Hey Friends! We are back again because Bel’s life has calmed down a little bit, or at least enough to be able to reasonably make our normal recording slot. Tonight we have a whole stack of things to talk about and not enough show to fit it into. So first up we talk about R-Type Final 2 which has been bouncing for a few shows and how it is very true to the PS2 original game. From there Grace talks about her recent experience finishing Subnautica and starting the Below Zero sequel. From there we talk a bit about E3 2021 so far and most specifically further information coming out about Elden Ring. This is another Dark Souls game that is not called Dark Souls. Bel also talks a bit about how weird it is that UbiSoft is working on an Avatar game… aka the big blue people and not the great sorta-anime series. Ash talks about his experience with Chicory and we talk a bit about what it is like to survive Snowpiercer the City Sim in Frostpunk.
Hey Friends! It is still very much game show season and today we have a new batch of shows to talk about. I contemplated saving this for Monday, but since I am sitting here with a handful of things to talk about I decided to go ahead and post it because I am hoping Monday I will be able to talk about cool stuff from the Microsoft and Bethesda show. Thursday was pretty solid with the Summer Game Fest, or at the very least there were a lot of trailers to consume. Friday I was largely out of pocket and today the more normal shows started up giving me a few things to talk about. I have to admit I did not do a great job of keeping track of which show had which games, but largely these are the shows that I am going to talk about today and links to the videos of them.
I have to admit I am a little underwhelmed by what was shown today. There are a handful of things that I am mildly interested in but nothing really that got me excited. Well that is slightly untrue because there is one game that we got a trailer for that I am very much looking forward to, and hoping maybe during the Microsoft show we might get a release date. UbiSoft for me is very hit or miss and they seemed to lean very heavily into properties that I don’t really care about. I am kind of hit and miss with FarCry in general and this one in particular with its “Tropico” feel isn’t my jam. Wholesome Games Direct is an excellent show and I support it wholeheartedly… but also most of the games they show off are not really my jam and tend to be more of the walking simulator or harvest moon-like variety.
Of the hundreds of games that were shown there are some that I thought were interesting. Again this is not a best of list or anything because I am certain you would choose differently. It however is my blog so here is my list I wanted to talk about.
Death’s Door
I had not heard of this game before today, but it appears to be another in a fairly long line of recent “zelda nostalgia” games. This time you are playing as a crow with a sword and battling all sorts of intense looking bosses. It looks fast and smooth and similar to Tunic from my last post I am all in on these Zelda-likes… at least enough to give them a shot when they launch.
There is an ongoing revival of the Tony Hawk Pro Skater nostalgia game which I guess is a bit of a misnomer for this particular entry given that OlliOlli is in itself a storied pixel art skating game starting in 2014. The early entries were a sort of linear side scrolling “endless runner” type experience. This game appears to be taking that and transforming it into something a bit more open world. In many ways the gameplay reminds me a bit of the old Atari game 720. Most definitely interesting enough to give it a look as it gets closer to release.
For starters I feel like it is a tragedy that the game was not called Skatebirb, but that is just a me thing. Secondly Glass Bottom Games is pretty great and behind a couple of interesting games including the firefighter endless runner called Jones on Fire and Hot Tin Roof a 3D stylized noir detective adventure game. I remember watching an early video on Skatebird and it is basically a love story to Tony Hawk Pro Skater but with birbs. Because of the scale of the birbs you also have some interesting “Honey I Shrunk the Kids” style repurposing of giant benign objects for the purpose of building ramps and obstacles. Very into this game.
I remember seeing this several years ago associated with a showing at PaxSouth. The idea looked pretty cool in that you build an airship and then explore the skies looking for resources and treasure… while occasionally having to deal with giant monsters that attack you. This is one of those games that I have kept my eyes out for and it finally has a release date. It looks fun, but I have no clue when I will actually get around to playing it. Unfortunately said release date is actually the beginning of early access… so take that as you will.
This is the one game from today that I am legitimately extremely excited for. So there is a game studio called Spiders that is one of the few companies making new games in the Bioware Action RPG style. They keep making a valiant effort to perfect the formula and thusfar each game has been flawed in a slightly different way, but still very enjoyable to play through. Greedfall is just about as close to perfection as they have gotten and my hope has been the next game… would really nail things. Steelrising is that next game and it appears to be set in an alternate version of the French Revolution where automatons are doing battle and seemingly killing off people. It appears that you are playing a good one of these automatons. I know this has been associated with Microsoft so I am hoping that maybe just maybe we get a proper release date tomorrow during their show.
