Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Lamentation of Outriders

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Good Morning Folks. I’ve been spending a bit of time over the last few days thinking about a game that could have been, but never really was… Outriders. I reinstalled it recently and it is still an enjoyable looter shooter experience, with its roots in the fundamentals of ARPG build diversity and design. It was the hoped Destiny Slayer that would come along and offer a more interesting gameplay experience. It had some connectivity issues out of the gate as often is the case with most new online games, but it recovered relatively quickly and offered a really enjoyable gameplay loop. Lets talk about some of the high points of the game.

First off it had a pretty freaking long story, at least compared to Destiny or any of its expansions. There was a lot of interesting gameplay wrapped up in that story as well and all of it was repeatable. It became commonplace to grind out your favorite story missions for loot in the endgame. While it told an exceptionally bleak tale that turned off some of my friends, it was a mechanically enjoyable experience from start to finish. It did a good job of easing you into combat and giving you progressively more difficult encounters as you learned the ropes of how to use your new powers. The male voice acting was less than amazing, but the female voice actor was pretty freaking great.

The class design and the powers that came with it were extremely fun. I spent most of my time playing the Devastator which uses Earth powers to “devastate” the enemies. My build of choice was to use Earthquake as an opening salvo, Tremor as a lifetap aura or a sort for everything fighting up against me, and Impale to lock down the biggest enemies while mopping up the weaker ones. The game had a talent point system that allowed you to really accentuate the abilities that you wanted to focus on, letting you lean into a specific gameplay style. For me it was all about being tanky and being able to take a lot of damage while dishing it back out in the form of elemental attacks. Other gameplay styles leaned into stealthy fast killers that flit across the battlefield or maybe being the best sniper you could possibly be. Classes had an identity and this was supported by custom gear sets and such making you feel like you were able to lean into a particular fantasy.

Then there were the weapons that not only looked cool but had some wild unique abilities on them. The craft system allowed you to replace any one node on your weapon with any other node you had unlocked to that point allowing you to craft some wild combinations. What I liked the most about this is that it was pretty easy for me to keep using the same sort of weapon over and over as I leveled through the game because I could keep bringing forward the attributes that I enjoyed the most. I imprint heavily on specific weapons in this sort of game and the fact that I could keep using them was huge for me. This is my big problem with a game like Halo where you end up having to spend most of your time using random trash weapons rather than the really good ones.

With later updates, there was a full cosmetic system that allowed you to swap up what your character looked like. This included weapons appearance swaps so if you had a specific loadout that you needed for your build, but you really liked the look of another weapon you could change that up and run around with whatever you liked. I personally with with a cowboy thing going on with a duster and everything. I think more than anything I appreciated how well the game played and how all of the cosmetics were unlocked through playing the campaign and for completing achievements. That said this is absolutely a game I would have happily paid for microtransactions in similar to how I happily pay for them in Path of Exile.

Now let’s talk about the downfall of Outriders. Prior to the launch of the game, the two biggest talking points were that it would have zero microtransactions and was “Not A Live-Service” which is a weird message for a game that required online connectivity and also was being touted as something that could compete with Destiny. Looter Shooters need content updates to keep bringing players back. You can look at the SteamCharts for Destiny or even The Division and see that there is a pattern. When new content is added to the game, players come back… there is a surge in player numbers and a slow drop off in numbers as players feel like they have gotten their fill and move on to other games. This is how this sort of game survives. Path of Exile has quite possibly the most predictable pattern each time a new league launches, there is a spike, and then after a few months a valley.

The game as a whole was reviewed reasonably well considering there were active campaigns attempting to review bomb the game during the first few weeks of connectivity issues. There were a lot of publications that reviewed this as an overwhelmingly positive game. The biggest concern that kept being raised however was whether or not the game was going to be supported in the long term. The constant drum beak of “Not A Live-Service” set up a bit of a paradox. Players engage in these sorts of games now as live services, as experiences to be revisited every few months each time a new drip of content is released… but as this game is reportedly a “finished product” it was setting up a scenario where it just could not sustain the players necessary to make things like matchmaking function.

Ultimately that is what we saw when it came to concurrent player numbers. There was an impressive peak of just over 125k players, and then by month three a constant fall off down to around 1000 players just before the first major patch, and a bump back to around 10k shortly after that. Then again a a bleed of players down to 1000 players again before some pre-expansions patches that introduced new things to the game and another bump of around 12k players with the release of Worldslayer dropping down to under 1000 players starting in November 2022 and continuing in that state to this point where at the time of pulling these numbers there was a 24 peak of just over 300 players. Without the rhythm of a live service game, there just wasn’t anything to glue the players to this game.

