Open World RPG Archives - Page 26 of 41

Games of the Decade: 2011

December 9, 2019 by Belghast

On Friday I started a new series where I talk about the games from the last decade that specifically had an effect on me. The original plan was to do a bunch of single posts, but after some back and forth I decided upon the format of posting games from a specific year. One of the interesting things about this journey is that I am realizing just how fallible my memory is. There is no way I would have ever said that Rift, Skyrim and SWTOR all came out in the same year… but I would have been very wrong. This was seemingly a year of significant changes.

Rift

Rift released in March of 2011 and on paper appeared to be everything that I had ever wanted in an MMORPG. It was an game with a techno-fantasy setting that allowed me to multi-class builds until my heart was content. More importantly it gave me the ability to have a tank with Charge AND Death Grip! I cannot underscore how important that last bit was to my early enjoyment of this game. I rolled a Bahmi Warrior which placed me on the side of the Defiant, aka the Red Team. The central conflict in World of Warcraft was often presented in terms of Good vs Evil, and your definition of that depended greatly upon the side of the fence you started on. Rift on the other hand focused on a debate between Religion and Technology, with me firmly throwing in on the side of technology.

Rift released at a time when it felt like Blizzard was not listening to the players, and in contrast the fledgling Trion Worlds was constantly engaging with the community greatly increasing the appeal. I changed my own religion at the time of being a World of Warcraft site to being all in on Rift, heralding it as the WoW Killer and true savior of MMORPG gaming. I can’t say for certain why I wandered away from the game, but I think in part it was due to the fact that a large chunk of my gaming circle didn’t quite set down the roots that I did. Without a viable raid, we were limited to doing the hardest version of the Rifts, which got old pretty quickly. The release of another game on this list ultimately signaled the closing of my renaissance with the game. It however has been something that I have returned to time and time again and while I am not actively playing it at the moment, remains an extremely important part of my gaming history.

Rage

Every so often a game is released that I absolutely love… and that apparently no one else did. One of those games was Rage, released by ID software in October. What it promised on paper was Doom meets Fallout… and what it delivered was something that felt like it had all of the potential in the world but never quite delivered on any of it. Rage was one of those games that I finished during act one, and I fully expected to open up a wider world… but instead got a credits roll. The few moments before the credit roll however were extremely compelling game play and presented a really interesting world, that I spent entirely too little time in. The follow up this past year took the wrong queues from how to make a sequel and I largely bounced off of it.

I think Rage would have done well, were it not for the horrific technical issues that I remember at the time. ID Software in the post Quake world is often times more of a game engine company than a game developer themselves, and in some ways Rage felt more like a tech demo than anything fully fleshed out. It was the first game to release on the Id Tech 5 engine, and reportedly at launch was a buggy mess. I remember it being a bit of a beast when it came to requirements, but I also managed to play it fairly successfully on the PC. I remember this game being poorly reviewed… but looking back it managed to get a 79 on meta critic… though maybe at the time we didn’t view that as a positive score. I replayed through this game a few years back and it still more or less holds up well.

The Elder Scrolls V – Skyrim

My first foray into the world of the Elder Scrolls was with Daggerfall, and I played through it well after that game was gone from its prime. The first Elder Scrolls game that reeled me in with the genres possibility was Morrowind, and when Oblivion released I was completely hooked. By the time Skyrim was announced and ultimately released I was a ravening fanboy ready to consume more of this giant open world setting, and the game delivered on every possible dimension. It would be impossible to create a greatest games of the last decade list without Skyrim on it, especially now that it is pretty much available for every conceivable platform.

What I love about Skyrim is how I am able to just roam aimlessly through the world deciding my own path at all times. The game doesn’t rush me to make any decisions and allows me to carve my own path through the world. I remember on my first playing I went about 15 levels without ever finding the stones that allow you to effectively choose what sort of “class” you were going to play. In fact I pretty much went the opposite direction and it was a significant time before I finally made it to town. As soon as the shackles of the intro quest were removed… I was off doing my own thing figuring out my place in the world. It is for this reason that the game seems to have infinite replay-ability for me personally. Most of the times I pick it up I don’t get even vaguely close to finishing it, but it gives me a fun escape when I need it most.

Star Wars the Old Republic

I have such mixed feelings about Star Wars the Old Republic. On one hand it is one of the best roleplaying games to ever exist with some of the most interesting story content I have ever played through. On the other hand, it is a clone of a very specific era of World of Warcraft and by the time the game released felt somewhat dated and awkward. This would have made a very worthy sequel to the Knights of the Old Republic franchise, if they would have taken a single path and expanded upon it. However what you have is some of the best story-lines that Bioware has ever created trapped inside the husk of a very traditional MMORPG.