I thought this one looked really cool. It has the whole pixel art plus detailed lighting and backgrounds that worked so well for Octopath Traveler. This however appears to be a side scrolling platformer where you battle fires, avoid obstacles and rescue people. I think it looks really cool and it reminds me sorta of a 16 bit era fire fighting game that I don’t think ever made it to the United States. Again zero clue if or when I will ever get around to playing it, but I dug its look and gameplay.
The trailer doesn’t really give much to go on here, so I was forced to do some external research. This looks like it is a SciFi/Cosmic Horror style game that maybe draws inspiration from Deadspace. The challenge is it describes itself as “Action RPG” which means many things to many different people. It appears to be a third person action hack and slash style combat game. It does however appear to also have gunplay similar to Mass Effect. What little combat footage I could find seemed to feel a bit more Dark Soulsy when immediately makes me question if it is my jam. I guess time will tell on this one and I will absolutely want to watch some gameplay before picking it up. Definitely looks interesting.
My initial take away of this game is that it is in the Stalker/Metro genre of post nuclear war Soviet era Science Fiction. The trailer doesn’t give us a lot to go on, but I did watch some play through and the entire thing looks somewhat compelling. Third person shooter with some exploration and stealth notes, but that seemed to be largely due to extremely limited resources. Also appears to have some survival aspects in that you need to keep tabs on your radiation as you roam around. The game has some heavy horror notes as well, so I am not really sure what bucket to place it in. I find these games extremely interesting but the problem I have had with Metro series is that they are somewhat klunky to control. My hope is this feels smooth and reliable, and if that is the case I will probably give it a shot at some point.
Release Date: Steam Early Access currently with July 2021 console release – Watch the Trailer
Moonglow Bay
This game originally interested me last year also at the Wholesome Games Direct because it had a very similar art style to Touryst. The game itself appears to be a fishing based harvest moon style game. There also is hinted at some mystery surrounding why exactly this fishing village doesn’t have people who fish anymore. I like the concept of a game like this but I always end up finding myself getting bored after awhile. Definitely seems charming however and I really like this simplified voxel art style.
There you have it. All of the games that I found interesting in the four shows that I watched today. My hope is tomorrow will be filled with games that are more my speed. For those interested we have Xbox and Bethesda showcase at 12 pm CDT, Square Enix at 2:15 pm CDT, PC Gaming Show at 4:30 pm and Future Games Show at 6 pm. With no Sony in the mix, my hope is that Microsoft/Bethesda gives me something to get excited for.
Yesterday was the kick off of the Summer Game Fest, another Geoff Keighley production. Essentially this is “The Game Awards” without the pretense of having to occasionally give out an award. Similarly you are going to hear the “World Premiere” sounder a ridiculous number of times before it is over. Apparently Geoff saw the Zach Synder Cut and was jealous of its length, because the official stream broadcast clocks in at around four hours. You can of course instead watch your favorite YouTube talking head talking over the show, or you could just do what I do… and simply track down the original broadcast and watch that so you can make your own decisions… and jokes.
I did not watch the entire thing, but instead chose to skip around a bit because to be fair… I don’t care about the random conversations in between the game trailers. That said it was sort of humorous to watch Jeff Goldblum awkwardly troll Geoff Keighley in a display that did not seem scripted or planned in any way. Even skipping around like I did, there was an awful lot to unpack and I did my best to catch all of the game trailers. I originally had a totally different post for this morning but instead realized that it is in fact game show season once again… and I will apparently be watching a lot of these over the weekend. It seems that E3 is back on the menu which is not something I expected. I legitimately thought E3 as a concept would not survive the last year given that for the most part it is really easy to do a pre-recorded segment that you can control the release of and most game companies are already doing this.
On to the games I cared about…
Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands
So essentially the breakout hit of Borderlands… aka Ashly Burch with her Tiny Tina character is helming a brand new game that is effectively the best DLC for Borderlands 2 turned into an entire game? I am down for this. Borderlands and I have a sort of hit or miss past with the games and I never really got into Borderlands 3 in spite of my best efforts, but I am interested in a fantasy looter shooter in the style of Borderlands. That is essentially how Ashly Burch described it and I am certain I will be giving this a spin.
