says in Persona (or, for the most part, Catherine) has any impact on the game. The player might progress a Social Link more slowly by being an ass to the protagonists' friends, but they'll still increase that Link over time, provided they put time into it.

And I don't want to be dismissive here. Time management is one of the major ways in which the player engages with the Persona games. Outside of combat and maybe monster-training, it's probably the most important mechanic at play. Taking longer to max out a Social Link means you're missing other content and missing opportunities to increase your stats. Or maybe the Social Link doesn't get completed at all. (Sorry, Haru.) Or maybe you’re not powerful enough to overcome the next Shadow in time and your game ends. Those are non-trivial consequences.

But the story of the Social Link, or the story of the game, will never change based on (the vast majority of) the player's interactions with their buddies.

Despite that, the games give the player a lot of freedom as to when (or whether!) they approach those relationships.

On the other end of the spectrum, Life is Strange (and Before the Storm) does a fantastic job of letting the player get to know the characters around Max (and Chloe) and responding logically to the player's choices.

The kid who has a crush on Max (Warren, I think?) remembers what the player promises him and then responds to whether or not the player follows through on it.

If Chloe plays A Game That Absolutely Involves Neither Dungeons Nor Dragons with her friends, they'll refer to it excitedly later and ask her to join in another round.

The TellTale games are also pretty good at this, especially Wolf Among Us, but that'll take me a bit far afield.

What Life is Strange does not provide the player is any control at all over the flow of the narrative. When the player completes a narrative beat within a scene, they're rushed along to the next scene, which is never one of their choosing. There's plenty of flexibility within the relationships (and within many of the smaller subplots), but little within the game's larger structure.

Ultimately, Persona provides little variability, while Life is Strange provides little narrative control.

I want to make a game that grabs the strong aspects of both of these while jettisoning their weaknesses.

(Far, far easier written than done!)

Basically, I want to make a game focused on the exploration of relationships. Where the personalities are the mysteries to unravel, and the interpersonal relationships between characters the dungeons to be navigated. Where the inner demons are the beasts in need of slaying - not through mystically entering the subconscious and doing battle with the Shadow, but through conversation.

I want a game about building a community, a family, and helping it come to support itself.

I think that one essential change that would make this significantly more doable is discarding the larger threats to the characters, especially those supernatural in nature. The relationships among the cast of Persona 4 are propping for the story of the Midnight Channel Murders. Arcadia Bay's pending apocalypse distracts from the relationships that seem to be the actual core story of Life is Strange.

(I find Before the Storm a stronger narrative than the original Life is Strange in large part because it's not being torn in multiple directions.)

Which isn't to say that there can't be threats, obstacles, and dangers. The world presents all manner of difficulties. Most of them requiring far more challenging and interesting solutions than "stick a sword in it."

That's a lot of abstraction, so what would this game actually look and play like?

Well, as I mentioned above, I think the Persona games, esp. Persona 4 Golden and Persona 5 already do a fantastic job of providing the player the framework for exploring a space and approaching relationships at their own pace.

Add into this characters that the player can engage with in order to learn more about them (not unlike Vampyr), help with their problems, and build (or break!) relationships with them or others, and you have something of an open-world interpersonal relationship game.

The narrative of these relationships would change based on the player's actions (both in regard to how they interact with the character and how they deal with (or fail to deal with) the character's problems). So would the player's reputation, which impacts their interactions with other characters.

(The reputation system is actually one of my favorite ideas in Pillars, but I think we sometimes fail to use it to its full potential. I certainly know I do.)

Side note: in this dream game, the relationships I'm describing are not expressed in a systemic way. They're not ranked like Social Links, and they don't have reputation bars like in Dragon Age or Tyranny. It's much more akin to Life is Strange here, with each character containing their own narrative(s) to be navigated.

Over time, you bring some of these characters closer to your protagonist, recruiting a tight-knit circle that helps you face the game's primary conflict. These relationships bounce off of one another. You can never make everyone happy, after all, and some people will never get along. Late game play requires that the player balance these relationships and help forge friendships or avoid catastrophic fallings out.

Yeah, but what is that primary conflict?

Potentially anything the world could throw at a person. A lot of television shows have provided us a framework we can borrow from. Veronica Mars comes immediately to mind. (Or one of my favorite films, Brick.) Then there's Lost, which is overtly about building communities and relationships in order to survive. The Wire is another possibility. (Imagine playing as a Stringer Bell type trying to build a crew while maintaining relationships with rival crews.)

My point being that we already know what these kinds of stories look like. We just have to be brave enough to make a game that's focused around understanding other people rather than shooting them.

tl;dr: Life is Strange meets Persona, minus the strange and the personas

And that’s three glimpses into my brain. Into my dreams.

You may have noticed a few through lines. I'm pretty clearly interested in making games:

Set in the modern day

That tackle modern, realistic (and I use that term extremely loosely) concerns

That are largely non-violent

With non-linear narratives

That involve exploring the lives and feelings of non-player characters

And give those interpersonal relationships systemic narrative bite

Obviously, the projects I've been involved in recently don't check off every one of those boxes on my wishlist. That's generally how it is, if you're making games with other people.

But if you're very, very lucky, you get the opportunity to work on projects that scratch at least one or two of those itches.

I've been very, very lucky.

Cheers, <3 <3 <#

#gamedev #game design #narrative #relationships #persona #catherine #mass effect #life is strange #prey #dishonored #vampyr #necrobarista

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darkarm66 · 6 years

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Further thoughts on Xenoblade 2

When reviewing Xenoblade Chronicles 2, I tried my best to avoid mentioning Xenoblade Chronicles and Xenoblade Chronicles X. Mainly because directly comparing sequels is always unfair. Any game should stand (or fall) on its own merits. Plus sequels aren't always the same game or mechanics, so any expectation of familiarity should fall only on the player (unless the devs explicity say 'this game is a direct sequel').

However, playing XC2 just really had me wishing I was playing the first or second game instead. And like I wrote in the review, XC2 lacked a lot of cohesion between its systems. Cohesion the past games nailed. One thing, the previous Xenoblade games had, in terms of cohesion, was a great environmental design. Xenoblade had the gimmick of living on the body of dormant mechgods, but the actual impressive part was how every area was interconnected. This lead to feelings that if the player wanted to push beyond the boundaries and see what they can explore or discover, only a gamer's patience (and some overleveled monsters) would stop them. Xenoblade X added verticality with the mechs, which always meant exploration had some surprises. Xenoblade 2....dispenses with most of that. In fact, much of the hidden stuff comes from warp gates locked by field skills, which may or may not be at the right level by the time. This leads to a lot of fetch questing and cat herding just to possibly level up that skill...which you need to access by increasing trust levels. By the time you have enough skill to unlock that warp gate, the player has to go back by fast traveling. I'm split on fast traveling as a game mechanic because I do love saving the player time but the disconnected nature of all the worlds take some of the joy of traveling away. It makes what should be a vibrant and unique world feel like an inefficient menu option with random bits of interactivity. It robs some of the worlds from having any lasting impact.

Another aspect was the handling of side quests because....let's face it, there's a shit ton of sidequests in all three games. And all three had a way to make it feel grueling. However, the first Xenoblade had the advantage of completing quests if you already had the stuff in your inventory...and you didnt have to go back to the quest giver. So much time saved. So much back tracking erased. This design advancement, all the way from 2010, is just missing in 2017. Xenoblade Chronicles X had this to some degree but this was mitigated due to many of the tougher quests being in the online portion and the post-story game turned into challenging grind for parts to unlock better Skells. In XC2, it just feels like a way to stretch out something a bit longer to pad for time. XC1 and XCX's quests didn't feel like chores to do because both games felt like they encouraged players to truly, truly play to their own style so players can unintentionally complete quests without needing to activate it.

The amount of backtracking saved in the first two games had the bonus of the game world to truly feel unique and warm, as opposed to Xenoblade 2's worlds just feeling like checkmarks to add on a map and the problem, at least for me, is that when you no longer have to be in a place any more, it doesn't need to exist. This waste the environmental design and robs it of being a world and is not just: a game. While a game being a game feels like a weird criticism, but games that are collections of exhaustive chores are usually not the best games.

One thing to keep in mind between all three games is the Affinity System. It shows up differently in between all three games, but their functionality is essentially the same: nurture a link between the party and the game world. In the first game, it gated some quests and side stories by incentivizing the player to actually do things within an area to increase affinity. But the first Xenoblade gave better payouts, gameplay wise, for the player's time. Talking to NPCs and creating good links between them allowed players to obtain items that may have been needed for quests or better: the affinity between the party members. This is where Xenoblade actually justified its long, long playtime. Not only does the party members receive the character development the cutscenes don't, it allows the players to have specific passive bonuses in gameplay. And its not just for the specific member in combat, but it benefits the entire party. And for the combat, performing certain actions for members allowed a boost in critical hits and buffed other effects. This made pay attention to which relationships were truly worth developing as the talking during combat mattered and determined how well an effect could take hold. Best of all, the affinity helped mitigate what could've been a super grindy affair.

This is the case for XCX as well, as the combat got tweaked to build on top of the combat chatter as performing a specifically called for Art, increased Affinity between party members, but was also the way to keep stacking attacks and effects on enemies, especially important as the game started doling out tougher enemies.

For Xenoblade 2, the Affinity system is the only thing that gets leveled up through quest completion, allowing the Driver to get specific bonuses and building the Trust between the equipped Blade. It's the interaction between Blade and Driver where the Affinity system gets smashed with sledgehammer. For the most part, it's similar to the first game where trust has to be built to unlock a skill node. Then, unlocking a specific skill requires specific tasks, tasks the player may have already done. Now add the fact that Rare Blades have specific unlock nodes and quests and they have to be present (or use the dreadful Merc Mission system) to keep unlocking. I could be misremembering the first two games, but Xenoblade 2 just made it feel like double the work for the same payoff. Stretched out for over 200 Blades.

The only thing that's consistent between all three games: there's a lot in the mechanics they won't even bother to tell you how to get it working. In the first game, it's never clear how much affinity is being added from each action but there is a number that levels it up. In XCX, you need several online guides to find out where to find the parts for the high end Skells and the fact there's a specific scheme to connecting probes. XC2 does this a little better in certain aspects but the overall vagueness to collecting is still present.

So, I this isn't a 'for the next Xeno game, they should' article because the Shulk, Fiora and Elma showing up in Challenge Mode felt like a hint that Monolith Soft may be moving away from the franchise for the next upcoming games and probably wanted to give the fans a bit of fan service before moving on. Plus, there's no guarantee that circumstances of Monolith Soft losing half their staff to a different Nintendo franchise will repeat, which I believe benefited Breath of the Wild at the expense of a better Xenoblade Chronicles 2. Hopefully, whatever the next game from Monolith Soft becomes and hopefully it's an amazing RPG, that it retains all the great parts from the Xenoblade franchise.

#monolith soft #nintendo #xenoblade #wiiu #switch #wii #xenobladex

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bastardrobocop · 6 years

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on fallout 76

so, because im a fool i pre ordered fallout 76. frankly, i was going to buy it on release anyway because im starved for anything fallout and new california was a complete bust.

anyway, this means i have had access to the “B.E.T.A.”, which isn’t really a beta. it’s just server stress tests. i’ve done every pc round so far and i feel like i can say pretty conclusively that it’s just not very good.

sorry, this is going to be a long meandering post

i dont know if its something they can fix in the like, week before they launch the game, but the delay/latency/feel is so fucking whack it’s unbelievable. the multiplayer fallout new vegas mod feels like it has better netcode. in addition, it is dreadfully optimized. i play on a laptop, so maybe take my perspective with a grain of salt, but i’m not the only one who has pointed this out. i use an nvidia 970m, which runs fallout 4 at around 50/60 frames per second. fallout 76 tops out at around 10-30 on average. just wandering the world, the framerate is atrocious. performance is best in small interior cells and in wide open spaces with nothing in it. in more dense and enemy populated areas, the game stutters hard. more than once ive had the game freeze for several seconds during a firefight. its honestly inexcusably bad most of the time. with poor latency and framerate chugging, the gameplay experience is trying. it makes literally everything painful, including just inventory management and crafting.

the gameplay itself isnt too awful in that its just fallout 4 again but without the pretense of minimal rpg elements. performance problems can make some engagements suck, but most common enemies aren’t too hard. however, the real nasty ones that are higher level than you can be nigh on impossible to take down solo, which sucks because my friends arent always available and dealing with online randos is always bad. but it’s also the only way to get like, good weapons. but anyway, the core gameplay loop is almost the same. i say almost because the ‘workshop’ storage is your only storage. and it has a 400lb limit. which takes into account anything you put in it. this should seem like an obvious issue; you basically cant afford to store things if you gather valuable resources. im currently stuck carrying this big fucking rocket launcher which is useless right now because i dont have any inventory space for missiles, which weigh a ton. also, ammo has weight now. and you can’t scrap ammo for ammo parts like gunpowder or lead. and you can’t sell ammo either. so instead you just have to like, dump hundreds of rounds just on the ground since you can’t store them in the workshop because you need space for steel and adhesive and that M2 Browning that you can’t use yet but want to hold onto because it looks bitchin. however, you can bulk scrap with plastic, which reduces weight by about half. however, therein lies another problem; plastic becomes a precious resource because you can’t make a bulk pile of wood without it for some reason. plastic is currently more precious than literal gold. still, you get stuck holding a bunch of valuable scrap in your inventory which you can’t put into your stash because it’s full and you can’t go out and find more plastic because then you’ll be over-encumbered and you cant afford to drop this circuit board and you can’t build any more things in your camp because the budget is painfully low and even when you DO get enough plastic to bulk things the bulked stuff goes into your inventory and wont necessarily fit back into the stash and i’m still carrying this fucking missile launcher please god let me put down this missile launcher please oh please god

the ui is a disaster. it’s like they turned 4′s console/gamepad control scheme and doubled down on it; on pc, random keys are bound to multiple things and then also bound to a separate key, and you can’t re-bind things individually. so that means middle mouse is both ‘open favorite item wheel’ and ‘enter third person’ and ‘enter build mode’ when there’s also V which is also ‘enter third person’. you cannot change this. there will always be one button for this. there is still no separate binding for bash and grenade throw, of course. if you press escape, it opens the map. if you press m, it opens the map. to open the pause menu with things like ‘options’ and ‘microtransaction store’ and ‘quit the game’, you have to open the map with either escape or M and then press Z. there is no direct button to take you to the pause menu, as far as i can tell. when you go up to a workbench, there are three options; E to craft, R to scrap, Space to repair and modify. from this menu, if you want to scrap an item, you must mouse over it, and then select it. however, DO NOT MOVE THE MOUSE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. even if the prompt is open and asking if you want to scrap, say, a pump action shotgun, if you mouse over and the highlight moves over to your only power armor chest piece, it will scrap the power armor chest piece. even though it was asking if you wanted to scrap the shotgun. its potentially one of the most hostile interfaces ive ever seen. the bindings for ‘scrap mode’ and ‘scrap item’ in different menus also change. if i’m in the repair menu, G scraps an item. if i’m in scrap mode, spacebar does. the only good thing ive seen so far is the favorite wheel and also you can set it so you can see through your pip boy background while browsing it.

