Open World RPG Archives - Page 39 of 40

Farcry 3: BLood Dragon

February 23, 2014 by Belghast

Steampowered Sunday #6

A few weeks back I did Steampowered Sunday over Far Cry 3, and thanks to the frustrations of dealing with UPlay I didn’t really give it that stellar of a rating. The forced stealth play just was not my thing, but one resounding chorus from folks responding to the post was… play Blood Dragon instead. From the moment I saw the artwork for the title… I knew I would love it, because I am an unrepentant child of the 80s. Everything about the game artwork alone screams 1980’s arcade cabinet artwork. Hand drawn polygon landscapes were a thing that became insanely popular in the post War Games sequence of games. We all wanted to be part of cyberspace in one way or another… even though at the time this was a largely fictional destination. Which leads to the question… did William Gibson predict the future in Neuromancer… or did we just build his future because of our love for it. That however is a topic for a completely different day.

All the Movies Rolled Into One

This game is in every way a love song for not only the video games of the 1980s but the movies as well. You start off with a minigun raid on a base form a Helicopter, while Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” plays on the stereo… a song that featured heavily in the pinnacle of 80s scifi action movies… Predator. It just keeps getting better from there. If you took Robocop, Universal Soldier, Ultraforce, and dumped them in a blender with Bad Dudes, Shinobi, and Duke Nukem… you might come close to creating a game like this. The visuals seem like a 1980s movie arcade scene vomited its magenta and red neon all over your screen. I could pick apart the picture above and name a dozen different movie and video game references in this one shot alone.

The Music is So Authentic

The visuals would not be enough to deliver the feeling of travelling back in time… but the music is really where the game scores 110%. Listening to the insane synths gave me flash backs of so many separate movies at once. I mean you could take this game as making fun of all the absolutely over the topness that was the 1980s, but instead they chose to make it some sort of a time capsule. For someone who lived through all of this, it is like a really crazy trip down memory lane. I had moments where I remembered the first time I watched Terminator, the first time I caught Highlander on HBO, the first time I watched Big Trouble In Little China… and Escape from New York. While none of it really is some kind of clone of the original tracks that obviously inspired it… it has the same feeling of sonic dissonance, driving drum machines and power chords.

Neon Archery Should Be A Thing

The weapons not only look great, but they are really functional. There is a sequence not far from the start of the game where like every 80s movie… you are captured and stripped of all of your weapons. Your fearless hero that has named Captain Rex Colt Power… has to get by with nothing but a bow and the ability to use the environmental behemoths… the Blood Dragons to take down a base. Sure the Blood Dragons do a lot of heavy lifting, but I feel like some sort of Neon Green Arrow as I headshot the guards with a bow. Firstly… I would wonder how the hell I could sneak around with glowing arms, and massively glowing weapons. However since everything in this world seems to glow… I am guessing also glowing is a form of camouflage? Whatever the reasoning behind it, things look badass. I mean as a child of the 80s… making something glow neon and putting skulls and spikes on it… is the absolute guarantee for making something awesome.

The Stealth Did Not Piss Me Off

Normally I hate stealth in games, but there is something about this game that simply changing the skins and color palettes immediately makes the default Far Cry 3 engine feel so much better. I think in part it is because I know that if I perform a take down, I get to see the awesome glowing blue wakizashi slice through the enemy and spill light blue glowing cyber fluid. Additionally there is a completely broken and overpowered ability to chain a bunch of take downs together by pressing your movement keys in the direction of the next mob in sequence. So far I have managed to take down 4 at once, but I imagine in later levels this becomes completely ludicrous. I think mostly my problem with stealth in games is the whole idea of a “bloodless” victory. I play these games to kill everything that stands, and when a storyline impedes me from doing this… my brain rebels.

The Cut Scenes are Amazing

Normally I also hate cut scenes of pretty much any kind. However apparently if you take those cut scenes… make them infused with the spirit of the 80s… and hand drawn… apparently I love them? The combination of the arcade game style pixel artwork and cheesy action movie dialog makes the whole experience enjoyable for me. That seems to really be an undercurrent of this game, “taking things Bel hates and making them enjoyable.” One of the more humorous moments is when your stereotypical mouthy partner initiates a tutorial sequence moments after dropping you on the island as a way of screwing with you. So you are forced there to sit through a sequence of tutorial commands… all the while you are yelling at your partner for making you do them. This is an awesome and irreverent way of making you play through the basic commands so that you know how the game controls.

