Tonight we talk about how constructed Kamigawa is a challenge and how effectively there are only so many viable decks that you can build. From there we talk about Vampire Saviors a game that Bel griefed Ashgar with and he has been playing at length. Grace discovers Chronicon, a game that we would consider the perfect diablo clone… if it had reasonable graphics. Finally we dive into a long discussion about our earlier feelings about Horizon Forbidden West, a game that has in large part consumed most of the cast since its release on Friday. There is a weird diatribe about dpads and the importance of a good one as well as a quick blurb about how Psychonauts does not maybe hold up as well from a representation of mental health aspect.
On Tuesday we got the big “Next Generation” patch for Cyberpunk 2077, and last night I finally got around to popping my head in to play with a few new features. Cyberpunk was easily my favorite game of 2020… but that was largely because I was playing on the PC with a pretty beefy system. If you had the bare minimum of specs or were on one of the consoles… your experience with this game was significantly different. Essentially I had the privilege of a great experience, but I know that for most people… that was not the case. With this patch however I am hoping the rest of the world can start to get the experience that I had.
To be honest it isn’t like CD Project Red had been slacking on updates because the game was already significantly different from the one that released a year and some roughly fourteen months ago. This is essentially the thirteenth patch that we have gotten from the release of the game. Not all of them added significant features, but in truth quite a few of them were rather lengthy. This one however seems to add more new systems and features and places the game on what seems to be extremely sturdy footing. If you want to check out the full list of changes the patch notes can be found here.
One of the most significant changes is to the way that driving works in the game. Suffice to say that driving… especially with WASD on a keyboard felt awful. There were a number of tweaks that you could make to your configuration to make it manageable, but it always felt like you were riding a thin line between being in control and sideswiping an entire district full of people. I managed to win all of the racing mini-games with a keyboard… but it was a constant challenge. Now things are just easier and the turning radius of your vehicle feels way more sticky and less likely to side out of control. This also means that I am going to have to essentially unlearn the behaviors that I have been using to account for the awful system, but it is very much a welcome change. Your vehicle feels like it has more weight to it and acceleration curves have been adjusted to account for this, and braking feels more significant.
Something that players have been begging for since the release of this game, is a way to legitimately change your the appearance of your V. Sure modders have sprung forth to fix this problem, but now it is super simple to change your appearance at pretty much any time. When you look in the mirror in your apartment you will now see an option to dive into the appearance modification interface, with unfortunately fem/masc body/voice/genitalia options being locked. I am guessing there are too many quest decisions locked to the gender options that it would be challenging to shift that mid save. However this should solve some of the issues of folks who created a V, thought they looked cool… then had one or two features that ended up bugging the hell out of them while playing the actual game. My first Masc V absolutely had this problem, where the lighting in character creation was wildly different than that of the game and I did not love my chosen appearance.
What I spent most of my time playing with however was the housing options. I am a sucker for housing in games and I am so glad to see Cyberpunk 2077 actually fleshing this out a bit. Firstly you can take your original apartment and give it a makeover by choosing one of a handful of preset styles. I would have rather had something where we could actually decorate the apartment ourselves… but this is at least something. I chose the Neon Sands theme for my original apartment which gives it a sort of neon yellow and mauve appearance with new textures being applied to the carpet and accent wall panels. I dig it quite a bit and fits my Nomad Fem V that I was last playing.
There are four new apartments added to the game. The cheapest of these is Northside in Watson and it has an Arcade cabinet and feels very small and cozy. The next would be Japantown/Westbrook and it has more of an Asian themed vibe and weirdly feels sorta like a hotel room. The next one would be Corpo Plaza in the City Center, and it feels a bit like the room you send the spider bot through in Konpeki Plaza. The most expensive and the one I went for is the Loft apartment which is located in The Glens just down the street from the Coyote bar in Heywood. One of the things I dig about the Glens apartment is that you have this really cool entrance with someone watching the door and a vending machine.
The apartment itself is this gorgeous loft with three levels. The main floor has the kitchen, pool table, and entertainment area. There is a small loft area that has a library and from what I can tell there are no intractables there. Then the big loft includes the bedroom and bathroom.
Here is another shot of the loft from the bedroom level and the views out of the city are phenomenal. One of the nice things about apartments is that all of our stashes are linked which means you will always have access to all of your gear regardless of which one you duck into. You can of course purchase ALL of the apartments but that would be pretty cost prohibitive until late game. I ultimately plan on doing this with my current play-through of the game, because why the hell not.
One of the cool things I noticed is that a bunch of the objects are have unique interactions. For example you can attempt to play pool… fail to hit the ball into the pocket and then flip off the table. You can turn on the television and instead of just having to play random things… you can actually flip between what appears to be three unique channels. A number of things give you buffs for example if you take a shower you get a refreshed buff that regenerates health during combat up to 60% for an hour. If you make a pot of coffee you get the Energized buff that gives you +25% max Stamina and +30% stamina regeneration for an hour. If you sleep in your apartment you get the rested buff which increases skill experience by 20% for an hour and regenerates any missing health.
