Month: July 2020

Growing Friends in Ooblets

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It feels like I have been waiting the better part of a decade on this game, but in truth it seems I first wrote about it back during E3 of 2017. Ooblets entered early access yesterday and after spending some time being a post apocalyptic delivery man, I decided to hop into a delightful cartoon world before bed time. Ooblets can best be described as what would happen if you got Stardew Valley and a Card Battling game in your Pokemon. You could also potentially relate some of the things to Animal Crossing, but instead of Animals there are delightfully weird human beings taking their place.

The character creation screen is very limited, and is doesn’t involve gender selection. You choose a hair style, a skin tone and the sort of outfit you want to wear. This is going to be a game where I don’t likely get a beard but I am largely okay with this as I think a lot more options open up once you start exploring. I found a barber shop and there are already hair options that were showing up that did not appear during the initial character creation system. Additionally there is a clothing shop that reminds me a lot of the Able Sisters from Animal Crossing. You collect a currency called Gummies and that seems to be what is spent on everything cosmetic. I just don’t really have many of those yet nor do I have any clue how to get a large quantify more so I am rolling with this basic look for now.

The game starts with you arriving by boat from an island to this seaside town. You come from a place where Ooblets did not exist, and you are immediately thrust into a situation where you are given a horrible farm house that you will need to fix up, and a job acting as the assistant of the mayor. Since you arrive without an Ooblet of your own you are presented with the choice between four clubs that dominate the town. This feels very much like a Hogwarts House sort of mechanic, but it truth I just went with the house that had the Ooblet that I wanted to use the most. Your choices are:

  • Frunbuns – They like cute stuff
  • Peaksnubs – They like success and competition
  • Mimpins – The science kids and the socially awkward
  • Mossprouts – Outdoorsy club that loves a good adventure

By the natures I probably should have chosen Mimpins, but I mostly just wanted to start with Shrumbo which is an adorable mushroom ooblet, rather than Sidekey a robot ooblet.

Combat in the game plays out in the form of dance battles, where instead of just choosing abilities and spending power on them, you are given a deck of move cards. You start with 3 beats you can spend per round, which are effectively the equivalent of “mana” in a Magic the Gathering style system. Certain cards can be played that give you addition beats per round that seem to last for the entire battle. There are also cards that give you Hype, which effectively buff all of your dance moves, again seemingly permanent until the end of the current dance. The goal is to hit some number before the other team, in the case of a group battle it seems to be 30, in single dances it seems to be 20.

As your Ooblet levels up it will learn new special move cards that go in your deck. I have no clue if this pushes normal moves out or not, but in my experience the special moves are seemingly the ones you want to be playing whenever given the chance. Sashy for example above only costs 1 beat to play it and gives you 4 points, whereas a similar base move Gavotte Trot shown in the image before that is 2 beats to play for the same 4 points return. Where you run into problems is when you are in a dance and one of your Ooblets is disabled for some reason… you still keep getting their cards which ultimately sit rotting in your hand since you can’t play them without that given Ooblet active.

One simple touch that I like, is that when you do defeat an Ooblet, your character tells them that they did a really good job and you have the option of collecting a seed from them. This seed literally can be planted in your farm to grow your very own new friend from that Ooblet family. This seems to take a few days to grow a new Ooblet, pending you water it every morning when you first get up. There is a day/night cycle like Animal Crossing but the days move much faster so it doesn’t feel anywhere near as real world gated.

The tasks you are given by the Mayor all seem to involve collecting various resources. However the big challenge right now is I don’t exactly know how to make those resources appear. For example I am really close to finishing repairs on my farm house, but I seem to still be missing some cloth… which occasionally appears as a random flower that I can pick. Your actions take energy, which is restored by sleeping for the night or eating food. I feel like right now I only have the most vague of understandings how all of these pieces fit together. There doesn’t appear to be anything similar to the tall grass where you can just randomly encounter Ooblets, but instead they show up in town and want you to give them resources in order to have them dance with you.

It is a super cute game in early access, and I feel like I have barely scratched the surface of how it actually works. So for now I am going to close things up as I have only played a few hours. I did however walk to talk about it a bit, because I have a feeling it is going to be right down the alley of several of my readers. I like the whole Pokemon but a card Battler aspect of it, because I never really did like combat in Pokemon that much. I also like the Animal Crossing/Stardew Valley aspect of the game, but I feel like there is a mountain of knowledge I am missing much like when I first tried playing Animal Crossing New Horizon. Right now it is somewhat hard to decide of things are intentionally obtuse at times, or if this is just an artifact of it being early access.