The Game Is Still Farcry 3

Everything about the game is still very much Farcry 3. You move around the world capturing back positions… but instead of doing so from generic badguys that happen to all wear red bandanas… you are doing it from the Omega Force androids. I guess at the end of the day it is all about the packaging. If you have played Farcry 3, you know how the gameplay works. Capture a base, which opens up side missions, which then leads to the next base to capture. The key difference everything from Farcry has been taken to eleven. One of my favorite things is capturing cyber hearts and then using it to lure the Blood Dragons to bases and make them do your work for you. I mean what is cooler than than giant dinosaurs with glowing neon stripes… that have a plasma cannon breath attack? While I gave Farcry 3, a colossal score of 3 Mehs out of Meh… I have to give the Blood Dragon counterpart 5 Kick Asses out of Fucking Awesome.

While I have not really made it terribly far into the game at this point, I know this will be one that I return to and play again quite often. It is the sort of game you need to be in the mood for mindless carnage to be able to enjoy. At this point I have secured the first base, and started working on some of the side missions. Every now and then I come home from work, and just need to kill something. This is the ideal game to reach for, because the objectives pretty much are all “kill all the things”. There is zero subtlety here, but I am not really that subtle of a person, so it works for me. Since this is such a nostalgic ride for me, I find it odd how popular it has been among generations of folks who did not live this experience the first time. Maybe the camp of the 80s is universal and will always appeal. God save us all.

Far Cry 3

January 26, 2014 by Belghast

Steampowered Sunday #3

I guess at this point Steampowered Sunday is a real thing now. I have friends nudging me in certain directions towards games I have in my steam list that I have yet to play. Today I intended to play one game, but wound up playing another as I didn’t really plan ahead and pre-emptively install it. So instead I decided to choose a game I did install over the Christmas break but never got around to playing. One of my good friends snagged Far Cry 3 from my Steam wish list and gifted it to me during the insane Christmas sale. I had always heard really amazing things about the game, so it sounded like something I would enjoy.

Already Installed DirectX Checkbox

Be warned today’s post is going to be far more about the frustrations of trying to play a game… than actually playing one. I had installed Far Cry 3 beforehand, but never actually fired it up. So of course when I went to launch the game I had to suffer through the usual steam bullshit that involves installing every driver and redistributable known to man. You would think that by now steam would have figured out a way to set a machine level flag that says “we’ve made this sucker install directx over 10 times, surely we can take it easy on him now”. On top of the normal bullshit… I had to deal with something I had never seen before called UPlay.

I guess this means that I have never actually played a Ubisoft game on the PC, since this seems to be required to play any of them. For starters it took a truly silly amount of time to download and install, and then it prompted me for a login. Since I didn’t think I had an account, I stubbed out the normal “Belghast” login, only to be told that it already existed. At this point I scratch my head because maybe at some point in the past I did in fact set up UPlay. I notice there is a handy reset password option, so I went through the steps to reset it to my email address.

At no point did it say “dumbass you don’t have an account”, it just said it would be sending an email to reset my password. I waited a truly silly amount of time, refreshing the email window, and apparently locked my account out in the process. However no emails actually arrived even after scanning the bowels of my gmail account, and sifting through half a dozen broken english versions of “your battle.net account is being banned” phishing attempts. Turns out I am guessing I really do not have a UPlay account, either that or it was somehow set up on the PS3 and seemingly irrelevant to my PC. So either this happened or there really are more Belghasts out in the world, as a result I had to set up my account on an old username that used for years.

Gameplaying Time?

So finally I am able to log into the game and launch it. I am greeted by the usual cinematic that I ignore and keep pressing the escape key trying to skip out of as soon as possible. It appears that I am a rich d-bag, and have equally rich and d-bag friends that are amped about spending my trust fund on an island vacation. Apparently also at some point we think it is a great idea to skydive onto a pirate held island… because you know the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney never harmed us… so surely the real thing will just give us candy or something. Color me surprised when we manage to get kidnapped and held for ransom so our equally rich and d-bag parents to pay.