This is a game that I most definitely did not expect to see in a genre that I think no one was expecting. Metal Slug is a favorite of mine and I think for the most part I love it because of the art style. It seems like all of that pixelated goodness is porting over to a rogue-like tactics game experience and while that isn’t normally my jam I am going to try it. The trailer was beautifully made, but also spent more time on animated bits than actual gameplay so it will be interesting to see any gameplay videos that come out about how things are actually going to flow.
I have been waiting for this damned game since 2014 when I first saw its trailer for the South Korean release. It finally released in 2018… and I have to admit I contemplated trying to buy an account given that you have to have the national id thing to create an account to play on the Korean servers. I thought surely eventually this would come out in the West and last year it was announced that Amazon would be bringing it here. Finally we have a release window and I am super pumped about it. I love hack and slash Diablo style games and I am hoping this is worth all of the wait time. I am trying not to hype it up any more than I already have because I really want this to be a great game.
Axiom Verge was a really cool love song to Metroid and I own it on a bunch of platforms. So when the second game was announced it was almost certain that I would give it a spin. What I find intriguing is how different this one seems like it is going to be. In the first game you mostly used ranged attacks and in this one it seems like your character is largely melee based. The trick however is that apparently your character can also hack the mechs you are fighting to change the pace of combat. Additionally in the trailer they talked about how apparently you don’t have to fight any bosses in the game to progress through it. If you just want to run straight through the battle and keep on moving… that is apparently a valid playstyle. Should be interesting to see this as it launches.
I’ve been tracking this game since E3 2018 and am still very interested in it. Essentially it is cute fox Zelda and that is pretty much all the hook I need. I’ve even played one of the earlier demos of the game and it was great… I just want it to actually release. I think this is a single developer project so I am way more forgiving on what has felt like the long development cycle. Ultimately this seems like a Switch game to me but I will likely buy it on multiple platforms to support the developer.
So I am going to have to admit… I have seen a lot of trailers for Tales games over the years and I am not sure if I have ever actually called one of them out until now. Basically Tales was a series that I knew to be as beloved and complicated as Final Fantasy… but I had never actually engaged with it in any form. That is until now when I have been playing through Tales of Vesperia and have found it super charming and enjoyable and now suddenly care. I have no clue when I will actually get around to playing it but I am very interested in Tales of Arise as a result of this new experience.
This is the trailer that pretty much everyone online seemed to be hoping for… but also at the same time preparing for it not to actually show. Elden Ring is this weird collaboration by red wedding aficionado George R. R. Martin and the fine folks that bring us games that make you want to punch your screen… FromSoftware. I mean I have to admit I held out a slim amount of hope that this would be a very Skyrim like game experience… all the while knowing it was probably going to be another non-Souls Series Souls game like Bloodborne. Based on the trailer footage, it seems like this is very much a Souls game and while I generally am not a huge fan of that genre… I have to admit there is something compelling about it. I am probably going to be a sucker and give it a try since I did make some measure of traction into the Demon’s Souls remake.
Of note… there were way the hell more games talked about than I just featured. If you ONLY care about the trailer reveals and want to completely skip the rest of the show… the YouTube channel GameTrailers has ripped and re-uploaded all of the trailers into a playlist form. There are 104 videos in the list so it will still take awhile to chew through it. Probably the strangest announcement is you can play as a Bean in Fall Guys that looks like 2B from Nier minus the mighty butt action. We have once again entered a wealth of new game information and expect my next several posts to probably reflect that.
Morning friends. I had plans last night and none of them really panned out as expected. I had been planning on watching The Game Awards which began at 5:30 pm my time. I also planned on running a Mythic +2 or two with some of my friends in Facepull in World of Warcraft. However as has been the case more recently we were limited by the lack of healing options. So instead of doing this… I ended up logging for the night and telling Kelsas to ping me over discord if it looked like we had healing options. This meant instead I spent my evening playing Cyberpunk 2077… which is a game that is not really conducive to watching a live stream during.
It was around this point that I had a realization. I don’t actually care about The Game Awards. I care about the fact that a bunch of Game Trailers get released during the show, but I don’t actually care about the awards themselves or the talking heads that appear in between them. The thing is… I have no skin in this game. Sure it is cool when a game that I like wins an award but it has absolutely no bearing on my life. What I care about is all of those game trailers and by the time I wake up the next morning those will all be available and syndicated on the internet in a number of various means. For example I was able to just tune in this morning and watch this playlist full of trailers.