I will always be wistful of what might have been with this game. This game is my new Hellgate London, a game that I greatly enjoyed… felt was far better than the other offerings that were available… but just was not supported and died an early death as a result. The main difference is that I can still revisit Outriders and enjoy it, and at least so far its corpse has not been crudely reanimated by a KMMO company. Outriders is still a damned fun game, but it would be a better game if people actually played it. I go through periods where I reinstall it, and play a bit of it… get my fill… and then wander off again because there is literally no reason to keep playing it after that point. The devs announced to the community/influencer groups in March 2023 that they were not releasing any more content for the game. So it is effectively a “dead” game at this point.

This is a case where you can get all of the fundamentals of this sort of game right, and release a technically proficient and at times phenomenal game experience but if you don’t have the follow-through support the game will flounder. The looter shooter and ARPG genres are all about nailing a release cadence and by publically announcing from the start that there was no “Live-Service” they sort of shot themselves in the foot. There are just certain genres that NEED to be a Live-Service with releases after the sale in order to survive. We’ve seen this backlash against that sort of game, but mostly in genres that did not need to have a cosmetic shop or carefully timed content drops. We are currently dealing with one of those games right now with the Suicide Squad, which everyone seems to wish was just another Arkham game… but instead attempted to be something akin to the Avengers.

Outriders though had everything aligned to be a great game that would grow over time… it had all of the hooks that could have supported a reasonable microtransaction shop in order to fund the development. Instead, it gets added to the list of games that should have worked… but never quite did. I will always lament the death of Anthem in a similar vein, but Outriders was way more technically competent than Anthem ever was and still could not quite make it. All of this said, if People Can Fly came out tomorrow and said that they were making an Outriders 2, and this time it would be given all the support that the first game deserved… I would be there and ready to go. That however is never going to happen because I think Square Enix has a bad taste in its mouth over how Outriders performed, and the IP lives in that murky territory of having too many cooks in the kitchen that would need to sign off on a sequel.

Anyways! I will always have a special place in my heart for this game. If you’ve never played it, it is probably super cheap on every platform it was released on. It is worth a gander because it is doing a lot of interesting things.

Losing a Player House

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Whelp friends… I screwed up. November, December, and January were exceptionally busy months for me. At some point during that time I was only saved from the repo man by my friend Sol who happened to pop into my house and see that it was set for demolition. She unfortunately could not save me this time, and last night someone on Gamepad posted about the monthly routine of logging in and checking on the houses… which prompted a panic moment. I checked the email bound to that account from bed only to find out that my house in Final Fantasy XIV was repossessed on January 15th. So I had screwed up royally and cost myself my “perfect” house as a result. Weirdly I am not as devastated as I thought I would be. The big reason why this happened is that my FFXIV account is bound to an account that I do not check on regularly and apparently went over two months without logging into it.

On some level, my house was an attempt to capture the magic of a specific time and place when the game was super engaging for me. Our original Free Company house was Mists number 13, and when I was able to get that I thought maybe it would unlock an attachment to the game that I had been missing. It did not. Sure I spent a bit of time obsessing over housing details, but quickly I abandoned that project for more exciting things and my poor house sat for a year with only the most sparse decorations. I thought maybe it would ground me into the community… but in truth, the neighborhood was in was pretty dead. On the day a bunch of us got houses it was pretty hopping, but in each return visit, I saw pretty much no one.

On some level buying a house was like trying to buy my way back to a place and time shrouded in the deep past. This was taken from our old FC house, and our old Neighborhood… with the lively folks that were so community-oriented that we had a neighborhood linkshell. Truth be told… of that old crew of players the only one that I ever talk to on a regular basis is Ayla who is the miquote pictured above. Most of the other folks in that neighborhood are no longer even on Cactuar and have migrated off to other servers. Our Free Company also is nowhere near as active as it used to be. So the game just does not feel the same. I thought maybe owning the same plot of land would rekindle some of those feelings and it maybe did for a short period of time… but not long enough to keep me active.

The other truth is that I have changed. I am just not as interested in MMORPGs as I once was. Recently I returned to World of Warcraft after over two years away from it… and while I had quite a bit of fun for a few weeks I am already on my way out of that game as well. I leveled to the cap, then decided that there really wasn’t anything else that I wanted to do and wound up bouncing hard. This has been the case with FFXIV and the post-Stormblood expansions. I show up… have a lot of fun leveling through the main story quest, and then bounce shortly after hitting the level cap and doing some rudimentary gearing. I am not sure why I changed, but I most definitely did. So while I could be bitter about losing my housing plot and the money that I laid out in buying stuff for it… but in truth, I just can’t seem to muster much ire other than a “well shit”.