the world feels desolate and boring. the lack of human npc interaction has been replaced with finding some dead persons holotape. there are robots. there is at least one AI. but all the questgivers are pieces of paper, holotapes, or voices on a radio. sometimes it’s a robot. you don’t actually interact though. there’s no interaction beyond listening and being told what to do. while im bitching about how the world feels, lets talk about factions. bethesda has kind of casually hyped up factions as being some kind of meaningful, cool choice. they’re literally nothing. there is no indication to other players what faction you are in. you can join every faction and reach top rank in every faction. you cant see if anyone is a member of your faction unless theyre in your faction specific base. there is no inter-faction conflict, there are very few faction quests aside from random events, and once you’re done with the main faction quest, you’re basically done for good except for repeatable ones. i honestly expected factions to be a meaningful choice, which was probably my mistake. i was hoping it would force you to commit to your current faction once you joined it, or would prompt you to abandon another faction in order to join a new one. but there’s just nothing. i was expecting something like, i dunno, destinys faction thing. like joining new monarchy. and maybe butting heads with members of other factions, like i figured the Brotherhood faction would be my enemy if i joined the enclave. but it’s just nothing. the world is nothing, the quests are nothing, everything just feels pointless.

this is also a personal gripe, but there are like no energy weapon alternatives to small guns aside from the errant laser pistol, but ammo is extremely rare. the only new energy weapon i’ve seen so far is the plasma gatling, which is a big gun. otherwise, it’s just the crappy pistol/rifle converting laser and plasma rifle. no plasma pistol, just a pistol conversion. no laser pistol, just a pistol conversion. i’ve always loved energy weapons and just like. not getting any variety while guns and melee weapons get tons of variety is grating. there are many new ballistic weapons that look neat. the 10mm smg is back, and i am admittedly fond of it. however, 10mm ammo is painfully rare. i spend basically all my lead making more ammo for it. i can kind of get by with my laser pistol and my shotgun always makes up however much ammo i lose because a lot of enemies use shotguns, but my 10mm just goes up in smoke and there’s none to be found elsewhere. there’s a shocking amount of .308 because almost every early/mid enemy uses a hunting rifle, but i guess it makes sense because the big MG-32 thing takes .308 so they want you to be able to use it when the time comes. still, i’d rather be using an energy weapon. i want like. a recharger pistol. or the plasma rifle with all the tubes. or a pulse gun. just like. anything other than the ugly aer9 pistol conversion. i think the folks down at bethesda just dont like energy weapons very much; theyre leaps and bounds less viable than small guns.

the enemies look okay. instead of raiders, you have the Scorched. they’re Marked Men, but weaker and also a cult formed by radioactive bats. there are super mutants, because bethesda cant be bothered to go outside of the comfort zone of Things People Recognize and also they hate lore i guess. the wild animals are kind of fun. theres a big toad that looks cute, and frogs that have MASSIVE arms that they run on, which looks funny. theyre small though. things like the mothman and snallygaster look neat. the flatwoods monster is okay. the grafton bastard is big and kind of easy to cheese out. there is a monster named after a flawed and racist interpretation of indigenous beliefs. theres a big sloth, who i love. the mole men (called mole miners) are intimidating and ANNOYINGLY precise with shotguns. they’re later game enemies and very aggressive. they drop a neat looking unarmed weapon that ive been using, called a mole miner gauntlet. it’s like a power fist with big claws. there’s a big bee called a honeybeast. ive basically covered all of the new monsters, though. everything else is from fallout 4 and dlcs. this includes things like anglers, which had obviously evolved on far harbor along with the lure plant so it doesnt make sense for them to be there, and gulpers which are big salamanders so i guess that’s more okay. there are swarms of bees that are just he same repeated png of a bee, spinning around. oh yeah, there are a couple new insect types; ticks and fireflies. both use the animations of the radroach and bloatfly, respectively.

solo play can be kind of boring and difficult. most randos you meet will either ignore you or call you a slur and run away. ive only had one guy break into my house and i murdered him. however, even though he had a bounty on his head, he was still allowed to get ‘revenge’ on me which meant he could spawn right next to me and this time he had a power armor suit, so he killed me a couple times before logging out to avoid my wrath. coward. if you’re out there dude, i’ll kick your ass. also, quick note about the bounty system; its kinda rough around the edges. i tried to save someones garden by shooting a ghoul that was stomping their flowers in the back. however, my shot somehow curved around him at point blank and broke a blackberry bush. from then on, i had a 20 cap bounty on my head. i had to hide from people in my secret enclave bunker and get my friend to kill me so i could perceive other people on the map again and also not live in fear of every tom dick and larry with a power armor frame and a bad attitude.

i feel like i should wrap up. fallout 76 is not very good, but if they can work out performance and latency it wouldnt be too bad for just dicking around with friends. in terms of being like, a fallout game, it’s worse than 4. i haven’t gotten into story spoilers, but its not great. and it feels remarkably desolate for a game thats advertised as being a cool time with your buds. maybe itll be better when there are more people playing. i dunno. its just not very good. i dont recommend it.

#long post #fallout 76 #i just want a good post apocalyptic role playing game #is that too much to ask

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thessalian · 6 years

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Thess vs Stats

Sometimes roleplaying is weird.

I mean, okay, basically ALL the time roleplaying is weird. On a conceptual level, roleplaying is, by the standards of society, a weird activity done by weird people in progressively weirder set-ups, usually involving the consumption of things that should not be consumed by man - boiled horse hoof, near-lethal amounts of sugar or caffeine or alcohol or occasionally all three - and of course it’s a breeding ground for puns. Roleplaying. Is. Weird.

Note: I never said weird was bad. I thrive on weird like I thrive on caffeine, and I basically look at the world and tell it, “I reject your ‘normal’.” The world’s normal is boring. Give me weeeeeeeeeeeeird.

But that wasn’t the point I was actually going for, so let’s go for why roleplaying is weird even by my standards. I mean, I’m talking on a mechanical level here. See, unless you’re free-forming (which comes with its own problems), there are stats to deal with. There’s those little numbers on sheet that tell you what your character can do. And after nearly fifteen years of gaming, one thing I note that whether it’s D&D or any of the d20-based games that doesn’t divide its core stats at all, or White Wolf that divides into Physical, Mental and Social ... there are always two major divisions to any of the base stats, sometimes carrying over into ability proficiencies. The divisions are these:

Stats reliant solely on narration and dice rolls

Stats that have to be acted out in-character all the time

Usually, in all fairness, this follows a physical / mental-social divide. I mean, not always, because you’re having to take into account boffer LARP (I learned that lesson the hard way), but when you’re sitting around a table narrating what your character’s doing ... well, it’s not you stabbing the mimic up the hinges, as it were. Strength, Dexterity, Constitution (and Appearance, back in the days when Classic WoD went in for ‘pretty’ as a stat) are things you can narrate.

Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma, on the other hand...

See, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma are about what you say in character and how you think. These are the places where the IC / OOC divide gets a little bit ... messy. It can get very complicated, very fast, when someone wants to play a class that relies on a heavy emphasis on a particular stat that can’t be simply narrated as action, and then can’t actually meet the challenges those stats present outside of dice rolls.

Intelligence is the worst for this, because frankly, intelligence is such a broad thing with so many little subcategories. Take me, for instance - I am not numbers-smart. (Ironic for a DM, but why do you think I a) squint over stats for as long as I do, b) fudge things for expediency and c) fuck up a lot?) I am, however, really intelligent in terms of words and spatial awareness - puzzles, riddles, narrative, all that stuff. I luck out in that because numbers are one of the few spots in an intelligence stat that do not require you to live up to them anywhere but in the dice. A person who’s really smart with numbers and factual stuff but may not be as quick on following a line of thought to its rational conclusion based on the presented evidence ... they might feel a little bit shitty about having to call for an intelligence roll every time a NPC starts talking because, “My character would get this but I don’t”.

This goes the other way around as well, particularly with history rolls and long-time gamers. Yeah, your players may all know that the five-headed giant dragon referenced is Tiamat, but if your character was brought up in a time and place and time when all the gods but the ones the humans and humanoids worship are being left by the wayside, Tiamat included, there’s no reason for them to know that. Particularly if the DM is taking whatever it is the party has tripped over in a new direction and has to tell them, “Forget what you know”. In those situations, even if your intelligence score is high, separating player intelligence from character intelligence can be a challenge.

Not that Wisdom doesn’t get ridiculous. Some classes heavily rely on Wisdom as a casting stat. Some of these people are not wise. Or at least, the actions they desire their characters to take are not wise. Unwise clerics who rush in where planetars fear to tread, just as a for instance. But at the very least, unlike with intelligence, a lot of these clerics can explain that shit away with, “Look, my vows got the better of my common sense; shut up”.

And then there’s Charisma. I feel really bad for socially anxious people who want to play high Charisma characters because that has got to be hard. On the other hand, there’s the lucky fact that there are lots and lots of ways of being charismatic. I mean, shy and meepy can apparently be really appealing when done well. So can “Yeah, I said the wrong thing, but I did it with style” and “I AM A BIG GALUMPHING PUPPY AND I JUST WANT TO LOVE YOU - sorry; I think I stepped on your face”. People trying to live up to a Charisma stat RP-wise can get away with just about anything so long as they’re doing it in an amusing, appealing way. Even the quietest damn ... paladin, say ... can live up to their Charisma stat if they deliver the right one-liner or narrate the right facial expression at the right time.

This isn’t meant to be bitching or anything. This is actually me doing the thing I usually do ... which is taking something apart to analyse - and in this case praise - the components. I can say that my D&D group is glorious from here until doomsday ... and probably will ... but sometimes I just like to look at the challenges that RP represents and raise a proverbial glass to my group and every other group for meeting those challenges head-on, for fun, and mastering them in such a fun way.

LONG LIVE THE WEIRD.

#Thess RPs

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6ad6ro · 6 years

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dark souls

an analysis of every game in the dark souls series by a big fan, but not a fan-boy. someone who isn't so clouded by toxic competitiveness and false pride that they can't see the obvious flaws. a sorta guide for the average person so they can enjoy all the great things souls has to offer, while avoiding the substantial amount of garbage that 95% of players will genuinely hate.

tl;dr - play ds3 or bb first. they’re the best and most fair. maybe watch playthroughs of others to see if you can handle the series’ flaws. a more detailed, WAY longer write-up is underneath the readmore cut! - souls games from best to worst - 1. dark souls 3 GOOD: best souls, best action, great aesthetics, best mixture of everything series did right, best starter game, most fair, least issues. BAD: broken early game co-op due to smurf invaders ruining it for everyone. still has issues that are in every souls games like no offline pausing and artificial difficulty. 2. bloodborne GOOD: fresh new take on souls, made the action better, fair difficulty, souls for people who don’t care about tolkien fantasy, another great starter souls. BAD: confusing multiplayer, shorter than most souls, aesthetic direction limited variety of everything, “chalice dungeons” suck. 3. dark souls 2 GOOD: co-op is the BEST in all of souls, fixed many difficulty and balancing issues brought in by ds1, not a miyazaki game but that can be a good thing sometimes. BAD: without co-op is probably worse than demon’s tbh, rigid laggy combat, kinda linear compared to ds1, not a miyazaki game and you can tell. 4. demon’s souls GOOD: really started it all and deserves the credit, short but sweet, weirdly happy but still evil aesthetics, feels like a fun set of obstacle courses, many ways to mitigate the difficulty. BAD: horrible co-op, confusing mechanics, comparatively too short, almost level-based which takes away from exploration, “world tendency” isn’t great, still very rough around the edges. 5. dark souls 1 GOOD: best aesthetics/music/characters/world/lore of any souls, originated souls exploration, plenty of secrets and replayability, HUGE game, the fan favorite, the deepest levels of masochists will love the abuse from this game, an exploit in all versions to “cheat” and help mitigate the bullshit. BAD: almost not worth playing due to insane cheapness and difficulty right from the start, the fanbase of ds1 is so toxic and horrible and elitist i have to include it, “ornstein and smough”, “curse”, even the world exploration is frustrating in this one, i have never labeled a game as “abusive” until now, is so broken that i have to include a cheat as a fix. 6. dark souls 2 on ps4 GOOD: a remixed version of ds2 that manages to feel very different, way better visuals and 60fps, potential for co-op paradise with ability to play through all of ds2 with 3 friends simultaneously (i wanna try thisss). BAD: worst souls, least fun single player of the whole series by far, most of the balance and fairness brought in by vanilla ds2 is gone, literally patched balanced bosses to break them and make them artificially unfair, feels like a sloppy ds2 fanmod made by a ds1 purist, combat seems even laggier than the original, as much as i hate on ds1 at least it was a fully original game, just go play the other versions unless you’re desperate.

THE READMORE

this will kinda be in order of release. one last thing to note before starting the series is that souls IS inherently cheap and unfair by design. even avoiding most of the worst parts and doing extensive research won't save you from all of it. the concept of souls is that wasting your time retrying parts isn’t enough of a punishment for errors. the creators wanna really hurt you. and they refuse to include difficulty settings! but imo some of the pain is worth it tho, because the storytelling, world exploration, and aesthetics might be better than any game in the last ten years. and highly competitive, “i wanna prove myself” types will eat this gameplay up. this is like if castlevania symphony of the night and silent hill had an incredible but problematic baby.

demon's souls: GOOD! a gorgeous, tough, medium-sized game that really started it all. rough around the edges, but so cool! don't skip this one. this is like your favorite band right before they hit it big. it's still hard, but a lot of the difficulty can be dealt with by choosing an overpowered starting class (royal), and grinding for levels and healing items. the aesthetics are through the roof. it's somehow a happier game than any other souls, which makes it stand out imo! sadly no expansions for this game. i'd have loved more!

there's some bad stuff for sure though. like having to keep track of inventory carry weight. and other things that became staples of the souls series but are really horrible design. like inability to pause even offline. plentiful cheap traps and "gotcha" guess and check mechanics everywhere. super easy to accidentally attack an npc and literally break an entire playthrough. horrible autosaving. confusing awful multiplayer. forced invasions by (usually) smurf players who aren't looking for a fair fight. i'd say "play this one offline" but sadly the servers just went down for good so you don't really have a choice anymore.

it's also comparatively short. maybe a third the size of ds1. maybe even less. and the whole "world tendency" mechanic is just... so so confusing. meaning most players will miss out on a ton of content. it was a cool idea, but it just kinda didn't work with how they did it. too much research required for too little reward. in it's defense, that made the whole game feel very mysterious? idk even with the issues it's still a fav.

dark souls 1: TERRIBLE! i have a lot to say about this one. it's a bit sad, because truth be told this has THE best style and THE best lore and THE best music THE best characters and THE best world design of any souls. aesthetically, this is the pinnacle. it's also a HUGE game with tons of replayability and hidden stuff everywhere. it even has dlc that's really really cool! as far as world exploration goes, this had my favorite part in any souls game ever ("under the tree").

