One of the things that I have learned about myself is that I have to be in the right mood at the right time in order to get engaged with a game. This has caused a bunch of problems in the past when I felt like I needed to play something, but for whatever reason kept bouncing from it. I think it is almost like I take this as a challenge, especially if I don’t fully understand why I bounced in the first place. For example I have spent so much time trying to like Guild Wars 2 and Warframe, because on paper they are games that I should like. However thus far no matter how many times I keep trying them, I fail to grasp the thing that my friends who are into them are so engaged with.
I wrote about this the other day in a post called Changing Perspective, as I chronicled my feelings about the Dragon Age series. Currently I show that I have 101 hours played in Steam, but originally I was attempting to play the game through Origin where I show 125 hours and I also own it on PlayStation where I attempted to play for an unknown amount of time. I kept thinking that maybe it was the platform or the way in which I was playing the game that lead me to struggle with it. The last thing I wanted to admit was that there was a game in the Dragon Age series that I just didn’t like at all. Thankfully I stuck with it and kept trying it every so often, with this fifth attempt at playing through the game seeming to finally be successful.
I can’t tell you with any certainty what is different this time around. However I have reached a point where Dragon Age Inquisition was my least favorite of the Dragon Age series, to where it may just be my favorite now. The game goes through a lot of changes and I’ve learned to love characters that I was absolutely diametrically opposed to going into the game. Cassandra for example I viewed as the enemy of the second game, but over time I have reached a point where I think she is absolutely one of the better written characters. Similarly my first time encountering Dorian I was annoyed by him, but now I have come to love his braggadocio.
I’m at a point in the story where I am effectively two quests away from the end of the game. As a result I am going back and wrapping up content that I had not had time to do yet. Yesterday I played through the entire Jaws of Hakkon DLC and then last night I started the Deep roads based one called The Descent. Once I wrap that up it will ultimately be time to face down the big baddy of the game and see the credits roll. I’m doing what I ultimately do every time I reach this point in a game and delaying the inevitable. I have come to love the characters that I am on this journey with and I don’t want it to end. So I will keep finding one more thing to do rather than committing and ultimately closing this chapter in gaming.
Sure I have a stack of games waiting to be played, but for now I am fully engaged with this one and that feels like a special time that I don’t want to end. I am sure I will revisit this game at some point in the future, but that will be then and a different sequence of choices will ultimately lead to a different experience. For now I am trying to savor the last drops of goodness in this experience before I ultimately dive into another. Dragon Age Inquisition is a game that does more for the larger world building of the setting than any of the previous games. The other two games were focused on a very narrow scope and this is more centered around wider themes of existence.
It makes me extremely interested to see where things go from here. I feel like we are going to the Tevinter Imperium, Nevarra and Antiva given that those are settings we have heard so much about in past games but never actually visited. I expect more information to unfurl about the core arc of the which centers around the events of when humans first set foot into the fade thousands of years ago. I mean effectively everything we have done to this point have been dealing with the ramifications of those events. Knowing what I know now… the teaser footage so far makes a lot more sense.
The post Second Chances appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we have a bunch of toppings that have been hanging around on the list for awhile. We talk a bit about the announcement that Riot is making an MMORPG and our general thoughts about that. Bel talks about the need for Attract Screens in game and this leads into a discussion about Tutorialization in games. From there we venture forth into how exactly you teach a non-gamer how to play games and if games are too complicated right now. Bel talks a bit about how much he misses F-Zero and why Mario Kart actually won the battle of the racing game that Nintendo cares about. From there we talk about the vast array of experiments Nintendo is doing right now surrounding Mario. Bel talks about revisiting Jedi Fallen Order and we wrap things up with a discussion about struggling to find a good tabletop cyberpunk game.
Bless Unleashed is a game that I have been watching for awhile since I first heard about it at Pax West 2018. A friend of mine appears to be doing some work with the game and hooked me up with closed beta test access along with a few keys to hand out to my readers, but we will talk about that specifically later. First lets clear up some confusion, because I can see that you might be thinking… but wait Bel didn’t this game release in 2018? The answer to that would be no but also sorta yes? Bless Online and Bless Unleashed are two different games in the Bless series, with the first being a traditional hotbar combat style MMORPG and Unleashed being more of a action combat limited hotkey affair. Last night I spent several hours playing around in the Closed Beta and immediately it feels like a mix of TERA, Neverwinter and Skyforge.
