The Technomancer Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

An Appreciation of Spiders

April 20, 2020 by Belghast

The earliest evidence I have of Developer Appreciation week is 2010, but it might have been taking place prior to that. Unfortunately the original site of its creator Scarybooster no longer exists, nor does even the social media evidence as his twitter account was hacked some years back. Whatever the case it has been going on for awhile and with Scary’s falling off the blogging wagon, we tried to start integrating the practice of taking a moment out to appreciate the folks that are behind the scenes creating the games we love into the Blaugust proceedings. This has morphed a bit to include content creators since I feel they also need some appreciation as well, but for this very first post of the week I thought I would bring things back to its roots and talk about a game studio that might not be that well known.

Prolific Release Schedule

Spiders is a French Game studio most recently known for the huge sweeping RPG adventure Greedfall that I have written about at length on this blog. However if you have not been reading the blog it is probably likely that you may not know about this studio or many of its games. I originally became aware of them when Technomancer released, because I thought it looked extremely interesting and it happened to be one of the games that Steam suggested to me through its discovery algorithm. However they have been cranking out ambitious games for awhile now, and it is highly likely that you have at least heard of several of them.

Sherlock Holmes Versus Jack the Ripper – 2009
Faery: Legends of Avalon – 2010
Gray Matter – 2011
Of Orcs and Men – 2012
Mars: War Logs – 2013
Bound by Flame – 2014
The Technomancer – 2016
Greedfall – 2019

The games utilize a custom in case variant of Sony’s PhyreEngine that they call the Silk Engine, and it seems to have allowed them to crank out a pretty prolific release schedule. Until Technomancer they were seemingly releasing a new title every year, which is fairly impressive. I’ve played through four of their games to date and finished three of those four. I ultimately decided that Bound by Flame just was not for me, but I deeply enjoyed Mars: War Logs, Technomancer and Greedfall. In fact Greedfall was on the AggroChat games of the year show and it really was one of the darlings of what was an otherwise packed year of games.

Flawed But Ambitious

In an April or 2019 Article, CEO and Co-Founder Jehanne Rousseau spoke a bit about their motivations and why they seemingly keep creating the same sort of games over and over.

We’re 35 in our team, with 40 at the moment working on the game. We are developing this because we love the type of game. There aren’t that many studios doing this type of games today. I mean, even BioWare have stopped doing it and I’m very sad because it’s what I like to play the most.
Jehanne Rousseau, CEO of French studio Spiders

That really is the thing that drew me to the games the most, is that they are in fact creating games in a genre that seems to be dying. There is a blind ambition in each of these titles that is impressive, but the negative side of that is said ambition sometimes outstrips their technical prowess. They seem to constantly be grasping for greatness and often times end up a few steps short of it. There are numerous things about the games that I would consider a bit buggy at best and poorly designed at worst, in each of the games that I have played there is something magical about them that kept me coming back for more. If you take the sequence of games Mars: War Logs, Technomancer (its direct sequel) and Greedfall there is a clear growth and improvement between each of the games.

The stories that they are telling are simultaneously huge and expansive while at the same time managing to include some deeply personal encounters. There is so much world building happening that feels fresh and interesting, and these worlds are populated with characters that are worthy of them. Where the games fall short however is on the technical execution. Combat often times feels a little stilted and control schemes often feel a little awkward. However much like going back to Dragon Age Origins which also suffers from many of these issues when compared against a modern game, the story and the characters are engaging enough to get you to look past those blemishes.

A Bright Future

The reason why I chose to talk about Spiders this morning, is that I am extremely excited for whatever comes next. After having played a sequence of games and seeing the improvements between each of them, I have to say Greedfall was without a doubt their most polished experience. It came extremely close to being a perfect game, at least in my eyes. It had some mechanical issues still, but the amount of improvement made between it and Technomancer for example were impressive. It is like I am watching a studio flirting with greatness so many times and Greedfall really was the show case of those abilities.

This makes anxious for whatever game comes next, because I feel like whatever title that is will be their big commercial break out. Greedfall was still very much a niche title for the people “in the know” about such things, but across the board it seemed to review extremely favorably. In hindsight it was probably my favorite game of 2019, and while based on their current schedule I don’t expect to see another game until 2021 at the earliest, I am pumped to get my hands on it and play it. Spiders is exploring one of my favorite genres of games… the Bioware style action RPG, and sadly it is a genre that not too many companies seem to be making. I think more than anything I want to keep pushing recognition of this studio out there, because they are doing some really interesting things. Over the last year they went from a studio that I knew next to nothing about, to one of the ones I am watching closely for any tidbits of information that might be announced.