BUT... you have to actually play the game to see all that, and that's the problem. it's just not fun to play unless you're an insane masochist and don't value your time. they kicked up enemy numbers like crazy, made the ai way smarter, REMOVED grinding for health items, and made grinding for levels not that effective at all. everything in this game is tedious work. escapism that's harder than real life? no thanks. there's artificial difficulty walls everywhere you turn, usually in the form of bosses.

seriously the bosses in ds1 are the worst. think of a normal tough game. take that difficult last boss fight. imagine you're now fighting three of those final bosses simultaneously (stun-lock included). now imagine that fight is at the start of the game. and that's the benchmark of ds1's bosses. they aren't ALL that impossible, but a lot of them are. there's this one particular boss fight, "ornstein and smough", that is by far the most misplaced, unfair, stupid boss fight i've ever seen in any game ever. whoever developed it is truly a moron. i almost forgot about the “curse” status effect! about half way into the game, you’ll run into this. it requires an expensive and rare consumable item to deal with it. it’s very easy to miss these until it’s too late. why am i bringing this all up? because not only does curse kill you almost instantly, you respawn with half your health missing until you heal it. imagine all your hard work leveling, all gone to waste from just a single status effect. and this is before teleporting between bonfires was just a part of souls games from the start, so even if you figure out where to go to heal it, you still need to slog through some of the worst areas with half max health to get to them. and then there’s always the risk of getting cursed again when you go back? big issue, because most likely where you’re at in the game the curse removing items aren’t unlimited. bad bad bad bad baaad design.

but, thankfully, there's a way around all these issues. kinda. CHEAT! there's an exploit that lets you consume boss souls an unlimited amount of times even on consoles. it still takes a while to do. it's not instant god mode. on the contrary, the game is still super hard even if you're over-leveled. by doing this, ds1 will feel more fair, like the other souls games. you'll have way more fun.

i NEVER cheat in games normally, but cheating in ds1 takes a bad, horribly flawed game and fixes it. you may hate cheating, but this is more like ripping off an evil casino or like the mob without taking any risk, since the game is so so so unfair to begin with. if you don't wanna cheat, i'd say play the first parts and then watch a playthrough of the rest. the deepest levels of toxic elitist souls fanboys absolutely WORSHIP this game. don't listen to them. even the creator himself has moved away from a lot of this games bullshit.

dark souls 2: GREAT! those same souls fanboys i just mentioned? hate this game. because it's noticeably easier. because it made co-op viable. because their impossible game was suddenly moderately more accessible to everyone else. it's still super tough, super cool, super beautiful. the original creator may have stepped down from this one to do bloodborne, but it's still DEFINITELY souls. and it's an overall better game than ds1 by a long shot simply because your ticket to fun doesn't come at such an unreasonable cost. oh and omg they added back grindable healing items! they also removed the STUPID tutorial area/mandatory boss fight before you can level that every other souls has. and just a lot of the other player-unfriendly changes made between demon's (des) and ds1 have been sorta reversed.

it might seem weird but, since the game is comparatively unpopular, it keeps the majority of toxic soul elitists from playing. the kind of people who get off smurf invading so they can bully others? to stomp new players so they can feel misplaced joy in their otherwise pathetic, purposeless existences? yeah not really here thank god! most invaders are regular people looking for competition, and usually even have a good sense of humor.

outside of that making online totally do-able in this one, it makes online co-op really fairly easy. in comparison to des and ds1, i mean. it's still unintuitive silly bullshit, but imo in this one it's SUPER worth it. amazingly fun! get a good friend. play through the entire game together! a++++. just make sure to keep that soul level similar to each other!!!

there are bad things tho. the single player isn't nearly as good as cooping through the whole thing. the aesthetics aren't quite as good as ds1. the exploration is kinda worse. the gameplay feels weirdly sluggish sometimes too. it's just insanely tanky. people that wanted "dark souls 2: more dark souls 1" would be a bit put off by this bc it was more like how ds1 was to demon's souls. unconnected in lore. imo i kinda liked that but... still. it's biggest flaw was it's lesser story/lore polish compared to the other games.

oh, and while the dlc zones (THREE whole big dlc this time!) are pretty cool, the bosses are just crazy tough to the point of not being fun. still worth getting the dlc for the awesome levels, but the bosses were disappointing in their frustration.

dark souls 2 ps4: THE WORST! this is a sorta weird one, but it deserves it's own little analysis. theoretically, this should've been really cool. a tougher, remixed version of ds2 with dlc included and better graphics/framerate. tbh the game IS beautiful. some if the little touches and changes, while subtle on the surface, completely change how you path through the entire game. it's what "zelda oot master quest" WISHES it could be. also, theoretically, you can play co-op with up to three other people this time (was two before)! neat!!

*should have been neat. because their "remixed enemy placement" really just added way more way tougher enemies. made everything insanely harder. certain bosses that were tough but fun before now just devastate you with no explanation. imagine a shoddy fanmod made by a ds1 fanboy "to fix the casual play". that's what this feels like.

ds2 rode a fine line between cheapness and fairness before, but now all the balance is gone. frustrating annoying bullshit. if you're that kind of ds1 masochist i mentioned before, this is the ds2 for you. everyone else should stay the fuck away. just replay the ps3 version again. i suspect the reason it's like this is they balanced it around the ability to have 3 people helping you at all times? which is idiotic. bc the co-op was a way to compensate for the super hard bosses and invasions. but if you then raise the bar like that, it'd make any single player parts totally unfair. which is exactly what happened. btw i only played the dlc on ps4 and not on ps3, so maybe that's why i was wishy-washy about it?

had they included both the original enemy arrange of ds2 WITH this one, it woulda been cool. but as it stands now it's a much worse version of ds2 for more money. no thanks.

bloodborne: AMAZING! it's so odd to me. people kinda ignored des compared to ds1. they didn't like how ds2 was it's own thing compared to ds1 (see a pattern???)... but then the most drastically different souls game comes out, and almost everyone unifies and loves it. but i'm not complaining, i love it too!

suddenly super fast paced action in comparison. jrr tolkien replaced by hp lovecraft. a smaller game with more polish. it's great! some of the reactionary gameplay was traded for rewarding aggression and risk. but truth be told, that made the game easier. imo bb was the easiest souls game at that point by far. might still be?

but that's not a bad thing, because souls games are so inherently hard and cheap, that the "easiest" souls ends up being the most balanced and fun. the gameplay is just so much more responsive and better than any souls ever came close to being. as much as i missed shields, it was just better. no more slow responses. gameplay feels more like an action game "should".

tho there are a few flaws here too. there are still a few unfair bosses. not like ds1 or ds2dlc... but just the same, they kept up the annoying trend of moderately difficult and insanely interesting/fun world navigation, but with bosses as disproportionately difficult brick walls in your way of the game you really wanna play. the co-op was the most confusing souls co-op yet, to the point i've never even done it (thus could be all on me but still).

there's a whole big (technically optional) chunk of the game called "chalice dungeons", which should've been this amazing roguelike maze of seemingly endless exploration. think souls meets diablo. but it ended up more like the most boring (and often cheap) repetitive thing you've ever done in a souls game. the assets uses to make the random dungeons were too few and so every dungeon felt kinda the same. and they locked a bunch of REALLY good content behind this dungeon slog. i'd say use em for a bit of grinding and then ignore em completely.

my last little complaint, and i'm torn on this, is actually something i praised before. the aesthetics. in all other souls, even though it was "knights n dragons", there was a TON of variety. bright, beautiful locations. dark, evil places. alien landscapes. bizarre abstract things. legend of zelda. silent hill. but in bb, it's mostly just dark. everybody wears edgy black. it's all the same. the weapons and outfits are way more limited. it's more focused for sure, but there's just... less of everything. but souls is a confusing complicated nightmare of gear management, so this might be a good thing to some people.

dark souls 3: THE BEST! this is it. the best souls. they combined the greatest parts of every souls game into one. the amazing combat of bb, but with all the customization and variety of the other souls. the good kind of lore that was in ds1. it's actually the lore sequel to ds1 that everybody wanted, all while being it's own thing as well. there's even a weird aspect of navigation simplicity like des had? oh and it's possibly the easiest souls yet. they even removed soul memory to make co-op way easier! just everything is more intuitive.

a wide variety of aesthetics and locations. a "best of souls" while having it's own unique things. the "weapon abilities" feature is great. everything was polished and optimized. if this truly is the last souls game they'll make, then they went out on the highest note.

okay but now here's the flaws, lol. the removal of soul memory, while it should have made co-op simple and fixed it in comparison, it actually created a whole new HUGE issue. it made things so so easy for smurf invaders. in the earliest areas, you can't take more than a few steps in co-op before some loser with a obv troll name pops into your game and takes almost no damage whatsoever. you won't beat them. they're cheating.

smurfing via high end gear to this level is cheating. there's no other way to look at it. nobody would call an ant vs an elephant a fair fight. so to save time and resources that you need to play online (it's complicated), you have the host disconnect. and then you try again. it's tedious. i'm sure it's made countless new players just give up on co-op completely, and maybe even the whole game. souls smurfs are all so pathetic like i genuinely wish they would find a way to ban them. this is the biggest issue.

another thing is it's sorta linear. maybe even more so than ds2. it's not awful like i think there are more branches than bb but still it's definitely no ds1 in that regard. there are also a few cheap bosses. "nameless king" (optional), "sister" (end dlc thus optional), and "dlc dragon" (forgot his name but double optional). i also think "dancer" (mandatory) is a bit bullshit, but it's also really cool so...

the first dlc, while looking very cool, is kinda tiny and lackluster. it does have amazing npcs/lore... but as stated before, the final boss of it is awful. souls boss formula at it's worst. the second dlc is MUCH better, with maybe my favorite end bossfight in all of souls. it's so hard, but fair. they made the garbage secret bossfight in this dlc thankfully optional. oh and the dlc itself is beautiful and large. and very fitting in regards to lore.

it's kinda hard to not mix in good with the bad on this game. i genuinely love it. most of the typical souls bullshit is easier to avoid, but it doesn't take anything away from the good parts. if you played one souls game, play ds3.

well that's it. srry if it was too long. tried to make it as short as i could. i'm sure i forgot a few points, but i'll rant about this stuff even more extensively in my ds3 letsplay i'm sure. thanks for reading! hope it helped people interested in getting into souls!!

#dark souls #long #souls #gaming #from #anikiii

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thedndguy · 5 years

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Campaign Editing

Dungeons & Dragons: Campaign Editing Ah, the voices that rings in your ear, right on time - with keys to vowel and ahem that are coin to deliver shorting of gold pieces, and draft of examination of silver. Why depend on anyone - because you have too? A good RPG player or at least one whom developing the uncanny effort of almost always doing this - discovers that putting together a host of individuals means - team. younger people see this as the role of a coach, older - a team captain, and educated a teacher. Real world folks whom are managers and business owners, have a likely invested value and are short beings to talk to - about it. Team building. Why come out with RPG behaviour, and "Assume" that you are going to need this skill as an employee some place? Your mom and dad might shake you down if you tried to rule into $40 - $60 dollars of this in your invested future. So, cannons and manuals all about; the strange real life books we we'll call cannons, are convening of education, and the manuals the deepness of rule and right discussions. Ah the voice that quite and queer, hither to be deer to your boss. One day. No matter, ye have had no better time than seek a real Campaign Person - or the sorts.

What's a Campaign? It's the long evidence of watching Lord of the Rings; any book and voiding out that it's just a story "but" a Campaign. deliver that you shall venture; and require material for that "Campaign", otherwise the camping trip is missing a thing to two. Huh; with all the Campaign stuff, you could miss-out on the needy "camping" things, like your own mattress to sleep on or perhaps a cover for just you. Uncanny that a magical one could be used for two. Well the Campaign; Lord of the rings style has ye with a troupe, horses maybe and the wiggle of fight to deal with the evil that bounds you to lore like special places. But think? Your Campaign - can be more prepared, developed with idea's that your needy self can be in short hold in no time.

Say what about the team; lets start with the thief; any RPG game could be with out one and finding one - is or could be camping ready. How about a warrior; does he or she have forge as an ability - Conan seems to think this is important. Are these good team building ideals that sum the consumption of time - or do we have a better model to work off of? Now classically D&D support the vines of communications regarding the subject not in the "cannons".

Lets begin with the world first mean existed the cave; further than burning trees and nearby rivers - man honed over a good period of time - needy things to carry to execute simple task - like discovery. And some were found to have small rocks that they could use to count with, like what about the food supply back at the cave, then the blue rock showed up; going further from this could mean that needy work could be missing. giving the educated answer - well nothing here. The gods as crafty as we can image them; left things right here, or signs that just further could support the advent of progress. Hark, being here and going back left a good amount of time to uncover stuff that could make security in the cave well support and the venture likely to be successful beyond the blue rock.

So, the first camping trip had been idealised in the cave; surmising that wandering around could in duty more need; some cave men found that if you come to close to the campsite you could be considered a... Thief. So, our caveman harked that his effort to bound his ploy at home could in duty be a very responsible thing with the camping thing. How; well most cave people with smiles don't look like thieves but short supplies beg the warrant to responsibly. So; the cave man now camping manager - determined that our smiles had a good duty to pro-vail in the woods, desert or some-place; and making some specialist is quite the likely event that they whom ever they were would keep collectable good secure as to where they were found.

So, in meeting with time; we shortly discover that a logical long route to exist from home is called a campaign. Ah the craft of gods, so be the lightings strikes the same in different places; sages muster that bolts afar are a good indication of further danger. Nice huh, now consider you can call your camping trip a campaign trip.

Now, any adventure mind is far from home, the tavern, town, city, country or far off dungeon are likely home bases for anyone needing to make a place a home point. Keeping things of campaign orientation - makes this the home base; supplies are necessary. Our city folk are willing to do this for money, hard to twist gold pieces. So, without a home-base in operation, any seller of supplies have the needy feeling of return; this makes the perpetration of distance easier to factor. Rope, hooks, packs, sleeping gear are functional surprises when you need to share a choosiness of intelligence.

So, some people choose the odd band of likely to be heroes from character sub list, or verge off the common path by giving additional characteristic to characters that make association kind of strange. That's okay; However if you consider your character sub list; Paladin, Monk, Assassin, and Elf Archer. The composite is easier to develop as a team about things that you feel should be what your game world is about.

Figure now; your regular cast of characters, Fighter, Cleric, Wizard, and Thief, we all have seen them in movies and having a selective idea about what they do; should be easier - and the route to clear effort more affordable to time. Taking a moniker from ability makes having to advance your character idea; profound because the new dimensions have a connective quality to other things.

