ampersandrew

I think they’re called that because they postdate the “looter shooter” that combined Diablo-esque “action RPGs” with FPS games, like Borderlands and Destiny. “Looter” without the “shooter” is a much better name for Diablo’s genre anyway, since we have far too many RPGs that are also action games and have nothing in common with Diablo.

I’m still waiting for the resurgence of the style of shooter that came just after those that inspired this wave of boomer shooter; the likes of Half-Life, Halo, 007, TimeSplitters, and so on. I don’t know what subgenre will be assigned to those games when they start to come back around, but that style is also old at this point, so hopefully it doesn’t also get assigned the label of “boomer shooter”, because then it’ll be harder for both audiences to find what they’re looking for.

I’m back into Final Fantasy VII, which I’ve never finished before. I’ve been playing this game off and on over the past several years, and boy is that a rough way to play it. It’s very difficult to remember what I was supposed to be doing next, because that game often gives you one line of dialogue about where to go and then has no in-game reminder of it. As a result, I’ve got a walkthrough handy to reference whenever I’m lost. I just got to the bottom of the mountain after the snowboarding sequence, and those parts of the game where you’re trying to navigate the pre-rendered backgrounds are where you can feel its age the most. I’m hoping to finish this one up in the next month or so, ahead of the possible Rebirth PC port that we might be lucky enough to get this year.

I’m replaying Horizon: Zero Dawn on PC ahead of the Forbidden West release as a refresher on the story, though I’m not going to play the sequel on day 1. They made me wait several years for it already. They can keep waiting for my money until it gets a sale down to about $40, maybe this summer. I still really enjoy the combat in that game, especially on higher difficulties, but this is a game that still feels like I’d enjoy it more if I could select missions from a menu rather than going through the open world trappings. It may have made these games cheaper to develop at the same time. Oh well.

I finished The Outer Worlds and its DLC. I highly recommend it. I feel like this game gets overlooked often enough. Did you wish Starfield was better? Play The Outer Worlds. Did you want another Fallout: New Vegas? Play The Outer Worlds.

Now that I’ve finished The Outer Worlds, another Obsidian game, I’m back to playing some Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire. I only progressed one quest a little bit this past week, but I want to keep pushing forward and finish this game before Avowed comes out.

Other than the above, still more Skullgirls grind. My pushblock guard cancel skills have atrophied, and I need to run some drills. Also, Peacock zoning, even when I know the answers, is tough to deal with.

It’s not a story when it’s a couple of conspiracy theorists making horrifically inaccurate deductions. It’s a story when it’s hundreds of thousands of people led on by a bunch of horse shit.

I think I’d have a problem with it if bad internet super sleuths came up with some nonsense reasons to try to destroy my reputation.

I beat the base game of The Outer Worlds and started the DLC. This game ought to have more eyes on it in the wake of Starfield. It’s just a better version of that game. Each settlement you come across might have about 10 NPCs in it, and each one of them is connected to the other ones via quests that help you form a picture of just what happened here before you landed. It’s excellent.

I also finished Penny’s Big Breakaway. When you hit a flow state in this game, it’s so, so good, but a bit of jank in the physics and controls for the game hold it back. Like last week, my recommendation is still to wait a few months to play it, in hopes that patches can square away some of these issues.

And then there’s my usual fighting game shenanigans in Street Fighter 6 and Skullgirls, trying to be the FGC equivalent of “swol”. The Capcom Cup finals for SF6 were a lot of fun to watch despite there being too many Lukes.

This deal happened because Embracer is shedding debt, and this is how you shed it. They just listed their debt a few months ago as 2.12B, so this and Gearbox will go a long way toward getting it down to a level they can actually afford. Meanwhile, it’s very hard to track what they still own, but one of those things is Tomb Raider. They’ll also have tons and tons of smaller bets. Alone in the Dark, Titan Quest II, and Gothic look to still be under their control, for instance.

Preservation is why it’s important to have emulators as soon as someone has figured out how to get one running. Nintendo should be embarrassed that pirating their games often lets these people experience their games better than if the games were run through official channels. I was sure tempted to pirate Metroid Dread instead of buying it, but it wasn’t because I couldn’t afford it, just wanted it for free, or had some notion of retribution toward Nintendo. I was tempted because the Switch is terrible hardware, I prefer to play games on my PC, and it would run better on my PC. I think that was the last Nintendo game I bought. I haven’t pirated any Switch games to date, because the only actual retribution I want toward Nintendo is for both my money and my time to go to games where the companies are less shitty. I’m not going to fault someone for wanting to play Tears of the Kingdom at frame rates higher than 23 FPS and resolutions better than 540p with no anti aliasing, and the best way for Nintendo to cut back on that piracy is to make the game for PC like everyone else is doing these days, but they know the upside of Switch sales is worth more to them than what these pirates cost them. Piracy will also preserve the game better than Nintendo ever will. I honestly don’t care what the percentages are of freeloaders by comparison, because it doesn’t matter.

EDIT: Oh, btw, I have pirated plenty of their back catalog, and I’m sure you have too. I’d love to buy them, like I bought Sega Genesis games and like I bought old Mega Man games on Steam, but how strange! There’s no legal way to buy those old Nintendo games digitally. You can only rent them in perpetuity. Nah, I’ll just pirate them.