There a ton of other changes including item cost balancing and an increase in credit gains… as well as a number of new weapons added into the game. My focus however was on the housing systems and trying to determine if driving actually worked well. I am sure I will explore some of the other changes over time. Essentially if you had been sitting on the fence about Cyberpunk 2077… this might be a time for you to check it out. If you have a PlayStation 5 or an Xbox Series X/S you can also check out the game for free right now as they are running a trial. It seems like you download the full game and then are put on a 5 hour timer to get as far as you can within that time. If you like it, you can purchase the game and carry the save over, if not you can uninstall it and move on with your life but I believe the save will stick around in case you ever change your mind.
Since I am still very much in a holding pattern waiting for Horizon Forbidden West to drop, I decided to check out another newly released game that I had not actually given a spin. Last week Dying Light 2 released and since I really enjoyed the first game, I had picked up a copy when it launch but for various reasons had not tried it yet. So far the story is interesting enough, even though at least on a surface level the story setup feels pretty similar. In both games you are an outsider traveling into a politically fraught area controlled by many competing factions, and in the process you find yourself infected forcing you to deal with keeping from turning. The core difference this time around is that a generation has passed since the events of Harran and now you are entering one of the last city states that is still functioning after the fall of society.
All was going smoothly right up until the point where my wife mentioned that she was ready for bed. Generally speaking after decades of raiding and indirectly forcing her to conform to that schedule, I try my best now to cut out whenever is reasonable. So my natural instinct was to hit escape and look for a way to save my game… only to find out that there is none. Dying Light 2 is one of many games I have played recently that has removed the ability to manually save the game. Instead it relies on a series of auto checkpoints, and so far I have not discovered a clear means of being able to force one of these events to happen. So ultimately I bailed out of the game hoping that I would not have to repeat a large sequence of game play when I come back… because there are few things I hate worse than having to replay segments I have already finished. Knowing there is no manual save process greatly hampers my enjoyment of the game because I find myself always searching for the optimal time to bail out.
This is not a problem that young and/or single gamers probably even have. The worse thing that happens is you end up staying up a bit later and suffer from little sleep the next day. For me I have been married going on twenty four years now, and in that time I have learned to temper my own game-play in the benefit of maintaining a sense of equilibrium. Control honestly was another game that worried me because similarly it does not have a manual save game system, however scattered throughout the levels are control points. I learned early on that much like a Final Fantasy save crystal, I could interact with any of these to trigger a forced save point allowing me to regain a certain amount of “Control” over my gaming schedule. Maybe Dying Light 2 has a similar mechanic that I have yet to discover but for now it is “doin me a concern”.
When a game however is diametrically opposed to save games, or even the ability to trigger a save point… the truth is I end up bouncing from it. I love Arkane games in general and was really looking forward to Deathloop because everything about that setting interested me. However there is zero way to save progress while in the middle of a loop. You need to be able to make sure you can complete a loop of the game or you might as well not be playing it, and truth be told the week this came out I sat down three times attempting to play through a single loop and each time I got interrupted by something that needed my attention. Each time I had to bail out of the game and found myself retreading the path, collecting items I had already collected, and effectively not having a good time doing it. The truth is that I have not played the game since September of 2021 as a result because I know that it does not really fit my gaming patterns. I can go large amounts of time without leaving the screen, but when I need to bail I need to bail at a moments notice.
So why do companies do this? Ultimately it is protection against a practice known colloquially as “Save Scumming”. If you are not familiar with that term, it is effective saving a game before any major decision and then reloading your save if things did not play out in the way in which you wanted them to. This happens a lot in heavy decision based games, and quite honestly… I hate it personally but have no problem with other people doing it. The last thing I want to do is replay a single sequence over and over until I have arrived at some “optimal” state, and instead am super willing to let the dice rolls fall as they will in order of moving forward and seeing new content. However some game developers appear to REALLY hate “Save Scummers”, and build in systems to thwart their efforts while also fucking up people who have busy lives outside of the games that might need to leave them quickly.
When long form RPGs started showing up on handheld consoles, they had to adapt to the transitory nature of playing games on the go. There are going to be times with a handheld where you absolutely need to get out of the game quickly, and won’t have time even to find your way to the nearest save point. In this scenario the concept of “Save and Quit” was introduced which allows you to take a temporary save point in memory and bail out of the game, allowing you to continue exactly where you left off when you boot the game up next time. Ultimately I think this is the solution that needs to be implemented in those situations where for whatever reason the developer is dead set against manual saves. This solves the problem of needing to get out of the game quickly, but also keeps you from using this save point as a way of rolling back changes as when you load a quick save like this, it destroys the save file.
