Good morning friends. When I sat down and decided to take a bit of a break I didn’t expect that a fortnight would pass before I put virtual pen to paper and start posting again. The weirdest thing about the entire experience is that I expected there would be this massive drop off in readership… yet for the most part my data stayed pretty normal. I figured eventually people would give up on me and forget that I existed, but that does not appear to be the case. I am not entirely certain if this means I am returning to my normal daily routine or if I will ultimately modify it slightly to be a little more forgiving.
Whatever the case I guess I am back and functional, but to be honest I am no less stressed now than I was when I ultimately decided to disappear. Part of that last bit might be because today is my first day back to work after having been off for a full week. During that week I allowed myself to get royally out of synchronization with my normal sleep schedule and as a result 5:30 this morning was a painful mess, as was attempting to get to sleep before midnight. Today will be hell but hopefully I readjust quickly to the normal routine.
I spent most of my break hanging out on the sofa remoted into my upstairs machine via Parsec and snuggling with cats. This is a pretty damned good existence if you ask me, and I would happily be on the sofa right now were it not for that whole need to be working thing. I played an excessive amount of Cyberpunk 2077 and love it so much… which seems to be counter to the wider opinion of the game for various valid reasons. I beat the game on one ending and started a second, and as a result I likely have a long form post in my breaking down my thoughts about the game as a whole. This morning is not that post however.
Another thing that I did over the break was to restart Jedi Fallen Order since around this time last year I stalled out on Kashyyyk. I originally played the game with a controller and this time around I decided to make the switch to mouse and keyboard which greatly improved my personal enjoyment. The problem with Jedi Fallen Order is it is not exactly clear in its directions of where you should be going… and when I stalled out the first time it was because I had misunderstood the games subtle hints that it was time for me to leave the planet. I probably have a lot of thoughts to share about this game experience, but again… that this not necessarily this mornings post.
I made an attempt to play Red Dead Redemption II, and this is the point where I have realized that I just don’t like Rockstar Games. I’ve “attempted” to play Grand Theft Auto before, but never really got into it and playing RDR2 made me realize why. GTA and RDR both give you the illusion that the game world is this massive open place for you to wander around in… however the second you start a mission you are forced onto a narrow track essentially closing in the walls of that open world into a fixed corridor where the mission actually takes place. Instead of getting a quest asking you to gather 3 animal pelts, you are instead placed on a specific mission where you and another character go out in the woods together and hunt those animal pelts.
A game like Witcher 3 or even a Farcry game gives you broad objectives and doesn’t much care what order you complete them in or even when you actually get around to them. This allows you to stack up objectives similar to that of an MMORPG and do multiple things while in the same location. This feels way more natural to me than starting a specific mission that has hard constraints on what you can and cannot do during it. This means that if you are on a stealth mission… you have to be stealthy or you meet a fail condition unlike the more open world genre where going loud causes problems… but if you can deal with those problems you don’t have to sneak about. I just think the Rockstar model may not be for me.
Speaking of games that give me a play style I am more comfortable with… I also played a lot of Ghost of Tsushima and realized I am WAY further from the end of this game than I realized. Additionally the PS5 does a much better job of smoothly streaming a game remotely than the base PS4 did. I am nearing the end of Act 1 and there are 3 Acts in total. I’ve been spending most of my time wandering the country side and challenging Mongols to duels. I now have the perk that allows me to take out three encounters at once when I do a Stand Off, which is still one of the coolest mechanics for this sort of game that I have seen. When I realized this was not a game that I would likely be able to wrap up over the break, I returned to my leisurely pace of knocking out a few objectives and then walking away for awhile.
Last but not least… I seem to have fallen back into the nostalgia of Fallout New Vegas. During a lot of my conversation about Cyberpunk 2077, I compared it to this game and as a result it probably isn’t a massive shock that I would ultimately pick it up and start playing again. Now that I am engaged I am more than likely going to complete this playthrough. The hardest part about Fallout New Vegas to be honest is getting all of the mods installed that make this decade old game look fairly viable. You can also blame this video by HBomberguy that triggered all of the emotions and feels.
