Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Microsoft Bethesda Show 2022

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Good Morning Folks! I’ve found myself weirdly checked out most of the time during this “Not E3” period. Normally this is my Christmas catalog as I drool over all of the trailers of games to come. However as the various shows have gone whizzing by, I am having trouble even catching up on the news. One thing that is not this way however was the Microsoft and Bethesda show that took place on Sunday afternoon. This show I absolutely watched live and with much anticipation. Microsoft has uniquely placed itself through acquisitions as being the arbiter of good stuff for the coming years. There is part of me that is deeply troubled that a single company owns all of these franchises. Then there is another part of me that loves that I can start a game on my Xbox Series X and then continue it on my PC… and maybe even get in some playtime from bed on my phone via XCloud all without missing a beat.

Another thing that I love is the GamePass ecosystem because it gives me easy access to a large list of titles that I might have missed otherwise. This is really where XCloud shines for me because it gives me fast streaming access to games with a very low time commitment. While I am laying in bed at night, trying to figure out something to do until sleep claims me… this is often when I hook up my controller and try something out on the phone. It will take a lot of effort to really dislodge me from the Steam ecosystem, but just having games available and ready for me to play… as part of my existing GamePass subscription is a good start. I really dig that they are supporting smaller games in addition to all of the big titles because it means that there is a regular flow of new titles coming into the system. What I do wish is that they would include things like ESO Plus into GamePass to expand the player base of Elder Scrolls Online, or a World of Warcraft sub when the Blizzard purchase completes.

There were a massive number of titles that interested me, so here is a quick run down with some discussion about each.

Free Riot Game Champions

I have to admit this one blew my freaking mind. I don’t play League of Legends all that much anymore, but when I did… I regularly liked trying out new champions. Essentially if you have GamePass you are getting every champion in every Riot game unlocked as part of that subscription. This legitimately makes me very interested in diving back into the game and checking out all of those champions that were released since 2015ish when I last gave the game any attention. Granted I hated playing solo queue, and mostly only really enjoyed bot games… but still had a certain measure of enjoyment doing that. I wonder if Wild Rift supports a controller.

Persona Games

This was another massive mic drop because fans have been begging for a PC release of Persona 5 Royal since the game was released. As part of GamePass you are getting access to Persona 3 Portable, Persona 4 Golden, and Persona 5 Royal on both Xbox consoles and PC. I’ve yet to really beat any of these games and I know that I should really attempt to get into P5R. There is just something about the daily chores section of the game that always kills my interest. I want to experience the story, but don’t want to have to shuffle through the dross.

The Last Case of Benedict Fox

I am extremely interested in this game. It pretty much looked like what you would get if you took Castlevania and took away the vampires and skeletons and instead swapped in elder horrors and void creatures. I love Symphony of the Night and this is giving me DEEP vibes. This is a perfect example of a game that is probably going to fall between the cracks, but absolutely will have new life because folks are going to play it as part of GamePass.

High On Life

Okay, I still unironically love Rick and Morty. This game basically seems like you take the weird as fuck space stuff from that cartoon and make an entire shooter-based video game out of it. The catch is you have talking sentient weapons. This legitimately makes me wonder if someone played Cyberpunk 2077… got Skippy and then thought… let’s make an entire damned game around this. I am absolutely at least going to give it a spin and check out whether or not I personally find this mess enjoyable or not.

Scorn

I like HR Geiger and I like Body Horror, so I think I am probably uniquely in line with the goals of Scorn. This has been appearing periodically at shows for quite some time now, and it just seems to keep getting higher resolution. I am mostly intrigued by the game at this point and want to see it in action. Do I think this is going to be a good shooter? No, not really, but I also don’t think that is the point of the game. It seems like avoiding combat is going to be the name of the game more than anything. Do I think this is going to be one of my favorite games? Nope! However again because it is on GamePass I am absolutely going to check it out.

Forza Horizon Hotwheels

So they spent way more time during the show on the version of Forza for people who get horny over cars, but I was happy to see we are getting a Hotwheels expansion for Horizon. If you have never played a Horizon game you really should. They are this weird fun arcadey car MMORPG for lack of a better explanation. They are just fun as hell to drive around in and unlock new cars, and I am super on board with taking my cars and now racing them on literal Hotwheels tracks.