The 3DS and Wii U digital stores were just decommissioned, and preservation is a bullshit excuse?

Your best bet is to just go on Steam and start filtering by tags. You can click on a search and search for both “JRPG” and “Turn-based combat” tags, and that will give you a good list of games in the ballpark of Phantasy Star.

No worries. I was not really able to deduce any more depth out of the combat, really. There were some defensive options that seem to always cancel into offense options to feel snappier, but I think it was really a matter of what the game bothered to teach me and what I needed to do in order to make it through the game. If they want to make it a priority on the sequel, I trust them to know how to do that.

I did finish it. Liked it, really enjoyed the presentation. There was a bit of abstract in the ending, which isn’t really my bag, but I’m on board for the sequel.

I don’t mean to sound rude, but it seems strange to pine for something lost that not only isn’t lost but also you don’t seem to have looked very hard for. There are some high profile turn based RPG hits all the time. Pokemon games are still turn based RPGs, and that’s the most successful entertainment property of all time.

That game is worth putting up with its jank. You may not know exactly what the character is going to say, but each option is always channeling either James Bond, Jack Bauer, or Jason Bourne.

I don’t know how worth it is to try to explain my idea of what a hypothetical better version of Starfield is, but the short answer is:

• only let you do one faction quest per playthrough
• those factions’ quest lines already, in the real Starfield that exists today, intersect with one another
• change how different factions react to you and those other factions based on a system similar to the type of reputation system Obsidian has done before, not unlike Levine’s “Narrative Legos” video, but it doesn’t even have to be that advanced

It wouldn’t involve grinding. If I still haven’t articulated it well enough, don’t worry about it, because that game doesn’t exist anyway.

I’m going through some more of The Outer Worlds. Still really enjoying it. It’s got a good pace to it.

Palworld is still my second screen game for podcasts and such. It needs some tweaking in the progression, but I’m at the point now where I can expand to additional bases.

I picked up Penny’s Big Breakaway. It feels great to play. The boss fights are really interesting. This could and should have been one of the best platformers I’ve ever played, and maybe it still is, but some bugs and jank occasionally get in the way. If you’re swinging from your yo-yo and hit a wall, you’re supposed to do a small climbing animation, but it doesn’t always work. Sometimes when riding your yo-yo, you’ll kind of just skip and jump off with poor feedback for why. Sometimes you get stuck in a wall. The design for air dashing by pressing the button twice can often get eaten by other inputs, and that doesn’t feel great. The bugs and jank are not the most prevalent part of the experience, but they happen enough to bring down my opinion of the game a peg or two. I’d highly recommend this game, but maybe wait a few months for a couple of patches.

My friends and I beat the main campaign of Quake II in co-op. It’s much faster in co-op and with the compass feature than they intended, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. Next we’ll move on to the expansions.

Still labbing some stuff in Skullgirls for my Combo Breaker grind. It’s painful going through replays for my losses, but it’s necessary, and I took good notes.

I had been dipping my toes into the waters of loot games with Titan Quest, and I think I’m at the point now where I can say I see the appeal with the genre and I’ll stick with it. For this game in particular, I do wish the bosses were more involved, because they don’t really hit a crescendo that a boss fight should have. Due to what defensive options the game gives you and doesn’t give you, they often just end up being running away from the guy in a circle until you can land some hits. Still, it’s fun. After this game, I might check out the sequel, Grim Dawn, or V Rising.

The thing that Obsidian has done plenty of times is system-driven reputations. The thing that would be new is bending that into new playthroughs on NG+ that interact with your past playthroughs.

But this isn’t a film. People replay systems-driven games all the time, because you can tweak the variables and make it feel new. RPGs have done this plenty of times. Interacting with a separate quest line that occasionally intersects with things you did in one of your previous timelines is something that there is absolutely a way to do, and Obsidian has made exactly that type of systems-driven RPG plenty of times.

On the other hand, an alternate perspective is:

• The average action game today has more going on in its story department than point and clicks did 30 years ago, and that’s not even accounting for games with a much larger emphasis on story like an RPG.
• Baldur’s Gate 3 and the last two Legend of Zelda games are great examples of actually thinking outside the box, not thinking of explicit answers that were hard coded into old adventure games as valid answers. Those types of games back then got a reputation for “moon logic” for a reason, and I’m not sure we’re better off with games that give you a soft fail state for missing an essential item in an early area like old Sierra games.
• What you might call “handholdy”, others might call “better UX” in a lot of cases, though there are certainly plenty of games that are a reaction to more guided designs; not just the above examples of Zelda and Baldur’s Gate but also the likes of Elden Ring, Factorio, Dwarf Fortress, and Outer Wilds.
• People’s attention spans didn’t necessarily drop, and it’s even harder to show that people are largely less educated than they used to be, but even if both of those things were true, neither would be demonstrated by the types of video games that came out over the past 40 years. People have built entire functioning computers inside of Minecraft, and Red Dead Redemption II certainly, without question, is doing more with its story than any adventure game from the 90s or earlier.

I would absolutely trust Obsidian to handle the NG+ angle that Bethesda was aiming for, because they would have known that the right way to do it is to not let you do every faction’s quest line in the same playthrough.

I don’t see a technical debt problem getting any better by ignoring the problem for longer. No better time to start than when they’ve got Microsoft’s war chest to help aid the transition.