Month: May 2019

Bloodstained E3 Demo

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Another game that I have been messing around with a bit this week is Bloodstained Ritual of the Night Backer E3 Demo. I am assuming this will be the version of the game shown on the E3 floor starting in two weeks. I only know about this existing because I got curious because I could not quite remember which version of the game I had pre-ordered as part of the Kickstarter. When I got to the key redemption page it informed me that I had a yet to be redeemed steam key, which turned out to be for what appears to be a largely finished version of the game.

If you have read this blog for very long you will likely know that possibly my favorite game of all time is Castlevania Symphony of the Night. The very similarly named Bloodstained Ritual of the Night is effectively a spiritual successor designed by the same person, Koji Igarashi. Konami losing their mind ended up stranding a bunch of really excellent properties and we have already seen several of the creators going out and creating new intellectual property. So far I am super on board with the path that Koji has taken in resurrecting the spiritual core of Castlevania in a brand new universe… that quite frankly has a way better story.

In Bloodstained you play as Miriam a Shardbinder, or a human being who has been experimented on with Alchemy to allow them to infuse into themselves the abilities of the enemies that they defeat. Warning this may contain spoilers to Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon the 8 bit honorific title that released before Ritual of the Night as a kickstarter stretch goal. The setting is one of magic blended with burgeoning technology, and one where up until the industrial age the alchemists were treated with almost god like reverence. However with the influx of technology, the common people started relying less and less on Alchemy and more on machinery.

In an act of desperation the Alchemist flung wide the gates of hell letting loose demons and all manner of other creatures. The reasoning here is a little thin but at the same time there was a hunting down of the Shardbinders so that you as Miriam represent one of the last ones. Which makes it super convenient that you now have to kill all of these demons that will ultimately allow you to steal their powers. If you have played Casltevania Circle of the Moon this entire process will feel really familiar. At some point while killing a monster a shard of their energy will infuse itself rather violently with Miriam and from that point on you get a new ability to play with in the menu system. These serve as both attacks and ways to grant new abilities that will help you traverse new areas metroidvania style.

Your character also has a wide variety of weapons available to them, which give you a slew of different ways you can tweak the gameplay to fit your desired style. I’m personally playing a lot with the “katana” style family of blades which have a wide blade flourish and are pretty hard hitting… but also very slow give the extra flourish animation. These are great for taking down bigger monsters, but pure hell for chains of bats or any of the other tiny annoying enemies. Something like the Rapier which hits extremely rapidly would be far better suited for the modern equivalent of the medusa heads. If you want to just feel like a Martial Arts bad ass, you can always stick with the Kung Fu shoes family of weapons which are essentially just boots that you equip and then kick literal ass with.

I am not certain I could be more on board with this game. Sure there is some weirdness at times with it effectively being a 2D parallax side-scroller built in a 3D engine… but this also lets the game do some really nifty things. There is a point I encountered in the third area where you are effectively walking along the base of the castle… and then to denote that you are turning a corner the scenery in the background begins to rotate as your character shifts heading slightly still following what is a 2D path. I have a feeling as I get deeper into the game they are going to do more interesting things with this same sort of mechanic.

The fidelity of the gameplay experience so far feels perfect. It is immediately comfortable and recognizable to someone who has played a lot of Symphony of the Night and it feels like they have taken all of those RPG element aspects that I loved so much and cranked them up to eleven. In SOTN it takes awhile before you reach the library… the area that effectively allows you to manipulate a lot of things about your character. In Bloodstained you are introduced to this aspect after the very first intro level on the ship. Everything about the game feels deeply familiar but also new at the same time.

My backer copy of the game is on Steam, but I fully expect to pick this up for every platform it is available on if for no reason other than supporting the team. I mean I do own a copy of Symphony of the Night for pretty much every platform it was available on. I think this is going to be awesome on the switch, as I think it will be another excellent pick and play intermittently experience given the game has scattered a generous number of save points throughout the game. If you were a fan of Symphony of the Night or any of the modern GBA and DS tittles that were in that same metroidvania style… then I highly suggest you check out Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night when it releases in June.

