 |
|
Oct 29th, 2021 at 17:46:48 - Tyranny (PC) |
This is all I've played since the semester began and, though I wish I had more free time during the semester, this was a good way to spend most of my alone time. I had been looking forward to this because it built upon the excellent Pillars of Eternity, which I played some of over the summer, and it has a unique "play as a bad guy" angle. It's actually far more nuanced and has the most interesting story I've come across in ages. Here's the gist:
Kyros, the Overlord, is in the process of conquering the Tiers, part of his long campaign to bring order to (as far as I can tell) the known world. His armies are led by the Archon of War (Graven Ashe) and the Archon of Secrets (the Voices of Nerat). The Overlord him/herself is an enigmatic, god-like being, never seen, but who rules through his hierarchy of servants. Archons are people who have attained some supernatural powers and renown and who govern others in the Overlord's domain. Another Archon--the Archon of Justice--is named Tunon the Adjudicator. This is your boss. You are a Fatebinder, someone who administers the Overlord's justice on behalf of Tunon. So begins the game.
You are tasked getting the Archons of War and Secrets to work together to complete the domination of the Tiers. They have been fighting with each other, delaying the Overlord's conquest. Time to end this silliness. The Overlord sends you to read an "Edict," which will cast a powerful spell over the land that, unless the Edict's terms are fulfilled, will have a bad outcome. Edicts are how Kyros wields ultimate power. He has cast them on various swaths of land and wreaked havoc on crops, made whole regions shattered and uninhabitable, incinerated the sages' library and destroyed the knowledge within, doomed royal families, and annihilated entire armies. With this Edict, Kyros declares that unless a rebellion (the one still occurring because the Archons are squabbling) is quashed within a set time limit, everyone in this region will die (including his armies, you, the Archons--everyone). Thus, you have make the Archons fall in line.
This is a bulk of the game, navigating between the two Archons' armies, the two main factions, as you oversee the rest of the Overlord's conquest. Graven Ashe's army, the Disfavored, are regimented soldiers, a big family, with Graven Ashe the father figure. Graven Ashe himself protects his soldiers with magic; if they are wounded, he can heal them, make them fight through pain. They are small, tough, and loyal. Voices of Nerat's army, the Scarlet Chorus, are a brutal mass of blood-thirsty conscripts. The army is made up of numerous gangs that are constantly at each other's throats. It's survival of the fittest. When they take over a village, they force the people to join or die. Maybe they force them to kill their families to prove themselves. Voices of Nerat himself is one of the most interesting characters ever. He basically kills people and absorbs them into himself, leading to like a schizophrenic, anti-social personality (well, a bunch of personalities). He's incredibly cunning. The armies couldn't be more different, but the Voices of Nerat and the Scarlet Chorus are so damn creative that I sided with them almost immediately as soon as I got the chance to pick a side.
In typical CRPG fashion, you recruit followers along your quest, all of whom have their own goals and storylines. Your first two are a member of each army, and you later get a sage, a beastwoman, an elemental mystic, and the Archon of Song. Verse and Barik (the Scarlet Chorus and Disfavored members, respectively), Lantry (the sage), and Sirin (the Archon of Song) are all extremely interesting and well-written. Barik, for example, was encased in an iron mangle of flying weapons and armor when fighting the battle during which Kyros declared the Edict of Storms (which basically annihilated everyone on the battlefield and continues as a raging and impassible vortex). During your journey with him, you learn about how in the world this happened to him and you can try to "free" him of his iron prison. He doesn't want this though because he sees his armor as a symbol of his allegiance to Graven Ashe (who protected him with it). I pushed ahead with the quest to remove it though, against his will (which felt like a violation of trust and of his body and made me uneasy), and he was grateful in the end (though I also killed Graven Ashe, which Barik did not enjoy). Sirin, the Archon of Song, has a beautiful voice like a siren through which she can persuade people to do things. When Kyros became aware of her, he took her into his empire's power structure. When she attempted to manipulate him, he strapped a helmet on her that muffled her power and gave her to the Voices of Nerat, who kept her as a pet and tortured and abused her. I forget how she got away from him, but she winds up in your party and is basically a bard class. Also in typical Obsidian fashion, the dialogue--in addition to the story--is impeccable. I read nearly every line of text in the entire game. Well, almost impeccable because the beastwoman character (their whole existence, really) was a weak point. I actually fed her to the Voices of Nerat trying to gain his allegiance (it didn't work and she was dead for nothing, oops!).