At this point after spending the first hour of the morning trying to get into the game due to the frustration that is UPlay… I am wanting to slaughter everything in sight. Just give me a gun, point me in the direction of a slaver and I will go Rambo on their asses and save the day. Conveniently for me, every single bad guy in the game seems to be wearing the same red shirt and red hat… making it super handy for drawing crosshairs down on them. I love it when bad guys shop at the same place, because I can’t be bothered to think before blowing them away.

But Wait… Stealth Time

There are few things I hate more in the world, than having to sneak around and be stealthy in video games. So when I finally get control of my character what do I get to do? Sneak around and avoid being seen as I play through a super on-rails cinematic. This is one of the things that frustrates me the most about modern games… namely those that started their life originally as a console game. They seem to relish the concept of making you play through a bunch of shit before actually letting you play the game. If I have to follow a predetermined path, while doing a sequence of events that are unchangeable… it is a cinematic. Letting me control my character as I go through the cinematic just makes it all the more unhinging.

For me the ideal intro to a game like this is the Elder Scrolls style… you arrive as a prisoner, someone breaks out out and then bam you are on your merry way causing mayhem. I guess the more I think about it… Oblivion and Skyrim both had some pretty frustrating “follow the dumbass npc” sequences early on… but they felt brief enough and in both cases you got to diverge from the script heavily if you desired. This on the other hand was sneaking about following a path set aside by your macho army brother… all the while you have nothing that you can really do other than throwing some rocks. Man I am a badass at throwing rocks… let me tell you.

Can It Be Fun Time?

So despite your best attempts at avoiding being seen… your dumbass brother runs right into the pistol of the big baddy that you met earlier in the cage. So you get to play a fun game of trying to mash your space bar hard enough to keep your brother from bleeding out. Guess what… he bleeds out regardless of how hard you play whack a mole with your keyboard. In a strange turn of events… instead of just shooting you in the back like you would think the big ultimate bad guy would do…. he decides to release you out into the jungle. So once again I am thinking to myself… man can I finally have control of my character? Can I finally play this game and do shit at my own pace? NOPE!!!

What you get to do now is have a weird sequence as you run through the jungle avoiding bears and helicopters flying over, flashing the tree line with spotlights and trying to shoot you. During this odd sequence you are once again following a predetermined path, and you seem to be able to take damage but never actually die. At one point it told me to bandage myself, which I did… but it really did not seem to have much to do with success or fail. Eventually I followed the path, went out onto a rope bridge… I lost a fight with a helicopter and just like baby Moses got tossed into a river only to get found by a seemingly friendly stranger.

Thanks Three Dog

While he sounds absolutely nothing like him… this dude for some reason reminds me of Three Dog from Fallout 3. So I completely missed his name, because in my head he will forever be Three Dog. Basically he saved you because you have the heart of a warrior… which if funny because up until this point all your character has done is whine constantly about being in the jungle. I seriously expected him to break out the Dante from Clerks “I’m not even supposed to be here today”. Essentially he sets up the premise of the story. The pirate slavers are taking over the island and these mystical tattoo warriors are fighting back. Since you escaped the camp alive, you are going to be their great white hope to save the day. You will learn powers that somehow show up on your tattoo because… magic reasons.

So at this point… I am finally starting to wonder if I get to play the game yet or not. Three Dog gives you some cash and lets you go shopping for a weapon… which basically means you get to buy a pistol… because all you can afford is a pistol. Now he sends you out into the jungle on a few missions… the first of them is to destroy a jammer on a near by radio tower. All in all this goes pretty safely other than the fact there is a static spawn snake that just sits there are the base of the tower. A bullet to the head and you are up the tower and mapping the world. It seems that as you open up the towers you allow the vendors to get new and spiffier stuff.

Capture Objectives

Once the actual game started after wading through what felt like three hours of bullshit… it was pretty fun. Essentially the game play is a lot like Just Cause 2, where you move around the map weakening the presence of the enemy forces in your area. Unlike Just Cause however you actually capture the elements for your blue team. Unlocking new stuff gives you new power-ups in the form of magical tattoo powers, and unlocks new weapons. Additionally in each outpost you capture there is a mission board that gives you hunting and kill missions. Hunting seems extremely important in the game as it allows you to upgrade your backpack… allowing you to carry more weapons and equipment.

