Tag: Games

Friday Fireside Chat

.Reading time 11 minutes.

Why fireside? Because it’s raining quite heavily outside and that seems like a cozy way to start off this Friday post. I also hope it helps distract from the fact that I might have missed last Friday… a little bit, or completely.

Sorry about that.

So what’s been happening? A little, a lot, really depends on where you sit.

I’m going to start with something I saw yesterday from one of my favorite YouTubers, Skillup. He started as a hardcore Division streamer and while he has since moved on to a much broader range of topics he has been covering Division 2. Since Ubisoft can’t stop stepping in it even when they’re doing well he released a video yesterday talking about their decision to sell stash space. Not to mention the ridiculous amount of versions of the game they have up for sale and at what prices.

Pretty sure you can all guess where I stand on this just based on my previous posts but I do want to reiterate: developers do not need to blackmail us to get our money. The reason that the subject of stash space and charging for it is so egregious is because of what a huge issue, among other things, it was in their first game. Massive and Ubisoft have been fairly adamant about avoiding the mistakes they made the first time around which layers this entire subject in sour irony. As Skillup points out in the video at this stage of development they don’t even know how much the space the base stash is going to have nor how many extra slots the Ultimate Edition will actually offer. They’re selling a product whose parameters aren’t even set in stone which in and of itself is insulting enough.

Ubisoft and Massive know definitively from their first release that they have a game people want, a game where people want to pay for cosmetic extras, a game that they can reasonably monetize. I have been and will always be vehemently against monetizing basic game mechanics and QoL (Quality of Life) improvements for players except in a Free-To-Play environment. There you can purchase what you want as you want or need it without any upfront cost to also consider, in effect you don’t need to purchase the game and it’s mechanics twice. Since this revelation my enthusiasm for this game release has been dwindling fast which is a shame as I fell in love the aesthetic and gameplay immediately and have been itching to play more. I want the story, I want the outfits, I want the guns and I want to continue exploring the world of The Division. I really do.

I just wish game companies like Ubisoft and Massive didn’t seem so dead set on making me weigh my morals as a consumer against my desires as a gamer. Being pro-consumer doesn’t mean you can’t make money, it never has, it’s just a way to make money while not making your customers simultaneously regret their purchase. I want to feel good about buying a product, feel good about the people whose jobs I’m supporting and about the type of business practices I’m encouraging. Eventually that grimace I make when pulling out my wallet is going to turn into disgust which is then going to turn into me looking elsewhere for my entertainment.

If you won’t take my word for it then listen to someone whose opinion you should at the very least respect: Shigeru Miyamoto.

Now that’s done with lets move on to some more fun things.

On a musical note the Moonbeam Rider EP by Slugabed has made frequent appearances lately in my writing playlists. I don’t know why honestly, I wouldn’t call myself a huge fan of the genre but its funky, awesome and just kinda puts me in a trance while I write.

It’s nice, you should give it a listen.

On the YouTube front I re-stumbled upon the joy that is Loading Ready Run and the series they make in co-operation with Wizards of the Coast called Friday Nights. If you like MTG and sketch comedy I recommend you give it a look, it’s worth your time. They have quite a few other shows they produce on a regular basis including their long, but well worth, Pre Pre-Release streams they do for new Magic: The Gathering sets. One of the things I like about it is that they have a judge on hand while they play their games so you can see how rules enforcement works. They also do a rules and mechanics review at the start with the judge to help familiarize you with new effects from the set. Even for the casual fan I think it can have some pretty helpful information and their streaming setup is great with a card reader to display cards as they are played.

I ran across this amusing thing in the smartphone world from Nokia: The 8110-4G. I understand the push for minimalism and people who want their basic necessities met without going overboard. Unfortunately I think we all know exactly who is going to end up buying and using these and spoiler; they’re not those people.

To the folks who want this kind of tech I wish you well and hopefully this thing fulfills all your needs. To the people who are going to buy this simply as an affectation, just do us all a favor and stick with your Android or iPhone, it’s fine.

Also, apparently it comes pre-loaded with Snake. Nothing but value.