Consider that what you are is in development; and having gear of any sorts defined you from the cast of NPC, monsters or strange identities. Gear prepared, anyone whom walks into the Yawning portal is a guest to sellers, and folks willing to bind with gold, and tell of long routes to goals, and seeking that this is the kind of job you want to have - determining your earning means that competition could be weather of flagons for a time. Overcoming the need to make big money has for many the wares of gear tell are forgotten story; and suggestive selling keeping a will that the experience is a delivery of good advice. Nonetheless - we consider the income of anyone interested to paying for idea's is a scoundrel. Try not to be so eventide in this unless the villainary quality is needy.

The secret cave of the Dungeon Master echoes with barks; skills, proficiencies, and safe notes about spell abilities. What are the darn cases of adventure need a want of froth to the campaign design? Snow caped mountains, long valley routes, hex maps with clear marking, dungeon maps crafty, or spell templates, or cards, help to give an image of the world and the duty of ability a foundry of actions anywhere placed; benign in the realm. Campaign editing is an investment of time; and sorting though the additional ideas that seem to hark at preparation. Consider that as a DM, the image of valleys, shares of homesteads, night-lights leading to lodge. The standing room of adventures have a need to understand the grounding of place and time - that seeks to remind everyone of what they have, and when the time is right; like Gandalf's staff and sword are stiff in his hands as he bellows "You shall not Pass."

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emma-boo-wearing · 7 years

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Stardew Valley:

Genre: RPG, Simulation. Platform: PC/Mac, PS4, XBOX One, Nintendo Switch. Year of Release: Feb.2016

Summary: Stardew Valley is a 2D Minecraft meets Harvest Moon. You, the character, start sitting by the side of your Grandpa on his deathbed. He gives you an envelope and tells you to open it when the time is right. The next thing you know, you are working a boring job with presumably no aspiration in life. Opening that envelope takes you to Pelican Town, a small country town with more than enough love to share. You have inherited his farm, and everyone around you wants you to be apart of everything that Pelican Town has to offer. You are learning to maintain a farm, slay monsters, buy and sell resources to make a living and, make friends. It’s easy to lose yourself in a calmer life. There’s no trouble that can’t be dealt with. And unless you make it so, there’s no hostility. Stardew Valley has been a wonderful experience, I have loved every moment, although slow to start, I’m now 15+ hours in and there’s still so much I haven’t even started exploring in this game.

Core Mechanics: Player, Farming, Mining, Relationship.

MDA: Player: the movement and the immersion of the player are the main aspects of this. The grid-based movement helps with everything in the game. It is designed to accompany this player and this movement. The immersion is being able to see yourself as your character. The character is open, bare, a blank canvas and you influence everything they do. You feel included in the game and the story because of the player you have made to be here.

Farming: The grid based map is ideal for farming. It gives you a layout, you know where you can farm and harvesting/planting/watering your crops can easily become rhythmic. There is not checking that you are standing in the right place, diagonals and facing the right way because these are all done for you. It feels natural. With the Player’s movement, it is easy and becomes second-nature almost instantaneously.

Mining: Gathering resources in the cave, or fighting off monsters. It’s the action of the game. An outlet for the player, to get away from the peaceful nature of everything else. It’s contrasting in a way that gives the player options. The mining and the farming interact indirectly, making the player feel like they have choice, their experience in this game is tailored by them, for what they want to get out of it.

Relationships: Talking to people, making friends and eventually, if you want to, getting married. The people in Pelican Town are subtle, you don’t have to acknowledge their existence if you don’t want to. But feeling apart of something, included, is what I got most out of Stardew Valley and the main aspect of that was interacting with the NPCs.

Game Loops Farm crops - gather resources - sell/buy resources - improve farm/town - build relationships - explore dungeon - do quests. These are the actions that the player can do throughout the game. Your character will wake up at 6:00am, has limited energy and health, so each of these actions would be prioritised over the course of the day. Slow farming day could leave times and energy for exploring the dungeon. Time-limited quests would dictate what else could be done that day. A large portion of the day is taken up by walking from place to place. And the character has to be in bed by 2:00am or they will collapse. Collapsing results in someone nearby taking you home, but you may have already lost items or money. So it’s in the player’s better interest to get to bed on their own terms.

Core Loop: Walk - Actions - manage time - bed

Moment to Moment: Walk - Actions - Manage Time

Level Loop: 1 level would be 1 day. 1 day is the Core Loop. (Walk - Actions - Manage Time - Bed) Session Loop: 1 Session would consist of about a week, 7 days = 7 levels.

Innovation: Made by one person; Eric Barone, in hopes of increasing his job aspects after graduating with a computer science degree, he decided to make a game.

Level Design: My only complaint thus far is the level design. The art is great, the size of the town, the farm and the interiors is great but the traversing from one to the other takes too long and there is little to do. Making that trip a few times a day can eat away at your available time, often being the reason certain quests aren’t completed in time.

Narrative Design: With a laid-back feel, and calming music for the farm and town it makes you feel included in the small, tight knit community that Pelican Town is meant to be. Contrasting to this is the cave (or the dungeon), you never feel overpowered in this game, you’re not supposed to and you definitely don’t feel like you’re at a disadvantage. It’s narrative is told through text, although this can be a no-no for some games, Stardew Valley keeps it short and sweet. There are only a few occasion where the text is compulsory (Being the start of the game, and the few and far between cutscenes). Otherwise, the story of the game is what you make it. You choose who to interact with, and by making friends, the game feel friendlier. People will talk to you and send you mail. Give you gifts and ask favours. If you choose to play alone, saving money or focusing entirely on clearing the dungeon then the game feels like you are more of an outcast. You aren’t getting involved and people don’t know you.

Why is it on the list? A lesson to be learned is that taking influence from an already successful and accomplished game and then making it your own, adding in what you felt was missing or changing something you didn’t like, this is a perfectly good way to make a game. Don’t clone something, but you don’t have to start from nothing and work your way up. 1 man made this game in 5 years. A first-time designer doing everything, as a student that is encouraging.

Proof that one day, all this practice will be worth it. With the right amount of dedication.

#StardewValley #EricBarone #ConcernedApe #Gamedev #Indie #Indiedev #games #gamedesign #videogames #MDA #AIEmelbourne #melbourne #student #aie #teamben

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ciathyzareposts · 5 years

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Game 347: Mirai (1987)

I believe these characters translate literally as “not yet come,” which is as good as any way to say “the future.”

Mirai

Japan

Xain (developer and publisher)

Released 1987* for PC-88, PC-98, MSX, and Sharp X1

Date Started: 13 November 2019

Date Ended: 17 November 2019

Total Hours: 6

Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)

*Various sites have Mirai‘s releases between 1985 and 1987. I’m persuaded that its earliest release was probably 1987 for the PC-88; some of the other platforms may have followed in subsequent years.

When I was compiling my master list, I rejected from the main list any Japanese game that didn’t originally receive a western release. This was because I assumed that everything in the game would be in Japanese, and that it would therefore take me too long to translate the text, given that (unlike, say, German or French) I can’t even type the characters into a translation tool. Yes, I realize it’s possible to use some tools by taking pictures or even scanning over the screen, but none of these are fast or accurate enough to make gameplay truly possible. I tried with The Dragon & Princess (1982) but ultimately couldn’t get anywhere without a full translation from helpful commenters.

However, I didn’t count on the fact that a number of early JRPGs were in English, or at least mostly so, even in their original Japanese releases. We’ve had some speculation as to why this was true, but nothing that’s ever fully satisfied me. Whatever the reason, I’ve been slowly re-investigating some of the titles originally rejected, to see if they are in fact playable in English. Mirai was one of those that made the cut, and it recently came up in a more-or-less random sort of my backlog.

The title means “future” in Japanese, which is why it is also the name of a Toyota hybrid sedan and a 2018 animated film about a time traveler. Several sites have translated the backstory that scrolls up the screen in katakana: It is the year 720 in the space era. Because of the destruction of the Earth’s environment, humanity is seeking other planets to which to emigrate. Seven planets have been identified in the “Reinbow Nebula,” but they are swarming with ferocious aliens. (These aliens are totally not just protecting their home.) Enter the protagonist, a legendary soldier, with his jetpack and power armor.

The game’s primary RPG credentials are found in its inventory.

Mirai is a side-scrolling action RPG. The player begins on Planet 1 with 200 energy, 100 fuel, and 100 cash. The joystick moves the player around, including up and down, expending fuel with every move. Energy is like hit points–when enemies attack, it depletes–but it also serves as an emergency fuel reserve.

Enemies start swarming from the game’s opening seconds, and they vary in lethality, durability, and patterns of movement. Mostly they damage you by hitting you directly, though a small number are capable of firing missile weapons. There are frog-like aliens that seem to move around randomly, colorful ships that always attack in a line, making them hard to avoid, and little flying saucers that like to swarm the moment you enter a tight corridor. You have to be quick on both the trigger and the movement keys. As with the recent Deadly Towers, once you fire your weapon, you can’t fire again until it hits something or the missiles clear the screen, so it’s important to time your fire carefully.

Grinding outside a warp center.

Killing enemies increases both experience and the “Shoot P” statistic. Each jetpack level has a “warp center.” Finding it is a priority. There, you can change your “Shoot P” numbers for cash, then spend cash on fuel and energy (which are relatively cheap), weapon upgrades, and special items. After some grinding on the first level, I went from a “Beam” weapon to a more powerful “Needle” weapon to a “Triple” blaster that shoots three shots in a spread every time you fire.

There are also special items to purchase. I don’t know what some of them do. “U_Jump” allows you better jumps on underground levels (more in a second); “P_Barr” creates a defensive barrier temporarily; “P_Hour” stops time for enemies temporarily. The ones I’ve figured out are useful enough that there’s a real incentive to grind for cash.

“M_Scan” makes a little minimap of the level.

The warp centers are also the only places to save the game. It costs 80 credits to save. I like the idea of having to pay in-game currency to save. Only a few titles have implemented such a system so far.

Having to pay to save means the player is encouraged not to save-scum.

Levels have occasional boss creatures. When they appear, their names show up in the lower-right screen along with their hit points. On the first level, they were flowery things called “B_ameda” that were able to shoot missiles. (Some of you Japanese-English experts tell me what all the underscores are supposed to signify.) They were also immune to the starting “Beam” weapon, so I had to upgrade before I could kill them.

Shooting the “B_ameda” with the triple blaster.

Killing boss creatures is necessary to activate various portals between areas of each level. Once you pass through a portal from a jetpack area, you find yourself in an “underground” area where gameplay is very different. Instead of flying around with a jetpack, you walk around, and instead of shooting enemies, you punch and kick them. It looks to me like you’re playing a female in these areas, too, although I’m not sure how that squares with the backstory.

Near a portal to the other half of the level.

You move around by climbing ladders and jumping from platform to platform, and the rules of both are different in Mirai than any other platformer I’ve played. You can’t grab ladders in the air, for instance. The only way to use them is to start climbing on them from the bottom. When jumping you can move latterly a little distance in the air, but not very much. It’s frankly hard to nail down the specific rules.

Climbing a ladder, although it looks more like a vine.

In the underground areas, all creatures are “boss” creatures, and there are only a few per level. The first one I played featured monstrous mushrooms called “Blueka” and beholder-like blobs “Dminga.” A later area had something I can’t even describe called “Norm” and little round balls with teeth called “goblins.” To fight them without losing too much health, you have to time your approach carefully, trying to punch or kick them from the rear before they have time to react. There are no warp stations in the underground areas, so you need a stock of good gear from the jetpack levels.

The freaky “Dminga.”

There are places where you can get stuck, unable to jump out unless you have one of the “u_jump” items from the store. These effectively double the height you can jump but also seem to make your jumps more maneuverable.

Eventually, after you’ve passed through enough portals, you meet the level boss. Special items don’t seem to work in his presence, so defeating him is a long process of learning his patterns, hitting him while his back is turned, and using jumps to avoid his missiles.

The level boss kills me as I take this screenshot.

Once I defeated the first boss, I found myself on the second planet. It also proved to be a trade-off between jetpack areas and walking areas, with different enemies and different bosses. Eventually, I got stuck in a small area that has a warp center but otherwise no exits. I thought maybe I’m supposed to grind here until I get enough money for one of the “U_Teleport” devices, but this warp center doesn’t sell items. Unfortunately, I saved over the only save slot at this warp center.

This warp center has suit shops, but I’m low on cash.

Even if there was a way to proceed, it took me about 6 hours (with quite a bit of reloading; I’m not good at action games) to reach this point, and it’s hard to see spending another 36 hours, assuming that each planet takes the same amount of time. One level, one boss sounds about right for a side-scrolling action game that barely achieves RPG status.

Micro-bosses on Level 2 are “beetles.”

If you’re curious about the end you can see a one-hour LP of the MSX version done by someone who cheated with maximum power-ups at the very beginning and had a map. The levels get more elaborate, the enemies more numerous and quicker, the bosses tougher, but the game remains fundamentally the same. The final boss is named Kariguls. Unfortunately, the conclusion in this particular video is in unpunctuated, poorly-translated English.

The hardness of the world the seven two one cosmic century the war of aggression at Reinbow Nebula was brought to the end as a result of an increase in population many war had been over again I think you had a hard time of it in the case human forecast the future feel uneasy and cherish a desire but hope love and peace I wish you happiness.

Glad we cleared up. On the GIMLET, I give it:

1 point for a bare minimum game world, including a framing story that isn’t well-referenced in-game (who is the woman?)

1 point for the most minor kind of character development with no character creation.

0 points for no NPCs

2 points for encounters and foes. I like how JRPGs often feature boss-level creatures that force you to adjust tactics on the fly, but the implementation of that system is at its most basic here.

The female hero fights a “mool” on Level 2.

2 points for magic and combat. There are some minor tactical considerations in combat.

3 points for equipment, its most developed RPG area.

I never figured out the use for some of these items.

3 points for an economy that works well, rewarding grinding and conservation of funds.

2 points for a man quest.

1 point for a barely-acceptable interface, mediocre graphics and sound, and sluggish keys.

0 points for gameplay. This is a highly subjective category, but there wasn’t really anything I liked about it. Far too linear, far too large for its limited content, and by the second level it was already getting too hard.

That gives us a final score of 15. I doubt even players who like side-scrolling action games would find a lot of value in this one. As for me, it’s probably my least-favorite sub-genre, and I’m going to want to see a lot more RPG and story elements (like Nihon Falcom’s Sorcerian from the same year) before I invest any more time in one.

This ain’t no soft action RPG.

Xain, also known as Zainsoft and Sein-Soft, published only a handful of games in its short history in the late 1980s. It is best known for Tritorn (1985) and its two sequels, which are also on my backlist and are also side-scrolling platformers. The company’s last title, 1990’s Valusa no Fukushū, is also a side-scrolling action game, but I don’t think I’d call it a “platformer” anymore.