The kill missions however seem extremely frustrating. I took the first one, and like always I paid little attention to the mission introduction. Look I am a big dumb monkey, give me a gun and point me in the direction of the enemies and I will destroy them. I however rapidly failed the mission because guess what they wanted me to do… that’s right sneak around and do some ninja stuff, using the nifty new takedown move that Three Dog just taught me. I have a feeling that if this is the case… I will likely avoid these entirely because like I said before… stealth is not a thing that Belghasts do best.

Will It Blend?

All in all the game really is pretty fun, once they actually let you play it. This game would have been so much better had they just created a simple reason for you to escape and let you pick up from the moment you get rescued by Three Dog without having to suffer through the horrible on-rails pseudo game play. Hell I feel like it would have been better had your parachute just landed you in the middle of the native camp, and they simply told you that your family was captured. Bam instant call to action, and instant adventure time. If you can suffer through two hours of crap, then the game is pretty fun, or maybe you don’t dislike the modern on-rails psuedo-cinematic as much as I do.

In either case it is worth a play through, so long as you don’t end up paying much for the game. This is definitely not going to be in the same league for me as Skyrim, Bioshock, Dishonored or even Just Cause 2. However it is still pretty fun and I like the map control aspect of the gameplay. I just wish there was more direct action early on that let me run amok and cause mayhem. Granted you have to understand that I have not played Far Cry 2 either, I have only actually played the first one. In that game you pretty much dropped straight into the action, and I was expecting the same from Far Cry 3. I figured sooner or later I would give a review that I didn’t just absolutely gush over the game like I did about Hammerwatch and to a lesser extent Steamworld Dig. I give Far Cry 3… 3 Mehs out of Meh.

2013 Retrospective

January 1, 2014 by Belghast

Grand Experiment in Review

2012 was an extremely horrible year for me and at least professionally I would rank it as quite possibly the worst year I have ever had. I would put it as worse than the year I was out of work for six months after the dotcom crash. On September 11th 2012 my company suffered what they thought was a network attack, that only later the security guy pulled his head out of his ass and realized it was a regularly scheduled security scan… that he himself authorized. The results of this was a massive overreaction that caused me and my team to spend the rest of the year and a good chunk of the beginning of this year rebuilding damned near everything that touched the web. Why did we have to do this? Because they quite literally pulled the servers out of the racks and sent them to the FBI, leaving us next to nothing to work off of.

So next to that year, this year has seemed like an absolute dream. However it has been more than that for me. 2013 has been a year of personal growth and exploring new things. In April when I finally pulled my head above water after the “faux” security incident, I really wanted to make a break back into blogging. I fell off of the planet shortly after the security event and simply could not bring myself to write about anything. Coming back I devised what I called a “grand experiment”, namely to blog each and every day even if I didn’t think I had much to write about. At this point there are 237 posts categorized as “The Grand Experiment”, and without fail I have blogged every day even when it was a struggle to do so.

Has the experiment worked? Well functionally yes I have managed to blog every day, but more importantly has it provided an interesting stream of content? Quite honestly I don’t know. Most of the time I feel like I am a little kid writing to a make believe audience. When I talk to someone who mentions something I have written… I am always shocked. I feel like no one actually reads my stuff, that I am mostly just writing it for my own benefit. People seem to enjoy what I write, and I have a regular stream of readers… but I will never have the type of audience that the bigger bloggers have. I am just too rough around the edges for that sort of thing. For the most part I am happy with the results of a year of blogging and my long-term goal is to make it at least one full year of posts without pause. That of course will be up April 26th of 2014, which seems like it is far in the future right now. However I don’t see myself losing steam at any point soon.

A Healthier Me

Another big change in my life over the course of 2013 is that I am considerably lighter. In March my wife and I began to shift the way we relate to food. I say it in terms like that because really we have completely changed our relationship to food as a whole. To say we went on a diet doesn’t really encompass the level of change. Diets are about the short term, but we wanted to make permanent and long-term changes in the way we ate. Namely we focused on trying to find a new and sustainable way to live. At this point I am 70 lbs smaller and have hit a bit of a plateau over the last month. However the fact that I survived both Thanksgiving and Christmas without breaking that plateau makes me happy enough.