If you are curious about some of my other posts related to Spiders games… you can find the various categories associated with them below:

Savior of Mars

February 5, 2020 by Belghast

This morning we are in the middle of a spot of winter weather and as a result all of the schools are closed down and there is madness on the roadways. As such I am going to shorten my normal morning post so that I can get out in said madness and contribute to it. Last night I wrapped up The Technomancer and across the board I considered it to be a really enjoyable game experience. My willingness and ultimate enjoyment of these games may be conditioned by having just finished Witcher 2 before starting down this descent into all things Spiders. If that is the case I am still very thankful for the shift in perspective because there is a lot of good happening in these titles.

They are all deeply flawed experiences, and I keep bringing up that point because it is important. If you can look past those flaws there is underneath it all a really enjoyable narrative with some really interesting ideas at work. The Technomancer is a sequel to Mars: War Logs in the same sort of way that Dragon Age 2 is a sequel to Dragon Age: Origins. It contains some of the same settings and central conflict but with a significantly different cast of characters and perspective on the ongoing “war” between the water merchants of Mars. Technomancer is effectively the heroes journey of one Zachariah Mancer an initiate into this order that plays a similar role in their society as the Jedi did in the Old Republic.

Your journey takes you across the face of Mars and two multiple city states in search of answers about the past and to uncover the secrets of your order. It also has a central theme about Mars being abandoned by Earth and the entire population striving to reconnect and ultimately waiting for a rescue mission that in multiple generations of estrangement never came. This central theme causes you to cross paths with so many interesting characters along the way that have moments of poor writing and moments of absolute genius dialog. The rough around the edges nature however seems to just be the hallmark of Spiders as I am now starting a third game and seeing the same sort of “almost but not quite” characteristics there as well.

Were I to give The Technomancer a numerical rating, I would give it a solid 7 out of 10. There is a good story and a lot of interesting characters if you can make it far enough into the game to feel a sense of investment in the setting and the political intrigue. The biggest negative that the game has going for it right now is the fact that you are locked into playing a Male character, and I am wondering if Greedfall was maybe the first game where Spiders experimented with having a main protagonist that did not have a fixed gender. I hope they keep that up going forward because you are playing Zachariah Mancer in Technomancer and as I am starting “Mars: War Logs” you are also playing a fixed character as well.

Speaking of which I did in fact start Mars: War Logs last night, lighting that wick off the waning light of the previous candle. Graphically the game is attractive and the motions all seem to be fine. Combat once again is vastly different from either Greedfall or Technomancer, so it is going to take some getting used to another interface. Like I have said before it seems like they are constantly searching but never quite finding the ideal interface for their games. This game came out in 2013, and as such it really belongs to the previous Xbox 360/PS3 era of games. That said I am enjoying myself so far and I think I will have no problem getting engaged with it much the same as I have the others. I’ve said it many times before… there is something about these games that makes them deeply interesting to me even though their ambition greatly outstrips their technical prowess.

Apparently Chosen One

February 4, 2020 by Belghast

It is not a great morning. I am suffering from what I sometimes refer to as “intestinal panic” and have been since last night. As a result I am little out of it and also did not get amazing sleep which has caused me to stare blankly into the void several times this morning instead of writing a post. Yesterday I found out that a round of mass banning went out in TemTem and for whatever reason I always get paranoid when something like that happens. To the best of my knowledge I have not done anything to warrant a ban, but given that there is usually no recourse it always makes me more than a little paranoid. This time around specifically because the company seems to think that maybe they accidentally banned a few people. Thankfully however I was able to log in just fine and thankfully this time around Crema is accepting appeals. However posts like this one will always serve to make me extra paranoid about random bans.

I continue to push forward in The Technomancer and while I thought I was getting close to the end… I realize that I have yet to finish chapter three of the game because I don’t have that achievement, and that there is also apparently a chapter four achievement. I may just not be able to tell at all where I am in the pacing unless the final chapter is super short. Last night I mostly spent my time working on a plan to disgrace my arch nemesis, which to be honest… I still don’t quite understand why he is chasing me in the manner that he is. That is a finer point that I have yet to figure out, and I am hoping that eventually as I wind my way further down this rabbit hole that it is explained. I am apparently the chosen one without actually having explained why anything about me makes me the chosen one.

There are two things that this game needs badly. The first is a way to skip time without having to find a bed, because unlike the Fallout/Elder Scrolls games beds are in fairly short supply in this world. The second thing is some sort of a fast travel system because I have retread the same steps to the point of madness. Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal, but Spiders made the design decision that encounters would respawn frequently, which means each time that I trek through the slums I have to fight the same guards and the same gates over and over. The game suffers from a significant amount of backtracking because new quests will send you to the same destinations you have been to hundreds of times, and will again force you to fight the same encounters. This is definitely something they seem to have learned from this game because Greedfall had a perfectly adequate fast travel system.