The bulk of your combat takes place with the left and right mouse buttons with some longer cooldowns existing on four buttons bound by default to numeric keys 1-4. The game uses an auto combo system similar to TERA where if you hit the left mouse button once you get a specific ability, but if you hit it again in rapid succession it actually performs a different ability. Combinations of left and right mouse clicks can be chained together to do specific combos, and there is an in game guide to these. By default your evade button is bound to the spacebar and jump to control, though the longer I played the more likely I was to swap these because I am a jumper in MMORPGs.
You start the game by choosing from one of the five classes and four races, but really… class is the piece you have the most control over. Thankfully this is not a game with gender locked classes like Black Desert Online, but each class does have a very limited choice of the four races of Human, Elf, Varg (big cat people), and Ippin (think Asura from GW2). For example I rolled a Crusader and had the ability to create a Human or an Ippin. When I went to create a Ranger later, that specific class was locked to only being able to play as an Elf. Race appears to strictly be a visual choice because I did not see any real difference between them.
You are given a number of presets that you can start with and then modify further. I hate futzing with faces in these sort of character creators, so I ultimately went with the face that I liked the best and then started customizing from there. You have a pretty wide range of options and almost all of the color pickers employ a full color gamut slider system allowing you to have purple skin and flame orange hair if you so choose it. For me I largely tried to create “Belghast” which regardless of the game has certain specific sensibilities. So I went with the dark hair, ponytail, full beard thing that I have done since World of Warcraft, and the closer a game gets to allowing me to do that thing the better.
For the most part Bless Unleashed passed with flying colors when it comes to the character creation system. There are some quirks I have encountered so far in combat. For example there are attacks that will stun your character and you have to mash spacebar, left and right mouse button at the same time in order to break free. My instinct is to stay holding on the movement keys while doing this so I will move out of the effect as fast as possible. However it seems that you have to ease up off them and re-engage them in order for the game to acknowledge that you are wanting to move now. That feels off but once I realized that was what was happening I adjusted.
The story being told is not the most engaging in the world, and if you have ever played ArcheAge, Blade & Soul, Black Desert Online or TERA you are likely going to be familiar with the style of questing that I largely associate with South Korean MMORPGs. There is a lot that is supposedly aiding the people and leading towards the core story of the game, but really it just feels like busy work. There is partial voice acting where the NPC says something… but it is completely unrelated to the dialog that is actually being said on screen. Essentially this is the modern equivalent of the Orc Peon cycling through a series of lines when you click on it in Warcraft 2. Instead of “Zug Zug” you get some comment about the festival that is going on, or that the weather is looking nice.
So far the moment to moment gameplay feels pretty enjoyable and combat feels fluid. You are going to spend most of your time attacking with dodges happening at specific times when the mob is very obviously building up to some bigger attack. I am curious to play the game when there aren’t quite so many people in the same area because since the game has open tagging and instanced looting… everyone was basically just attacking everything and getting credit for it. I mean don’t get me wrong I greatly prefer open tagging to strict encounter tagging, since the later is miserable when there is mob contention. However I would like to see how the questing flow feels once I am having to stand on my own two feet a bit more.
As of now I am not really seeing much in the way of telltale cash shop monetization. Things like bag space for example are slowly earned over time being doing stuff in the world and then trading in these scraps to NPCs for additional space. Mounts similarly seem to be permanently unlocked and not the nonsense of 7 day licenses as is the case in so many South Korean free to play games. Doing a bit of research it seems that they may be going down the Battle Pass route for monetization, which I am absolutely fine with. It could however just be that we have not reached the phase of testing where they are working in the Cash Shop. Whatever the case at this very moment there doesn’t seem to be any signs of this.
Now we are at the point of talking about access to this Closed Beta test. This current testing phase started last night at 6 pm PST and will conclude on Monday the 18th at roughly 6 pm PST. During that time I believe the servers are up 24/7 and you will have full access to the game. Right now the testing phase is being run through steam, and as I said at the beginning of this post I have been given a handful of keys to give away. I am going to be doing these on a first come first serve basis and in order to get one, drop a comment below telling me you are interested. Past that I will sort out a way to get you one of the keys privately.
I will likely be dinking around in the test throughout the weekend. I am over on the North American server and shocking to no one my primary character is the sword and board class named Belghast. If you make it into the game ping me and say hello.
The post Bless Unleashed Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Yesterday I ranted a bit in a twitter thread about how generally bad of a steward Electronic Arts has been over the Star Wars licensing. From 2010 to 2020, Lucasfilm had granted Electronic Arts the exclusive rights to develop video games for the Star Wars brand. At the time this maybe seemed like a good bet on the side of LucasFilm because Bioware was just about to released a Massively Online Roleplaying Game based on the wildly popular Knights of the Old Republic setting. However over the years Electronic Arts held the license they really did not do much with it. Here is a quick rundown of the titles that were released under this license agreement.