Death Stranding Thoughts

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I played something last night, and I have to admit I am not entirely certain what type of game I played. There are a few things you have to understand going into this. First I have never played another Kojima game that I am aware of. I missed the whole Metal Gear Solid thing, in part because I don’t really love stealth games and whichever one I tried first… I believe Solid on the PS1 had some early stealth mechanics. Secondly I more or less ignored Death Stranding when it came out on the PS4 because it had already been announced for the PC at that point, and I figured I would just wait and play it on my system of choice. It is very rarely that I will choose to play a game on a console that is not the Switch over my beloved PC.

Most of the world is going to come into this game with specific expectations or opinions, but I figure I am entering from fairly fresh terms. My initial thought is that this might be one of the most gorgeous games that I have ever played. We were off to a rough start because I did what every PC gamer does when they first get a new game… open up the options and check out the graphical settings. I am not sure why this is a thing, but it absolutely is… and I was greeted by my game crashing to desktop. I immediately turned around and tried to configure the settings through GeForce Experience, but it also seemed to have trouble reading the settings, so in the end I just went with whatever the game detected which seemed to be perfectly reasonable for 4k at 60 fps.

The opening of the game feels more like the opening of a movie, with each actor announced any time they are on screen and in what was ultimately the opening credits. You are presented this view of the world which seems dark and brooding but also at the same time full of unexpected life. The pictures don’t really do this experience justice, because it honest to god feels like I am watching big sweeping panoramic shots at the beginning of a movie as they give us a glimpse into the world we are about to explore. I knew enough going in to realize this has more or less been damned to the term “walking simulator” but I am largely okay with that. I have been bouncing between games and figured it was worth a shot to see how well the pacing of the game fits with my current mood.

You play as Sam Porter Bridges, which seems like a name but appears to be a designation in this world. Sam is a Porter and works for the Bridges organization… so Sam Porter Bridges. There are others that work for other organizations like one called Fragile, and appear to be named accordingly. Ultimately you are existing in what is a post apocalyptic landscape, and this particular apocalypse is an event called the Death Stranding, which I don’t fully understand. What I do understand however is that when someone dies, it is important that they be incinerated or some event happens which causes an explosion of this black goo that appears to have a malevolence and drags anything it touches down into it.

At the beginning of the game you are sent on a mission to incinerate a corpse, and a bunch of “BT” entities show up which apparently stands for “Beached Thing”. Your character has DOOMs, which is apparently a psychic connection to the world of the dead allowing you to sense them. I accidentally triggered one of them and what transpired was some of the most terrifying game play I have experienced. An eruption this black ooze appeared underneath my character and several oil slick figures started trying to claw me down into… but I was able to escape barely which set me running from whatever it was. The oil slick coalesced into a tentacled monster of a sort that kept chasing me and firing volleys of the black ooze at me, eventually giving up chase as I climbed a nearby rocky precipice. I am maybe going to have nightmares in the future about the sequence… but it did immediately underline the danger of being discovered by one of these things.

The core gameplay appears to be you running around this green waste picking up packages and delivering to their intended destination. There is a lot of nuance to this, and travel itself is a challenge as you load yourself up like a pack mule there is a constant concern of tipping over or slipping and falling down causing your cargo to tumble behind you. There are some really interesting mechanics of how one stays upright and a stamina meter that feels very reminiscent of Breath of the Wild that dictates for how long you can manage to forcibly stay upright. The over arching mission is to reconnect humanity which now lives in a scattered and disconnected series of city states. Reconnecting the world uncovers bits of long forgotten tech and allows you to do more things.

Now we get to the part of this discussion where I talk about the nonsense of this game. Firstly like I said before I have never played anything by Kojima before. I was not exactly prepared to be expected to take seriously names like “Deadman” and “Die-Hardman” like they are completely normal. I have no clue what is going on with the skull mask, but I figure by the end of the game we will have likely learned something about it. I assume there is some facial scaring or something… or that he got caught in the “Timefall” which is a rain that prematurely ages everything it touches. So many weird things are going on in the game that you just sorta have to roll with it and accept them at face value until you learn more about them.

What I was not really expecting however was the shameless product placement. You spend a lot of time in your “private room”, which appears to exist in pretty much every outpost that you encounter. In it is always a constant supply of Monster Energy drink, the old fashioned green and black can version. If you drink one, you are given a stamina boost that seems to last for the next mission. It is something that you ultimately want to do given it seems to help, and the game is seemingly designed around you having that extra little bit of stamina. It does make me wonder exactly how much was spent on this promotion, or if this is just one of those inside jokes that Kojima thought was funny? Maybe he is a Monster chugging addict or something.

