RPG

A Schedule of Play

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Yesterday I spent a good chunk of time hanging out in Elder Scrolls Online and talking with my friend Clockwork Bells or Bells as I tend to refer to her more often than not. I realize it is probably confusing given that I am most often known as Bel but I assure you that Bells is a completely different human being that is legitimate and not someone I just made up to entertain myself. Somehow we ended up getting on this kick of talking about the games coming out and release dates and it made me realize just how much of my year is already spoken for. In January I did a post looking forward into the year but at that point a lot of the dates were not necessarily set in stone. This morning I thought I would refresh that post and talk about some of the dates of specific things that I know I am going to be playing.

Outriders – April 1st

On February 25th we got our hands on a demo of this game and I am super engaged with it. I like its particular brand of run and gun looter shooter nonsense combined with a very Diablo 3 style build system. I am fully on board with this game and looking forward to the release date on April 1st. I think the demo was a pretty great call because this is one of those situations where a game is launching into a genre that has some pretty tarnished history with games like Avengers, Godfall and now the mostly cancelled Anthem. Putting a demo out there shows that they were confident in their product enough to let us start playing it ahead of time. The cherry on the top however is that some progress will be carrying over, but I have not gone grind happy like so many have because I don’t want to wear the game out before it even launches.

Mass Effect Legendary Edition – May 14th

I love Mass Effect and over the course of the years since its release I have played through it a number of times. I cannot believe how absolutely giddy I am about the prospect of playing through it once more, but this time with improved graphics and hopefully improved interface on the game that needs it the most… Mass Effect 1. Over the weekend I talked about comfort gaming and how often I revisit good experiences from the past as a way of salving mental wounds of the present, and experiencing Mass Effect all over again with fresh visuals is going to be one hell of a nostalgia trip. I pretty much expect to be doing nothing but playing this when it launches until I have exited the other end and am watching the credits roll on the third game.

The Elder Scrolls Online: Blackwood – June 1st

I’ve said this before, but right now I am having this renaissance with Elder Scrolls Online and on June 1st the next major chapter of the story is released with a whole slew of new content and a new zone. That said I am so far behind that I doubt I will actually be caught up by then, but I am going to make an attempt to at least get a little closer to being caught up. If nothing else I am sure there will be some trickle down effect that impacts me and my enjoyment of the game when this batch of content launches.

Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart – June 11th

This is finally one of the reasons why I actually bought a PlayStation 5 and it is coming out like six months after that purchase. I am hoping for the sake of many that by the time we hit this point in the year that it becomes a little bit more reasonable get a console. I am a huge fan of Ratchet and Clank and I am super looking forward to Rift Apart. Like this is a different sort of experience than playing a “forever game” like so many on the list. Similarly the Elder Scrolls experience is different than a traditional expansion launch because I am effectively at end game gear and have been for years now. So there shouldn’t be much of a conflict of poking my head into this game and playing the hell out of it.

New World – August 31st

This is another game that I am super on board with and looking forward to playing. If you too got caught up in the whole madness of Valheim, then I highly suggest you also put this game on your radar. While it doesn’t have the really cool building elements, it does have a lot of the same exploratory and resource gathering concepts. I played this game last year for the first time and fell in love and have been anxiously waiting to get my hands on it legitimately. There is part of me that wishes it had just launched last year as planned, but I know the game that exists today will be better received than the first version that I played. I am not at all into PVP and this game has so much PVE meat on its bones that I think it will keep most traditional MMO players happy.

The Plan So Far

That friends is pretty much all that I know that has a proper release date. There are lots more games that I am interested in, but for now this seems to be the tentative schedule that I am looking at as I progress into the year. Other bits of information that we know are the fact that Diablo 4 will not be coming out this year at all and it is starting to look like Vampire Bloodlines 2 won’t be either. I am certain whenever Horizon Zero Dawn Forbidden West comes out that it is going to take up prime gaming real estate. Currently Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis is also slotted for release which I expect will get on this list at some point as well. Right now there is a big gap that is the month of July and most of August but honestly I would probably be perfectly happy just to keep plugging away at Elder Scrolls Online pending we still have a presence in that game.

I’ve never really done this sort of thing, actually tried to plot the course game wise through the year. We will see if in the end my year actually does look anything like this since I am very easily distracted.

KOTOR2 is an Interesting Mess

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This is going to be a screenshot free post because I never could sort out how to actually take screenshots successfully with Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords. I ultimately had to disable the Steam Overlay because it would cause me to lose access to the mouse randomly. If I took a screenshot with ShareX I would generally get either a black screen or the most recent loading or UI screen and not actually what was up on screen at the time when I pushed the button. I broke out some of my older screenshot options like DXTory and Fraps and they were similarly oblivious to the existence of this game. I even attempted to enable the in game screenshot functionality by editing the ini file and that did nothing either. This whole sequence is an allegory for what it is like to play Knights of the Old Republic II.

