 |
|
Oct 29th, 2019 at 22:58:46 - Risk of Rain (PC) |
A friend showed me this unique roguelike a few years ago and I was smitten with the time-based difficulty mechanic. The longer you play, the harder the game becomes. You have as much time as you want in any given level to collect and buy items, gain experience, and so on, but the more time you spend doing that, the more likely you are to die. Oooh, the tension that balancing act produces!
At some point, you will need to activate a teleporter to leave to the next level. When you do, a boss comes, a ton of enemies spawn, and you have to stay alive until a 90-second timer runs out. I initially thought that once the timer ran out, you could teleport, but no! You have to kill everything. The function of the countdown seems to be to let you know how much longer until enemies stop spawning, and maybe you get some rewards for killing all remaining enemies before the timer runs out (?).
Risk of Rain is an engrossing roguelike. There’s a large pool of random items that really modify your character. You get all sorts of attack bonuses, health bonuses, and movement bonuses. Each character (you start with one, the Commando, and I've unlocked one more) has four abilities and can equip one reusable item. The Commando shoots a gun at long range, has a knockback shot, a dodge roll, and a machine gun burst for a lot of damage. I didn’t unlock any new characters for beating level one, and I don't remember where I got the second character (the Enforcer), but there are about 10 more.
The Enforcer really changes your playstyle. Whereas the Commando is a fast run-n-gun kind of person, the Enforcer is slow and armored. They fire a close-range shotgun blast that penetrates enemies and their special abilities are a knockback, a huge AoE blast, and a crouching stance that increases your rate of fire. Playing the Enforcer is all about lining up enemies, crouching down, and blasting away at them, whereas the Commando is all about rolling around enemies, popping up on the other side of them and firing before moving again.
One brief criticism is about the items. You can collect a lot and their buffs all stack. But there are no tooltips for them except a brief description that floats away as you pick it up. But unless you know what the item is or does by what it looks like, then you don't really know what all your buffs are or what any of the items you can choose from will do. There's a row of pixelated icons (a green blob, a couple guns, some round thing...) on the bottom of the screen, impenetrable as night. It would be nice if you could hit ESC and have a list of buffs or items that you have. Some of them play well with certain characters, and I imagine I'll learn more of these "combos" as I play. For example, the Enforcer benefits a lot from items that activate when you're standing still. Since the Enforcer is supposed to stand still in a crouch and shoot things, these items are natural fits. But I don't always know if I've got the item because I can't tell what the pixelated objects are supposed to be half the time! I'm sure I'll learn to recognize more and more of them, but it's fairly annoying for now.
In my second play session I did better than the first, getting to the third level. I didn't unlock any more characters and have no clue how to do so, but I did unlock a ton of new items that now have a chance to drop. Achievements in Risk of Rain are tied to item unlocks. I like achievements that have value within the game. It's more motivating than just achievements for achievements' sake. Anyway, I wind up being absolutely crushed by the third level. I think I've realized that the trick is finding the teleporters as fast as possible, activating them, killing the boss, killing the extra enemies, and getting out of there to the next level. I think the faster you can do this, the easier the game will be. I'm sure there are difficulty modifiers applied to different levels, but it's probably got nothing on the difficulty increases as the timer goes up. It even tells you that it's "easy" or "hard" or "impossible" or whatever. Your character does become pretty badass with like 20 items, but I always become totally outmatched at some point. Sometimes you find teleporters right away; other times it takes 5 minutes. So there's a huge window within which to get screwed over. Fun game, looking forward to trying to press a little further and hopefully see a few more characters.
add a comment  - read this GameLog  |
|
Oct 29th, 2019 at 22:21:35 - Destiny 2 (PC) |
I am surprised by how much this feels like World of Warcraft. I knew Destiny had raids, but I didn’t know to what extent its quests, NPCs, factions, reputation, crafting, gear score, public events, and all the rest felt like the fantasy MMORPGs I used to love. I suppose in the near-decade that I’ve been away from them, MMORPG elements have seeped into a lot more online games.