Although side-scrolling action with platform elements isn’t what most players would later think of as “JRPGs,” it’s notable how many early Japanese entries featured these characteristics. The earliest was perhaps Xanadu: Dragon Slayer 2 (1985), although there are quite a few 1984/1985 games I haven’t yet investigated. Later ones include Sorcerian (1987), Zeliard (1987), Castlevania II (1987), The Scheme (1988), and parts of Zelda II (1988). The sub-genre is virtually unknown outside of Japan. But of course Japan had also led the way with non-RPG platformers (Donkey Kong, 1981) and side-scrolling platformers (Jump Bug, 1981, and most notably Super Mario Bros., 1985). It makes sense that some developers in that country would try to attach RPG elements to a successful template.

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/game-347-mirai-1987/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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recentanimenews · 5 years

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Sinking Our Fangs into Code Vein for Some Delicious Action

When I saw the announcement trailer for Code Vein being unveiled, I thought: "Wow, this game might totally be my jam!" But what I mostly heard from others watching the same trailer was: "Wow, it's anime Dark Souls!" It seems overdone lately to compare games to Dark Souls, to the point that the comparison is starting to not mean anything anymore. If a game is difficult, it’s Dark Souls inspired. If a game is dark fantasy, it’s Dark Souls. Co-op or Antagonistic online interactions? Dark Souls. Suffice to say, the comparison to From Software’s popular Souls series is starting to become meaningless, so when I heard people say that “Code Vein is anime Dark Souls”, I wasn’t really sure what that meant before getting my hands on it.

Code Vein’s first impression on players is an almost ridiculous amount of character customization. The amount of options available sound almost comical when put into some sort of list, so let’s just say you can choose from things like pupil shapes, sclera colors, hair lengths, tiny hats, how many individual tiny hats you want to wear, your gas mask, and other things. Though, the only real disappointment is that body size isn’t a slider; your character just goes from ‘unhealthily skinny’ to ‘approximation of normal human weight’. Also, ladies, you’re gonna have some big… assets. A player could spend literal hours in here, and the game seems to note that maybe you want to change things up after you start playing, as you’re able to change your appearance at will in the central hub of the game once you unlock it. There have been a lot of people posting recreations of anime characters and others in Code Vein, and honestly the creation aspect is perhaps one of the best parts of the experience, really letting you spend your time crafting a character that is uniquely yours. Unfortunately, the game… sort of forgets that this is who the protagonist is not too long after.

Players take their newly awakened (and amnesiac) main character out into the destroyed world of Code Vein, a place where Revenants are constantly trying to secure their survival after a calamity, with Revenants that succumb to the parasites within them morphing into dangerous Fallen. The world of Code Vein is in shambles, and your character may hold the key to unlocking a way forward… If you can survive long enough to do so.

The first thing that struck me with Code Vein is that there is A LOT of talking. Like, a lot. Within the first 5 hours of the game, I felt like I had spent most of it listening to people talk, walking my way through memory fragments, and seeing things happen without taking a lot of agency in making those things happen. This, personally, was where I first started seeing the flaws of “It’s like Dark Souls” falling apart; Souls games have always operated on a very specific story aesthetic, where the character has arrived too late, things are already falling apart, and there’s really nothing left to save, just an attempt at piecing together what was happening before whatever calamity befell everything around you. Code Vein is different: There are a lot of characters still kicking and talking, and at times your silent protagonist fades into the background as the other NPCs talk to one another, as if you weren’t even there.

My first real disconnect with the game happened after the first major boss, which was followed by numerous cutscenes that made my character feel like an accessory to what was happening; if Code Vein were a directed action game where I was asked to play as Louis, an NPC you meet early on who becomes integral to the story, I think I would have been less disconnected to what was happening than how things were presented.

In fact, this might sum up my biggest complaint about Code Vein: you don’t ever really get to feel “alone”, unless you go out of your way to do so. The game works off of a sort of “buddy” system, where an NPC ally follows you around during the game’s action sequences, fighting enemies with you and tagging along. The problem is that they seem far better at doing things than you are, charging headfirst into waves of enemies and usually clearing out mobs far faster and with more style than your character is capable of. This changes a bit as the game goes on, where instead you end up babysitting your NPC companion into not dying because they can’t seem to read enemy patterns and behavior, but early on the game very much feels like you’re playing a supporting role to the NPC, a problem that presented itself to me in the first major boss fight.

Without spoiling anything, the boss fight felt… hectic. The boss’s behavior was almost totally random, with no discernable patterns, because it would change wildly based on whether characters were near it or not, and would switch between targeting myself and my AI companion seemingly at will, leaving sometimes little room to react or block. Eventually, I had to adopt a more long range fighting style, simply so I could stay far enough away from the enemy to have it focus on my companion, then lure it towards me while they would recover. This system eventually worked out, but it felt far less satisfying than I had wanted it to be, essentially making me change my entire playstyle and weapon loadout to complete rather than going at it with whatever I had and figuring out a strategy from there. I even tried fighting the boss solo, but that proved to be an even worse nightmare, as the AI seems coded to work best (as in, most fair) against multiple targets, and became ridiculously oppressive against me by myself. Attempting a later boss using the online multiplayer had a different issue: bosses became far too easy, as they couldn’t seem to handle 3 attackers, 2 of which were human and less prescribed than the AI NPC.

This was when I realized I had to make a decision that would affect how I would look at Code Vein: It was a more action-oriented version of God Eater, which happens to share numerous staff members with Code Vein.

Areas are bland, and opening shortcuts really just allows you to avoid having to walk through them again, but almost every area is a straight line of sorts, meaning there really isn’t much reason to backtrack to begin with unless hunting particular enemies for crafting essences or grinding. There is no diverging path: you simply go in the direction the game points you in, and work from there. Map exploration feels less important to exploring the game, and more important to just figuring out where to go next, or what specific item or location you were attempting to reach might be. Unless you were totally reckless, your AI partner will ensure you stay alive (unless, as the end of the game starts to invert, you’re racing to keep THEM alive), meaning that brute forcing your way through Code Vein is also totally possible, making the game seem fairly easy. At times this is nice, as Code Vein is certainly an accessible action game; players can somewhat coast to victory on the support of their NPC partners, and can even adopt supportive playstyles by equipping Blood Codes that allow them to buff and heal party members, and the limited online functionality allows you to call for help from other players (if you can find any; in my time playing I was only able to get this to work twice) to add a second partner to the mix.

This wouldn’t be so bad if the world of Code Vein was interesting to explore, but it never really feels like it is. It also adopts the “storytelling” method of Souls games in that many items fill in lore gaps and info dumps, but this feels superfluous at times because despite how much narrative the game throws at you, it never really tells you enough information to know what anything that’s happening means. While your character is an amnesiac, it takes that issue too literally, as characters will begin talking about events and important ideas without ever taking time to clue your character in on what any of that stuff means until perhaps hours later (or you discovered it on your own from some sort of item description).

Code Vein gives you a huge amount of options and customization (25 Blood Codes, all with different stats, abilities, and specialities), allowing you to tailor your approach to enemies and areas in whatever way suits that particular challenge best. The story makes a big deal out of your character having the ability to be this blank slate, and the game seems to push you into taking advantage of this in terms of gameplay too, without outright punishing you for only using one approach. As you level up, the stat specializations and changes come from swapping Blood Codes. While you can change them on the fly in the pause menu, I will say that I wished it were possible to have hot keyed at least two of them, making it possible to change during battle more seamlessly than just mashing the Option button to get to my menu, change all my gear and set up, and then go back to the fight.

Early on, it’s hard to appreciate the Blood Code system, as you don’t have a lot of access to things that let you take advantage of the variety they offer. You start with very basic gear and start finding pieces along the way, and I found myself prioritizing fast attacks with wide arcs to damage or variety until about midway into the game, where it started to become obvious that my best approach wasn’t a “Jack of All Trades” method, but instead creating and maintaining gear that would suit particular circumstances best. While you could very likely brute force your way through Code Vein with only one or two Blood Codes, the game really seems to expect you to change your build constantly; the game encourages you to make a character that can change on the fly when a new problem rears its head.

The game has you fighting hordes of enemies and occasional bosses, meaning the combat has to be faster paced and also a bit more hectic. Combat can be a bit slow to keep up, though, as you don’t really have a lot of combat variety in your combos, and while you can change to various weapons and styles, there are really only a few basic types of weapons in the game. The amount of buffs and abilities you can use are where the real customization comes in, but it combat can still feel a bit rote and clunky as you mash the same buttons over and over again to mow down mobs, and using abilities like Drain to increase your Ichor count, or special attack abilities, can become costly as Ichor tends to be a small resource, and your AI partner will occasionally steal your kills, meaning your flashy attack not only doesn’t work, but wasted resources.

While it may not sound like it, I enjoyed Code Vein quite a bit! One of the best parts about it is that it is a far more accessible version of the “Souls” style games that everyone knows and loves, while also being a bit more like God Eater in the way it presents some of the gameplay in a far more accessible way. For example, while your healing is limited, you and your partner can use a skill that shares health between you, and you have some window of time to use this skill before a character dies completely. While exploring an area, I got attacked by a huge enemy, and their attack knocked me out; I assumed I was done for, but Luis actually revived me using his skill, allowing me to roll to safety, recuperate, and then team up with him to take down the enemy. During our fight with the boss, I was able to do the same, sacrificing my own health to heal him and keep him in the fight, allowing us to take the boss down on what was essentially our last ditch effort to do so. In these little moments, Code Vein really shines, letting you feel cool and do cool things with the character you spent so much time creating.

And while the action is a bit stale, the flow of combat can feel fun and cinematic, especially as you unlock more complicated abilities and Blood Codes. Code Vein operates on a Rule of Cool, sacrificing challenge at times in order to make sure that you feel like your character is a badass, doing cool, flashy attacks and decimating hordes of enemies. This doesn’t always work, but when it does, it feels fulfilling and enjoyable. The game rewards your investment into your character, allowing you multiple opportunities to take pictures of your character, posing them at various stations in your home base, and has flashy cinematic sequences during certain combat attacks, that let you look as cool as you hoped your character would after all that time in character creation. I appreciated this, but some may not, as it does tend to make the game feel easy and somewhat unchallenging; even though I butted heads against the first boss a few times, after that, the game was fairly smooth sailing, with the occasional death coming as a result of trial and error more than specific, unique challenge. The game has a LOT of bosses, so if you enjoy big, cinematic battles, you’ll find a lot of them here, although ironically I felt that the second boss in the game was one of the hardest, with many of the bosses having similar, repeated attack types: AOE, tracking magic, big 360 swings, and somewhat erratic patterns. This meant that while the bosses were quite different in aesthetics, they have somewhat similar movesets with some slight variation; the second boss, who uses poison, is something of an outlier because it hits you at a point in the game where you have limited resources and haven’t seen a status ailment yet; the rest of the bosses feel more “fair” in that regard.

Code Vein feels a bit like an RPG in terms of story; characters talk a lot, and the story is the main motivator to continue the game, but there are sometimes a few speed bumps to this. While the game’s characters push a sense of narrative urgency, nothing ever feels overly urgent or dire, and the focus on reclaiming memories (both your own and of NPCs) makes the game feel like most of the bad, challenging, or dramatic events have all happened in the past, leaving many of the big character reveals to feel somewhat inconsequential. Even when I finally learned the big secret behind my own character and her companion Io, I couldn’t really say I was very surprised (the game kind of telegraphs everything), nor did I find the game treating these revelations as anything big; if the characters in the game weren’t very concerned about it, I didn’t see any reason I should be. I did, though, enjoy the various characters that I met and can’t say I didn’t like any of them, but it just felt like I wasn’t on the edge of my seat, worried that something bad will happen to anyone.

The game forges a style of game that centers on the idea of reclamation and forward momentum. Your character’s amnesiac past isn’t that important, because what matters in Code Vein is moving forward. Even as characters regain their memories, they react to them in a way that centers on what that means to them now, rather than what it meant to them then. If you're itching for a fun action game with a colorful anime-styled world, Code Vein is the game for you! The game will never ask too much of you, and rewards short play sessions quite well, meaning that you can take your time and enjoy the story and world that Code Vein have to offer, even if the challenge isn’t particularly there. Personally, while I’m quite finished with the game, I do still find myself turning it back on to mess with the character creator, posing to take screenshots and occasionally doing some small adventuring with my partners for gear I didn’t complete, while trying to occasionally find multiplayer sessions to join and help others.

REVIEW ROUNDUP

+ Aesthetics and visuals are great, with character creation being a big high point.

+ Action is fun and fast, and develops more as you get more Blood Codes.

+ While not groundbreaking, the story is very enjoyable.

+/- Difficulty is somewhat on the easy side; accessibility is nice, but self imposed challenges (like playing solo) become far too difficult due to game balance.

+/- NPC ally mechanic can be somewhat odd, as it shifts wildly between holding your hand and babysitting fragile CPU partners who can’t read patterns.

- Online is a bit boring and hard to manage, and not many people seem to make use of it.

- Exploration is kind of dull; maps are generally straight lines with the occasional loop.

Does the vampire curse of Code Vein call to you? Do you also spend hours in character customization like I do? Let us know what you think of the game in the comments!

----

Nicole is a features writer and editor for Crunchyroll. Known for punching dudes in Yakuza games on her Twitch channel while professing her love for Majima. She also has a blog, Figuratively Speaking. Follow her on Twitter: @ellyberries

Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

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hellosaltysaladcollectionstuff · 5 years

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With the Nintendo Switch, you can take Geralt on the go.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is a beefy action-RPG with a massive world packed with tons of quests to complete and a variety of complex mechanics to wrap your head around. If you’re picking up the game for the first time on Nintendo Switch, then don’t worry if you feel a bit lost during the game’s opening hours. Properly playing this game is no easy feat.

To help you better grasp how to play The Witcher 3, we’ve gathered essential wisdom and tips about the game’s most significant systems. Below you can find advice about combat, crafting, leveling up, and more. To better track down your desired subject of interest, click from the table of contents below.

Table of Contents

How to Ensure You Get The Best Story Experience

Choosing The Right Difficulty

A Witcher’s Swords

Breaking Down Signs

Alchemy 101: Potions, Decoctions, And Weapon Oils

Pursue Monster Contracts: The Game’s Best Quests

How To Make The Most Of Skill Trees

For more about The Witcher 3, be sure to read our story explainer, which details everything you need to know about the events leading up to the game before jumping in. If you’re curious about how the game stacks up on Switch, then be on the lookout for our full review in the coming days.

Are you playing The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt for the first time on Nintendo Switch? What are your initial thoughts so far? Let us know in the comments below.