In Josie news, she has entered the phase where she is into everything. She has explored her environment enough to be comfortable with going places she shouldn’t go now. I woke up this morning and she had knocked a ton of stuff off the top of one of the dressers because of course she did. We are reaching a point of equilibrium with the cats, or at least Mollie is starting to settle down. She has always been our high strung baby, and as I said yesterday over twitter she has now adopted the upstairs cat toy and Josie has adopted the downstairs one. Last night was the first time since Josie coming home with us that Mollie snuggled properly, which I am hoping is a good sign. In fact for most of the night I had Kenzie snuggling on the blanket draping my legs, Mollie laying over my mouse arm and Josie sprawled out behind my head on the top of the sectional. This absolutely seems like progress.

Melancholic Undertones

February 3, 2020 by Belghast

It has been a really weird weekend and as I sit down here to write my Monday morning post I largely just find myself staring at a blank screen. It was real hard getting up this morning because it was real hard sleeping last night. Around 9:30 Saturday morning I dropped my wife off at the airport for her very first international flight and around 7:30 Sunday morning she was landing in Lisbon Portugal. Knowing that she is that far away is doing weird things to my brain, and that first night I suffered a pretty nasty panic attack. Like it is not unusual for her to travel but for whatever reason the distance seems all the more extreme and tangible.

My parents wanted to meet for dinner Saturday night and that is probably the exact wrong thing for me to do. I love my folks dearly but they have a way of putting me into a real bad mindset after being around them. Admittedly it is a large part of why I avoid phone calls and have tried really hard to get them used to texting. I get off the phone with my mother and I am in a foul mood for the next three or four hours… and I am never exactly sure why because there really isn’t a reason to be. However that reaction combined with the fact that I was already worried about my wife’s international adventures sent me down a deep hole that I am finding it hard to dig out of today. Apologies that this is not the most cheery of topics for you to be reading on a Monday morning.

All in all however things are fine apart from the bed being too cold and there being too much room in it. Kenzie and Josie have more or less been glued to my side the entire time. I am not sure if it is that they can tell I am somewhat distraught or if they are continuing to get along better. Whatever the case I have had both of them with me in bed the last two nights, generally speaking Josie in my knee pit and Kenzie either laying on top of me or beside me. Mollie on the other hand has largely been non-interactive and I am guessing this is due to the brewing collusion between the other two. She is largely spending the majority of her time up in my wife’s office where she has reclaimed the room we formerly had Josie isolated in.

As far as media goes, I watched the first season of Atlanta because I am wildly behind watching things. That was one of my hopes for the period where I am the only person in the house was to watch a bunch of shows that I had wanted to. I knew that I really should not catch up on BoJack Horseman for reasons that it always makes me question my own existence… but Atlanta maybe wasn’t that much better of an idea. While I loved the season it also has some deeply melancholic undertones which likely did not at all help my mental state. I am engaged however and I am probably going to watch the second season tonight, or at least start it. It really has such a phenomenal cast and I am fully on board with anything that has Donald Glover or Zazie Beetz in it.

On the gaming front I made more progress into The Technomancer and I continue to love it even more. I am really interested in seeing the games that Spiders has to offer because there absolutely was a void left by Bioware that they are seemingly trying to fill. I feel like I am maybe starting to enter the phase of the game where you begin to collect allied forces and head towards a final showdown. That seems to always be a thing that exists in the type of games that Mass Effect or Dragon Age represent, and I am not exactly sure what to call that genre. It is like a sub genre within the Action RPG genre and I sorta feel dumb always referring to them as Bioware-Likes. Whatever the case I am on this course until I finish the game. It is doing a lot of interesting things, but unfortunately I can’t talk about them at length without generating significant spoilers. Part of why this game works is the way in which it unfolds the setting, and in case someone wants to follow in my shoes I don’t want to ruin it for them.

Josie is getting exceptionally good at climbing things… including me. Sunday morning I was sitting working on editing the podcast and Josie was apparently completely enthralled by whatever was happening on the screen. She figured out a way to latch onto my shoulder and then sorta drape herself down my chest as I leaned back in my chair. She is super bonded at this point and follows me around like a little lost puppy. It is almost always Kenzie and Josie that are with me all of the time, and I try and make sure they both get equal attention so that Kenz doesn’t get jealous. I write that and behind me Kenzie just bopped Josie for some reason that I fail to grasp. For those who are like me and search the background of photos, some things that you can see.