Redfall

I am deeply interested in this game, but also probably deeply out of the core demographic. My hope is that this is going to be a game that is solo-player-friendly. My expectations are that it is going to be all groups all the time, and expecting you to bring your ready-made group of exactly four friends into the game with you. I already struggle at matching up with people to play games with, and I doubt Redfall is going to be the game that changes that. Between timezone constraints and my own anxiety over player expectations of me… yeah no this is going to be a fraught mess for me personally. I still think it looks cool as hell though, so I guess I will watch this evolve over time.

Ravenlok

I am getting deep Legend of Zelda meets Harry Potter vibes from this game and I am on board with that. Again this looks like it is going to be one of those many smaller titles that come out and the fact that it is on GamePass gives me the freedom to just check it out guilt free. The only thing that is really tweaking me a bit is the mix of voxel models and traditional models that seems to be going on. Like I enjoy voxel graphics, but I prefer if games completely commit to them like something along the lines of The Touryst. I just hope that the actual game while playing it does not seem jarring as the two model styles clash.

Hollow Knight Silksong

I would likely be disowned by several of my friends if I did not at least talk a bit about Silksong. This is a game that so many of the AggroChat folks have been anxiously waiting for. I am not sure what it is about Hollow Knight but it never really clicked with me. I think partially it is that the game requires so much more technical prowess than Symphony of the Night, and by reference Bloodstained Ritual of the Night. That is pretty much my perfect form of the Metroidvania. Ash and Kodra, however, love the skill-based games, and more specifically they both seem to enjoy the randomization mods for Hollow Knight. I am hoping this is the game that they have been anxiously waiting for. Me… I’ve not decided to devote the amount of time needed to actually get good at Hollow Knight so I could decide if I enjoy it or not.

Flintlock The Siege of Dawn

This is another game that I am cautiously interested in. I say cautiously because I am getting deep Dark Souls vibes from this game. Everything about the setting and lore makes me interested, but generally speaking, don’t want to work as hard at combat as a Dark Souls game wants me to work. I play games to relax, not cause more anxiety. Jedi Fallen Order bridged this gap because I just played the game on a lower difficulty setting and it stopped feeling like a Dark Souls game. So I guess I have hope that maybe just maybe this game will work for me as well. Again the low investment of it being on GamePass means I can boot it up… check it out for a bit and then decide if I like it or not.

Diablo IV

Oof do I have some feelings about Diablo IV. Of all of the Blizzard games, Diablo is the franchise that I have cared about the most over the years. First, it was weird as hell to see Blizzard games now just being included as part of the Microsoft conference. Second, I have been on this emotional rollercoaster lately thanks to the collosol fuckup that is Diablo Immortal. The team working on Diablo IV has come out trying to stem the bleeding and guarantee that this game will not be an egregiously monetized pay-to-win mess… but I am not sure if I am willing to trust them yet. What I saw in this trailer and the other trailers at the show excited me, but also made me think that maybe this game is going to be a direct competitor for Guild Wars 2. A lot of the big open-world multiplayer stuff felt a lot like events and zone metas in GW2. I am sad that there will not be a Crusader at launch, but generally speaking, I can be happy with a Barbarian for the time being.

Starfield

This was the reveal that I think most of the folks who tuned in were waiting for. I get that “No Mans Skyrim” is a meme, but this felt way more like a Fallout game to me. I have deep concerns for this game, namely that I think maybe Bethesda bit off more than they can chew with the whole “1000 planets” thing, including full space flight and seemingly a whole dogfighting game. That also gives me pause because I like the concept of spaceflight… but I don’t actually like flying ships. I really do not like flight sims, so I am hoping that this is very “starfox” in its interpretation of space flight. Either that or I hope there is an option to just let the computer calculate the space combat because I am not really interested in doing much of that. I would be down with the equivalent of VATs but for ship-to-ship combat. Planetary exploration and the improved gunplay though… I am all on board with that.

A Solid Show

This year’s Microsoft Bethesda show was legitimately one of the better ones I have seen over the years. There were so many things that I was either extremely interested in or tangentially enough to play them with GamePass. I need to spend some time and sift through the other presentations and cherry-pick some of the other gems. I might turn that into a single post covering multiple shows. If you have been more plugged into the “Not E3”, which of the shows should I check out? What games do you think I should watch trailers for? Drop me a line below.