Yesterday I finished of KOTOR2 and I have to say it left me with one of the least satisfying endings I have experienced in awhile. Before anyone asks I did in fact play with TSLRCM (The Sith Lords Restored Content Mod) and M4-78EP (M4-78 Enhancement Project) both installed which supposedly restore items that were cut from the game before release and make bits of the story flow together better. So I believe I did in fact get the best possible experience I could have, but even with that the game is somewhat of a mess. Don’t get me wrong I am glad that I finally played through it and there are bits of detail outlined in this game that came up in SWTOR later that I was somewhat oblivious to. The game had some notorious development issues and if you are curious about some of that check out this long form review of the game.

I think more than anything the game suffered from an identity crisis. If you had told me that this was intended to be the further adventures of Revan until six months before release, I would have believed you. You play a character known as the “Jedi Exile” which for all intents and purposes COULD have been Revan, the character you play in the first game. You are a character that has had your connection with the force damaged, and you have officially been exiled by the Jedi Order for your “betrayal” of the Jedi Code. You followed Revan into battle against the Mandalorian forces and instead of following him on further into the Jedi Civil War, you returned to Dantooine to submit to the will of the council. Given that you were the only Jedi to do so… they were not really certain what to do with you and as such Exiled you.

This would have been a reasonable start of a game… playing out this sequence of events. However instead you start the game as T3-M4 from Knights of the Old Republic as you are attempting to keep the Ebon Hawk from falling apart. You are put through a sequence of events as you try and save the ship and land it safely on a mining colony. If you thought this was the tutorial for the game, you would be wrong… because while you can skip it… you then continue onwards to Peragus where you finally get control of the main character for the first time. Again you go through what feels like a sequence of tutorialization as you explore the colony where the robots have run amok and seemingly killed everyone. Upon solving those events you make your way to the nearby Citadel Station hovering over the dead world of Telos.

Immediately after landing on Telos your ship is put into impound and you are placed under house arrest, which now begins the THIRD tutorial section of the game. It is only after solving the events on the Citadel station that you finally regain control of your ship and can explore the galaxy freely. However what feels super odd about this process is that you are one hundred percent on rails for the first three sequences in the game and then suddenly are given free reign in a choose your own adventure style as to which of the planets that you want to tackle first. There is no call to action really, just some information that T3 deus ex machina’s his way into a list of last known locations for the members of the Jedi Council.

I mean in theory you are trying to recruit them to your cause because the Sith are real and they have returned to the galaxy and you are apparently being stalked by a Sith Zombie. However there is zero sense of urgency as you explore these worlds and find lost spanners and shit for the general populace that side note… now hates with much passion the Jedi order. I am not sure what order I should have done the worlds, but I started with Dantooine, thinking that this was the first planet that you visited in KOTOR after escaping Taris. In theory this was probably a good call even though you don’t actually pick up any new companions here. With companions in mind… it might have been a better call to go to Nar Shaddaa first given that you would encounter one of the last core companions earlier.

So getting back to the identity crisis. This game attempts at several points to teach you some lesson or pass some judgement upon you as the player. For example it does this whole sequence where it judges you for all of the combat that you engage in and how it doesn’t exactly align to the Jedi code. Then moments later those attempting to judge you decide that you have to die… forcing you once again into combat and diminishing the impact of what that message might have been. Additionally there is still the problem that the Jedi Exile is not sufficiently different from Revan as to make it seem like you are playing a unique character. Making it even worse is the fact that the character that serves as the narrator for the game… often draws parallels between the two of you.

I think Obsidian had some really interesting ideas, but those ideas did not add up to be a complete game. Instead they sort of applied Band-Aids and glue to join those ideas into something resembling a story. As a result while Knights of the Old Republic is this master class in narrative design and applying the correct amount of pressure at the correct time, the sequel just ends up being this mass of cool ideas assembled into a crude presentation of a game. In my mind I thought this game was released after Fallout New Vegas, but it turns out this is probably what they were working on just before they got the call to make a new Fallout game. Both games are trying to do some interesting and ambitious things, but I can only assume they learned from the mistakes with KOTOR2 in order to stick the landing with New Vegas.

