Legacy of the MMO

Good Morning Friends! I am still very much enshrined in my current play-through of Horizon Forbidden West. At this point I am somewhere between 40 and 50 hours into the game and still have so many little side objectives to finish. There are some that I don’t really look forward to like the hunting grounds… largely because I hate gimmick fights. Then there are others like the Tallnecks that I have just been avoiding because it slows down the action as I try and figure out how to jump up on top of them. I need to focus on completing those however because generally speaking a whole slew of things that I didn’t even know about open up. The story continues to be super interesting and while on some level it mostly just feels like I am playing Zero Dawn, there are so many general quality of life improvements.

It was one of these that started a twitter thread yesterday. Something that Horizon Forbidden West does that I adore is that it puts a little thought bubble exclamation mark over the head of any of your companions that have new dialog options. Something that I have always found exhausting about RPGs in general… and most specifically Bioware RPGs, is the need to keep checking in with your crew to determine if you can make any forward story progress with them. Essentially the old adage is that after every single quest you need to run around and talk to everyone, just to make sure nothing has opened up because you certainly do not want to miss it. With Horizon Forbidden West not only do you get an indicator that there is something new, but you also get an indicator on the specific dialog tree you can find the new information.

I had a friend try and share his frustrations with this style of mechanic twice, only to end up deleting the messages. Essentially it went down to something like this… that he hated to see MMORPGs bleeding over into single player games. So it made me think, is the lasting impact of the MMO the quest giver? Since the advent of World of Warcraft it has become ubiquitous to see an exclamation point over something and immediately translate that into “they have a quest for me”. Personally I adore this because it gives a universal language that makes it easier and more efficient to navigate the world. However I think it largely comes down to which side of a discussion you are on. I am very much on team “Efficiency and Better Communication” with the player.

Then I think there is the opposite side of that coin which is team “Mystery and Immersion”. This team tends to dislike obvious quest markers out in the world because they draw them away from the immersion of living in the game world that they are playing. This is also the team that loves Diegetic Interfaces in games, where when you click on a screen the menu options appear on the in game screen and not some popup that happens in your heads up display. A lot of times this sort of player might prefer to turn off the HUD entirely to allow for only in world queues to guide them. Based on the two deleted attempts at a comment, I am guessing my friend falls in that camp, which is a perfectly reasonable way to play the game. Personally in truth… I think both options should exist and often times when a game does not support them… I install mods that give me back my better visualization elements.

This however got me thinking, and I firmly believe that the true legacy of the MMO is not the quest giver system, but instead the codification of color coded loot systems. In 2020 I wrote a piece attempting to divine the origins of these systems. While there has been quite a lot of shifting over the years as to what color means what rarity, we have more or less stabilized on a specific standard moving forward. The more games that I find myself playing, the more I am seeing this exact scale repeated over and over. Currently I am playing Horizon Forbidden West, Dying Light 2, and Lost Ark and in all cases the scale is alive and well.

  • Grey – Junk
  • White – Base Rarity
  • Green – Common
  • Blue – Rare
  • Purple – Epic
  • Yellow/Orange – Legendary

It truly is staggering just how common this loot system ends up being in modern games. This sort of thing has happened over the years with different systems and arriving at a “solved” state. Prior to the early 2000s for example, there were some wildly different solutions to how to do three dimensional movement in a video game. Then almost as if at once, we coalesced upon a standard for how third person movement in a video game should function. Similarly over the years we have arrived at what appears to be the best solution to easily giving the player visualization that an item you just picked up, might be better than the item you were previously using. I personally think this is a positive thing, but poor team immersions is going to ultimately find the walls closing in on them as we get better visualizations.

The other lasting impact of the MMO that I have seen starting to trickle into other sorts of experiences is that of the Item Level. Ultimately every single item created in a game has some sort of item budget, that denotes how many attribute points are granted by using it. For years this was an opaque system, but that did not mean it was not there. World of Warcraft, and more specifically the modding community created a way to transparently visualize this number and give a reference that this item had a larger item budget which was quantifiable. That did not necessarily make that item better, because some stats mean more than other stats, but it did assign some numbers to an obtuse system. It is very weird to see this same concept being applied to otherwise single player experiences. It is not necessarily a system I would have carried forward, because it can be the source of bullying, but I guess anything that helps a player better interpret the value of gear is not completely awful.

So I am now curious. What other systems have you seen trickling out of the MMO space into Single Player games? Drop me a line below and lets talk about whether or not you find them good changes.

A Night of Second Choices

I’ve talked about this before, but some weeks back I moved my two main consoles… the Xbox Series X and the PlayStation 5 downstairs. The theory being when I finish working from home for the day, I need a shift in my surroundings which is why I have been spending so much more time downstairs. Now I get this is how almost everyone plays console games already, but the primary reason why this was never the case is because for me… I never felt like I could monopolize the television. Yesterday was the first real negative ramification of my decision, and reminded me of why I kept them in my office up until this point.

My wife has been a follower of Grey’s Anatomy since the show first went on the air in 2005, and is religious enough of a viewer that she used to have post show calls with friends to talk about the episode. So if I am downstairs on a Thursday, then the television is going to be tuned to ABC for a block of watching the Seattle Fire Department show and then Grey’s Anatomy immediately following it. All I really wanted to do last night was pick up where I left off the previous evening with Horizon Forbidden West, but alas for sake of marital bliss… I had to be in the same room as the very loud and obnoxious musical score of a show that loves to kill off its doctors. Granted this is completely fair play given that I have subjected her to the Walking Dead for a similar amount of time.