On the extreme other end of that you can take a peek at the upcoming Hydrogen One phone from RED, the camera company. Looking it over with special emphasis on the price tag might have me understanding the minimalists a bit more.

Alright, now it’s time to discuss what is apparently on everyone’s mind: Nipples. No, seriously. I have to say that I am honestly impressed you can get so much out of a subject like this. I understand that everyone feels differently about things but, really? This can’t be that big of a deal. Although we also had to apparently deal with the whole fiasco of Luigi dying in a trailer for the new Smash game so maybe it shouldn’t be all that surprising.

I can’t tell if folks are having too much fun or too little fun that these things need to be reported on as news but either way, let’s all take take a moment and reflect on where we are as a planet.

While you’re contemplating that you should also check this out. I’m not the biggest fan of racing games but I am a huge fan of, the old, Top Gear and the new Grand Tour on Amazon so I’m tentatively interested in this. Especially if it has Jeremy, Richard and James doing voiceover for it. So far it seems like a novel idea where the tracks you’ll get to play through in the game are taken directly from things they do on the show with new cars and locations being added as episodes release. Hopefully it will add up to being more than just a gimmick and instead a fun way to interact with a show you love. Unfortunately it seems that the game will only be available for PS4 and XBONE which seems like a peculiar choice to me given the company that is making it but hopefully we’ll see a PC release in the future if it’s successful enough to warrant one.

There is always more but that is where I’ll leave it this week so this doesn’t risk becoming a truly uninteresting novella. Thanks for sticking around and I hope you have had a good week!

Was there anything I missed that you think I should have included? What interesting things did you stumble across recently? Let me know!

Have a great weekend and I’ll be back soon!

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The Friday Wrap Party

.Reading time 11 minutes.

Happy Friday folks! Let’s do a little rundown shall we?

There seems to be a new consensus about the No Man’s Sky: Next update that say it finally delivers the game that was promised two years ago. Watching the trailer I can’t say that much looks very different to me except for the very conspicuous presence of players together on the same planet with the ability to see one another. I know it’s a little disingenuous because of the overall tech involved in the game but, hooray! Welcome to gaming… 20 years ago? Even more actually but twenty is a nice round number that sounds strong when you place some emphasis on it. 20. See?

The trailer still starts off by reiterating that everything in the game is created with procedural tech, which is cool, but overall has never really managed to be a good selling point. It sounds really nice and like it will do wonders for any game that uses it but almost universally it ends up being a disappointment instead of a standout feature. I do think that procedural systems will be absolutely integral as games continue to grow and push boundaries but for right now its just not ready to be the face of a game. Outside of, I think, the underwater stuff, multiplayer and, freighter ships it looks a lot like a redux of their E3 trailer from so long ago.

To be up front, at the top of the third paragraph, I haven’t played No Man’s Sky and I don’t think I plan to so anything said here is strictly an outsiders opinion. I don’t think anything I have to say is particularly controversial or something that requires me to have actually played the game but certainly let me know if it is, or does, or did. Tense is hard. Anyways, I find myself in a weird situation with regards to the comments I made in previous posts, like last Friday, about companies like Ubisoft sticking with their games after rocky releases. Yet reading about how far No Man’s Sky has come I don’t feel the same level of forgiveness for Hello Games and even after ruminating on it for a week I’m not exactly sure why. The best guess I have is that I absolutely could not stand the way they handled the backlash to their release “issues”. I put that in sarcasm quotes because one of the biggest knocks was the shocking realization that multiplayer was not a thing in any sense of the word. Something that is far worse than a bug or mechanical failure but an outright misrepresentation of their end product coming to light. The reaction to these issues started with Sean Murray exclaiming how “Amazing” the community was for achieving the purported nigh impossible task due to the sheer size of the game within a week of release. Despite calls for clarification on why the players couldn’t see each other or why the functionality was missing Hello Games essentially shut down on the PR front and retreated to their offices to work on the game. An admirable goal all things considered but with little or no attempt to take responsibility for the state of the game at release or address statements made prior to release. Leaving fans and gaming media to debate among themselves and dissect interviews given about whether or not certain features had actually been promised.