Like I said earlier I do not regret that I played my way through this game. All told it took me around 40 hours to beat it. There are probably some side content that I missed along the way, but I also don’t really feel like much of the side content was meaningful in the way that a game like Witcher 3 makes it. This is a game that had been hanging out on my list that I was always curious about, and now that curiosity is sated. The Jedi Exile is also a character that appeared later in Star Wars the Old Republic and now that I have played this game I understand why so much of a big deal was made about her. Much like they made Revan male in the Canon, they made the Jedi Exile female and named her Meetra Surik. This feels a little odd but I understand it greatly simplifies talking about the characters in the future.

So here we are at the end of the post. Have you played KOTOR2? What were your thoughts? Drop me a line below and especially if I missed some great truth about the game.

Mass Effect Thoughts

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Mass Effect is an extremely important series for me on a personal level. I am not exactly sure when I came to the realization, but it might be the single best piece of Science Fiction that I have experienced. During my formative years I bonded heavily with Star Wars and Dune so I am already wired to love great Science Fiction storytelling. A little over a decade ago I played my very first Mass Effect game with the release of the second game in the series. Mass Effect 1 was originally an exclusive for the Xbox 360 Console, and as such I completely missed out on playing it as I did not have one at the time. It got a PC release in 2007 but I never actually got around to playing it for one reason or another… more than likely it was due to the fact that I was knee deep in the raid scene during Burning Crusade in World of Warcraft.

There are a lot of games that I play repeatedly, but other than Castlevania Symphony of the Night there is no game that I have “finished” as many times as Mass Effect. While I have only actually done the start with the first game and play all the way through to the third game once, I have played some semblance of other sequences on four other times, having played the first game to the second game sequence probably the most. I did not exactly love the wrap of and conclusion brought by the third game, so I am guessing that more or less halted my fairly regularly revisiting this franchise. Though admittedly my in sequence play through was before the revisions brought on by the later Mass Effect 3 patches which I have never gone back and played.

Mass Effect Andromeda

Even though it did not do as well, I have a deep love for Mass Effect Andromeda as well and I was enterally frustrated when the media backlash effectively destroyed this franchise that I love so much. I still want to see a continuation of this storyline, and I want to know more about the Andromeda expedition. I have a whole slew of theories that are more or less going unrequited other than some occasional conversations via DM with Pixel One. I was extremely happy when the teaser came out during the Video Game awards and hinted that maybe we are going to be getting a new story that blends both Mass Effect timelines/settings.

More exciting than anything however is when I found out that finally we had a firm confirmation of the rumored remaster of the series. Then yesterday we found out that this Mass Effect Legendary Edition would be releasing on May 14th 2021, just over three months from now. One of the biggest questions for me personally is whether or not this would do anything to remedy to awkwardness of that first game. I’ve suffered through it a number of times because an in sequence play through largely requires it being there in order for everything to flow together neatly. However in 2007 they had yet to really land on the sort of interface and feel of the game that was going to win it the masses.

Original Game as Pulled from on Website Footage

The biggest problem that the first game has is the mechanical control and UI elements. The controls just feel wrong as compared to my first entry in the series which was technically the second game. The graphics are fine and the dialog and acting is still fairly solid. However actually navigating and experiencing the world feels off. Playing Knights of the Old Republic 2 recently, I am realizing just how far Bioware has come as far as interfaces go. It wasn’t really until 2009’s Dragon Age Origins that they truly “stuck the landing” and then steadily improved on that feeling ever since with Mass Effect 2 landing a year later in 2010. My biggest hope with this remastered version would be to blend everything together so that ALL of the games use the same user interface and same controls for a seamless experience.

Legendary Edition as Pulled from the Website Footage

Ultimately all I really wanted was for them to take the User Interface from Mass Effect 3 and carry it down to the other games. What instead appears to have happened is that all of the games got reworked with a new UI. On the Mass Effect Legendary edition website, they have one of those split screen videos with a slider allowing you to shift back and forth between original and new versions of some Mass Effect 1 footage. In this you can see wildly different interface elements between the above screenshot and the one before it. This gives me hope that the first game got the significant work that was needed.

In all of my plays through the game, the one thing I have never actually managed to do is complete a fun as “FemShep”. Everything that I have heard is that the Jennifer Hale voiced Female Shepard is the better way of playing the game. However my deeply engrained need to keep trying to “create Belghast” in every game I play… has always steered me down the path of playing the Male Shepard. One of my goals on this replay is to dive down the rabbit hole of the Jennifer Hale experience. I can’t say that I will succeed, because supposed the character creator is significantly better than the previous versions allowing you to create wildly different looking Shepards rather than just awkward versions of the stock character.

I am excited to revisit this old friend. I look forward to it much the same way as I might look forward to some day sitting down and re-watching all of the Marvel movies in sequence or revisiting the Lord of the Rings movies at Christmas time. I would love to see Mass Effect adapted as a high budget series, because the story that is told is so good and I am slightly disappointed that more people have not gotten to experience it. If you yourself have never played through this series, then you really should pick up Legendary edition and give it a fair shot.