How to Ensure You Get The Best Story Experience

In The Witcher 3, you will meet a ton of characters, undertake dozens of quests, fight a wide range of monsters, and collect new equipment as you level up. One of the biggest draws to The Witcher 3 is its intricate branching narrative. Throughout your adventure, you will make dozens, if not hundreds, of choices, both big and small. Many of these decisions have unforeseeable, far-reaching consequences.

But keep in mind, there is no right or wrong and good or evil in this world. You might think you’re doing the right thing, but 20 hours later, your decision could come back to haunt you. Sure there are better outcomes and endings, but rarely will you walk away thinking you made the best decision under the constant difficult circumstances you're thrown in.

Our most significant piece of advice for those who want a positive ending is to do all the sidequests that relate to critical characters. If you ignore your friends in their time of need, you could be locked out of essential subplots, they may not come to your aid when you need them, and frankly, you’ll be missing some of the game’s best writing.

Choosing The Right Difficulty

When it comes to combat difficulty, we typically tell newcomers that what you get is what you put into it. If you play on an easier difficulty, you can get by with just your swords. But after thirty hours of swinging your swords around, things might start to feel dull or repetitive.

Unless you just want the story and breeze past everything else, we highly recommend playing on the Blood and Broken Bones difficulty. It’s not the hardest difficulty, but it can be quite challenging at times, especially if you aren’t utilizing Geralt’s full set of tools and skills. The most satisfying part of combat is preparing for different fights and finding ways to exploit a monster's weakness. If you play on Sword and Story, you are missing out on a massive part of what makes the game's combat special.

A Witcher’s Swords

When you aren’t making decisions or chatting up NPCs, you’ll be getting into fights. Geralt has two swords on his back to fight enemies with: one silver and one steel. The silver sword is for monsters, and the steel sword is for the real monsters, humans.

Most of the time, Geralt will automatically pull out the correct sword for the encounter, but make a mental note of which sword is what, so you’re not trying to attack a foe with the wrong one. As a reference, the one on the right is his silver sword and the one on the left is his steel sword.

Geralt's swords are your primary means of consistently damaging enemies head-on, so take time to practice and understand how their combos work, as well as how long it takes to dodge or roll out of any given swing.

Breaking Down Signs

Aside from Geralt’s swords and other offensive consumables, his most essential tools in combat are his five spells called Signs. In fact, you will probably use them more often than your swords. Below we detail what each Sign does:

Aard: A spell that fires off a powerful blast of air

Igni: A spell that lets Geralt shoot fire from his hands

Quen: A spell that protects Geralt with a magical shield

Ydren: A spell that stuns or traps enemies

Axii: A spell that temporarily makes its target more impressionable

Aard and Igni are reasonably straight forward. Aard can stun enemies, and Igni can set them ablaze. These signs are perfect for crowd control, but early on, they aren’t super effective. On the other hand, Quen is a solid opener for any fight, as it can protect you from incoming hits, big or small. It's worth noting that if it’s a big hit, Geralt might get knocked to the ground, though he won’t sustain any damage. Quen is an excellent spell for beginners who decide to play on harder difficulties because it'll protect you in critical moments.

Ydren has specific uses, but chances are you probably won’t need it all that often. Only a handful of monsters are weak to it, such as wraiths.

Finally, Axii can stun an enemy for a short time. If you use it on a human, they will stand still momentarily in a daze. It's worth mentioning that Axii is the only sign that you can use outside of combat. If you see this symbol next to a dialogue option, it means that Geralt is going to try to brainwash the person he’s talking to.

As you level up, you can invest in Geralt’s signs to unlock alternate versions of them. For example, if you invest in Quen, Geralt can cast a force field that not only protects him but regenerates his health with each hit an enemy lands. This sign is handy as it offers a great way to conserve healing resources.

Alchemy 101: Potions, Decoctions, And Weapon Oils

Swords and Signs are only half of a Witcher’s tools. They’re also fantastic alchemists, being able to craft a variety of temporary stat-boosting consumables, such as potions, decoctions, and weapon oil.

To make these valuable items, you’ll want to loot all the ingredients you can. Geralt’s invisible backpack holds an almost infinite amount of ingredients, so there’s no harm in looting every monster, corpse, barrel, chest, and plant. However, you can’t just craft anything from the get-go. You will need to find recipes scattered throughout the world first.

The beauty of potions, decoctions, and weapon oils is that if Geralt has alcohol in his inventory, they’ll all be replenished every time he meditates. You only ever need to craft these items from the crafting menu once. Below you can find more details about potions, decoctions, and weapon oils.

Potions

Potions are temporary physical buffs to Geralt. Two of the most well-known Witcher potions are Lighting, a potion that increases Geralt’s strength, and Swallow, a potion that heals Geralt over time. The game does an excellent job of making sure you get both of these potions early on, but we recommend crafting Swallow as soon as possible as it’s the most reliable way to heal Geralt in a pinch. Be mindful that Witcher potions are incredibly toxic, and Geralt can only handle consuming a few before he gets sick, which can prove fatal.

Decoctions

Decoctions are more potent potions. They require rarer ingredients and only hold one charge instead of the standard potion’s three. They also last much longer and are far more toxic than Geralt’s standard potions.

Weapon Oils

Weapon oils can be applied to Geralt’s swords to give him a damage boost against certain types of enemies. If you are having trouble with any monster, check the bestiary for the specific oil that's most effective against it.

Pursue Monster Contracts: The Game’s Best Quests

Once you are familiar with most of Geralt’s weapons and tools, it’ll be time to fight some monsters. In the Witcher 3, there are main quests, side quests, and the most rewarding of them all, monster contracts. Monster contracts don’t affect the main story, but they are a fantastic way to earn money and fight some of the game’s coolest bosses. Better yet, most of these missions are elegantly simple. More often than not, these quests have exciting characters and neat twists that are worth experiencing.

Most monster contracts are structured similarly. You’ll start by meeting the person who posted the contract, interview any victims and witnesses, track down the monster, and then fight it. If you take our advice and play on a harder difficulty, then these fights can be tough. Check your bestiary, craft the necessary oils and potions, and equip the right weapons. Most of these quests are more complex and morally ambiguous than their simplistic premises sound, so if the initial quest hook sounds interesting, chances are it won’t disappoint you.

How To Make The Most Of Skill Trees

As you complete quests and kill enemies, Geralt will level up and earn ability points. You can invest your ability points into four different skill trees: Combat, Signs, Alchemy, and General. The catch is that you can only activate a few of these skills at once. In the “Character” menu, you can see your skill trees to the right and your active skills, or mutations, on the left. When you start, you will only have a few slots unlocked, so you’ll need to pick your mutations wisely.

At first glance, a lot of these abilities, perks, and mutations may seem inconsequential. Many of them only offer a small percentage of bonuses and slight buffs. However, there is a bit of strategy in picking your mutations that can strengthen them significantly. First, you’ll want each group of active mutations to match, which means that you'll want to keep all your combat perks in the same quadrant. If you have three red combat perks in the same section, all the abilities in that section will be strengthened. It may seem like a lot at first, but the most important thing to remember is to match colors.

One final thing worth pointing out is that general perks and mutations don’t get a buff if you match them together. We recommend investing in a few of these early on, but when you start to unlock more mutation slots, it’s best to ignore this skill tree altogether.

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fightasone · 5 years

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≡ MOBILE NAVIGATION ≡

This post contains key information for potential and new players. It contains our rules, character follow list, player application, and more.

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General:

FightAsOne is a mature group. No one under the age of eighteen will be permitted to join. This rule will not be negotiated or lowered.

NSFW posts should always be placed under a cut. Certain things like extreme violence, anything related to sexual assault and drug use need to be tagged with an appropriate trigger warning (ex: tw: drug use, cw: body horror)

This is a closed community. Interaction with characters outside of the FightAsOne group with your in-game character blog is not allowed.

Please make sure you follow all characters on the Follow List.

Follow the group’s main blog.

Track the tags listed here. You will also be required to follow any main plot or subplot tags as they are developed.

Read through the group’s Current Plot. Make yourself aware of the group’s Previous Plots.

We regularly use Discord for plotting big events and have an ongoing, casual group chat. Ask a mod for access if you are interested in joining.

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Stage One: Approach the player OOC - whether through Discord or Tumblr’s various means of private communication - and attempt to resolve the issue at hand.

Stage Two: If after approaching the player in question, the matter absolutely cannot be resolved on a player-to-player basis, alert the mods for assistance. We ask that you please provide a brief summary of your issue; to create an unbiased viewpoint, we will also contact any other players involved to hear their side as well. A Discord chat will be held with the involved players and the mods in an attempt to guide the discussion to a mutually acceptable compromise. The mods will not assist in any OOC issue unless Stage One has first been attempted.

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This is an action-oriented roleplay. There will be times when you are asked to be present for a certain plot. Generally, you will be given notice weeks prior to the event you are needed for. If you are unable to be present for a plot, notify the mods ahead of time.

Should you decide to leave the group while playing a character who is heavily involved in plot related threads, you must contact those involved within your plot threads to work out a resolution prior to your unfollow notice being posted. A mod will assist if need be.

We’re extremely liberal when it comes to a lot of things, but one rule we actively enforce is our activity requirement. Only fourteen days of unannounced inactivity will be tolerated. If you are unable to post, will be busy, need to go on a temporary hiatus, or will be unavailable for any amount of time, we ask that you send a notice via ask box.

Six weeks is the maximum amount of time given for hiatuses. Regular OOC chat activity while on hiatus will be considered a sign that the hiatus is over and activity checks will resume as normal. Should a player take frequent hiatuses, they will lose one week of time for each consecutive hiatus (for example: Person A takes a six week hiatus, comes back for two weeks, and takes another hiatus; they will only get five weeks of hiatus time). This rule will apply for anyone who comes back from a hiatus and isn’t consistently active for at least six weeks.

After two weeks of unannounced inactivity, you will be placed on activity notice.

There is a two-strike policy in place here at FightAsOne. If you have been placed on activity notice a total of two separate times (equating to a month of unexplained absence), you will be asked to give up your spot due to inconsistency.

Following a week of consistent activity for a character holding either one or two activity notice strikes, an existing strike for that character will be removed.

If a player is consistently on activity notice but avoiding strikes by making single posts at the cut off time (consistently gaining and losing strikes), they will be asked to post a minimum of three in-character threads before the next check date. If the player fails to do so, they will be asked to give up their character due to inconsistent activity. This rule is designed to prevent abuse of our activity policy and prevent character camping.

We require that players be at least four weeks active on each character they play before picking up another. This is to ensure player activity as well to grant opportunity for new players to join the game.

There is a maximum of four characters per player. Only two of your characters can be Avengers.

Players who pick up a villain as a secondary character may have that character exempt from activity notice as long as their main characters remain off notice. Players may NOT pick up a villain without having some idea as to the direction they are going to take the character (whether this is with a certain character/group of characters or picking up a villain for plot purposes).

Bold/italicize memes, ooc meme replies, photos or gifsets, and text reblogs/character musing reblogs do not count as player activity. Only on dash threads, starters, writing prompt memes, or character headcanon/analysis writing prompts will count as character activity.

CHARACTERS/FOLLOW LIST

Avengers

James “Bucky” Barnes | Captain America

Carol Danvers | Captain Marvel

Tony Stark | Iron Man

Natasha Romanoff | Black Widow

Wanda Maximoff | Scarlet Witch

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Sam Wilson | Falcon

Thor Odinson

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Steve Rogers

Young Avengers

Kate Bishop | Hawkeye

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America Chavez | Miss America

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Defenders

Jessica Jones

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Luke Cage | Power Man

Matt Murdock | Daredevil

X-Men

Anna Marie | Rogue

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Scott Summers | Cyclops

Mutants

Callisto

Guardians of the Galaxy

Gamora

Peter Quill | Star-Lord

Vigilantes & Various Characters

Shuri

Trish Walker | Hellcat

Tandy Bowen | Dagger

Wade Wilson | Deadpool

Peter Parker | Spider-Man

Danielle Cage | Captain America

Hector Cervantez | Spectro

Civilians

Jane Foster

Villains

Synthia Schmidt | Sin

Yelena Belova | Black Widow

Mary Walker | Typhoid Mary

Erik Lehnsherr | Magneto

Raven Darkholme | Mystique

Emma Frost | Black King

———

FightAsOne RP Side Blogs

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As this group will oftentimes include mature subjects, content and storylines, we ask that no one under the age of eighteen attempts to join.

Read the Rules to make sure you can adhere to them.

Send in a message prior to applying to make sure your desired character/faceclaim is available.

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SUBMIT an application comprising of a few consecutive paragraphs. Our application form including a writing example can be found below. Remember: we accept players based on quality, activity level, and fit for our group.

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Follow all our characters.

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☆ Character Application (example):

Character: Bucky Barnes / Winter Soldier

Faceclaim: Sebastian Stan

OOC Name (pronouns): Sarah (she/her/hers)

Age: 27

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Writing Sample:

He sits there in the abandoned dirt and dried grass of Fort Lehigh, head in his heads, fingers gripping too-long hair as his brain swims and his stomach churns. He wants to scream. Maybe even should scream (after all, the place he could once vaguely associate with the word ‘home’ is desolate, empty – no one to hear him). He should be allowed that, right? One moment of complete, familiar abandon in reaction to years – no – decades of control. Still, he remains silent despite every image burning behind his eyelids giving him every reason not to.

He doesn’t blame Steve. Or at least he tells himself that (an endless mantra – he doesn’t, he doesn’t, he doesn’t, he doesn’t, he can’t) as he tries to grasp at older memories. Before the fall, before the war. He can’t fault Steve for wanting that back (he can), can’t fault him for doing what he thought was the right thing (he won’t). A part of him feels guilty for leaving him at the warehouse, knows what it must look like. But he can’t bear the idea of being around Steve right now. Not after he’d just tried to kill him. Not when the impulse and the thought to do so were so clear in his mind, fresh and lethal. Steve had his own problems to deal with (he refused to acknowledge that one of those problems was probably still him), he didn’t need his added to the mix.

Looking around at the weathered lodges of the camp, it was hard to imagine that he used to peddle cigarettes, magazines, and sometimes alcohol to soon-to-be soldiers. For cash, favors, or just to give himself some sense of belonging. He’d been so young. Its current decay is somehow fitting.

Heaving a sigh as his thoughts settled into the closest thing to calm he figured they’d get, he pushed himself to his feet, brushing the dirt off of his clothes. He had work to do.

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Chris Pratt

Courtney Eaton

David Tennant

Elizabeth Debicki

Elizabeth Olsen

Evan Rachel Wood

Godfrey Gao

Herizen Guardiola

Jaime Blackley

Jodelle Ferland

Josh Dallas

Justin Hartley

Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs

Krysten Ritter

Letitia Wright

Maisie Richardson-Sellers

Mason Dye

Melissa Fumero

Mike Colter

Natalie Dormer

Natalie Portman

Nikki Reed

Olivia Holt

Priyanka Chopra

Rachael Taylor

Rebecca Romjin

Rhydian Vaughan

Robert Downey Jr.