I am hoping to spend some more time in Dying Light 2 and maybe figure out how to manually trigger the game to save my progress. However that said it already has one pretty hefty strike against it. I firmly believe that games should bend to my needs… not the other way around. Any time you purposefully take a tool away from me in order to manage my game time, it is going to end up frustrating me. Every game is a tug of war between the joy that it brings me and the frustration it causes, and it is pretty easy for that balance to tip…. and cause the game to get chucked into the dustbin. I don’t want that to be the case but lack of save games is a major trigger for me, and it seems to be something that is in vogue with game design currently. Here is hoping that they either stop that shit, or start implementing temporary volatile saves. This is going to become all the more important when the Steam Deck rolls out and effectively ALL PC games become handheld games.
Good morning friends. I think for the moment I am going to be bouncing my way out of Wolfenstein: Youngblood. It isn’t a bad game but it is not the game I wanted it to be. The other Wolfenstein titles from Machine Games were very much narrative driven, and this is more of a hub based choose your own adventure title. I mean on some level it makes sense given that this was created by Arkane and I am guessing more specifically some of the folks that worked on Dishonored II given how much the setting FEELS like that did. I would not have enjoyed that game anywhere near as much however if it did not have the powerful driving storyline, and so far Youngblood has just not grabbed me. I really think this game was designed for two people and playing it solo is not really giving it a full chance. I might return to it at some point in the future but for now I am bailing.
In truth pretty much everything that I do this week is just biding time before I can play Horizon Forbidden West. I am trying my best not to hype it up in my mind, but I have to say I miss the adventures of Aloy. She is easily among my favorite video game characters and I am looking forward to learning more about the world she lives in. If you never played Horizon Zero Dawn, absolutely stop whatever you are doing now and go play it. I played it initially on the PS4 and then later again on the PC when it released there and I loved both experiences. I have the game installed and readyish to go… given that I am certain there will be a zero day patch required to actually play it. I freaking love digital distribution. I grew up in a tiny town without access to anything other than a Walmart… and eventually even that closed up its doors. Digital distribution would have been a life saver… pending of course I could have actually gotten a reasonable internet connection. My parents got the fastest that they had available recently… and it is 10 mb down and 5 mb up… which is a far cry from my 300 mb down 50 mb up.
One of the games that I have been spending time with is something that my friend Grace found. I thought I had tried almost all of the diablo-likes on Steam, but apparently missed one. Chronicon does not look like much, because it absolutely suffers from the feeling of being “programmer art”, but where it does shine is in its systems and game-play. It has been a long time since I have seen a game nail what it feels to play a proper Diablo style game as much as this one has. On some level I would love to see this team and the Wolcen team join forces, because one game is gorgeous and the other game understands the systems of what is required to make an ARPG feel fluid and enjoyable. I really wish this game were available for the Switch. In theory since this is a GameMaker Studio game, it might be possible at some point for them to port the game.
I spent the majority of last night however playing some Ghost of Tsushima… getting hassled by my Uncle about my recent behavior. It’s not a phase dammit! I love this game but the fact it is on the console has lead me to play it far less than it deserves. My hope is with me dragging my consoles downstairs, that it might actually get my attention considerably more often. I’ve been working remotely for going on three years, and as a result when the work day is over the last thing I want to be is up in my office… which I largely associate with work. Since my consoles were stranded up there, it meant also that I never really played them. Last night I chilled on the sofa with a cat in my lap and killed some bad men… and apparently I am a source of disappointment for picking and choosing my battles. You’re not even my real dad!
I actually moved the story along a bit. For awhile I had been booting up the game, discovering a few points of interest and then logging right back out. I finished the last two story bits leading up to the storming of Kaneda castle. I am terribly disappointed that there were zero futuristic motor bikes available for me to ride. I’ve opened up the world a bit and met a really cool warrior monk that I want to be friends with. He has seen some shit but also seems to mostly remain a genuinely good person in spite of everything. I have to say I feel like this game is going to make me choose between Fake Dad and Murder Mommy at some point, and I am probably going to choose Murder Mommy. She just genuinely seems cooler and I genuinely want to help her people and get her and her brother off the island.
It is such a gorgeous game, but I have to say because I have old eyes… I wish the text was a bit bigger. I went into accessibility settings and turned on the zoom functionality on the console so if there is absolutely something I need to read but can’t, I can at least use my old man magnifying lens. This cracked me up because I remember growing up, my grandfather always had a magnifying lens out on the kitchen table… and now I completely understand why. I remember my friend Nimgimli complaining about consoles and text sizes and now that I am actually playing a console like most normal humans do… I absolutely feel these feels. I am sorry Tsushima but your salvation will ultimately have to wait when Friday rolls around because it will then be time to fight robot dinosaurs once again.
