Traditionally I had never really been a fan of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, but that changed in 2017 when the entire thing pivoted hard. I feel like the modern incarnation of the series is very much UbiSoft attempting to capture the magic of The Witcher 3 and duplicate it. So if you too had bounced off early titles, but also love big open world adventures… then maybe AC is a series you should check out again. It took me awhile to really attach fully to Origins, but when I finally did I loved the game and greatly enjoyed playing as Bayak of Siwa. Then the sequel released and brought us to Ancient Greece and while I picked it up… I never actually got around to playing it.
Since I seem to be rolling through a series of single player games and after coming off Guardians of the Galaxy, I decided to remedy never getting around to this game. I had started the game but never really got very far into it, so I picked up from the original save and kept going. I had heard from many people that Kassandra is the far better option as far as the game goes, and is a more interesting character. I’m already a big fan and I am looking forward to see how this character evolves over the course of the game. I had some “free” outfits waiting on me, so I have dressed my Kassandra is Norse outfits that I am guessing I got around the launch of the next title in the AC series.
I am not super far into the game but have essentially completed most of “tutorial island”. There are a lot of things about the game that feel like they have improved since the previous outing. There are quality life life improvements like the ability to just crank up your walk speed to where you are running all of the time. Essentially in an open world game like this… I don’t love using horses. I am not sure what it is about horses, but I always just end up running around everywhere and my pinky finger gets tired mashing the shift key. I think part of it is that I feel like I miss a lot while mounted, because I live for random combat encounters as I move from point A to point B. Additionally it allows me to pick up all of the random iron and wood that I happen across along the path.
When I stopped playing for the night I was finally out on the open waters with my ship and crew. I learned how to do me some open water piracy and such. This series has always done a better than average job of ocean combat, and I greatly appreciate how they have improved a lot of aspects of it. For example you can just hit a hotkey to board the ship, and it will align the ship so you can jump across and do some deck to deck combat. Similarly you can just hit a hotkey to “dock” the boat when you get close to land. Things things were always somewhat fiddly in Origins and I am always on board for improvements.
This is a pretty huge game, so I fully expect to be engaged in this one for awhile. Maybe even long enough for Horizon Forbidden West to come out next month.
Good morning friends. This morning I am going to talk about the thing that I had originally planned on talking about yesterday… before the Blizzard news broke. I am about four years late to the party, but God of War is a pretty damned phenomenal game. On Monday I wrapped up my play through of the game and I have to say the characters have all grown on me. I went from feeling sorry for “Boy”, to wanting to throttle “Boy”, to feeling genuine love and affection for “Boy”. The game takes you on a ride and for anyone who has missed out on the memes surrounding this game, it focuses on a very grizzled and world weary Kratos and his son Atreus that becomes collectively referred to as “Boy”. Moments in to the game Faye dies, the mother of Atreus and we embark upon a mission to take her ashes to the highest peak in the realms.
This simple quest drives the entire game, but as we attempt to complete it… there are certain obstacles that keep getting in our way that we must deal with first. The flow of the game feels extremely natural as we are besieged immediately upon setting forth on the quest, and hunted the entire way by forces that we do not quite understand. We also find friends along the way that help us on our journey, and the entire narrative structure feels very much like one of the epic poems of antiquity from which we base the mythology that makes up this series. There is no straight path through this game but instead one that weaves and loops back on itself constantly as we slowly discover what still remains in our path keeping us from our final destination.
I’ve been jokingly referring to this game as “Bad Dad Simulator” on twitter, because so much of the game is actually really revolving around the relationship between Kratos and Atreus. We get the impression that Kratos really did not know what to do with “Boy”, and had mostly shunned him. We learn that Atreus was a sickly child and Kratos spent most of his time off hunting or doing other busywork to provide for the family. Atreus does not fit the mold of what a man should be in Kratos eyes, and throughout the journey he keeps trying to batter him down into the pattern that he is most familiar with, that of a Spartan warrior. Through this journey however I truly feel like the pair come to a point of acceptance with each other. Atreus has skills and gifts that never would have fit within that role, and Kratos is not the cruel immovable object that the son thought he was. The two understand each other and I think really come to love each other… as opposed to the resentment that is very obvious at the beginning of the game.