Playing Destiny was like a cross between WoW and Borderlands for me. You create a character from one of three classes and are dropped into a city hub. Take your quests and go to the world map to choose among various PvE zones and PvP locales. The main quest that I had planned on following to completion (which is supposed to be the “single player” portion of the game) just kept moving an item score benchmark up and up. Reach item score 750. Reach item score 760. And so on until at least item score 800 when I figured I’d gotten the gist of Destiny.
I noticed that in Destiny, in general chat or my sample of groups, no one talks. No one said a word to me or in any chat I was in. Not once in 6 hours! I wonder why exactly that is in Destiny. Part of it is that you don’t need anyone else to help you do anything except the dungeons, and those are easy enough at this level that you don’t need to communicate. But what kind of community does Destiny have? Not sure!
Some old MMO habits remained, such as sprinting as fast as I can through mobs to get to a quest item or location. Ignoring mobs whenever possible is really efficient. I also started skimming quest text because, wow, the story is so unimportant to anything I was doing. Playing an MMO got me right back in the grind mind(set). Collect the quests, track the quests, complete the quests, turn in the quests, collect more quests, track the quests, etc. Get better gear, clean out my inventory, loot better gear, clean out my inventory, etc.
These loops are part of why I quit playing WoW. I finally began to feel like the hamster running on the wheel. Now it’s really obvious to me when there are wheels in my games. I mean, there are wheels in most games, but MMO wheels are special. You can see them spinning years into the future. What a genre nostalgia trip.
add a comment - read this GameLog |
|
Oct 16th, 2019 at 17:55:59 - Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (PC) |
Aw, I thought I was much closer to the end than I was! I did the "Are you sure you want to do this? You cannot go back!" thing, then when there was no grand confrontation with the big boss in the secret Swiss Alps facility, I looked at a walkthrough. I still had like 4 more chapters and another city! I had so much money, always had a full inventory, all the guns, ammo, and augmented abilities I could ever need. I could hack everything (and the hacking minigame is soooo boring). The story was just not gripping me either. For all these reasons, I am very unmotivated to continue. I did watch the final encounter and ending on YouTube and I didn't seem to miss much. The final boss is who you expect for half the game. And he's actually the ONLY boss fight in the whole game. How is there only one boss fight? I wondered this as I was playing, as there were not any very climactic moments. Maybe it's because the boss fights in Human Revolution were notoriously bad, they just shied away from them. Anyway, dang, I played this too long and what a disappointment! If there's ever a third one, I'll be really wary.
add a comment - read this GameLog |
|
Oct 15th, 2019 at 08:08:18 - Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (PC) |
I just re-read my entries from Deus Ex and Deux Ex: Human Revolution, and wow! They had so much more impact on me than Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. The original showed me how innovative the game was in 2000 and I understood why the series was revered. The second one mesmerized me with its story and exploration of medical ethics regarding technologically modified humans. Mankind Divided though? It's a flop.
It's worth noting that I didn't play (any games at all!) for two months from early August to early October, so when I picked Mankind Divided back up last week, I spent my first play session relearning the controls and remembering what was going on. That hiatus may have colored my view of the game because I don't remember my particular thoughts that I didn't write down in the ~30 hours I had already played. I've jumped back in for the remaining ~10 hours. I do know that 40 hours is way too long to invest in Mankind Divided. It doesn't earn that time, and I'm disappointed that the payoff isn't worth it.
Let me explain. This game's pacing is bananas. It took me about 25 hours to play Chapters 1-3. In these chapters, I explored every nook and cranny of Prague, which is beautifully detailed and appropriately dystopian. I put my Praxis points into stealth and hacking. I illegally entered every building, read everyone's emails, and liberated the city's people from their material possessions. I broke into the Palisade bank and spent hours hacking CEOs' vaults and getting past impossible situations with guards, auto-turrets, mechs, laser grids, and more. I fondly remember those times.