A Thorny Season

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Things are in theory starting to go the right direction. The lake just up from Tulsa has reached a point where more water is going out than is coming in, which in truth means the beginning of the slow process to pull us back from the brink of disaster. The rain yesterday and last night caused localized flooding but did not fall in the river basin, so did not add to the long term woes. I worked a late shift last night getting home around midnight and as a result I am getting a bit of a slow start this morning. I am looking forward to reaching a point where my life is no longer built around what emergency shift I need to work next. All of that said… I am exceptionally lucky in that the flooding has only effected my schedule and has not decimated my life or livelihood in the process.

A good chunk of my downtime has still been spent working on Diablo 3 Season 17. At this point I am one achievement away from completing Champion rank in the seasons journey, and my home is tonight that I can have the presence of mind to be able to master the set dungeon. These are not exactly my jam and I always end up putting them off until I absolutely cannot progress without doing them. After that I only have gems to 45, one conquest and extracting a bunch more things with Kunai’s cube to be able to complete Destroyer. My goal is to ultimately go for finishing all of these this season and be able to claim the really spiffy wings. This is something that Grace has already managed to finish, but I have a feeling she is going to be willing to help me out with the things I end up getting stuck on.

Ultimately the conquest that I am planning on going for is going to involve running a ton of bounties and stockpiling the caches so that I can open them all at the same time and consume a ton of gold all at once. Once I knock out mastering a set dungeon this might be my next farm for the short term because I need a ton of materials to be able to extract stuff with the cube, so I might as well farm for the chests at the same time. I have no clue how Grace is finished so fast other than the fact that she has poured a significant chunk of hours into the game over the Memorial Day weekend. I am just happy at this point that I have a functional build that seems to be going smoothly.

Invoker is probably my favorite set in the game and I really like the play style of killing things with thorns. I am however going to have to swap out a bunch of abilities to master the set dungeon as I am not playing with a good number of the abilities that are required. I might end up looking up a guide again to see what is the suggested combination. I know I need to disable my Paladin follower because he will ultimately screw things up. When I do the run on the gold achievement I need to remember to disable my pet, because it will also ultimately screw things up. All of that said… I want to make my push to finish up this season so I can devote some time to running up a character on the Switch as well.

Original Start is Best Start

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My schedule is completely out of whack right now because of the stuff I am doing in regards to the flooding in town. We are doing this 24/7 management shifts thing, and previously I took one of those sessions on Friday from 6 am to 3pm, and hoped to keep taking that shift given that it is the closest to my normal sleep patterns. Unfortunately due to some shuffling I am now going to be captain 2pm to 11pm… which is manageable but I’ve not gotten to sleep that late since I was actively raiding. As a result this morning I slept in considerably later than normal as I am not going into the office until right before my shift. The further results of that is that you are getting a blog post later than normal, and that I may partake of a nap at some point between now and 1:30 pm when I leave the house.

I’ve truly been all over the place game wise over the last few weeks and I blame it at least in part of my fragmented schedule due to the weather. One of the things that I poked my head into again was Elder Scrolls Online, in part because the Elsweyr expansion released… and also I find that name complete hell to try and spell. ESO does this interesting thing each time it releases a new expansion, in that it replaces the new player experience with one that begins right at the newest expansion. I believe this started with the Morrowind expansion, continued with Summerset and is now doing it again with Elsweyr, which leads to the problem I am in currently.

I am probably in the minority, but I greatly prefer the original starting experience that shipped with Elder Scrolls Online… aka the three starter islands of Khenarthi’s Roost, Stros M’Kai and Bleakrock. So after piddling around with a Necromancer which so far is nowhere near as much of my jam as I would have thought it would be… I wound up grabbing a character that was still on Khenarthi’s Roost to play around with just because I wanted to experience that start all over again. The funny thing about this is… this is how a character I created as a joke is winding up to be my primary alt. Van Belsing was largely created at the insistence of a friend of mine, and was never intended to be played, but here we are with the fact that I’m now level 8 on that character and having a lot of fun re-experiencing the original starting game flow.