Finally I leave you all with this video that my friend Cylladora sent me over the break. It is amazing… true… and also sad. I hope you had an excellent break and for those of you still out there, thanks for sticking around. It might be a few weeks while I sort out what my normal pattern is going to look like. I have a bunch of topics for the next bit as I go through all of the end of the gear stuff. I also want to do a deep dive into Cyberpunk 2077 and Jedi Fallen Order after having beaten both recently. So I have some ammunition for several weeks, but when that runs out… I might allow myself another break because it seems to have at least improved my desire to sit down and write.
Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we start the show talking about Monster Sanctuary a blend of Pokemon and Metroidvania. From there we talk about the periscope through which we view the media and how it can be wildly different for two people who are in regular communication. We talk about the problems with Cyberpunk 2077 and then Bel shares his experience playing through the campaign and finishing the game. From there we talk about the Nintendo Direct and more specifically the games Cyber Shadow and Calico. Lastly Bel talks a bit about his down cycle with World of Warcraft and how he is lacking the drive to keep playing.
I have been playing an excessive amount of Cyberpunk 2077 since it released on December 10th, or technically in my time zone the evening of December 9th. I have a lot of things to say about this game because it legitimate is one of the most interesting gaming experiences I have had this year. That said I feel like I need to address an elephant in the room, because I was absolutely caught unprepared for the amount of dislike some folks have for this game. We all live in our own little sheltered bubbles and up until this point all that I had really seen about the game (and truthfully most of what I am still seeing) is a general sense of disappointment each time the game got delayed but overarching excitement about finally getting their hands on the game.
There are apparently a totally different set of circles where this game is the poster child for everything that is wrong with modern game development. I didn’t realize my world was quite as shifted in one specific direction as it apparently is, but as one of my friends put it this weekend intentionally or not we all sort of see the world through our very own periscope. Needless to say I was a bit shocked and angered when I wanted to talk about it this weekend on AggroChat and was effectively met with “how dare I”. We are sorting this out and it will probably lead to an interesting conversation at some point, but for now I find myself roughly twenty hours into what many consider to be a deeply problematic experience.
It should also bear noting that for the most part my play through has largely been smooth. I am playing on the PC and seemingly that is the platform this game was targeted towards. I feel exceptionally sorry for the console players because from what I can tell it is a bug riddled mess. That is not to say my play time is bug free, because there are plenty of weird NPC movement issues like the above example of one just clipping straight into the engine compartment of a vehicle. These however are things I have been dealing with for several decades in Bethesda games and that might be your best frame of reference. Cyberpunk 2077 is essentially Fallout New Vegas set in a grossly dystopian society pulled straight out of Robocop or Judge Dredd. Going in with those expectations and not that this is going to be a Destiny quality shooter is going to greatly improve your experiences.
When I was in high school I discovered William Gibson, and by discovered I mean I had the novel Neuromancer given to me. I became obsessed with the world wrapped within its pages and tore through all of the novels that were in that same vein by the author. The world represented this dark future that admittedly has become more science fact than science fiction as the internet and the culture around it has evolved. The original Cyberpunk setting is deeply rooted in that narrative structure and as someone who can remember the time before the internet, it is representative of the future so many people thought would exist. It is a late stage capitalism narrative where everything has been fetishized and packaged for easy consumption.
Instead of a time of great prosperity, it is a time of corporate servitude. No one has it good and everyone is adversely impacted by this world. That is one of the most interesting things about the game is that it more or less presents this all in a neutral tone. The game shows you the negative impacts that this world is having on everyone, but it is displayed in a manner fitting of this genre. This is just the way of the world and it is up to you as the player to determine what exactly to make of it. So it presents sex workers trying to make their next meal with the same dignity as a “salaryman” trying to avoid ending up face down in a garbage heap when the next corporate take over occurs and they become expendable. Even the penthouse dwellers are negatively impacted by the state of the world which becomes more and more apparent as the game continues.