The other product placement that I find hilarious is that any time you go to use the toilet, a modesty screen pops up with an ad for Ride with Norman Reedus. Since the actor plays such a major role in the game, I am wondering what sort of quid pro quo behind the scenes occurred to make this happen. I does make me wonder if at some point during the game we are going to see an advertisement for something related to Guillermo Del Toro since he also very prominently plays the character of “Deadman”. In the grand scheme of things I can look past it, because it doesn’t really bother me that much but it is something that will pretty well yank you back from any sort of immersion quickly.

I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect from this game, and like I said I more or less went into it with a fairly clean slate. The end result however was rather enjoyable and I expect to be playing some more of it. There is something relaxing about the combination of having to struggle your way across the landscape while watching out for lost packages and listening to a rather chill soundtrack. I can see how for a lot of people this was an unexpected and frustrating experience, but I am enjoying myself. It is very much not an action game, apart from very small segments of action playing out when something goes terribly wrong. I am interested to find out more tidbits about this world and its setting however so for the time being I am hooked.

Gaming Grievances

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The last few weeks have been a bit hard, and I have noticed I have been grumpier than usual. So I decided that I should probably channel that grump into something useful. In gaming there are a bunch of things that bug me, and that really limited to a specific game. Sure there are games that trigger these things, and I am likely going to use those as examples, but a lot of these complaints fall into larger groupings. This morning I am going to explore some of these things that I think the game world would be better off if “fixed”

Lack of Cross Saves

This one has been bothering me a lot lately, because I have been spending an awful lot of time playing Diablo 3 on the Nintendo Switch from bed. It bugs me to no end that my Switch account has no relation back to my Battle.Net account. However this isn’t limited to Diablo because when I was playing Minecraft Dungeons the same frustrations applied and in that case it made even less sense given that all platforms have to log in with the same Microsoft account. Right now Bungie is the shining beacon with Destiny 2 and allowing me to choose between playing a separate character on each platform or binding them all together into a single save. I want this functionality to exist across the board, because I don’t mind paying for multiple clients especially when I get to carry my same characters with me.

Lack of Cross Play

This is another big one for me, and is the beginning of what is going to be at theme. I hate artificial boundaries, and I want every game to offer cross platform play. Your gaming platform of choice should be that and I should be able to group together freely with my friends regardless if they are playing via Steam, Origin, the Epic Games Store or any of the consoles like PlayStation, Xbox or Switch. Games feel better when you have the ability to play with whoever you want to. The same goes for MMORPGs where we have made strides over the last decade but really there are still a large number of artificial boundaries… I am looking at you FFXIV and your data centers.

Regional Play Walls

Now we have one that is big for me and Blizzard products. I hate that my EU friends are walled off on an island that I can’t interact with unless I specifically switch over to a EU based Battle.net account. This should be fixed and this is a broken system. The internet is a giant melting pot and as a result has given me access to a ton of players that I probably never would have developed close ties to without it. However it is way more likely for me to want to hang out with friends from Ireland than those from Idaho. Truth be told I am not sure if I actually know anyone in Idaho, but that is not the point. Let me hang with my friends folks regardless of what Region we happen to play in. Sure I realize that it is going to be a less than optimal experience at times, but if I have friends that need to finish some achievement I should be able to pop over and help them out.

The Horrible Faction Wall

This is going to mostly be a World of Warcraft thing, but it goes true for any game that creates an artificial barrier that cleaves in half the player base. The Alliance and Horde wall needs to fall and we as player should be able to group freely with our friends on either side of the divide. Additionally the game as a whole should maybe adopt a better theme than constant racism and genocide, but that is a completely different discussion for a different day. One of the best things that Rift ever did was drop the barrier between the Guardian and Defiant players with their “Faction as Fiction” patch. This is desperately needed in World of Warcraft and maybe stop forcing the divisive Red vs Blue narrative while we are at it.

Physical Transmog Systems

Now lets switch over to a problem that is most represented by Final Fantasy XIV but goes for any game with a similar system. I hate having to keep track of physical items that I am only holding onto for cosmetic purposes. All this does is serve to bloat our banks as well as the amount of items that you are having to store for a specific character. Each one of those items has a full array of stats associated with it and is effectively a unique copy that is being stored, where you could simply give us a system that allows us to flag our account with a specific appearance storing significantly less data. It would be better even if this just happened automagically like it does in Guild Wars 2 or World of Warcraft when we bind an item with an appearance that we didn’t already have. Please fix this Squeenix… and if you are building a similar game out there remember that cosmetics are super important to the overall enjoyment of a game.

Gender Locked Classes

This is a trope that is rife within a lot of the South Korean or Chinese MMORPGs, but it drives me up a wall. If you are going to add classes to your game, make sure that they can be played by either gender. Black Desert Online has effectively been walking this back by creating different versions for each gender, but having that line drawn in the sand is still horrible. Better yet I sorta wish that games didn’t have hard gender choices but instead a character creation system that allowed you to create your character in any way you saw fit and assign whatever attributes you wanted. That however is a battle for the future, and for now I just want games to stop releasing Male only or Female only content. This also is a problem with cosmetics in FFXIV, and it drove me nuts for years that as a Male character I couldn’t have bunny ears.