This era is also somewhat tainted by the fact that it was a grand experiment in guild building as I attempted to make lots of disparate groups of people mesh together, a problem that I consistently find myself in. This experiment however didn’t go so smoothly and saw the guild fracturing into two factions. In later years the game redeemed itself as the sort of expression of pure joy that I seem to find myself returning to anytime there is a Star Wars movie on the horizon. The more single player focus allows you to churn through the story and feel powerful doing so, more or less allowing you to skip over the bumpy bits. The Fallen Empire and Knights of the Eternal Throne campaigns represent some of the best RPG goodness I have experienced in a long while. I would at a bare minimum suggest working your way through the original story-line on every single class, because there is interesting overlap and interplay between them. It was and continues to be a pretty phenomenal game-play experience, once you get past a few of the rough spots.

Where Bel Was Mentally in 2011

I felt extremely off balance, having left a game I had been playing for the better part of several years and trying to find a new home. House Stalwart had been that home and as I ventured forth into post WoW territory I found a bunch of temporary housing but it really did take me a long time until I settled into a new family. It also begins the era I am in currently of never quite being able to fully commit to any game. I was super prolific when I was into Rift… and then not at all as I started to pull away from that game. During April I had 24 posts… and by the time you get to November I was down to a single post for that entire month. I found myself actively avoiding the concept of raiding, having effectively just had a “bad breakup” with World of Warcraft and raiding in that game.

So where were you in 2011? What were the games that you found important during that year? Drop me a comment below and let me know what I missed that really mattered to you personally.

Jedi Fallen Order Impressions

November 18, 2019 by Belghast

This morning I thought I would write up some of my thoughts about a game that several of us absolutely thought was going to be vaporware… Jedi Fallen Order. There is a specific reason for this because it seems like EA has cancelled more Star Wars games than it actually has made since getting the exclusivity deal to the licensing. However it appears that Respawn has decided to just give a giant middle finger to EA and make whatever the hell they want to make. All reports seem to indicate that Apex Legends was more or less a passion project that EA ignored, and Jedi Fallen Order is a game that EA just doesn’t make anymore… a Single Player non-LIve-Services game with absolutely no Micro-transactions and a boat load of cosmetic goodies that are unlocked through gameplay. Respawn should really share whatever dirt they have on EA with other studios so they can make awesome things as well.

During the game you play as Kyle Katarn… I mean Cal Kestis a wayard Jedi Padawan that managed to hide out in the time following Order 66. I like Cal fine but he seems to be purposefully bland as to allow you to more or less insert yourself into that character. He is voiced and looks like Cameron Monaghan who I mostly know from Shameless but others will know from Gotham. He does a perfectly cromulent job bringing this character to life and there is an adorable “a boy and his dog” relationship between him and the goodest droid boy ever… BD-1. The only negative is that I would have liked it if there was a Female option as well given that absolutely nothing about the character appears to give two shits about the gender. Cal Kestis is an equally generic name so they should have totally done a Revan here and just let you pick whichever gender you preferred to play as.

The game itself is gorgeous and I have been playing it upstairs on my gaming machine in 4k, which leads to a really awesome experience. The game presents you with a giant warning screen suggesting that while it is playable with a keyboard and mouse that you go ahead and use a controller, so I am begrudgingly doing that as well. Since I have nonsense large hands I am using my favorite Xbox One controller the Power A Fusion Pro 1.0 controller which is sadly no longer made. As far as gameplay itself it is this weird amalgamation of Uncharted and Darksiders… with a lot of tropes made popular with the Dark Souls games but play out in a way here that feels less awkwardly punishing.

The souls comparisons go basically like this. When you die you lose a bunch of experience and you can gain it all back… as well as completely heal your character by tapping the mob you died to. There are a bunch of meditation locations in the world and these function like campfires in Dark Souls games… as in you will completely heal up and restock but also all of the mobs you killed respawn as a result so it plays a tradeoff between healing up now or causing yourself hassle in the future. BD-1 has the ability to dispense healing stims which play the same role as the Estus Flask allowing you to heal up without invoking the respawn penalty.