Categories E3

Sony State of Play – June 2022

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Good Morning Folks! We find ourselves entering the time of the year that used to be dominated by E3. Now instead we get a number of individual shows all orbiting this concept of the Geoff Keighley Summer Game Fest. Last week on the 2nd we got one of the first of these shows, but it has been a crazy sequence of days and I am just now getting around to talking about my thoughts. Ahead of this show Sony had released some warning information to make sure that folks were realizing that it would be largely focused on third-party games and things involving the new PSVR2 system. I still don’t have much interest in VR as a concept, so it threw out some interesting offerings like Resident Evil 8 in VR or a wholly unique Horizon Zero Dawn universe game set in VR. Even once you cast off the VR-only titles, it still left a lot of meat on the bones for the rest of the show.

Stray

I believe we first saw a sign of Stray at the PlayStation 5 reveal conference several years ago. From that point forward I have been hooked on the concept of this game, where you play a cat roaming around a cyberpunk landscape seemingly made up of humanized robots. It is very prescient that I am writing about this game as one of my own cats, Mollie, winds her way around my office to find a perch to sit on while I write. This is very much a “cat person” game and I hope it is every bit as enjoyable as it looks. The only problem is… this has consistently been revealed at Sony shows… but I am also finding out that it is going to release on Steam which immediately skews the scales towards a PC purchase for me.

Eternights

The first game of the show that I had not heard of before was a title called Eternights. This very anime game seemed to center around a protagonist that has had part of his hand replaced with a rainbow and then can turn that into weapons. The gameplay looked fun, but I guess the determining factor if I play this… will be just how obsequiously anime it really is. I like Anime just fine but I am not super engaged with it and as a result, am mostly into the very surface level and “poser” properties. I think I will need to see more of this to determine if it is a purchase. Again however this is a game also coming out on PC via Steam, which leans me in the direction of purchasing on that platform… so I guess strike 2 for PS5.

Street Fighter 6

Capcom seems to have resolved its problems with the clipart logo and is now presenting additional footage of Street Fighter 6. I am still not entirely certain what I think of “thickboi” Ryu, mostly because I have always thought of him as a fairly agile character. What I do really dig about this game is the paint splatter style as they do attacks. I am certain this is probably some sort of special meter, but I dig the way it looks. It has been decades since I have really been into a fighting game and my old man reflexes keep me from ever being competitive again… but I still enjoy the idea of them. Trying a night fighting game is essentially me wallowing in my nostalgia about the early days of the fighting game arcade scene. Again this is absolutely coming out on Steam so strike 3 for the PS5.

Callisto Protocol

This was the second game in the show that I had never seen, and at first, I thought we were just getting an early reveal of the Dead Space reboot. This appears to be a game from one of the folks behind the Dead Space franchise and the studio started by Robert Kirkman of Walking Dead fame. At a time that last part would have been a serious pedigree for me… but after having watched that franchise more or less die over the last several years it starts to shift in the other direction. The game is also described as a Survival game, which could be really cool or could be not so much depending on how that genre is implemented. I am interested in it for certain, and right now the game is targeting pretty much all platforms… so again that shifts me towards a PC purchase. That would be strike number four for the PS5, which isn’t great given this is a Sony show.

Final Fantasy XVI

Friends, I am so freaking into this game. This trailer spawned one of the comments on Twitter that concerned a number of my friends. What really did it for me… were these scenes shown in the above image, featuring what appears to be a Kaiju fight between two primals/eikons. So this game is being led by the same studio that works on Final Fantasy XIV and I am hoping that we are essentially getting to see another one of the reflections of the source as a result. The recent shift from Final Fantasy being turn-based to more action combat has been controversial, but I tend to land on the side where I actually enjoy the moment-to-moment gameplay better as a result. I am so ready for this game and expect to pretty much give it my full attention whenever it releases. This will once again be released on PC, which means I will be purchasing on that platform rather than the Playstation.

The Others

As always with my reviews of the shows, I tend to focus on the things I was most interested in. That is not to say that there were not a number of other interesting games shown. For example, Resident Evil 4 is being added to the list of high production value Capcom remakes. This is really cool but also I have not played RE 1-3 remakes, but if I ever get around to doing this… I will be interested in this game as well. Also of interest is that Spiderman is getting a remastered edition and is being released on the PC platform, which interests me a bit but I already have those games on the PS5. Seasons: A Letter to the Future looked really neat, but also seemed deeply “Walking Sim” which is not exactly my jam. It very much looked like the sort of game that I would probably rather watch a “Let’s Play” for while doing something else than actually play it myself.