The next 12 hours (I'm at 37) have seen me from Chapter 3 to the final Chapter 13. The story moves at quite the clip when you actually follow it. There are some cool moments, but the general thread is not half as exciting as the previous game. The game opens with some mysterious masked men destroying an operation Jensen is on and then there is a train station bombing. The rest of the game involves tracking down clues to figure out who the men are and who was behind the bombing. It appears that the Augmented Rights Coalition (ARC) is behind it all, but as Deus Ex goes, there's a larger conspiracy afoot, which means there are a lot of threads worth pulling that Jensen can't pull. This means that you're occasionally given a small piece of revelation that other characters respond to with great emotional investment, but that you and Jensen don't share. It's hard to understand why you are doing what you are doing, and the contrast of these uninspiring story threads and most of their accompanying missions pales in comparison to the excitement of the stealth exploration.
SO, it turns out that if you spend most of the game exploring Prague, you're setting yourself up for backtracking hell. The game doesn't value exploration by having the world or story respond to it in a meaningful way. You get your XP or whatever, but the instrumentality of exploration isn't only in leveling up Jensen. In my two-hour play session last night alone, I was asked to go back into at least four places that I had already been (and robbed blind). What contributed most to this last night was an awful side mission where Jensen can help solve the murder of an Aug woman. At the scene of the crime, you can talk to a witness and a detective. The witness won't talk to the detective, so you can glean clues from her. You can also use your x-ray vision to look for clues at the scene. The woman's ex-husband, another Aug, is a suspect, and the police detective is going to arrest him if you don't either prove that he didn't do it or prove that someone else did because institutional racism.
Off to find the guy, who is sitting on the couch in his apartment with the door open. Why is the door open? Because I broke in earlier and scoured his apartment. He doesn't seem to care. When asked, he says he's been in his apartment for a long time, never leaves, and when I search now, I find a clue. Well, first, he hasn't been in his apartment for long because I was just in there stealing everything. Second, the quest item magically appeared. His ACTUAL whereabouts, of course, are irrelevant. I KNOW he wasn't in his apartment, but the story says he was, which overrides my evidence-based interpretation of events (he's lying!). This is what I mean when I say that the story/world doesn't value your exploration. I discovered a lot of cool things on my own, but it's like my subjective reality becomes invalidated later on.
Later, the detective suggests you search for some files in a bombed out police station. Ah yes, the one that I already searched through. Now, there are some special files to find and new emails on the computer sent from the dead woman at the same time as the old emails on the computer that were there when I broke in last time. Mankind Divided does this constantly. "Go search this apartment! Extract the contents of the safe!" Oh, the safe I already opened up and cleaned out and now there's another item sitting in there? So someone came in, saw the opened safe, put this new item in it, and left the safe wide open again? At least reset the safes or close the doors again!
In a game celebrating player choice, these moments make the experience feel hollow. Another example may be found in a moment of narrative decision-making. At one point, you can decide to save a man's daughter to secure evidence about the train station bombing OR you can break into Palisade Bank and find corporate secrets, loot all the corporate vaults, and expose how these military-news-medical mega-corps are influencing the ongoing story. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Which one of these seems more important? Save one person (who killed a lot of people, btw) or expose the conspiracy and save who-knows-how-many people? And boy, if you choose to expose the corporations, that woman's father sure tries to make you feel bad. You already have the evidence against the woman, and the only point is to save her. This choice just didn't feel meaningful to me, and aside from the ongoing dichotomy of deciding to be honest with your boss or your hacker colleague (hacker colleague all the way!), this has been the only "this or that" decision to make in the whole game. If you're going to have only one of these, make it more difficult to choose. I would love to know statistics of what players did here.
ANYWAY. TL;DR, the game now feels tedious to play, I don't care about the conspiracy-laden story, I already stole everything in Prague, it doesn't tackle social issues in an interesting or thoughtful way like the previous game, instead making a really thin analogy to racism (Aug Lives Matter? Really?), and I can't wait for it to be overrr so I can play something else. I know that it ends on a cliffhanger and I am so cloooose!
add a comment - read this GameLog |