Lack of Beard Options

This is really a personal thing for me, and I am not sure how many players are impacted by it… but I cannot get into a character that doesn’t have reasonable beard options. This has been a big barrier for me and a lot of the Korean, Chinese or some Japanese MMORPGs because in many cases I have to deal with the meager offerings that are given to me. The best game of all time is probably Warhammer Online because it is the only one that offered wonderful ladybeards on the Dwarves, and you are darn tootin I took advantage of this on one of my characters. The reason why I play an Exo in Destiny 2 is because I could not create a Human with a beard, and for my Warlock and Hunter I just gave up and made female characters.

Lack of Account Wide Storage

I believe that you bank space should be plentiful, expandable and at least some of it should be account wide. This exists in some games but it absolutely should be a thing in more of them. I should be able to swap and materials freely between my characters, and better yet there should be a separate material storage available to them all. More games need to approach things from an account level giving players deep and meaningful reason to have multiple characters without creating the feeling that they are always on the wrong character at the wrong time.

Lack of Account Based Skills and Currencies

Once again adding to the whole discussion of feeling like you are on the wrong character at the wrong time… I wish any sort of currencies that are accrued for doing “things” were done so an an account wide level. So if your friends need you to be raiding on your main, but you really want to be gearing your alt… you could earn the currency on one character and spend it on another. In a similar note I wish things that are long grinds were attached at an account level as well. Tradeskills for example, I wish tradeskills were a thing that just existed and once unlocked and fully leveled could be used by any character on your account. There are plenty of ways to make this work from a lore perspective, but the convenience added of never not being on your gemcrafter or your enchanter would be phenomenal… or always being able to pick that herb or mine that node.

So now that I have aired my grievances with you… what are some of the things that drive you up a wall about games in general or that you would change? Drop me a note below, or feel free to wreck my opinions listed above.

Season 21 Complete

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Saturday afternoon I finished up Season 21 in Diablo 3 and I have to say… I am a bit listless now when it comes to what I should be doing with my time. I have plenty of other options, and I have been more or less falling back on playing Destiny 2, but it feels a little weird. During the course of a season I pour so much of my time and thought process into it that when it is over it feels a little strange. Games can be that way, and often times I find myself stalling finishing one just because I don’t want the experience to be over. There are a slew of games that I am one to two hours away from beating… and then just stopped playing rather than pushing across the finish line for one reason or another.

With Season 21 I had gotten into this familiar and comfortable pattern of farming bounties to get caches. I’ve written about this at length in other posts but the “easy” way to get the Avarice conquest is to save up enough caches and then open them all at once so that when you move you gather up over the 50 million gold needed. For me this represented 36 bounty caches that I managed to farm up, when I in theory only needed 31. However the amount of time that goes into the farming… always makes me want to over farm just to make sure I don’t screw things up somehow.

The most stressful moment is when I have to reach back into the bank to grab more caches knowing that if I move now it will be over and all of my farming will be for nothing. This is quickly followed by the frustration of having to clear out the mass if items that drop as a result. It takes so many trips do and from the pile of loot in order to clean everything up. This time around I spend most of the time cubing legendaries to finish out the last 20 or so that I needed for that final step in the seasonal journey. Unfortunately I didn’t get anything of note and am still at a single Primal Ancient for the season.

Why did I go through all of this effort? Well for the pet of course. This time it was some sort of a skink in a tube on top of a robotic crab body. The last time I did this seriously was for a Goblin that looked like Tyrael. Why do we do anything in games? For me at least it is more than likely for either a gear upgrade or cosmetic reasons. I could in theory do a bunch more things this season, but in reality once the final goal has been accomplished it feels like it is time to put this character to bed for a few months. I do at some point really need to clean up all of my alts in Diablo 3. There isn’t much of a reason to keep anything more than one of every class, so that might be another side project over the coming weeks.

There is of course my Switch character that I will continue working on. As of last night I hit level 66 and have started trying to pre-emptively knock out as much of the seasonal journey stuff as I can so that when I ding 70 I should have some packages of loot waiting on me. Since I did not do Crusader for the PC season, I decided that Thorns would be a highly playable build for console. So over the next few days I should be dinging 70 and will begin knocking out those seasonal journey accomplishments there. The only real challenge is that I don’t have much in the way of a peer group to knock out things like curses. I know Carth managed to solo it with a well leveled Boon of the Hoarder gem, so I might go after that route.