Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Black Forest Outskirts

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Yesterday I played an excessive amount of Valheim. I am still not entirely certain what it is about this game that ticks the right boxes for me, but suffice to say it does. After yesterdays post I did a bit of research and I now understand how one summons the bosses in this game. Essentially in each new area you are going to find an altar that allows you to sacrifice items to it. I didn’t fully grok how exactly this worked or what the game was trying to tell me. However near each altar will be a runestone that gives you a clue as to where to find the items needed for sacrificing. So for example the first boss in Valheim is a giant lightning deer and the clue that is given is “Hunt His Kin”.

Turns out the Deer Trophies that I had been collecting from sneaking up and “murderating” them with a knife… is the key to summoning the boss. I needed two of these and this summoned the angry stag god Eikthyr. Now the guides that I had read talked about needing a specific level of bow with specific arrows, but I opted for a more Belghast solution. I fought it with a Flint Axe and a Shield and this allowed me to block pretty much all of the incoming damage and time my attacks between blocks. It seemed way easier than I was expecting. Over lunch break yesterday I finished the first boss and moved on to the Black Forest.

This has also led me to build a brand new Chateau in a big open field near the entrance to the Black Forest. This became a necessity given that it was over a days walk between my original home and where my new hunting grounds would be for the next segment of the game. I opted for a completely different design this time, but so far my fortifications have not been needed. For whatever reason none of the hostile monsters seem to be screwing with my domicile this time. I do think I am going to make a jaunt over to the original home base and collect my bee hives because I have not had much luck in finding replacement Queen Bees to build new ones.

Truth is my second time around I made a much better home, minus the bit of floor missing… which worked out fine in the end because that is where I have my camp fires set up. I find it annoying that I now have to manage two fires given that I need one for the meat rack and the other for the cauldron. I however have so much more “room for activities” with this design as opposed to the more longhouse thing I had going on previously. Now I am very much in the mode of collect raw metal and create charcoal… which is why I left the meat on too long as an extra easy source of it. I can craft bronze which opens up a whole new world of gear that I can equip.

The one word of warning that I have is the Black Forest is a whole new world of challenge, and all of those things that you fought regularly in the lowlands seem to have a version that is much much harder to kill and attacks in packs. Gone are the Greylings that haphazardly roam into you and may or may not attack… and replaced are Grey Dwarves that attack in packs of five or six and have specialization with casters. The dungeons have been specifically challenging filled with Skeletons so I am getting much use out of my tier 3 gear and more specifically my shield.

The king of the “programmer art” creatures in this game though has to be the Troll, which looks like a giant doofy blob of humanoid playdough. They are however extremely challenging and while I have killed a few… they have taken me down to almost dead each time. Blocking helps quite a bit… but also does knocking them down which I am not entirely certain if it happens because I hit them in the junk or in the leg. When I am swinging my axe it sort of hits both at the same time. However while knocked down they seem to take considerably more damage which allows you to sorta power through with the kill.

I’ve found the altar for the next boss, and I am guessing that since I have killed a Troll I am likely ready to actually take it on. On the other hand I kinda want to finish crafting and upgrading my gear at this step in the game before moving to the next. Having a lot of fun with this game.

Valheim Early Impressions

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As is likely to happen, every so often a game comes from out of nowhere and takes the zeitgeist by a storm. One of those happening right now seems to be Valheim, a small indie survival game based on Norse mythology that has entered steam early access. Currently the game is $20 and based on the press I had seen about it, I decided to poke my head in. I have to say Valheim is charming in a way that most games in the survival genre are not, and it is very hard to put my finger on why. In many ways it reminds me of games like Outward that in turn remind me of my early experiences in MMORPGs like Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot.

The game sits in this really odd place of being both beautiful, and also a little rough around the edges. Take for example the character models. They are blocky and brutish and remind me more than a little bit of the faceless poppets from Ashen. I went with my standard beardymans look and ventured forth into the world not fully understanding what I was getting myself into. One of the interesting things about the game is that it works both as a single player adventure as well as giving you the ability to host your own server session or rent a permanent server space. Additionally your one character can span multiple worlds, so that when you feel like you have tapped out the resources in one… you can just move yourself along to a brand new randomized world.

The intro to the game shows you being carried into Valheim in the clutch of a giant raven. This seems very reminiscent to the opening sequence of Demon’s Souls. The key difference being you are effectively being carried by one of the messengers of Odin the all-father given his connection in lore to the raven. In fact Huginn serves as your guide to the world, and each time you encounter something new he shows up to teach you some lesson about how to utilize this thing. That said the game really does not do much in the way of hand holding at all, and you are effectively left to your own devices to sort things out. Shortly after the crow sequence the following text plays out on screen effectively explaining the games setting.

