The Good, the Bad and the Ghost

This morning I have a handful of topics to talk about, and none of them really feel like they are big enough to fill an entire post. As a result you are going to get a number of tidbits about each. Starting up with a screenshot from the credit roll sequence of Horizon Zero Dawn that is in no way a spoiler for the game as a whole. This is the second time I have gotten a credit roll for this game as I had originally played it on the PlayStation. Knowing how the game goes does not stop the fact that the ending was still an emotional sucker punch and I did not have dry eyes at several points during it. The only advice I would give is that it personally felt better to pause the main story at some point and go knock out the DLC content, and that more or less paid off well. I love it when a game gives you a moment to visit with your friends that you met along the way one last time before the looming end battle. Playing through the DLC ahead of this moment meant that elements of the DLC were included which felt really good. I personally paused the main story shortly after getting to the main city of the game and getting the quest directive “Find <character name> at the Excavation Site” and that seemed to be a good place because it was a lull in what was happening.

I feel like I am getting dangerously close to beating a dead horse at this point with this topic. I tweeted my feelings on Friday and spent a good chunk of Saturday’s podcast talking through it as well. Avengers was not a game that I had been following super closely, but I was hoping it would be enjoyable and had been looking forward to it. On Friday’s I have to take a half day furlough and as a result I had planned on spending my afternoon playing the game. I ultimately lasted about two hours before giving up and asking Steam for a refund. I verified this but in the entire history of using steam since September 22nd of 2004… I have asked for two refunds. The first was for Skater XL, because I was hoping for something like Tony Hawk Pro Skater and when I asked if there was a way to configure the game to behave like that the community was toxic as fuck to me. The second game is Avengers, because I feel like the problems I have with this game will not be fixable within the time frame of a September launch. The sad thing about this is that I really was enjoying the story beats, but the core gameplay loop felt awful. If you have ever played a truly alpha game, there is a phase that sorta happens early on when all of the pieces that make up the combat system are in the game, but nothing has really been tuned to make it feel enjoyable. The characters are making attacks but they don’t really have a solid flow that they feed into. This is what Avengers felt like to me, as I fought with the overly aggressive camera and screen shake and combat that didn’t feel seem to feel like it was actually connected to what my character was doing. The similarly aggressive Quick Time Event system and the fact that sometimes they just wouldn’t fire when you needed one of them to… like swinging over a chasm… got tiring as well. We are effectively two and a half weeks away from launch, and at this point… I have no faith that the game is going to change in a significant way. Unless they made the stupid decision of having players play through a year or more old demo… the game is effectively where it is going to be when the game launches. Ultimately it came down to the fact that nothing I was doing was really “fun” because I didn’t feel like I was engaged with the world around me. Maybe it feels particularly bad because I have been playing Horizon Zero Dawn and Ghosts of Tsushima… both games with phenomenally engaging combat systems. As it stands it is doing a lot of the things that DC Universe Online did in 2011 but instead gives you less freedom of movement and throws in a bunch of Quick Time Event infused cinematics for you to watch. However I believed the combat in DCUO, which I guess makes it the better game.

Another demo that I got to play with this weekend is the Warehouse level from Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2. I don’t have a ton to talk about this because I have only played a few sessions, but I know enough now to feel like this is legitimately going to be a good game. I have been playing THPS2 on my RG350 emulator handheld, and I have to say that this essentially checks all of the boxes that the original game did. The only thing that takes a little getting used to is that the game as a whole is considerably faster than the original. The other thing that is a bit weird is that instead of standing up after a wipe, you sorta do this glitchy rewind thing which is stylized… but takes some getting used to. Those things aside… it was after a few minutes that my muscle memory started to come back. I do want to play around a bit with button mappings because as it stands a few of the buttons should be handled better with triggers.

I spent the majority of Sunday playing Ghosts of Tsushima. I had been wanting to play through HZD before really getting into this game in earnest. I gotta say I am really enjoying myself and the only thing that would have made the experience better is… 1) if it were on a PC and 2) if I was playing with a keyboard and mouse. Essentially controller just isn’t my jam but I suffer through it on occasion for games that I feel are worthy of the frustration. I am still largely in the first area of the game, slowly working my way through the story missions and recruiting help. I am sure I will have more to say in the coming days. I know everyone has been talking about this already for months but it is all new to me. The post The Good, the Bad and the Ghost appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.