So, you go about choosing a side and basically making them look good to Tunon while making the other side look bad. Or...you can betray everyone. I don't know how many endings there are, but a really cool thing about Tyranny is that you amass your own power, and what you do with it is up to you. You gain renown as you discover "spires," ancient, mysterious towers used by a civilization before Kyros's time. As you claim spires, you gain more followers, abilities, and so on. Finally, once you have all 5 spires, well, you've gotten Kyros's attention. You're a little more powerful than anyone anticipated you would become. I won't spoil the magnificent events that occur in the last act toward the end of the game, but my goodness, what epic story turns.
The gameplay itself is nothing special. It works, it's fun enough, but I played for the story, and spent most of my time reading. If you've played any CRPG like Pillars of Eternity or the old Baldur's Gates and Icewind Dales, it'll be completely familiar. Oh, there is a cool spell crafting system where you basically mix and match attributes (e.g., spell distance, power, duration, how many targets, cooldown, etc.) all with different intensity levels and corresponding resource costs to make the spells that serve your purposes. The only ones I really created were powerful healing and buffing spells that Lantry, the sage and my healer, used. Once I took time to play with spell crafting, honestly, I never died again. You can make some POWERFUL stuff.
So that's Tyranny! Fantastic CRPG and highly, highly recommended if you like the genre.
add a comment  - read this GameLog  |
|
Aug 26th, 2021 at 09:29:32 - Diablo III: Reaper of Souls (PC) |
It's been over a week since I finished this. It was a grind. I played Diablo III, what, a decade ago? My then-new computer came with a free key for it, so it was a rare "day one" experience. If you recall, with Diablo III, the day one experience wasn't fantastic. Two things stand clear in memory from back then: (1) the auction house was horrible because it incentivized pure grinding for gold and (2) elite monsters were pains in the ass often because they had ridiculously large health pools. But also, I played some with a friend back then and enjoyed co-op. A lot has changed!
I picked up Reaper of Souls a while back and was waiting for the Rise of the Necromancer expansion to go on sale before playing it. I got tired of waiting and bought it just to play as a necromancer, which was one of my favorite classes in Diablo II. Who doesn't want to raise an army of undead? Was it worth it though? Overall, the necromancer character was really cool: dark, moody, sarcastic. The level of fun varied depending on how far along the skill tree I was and the difficulty level. As a class, the major advantage is that you are largely shielded from attacks since you can have about a dozen minions running around at any one time. The only really dangerous enemies are the ones that relentlessly attack you (e.g., bosses or elites with lasers).
I started from level 1, act 1. When I logged on and saw my level 60 barbarian, I did have a moment of "well, maybe I should just play the new content and save time..." I'm glad I didn't because, even though the game was a grind, I enjoyed having the full experience, beginning to end. The game is basically how I remember, minus the auction house, and plus a lot of optional lore. I think the lore was probably there before, but either was expanded, or I just don't remember. Also, plus CRAZY DIFFICULTY LEVELS!
I started on "normal." This makes sense. Normal is the base game, no bonuses, no extra challenge. The game was simple, so I bumped it up to Hard (+75% xp and gold, nice!). It was still easy, and somewhere around here I completed act 1 and got a socketed helmet from the boss that increased the power of any gem slotted in it by like 83%. Rubies increase experience when put in helmets. From my previous playthrough, I had some powerful rubies, so I put one in that increased XP by 30% or something. With the socket bonus, that was roughly 55%. With the difficulty bonus, that was roughly 130%. Nice.
The game was still easy, and it seemed like I was starting to be over-leveled. So I changed the difficulty again to the highest available, "Torment 1," which granted +300% XP and gold. Plus 55% from the helmet = 355%. Nice. I cannot convey how absurd the game became! I was leveling up SO FAST. I think I was over level 60 by the end of act 3. Note that the level cap is 70 and there are 5 acts. So yeah, the enemies were way harder, but I was ridiculously over-leveled such that, for a long time, I was untouchable. Eventually though, the difficulty ramped up (I was basically getting one-shot), and I lowered it back down to something more reasonable sometime in act 4 before fighting Diablo. I finished the game at level 70 with like 30 paragon levels (levels achieved after 70). All said, I loved the weird difficulty. It is so specific that you can find the perfect challenge for your level, play style, gear, or whatever. I just looked and there are 10 "Torment" levels. I don't know how one unlocks them, but wow. I saw people linking weapons with insane stats in the general chat, and I guess they are playing on these highest difficulties.
As the difficulty went up and down, my fun did as well. Too hard? Get one-shot and take forever to kill elites. Not fun. Too easy? Steamroll through, pretty fun. Just right? Great balance of threats and rewards. As a necromancer, my favorite skill was corpse explosion. The more you kill, the more corpses you can explode. So for me, that was incentive to keep the difficulty down enough such that I could explode corpses constantly. I mean, I really loved exploding corpses. Other necromancer skills were not as cool, and the class really stagnated. At some point, you've got all your skills, and you just unlock little tweaks to them. Those tweaks are usually like "who cares?" So for most of the game, I used the same abilities with pretty much the same tweaks. This made it feel grindy too, not just because you're literally grinding through monsters, but because it's very much like repeating the same skill combinations over and over and over ad nauseum.