All in all, it was a pretty solid show. It lacked some of the big reveals that I have come to expect from a Sony E3 show, but was a relatively solid showing. The biggest problem that I saw from the product offering is that there really was nothing shown that would move units. The only thing truly limited to the Sony platform is anything PSVR2-related. Even “Seasons”, is coming out on PC… so for me personally this seemed like more of a big win for Steam as a platform than it was for Sony. Maybe this was intentional to try and relieve some pressure on the supply chain and lower demand for new PlayStation 5 units? I sincerely doubt this, but it could happen. I’m extremely interested in seeing how Microsoft answers this show on the 12th.

Categories E3

Lottery Lost

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Good Morning Friends! I just realized that I talked about it on Twitter but have yet to talk about it here. The first non-Ishgard round of lottery is finished and I failed to snag the house I was interested in. I was bidder number 5 and I have no clue the total number of players that were in the running, but number 15 won. Even though it makes me sad that I lost the property, I will say it was an infinitely better experience than the previous click fest. On June 4th if my information is correct, I will be able to go house shopping again and place another bid that will be drawn on the 8th. I really think there needs to be some sort of in-game clock to let players know where we are in the housing draw period. Either that or I need to go sifting around on the interwebs and find a resource that is going to be reliable for this purpose.

I will take this opportunity to plug the Super Dungeon Friends discord again. If you are curious about the whole idea behind the SDF then you can read the original post. As far as me lately it has turned into an FFXIV housing system support group. I know a few people in the chat managed to snag a home and I was super happy for them. Since launching it has been expanded to have some channels related to other games as well including New World, Guild Wars 2, Diablo, Destiny 2, Lost Ark, and World of Warcraft. It is not exactly a high-volume server but is a fairly chill place to have a conversation.

So I know I said I was done caring about New World yesterday, but here comes some more New World talk. My main is currently situated on Valhalla and I got there because Minda my original server merged into Frislandia… and then Frislandia merged into Valhalla. The above screenshot was taken Monday night and represents something close to the active population of servers during North American primetime. So the server I play on is effectively the sixth most populous server during the times I am active. For a while now I have been hearing that Maramma is this haven for PVE players and that is really the place you want to be if you care about that side of the game. As a result, I have found myself contemplating a server move given that I have two free tokens.

So as a result I decided to create a throwaway character on that server to “test the waters”. In the hour I spent playing last night I saw far more openly racist statements in chat than I have ever seen playing on any of my previous servers. Frislandia is probably the worst server environment that I had been on during my time playing New World for community global chat, and it is starting to look like that even though it is very PVP focused… Valhalla is the best. The only problem with Valhalla is its extremely expensive prices for anything crafting-related. I think it is a sheer case of fewer resources entering the market and as a result, the price gets driven up. I responded to a comment from Nogamara about reagent prices, so I decided to use that as a reference point for the differences.
ReagentValhallaMaramma
T5 Sandpaper0.830.09
T5 Tannin0.590.15
T5 Flux3.050.89
T5 Weave0.630.1
T5 Solvent0.750.19

On my original server Minda we had this problem where everything was either worthless or had insane value, meaning that you could not make a reasonable living selling normal materials. Based on my quick survey of the Maramma economy, it seems as though that is taking place there as well. While reagent prices are nonsense on Valhalla, I can make quite a bit of money just by providing refined resources and selling them on the open market. I think again this is entirely brought on by the fact that we seem to be a very PVP-focused community, and as a result, there are fewer PVE-centric players providing the resources to the market. It is moments like this that I really miss the Guild Wars 2 economy where prices are so stable and regulated that you could set a clock by them.

So essentially I am finding out that the grass is not in fact greener on the other side. We are going through this weird period of Valhalla where there was a mass migration of green players to team purple, and as a result, my faction controls most of the map now. I really need to get over my own social anxiety and just put myself out there and do some end-game content. I’ve made a handful of friends of the server already through random interactions, and I would love to get to the point where I had a regular group of people interested in running dungeons. I think if I could ease my way into that side of the game that it might be the enjoyment I am looking for. All of this said… I am still actively playing Guild Wars 2 every night and if I just managed to get further into some of the grinds like Skyscale I would probably forget entirely about New World.

New World’s Fatal Flaw

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Friends, I think I might be winding down my playtime of New World again. In my time playing the game I feel like I maybe understand what is wrong with the experience. Sure there are technical hurdles like the fact that the game was designed to be played like Ark on rented servers, but instead sold itself as an MMORPG. However, the core flaw that cannot be easily fixed is that the game feels progressively worse the longer you play it. For the first few dozen levels, everything feels fresh and new. It feels as though literally anything in the game is rewarding and just running around and clearing out towns gives you meaningful rewards. This changes as you start narrowing the scope of what exactly you need to be gaining anything feeling like meaningful progress.