One of the things that somewhat shocked me about the game however was how short it ended up being. All told at this point I have put in 22 hours of gameplay according to steam. I’ve completed the main story, all of the major highlighted side quests, and a few of the hidden objectives. There is still an awful lot of scouring that I could do to tick off the last few checkmarks and hunt down the last few things to kill or collect. That said I think I have picked most of the meat off of these bones and am left with the competitionist busywork that every game has these days. The reason why I am shocked is pretty early on in the game you are presented with this screen, the Realm Travel system that includes 8 realms plus Midgard. For those who are not familiar with Norse mythos you have:
Alfheim
Helheim
Muspelheim
Niflheim
Jotunheim
Svartalfheim
Vanaheim
Asgard
Midgard
So upon seeing this screen I thought wow… I have only really been to Midgard so far and it seems huge, I cannot wait to see these other realms! The truth is… any realm that is not Midgard is tiny by comparison. Alfheim is involved in a single quest early in the game, Helheim is involved in two quest chains and cannot really be explored, Niflheim and Muspelheim are realms that each feature a specific mini-game that you can grind for zone currency that lets you craft specific things, and then Jotunheim is used for a single quest near the end of the game. The leaves Vanaheim, Asgard, and Svartalheim completely inaccessible and the vast majority of the game taking place in Midgard… that actually seems entirely focused around the lake of the nine and areas immediately adjacent to it. While I greatly enjoyed the journey, it does immediately hit you how small of a game this actually is in comparison to other “open world” offerings.
All of that said, it is an extremely enjoyable experience and mechanically the Leviathan axe now joins the pantheon of truly epic video game weapons. That seems like a really hard ask these days, to create a weapon for a game that feels unique and memorable enough to really break into the list of the greatest, but Leviathan absolutely earns its place. Similar to Mjolnir, you can throw the axe and summon it back to your hand no matter how far away it actually is. It also has the elemental effect of freezing certain objects, which allows you to use it in order to complete certain puzzles. When you finally get back your Blades of Chaos from the previous games, these also have their own puzzle uses which makes the weapons not only mechanically enjoyable in combat but also strategically interesting for traversal.
Ultimately this game is going to appeal to two sets of players. Firstly if you love a very interesting and well crafted story, then you need to play this game and experience it for yourself. Secondly if you are a player that really enjoys open world brawlers with RPG elements that allow you to fine tune that combat, then this is also going to be a game for you. Additionally if you really enjoyed the original God of War games and can handle the shift to the third person perspective, then you are probably going to enjoy this game as well. I personally am glad that I waited for mouse and keyboard because it felt extremely easy to dive into this title with a control scheme that felt familiar. Like I said at the beginning, I am four years late to this party but I am glad that I finally completed God of War and look forward to Ragnarok.
Hey Friends! I decided to take yesterday off because I was not really feeling up to blogging… and also had the day off. We had a cold snap this weekend that basically killed any desire to go out into the world and do things. Additionally we have been on this kick of trying to cook more at home rather than door-dashing everything. So the end result was that we mostly hunkered down while my wife read and I played lots of video games. I stumbled onto something humorous in Forza Horizon and if you follow me on Twitter you already know this. They have in game the 1974 Honda Civic and it is very close to what was my very first vehicle. So of course I had to pick it up and play around with it… and it drives pretty much exactly like I remember the ACTUAL “Bob” driving like.
The actual “Bob” has been rotting away at my parent’s house since I parked it there in college. There were significant transmission issues when I stopped driving it, and now it more or less sits there like many other vehicles rusting away. I don’t really clearly remember if I paid $100 or $200 for the car, but I do remember buying it myself outright when I got my drivers license. At 6’4″ it was never a comfortable vehicle for me to drive… but it was transportation from point A to point B. In my most immediate circle of friends I also represented the only one with transportation and as a result ended up playing chauffeur quite often. It is kinda cool to tool around a virtual world in something that feels so damned familiar.
Over in Witcher 3 I wrapped up this current play-through, or at least the main story. I managed to navigate my way this time to what I would consider the “best” ending. I had originally planned on going with a Yennifer play-through, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. Triss is just better, sorry for all of you Yennifer stans out there but it is true. Mostly the part I was wanting to correct this time around was the fate of Ciri, because last play-through I made some mistakes and it wound up with Ciri in a not great position. Not going to go into too many details here in case I have friends who have yet to play this game. Side note… if you have not played this game you really should. Just don’t let the early nudity turn you off or set your impressions of what the game at large is going to be like.