Long ago, the all-father Odin united the worlds. He threw down his foes and cast them into the tenth world, then split the boughs that held their prison to the world-tree, and left it to drift unanchored, a place of exile…

For centuries, this world slumbered uneasily. But it did not die… As glacial ages passed, kingdoms rose and fell out of sight of the gods.

When Odin heard his enemies were growing once again in strength, he looked to Midgard and sent his Valkyries to scour the battlefields for the greatest of their warriors. Dead to the world, they would be born again… In Valheim.

From here it plays out a lot like Rust or Ark where you start by punching trees and foraging berries and eventually build up to making proper tools and weapons that allow you to explore a little more safely. There are hostile animals as well as little forest Trog looking things called Greylings. They will randomly decide to come after you and also have the habit of coming around and messing with your stuff, pending there is anything worth messing with. One of the first missions of the game seems to be finding shelter, given that the nights can get very cold and if you stay cold for too long you start to take damage.

This was my very first “base” which ended up as a crudely assembled long house with a dirt floor and a few objects like a bed and a workbench. This served me well for awhile and more than likely I would have been just fine keeping this up. Knowing what I know now however, the Island you start on is dotted with ruined shelters that could very quickly be repaired to a pretty comfortable state much faster than going about building your own thing. On future islands I am probably going to seek one of these out as my starting base of operations. Instead I built a structure where you spawn in and have just been exploring out each day from that location.

There are interesting aspects of the game, like cooking for example requires you to stay by the fire and listen for the thing you are cooking to change the way it is sizzling. This reminds me a bit of the way that cooking in the Monster Hunter games works, in that you have a brief window of “doneness” that you have to harvest the item before it is charred beyond recognition. Side note however this is how you get charcoal that I believe you will need in the future for other things. I have a cooking rack over my fire which allows me to cook two slabs of meat at a time. I also have a number of bee hives that supposedly will allow me to start making mead… but I have yet to properly figure that one out yet.

My activity for last night was to build a proper house, which you can see in the last two images, the inside and the outside. I had to put fences around my bee hives because over night I could hear greylings messing with them. They got too close and aggravated the bees, which drove them away but I don’t want them to be able to break them. Finding a queen bee is enough of a challenge that I don’t want to lose one. As far as where I am going now… I am not exactly sure. For the time being I seem to be out of aspirational goals, so I think now is the time when I am supposed to fight the first boss. That is the other aspect of the game that is interesting is it apparently has bosses and dungeons. Neither of which I’ve actually encountered as of yet.

I did however get what I think is the boss to summon hordes of monsters to come attack me. This is ultimately why I put the row of spikes around the outside of my building, to try and double up the layers and hopefully be able to fend off and attack if I needed to duck inside and wait it out. The entire attack seemed to only last for a specific amount of time and I am guessing these are going to happen at a fairly regular interval until I defeat the boss. I have no clue HOW to summon the boss however and I have gone to the location where it is marked on my map and found nothing. So this means I am likely going to do some research and try and figure out what I need to do to move forward.

Regardless, I think one of the things that makes this game so relaxing is the soundtrack. It has one that is not dissimilar to that of Minecraft which at least during the day leads to a relaxing sort of vibe as you wander the forest looking for resources. Are you also playing Valheim? Drop me a line with your thoughts.

Walking on End Shine

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I have been completely out of the loop on all things Final Fantasy XIV for awhile now. I bounced pretty hard after completing the phenomenal Shadowbringers storyline and never quite came back. So it completely snuck up on me when Friday night they were having a big reveal stream about the next expansion. So if you were like me, here is an attempt to catch you up. Granted this is by no means going to be a detailed rundown of the events. If you want to see the entire presentation you can check it out here. If you want a highly detailed rundown then I suggest Nova Crystallis which tends to be where I watch via twitter.

Based on what I have gathered, this expansion is going to represent the end of the Hydaelyn and Zodiark storyline. I don’t want to go into too much detail about that given that you really should play the story content to experience what we know up to this point for yourself. I myself plan on playing catch up soon and working through the story quests to get wrapped up and prepared for the expansion. Essentially there has been a story arc that has been lovingly crafted that starts with A Realm Reborn and will end with this expansion. Yoshi-P made it very clear to point out that this is not the end of Final Fantasy XIV nor is it the end of his involvement with the project.