Truth be told… I think I am okay with this. Having my own housing plot really didn’t bring me much more happiness than having unfettered access to the Free Company plot does. The biggest change is that I stopped seeing a lot of the familiar faces from Shriogane that I had come to know, like the folks who lived across the street from our Free Company. I had thought if I ever lost the house I would decide that I was “officially done” with the game, but in truth, I am finding it doesn’t really matter that much one way or the other. I am way more attached to my Hideout in Path of Exile than I ever was to the housing plot that I purchased a little over a year ago. Maybe whoever buys the plot will be happier with it than I was. Maybe it will be the act that binds them to the game and makes the feel part of something. Maybe a fledgling Free Company will use it as a base of operations for many fun adventures. I am okay with letting it go, mostly because I have to be. It was my own damned fault and my own lack of focus that caused it.

Rescuing Tradesfolk

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I guess I am digging into Enshrouded as a primary game… after saying that I was mostly casually playing it on the side. The Path of Exile league is winding down a bit, and we are a ways out from the launch of Last Epoch so I am finding myself gravitating towards this game more and more. Last night I pretty much only played it and as a result made a ton of progress. They recently added a hide HUD option in the menu, but I really wish it was something that I could hotkey quickly as the game can generate some really breathtaking vistas. That is a general comment though, because I wish ALL games had a hide UI button that was easily hotkeyed or better yet… have the ability to configure in-game screenshots that by default hide the UI. I don’t remember which game had that but I loved it.

Mostly I have been focused on collecting the various tradespeople from around the map so that I can flesh out my trade hall. At the moment I have unlocked the Blacksmith, Alchemist, Hunter, Carpenter, and Farmer… with Carpenter probably being the most difficult to get to. I’ve been using the waypoint tower that I unlocked as a way of gliding down toward various map objectives and at least getting part of the way there. I’ve also been using the fact that I could craft flame altars cheaply as a method of creating a waypoint network to get around the map quickly. Unfortunately, I seem to have reached the point where I can no longer place down any more of those. I am not sure if that number goes up as I upgrade my primary altar or if it is a fixed number of “bases” you can have around the world.

I guess I will have to reassess where I have placed them. Unfortunately, I built a bit of a base near the one furthest to the west, so that one is probably stuck where it is currently. The others are just a flame altar without anything build around them, and in theory I really need to move one of those to the north. That is the direction I need to explore now because apparently that is where I can find clay. I need clay in order to craft the Kiln that the Carpenter is requesting, which in theory should unlock additional stuff that I can craft. I also have a slew of fetch quests for the various tradespeople that I already have, and in theory, should probably focus on those now to unlock additional recipes. I also need to find a more reliable source of tar than just crafting campfires and letting them burn out.

I veered off the Tank path a bit in my character build in order to pick up some utility abilities. Double Jump is something that pretty much makes EVERY game better, and Enshrouded is not an exception to that rule. In theory, going forward I would probably rush that ability because it makes that much difference while trying to traverse dangerous areas. I think Double Jump is probably as far into the Survivor tree as I want to go for the moment and there are still a number of beefy abilities in the Tank tree that I want to pick up. I like that I can pretty easily respec my character completely by spending some of the runic coins that you get off monsters and from salvaging weapons. One of my bases is next to the spot where a legendary sword can be obtained, so in theory, if I ever get short I can just go there and keep looting that sword to salvage it.

Speaking of weapons… I’ve picked up a number of very nice items along my travels. In truth, the only one of these I can say for certain where it comes from is the Wailing Blade, which started a neat dialog with the Smith because apparently he crafted it. I found it originally because this video showed up in my YouTube feed, and in truth, it is pretty straightforward to get early on and I leaned on it heavily for some of the harder areas I have been adventuring in. I am not sure if the Wand or Bow are from fixed locations because they are named similarly to green or blue quality weapons, so I think I might have simply hit the jackpot there. One thing that I did not appreciate early on is just how good wands are in this game. They auto-target things… making them super freaking easy to kite mobs while plinking away at them. The range is really short so if you want to snipe… you still need a bow but once you equip your bow in the ranged slot you can access it from whatever weapon you have equipped currently by holding down Q.