As far as my main goes… I am nowhere near Elsweyr either and still digging into the Vvardenfell campaign. I have a weird requirement when I am playing my main character in that I will only do content in the order in which it was released. Now I had to pace this out a bit given that both Thieves Guild and Assassin’s Guild are not exactly expansion that you can fully complete in this manner given that there is a lot of faction grinding involved. However with the mainline content I have been extremely strict in this nature. I completed all 150 levels worth of original content doing the trip from Daggerfall to Dominion to Ebonheart before touching any of the expansion content.

Now I have a stack of content waiting on me and honestly… that isn’t a bad spot to be in. So often with MMORPGs I am a content locust and can easily gobble up all of the available content leaving me with a feeling of nothing left to do. However the content in Elder Scrolls online is so dense and story driven that I can only handle doing so much of it before I need to go play something else for awhile. The end result is that ESO is a game that I can seemingly constantly return to and experience fresh story driven content that has piled up and is waiting on me. Now I tend to stay subbed pretty much permanently so I can pop in and out at will. I cannot play the game without the magical reagent storage bag, because I like looting pretty much every object that crosses my path.

This is still a really damned good game, but all of that said… I still do think I prefer the story line that came with the original game the best. That is not to knock any of the expansion content, because it has all be excellent. I just prefer the core game flow of the old world. I realized there was a lot of gnashing of teeth and it was fashionable to hate on this game when it first released… but I loved it then and still love it now. It is like a comfy sofa that I can crawl back on at any point I like and take a nap. That might not be the best tagline ever for an MMORPG experience but it seems to have found a niche in my game play schedule that I keep returning to.

Guinea Pigs and Stone Men

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In what is seeming to be the continued tradition of writing disclaimers at the top of my blog posts. I am still fine even though everything around me seems to be going batshit crazy. I officially cannot travel to see my parents right now as the highway between me and them is blocked with flood water. In my suburb the water has receded, but the city of Tulsa proper is struggling. I am getting pulled into some support of the flood prep effort, which is why I did not blog at all Friday. I got up for work at 4 am and was in the office at 5:30… which left me no time at all for my traditional blogging.

Yesterday was of course a holiday here in the United States, and I contemplated writing a post… but could not bring myself to actually do so. Instead I more or less spent the weekend recuperating from the madness that has been our life over the last several weeks. Saturday night we had another string of Tornadoes, and there is a high chance that tonight will be a repeat of that process again. My wife just happened to be up and around at 1 am when the warnings started happening, so my slumber was briefly interrupted as we lay there in bed trying to determine if we need to worry about it. It managed to touch down in a few places but nowhere near us so we rolled over and went back to sleep… still leaving the television on just in case.

As far as gaming goes I have been all over the place. Some years ago I backed the Crowfall kickstarter, in part because it seemed like it was gaining a bunch of steam within the greater internet zeitgeist. I figured either I would really like the game or else it would at least give me a cheaper copy to try it as is often the case with kickstarter pricing. However over the period of time since Alpha went live the game itself has seemed more of a tech demo than an actual game Periodically I would poke my head in and think to myself “yup that is an unfinished mess” and move on with my life. This time however I am starting to see the early signs of a functional game, and as a result I spent more time playing it this weekend than I have to date.

Crowfall itself is this bizarre amalgam of Dark Age of Camelot, Eve Online and Everquest Landmark all sorta rolled into a single game that neither explains itself nor really gives much in the way of breadcrumbs as to how you should be approaching it. As a result I personally found myself perplexed by the game each time I had logged into it in the past, and this time I resorted to actually watching a tips and tricks video to somewhat ease the transition into the mindset required to be playing it. Effectively there are three modes to play the game and each have their own specifics. Eternal Kingdoms is effectively sandbox mode where you have total control over the world and can fiddle around and build til your heart iscontent. God’s Reach is effectively newbie mode, which is a largely PVE experience that allows you to get a taste for how the game will feel. Campaign is the PVP conquest mode which resets every so often and pushes the players back to square one. At this point I have only dinked around with the first two modes, and my allergy to PVP will largely keep me out of the third mode for some time.