Where are we going? Apparently the moon! It seems like it is finally time to mine Final Fantasy IV for story tidbits and that means we are visiting the moon and all the weirdness that it entails. They have announced a Lunar Whale mount that you can get as part of the digital fanfest package… which makes me wonder if we will in fact be riding a giant whale to the moon and back like we did in the 16 bit era game. I am super on board with this if it is in fact a thing that happens. Additionally since each expansion has had a chosen class to represent the Warrior of Light/Darkness it seems that for this one we are going with Paladin. So lets run down the sequence of classes so far…

  • FFXIV 1.0 – Archer and Gladiator depending on the marketing
  • A Realm Reborn – Warrior
  • Heavensward – Dragoon
  • Stormblood – Monk and Samurai at different times
  • Shadowbringers – Dark Knight
  • Endwalker – Paladin

Other places we are going apparently includes Thavnair and apparently the city of Radz-at-Han. I am not sure if this is going to be a main destination or something crafting related given that this city shows up so much in crafting lore. The city this artwork shows off seems really freaking cool to explore and it almost gives a whole walled city vibe but suspended in the air. Maybe we will just be able to buy the onions in the market?

We are also apparently visiting Garlemald proper, rather than just through a series of cutscenes not involving our character. I think more than anything this proves that this is in fact the end of this storyline and maybe even this world. Garlemald has been something held over us from day one, and I figured we would finally arrive there and visit in the final expansion. The last expansion gave us a way out of this being the end of the game, but I think it might be the end of this world since we are finally seeing the evil empire for what it is.

As has been the standard when an expansion is released, we get one new class reveal early on. It seems we are getting a new healer this time in the form of the Sage. The thing is… this version of the Sage is nothing like I remember from other games. It looks very Allagan in theme with weird floating swords called Nouliths. It was described as a “Barrier-Type” healer which sounds like the realm that the Scholar already occupies? They seem to be splitting the healers into two categories of Barrier and Pure, which is only going to serve to cause much drama among the healers. I forsee gatekeeping in the future.

Allisae got her “glow-up” during Stormblood when she was announced to be a Red Mage. This time around it is time for Alphinaud to get his turn and instead of forever being an Arcanist, he finally gets a proper job in the form of Sage. I will sorta miss his grossly overpowered Carbunkle action. I do think that the class looks sorta badass and if I ever play a healer I might run one of these up. Other tidbits of note is that there is a level increase but also at the same time a stat squish of sorts to bring the numbers down. It seems like any game that successfully runs a sufficient amount of time has to have one of these.

I’m linking the full sage reveal trailer so you can find that easily if you so choose. As far as the other class they have announced that it is a melee class but we don’t have many solid lead to go on. Some folks are saying Templar which apparently is sort of like the Mystic Knight from FFV. Others are saying that it is going to be Necromancer using a scythe as the weapon. Others still are claiming once again that we are going to get Beastmaster which never seems to work out given how hard that class is going to be to implement properly. I have no ideas at all because most of the classes that I could think of that would be interesting are casters.

The thing that honestly interests me the most is supposedly there is going to be an Island Sanctuary we can go to that is essentially Stardew Valley meets Final Fantasy XIV. Depending on how well this is carried out and how grindy it feels… this might be that thing that keeps me engaged with Final Fantasy XIV for the long run. If we got our own version of Stardew/Animal Crossing in Final Fantasy with adorable Final Fantasy themed encounters… I would probably be completely there for it.

So have you been following the news about Endwalker? What are your thoughts? Drop me a line below.

KOTOR2 is an Interesting Mess

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This is going to be a screenshot free post because I never could sort out how to actually take screenshots successfully with Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords. I ultimately had to disable the Steam Overlay because it would cause me to lose access to the mouse randomly. If I took a screenshot with ShareX I would generally get either a black screen or the most recent loading or UI screen and not actually what was up on screen at the time when I pushed the button. I broke out some of my older screenshot options like DXTory and Fraps and they were similarly oblivious to the existence of this game. I even attempted to enable the in game screenshot functionality by editing the ini file and that did nothing either. This whole sequence is an allegory for what it is like to play Knights of the Old Republic II.

Yesterday I finished of KOTOR2 and I have to say it left me with one of the least satisfying endings I have experienced in awhile. Before anyone asks I did in fact play with TSLRCM (The Sith Lords Restored Content Mod) and M4-78EP (M4-78 Enhancement Project) both installed which supposedly restore items that were cut from the game before release and make bits of the story flow together better. So I believe I did in fact get the best possible experience I could have, but even with that the game is somewhat of a mess. Don’t get me wrong I am glad that I finally played through it and there are bits of detail outlined in this game that came up in SWTOR later that I was somewhat oblivious to. The game had some notorious development issues and if you are curious about some of that check out this long form review of the game.