The other connection that gets drawn is the style of combat. This is not a button masher and if you do button mash… your character will flail around uselessly as a result. You start with a single bladed light saber and at a couple of points during the game you will be able to upgrade this to a double bladed saber, and swap between the two freely as needed. The thing that I find the most interesting is that each weapon has its own feel and range of uses and the first time I tried to treat my double saber like the original single I also flailed around hopelessly until I got the swing of it. Combat is deliberate and involved you exploiting timing in order to unleash some extremely impressive looking combos that make you feel bad ass.

All of that said… there is still a large chunk of the game that is learning how to traverse the levels and figure out Zelda Temple style puzzles. When you are entering a puzzle area and you are seemingly struggling to grasp what needs to happen… you are offered hints in the form of conversations with BD-1. Often times these aren’t super helpful but are charming as hell and well worth listening to… and at least in a few cases reaffirmed that my idea was correct as to what needed to happen next. There are a lot of times this game feels like Uncharted or a modern Tomb Raider. The truth is… the mix of elements makes for an extremely compelling gameplay experience.

The game excels at giving you set pieces that make you feel like a Jedi, and does an exceptional job of set design that slowly teaches you the basics. It then takes those basics and repeats them over and over through the level, each time mixing and remixing the same themes that you have seen before and then finally chaining them together in a way that makes you feel like you really can use the force. There is one sequence that involves a zip line, to a wall run, to a wall climb that seems extremely daunting at first… but by the time you reach that area you have done all of those separately enough times to make you feel comfortable to chain them all together.

The game tells a relatively simple story, but it does so in a charming manner with a bunch of characters that are both interesting and acted extremely well. It isn’t so much that it is a storytelling juggernaut, but the complete package of how the game feels and the story blend nicely to give you an enjoyable experience. While it is not a role-playing game at all, I would say that this is probably my favorite Star Wars game since Knights of the Old Republic. The only thing that could have made it better was to make the character something you could create yourself similar to the original character in KOTOR.

I get the impression that Disney is wanting to enter this game in as part of the cannon as it mingles with other characters that are already firmly rooted in Star Wars history. I have to assume that is why we have a fixed character that we are playing. This is an unfortunate choice however given the levels of superfluous cosmetic choice you are given in the game, that the most important one is completely missing. If you can get past that one fatal flaw however the game is amazing and I would highly suggest it to anyone who is willing to listen to me. I’m on what is either the 3rd or 4th planet depending on if you count the starting area as its own thing. I will be playing more of it tonight because it is pretty much dominating my gaming schedule.

Regularly Playing: November 2019 Edition

March 7, 2025November 8, 2019 by Belghast

Forgive me father for I have sinned. It has been two months since my last Regularly Playing column. The idea behind this is that I throw out and update once a month talking about what I am playing and what has faded away. It also serves as an opportunity for me to “true up” my regularly playing widget in the sidebar of this blog. However had I updated at the beginning of October you would have largely just seen a single entry for Destiny 2. I was in a pretty unhappy place with Blizzard and it really made me not want to spend much time writing about what I was doing other than Destiny.

However we have a new month and with it comes some new perspectives. I’ve allowed myself to step back from that precipice even though I feel like a bit of a fraud for doing so. I was making myself unhappy by dwelling so much on the bad feelings. I am back dipping my toe into Blizzard things, but I am still largely feeling awful for doing so. However lets get to the list so I can start talking more about each one of them.

To Those Remaining

I’ve been playing an excessive amount of Destiny 2 and if you have read my blog over the last month or so you will have noticed this. Destiny is in a truly amazing state right now and the Cross Save functionality has created this hotbed of players on the PC platform. Over night it seems that PC went from the lowest population platform to the highest as folks are taking advantage of just how much better the experience is on the PC as opposed to the aging console generation. I still only have a handful of people regularly playing but it helps greatly to have Thalen who is also going through a similar renaissance. I’ve more or less given up on most of the AggroChat crew understanding or even latching onto how great this game.

This game was periodically off the menu… but as soon as I eased up on my stance regarding the Blizzard/Hong Kong situation it was one of the first things I logged into. With all of the news about Diablo 4 it has renewed my interests in playing some Diablo 3. I more or less failed miserably at this season but I did managed to knock out the cosmetics for it. I am hoping to get back on track with the new season starting soon and return to semi-regularly playing this with Grace.

This continues to be a nightly thing that I play as I am winding down from the day. I am not super active in it, but generally speaking I play enough each night to knock out the daily objectives. I am not sure what it is about this pattern that I find relaxing but generally speaking as I am wrapping up the last few things I am finding myself fighting to stay awake and can lay down the tablet and slumber peacefully. The release cadence as I have said before really is the piece that keeps me engaged, and the fact that I get a gacha summon pretty often through simply playing the game normally. They are not getting money from me, but they are getting a bunch of active usage.