Crafting in the early game feels phenomenal. You can walk outside of town and find a bounty of resources at your disposal to craft until your heart is content. However, once you move into the higher tiers of materials you put yourself in contention for the same resources that everyone else playing the game on your server is hungrily seeking. Sure there was what felt like an Iron shortage, but every single zone has two or three good Iron routes and if one is being farmed down, you can move over to a new area that is in less contention. When you get to Starmetal, Orichalcum, and Ironwood… there are literally two or three good routes in the entire game all of which are heavily farmed.

This leads me to the last week or two of my life as I have run a route in Brightwood that takes me past four spawn points for Ironwood, four spawn points for Orichalcum, and a couple of different spawns for Wyrdwood. I don’t really mention Wyrdwood as being a resource in heavy contention because if you are desperate enough there are ways to get an infinite amount of it by just farming mobs that can be harvested for it. A pack full of 3000 Ironwood or so, would end up netting me a half dozen skill raises, which is the byproduct of farming for hours. The problem is while doing the loop I was regularly in contention with four or five other players, hoping to arrive at exactly the right time for the “big nodes” to be respawning giving me the maximum yield for my harvest.

A had a few goals coming back to New World, and most of them were crafting-related. I wanted to push up my armoring skill and craft a full set of Voidbent Armor. This was accomplished and gave me a good suit of gear to run around and cause trouble in. The next was to push up my engineering to 200 and be able to craft at least one level 600 weapon, namely the hatchet. My last few weeks grinding away on the Ironwood trade, paid off yesterday allowing me to craft the Axe of the Abyss. Now unfortunately I am not sure what is left for me to do. I like a good grind but the grind has to be within reasonable reach, and as I survey my options I am not seeing one of those.

When I left New World my Furnishing was sitting at level 121 after a copious amount of grinding. This in theory would be my next target but it does not really seem terribly reasonable. There is a website that keeps a fairly accurate count on what it would take in resources to level crafting, and a suggestion of the cheapest path to get there. When I plugged in getting from 121 Furnishing to 200 it returned this. Pending that I had no resources saved up going into this, it would cost me something in the neighborhood of 88,000 gold to level this to 200. I have no interest in purchasing or farming 45,000 Pure Solvent, which only drops from a handful of level 55+ camps in the entire game.

What felt amazing at low levels just kept feeling worse as you climbed the crafting tiers. It would not be so bad if you were just contending for those high-level resources, but that is not the case. You still have to spend countless hours to grind your way up from the lowest level resource which is used in the crafting process of each additional tier. If my math is correct getting a single Ironwood Plank takes:

  • 8 Ironwood
  • 12 Wyrdwood
  • 16 Aged Wood
  • 64 Green Wood
  • 7 Sandpaper

All of those resources are reasonable enough to farm, but that sandpaper requires just going out into the world and roaming around looting boxes. Beyond that, it requires you to be lucky that the reagent that you get is the one that you actually need. If it is not the one you need… then you have to grind faction tokens in order to buy converters to switch it into the reagent that is useful to you at a significant loss in quantity during the conversion. So when I look at the nonsense required to level Weaponsmithing, the other trade that I would find useful… it is again a big freaking no. Either I farm up almost 70,000 flux or I shell out roughly 246,000 gold in order to pay my way to level 200.

Farming resources are now enjoyable honestly because you end up walking away with a big stack of aptitude caches. However, they recently nerfed the number of materials that return from each cache, so again… lowering the amount of fun and increasing the amount of grind. I just don’t feel like the team that is working on this game understands what would make their game fun to play. They continue to double down on PVP as a focus, making me lose more interest in the game as a whole. They made a significant number of quality of life improvements, but I also feel there is a flawed core to the game experience once you reach the endgame.

The only other goal that I really have left is that I would still like to be able to say that I got my expertise up to 600. However, I can do that by playing for about fifteen minutes each day and earning a few very easy gypsum orbs. I think for the time being that is probably going to be my interaction with New World. The other track for expertise is grinding dungeons, which everyone seems to be doing. The end result is there is a flood of less than perfect level 600 orange weapons on the market board going for as low as 500 gold. I now have most of my slots filled with cheap cast-off weapons, and I really don’t see any point in attempting to get “good rolls” until I have maxed out that expertise score. If I could coax a regular group of four other players into having a dungeon night I would be game, but I am not going to subject myself to the generally awful community when I know everything I get will be disposable.