My wife on the other hand continues to lose at a steady pace and is now down roughly 60 lbs. At some point I need to get super serious again, as I have become lax of late. However the current weight seems to be a place I can comfortable stay without any real intervention. I have reached my goal and it is time for me in this new year to refocus myself and set a new one. I will never be a small man, I come from a long line of really big people. I am however happy enough being able to say I am a “smaller” man. The thing I was not expecting to be honest were the health benefits. As a whole I am far healthier than I was a year ago, and the primary benefit is that my Asthma that I have struggled with my entire life… and have even been hospitalized for… is really a mere nuisance these days. I can go months on a single inhailer, and that is not a thing I have ever been able to do in my life.

Professional Growth

In the last year I have grown more into the role of the manager of my group. I have learned to delegate more, which is something I have always struggled with in my life. I was good at accepting assignments, but never very good at passing them on to my troops, instead trying to take them all on myself. My team is pretty amazing and I would be lost without them. I guess in some small way I have learned to have more faith in them, and trust that they will do as much diligence with an assignment as I would have. As a result I have shifted more into the architect role for my group and part-time project manager and full-time traffic cop. Making sure all of the assignments are going to the right places and all seeing at least some progress.

We usually have 50-60 active projects for a team of three people. So it involves lots of juggling. Various forces in my company want me to move up into a permanent management position. However I simply do not want to distances myself from the “real work” enough to take them. Additionally right now I am responsible for three extremely highly functional people, and I don’t think I could cope with being put over less functional people that I would some how have to whip into shape. I am not really great with confrontations, and as a result I think I would flounder. Either that or it would be similar to me as a raid leader, and I would turn into a real asshole. For the time being I think I am happy with where I am and what I am doing.

I Wrote A Novel

One of the things I have always wanted to do in my life was to write a novel. I made several false attempts at various times over the years but never could seem to push myself to do it. This November I joined the NaNoWriMo event, and over the course of the month knocked out my first novel. I have no idea if it is actually any good, because honestly I have not even read it since finishing it up. I plan in the new year to tear it asunder as I edit it, and fix any issues. However regardless if it completely sucks, I have accomplished a goal. I managed to write a novel, and that is a thing most people can’t say about themselves. I didn’t do it to get famous, or be published, I did it mostly just to prove to myself that I could.

The weird thing about it is, November seems like a lifetime ago. The whole concept of writing 1500 words per night was just absolutely draining. My entire life revolved around that novel for those thirty days, which is honestly longer than I have stuck with anything like that in my life. More than anything I feel like it was a venue of personal growth. I did a thing I never thought I could, and I did so in a methodical way in which it felt like success was assured from the moment I started. Sure I faltered a few times along the way, and there were a few days I didn’t write a blessed thing. However I kept moving forward towards the eventual 50,000 word count goal and I achieved it. I think more than anything I am proud of this accomplishment from 2013.

A Year of Gaming

This is a gaming blog afterall, so during 2013 I played a lot of games. I played way more games than I can ever manage to remember, but I will try and run down a few of the big ones. The list of major titles is as follows.

Oddly enough I am beginning this new year not entirely differently than I began the last year. January 2013 I was still involved in the launch of Mists of Pandaria, and it was not until April that I really began to distance myself from that game entirely. World of Warcraft and I have this love/hate relationship. I get frustrated with it so much, because it seems that they always seem to take the most short sighted solutions to problems, and there are so many games that there that do various things it does…. so much better. However as a total package I feel like the game is unbeatable. It offers the most good things in one package. The realization for me however after my 2+ years of absence from being serious about the game is that it is not about the game at all. World of Warcraft is about the people playing it, and I had missed the ragtag group of people known as House Stalwart immensely.

The game I probably played the most often during the year however was Rift. I want to love rift so badly, the promise of the game is really great. The problem is it just lacks something that I can’t quite put my finger on. It is a technically superior game in every aspect, but it is like it lacks a cohesive narrative that makes me care about the world every single day. The dragons were a thing I thought I could get behind. But now that we have systematically killed each of them off, I cannot say in a single sentence what the world of Rift is. I think that might be the problem, there is no one clear narrative to the game. You cannot say “this game is” and have even half of the people agree on it. I still play it occasionally and there is still an incarnation of House Stalwart there that Psynister and Fynralyl are keeping alive. I thank them so much for being there, but I just can’t seem to care about the game right now. I am sure at some point I will again.