Where the comparison to Eve Online comes in is the fact that the game has decided to have offline skill progression. This means that probably the very first thing you should do in the game is decide to make a primary and a secondary path which will allow you to begin accumulating skills in a sort of alternate advancement system that is independent of your characters. I have no clue how fast this acquisition is, but it always feels like I have a ton of points anytime I have logged out of the game for awhile. Right now I am working my way through the Crafting and Combat basics… with a focus on crafting to in theory be able to build better stuff for myself.

The above image represents the tree within “Crafting Basics” and I am nowhere near maxing it out, which I assume is required to move on to the next sub tree in the master list posted two images above. All of the pips seems to largely focus on efficiency and success of the patterns, and over in the combat tree they largely focus on increasing your stats and less on granting abilities which are done at a per character level. Right now I have spent most of my time on a Guineacean Knight aka Sword and Board and a Stoneborn Champion aka the big axe wielding warrior. The one credit I have to give them is that the character models they have created are glorious. The character animations however leave a little something to be desired.

The gameplay largely involves a mix of combat and crafting and you sort out how to make yourself the tools necessary to navigate the world and its combat system. It all starts out by gathering wood which then allows you to make the most basic of crafting implements. From there you can work your way through tiers of materials and at least cobble together some basic armor, and once you find the next tier of uncommon materials and a crafting bench some decent armor. I’ve not encountered anything I would call a unique drop, and effectively everything seems to come from crafting. This is going to be a key point in a few moments.

Up until this point everything was a fairly pleasant experience, but the game was just about to hit me with a sucker punch. As I expanded out from the starter areas I started encountering more difficult monsters. At which point I stumbled across this trio of skeletons… and took my very first death. In Crowfall when you die apparently everything that you were carrying in your inventory and that was not equipped on your person stays at the point of your death in a grave marker form. In order to get back your stuff, you have to get back to wherever you died… and tediously loot your items one by one with no bulk loot option. If you read the forums this is designed to purposefully lead to some tension surrounding if you can successfully loot your corpse before trouble arrives.

I spent a good hour and a half trying to clear the camp of 3 skeletons… that if I was super careful I could split a single mob of that pack. I could not however managed to take down two of them at a time… which meant that I would ultimately die again… strand another tombstone and have to repeat the process. I finally Leeroy Jenkins’d my way into looting enough stuff off my corpse to be able to get started again, but I have to say the entire experience put a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. That said… once I got back some basic crafting tools there really was nothing on my body that I could not get back given enough time harvesting which I guess is the one golden takeaway from the experience. Death is a loss of time and opportunity, but doesn’t really do anything to permanently impact your progression.

There are a lot of titles that are nostalgic about various aspects of games gone by. Crowfall is very much a game that is nostalgic about the realm versus realm game play of Dark Age of Camelot and having to do corpse runs. That is not at all something I am nostalgic about other than being able to tell the gamer version of “in my day” stories about how rough we had it. Death is a bad enough set back… I just don’t feel like we need additional penalties tacked onto it, especially when it effects the items that I had spent the previous two hours of game play fastidiously assembling. Ultimately I find what Crowfall is doing interesting… but I also figure at this point it is pretty certain that the game that exists is not really in my wheelhouse.

All of that said… I am glad the game is progressing and has turned into something more than a tech demo. I will continue to watch it evolve into whatever it is planning on becoming. It isn’t really my jam but I figure it is someones out there. If you have deep nostalgia over the way Dark Age of Camelot used to be, then you might want to check it out. Otherwise you can just keep watching me as I poke my head back in periodically.