I think more than anything the game suffered from an identity crisis. If you had told me that this was intended to be the further adventures of Revan until six months before release, I would have believed you. You play a character known as the “Jedi Exile” which for all intents and purposes COULD have been Revan, the character you play in the first game. You are a character that has had your connection with the force damaged, and you have officially been exiled by the Jedi Order for your “betrayal” of the Jedi Code. You followed Revan into battle against the Mandalorian forces and instead of following him on further into the Jedi Civil War, you returned to Dantooine to submit to the will of the council. Given that you were the only Jedi to do so… they were not really certain what to do with you and as such Exiled you.

This would have been a reasonable start of a game… playing out this sequence of events. However instead you start the game as T3-M4 from Knights of the Old Republic as you are attempting to keep the Ebon Hawk from falling apart. You are put through a sequence of events as you try and save the ship and land it safely on a mining colony. If you thought this was the tutorial for the game, you would be wrong… because while you can skip it… you then continue onwards to Peragus where you finally get control of the main character for the first time. Again you go through what feels like a sequence of tutorialization as you explore the colony where the robots have run amok and seemingly killed everyone. Upon solving those events you make your way to the nearby Citadel Station hovering over the dead world of Telos.

Immediately after landing on Telos your ship is put into impound and you are placed under house arrest, which now begins the THIRD tutorial section of the game. It is only after solving the events on the Citadel station that you finally regain control of your ship and can explore the galaxy freely. However what feels super odd about this process is that you are one hundred percent on rails for the first three sequences in the game and then suddenly are given free reign in a choose your own adventure style as to which of the planets that you want to tackle first. There is no call to action really, just some information that T3 deus ex machina’s his way into a list of last known locations for the members of the Jedi Council.

I mean in theory you are trying to recruit them to your cause because the Sith are real and they have returned to the galaxy and you are apparently being stalked by a Sith Zombie. However there is zero sense of urgency as you explore these worlds and find lost spanners and shit for the general populace that side note… now hates with much passion the Jedi order. I am not sure what order I should have done the worlds, but I started with Dantooine, thinking that this was the first planet that you visited in KOTOR after escaping Taris. In theory this was probably a good call even though you don’t actually pick up any new companions here. With companions in mind… it might have been a better call to go to Nar Shaddaa first given that you would encounter one of the last core companions earlier.

So getting back to the identity crisis. This game attempts at several points to teach you some lesson or pass some judgement upon you as the player. For example it does this whole sequence where it judges you for all of the combat that you engage in and how it doesn’t exactly align to the Jedi code. Then moments later those attempting to judge you decide that you have to die… forcing you once again into combat and diminishing the impact of what that message might have been. Additionally there is still the problem that the Jedi Exile is not sufficiently different from Revan as to make it seem like you are playing a unique character. Making it even worse is the fact that the character that serves as the narrator for the game… often draws parallels between the two of you.

I think Obsidian had some really interesting ideas, but those ideas did not add up to be a complete game. Instead they sort of applied Band-Aids and glue to join those ideas into something resembling a story. As a result while Knights of the Old Republic is this master class in narrative design and applying the correct amount of pressure at the correct time, the sequel just ends up being this mass of cool ideas assembled into a crude presentation of a game. In my mind I thought this game was released after Fallout New Vegas, but it turns out this is probably what they were working on just before they got the call to make a new Fallout game. Both games are trying to do some interesting and ambitious things, but I can only assume they learned from the mistakes with KOTOR2 in order to stick the landing with New Vegas.

Like I said earlier I do not regret that I played my way through this game. All told it took me around 40 hours to beat it. There are probably some side content that I missed along the way, but I also don’t really feel like much of the side content was meaningful in the way that a game like Witcher 3 makes it. This is a game that had been hanging out on my list that I was always curious about, and now that curiosity is sated. The Jedi Exile is also a character that appeared later in Star Wars the Old Republic and now that I have played this game I understand why so much of a big deal was made about her. Much like they made Revan male in the Canon, they made the Jedi Exile female and named her Meetra Surik. This feels a little odd but I understand it greatly simplifies talking about the characters in the future.

So here we are at the end of the post. Have you played KOTOR2? What were your thoughts? Drop me a line below and especially if I missed some great truth about the game.