I’m leaving this one on the list but I have to admit it is hanging by a thread here. I initially stopped playing Classic over the Hong Kong incident as I stopped playing any Blizzard games. However upon resuming play I am finding it exceptionally hard to get back into the slower pace of this game. I’ve become used to the run and gun pace of Destiny 2 and my brain is sorta fighting back against this. I had some experience with this when I came back to Classic after the launch of Destiny 2 Shadowkeep. In theory I probably need a bit more time to figure out how to slide back in and resume my path to 60.

To The New And Returning

While I am in a bit of a holding pattern thanks to activity in Destiny 2, I eased into The Outer Worlds a few weekends ago and am looking forward to maybe getting in and playing some more this weekend. This is pretty much the perfect logical successor to my favorite of the Fallout series, New Vegas. It is a weird remix of Fallout, Firefly, Bioshock and Mass Effect and were I not as addicted to Destiny as I currently am it would have become my primary game. I am sure I will get back in and play some more, hopefully prior to the podcast on Saturday.

This is one I did not expect, but after my ceasing of hostilities towards Blizzard… I am finding myself playing a lot more of Retail than I am of Classic. I got in the other night and did the 15th anniversary quests, but I am also finding myself just running around on the Demon Hunter a bit. The other thing I found odd was that I attempted to log into my Alliance characters and found myself turning my nose up at them because they just didn’t feel right. I guess I made a legitimate transition over to The Horde at some point? I blame Grace.

To Those Departing

I am sure I will pick this game back up at some point but I have had another things on my mind. In truth I will always be more of an MMO player than I ever am a purveyor of Single Player games. This one will get attention because I still have yet to beat it. I just haven’t been in the mood for it of late.

I am sorry Shadowbringers… you suffered a cruel fate at the hands of WoW Classic and never quite recovered. I know there is a new patch, with new content to experience… but I am also not exactly finding myself rushing back to play it. I am not exactly sure what it is with this game but I go through this cycle after the release of an expansion. I play it hard and heavy for awhile… level two characters… and then disappear. It happened to some extent with Heavensward but absolutely both Stormblood and Shadowbringers saw me in exactly the same pattern. Once the overarching story was completed, my desire to keep playing dissipated.

I’ve also found myself simply not logging into Magic the Gathering Arena. This is a game that desperately needs a tablet friendly version. If that existed I would spend way more of that “before bedtime” tablet gaming playing Arena. As it stands when I am at a PC there are just other games I would rather be playing. I’ve also not felt nearly as connected with either War of the Spark or the Eldraine expansions as I have with previous themes. I loved Ixalan, and I think it might go down as probably my favorite non-Dominaria plane we visited. Return to Return to Ravnica felt weirdly watered down as though it were a subject that had been just spread too thin. I am sure I will return at some point but for right now it leaves the list.

You just never had a chance did you Iceborne. You launched at a bad time for me when my attentions were drawn elsewhere to WoW Classic. Then you announced the release of the PC version and I more or less decided to wait. The PC version really is the best version of the game and I found myself just struggling to get used to using a controller again. I am sorry that we just couldn’t come to a workable arrangement. I will see you in January.

Summary

Hopefully I can get back on the wagon of keeping this updated at the beginning of each month. We have a lot of familiar faces on the list in spite of a few of those exiting. I am sure for example I will play through the new patch content in FFXIV at some point, but that point is not now and it is not even really on my radar. My goal is to finish up The Outer Worlds and try and ease back into WoW Classic. However I have a bad habit of abandoning my goals.

Outer Worlds Impressions

October 28, 2019 by Belghast

I wrote a little bit about this on Friday during my send up of Fallout 76 and the Fallout First subscription. The Outer Worlds came out at some point on Thursday night through the epic games store and then on Friday seemingly through the various sundry Microsoft game stores. This has been a game I have been looking forward to for quite some time, but I have to say cautiously so. What I mean by that is that everything I had seen to date gave me hope, but quite honestly we are living in a time when my hopes are pretty often dashed against the rocks when it comes to new games. What Outer Worlds promised was not only a new game but a brand new IP that seemed like it would be drift compatible with Obsidian games work on the Fallout franchise.