Since yesterday was Elden Ring day and it is apparently the new hotness… I figured maybe this was a sign for me to dip my toes into it. I played about an hour last night and I am not sure if it is really a game for me or not yet. I’ve never really attached to a Dark Souls game, and so far Elden Ring is no exception. There was also something weird going on performance wise. I am playing on PC, and I had more than a few moments of the game freezing on me. If this happens at the wrong moment… like on a boss or mini boss… it pretty much spells your doom. I might wait a bit for a patch before diving in further because apparently I am not the only one with more than enough system to handle the game experiencing similar freezing.

Instead I spent my night returning to Dying Light 2, which I am still enjoying greatly. One of the things that I do not love about the game however is that you can’t just pick a single faction. You are forced in the story to keep dealing with both. I do not love the Peacekeepers at all, and I very much do not like Renegades. However there is no real way to flip certain territories to your faction of choice. There will always been certain territories that are claimed by one faction or another. I would prefer to paint the entire map yellow, but that does not appear to be in the cards. There are certain territories that are neutral by default, and those you can flip in a specific direction. This is not stopping me from handing every power plant over to the survivors however. I have a feeling that I am just about to be forced into a situation of doing something awful… in order to save my own skin. We will see how it plays out in the end though.

Curse of Too Many Games

Morning Friends! I am going to give you fair warning that the next little bit is likely going to lead to some fairly boring morning posts. I am very much in a head down mode working my way through two very large open world games… both of which I am trying to be extremely spoiler sensitive. Example I took this screenshot and then realized that the quest dialog might be a bit spoilery and used the mosaic tool to blur it. I spent most of last night playing Horizon Zero Dawn and I’ve started moving the main story forward again. I’ve not gotten anywhere near finished with the first part of the game, but there are certain objectives I have to be in the right mood in order to enjoy. For example Cauldrons and exploring ruins are a very specific mindset, and if I want to just kill things with my bow I am going to shy away from both.

Last night was very much a night for murder as I entered the desert and had my very first experiences with the Tenakth tribe. To be honest I expected this region to be way more hostile than I have found it to be. It is not at all that different from the desert band on the other side of Meridian in the first game. There are way more dangerous dinobots roaming around but in general I know the basics of hunting them and can successfully take them down. The flyers though are always going to be the bane of my existence and ultimately I need to become more proficient with a sling in order to help drop them. I have a bad habit of never wanting to use anything other than the Hunter bow. I go through most of the game without ever swapping weapons unless I am completely desperate.

However not being a controller native player anymore… I need to rest my hands from time to time and return to my significantly more familiar mouse and keyboard gameplay. When this occurs right now my game if choice is Dying Light 2. One of the rough things about February is just how packed it has been with interesting games. In another year any one of these games might have been my sole focus for much of the month. Over the course of this month we have had:

  • Dying Light 2 – 2/8
  • Lost Ark – 2/11
  • Cyberpunk 2077 Next Gen 1.5 Patch – 2/15
  • Horizon Forbidden West – 2/18
  • Destiny 2: The Witch Queen – 2/22
  • Elden Ring – 2/25
  • Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons – 2/28

Now Lost Ark I threw on the list largely because it is eating up a lot of time of folks in the internet zeitgeist. For whatever reason it didn’t really click with me. Elden Ring seems to be the game that the internet is waiting for… and I am deeply interested in it but uncertain it would be a day one play. However the rest of that list are all games that are firmly placed in my wheelhouse and that I want to play… just not sure when I will get around to playing them. Destiny 2 is full of FOMO, but I am going to have to learn to play it on my schedule rather than let it dictate a schedule for me in order to reach a happy place with it. Guild Wars 2… me and this game have struggled for years and I am still trying to figure out how to play it and enjoy it but I am very interested in Cantha.

My prime non-Horizon game right now is Dying Light 2, and I am really enjoying it. It is ultimately my fear that this game is going to get missed in the mix. Essentially if you enjoyed Fallout 4, you are going to enjoy Dying Light 2. The games feel very similar in your interactions with the world and other people in it… but instead of irradiated monsters and questionable nuclear powered tech you have zombies and parkour. The world is chunked up in different zones and I have crossed the river finally into the central loop/downtown area. It also means I finally have access to a bow and the glider…. which is way the hell harder to control than the breath of the wild style glider from Horizon Forbidden West. I might need to change the keybinds because for now the process of popping it open and then stabilizing it feels cumbersome.

What has surprised me the most about this game is just how much I have enjoyed the side stories. I enjoyed Dying Light 1 quite a bit, and the main story while enjoyable was nothing really to write home about. This time around the world seems way more vibrant and while a lot of what you are doing is fetch quests, the story woven around them makes them feel like so much more. For example this is Maya and she had some bandits steal a music box from her… which is the only thing she had left from her mother. There is no way I was not going to go out into the world and retrieve it for her, even though it was quite an ordeal to actually make that happen.

In a perfect world Dying Light 2 and Horizon Forbidden West would have been spaced out far enough apart to feel like I had all the time in the world to enjoy both. Also in a perfect world Forbidden West would have launched on the PC so I didn’t need to take controller breaks. We however have what we have and are cursed with an overabundance of excellent new games. As I said for the next bit you are probably going to hear me talking about Dying Light 2 and Horizon Forbidden West as I move my way through both games. I fully expect that both are going to be upwards of hundred hour games for me to explore.

Checkpoints Are Not Good Enough

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.