Final Fantasy was another major force for the year. This was a game I never intended to like because really I feel like me and Japanese RPGs had a messy divorce quite some time ago. I had a group of friends actively wanting to play it, so against my better judgment I went along for the ride. What I found however was a really well crafted narrative and dungeon experience. If I could have kept experiencing new bits of immersive content, I would have likely stuck around. However once you reached the end of the game, it was exactly that… the end. All paths lead to massive amount of grinding, and for whatever reason… while I can stomach grinding all day long in World of Warcraft… I could not stomach the particular FFXIV brand of grinding. Namely I blame this on the overall lack of meaninful drops in the game. If I have a chance of getting something cool while killing mobes, no matter how remote the chance… it feels exciting to me each time I open a loot window. There was nothing that could drop from mobs in the world that I would ever care about. Additionally gearing up to get to a point where we could raid, was just not a bridge I was willing to cross.

Games for 2014

There has been a game I have been in super secret closed door testing since February. I cannot name the game by name, but I have to say I am still extremely excited about it even after most of a year testing it. I have watched the game grow from something that felt polished to something that really is amazingly rich and polished. I don’t think I will quit WoW this time for another game, because I have set down some pretty solid roots there again. However I know I will also be playing this game, at the very least two to three nights a week. It is probably the least wow-like game I have played in a long while, and because of that I feel like there is room in my heart for both games to have a unique space.

Past that I am really not certain what 2014 will hold. I know that I am not really interested enough to purchase a PS4 or an XBox One, so I think I will be exiting the console mainstream once again. I am mostly a PC gamer to be honest, and since my gameloft has been taken over by my wife I am okay with not having access to the consoles. More than anything I am looking forward to the various stores beginning to liquidate their stocks of PS3 and XBox 360 games, so I can pick up the titles I always wanted to play but didn’t have the desire to pay for. Additionally there are still a lot of things on the DS/3DS that I want to play, and I am looking forward to picking up the newest Zelda game. I am sure there will be a number of surprises along the way, games that catch my fancy enough to deserve lots of blog posts.

I hope that 2014 will be as positive force in my life as 2013 has been. Additionally I hope each and every one of you out there can say the same. My friend @AlternativeChat has declared 2014 the “Year of Faff”, and I am down with this notion. I think we all need to learn how to faff about in the game worlds we are in, because stopping and smelling the roses is the only real way I know to break the cycle of burnout. I have tried my best to embrace this concept, and hope to continue to do so in the year to come. More than anything, I feel like I am sick of jumping games every three months, and I get the sense that the gaming world as a whole is somewhat sick of that as well. I hope we can each embrace our own faff, whatever that might mean.

Zombie Infestations

September 29, 2013 by Belghast

Black Helicopters

This morning is a bizarre morning here in Tulsa. I woke up groggily to the sounds of my wife taking a shower, which was essentially a signal to myself that I needed to get up as well. So I rolled out of bed, showered, threw on some clothing and stepped outside with the purpose of getting some food. What greeted me was this eerie fogscape that felt like it was straight out of The Secret World. The sun was up already, which is usually the death of any fog in the area, but this fog seemed to be persisting.

By the time I had gotten to QuikTrip for my normal morning breakfast of a sausage roll… it almost seemed like it was getting worse. As I pulled in, I noticed that the building was ringed in Crows, with a little semi-circle of them gathered on the grass. This definitely did not help the odd feeling… and the last thing I wanted to do was go step into the middle of the semi-circle. Pretty sure if I had a Revenant would have spawned… and I had left my shotgun at home. So I made it home safely, and nothing really far from the norm happened… but the world definitely feels like it would be flooded with Draugr.

Zombie Infestations

Yesterday I played quite a bit more State of Decay, and since Marcus was in a tired state, I had to switch things up and break out Maya Torres. One of my biggest frustrations with this game and Dead Island as well is the whole “melee weapons break” construct. I have always been a melee centric player, and tend to gravitate playing someone I can beat shit down with. As a result when you throw me into an open world game… I tend to gravitate towards the melee weapons. One one exception to this is the fallout franchise… where I tend to stick with the combat shotgun indefinitely.