You play the role of “V” a Merc that does jobs for whoever can afford them. Your character is an assemblage of choices, masculine or feminine body types, masculine or feminine voice, and your choice of genitalia. The last of these choices is really bizarre given that it doesn’t seem to actually factor into the game much. From here you choose a background which include Corporate, Street Kid or Nomad representing three vastly different experiences. Regardless of this choice you effectively end up in the same place where some events transpire to put you on the outs with whatever that faction is and see you partnered up with another “gonk”.
You then are presented with the opportunity of a lifetime, one that you and your partner cannot ignore. For me it seemed like this was the beginning of the game in proper, but instead this is actually just the extended tutorial mission. You have full control over your character and the world begins to open up, but you have yet to arrive at the “actual” game yet. This is essentially the RPG “World One” that seems large and expansive… until you actually make your way through it and see how much larger the scale of everything else is. I am not going to go into story spoilers here, and in truth I am going to try and avoid much in the way of spoilers in general. Some things happen and you have to deal with the results.
Every science fiction setting has a seedy underbelly be it the Hutts in Star Wars or the Black Market chop shops in Blade Runner. Cyberpunk 2077 is a setting where this underbelly is exposed for all to see and the characters appear to just view it as normal. As V you do a lot of pretty horrible things, but it also feels like you are the only force attempting to make things any better for anyone. You take jobs from Fixers and random clientele and are given a series of choices on how to resolve each matter. For example I came up on a scene where a guy was shooting the NCPD with a sniper rifle, and I was asked to “resolve the matter”, which I originally took to mean take him out. However if you play it differently there is a path that allows you to talk them down where you find out that they are just off their cyberpsychosis muting drugs. There is a chance to resolve it relatively peacefully, but you can also just put a bullet in their head and walk away with some fast “Eddies”.
Cyberpunk is also not a game for the weak of stomach or the squeamish. I want to underline that point in bold to make sure you understand that you are going to “see some shit”. There is a concept in the game called the Brain Dance, which is straight out of the movie Strange Days where folks can record their sensory inputs which then get sold as the pornos of the future allowing the viewer to experience everything happening to the original person. Thing is these record a lot of extra data other than just the visual feed, so you learn how to flip them into “edit mode” allowing you to zoom around the outskirts of the recorders perspective picking up on audio and visual elements that maybe the original viewer didn’t even realize they saw.
This becomes a tool at many points in the game allowing you to try and piece together what exactly happened in a scene. However these “BDs” as they are referred to by the denizens of Night City, are often of situations that you maybe wouldn’t want to find yourself in. For example fairly early on I found myself editing what was effectively a “snuff film”, where the recorder was executed and I had to attempt to glean information about the “studio” where it was recorded. The end goal was to save someone else who was being held by these same perpetrators, and would likely meet the same fate. It reminded me an awful lot of the movie 8MM, and it was similarly mentally and emotionally jarring. You find yourself developing a sort of clinical detachment as a defense mechanism to what is actually happening in the recording… so that you can scan for objects that might be able to uncover the location
The thing is… where Cyberpunk differs from most games is that when you finally do save the day and rescue the person being held. There is no shiny achievement unlocked where everyone lives happily ever after. Instead you deal with the ramifications of the mental and physical abuse that this person had heaped upon them. You see the impact on this extremely damaged human being and the trickle down effects that it has on all of the people that care for them. Quite honestly over twenty hours later and countless additional missions I am still dealing with the impact of these moments. In Night City… no one is ever “all right”, because you are slowly peeling back multiple layers of stress, abuse and neglect that has played out over the course of the characters lives.