The bulk of my weekend however was spent playing God of War on the PC. Yes I am one of those suckers who rebuys games that I own on other platforms. If I have the chance of playing something with a mouse and keyboard I am going to take it. I never made it terribly far into this game on the PS4 or PS5 and now that I am playing on PC it is really in my element. I can only hope that at some point Ghost of Tsushima gets a PC port, because these big open world games just feel better with a mouse and keyboard. I am sure I will probably write a post about it of its own, but I am having a blast. I get the feeling that I am nearing the end of the main story, because I just got one of those “better wrap up everything you need to do” messages. So that places this in the 20-30 hour game range for gameplay, so in that sweet spot of not too short but very much not too long either.
It has been interesting to see how getting the Xbox Series X has changed my gameplay habits in a way that the PlayStation 5 has not yet. In part some of it is the fact that I set it up in the living room and after a few years of working from home, I feel the need to escape my office each evening. Another part is Microsoft Game Pass. I am not sure if you can fully explain how liberating it is, to be able to just download any game that I might even having a passing interest in and be up and running in very short order. The thing about Forza Horizon 5, is that I never would have purchased this game on my own. The irony of that statement is that there is a version of me from the past that used to love driving games. I played a ton of Gran Turismo and Ridge Racer on the PlayStation and even gravitated towards the Crusin series and Daytona in the arcades. However as a modern gamer… I never really spent time playing racing games because it felt like they doubled down on the simulation aspect whereas I was more interested in big dumb arcade fun.
For awhile now folks had told me that the Horizon series from Forza was their version of big dumb arcade fun, and after spending some time with it I would agree. Sure there is some simulation there, but you can also mostly turn it off by lowering the difficulty. This is a fact that I forgot when I briefly got excited about winning. However while we are on this screen I want to share my biggest complaint about the game. There are no beard options… what the fuck is up with that? I give them props for having the ability to include various prosthetic limbs, but I do get annoyed by this babyfaced schmuck every time I get out of the car. Apparently I am not alone in this notion with reddit threads offering to start a GoFundMe to get Microsoft to add beards.
I will say one thing that almost makes up for it however… is that while you are limited in the names that you choose for yourself, they are all voice acted. There are a whole slew of common names you can choose, but I noticed with Horizon 5 you can also add a list of “nicknames”. Among these is “Bell” which while I don’t put two Ls in my spelling… it sounds the same, which means every time I do anything in game I get called by my chosen online moniker. Honestly… I would probably rather have this than beards given how little time I actually spend out of the car. I’ve never really gotten to experience this in a video game and I think it is exceptionally cool.
One of the weird things that this game does when you are doing solo races… is it populates all of the other drivers from your friends list. At first when I saw this screen I was getting all excited that I bested Nimgimli in the race, until I had a slight realization. I thought it was showing me the record times of all of my friends and that I had beaten them all. Instead I realized it was just showing me winning against a bunch of low level bots that happened to be named the same as my friends. Granted racing actual friends is a thing that can be done in this game and at some point it might be worth trying. I still would rather race against a bunch of names I recognize than completely random bots, so I guess it is still neat.
The other time that I have spent some time doing is customizing my vehicles with new paint jobs and wraps. I thought it was really cool that there is a whole community driven thing where folks can upload their favorite skins and the community can vote on them. If I was going to have a Jeep Wrangler hard top… and a Jurrasic Park skin was available… there is no way I was not using it. They had some skins that were more true to the movie, but I personally liked the one the best. If I get a Ford Explorer I will have to see if they have that skin as well.
My favorite vehicle so far is the 2021 Ford Bronco that you get as part of the initial allotment of vehicles. I would love to own one of these in real life, and I greatly prefer driving a more off-road friendly vehicle in this sort of game. I am having a freaking blast with this game, and again this is not a title that I ever would have purchased on my own. I used to love driving games and this has rekindled that in me. It makes me wonder about exploring some of the other genres that I used to love but mostly abandoned when I got so heavily into MMORPGs. In line with this… I have been playing a ton of Lumines on the Xbox as well and I downloaded Tetris Effect and Bejeweled 3 which were also on Game Pass. There are rumors that Sony is working on their own Game Pass like service and I legitimately hope they make good on that concept. For now however… for the sheer aspect of getting to try out a lot of different things… Game Pass is a phenomenal deal.