I persevered and killed all the things. The world is safe once again...for now.
add a comment - read this GameLog |
|
Aug 7th, 2021 at 06:50:16 - Starcraft II: Legacy of the Void (PC) |
So the Starcraft II trilogy comes to an end 11 years later! I loved wrapping up the whole thing, but Protoss are the least interesting beings in the galaxy and the level of techno-science fiction mumbo jumbo narrative is off the charts. You do get to kill a god, so I can't argue that it isn't epic. But I suppose that, after playing all three parts of Starcraft II this year, Legacy of the Void is more of the same.
A lot of the levels involved destroying x things. The variety seemed less than Wings of Liberty and Heart of the Swarm. Already, I barely remember any of the levels. The most memorable ones are the later ones when you're really starting to hunt down Amon, and then the epilogue. The reason the epilogue is memorable is because Raynor and Kerrigan come back and there is some contrived story bit that requires them all fighting together. It's pure fan service--fun, but very odd that at the end of the Legacy of the Void campaign, you finish off by doing the final two levels as the Terrans and the Zerg.
Protoss were fun to play. The unit modifications were interesting and led to unique styles of play. By the end though, I fell into making carriers and collosi, then cloaking them with arbiters. Easy victory every time. But it was fun to make sentinels (zealots that rebirth upon death), reavers (nostalgia!), and to use warp gates, which allow you to warp units from gateways to any pylon, especially with the Spear of Adun's "create a pylon anywhere" ability.
The Spear of Adun, your megaweapon, was also fun to level and use. It had some crazy powerful abilities, like freezing all enemies on the battlefield for 20 seconds (5-minute cooldown). Want to destroy literally any enemy base? Assemble a giant army, go to the enemy base, freeze them all for 20 seconds, destroy them all. You can also give all your units 200 shields, strafe targets with lasers, or, another favorite of mine that I used the entire game, a passive ability that lets you automatically harvest vespene gas with no gathering units required!
I may keep this installed to screw around online sometime or play custom games or any of the other hundred event types that now exist. For now though, wrap it up and put a bow on it!
add a comment - read this GameLog |
|
Jul 29th, 2021 at 09:35:15 - The Evil Within 2 (PC) |
Well, this game is VERY EXCELLENT. It improves upon the first, which I enjoyed, in every way. The gameplay is even better and the story is way less convoluted. In fact, you can follow it from the beginning! There are, however, a ton of callbacks to the first game. While you don’t need to have played the first game, it would certainly inform your understanding of the characters and the world, so at least read about it.
In The Evil Within 2, you again play as Sebastian Castellanos and enter another fucked up, disintegrating world in a simulation. This time it’s to save your daughter, who was taken by the big evil corporation and is the “core” of the program they built, necessary for its functioning. The game takes place in a town called Union, and things are not pretty. The population has started turning into monsters, the corporate special forces have been deployed to try to find out what’s going on and stabilize the place, and it turns out that there are some very bad people who have taken control of the core/your daughter and are growing in power. There is a big psychological horror element, as Sebastian is also battling trauma from what happened to him in the last game, guilt over losing his daughter, and other stuff.
The characters are really well written. I like that Sebastian is focused on his daughter (and to a lesser extent his wife) and doesn’t give a shit about the corporation. He is empathetic to the people he meets and genuinely disturbed by what is happening. You’ll meet several other helpful characters with their own backgrounds and motivations (spoiler, most of whom will die). The villains all have clear motivations and are unique. There’s a psychopathic artist that sets up death scenes to photograph, usually of unfortunate corporate special forces members. There’s a “preacher” sort of guy who is a master manipulator. Then there’s your wife, who isn’t quite your wife. Plus, some other “mini-bosses.” All these villains have back stories. Union is composed of people who volunteered to come live this idyllic simulated life. The corporation does strict background checks to filter out people with mental illness and other problems. So, this artist was actually an artist in the real world pushing boundaries with his work. He eventually went too far and upset a lot of people, but defended his art. He saw Union as a place where he could pursue his vision. They let him in and, well, I guess they didn’t do a good enough psych eval, or his sociopathy allowed him to pass evals. The preacher was a community leader and charismatic figure in the real world who saw an opportunity in Union to take advantage of optimistic, idealistic people. So, these people become like manifestations of their core desires and attributes when they are corrupted by power in Union.