Other than that I have been starting to do some renovations on my keep. I am trying to make it a bit less “big generic stone box” so I will likely be spending some time trying to improve the outside now. The main crafting hall works pretty well and I ended up replacing chunks of the wall with wood just to vary the appearance a bit. The little annex I built off the side was originally just a way to have an entrance on the other side of the building but I’m contemplating closing it in and opening it up to the inside and turning it into a treasure vault. I just unlocked magic boxes when I rescued the Carpenter and those allow you to draw from those boxes automagically when you are crafting in your base. So in theory I am going to want a room with nothing but a ton of boxes in there, potentially one box for every item type. Having it off the room where I spawn into the keep would be extra handy because it would mean depositing loot is pretty straightforward.

I’ve also spent a bit of time trying to craft out some living quarters and something resembling a proper bedroom. Most of this was to get my comfort buff up a bit, but also because it felt like I needed something down here. I am looking forward to whenever I can craft some bookcases or something like that. I just unlocked the ability to make rugs so I am probably going to focus on getting one of those which I think will bump up that buff a bit more. All in all I find myself going through phases of serious crafting and other phases where I am adventuring. I need to figure out where best to park some of my flame altars to make farming resources a bit easier.

Enshrouded Early Thoughts

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We seem to be living in a bit of a renaissance of “survival” games, and I am going to use that term loosely here. If you hate combat and want to do the comfy squishy parts of a survival game you have something like Palia. If you were a 90s kid and are obsessed with catching them all, then you have PalWorld. Then there is Enshrouded which is a bit of a harder nut to crack when it comes to actually giving you the elevator pitch. What if Minecraft but with solid combat and an actual point beyond the crafting? What if Valheim but with a clear quest progression system and actual NPCs? While most people seem to be talking about PalWorld, I was drawn to the lesser-known new survival game because what I had seen of it interested me. It seemed like it was drawing some upon classical MMORPG roots with a fixed well-designed world, quest progression throughout it, and something akin to a proper loot chase.

So the quick summary of this world is that the general populace was tempted by this magical drug called the Elixir, and dug too deep rending the world seeking it. These deep wells unleashed upon the land a curse in the form of the Shroud, which is a fog that spreads in the low-lying areas of the world and becomes fatal after too much exposure. The ancient people created the forge born… and I am not entirely certain if we are a created being or just someone who has been locked away for safekeeping. Whatever the case we are spat out of this weird cauldron-looking thing and have to make our way through the world with nothing more than a crappy pair of pants. This starts the normal sequence of events you always do in a survival game where you collect some twigs to cobble together tools and then start harvesting ever-increasingly more difficult items to build the very best of everything.

The world is divided into essentially two different areas. There are the highlands that are not impacted by the Shroud, or at least not as impacted. These serve as the relatively safe area, and it is on of these that you are prompted to build your first base. From here you can harvest the basic resources needed to get started… wood, stone, assorted plant matter, fur, and food. You are also near a number of ruined former towns where you can start to scavage things like cloth and metal bits. All of this is in theory to prepare you to delve down into the shrouded areas and get more rare and dangerous resources. The game has a day/night cycle and during the night… some hostile things spawn in like these weird shroud-infected zombie things. They are slow-moving and relatively easy to deal with and honestly serve as a great resource for dropped weapons and such.

Then there are the shrouded areas, which are more dangerous to traverse and generally have some sort of visual occlusion in the form of an ever-present fog. You are usually going to encounter more of the shroud zombies here but also might encounter more difficult things as well. When you enter a shroud it starts a timer which you can see at the top of the above screenshot. When it ticks down you end up taking fatal damage and dying. When you die you end up dropping a tombstone of a sort and lose some of your resources. I am not entirely certain what the line in the sand is for what gets dropped versus what stays on your character. It does not seem to impact your actual gear loadout, but does seem to impact a lot of the resources you have gathered. You have to find your way back to your tombstone to loot everything. One interesting thing of note… I died underground and my tombstone was spawned up on the surface. Not sure if this is intentional to make it easier to gather your stuff or just a bug given that this is an early access game, but I am hoping it was intentional.

I’ve heard this referred to as the “Dark Souls of Survival Games” which is a bit off to be honest. Dark Souls means a lot of things to a lot of different people. For me at least it is “Dark Souls” about challenging combat and some sort of mechanic that trades healing your character back to full for respawning the entire world as a result. At this point, I have taken down the first boss but it was over the weekend and I did not think to take any screenshots. Instead, I am linking to a gameplay video of someone fighting it. The only comparison to Dark Souls is that when the enemy hits you… it deals a LOT of damage, like a disproportionate amount of damage. However, you have a bunch of different ways to heal yourself back up to full health in the form of bandages which are cheap and easy to make, potions that are rarer but more impactful, and the ability to have three food buffs ticking on your character that greatly increase your natural health regeneration. Instead of Dark Souls, the combat feels more like New World did when that game was new and before we had really good gear to soak damage. Anyways the above video shows a bunch of combat if you are interested.