Lacking Plot Urgency

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I am not exactly sure what is going on, but I have been on this single player game kick. It sometimes happens over the Holiday break and then continues forward into the next year. I went on a bit of this last year playing through several of the titles by Spiders, the game studio behind Greedfall and a number of “Bioware-like” titles. I’ve talked about bouncing off of Dragon Age Inquisition and the joy of revisiting that game and finally latching onto it. Similarly I bounced off of Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords back when it came out on PC late 2004.

There were of course a number of reasons why I bounced, not the least of which was the fact that World of Warcraft had just released. On top of that there was also the suicide death of my nephew that we were contending with. I know at some point I gave the game an attempt at playing it, but ran into a number of technical difficulties that I never quite pushed through. Similarly when a re-release happened on Steam in 2012 I once again gave it an attempt at playing but kept running into technical problems. We scan forward to now and a dozen unofficial addons later, and I am now successfully playing and engaged with the sequel to one of my favorite games.

Another reason I was super interested in playing KOTOR2 is the pedigree of it coming from Obsidian. This is the same studio that created my beloved Fallout New Vegas which was a very similar scenario of them working within a pre-established IP. However I had forgotten that they also created Neverwinter Nights 2 between these two games, a game that I so thoroughly bounced off for both mechanical and narrative reasons. So I went into this game hoping for hidden greatness, but what I am ultimate finding is lightly messy “goodness”. This is another game that had a fraught development life cycle and a number of things were left on the cutting room floor that have been since restored by fans of the game.

The key problem I am having as I play through it is that the game as a whole is missing the clear call to action that Knights of the Old Republic had. Each planet in that game lead you to the next planet in sequence and there was a sense of urgency in your actions because you were trying to beat another group to the chase. In KOTOR2 you have some vague threats and a galaxy that has more or less forgotten that the Jedi were ever a force for good and see them as destroying the galaxy in some fool crusade. You have a few evil forces working against you, but there is no clear path forward other than “maybe find some other Jedi”.

The other challenge that this game has against it is that it takes a really long time to get into what feels like the normal flow of the story. The game starts with you taking control of a droid and attempting to save the Ebon Hawk, the ship from the first KOTOR. This sequence plays out fairly slowly and acts as a prologue, which is skippable. Then you become stranded on the Peragus mining facility and finally take control of your primary character throughout the game. This effectively ends up being prologue 1.5 and it is very much not skippable and the actions taken within this section start to have some weight applied to them.

Finally if you make your want through Peragus you gain control of the Ebon Hawk once again… only to immediately lose it as soon as you dock with the Citadel Station at Telos. Surprise surprise your first “planet” is a space station where you are under House Arrest. This serves as the “tutorial planet” where you have to determine which of the factions you are going to support in order to finally go on a mission to reclaim your ship. Which leads you to finally encountering your first plot point in the form of the individuals that seem to have stolen your ship and indirectly send you out on a mission to find other Jedi. I am being purposefully vague here because plot points happen, but also they happen in a way that ultimately feels bad.

So I presently find myself in this uncanny valley of enjoying myself, but also at the same time admitting that Knights of the Old Republic II is not exactly what I would consider to be a good game. There are moments of greatness, but the tapestry that is woven has giant chunks that went horribly wrong. Granted I do realize that we have not arrived on the Bioware formula with this game that ultimately lead to things like Mass Effect, Dragon Age and Star Wars the Old Republic MMO. KOTOR and KOTOR2 are the prototype upon which those games were built, and KOTOR2 specifically seems to be trying to do some interesting things that are mostly landing flat.

This however is the challenge of spelunking into the backlog and pulling out a game that is at this over fifteen years old. Normally the thing I struggle with these older games is when the mechanics of gaming has evolved in a different direction than what was the standard at the time. This however is not really a problem with KOTOR2 because it does a good enough job of mouse look once you invert the Y axis. What I am struggling with instead is that this game comes from an era when the plot lines were not so emphasized and things just sort of evolved as you progressed through taskwork. KOTOR2 struggles with this more than its predecessor, but I am now engaged and committed to seeing this through.

Like I said I am enjoying myself and I am enjoying the character development, but also it seems to be just dumping large amounts of exposition on me that I don’t necessarily feel like I have earned yet. Obsidian had some really interesting ideas and I am glad that they used this game to polish those ideas so that we ultimately got Fallout New Vegas, but this game is a bit of a challenge. I see why I ultimately bounced off when I was nowhere near as focused as I am currently.