The longer I play… the more distinct I feel like this is not going to be one of those games where your character gets a happy ending either. Instead it feels like I am just trying to do whatever good I can while I am alive and able to make a positive impact in this city. I am sure were your so inclined the game could play out in a completely different manner and take a more “renegade” path. I however choose to largely be a force of good, at least for those who are willing to pay for my services. Truth be told however… I have stacked a pile of bodies high in my path. Those purveyors of snuff braindances… needed to die however and I was their willing executioner. The NCPD has been all too keen on looking the other way if you make their lives easier.
The game also has down right quirky moments. For example I just happened to be walking along the street and this vending machine called out to me, introducing itself as Brendan. It wanted to strike up a friendship with me, and then immediately asked to impose upon me a favor. Someone had parked a trash dumpster in front of its machine, blocking the view of the road which was their favorite pastime. Brendan asked if I would be so kind as to move the trash bin, which required a feat of strength to do so. I now apparently have a vending machine that considers me their best friend because I was the one who took the time to pay attention to its needs.
It is such a weirdly nuanced game that I feel like I have barely scratched the surface of. Night City is so massive in scope that I am not sure if I even have a shot in hell of ever seeing all of it. There are large swaths of the city that are uninteresting, specifically the in between spaces as you transition major districts. That said I have spent a large amount of time just wandering around aimlessly and have encountered quite a few interesting sights. The game loves to also throw random encounters where you can aid the populace by “neutralizing” some threat. The one thing that I find a bit odd, is that there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of lasting consequences of pissing off the various gangs within each area. Maybe I just haven’t encountered that since most every time I have racked up a body count it has been part of a mission.
There were significant issues with this games launch and significant issues with the creation and working conditions. Additionally there are apparently a number of social issues surrounding the game that I had more or less been oblivious to. I purchased this game when it was first announced and I had been avoiding much information about it, because I didn’t want to spoil my experience. However part of what I had been unwittingly avoiding was the outrage surrounding it. I personally am enjoying this game immensely and it saddens me that it is doing so many interesting things, but a chunk of my friends will never experience it because of the other issues associated with the content. I do hope that CDPR makes good on fixing the console versions, because clearly they are in a horrible state. I also hope that maybe the studio grows a bit and realizes the steps they took wrong in this process.
For now however, I find myself deeply attached to a number of characters in this game and I am with them until the end. I hope we will reach some sort of satisfying conclusion, even if it maybe won’t be what I would call a happy ending. This game appears to be uniquely designed for my interests, and it will be interesting to see where it goes from here.
Morning friends. I had plans last night and none of them really panned out as expected. I had been planning on watching The Game Awards which began at 5:30 pm my time. I also planned on running a Mythic +2 or two with some of my friends in Facepull in World of Warcraft. However as has been the case more recently we were limited by the lack of healing options. So instead of doing this… I ended up logging for the night and telling Kelsas to ping me over discord if it looked like we had healing options. This meant instead I spent my evening playing Cyberpunk 2077… which is a game that is not really conducive to watching a live stream during.
It was around this point that I had a realization. I don’t actually care about The Game Awards. I care about the fact that a bunch of Game Trailers get released during the show, but I don’t actually care about the awards themselves or the talking heads that appear in between them. The thing is… I have no skin in this game. Sure it is cool when a game that I like wins an award but it has absolutely no bearing on my life. What I care about is all of those game trailers and by the time I wake up the next morning those will all be available and syndicated on the internet in a number of various means. For example I was able to just tune in this morning and watch this playlist full of trailers.
So here is that thing where I run through a bunch of things I personally found worthy of talking about. Let’s do this!
Some sort of Dragon Age Game
To be honest… the thing that I was looking forward to information about before the Awards show as Dragon Age. While I was never really able to get into Inquisition, I loved the first two games quite a bit and was looking forward to more adventures in this universe. What I had hoped to see was some signs that a game was happening here, but instead we got another vague demo reel of footage. This is a sizzle reel and not anything even vaguely resembling a game. As such I figure this game is at least two to three years away and possibly even more… and has not really coalesced into anything resembling a playable experience. This honestly concerns me more than it bolsters me.