The first and most important step is to see if I can create a proper “Belghast” in this game. After some quick fiddling I managed to dial in what tends to be fairly close to the traditional appearance of all of my characters. The game could have used for a few more beard options but I ultimately went with this nice full beard. As to ponytail options the only thing that was available was some sort of a bun nonsense and as a result I just went with long locks instead. In order to get the over the eye scar thing that I tend to put on all of my characters if it is available, I had to accept some other scaring and I finished things off with the little nose slash makeup. First step passed as I have a character that I am perfectly happy to be playing.

Next we have our setting. At the highest level The Outer Worlds is like you dumped Bioshock, Fallout New Vegas, Firefly, and Paranoia in a blender and mixed up a delicious dystopian slurry. Where Fallout is a game built upon rebuilding the world after a nuclear apocalypse brought on by war, Outer Worlds is a game about what happens if you allow capitalism and corporatism to run amok. You start your life as a colonist that has been stranded on board “The Hope” on the outskirts of the Halcyon system for roughly 70 years. It seems that something went wrong with your colony ship and rather than trying to fix it the corporations just cut their losses and left it out there floating in the void as a stranded hulk.

You begin your life in the cargo hold of one Doctor Phineas Vernon Welles, a fugitive scientist wanted by the Halcyon Holdings Corporate Board. He has figured out a chemical concoction that can be used to revive folks stuck in cryosleep on the Hope. You are unceremoniously deposited on the planet of Emerald Vale and told to meet up with a smuggler who is going to take you the rest of the way to your final destination. Your escape pod happens to land on top of said smuggler… Captain Alex Hawthorne… and which point you are asked to make your way to their ship. It turns out the ship has a blown power regulator which sets you down your primary decision path.

It seems that you can either get a power regulator by helping out the corporate townsfolk, or by helping out a band of separatists. Helping one group means almost certain death for the other group, so you are given a weighty choice almost immediately. The Outer Worlds is a game about choices more than anything. Do you accept the harsh bounty of corporatism, or do you strike out and try and help the little guy whenever you can often times knowing that innocents will suffer in the process? Corporatism is so invasive that it has literally become the religion of the land, and in spite of constant scientific achievement the reality of the world has gotten skewed by whatever is going to make the most profit.

The first colony you visit is Edgewater, is owned by the Spacer’s Choice corporation. Not just the land and the buildings but the people are all property. One of the early missions that drives home the starkness of your situation is that the town is concerned about having to deal with a suicide. This is considered to be damaging company property, and the rest of the townsfolk are going to ultimately have to pay back the Spacer’s Choice corporation because of this. There is another situation where you are trying to help out someone who managed to get sick, and they are unwilling to take any medication because the brand you happen to find while scavenging the world is produced by a rival corporation.

If you played a lot of the Fallout series, the game is going to feel immediately accessible to you. In many ways it feels like Fallout New Vegas, but set in space and swapping the radioactive threat for a corporate totalitarian one. The game is not at all subtle about the messages it portrays, and as a result it ends up being pretty dark, which is weirdly contrasted by how bright and vibrant the game world itself is. The game takes the Fallout format and evolves it a bit by adding better gun play and weaving in some of the companion mechanics from the Bioware games. The end result feels extremely good… that is so long as you didn’t lean heavily on VATS in Fallout games. I personally hated them and because of that the time dilation system feels good and useful, but the end result largely destroys any sort of tactical gameplay.

The writing is excellent as is the voice acting. I am not sure if I could be more happy with the end product and the total package that is The Outer Worlds. I am not terribly far into the game, but what I have played has been excellent. I played the game all of Friday night and for the most part all of Saturday until we recorded the podcast. I have roughly 10 hours of total play time at this point and am at what is I think the third destination? I’ve heard that the game itself is relatively short if you are the sort of person who cares about beating games and following the critical path. I have a feeling that for me personally this is going to be somewhere in the avenue of a 40-60 hour game based on the way I roam around aimlessly and slowly clean areas out of all of the tasty “bits”, aka the currency of the game.

I really don’t want to say too much more, because the game gets really interesting. After comparing notes with Kodra after the podcast we made different decisions and I managed to find a solution to a problem that he didn’t even know was possible. That tells me this is a game with deep replay capabilities, and also that maybe you shouldn’t just accept blindly when the game tries to give you an A or B solution path. There is often times a C and maybe event a D and an E. If you were like me and liked New Vegas way better than the other modern Fallout games then you should stop reading this and go buy Outer Worlds. If you like this style of game in general, you should probably still go buy the game. If you liked the setting and feel of the Bioshock games, then again you should probably buy the game. If nothing else you can try a month of Xbox Games Pass on PC and play the game through that if you are uncertain.