Rooney Mara

Rose Leslie

Roselyn Sánchez

Ryan Reynolds

Sarah Gadon

Scarlett Johansson

Sebastian Stan

Tom Holland

Zoe Saldana

CURRENT PLOT

"What do you fear?"

In the aftermath of the Accords, our heroes face a time of great uncertainty. Friendships are broken, faith is shaken, and the future is unknown. In the shadows of the chaos, an organization calling itself The Hand seeks to take advantage of the crumbling foundations of society.

Their reach is ambitious, spreading from within the criminal underground and beyond, using any means necessary to achieve their goals of total infiltration and domination. How does one sustain an empire that lasts? Yearning for immortality, they seek out knowledge of rumored mystical, powerful artifacts scattered across the globe in the wake of Asgard’s destruction and the Skrull invasion.

Meanwhile, HYDRA and their leader, Sinthea Schmidt, is looking for outside means to maintain HYDRA’s subversive power within S.H.I.E.L.D. and beyond. With the two organizations working to upend the natural order– heroes, villains, and civilians alike will be caught in the maelstrom.

PHASE ONE TIMELINE

→ Events beginning June 3rd, 2018:

Jessica Jones has an explosive fallout with Luke Cage, while Kilgrave ensures the heroes of Hell’s Kitchen are not prepared to fight back against the rising tide.

Lawyers find themselves cleaning up the loose threads of the criminalization of vigilantism in the wake of the Accords.

Harlem begins to notice the rise in crime, as young men are recruited to move arms through the city. Drug dealing is also on the rise in Harlem and Hell Kitchen neighborhoods.

The X-Men notice a rise in the sudden disappearance of mutants following the fallout of the Accords. They begin to investigate and find something shocking about the missing persons.

The Daily Bugle publishes reports of exciting archaeological discoveries across the globe, the results and recognition of which arouse suspicion in the more cosmic-minded heroes.

The Guardians and Asgardians look into identifying and recovering some of the lost artifacts arising around the globe, knowing the danger of these items falling into the wrong hands.

As investigators begin to look into a mysterious series of shell companies, New York’s corporate elites- Rand, Stark, Osborn- begin to examine their own holdings.

Everything begins to coalesce as a shadowy threat emerges from the very roots of New York City itself, forcing the Avengers’ hand in retaliation.

PHASE TWO TIMELINE

→ Events beginning December 1st, 2018:

The heroes make several startling discoveries regarding the mysterious artifacts recently unearthed. They’re not the only ones interested in the power these objects hold.

The Phoenix comes home to roost, leading to a mutant reunion that’s long overdue.

Tandy Bowen gets closer to the truth of her powers.

With the knowledge of Mutant Growth Hormone hitting the streets, the X-Men begin to mobilize to liberate the missing mutants, uniting to form X-Force.

The Guardians of the Galaxy open a dimensional door they should not have.

HYDRA works to maintain their governmental vice-grip while heroes begin to take action.

Old ghosts come to call, and Bucky Barnes finds himself in danger.

Typhoid Mary makes a move to keep the Defenders off her track.

The Asgardian Embassy is attacked for the treasures it holds within. Thor finds a tool to help him in the coming fight.

Clint Barton takes an unfortunate turn.

Jessica Jones has a chance to take back control of her life, at the price of another.

The true power of the stolen artifacts is revealed, and New York might never be the same.

PREVIOUS PLOTS & TIMELINE

DARK REIGN — MARCH 2013 - NOVEMBER 2013

Overview:

The Chitauri Invasion and subsequent unveiling of The Avengers raised many questions for the people of Earth. Questions that, in the months following the Battle of Manhattan, transformed into outcry as the devastation wrought upon New York state was put to long-term perspective. The World Security Council announced that in light of his failure to safeguard New York from alien attack, Nick Fury would step down from his executive role within S.H.I.E.L.D.: Norman Osborn would be taking over as Director. Soon after, Osborn fired Maria Hill and appointed Victoria Hand Deputy Director. With his team now in place, it was time to gain the trust of the people whilst casting doubt about the heroes that protected them. His first order of business was to recruit a group of his own “heroes” and unveil them to the world as his new Avengers team. His Avengers included such criminal maniacs as Bullseye and Daken. Vigilantism was subsequently ruled unlawful. Osborn used the Battle of Manhattan as proof that the former Avengers along with their allies were a threat. With superheroes now considered outlaws, the Dark Reign began.

Result:

Heroes were sent into hiding in order to survive. Those who chose to remain, such as Tony Stark, were openly attacked or captured and imprisoned. Osborn continued to extend his reach by ordering what he thought to be successful hits on both Hawkeye and Captain America. Several heroes were apprehended while some were added to his Dark Avengers roster, including James Barnes as Captain America. But the heroes were making progress of their own, coming together in secret to form a plan to put a stop to Osborn’s rule. Eventually, Osborn’s schemes began to unravel beneath him. Daken, recognizing the signs, began making plans to betray his superior. During a daring rescue, the imprisoned heroes were freed. With Osborn’s forces weakened, the final battle ensued and Osborn’s treachery was exposed. Norman Osborn and his Dark Avengers were defeated and sentenced. For his part in Osborn’s capture, Daken was pardoned and Maria Hill was reinstated as Director of S.H.I.E.L.D.

RISE OF ULTRON — FEBRUARY 2014 - AUGUST 2014

Overview:

After the shadow cast by Norman Osborn’s Dark Reign passed, our heroes enjoyed a period of relative peace. Determined to ensure that the team would never have to face a bitter divide again, Tony Stark converted his New York City Stark Tower into the Avengers Tower and invited the team to move in. It was Stark’s hope and belief that this would further unite the team against any threats that may arise. During this time, Dr. Hank Pym was formulating a plan of his own and the Ultron project was born. Pym, who had been contracted by S.H.I.E.L.D., reported his progress to the organization who in turn took possession of the Ultron robot and modified it, uploading to it a program known as Project Insight. What both S.H.I.E.L.D. scientists and Dr. Pym failed to realize was that the AI had already begun to rewrite its programming. After publicly breaking ties with the Avengers, Director Hill announced to the public that the Ultron robot was now on patrol, predicting and preventing threads in order to ensure civilians’ safety. It wasn’t until Ultron openly attacked Thor after deeming him a threat that people began to question whether or not the robot could be trusted to protect innocent lives.

Result:

The attack against one of their own forced the Avengers to publicly oppose S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Ultron project. Tensions continued to rise as the robot became more reckless with each arrest, eventually favoring killing targets instead of apprehending them. With S.H.I.E.L.D. now unable to control Ultron, the Avengers confronted the AI and managed to damage him before he made his escape. The team returned to the tower post-battle only to have it taken over and put into emergency lockdown by Ultron, who was using Tony’s lab to repair and upgrade himself. Ultron then unleashed his army of Ultron bots and a fight ensued. Many heroes were injured and Bruce Banner was killed. After a heartbreaking goodbye, the team regrouped. Now joined by Hank Pym and Cable, as well as armed with an Oscorp-patented electronic disabling device invented by Max Dillon, they launched one last attack against Ultron. While the team weakened the robot, it was Cable who dealt the final blow, sacrificing himself in the process. Ultron was defeated but not without cost.

INFINITY WAR — NOVEMBER 2014 - JUNE 2015

Overview:

During what was supposed to be an ordinary retrieval mission, the Winter Soldier stumbled across an exchange between AIM and HYDRA, acquiring a device he believed to be a weapon of mass destruction. The item was given to Jane Foster and later to Tony Stark for analysis. While the heroes attempted to discover the stone’s origins, the titan Thanos began recruiting forces in order to obtain the legendary Infinity Gems, pulling Loki into the fold through the Mind Gem’s powerful persuasion, having had already recruited the Red Skull from the voids of space he’d been transported to in 1945. Having learned of Jane Foster’s unfortunate encounter with the Aether, Thanos had Loki remove its essence from her and return it - another gem in his collection. The magnitude of the threat humanity would face was soon revealed after Tony Stark’s work on the Soul Gem attracted HYDRA’s attention, causing the Red Skull to launch a brutal attack on Avengers Tower.

Result:

After an interrogation revealed Thanos’ plans to attack Asgard and Xandar for the Infinity Gems residing there, Bucky Barnes reported to the Avengers’ liaison, Sharon Carter. Despite the tension between S.H.I.E.L.D. and the superhero community, both agreed to set their differences aside in the face of such a cosmic threat. With the Avengers’ home in ruins, Tony Stark opened the doors of his family’s mansion as new headquarters and a place to address the task at hand. After an alliance with the Guardians of the Galaxy, two teams were formed, one headed for Asgard and the other for Xandar. Team Xandar’s endeavors were completed successfully while their counterpart’s mission wrought disaster, a series of events triggering Ragnarok, half of the team’s heroes falling. Those who made it back were met with a New York City ravaged by HYDRA’s forces, its hospitals filled with superheroes, S.H.I.E.L.D. agenta, and civilians alike. The aftermath of Ragnarok found the fallen Asgardians’ souls inhabiting those of mortals while the rest of the heroes prepared for the imminent threat of Thanos’ wrath, armed with four of the six Infinity Gems. When the titan finally attacked, he faced off with Scarlet Witch, who - her powers exacerbated by the gems - managed to thwart their enemy single-handedly.

Overview:

Unbeknownst to the heroes of Earth, the destruction Thanos left in his path in his bid for absolute power decimated the planet known as Skrullos, home of the Skrull empire. In the ashes, those who remained turned to the exiled princess Veranke, whose prophecy of her people’s rise to power in the wake of their destruction seemed to be in motion. Their steady invasion spread to every sect of human society, including the superhero community, where their presence was revealed during a foray into a remote HYDRA base mounted by Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes. During the excursion, Rogers was seriously injured and - while Barnes attempted to stabilize his friend - revealed to be a Skrull. The revelation snowballed as Tony Stark was contacted and informed of the situation on-site, granting Pitt'o - Steve Rogers’ impostor - the chance to activate a Skrull virus that would wreak havoc not only on Stark but his entire network, shutting down countless security protocols (among them being S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Avengers’), satellites, and memory banks.

In response, both S.H.I.E.L.D. and Oscorp sought to create a device capable of detecting the alien invaders. Others took a more hands-on approach, among them being Kraven - on a solo mission to hunt down street-level Skrull threats - and Maria Hill, bringing in Bucky Barnes and functioning as a two-person team to do the same on a more political sphere. However, any cohesion between the two major organizations was short-lived, falling to disarray as both S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Avengers blamed the other for lack of progress, neither willing to admit to their own faults and shortcomings.

With the threat spreading to less Earthly places, Loki and Muninn embarked on a quest to discover the identity of the Skrull’s leader. While they learn that the queen, Veranke, has been posing as Sif of Asgard from the start, the Skrulls - with disorder seeded and agents in place hindering the progress of detection technology - began invading in full force, launching an attack on the Triskelion and claiming it as their base of operations.

Result:

With their resources, communications, and means of protection and aid cut away, the remaining Avengers took shelter within Fury’s Memorial base in D.C. in an effort to regroup. S.H.I.E.L.D. fled in a similar vein, taking up camp in the hidden barbershop base in Midtown Manhattan. The Skrulls, using their media connections, broadcast pleas from various outlets, including using an apparently held-hostage Harry Osborn as a means to demand a cease to all resistance efforts, eventually leading up to his publicly implied, apparent death.

Having reached a breaking point, the Avengers - led by Bucky Barnes as Captain America - launched an attack to reclaim the Skrull-held Triskelion. In the effort, Antoine Triplett was able to assist both Avengers and S.H.I.E.L.D. forces into the building while the vicious battle outside bled onto the National Mall. With the aid of Steve Rogers - alive and escaped from Skrull captivity along with other heroes - Barnes was able to track a defeated and wounded Veranke to an unfinished apartment complex, killing her and bringing an end to the Skrulls’ oppression.

EXTREMIS — FEBRUARY 2016 - AUGUST 2016

Overview:

After the digital corruption at the hands of the Skrulls during Secret Invasion, Stark Industries announced that the Stark Network is back online with advanced security measures. To rebuild his company’s reputation, Tony Stark took responsibility of its direction and announced the Starkdynamics event in Tokyo - an international think-tank comprising of a global consortium of brilliant people given a year to come up with a paradigm shifting concept. After 15 years of ostracism, representatives of Oscorp were allowed to attend the event as a goodwill gesture purely on the basis that the company is under new management as well as the good work they did during the Invasion.

While several companies showcased their work and research, Stark delivered a keynote speech announcing the commencement of Project Epsilon with the procurement of Extremis which harnesses the bioelectrical potential to hack and upgrade the human repair center, with the prospect of accelerated healing, boosted immune system and new organ generation - unbeknownst to the crowd, his personal goals for the project being to heal himself of the shrapnel injuries his sustained that made him dependent upon his arc reactor technology. Harry Osborn - in a similar vain - seeing the potential for Extremis to cure his inherited, terminal disease, approached the Avenger with the offer of collaboration. Despite tensions, the two came to an agreement. They each selected the best minds they know to aid them in their research, one being Osborn’s pick - Jemma Simmons, who - on Maria Hill’s orders - uses the offer to gather intel for S.H.I.E.L.D..

Despite initial difficulty (and side-research requested by Stark of Reed Richards, exploring the potential of Extremis to unlock the key to the Super-Soldier Serum given to Steve Rogers), the team made a breakthrough. To celebrate, Osborn and Stark hosted a Casino Royale event, the winnings to be donated to charitable cause Citizens’ Heroes. Despite the festive atmosphere attended by S.H.I.E.L.D. agent and Avenger alike, Bruce Banner confronted Stark about the direction he’d taken the Extremis project, their argument turning heated and provoking a Hulk incident. Though S.H.I.E.L.D. attempted to quell the situation and the Avengers assisted in clean-up, the incident became a PR nightmare. Banner reached out to Bucky Barnes to confirm his departure from the Avengers, and not long after, Stark did the same.

Result:

With newfound single-minded focus on his work, Stark discovered Oscorp files of questionable content, including connections to the Ravencroft Institute’s dabblings in human experimentation and schematics on patented Stark Industries technology. The discovery brought about a full breakdown of communication between the two CEOs as Stark began shutting Osborn out. In the following weeks, Stark staged a hackathon, hiring Yelena Belova to retrieve the Extremis sample from Oscorp’s Brooklyn lab. Osborn, panicked, alerted both S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Avengers to the theft, leading to a conflict of jurisdiction between Sharon Carter and Bucky Barnes and hindering the search for the sample.

Upon the loss of Oscorp’s AI, K.A.R.I., to the stalwart defense of J.A.R.V.I.S. following Osborn’s attempt at forcing a retrieval of the stolen data from Stark’s servers, Osborn’s health rapidly deteriorated. This process once more ushered in the Green Goblin, who carried out several attacks against Stark Industries’ facilities, leaving almost a hundred casualties in their wake. During another of the Goblin’s attacks - the now unused Avengers Mansion - the two clash, leaving Stark severely wounded, his arc reactor destroyed, and - if not for the assistance of Loki, who had his own grudges against the Goblin - left for dead.