So here is that thing where I run through a bunch of things I personally found worthy of talking about. Let’s do this!
Some sort of Dragon Age Game
To be honest… the thing that I was looking forward to information about before the Awards show as Dragon Age. While I was never really able to get into Inquisition, I loved the first two games quite a bit and was looking forward to more adventures in this universe. What I had hoped to see was some signs that a game was happening here, but instead we got another vague demo reel of footage. This is a sizzle reel and not anything even vaguely resembling a game. As such I figure this game is at least two to three years away and possibly even more… and has not really coalesced into anything resembling a playable experience. This honestly concerns me more than it bolsters me.
Some sort of Mass Effect Game
We also received “trailer” footage of Liara T’Soni wandering some snowy planet and retrieving a piece of armor bearing the imprint of N7, which is in theory supposed to make us think that this is Sheppard’s armor. Once again this is not even vaguely resembling any sort of game yet, so I would imagine this probably has the same timeline trajectory as Elder Scrolls 6 at this point of being vaguely somewhere off in the future. There was a message at the end saying that Mass Effect would continue… which combined with this footage would make one think that they are returning to the original Trilogy and extending it. What I actually want is more Andromeda to be honest, but I legitimately think this is something that was rushed out in order to combat the news of the Studio head and Dragon Age producer both recently leaving.
Crimson Desert
On the positive side… I am significantly more interested in Crimson Desert than I was before. The footage shown would lead you to believe that the game is a sort of God of War style single player narrative experience. There however is reportedly some sort of online multiplayer functionality, but it doesn’t seem like an MMORPG along the lines of its precursor Black Desert. The game looks incredible, but so did Black Desert. I guess the proof will be once the game gets closer to launch because Godfall also looks gorgeous but was a soulless husk of an experience.
Back 4 Blood
It seems like it is officially time now to reboot the Left 4 Dead franchise… or at least a spiritual successor to it. Turtle Rock Studios the folks behind the original Left 4 Dead and the ill fated Evolve… are presenting a new game called Back 4 Blood. By all evidence this would appear to be a modern reboot of Left 4 Dead under a brand new name. I guess we can all hope that it will bring a fresh perspective to this style of multiplayer shooter experience.
Evil Dead: The Game
Apparently also there is going to be an Evil Dead game that may or may not also be attempting to reboot the Left 4 Dead concept? There isn’t a lot to go on with this trailer but it certainly feels like it is going to be some sort of four player co-op vs hordes type gameplay mechanic. It also appears to be drawing characters from across the entirety of the confusing Evil Dead universe. It might be really cool, but it also might be a confused mess. It appears to be lead by Saber Interactive the folks behind the 2019 World War Z game.
League of Legends: The Ruined King
This appears to be a fixed party RPG surrounding League of Legends characters and the Bilgewater setting from Airship Syndicate. These are the folks that developed Battle Chasers: Nightwar and Darksiders Genesis, and it appears to lean more towards the original of those two titles. The over world looks very Diablo style, with also combat taking place in a Final Fantasy style console RPG style. I am most definitely interested because League of Legends is a setting where I have been interested in the world building… but just not any of the games released so far.
Scarlet Nexus
Scarlet Nexus continues to look really interesting. It reminds me quite a bit of Astral Chain… which was a really cool game stranded on a console that struggled a bit with its graphics. I think ultimately will have to see how the final product comes together. Definitely something I am still keeping an eye on however.
Monster Hunter Rise
This game really makes me wish a Nintendo Switch Pro existed. This is appears to be the Switch getting a game in the open world style of Monster Hunter World. The only problem here is the console will not be able to output the sort of visuals that Monster Hunter World did. Still going to play it because it looks great and also both Palicos and Doggos to go adventuring with.
Evil West
The last of the games that looked interesting to me was Evil West, which is from Flying Wild Hog studios the folks behind the most recent Shadow Warrior games. So what I expect is a fast paced over the top shooter with melee combat. I like the mash up of Van Helsing with the Wild West that appears to be going on in the trailer. It should be an interesting game with a lot of really visceral combat if the lineage of this studio is any indication.
obviously the thing that some folks are going to be talking about is Sephiroth in Smash Bros… but I could give a shit about Smash Bros. If you watched the show last night, or did what I did this morning and catch up on only the trailers… what were some of your highlights? What are some of the things you are looking forward to? What are your thoughts about the Bioware “trailers” and non-announcements? Drop me a line below because I would love to hear your thoughts.