For my money if your fans are even engaged in that debate then you as the developer have done something wrong, either by intentionally or unintentionally misrepresenting your product or outright lying about what you could deliver. None of those options are good and barring a complete group psychosis on the part of your fans and the media they probably didn’t hallucinate those expectations. All said and done I’m happy that the fans of the game finally have a mostly complete product that they can play and enjoy as they more than deserve it for sticking with them this long. I do hope that Hello Games and Sean Murray specifically learned some lessons with No Man’s Sky which will result in their next game being one that I will want to buy. I love this genre of game and desperately wanted to want to play this one right up until the shit hit the fan and that is coming from someone who was assuming the game wouldn’t deliver what was promised up front.

Now, onwards!

In the wake of it’s absolutely crushing success the game, God of War 4 is getting it’s very own novelization written by none other than… the game directors father! On the level of pure synergy this is just so cool however if he doesn’t dedicate the book to some version of “Boy” a great opportunity will have been missed. I haven’t played the game yet but I look forward to checking this out in hopes that they’ll take this opportunity to expand even further on the lore behind Kratos in this new setting. Instead of just regurgitating a step by step re-telling of what the player experienced in their playthrough.

In the wake of still getting my ass handed to me by likes of Hollow Knight and Dead Cells I don’t think I really need a new 2-D platformer to play but if I did it might look something like Salt and Sanctuary. There is just something truly endearing about that paper doll style animation that I really like, even when the overall aesthetic of the game oozes nightmare fuel.

I am a huge, huge fan of Magic: The Gathering and by default this means that Richard Garfield is high up on my People-I-Love list which means that his latest game called Keyforge: Call of the Archons piques my interest. The only problem is that for every game released which isn’t Magic: The Gathering I never get past the stage of having my interest piqued. It’s not that these games don’t look good or aren’t good in practice it’s just that they all inevitably end up being stacked against objectively the best TCG to ever exist. I know the argument people will make is that I must judge each game on it’s own merits but it’s hard to not use games I already like as a reference point. Keyforge is touted in it’s description as–

From the imagination of legendary game designer Richard Garfield comes a game unlike anything the world has ever seen—a game where every deck is as unique as the person who wields it and no two battles will ever be the same.

Unfortunately MTG already does these things and because of it’s long history it almost inevitably does them better than anyone else. The sheer longevity of the game makes it infinitely more varied and unique than anything new both in builds and matchups.

In fact, in just the first set of KeyForge, Call of the Archons, there are more than 104,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible decks!

That is a huuuuuuge number and something really impressive to put on your box except just take a moment to google how many possible MTG deck combinations there are and you get results like this. I’m far and away the worst choice of someone to come to if you need math equations interpreted but I think the argument ends with MTG’s number is probably more ridiculous.

At any rate, all of this is in service of me saying that at some point I should really buckle down and give one of these new TCG’s a try because chances are there are some new and fun mechanics out there that I would enjoy. This includes the upcoming card game from Valve called Artifact because it is also a game Richard Garfield collaborated on and because I’m an inveterate Valve lover in spite of my attempts to be objective. I haven’t played DOTA 2 in quite a while but the lore and art seem to me to be prime candidates for the beginnings of a TCG, digital or otherwise.

What cool things have you seen recently and think I should also see? Leave a comment!

Apologies for this wrap up being a bit rambly but I’ll cut it off there and wish everyone a nice, relaxing weekend filled to the brim with your favorite activities and I will see you next week!

  • Non-Washable

 

Friday Wrap-Up

.Reading time 8 minutes.

This was something I said I wanted to do more regularly a while back and like comes naturally to people like me I promptly stopped doing it and immediately began hating myself. I knew it would happen almost the second I hit publish on that first Friday post and while I don’t regret stating the goal I do regret not following through. One because it sucks to make a promise and not come through and two because I actually legitimately enjoyed writing it.