One of the more interesting things about Enshrouded is that it has a proper MMORPG-style talent tree rather than a more sparse tech tree as found in the majority of survival games. There is a sphere grid of a sort with different paths of evolution and the freedom to go down multiple at the same time to sort of create your own mangled multiclass. I know absolutely nothing about their magical system but I can craft wands and saves and have even seen a spell drop… so it seems to “exist” but “finger wiggling” is not my forte. I am doing what I always do and focusing down the tank tree which at least currently seems to be focused on parrying an attack to stun the target and then follow up with a massive “merciless attack”. Mostly I just want to “embiggen” my health poor and armor stats to make combat a bit more forgiving.

The progression of the game seems to focus on two things. Firstly saving NPCs from shrouded areas or from hostile camps, and then setting them up in your base to allow you to craft better items. The second is that you can destroy Shroud Roots which will remove the shroud of areas of the world opening where you can more safely travel. You can also build up your flame altar which allows you to have a bigger buildable area in the world and allows you to spend more time in the shroud before taking fatal damage. There are also other bits and bobs that you can craft that make your base more “comfortable” which gives you a much better-rested bonus while you are out in the world. It seems there is also a bit of a “Metroidvania” system in the game where certain machines allow you to unlock access to new areas of the game. For example, I have built a glider and a grappling hook, both of which allow me access to areas that were not previously.

Another thing that I find interesting about the game is that your character progression is separate from your world state. I’ve been spending most of my time playing privately, but I can flip over to “host” mode if I want to let a friend of mine join me in my world. I can also join a public server that has a persistent world state or even host a dedicated private server. I’ve not done any of these things, but when I flip over into “host” mode it seems to adopt the current state of my world, and my guess is if I joined someone else’s game I would be living in their world for the time being only bringing over what I had in my inventory. Mostly I dig the flexibility with these various options because when I want to progress on my own I can, but also then later join up with friends to do shenanigans.

I’ve only played about six hours of the game so far, but I have a spiffy “Keep on the Borderlands” to show for it. Resources seem pretty plentiful, to be honest, and everything respawns pretty quickly so you can keep harvesting the same bushes, rocks, and trees… or just start digging a hole into the ground looking for stone that way. That is my own real complaint so far is that the excavation systems seem to be a bit “squishy” and my brief foray into trying to dig out a basement was less than successful as I kept having to stop to rest after depleting my stamina. If you have tried to dig into the ground in Valheim you would be familiar with this problem and maybe that is just a thing with voxel terrain. Instead, I closed in my bottom floor and just built up allowing me to still have a basement feel.

A lot of the early game has been a progression through the normal tech tress of improving your gear. Right now I have a full set of metal gear that I have crafted which was opened up by saving the Blacksmith and then building a Charcoal Kiln and Forge. I had to spend quite of time going to a nearby hostile scrapper village in search of metal scraps which I then turned into sheets of metal to craft into armor. You can kit yourself in a full set of cloth gear pretty quickly, then I progressed into fur armor, and finally metal. My hope is that as I go forward it will start looking a little less haphazard and broken down as it does currently.

There are also world drops that follow the standard blue, purple, orange progression scheme. For example, I got this purple sword to drop when I took out the first world boss, and I was able to spend down this runic coin currency with the blacksmith in order to level up the weapon and unlock a bunch of bonus traits. You tend to get those coins from killing zombies and cultists so you could in theory farm up enough of them to fully kit out your gear. I had gathered enough by the time I found this weapon to fully unlock it, but it burned through most of my reserves of that currency. In theory if you wanted to always have the best of everything unlocked you would probably need to make a concerted effort to go farming.

Right now I am pretty happy with the game, but I am also not really paying it as my “main” game yet. I am always somewhat hesitant to dive too deeply into an early-access title. I remember going super hard with Valheim and essentially burning myself out before a lot of the later features even went into the game. I don’t really want to do that with Enshrouded, and quite honestly at some point I should pick back up Valheim and see what all has changed. This is probably something I am going to quietly play on the side and if some of my friends end up picking it up, I might dive in to see how the group play works. Right now it seems like the game has a lot of promise though. For now, I think I am staying out of the Palworld discourse because Pokemon were never really my thing. This, however, lands firmly in my wheelhouse.