Gameplay is tight. It follows in the vein of third-person psychological horror games like the previous in this series, Silent Hill, Resident Evil, and so on. Although you have access to an expanded arsenal, and in this game I had more ammo than in the previous one, the emphasis is on stealth. I leaned into this and used stealth whenever possible. You get “green gel” (experience points) when you kill enemies, so you are incentivized to fight. For me, that meant putting points first in the “stealth” skill tree and using my knife and hatchets. I could move faster while crouched, initiate stealth kills from farther away, do stealth kills from around corners, and move much quieter. This is a slower, more methodical approach to exploring Union and navigating combat areas. Other skill trees focus on health, stamina, and combat.
Despite focusing on stealth, I did use guns a lot. You’ll have to for bosses, of course, but more difficult enemies are hard or impossible to stealth attack and, well, you don’t want to get close to them anyway. For example, later in the game there are some enemies with flamethrowers. They run from place to place, yell prophetic gibberish (because they’ve been swayed by the preacher), and shoot flames in a 180-degree arc for a few seconds. Then they turn around and run somewhere else. The way to do stealth attacks on them is to stake out where they run to, hide behind an object, then come out behind them as soon as they start spraying fire. If you do it quickly enough, you can get a stab in. If they turn around though, you get fried. Harder enemies have more life and these flamethrower dudes require at least three or four stabs. So, once you stab them, you sprint away and hide. The enemy will look for you briefly, then go back to what it was doing and you can stake it out again. Once I got the sniper rifle, I felt more confident against tougher enemies because I didn’t have to get close to them (to stab or shoot with shotguns/pistols).
There are tons of crafting components for ammo lying around (you’ll never actually find sniper rifle ammo), so I always had a full clip by just spending nearly all crafting material on sniper rifle ammo. You can craft ammo for other guns too, including the crossbow that returns from the first game (with a bunch of kinds of bolts, which, admittedly, I did not experiment with, but there are some environmental kills available by shooting an electric bolt into water, you can set traps with explosive bolts, and so on…). You can also upgrade all your weapons with machine parts that you find lying around everywhere. There are enough components (and enough green gel) to upgrade pretty much whatever you want. You won’t be able to get everything, but if you choose an upgrade path or two, you’ll get there. I upgraded the pistol all the way and the other guns (minus crossbow) at least through level 2 (out of 3).
I’ve offered a ton of description! Maybe that’s because The Evil Within 2 sucks you in. Its dark, intense, surreal atmosphere, urgent story, and great exploration and combat are easy to lose yourself in. Like, I felt I was as much a part of the simulation as Sebastian. I could go on and on about the exceptional art and sound design and so many other things. The fracturing city of Union is a sight to behold, just like the crumbling environment in the first game was. I love that they did that again.
There are just a few drawbacks. One is minor, but persistently annoying. Sebastian often pauses before or after performing an action. For example, when you open the map, you press the button and wait for him to pull out his little communicator device. That 2 second gap between pressing the button and seeing the map, especially when he doesn’t move immediately after you push the button, is irritating. I often pushed the map button again thinking that it didn’t register, which resulted in him pulling out and then putting away the map. Similarly, Sebastian waits too long after smashing a crate to pick up items that drop from it. Smash. Wait two seconds. Then pick up things. Sure, in less realistic games you can open menus and loot at will, but quality of life! Like, they could have halved the pause time and still gotten across the effect of him looking at a communicator or switching actions. Another thing I remember being bad was one design decision in Chapter 3. In that chapter you get to explore the largest area in the game, and there is this place in a warehouse that you can’t get to, but it is obvious that you’re supposed to get there. There is a conspicuous piece of wood blocking your path, but you can’t chop it, shoot it, kick it, and Sebastian won’t comment on it. I spent a long time trying to figure out how to get by, then finally looked it up. It’s part of a damn side quest that triggers the path. They should have blocked the entrance to that part of the warehouse with a refrigerator or something that didn’t look like you should be able to break. Finally, I mentioned the importance of stealth. Enemies in this game are pretty stupid. Most of them patrol a set path between two points. They walk to point A, look around, walk to point B, look around, walk back to point A. So, stealth killing can become formulaic, repetitive. I wish there was more randomness or more complex paths that they took to make me think harder. It’s still stressful, but it’s not hard. Sometimes I felt I didn’t have to be much smarter than the monsters to do well. Bosses and harder enemies excepting, of course. But still, as long as you run away and hide, most enemies will forget about you after a short time, and this includes harder enemies that you have actively stabbed! “That guy stabbed me! I will chase him. Roar! Hmm, he seems to have disappeared behind that car. I will stand here and look at the car for 10 seconds. Hmm, he must not be there. I will return to facing the other direction. Roar!”
Minor shortcomings aside, I highly recommend this if you like the genre. I loved it, fantastic, want to play a third installment.
add a comment - read this GameLog |