Delivered to the Baxter Building and with Extremis administered, Stark learned the Goblin’s true identity. After a brief encounter with Bucky Barnes, the Goblin fled for Avengers Tower, laying waste to Stark’s suite. Barnes, having received the programmed distress signal, arrived too late, met only with a dejected Tony Stark amidst the ruins of personal belongings and technology. What should have been a welfare check between teammates turned into an embittered dispute, months of mutual frustrations coming to a head as the two Avengers clash - breaking bones and trust. With the knowledge that the missing Extremis sample had been given to the wayward Avenger, Barnes reported to Sharon Carter and - with Stark and Osborn battling it out over Manhattan - the two sent their forces for aerial and ground support. The battle between the two enhanced corporate moguls ended in a destructive stalemate over the East River, with both participants plunging into the depths below as lower Manhattan was thrown into darkness at the hands of an explosive EMP burst, set off by the Goblin in one final act of vengeance.

CIVIL WAR — AUGUST 2016 - AUGUST 2017

Overview:

As New York City began to recover from the disastrous outcome of the brawl between Iron Man and the Green Goblin, the United Nations World Security Council resolved to take necessary action to counter the rising tide of an increasingly unaccountable enhanced vigilante community. With immense pressure placed upon S.H.I.E.L.D. to direct the momentum of such a measure, a hearing was held in Washington D.C. with Maria Hill and Sharon Carter - from it, the Agreement Concerning Cooperation, Oversight and Registration of Discovered Superhumans (Accords) were soon subject to a first draft. Tony Stark was the first Avenger to view it, and - in the aftermath of Extremis - became its first supporter.

When the Accords were revealed to the public, they were met with an array of tension among civilians, heroes, and vigilantes alike. As a facility to hold those in direct opposition of the new law was revealed on Hart Island, protests began to spark. Heavy hitters such as Steve Rogers took their disagreements to the UN General Assembly, while the rest of the Avengers met among themselves to discuss their course of action only to find themselves on opposite sides of a fence. When the final day arrived, in a gesture of good will, the World Security Council’s Alexander Pierce, with support from Director Maria Hill and Deputy Director Sharon Carter, offered a ceremonial signing of the Accords on S.H.I.E.L.D.‘s Iliad Helicarrier to Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes.

With inside string-pulling from HYDRA’s Jack Rollins and Grant Ward, what the public was led to believe was a bureaucratic olive branch spiraled into a terrorist attack as the Helicarrier crashed into Liberty Island. With the Iliad’s black box released to the public, both Barnes and Rogers were implicated in the attack and forced underground. Matters only worsened when, during the memorial service for the fallen S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, Alexander Pierce was assassinated and all evidence pointed to Barnes being the one responsible. It was enough to sway public opinion, and registration becomes mandatory for all enhanced individuals.

After a disastrous scrap between a S.H.I.E.L.D. S.T.R.I.K.E. team and several enhanced, S.H.I.E.L.D. tasked it’s science division, along with the help of Jane Foster, with the job of inventing a means of detecting such individuals in order to better protect their operatives in the field. To further assist, S.H.I.E.L.D. unveils the Vision, their newest asset and a strong proponent of the Accords.

Result:

The World Security Council, under the new direction of Gideon Malick, began implementing the detection device for offensive purposes. After learning of this decision, Jane Foster - as Thor - alerted the underground heroes of their plans. Wanda Maximoff reached out to the mutant community and other scattered fugitives of the Accords with the offer to use Cerebro as a means to combat the detection tech, and alliances were formed.

Meanwhile, those who were sent to the Hart Island Facility learn first hand of darker endeavors taking place behind the secured walls. Mistreated, experimented on, and tortured - human rights violations took place beneath the government’s nose at the hands of infiltrators from HYDRA and other seedy organizations. Rumors of these conditions leaked outside the walls and water of the prison, and from Sharon Carter and Steve Rogers to Harry Osborn and Kasper O'Connor, insider and vigilante investigations led to a massive prison break. The Hart Island prison was left in ruins, and details of what took place within were soon released to the public. The UN World Security Council announced a period of amnesty for the fugitives while the Accords were amended to ensure no such horrors would take place again.

#fightasone #m: sarah #fao: mobile navigation

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thomasroach · 5 years

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Outward Review – A Rough Adventure

The post Outward Review – A Rough Adventure appeared first on Fextralife.

The following post is this author’s opinion and does not reflect the thoughts and feelings of Fextralife as a whole nor the individual content creators associated with the site. Any link that goes outside of Fextralife are owned by their respective authors.

Can you defy the bitter cold, brutal heat, and ravenous monsters that all desire your death? Outward is an RPG that doesn’t hold your hand in the slightest, as you make your way through an open-world filled with adventure and death. Only with careful preparation will you survive the dangers of this world.

Outward Review – A Rough Adventure

Genre: Survival RPG Developed by: Nine Dots Studio Published by: Deep Silver Release date: 26 Mar 2019 Platforms: PC (Reviewed), XBOX One, PS4 Website: https://www.ninedotsstudio.com/outward Price at time of review: $39.99

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Outward Features

Play solo or coop in local or online modes

Dynamic defeat scenarios that react to your context

Constant auto-saving means there’s no turning back

Ritualistic, step-by-step approach to spellcasting

Constant auto-saving means you must live with your decisions

Encounter dynamic defeat scenarios

A unique experience with every playthrough

An immersive exploration experience

Creatures will be harder to beat in co-op mode

Single-player, online co-op and local co-op with split screen

Story and Setting

Outward starts you off indebted to your tribe, a debt in which you must try to repay. In an effort to clear the amount you owe, you embark on an ill-fated voyage to try and earn enough to pay it off. Of course the ship runs aground, leaving you with almost no money and a crowd of angry villagers demanding payment. From here on out, the game opens up into three distinct main quest lines, with a small variety of sidequests you can participate in. Sounds like a good setup, but it is not executed well in my opinion.

This is a good friend, or so I’m told

You are tossed into this town and told someone in your family did something bad, you’re again told this one person is a close friend, you’re told that you are a part of this tribe. Due to the way the story is told, none of this is given adequate time to develop. I’ve poked at one of the main quest lines out of a feeling of professional obligation and I still have no real drive to pursue it. This is fine though as Outward does not advertise itself as a game with an in-depth story, rather the focus is on the story that you make for yourself.

Even with that though, things fall a little flat as I can tell the devs put a fair amount of work into this world, but very little of it comes across to the player. Very few NPCs will talk with you, and many of them are just shopkeepers that have just add a little bit of flavored text. If there’s books or other written lore entries in this game, I haven’t found them yet. There are ruins scattered throughout the game, but so far I’ve not found much inside any of them so far. To be fair, this is a very slow paced game and I’ve not gotten too deep into the more dangerous ruins, so there might be more if you venture further in. That being said, it’s not very excusable that I’m still so clueless on the world given the amount of time I have spent playing.

And thus starts the legend of the Bird Lady

Gameplay

In my original draft, this section was turning into a small novel as there are a lot of mechanics in this game but two things made me stream-line this section. Firstly, if the mechanics of this game aren’t going to interest you, the Cliff Notes version is all you really need to read.

Secondly, if the mechanics of this are your cup of tea, then all you’ll want to read is the Cliff Notes version. See, a lot of this game is about exploration, discovery, and the story that you create. Going through the game and making decisions based on imperfect knowledge is a major part of what makes this game unique. There is a tutorial, and it is a must for this game, but you’ll really be short-changing yourself if you go in with a complete understanding of the mechanics. This is the same for most things in this title, for some this will sound like heaven and for some it will sound like a complete waste of time.

Avatar customization is limited, but it has a purple hair option so it’s all good.

At its core, this is an action-RPG, while there are plenty of side mechanics, the main thrust is exploring dungeons and beating down the bad guys and monsters. After administering the beat downs you will loot all of their stuff, maybe find an upgrade or two, sell the rest, and move onto the next group of walking loot.

Combat

This brings me to my major criticism of the game, and one that I think will be the proverbial straw for many gamers. The combat is not fun as it is clunky, unresponsive, and it is difficult to use the flashier more complex spells if you’re playing solo. After the most difficult fights have ended, I don’t feel like I achieved a victory, rather I just feel like I cheesed the AI. I honestly can’t tell if this is the result of inexperience or if it was a deliberate design choice. Either way, combat really needs to be better given how much of it you’ll be doing.

As for the rest of the mechanics I’ll just skim over them. Survival is a big aspect of this game, with hot and cold weather, hunger, thirst, and the need for sleep. It might sound like a bother, but the game does a good job of encouraging you naturally to keep track of all your bars. As long as you are mindful, you won’t get in trouble.

That being said, the UI to convey some of the information is lacking. For example as you take damage, you recive ‘burnt health’ which reduces your max HP until you either eat specific foods, drink a potion, or sleep. However, the UI really isn’t very clear on this and I died several times before I figured out what that slightly different color red meant on my health circle.

I mean it’s obvious in hindsight, but it did take a few deaths to figure it out

Death

Speaking of death, you don’t really ‘die’ in this game. If you lose all your health, you’ll pass-out instead. This will cost you one day (which can be a major problem for some quests) and you’ll wake up in a context sensitive situation. This can either be fun, an annoyance, or a really bad situation since the time might have caused some food to rot, which means you can’t eat to get rid of that hunger status, as well as your max HP and stamina is also now reduced. It is certainly an interesting way to handle death, I’ll give the developers that. Something to be aware of is that because you can’t ever die, the game does not allow you to save. There is only one auto-save for your character, and the game is saving almost constantly. Don’t count on ALT-F4 to bail you out of a bad choice either.

Character Progression

Character progression is mostly done by getting new gear, you don’t level up in this game, though you can gain new skills. Some skills are free, some cost silver, and a few require you to spend one of your three skill points to unlock. While skills help, your gear is everything here. Getting a new piece of armor or a better weapon drastically effects how well you do in combat. This also means in certain situations you can lose all your advancement because all your gear gets taken, needless to say that really stings. Though it is always possible to get your stuff back, however it might be pose a big challenge, but as far as I can tell nothing gets destroyed unless you sell it to a merchant and their inventory resets.

Multiplayer/Co-op

Multiplayer is potentially a big bonus here as not only does it have online drop-in drop-out gameplay, but it has split screen co-op as well. I didn’t get to test this feature a lot but from what little I did test out multiplayer worked well. It does seem to make the combat an order of magnitude easier though, which could be a concern. To me this is a non-feature since I don’t have anyone in my house I can play with and I’m not all that interested in playing with random people, but I can see how others would love the ability to play an RPG like this with a friend.

Crafting

Finally, there is quite the crafting system to explore here. There are no skill points here, you either have the materials to make something or you don’t. There are recipes but you don’t get to read them before crafting, If you look it up on a wiki (or in some cases just take an educated guess) you can craft the item and the recipe will be added to your journal. While you can craft weapons and armor, you’ll mostly be crafting adventuring supplies such as fire rags and potions. Cooking is a major crafting area as well and is very well integrated into the other systems. Different dishes have different bonuses, with more complex dishes providing additional bonuses.

Audio and Visual

There is honestly not much to say here, the visuals are to put it simply, functional. Occasionally you’ll come across some interesting monster designs and much of the gear you can equip is unique in design, but most of the terrain and architecture is very plain looking. There’s also tons of small, tiny errors in the terrain with the occasional prop that just looks out of place such as the giant rib cages that look like they’re made of plastic.

This does not look like weather-aged bone

Another thing about the visuals that ties in with gameplay is lighting. When it’s supposed to be dark, it is dark. Running out of light in a dungeon is not good situation to be in. While this sounds like an interesting mechanic, it really doesn’t work well when you are outside. If you’ve lived your life in the city, you really don’t realize how dark the great outdoors gets. As someone who does a significant amount of camping in his life trust me, this games gets moonless nights perfectly, which ultimately means you can’t see a darn thing. This makes outdoor navigation a massive pain, even if you have a lantern.

I did not doctor this screen shot at all

Audio is a bit of a mixed bag as the actual songs aren’t bad, and SFX are serviceable, but whatever system they are using for dynamic music is a bit wonky. I’ll be on my 17th trip back to town to sell off the two swords I looted and suddenly the music will swell into this epic score, usually spooking me a bit in the process. The voice acting is a bit off as well. It really does feel like they just went around the office and said “Hey, you’re not doing anything. Go get into the sound booth!” I really don’t think you’ll miss much by muting the sound and listening to your own stuff, but it won’t hurt the ears to leave their stuff on either.

Replayability

OK this might be a bit of a controversial view point, but I feel this game has very limited replayability. As I mentioned in the gameplay section, the vast majority of your adventuring effectiveness is in your gear. True, there is the choice of using magic or not, and which of the skill trees you wish to max out, but honestly you’ll probably have a favorite combat style that you’ll want to stick with. The only real reason to replay the game will be to experience all three faction story lines, since once you join a faction, you’re locked out of the others.

As I’ve already stated though, I don’t feel the main quest lines aren’t all that compelling. Certainly not enough for me to want to redo the game from the start. I really feel that whether or not you want to replay this game is going to hang on both how compelling you find the three factions vs how much the gameplay annoys you.

Pricepoint

So despite that fact that I just roasted Outward for a perceived lack of replayability, I still feel this game is a good buy. Assuming again, the mechanics sound like your cup of tea. Due to the pacing and the size of the world, this is going to take you a solid 30-40 hours to finish one of the main quest lines. It might take you a little less time for additional playthroughs, but not much so for a $40 game, that’s not bad at all. The devs give an estimate of 40-80 hours to fully experience the game, and I can see someone easily spending 60+ hours in this game if the mechanics happen to click with them. Toss in the fun you can have with a friend or random people on the internet, and Outward will really give you your money’s worth.

Final Thoughts

If I could give this game two scores I would. This game has a target audience and for them this is easily a 7.5, maybe even an eight. For the average gamer looking for a neat RPG experience to tide them over until Elder Scrolls 6 or Cyperpunk 2077 it would not even come close to that. Very slow pacing, unexplained mechanics, removal of modern systems, clunky combat, all of this adds up to an experience that the average gamer is probably not going to enjoy.

But if you are in that target group, those looking for an RPG that absolutely does not hold your hand and allows you to get hopelessly lost if you don’t pay attention, and will rip you a new one if you mess up, then this game is for you hands down. In the end though, I do need to choose a single score, and I’m going to go with the one I think will reflect the experience most people will have with this game.

If you enjoyed this review be sure to read more with our latest thoughts on action shinobi Sekiro Review: Shinobis Die Many Times. Or you can check out what we thought about CD Projekt Red’s upcoming sci-fi action RPG in Cyberpunk 2077 Preview: When Fallout Meets Blade Runner.

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