So as a result of this fetish of mine… my entire gaming experience seems to be a search for new melee weapons. This is not really kosher when it comes to the flow of State of Decay. Immediately you think… open world game… explore all the things and gather up the loot. While this is a viable play mechanic… the world is not a static thing. There is a whole meta game going on behind the scenes of trying to keep the morale of your survivors up and protect them from the badness outside the church gates. In my search for things to beat zombies with… I noticed a series of messages showing up announcing that such and such location was infested.

I didn’t think much about this at first… but the infestation kept spreading to a new location. Once there got to be three infestations up… my survivors started to lose morale. So I had to go on a mission of cleaning out each of the houses. This was not the easiest task in the world… because each and every one had a half dozen to a dozen zombies in it… and at least one or two of the red eyed “super” zombies. Each time I cleared out an infestation I got back the lost morale and then some.

I Do Bad Things

The coding of State of Decay is frustratingly brilliant at times. The rule we have learned from watching the various zombie movies… is that while zombie eyesight is pure shit… their hearing is pretty amazing. Gunshots draw more zombies to investigate the noise… and this mechanic annoyingly well. Essentially if you decide to go out guns a blazing… you will have to fight an endless string of zombies. I know eventually you can attach a muzzle suppressor to dampen the noise but I have yet to find one… or figure out how to do it. The above shot is the beginning of my foolish attempt to shred a horde of zombies.

During the gameplay there will be roaming hordes of zombies that will wander around town and have the potential of attacking your base. There was one heading up the road towards home… and I got radio’d about it while out and about. I finally managed to kill enough that I could run into the safety of the base…. which kept them from spawning more. Yes I know I am abusing the shit out of that mechanic… but I was running out of ammunition by the time I had taken down a handful of them. I got a huge morale bonus for taking out a zombie horde, but it greatly hurt my ammo stock and weapon durability doing it.

The biggest problem I have with gunplay in State of Decay… is that I still suck at aiming a weapon with a controller. I feel like I will be far more confident sniping zombies in the head… once the mouse and keyboard controls are available. Right now SoD PC is a direct port of the xbox version, and as a result there are some goofy graphical glitches at times and you have to rely entirely upon your controller. The gameplay mechanics work well for a controller, and the game performs a smooth 60 fps for me at max graphics.

Bard is Born

Yesterday I also played quite a bit of Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn. Since I got my main to 50… and I am the second in the guild to do so… I figured I would work on my Bard a bit as the others caught up. I managed to take it from 26 to 33, and at level 30 I completed the sequence of quests to pick up the Bard job. The odd thing about it… there is very little change in the way the class feels between Archer and Bard. With the Warrior and the Dragoon… in both cases I picked up a massive quality of life ability, whereas with the bard you pick up an ability that makes you more attractive to other players…. but not much of anything you can really use yourself.

It feels as though the players have congealed at the upper levels, and as a result the lower level FATE grind spots have become more sane. I had quite a bit of fun in Costa Del Sol doing the various fates there and managed to get extremely good contribution which has pushed me up in level quite a bit. If I play this morning I will likely go back to Costa and work on getting to 35 so I can do Sunken Temple. I think we have a back of guild members that are at that level. I know Lethbridge still needs Haukke which I can do with him now… that was my ulterior motive for leveling yesterday.

Additionally I really need to work on my pugilist to get him caught up with archer. That way I can get rid of a ton of low level leather gear without fear of it being needed by someone else. The inventory management meta game has become a real thing for me, with both of my retainers almost completely full… and my gear store hovering around 20 per slot. I need to push up all my melee classes so that I can free up room by deconstructing it. I am still having quite a bit of fun with the game, but I am really hoping they open up some questing options in the upcoming patches.

Wrapping up

Well it is that time, and I need to wrap this up. I really need to clean the house because it is a pit… and I think it is adversely effecting the moods of both myself and my wife. Also it would be nice to start the work week with a clean house, and anything I do today will save me scrambling Monday night to gather the trash. I hope you all have had a great weekend, and I hope that the start of the week is equally great.