Some sort of Mass Effect Game
We also received “trailer” footage of Liara T’Soni wandering some snowy planet and retrieving a piece of armor bearing the imprint of N7, which is in theory supposed to make us think that this is Sheppard’s armor. Once again this is not even vaguely resembling any sort of game yet, so I would imagine this probably has the same timeline trajectory as Elder Scrolls 6 at this point of being vaguely somewhere off in the future. There was a message at the end saying that Mass Effect would continue… which combined with this footage would make one think that they are returning to the original Trilogy and extending it. What I actually want is more Andromeda to be honest, but I legitimately think this is something that was rushed out in order to combat the news of the Studio head and Dragon Age producer both recently leaving.
Crimson Desert
On the positive side… I am significantly more interested in Crimson Desert than I was before. The footage shown would lead you to believe that the game is a sort of God of War style single player narrative experience. There however is reportedly some sort of online multiplayer functionality, but it doesn’t seem like an MMORPG along the lines of its precursor Black Desert. The game looks incredible, but so did Black Desert. I guess the proof will be once the game gets closer to launch because Godfall also looks gorgeous but was a soulless husk of an experience.
Back 4 Blood
It seems like it is officially time now to reboot the Left 4 Dead franchise… or at least a spiritual successor to it. Turtle Rock Studios the folks behind the original Left 4 Dead and the ill fated Evolve… are presenting a new game called Back 4 Blood. By all evidence this would appear to be a modern reboot of Left 4 Dead under a brand new name. I guess we can all hope that it will bring a fresh perspective to this style of multiplayer shooter experience.
Evil Dead: The Game
Apparently also there is going to be an Evil Dead game that may or may not also be attempting to reboot the Left 4 Dead concept? There isn’t a lot to go on with this trailer but it certainly feels like it is going to be some sort of four player co-op vs hordes type gameplay mechanic. It also appears to be drawing characters from across the entirety of the confusing Evil Dead universe. It might be really cool, but it also might be a confused mess. It appears to be lead by Saber Interactive the folks behind the 2019 World War Z game.
League of Legends: The Ruined King
This appears to be a fixed party RPG surrounding League of Legends characters and the Bilgewater setting from Airship Syndicate. These are the folks that developed Battle Chasers: Nightwar and Darksiders Genesis, and it appears to lean more towards the original of those two titles. The over world looks very Diablo style, with also combat taking place in a Final Fantasy style console RPG style. I am most definitely interested because League of Legends is a setting where I have been interested in the world building… but just not any of the games released so far.
Scarlet Nexus
Scarlet Nexus continues to look really interesting. It reminds me quite a bit of Astral Chain… which was a really cool game stranded on a console that struggled a bit with its graphics. I think ultimately will have to see how the final product comes together. Definitely something I am still keeping an eye on however.
Monster Hunter Rise
This game really makes me wish a Nintendo Switch Pro existed. This is appears to be the Switch getting a game in the open world style of Monster Hunter World. The only problem here is the console will not be able to output the sort of visuals that Monster Hunter World did. Still going to play it because it looks great and also both Palicos and Doggos to go adventuring with.
Evil West
The last of the games that looked interesting to me was Evil West, which is from Flying Wild Hog studios the folks behind the most recent Shadow Warrior games. So what I expect is a fast paced over the top shooter with melee combat. I like the mash up of Van Helsing with the Wild West that appears to be going on in the trailer. It should be an interesting game with a lot of really visceral combat if the lineage of this studio is any indication.
obviously the thing that some folks are going to be talking about is Sephiroth in Smash Bros… but I could give a shit about Smash Bros. If you watched the show last night, or did what I did this morning and catch up on only the trailers… what were some of your highlights? What are some of the things you are looking forward to? What are your thoughts about the Bioware “trailers” and non-announcements? Drop me a line below because I would love to hear your thoughts.