So let’s give it another shot, shall we? I’ve missed a lot in the past month because of the aforementioned personality defect which I’ll wrestle with until I’m dead so I’m not going to bother recapping it all. We’re going to start fresh and cover a few interesting things that happened more recently.

In past posts I’ve been pretty harsh on companies like Ubisoft for their myriad failures and gaffes so I wanted to take this opportunity after reading an interesting article over at Kotaku to give them some kudos. We’ve had plenty of examples of companies who instead of fixing their mistakes simply abandon them and move on to a new project without so much of an admission of guilt. Unfortunately we don’t have a lot of great examples of game devs who are willing to stick around and fix what they broke. Bungie did so with the first Destiny and are in the process of voluntarily re-living that adventure with Destiny 2 for reasons that escape me and everyone else.

The Division was a good game that failed to deliver on its promises at launch, a story as old as time, song as old as… anyways, suffice it to say that it struggled along for quite a while. In a surprising move Ubisoft and Massive were unwilling to simply let the game languish and die so instead they persisted until with the final content update it felt like the game they’d promised from day one. This questionable financial move was validated with the return of scores of new and old players giving what should have been a dead title a new lease on life. Even more to their credit with the announcement of The Division 2 complete with extensive gameplay previews they still haven’t stopped giving people reasons to play the original game. New challenges and badges have been added in order to earn cosmetic items in Division 2. They’re being drip fed to the community as the release of the sequel gets closer. As someone who stopped playing a while back after finishing the game finally I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t considering going back to get these shields.

I have high hopes for The Division 2 and this only serves to bolster them as Ubisoft and Massive continue to prove that they stand by their promises while striving to learn from their mistakes.

On the opposite end of the spectrum lets rewind several years and remember the somewhat hilarious disaster that was Aliens: Colonial Marines. Recently it was revealed by an enterprising modder who was dead set on fixing the game that some of the more noticeable problems may have been caused by a typo. For anyone who has ever dabbled in any level of programming you can understand how much frustration a typo can cause you, only for most it isn’t to the tune of six figures and international ridicule.

If for nothing else it highlights just how delicate the development process can be and the kind of hell  these developers put themselves through with 80+ hour weeks in crunch time trying to get games finished. I can’t even imagine the amount of typos my code would be riddled with in that environment. In the case of this game it was one mistake among many but one of the few that was truly funny.

I came across this announcement about a game called Digimon Survive and 16-year old me has completely lost his shit especially since it was announced for the Switch which is exactly the right platform. I honestly don’t even remember much about Digimon in spite of watching the cartoon but I’m excited none the less to see how it turns out.

We. The Revolution is possibly one of the coolest game concepts I’ve seen in recent memory, either that or I have some kind of undocumented fetish for pixelated death after playing Domina for way too many hours. It doesn’t have a release date but I’ll be watching it closely.

I feel like this needs little or no explanation. It exists, yes I love it and if you don’t understand why, I can’t help you.

Young Justice Season 3 was announced which is fantastic! DC has had the market cornered on great animated content and its nice to see one of their best coming back.

Similarly the announcement that Clone Wars is finally going to get some closure has me once again anticipating a Star Wars release.

And Godzilla because, Godzilla.

Lastly I want to touch on the Shazaam! trailer that came out and say that I’m really happy to see that DC is attempting to loosen up a little bit and have some fun. It’s no secret that DC’s top superhero line-up is decidedly darker and more dour than their competition but playing into that has done them no favors so far. Their animated offerings have struck an impressive balance between being somber and funny but so far its eluded their DCEU outings except for brief moments here and there. And a somewhat ham-fisted attempt with the Flash in Justice League which was plagued with other issues. I’m not sure where the DCEU is going from here and if we’ll even see Shazaam team up with the rest of the Justice League but if for nothing else I hope this marks a new beginning for them. From here I’d definitely like to see them reintroduce Green Lantern who to date has been a conspicuously absent piece of the puzzle.

I think that’s it for now! What cool things did you come across recently? What things should I know about?

I hope you have a great weekend full of whatever it is you like to do or just some good old relaxation and doing nothing at all.

See you next week!

  • Non-Washable