Star Wars the Old Republic – 2011 – Started prior to the agreement
Star Wars Battlefront – 2015
Star Wars Battlefront II – 2017
Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes – 2015 – Mobile Only
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order – 2019
Star Wars: Squadrons – 2020
The Sims 4 Star Wars: Journey to Batuu – 2020
Star Wars: Rise to Power – 2021 – Mobile Only
Of those titles other than SWTOR there is only one that I would really consider to be a great experience, but I’ve heard good things about Squadrons and the Sims pack but those are not really in my wheelhouse. What makes this extremely criminal is the fact that they held the reigns to this license during one of the most prolific periods in the history of the Star Wars brand. Let’s take a look really quick at the other Star Wars content that was released during this time frame.
The Majority of the Star Wars Clone Wars series – Seasons 3-7 – 2010 > 2020
The entirety of the Star Wars Rebels Series – 2014 > 2017
The entirety of the Resistance series – 2014 > 2020
Star Wars Episode VII – The Force Awakens – 2015
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story – 2016
Star Wars Episode VIII – The Last Jedi
Solo: A Star Wars Story – 2018
Star Wars Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker – 2019
Forces of Destiny micro series – 2017 > 2018
Galaxy of Adventure micro series – 2018 > 2020
The Mandalorian series – 2019 > 2020
If you look at the past list of games from the Star Wars franchise you will realize that more than likely every single one of those major touch points of film or media would have had some sort of game released for it. Instead we got two shooters, a really solid soulsian game, a space dog fighting game and an asset pack for the Sims. This all comes up because Disney just announced the creation of Lucasfilm Games and in doing so more or less verified that EA would be losing their exclusivity deal. Yesterday it was announced that Ubisoft Massive is working on a new open world Star Wars game just to further drive that point home. I am certain that EA will still be able to make games in the franchise, they are just going to have to compete with everyone else at the same time.
In light of all of this… I thought I would spend a little bit of time this morning talking about some of my favorite Star Wars games.
Star Wars: Yoda Stories
We are going to start off with what is likely the worst game on the list. Yoda Stories came out in 1997 and was in the weird category of desktop games. This was meant to compete with the likes of Minesweeper or Solitaire, but offered a small randomized adventure that you could flip over to and play while doing other things. There is just something nostalgic about this title and while it was arguably not great I still love it. It did so poorly that right now the game is largely considered abandonware and has made several worst games lists. That said it holds a special place in my heart. This came from a company called Torus Games.
Star Wars Arcade Game
Going back old school now, I remember the first time I experienced this game in the arcade. It had this sit down cabinet that made you feel like you were in the cockpit of an X-Wing and had voice sampling that I had never really experienced to that point. It felt like I was in the movie and I loved it… even though it cost two whole quarters to play it as opposed to the usual single quarter games. I was never terribly good at it because just the act of going to an arcade was rare enough, let alone going there with enough quarters to be able to play this game and practice on it. This was published by Atari.
Star Wars: Dark Forces
It was Doom… but Star Wars and while there were unofficial conversions of Doom that let you do the same basic thing I was completely hooked on this game. The graphics seemed amazing at the time and the storytelling was considerably better than most shooters that were available. It even had fully rendered spaceships… even though they were mostly just made out of the same blocky chunks that the texture mapped terrain was. It felt like I was legitimately on a mission to save the republic from the empire. This game hails from the Lucasarts era.
Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II
Sure this game is the direct sequel to the game I just talked about, but it was so much more. While Dark Forces was a Doom like game that used 2D sprites to represent 3D enemies, Jedi Knight was rendered in low polygon glory with actual 3D models. This also allowed the player to shift out to the third person giving me my first taste of what it would be like to wield a lightsaber like a proper Jedi. This game also gave me my first real tastes of Nar Shaddaa, because while the first game allowed you to go there you didn’t really spend a whole lot of time exploring it. It also had an expansion to the game that featured Mara Jade which at this point was one of my favorite Star Wars characters. Again this is a title from the classic era of Lucasarts.
Star Wars Rebellion
This game comes from an era when maybe the licensing had loosened up a bit too much. There were several games that came out in the 1998-2000 era and not all of them were winners. This one however I thought had a lot of promise. Essentially it is a game that could be described as what if Civilization or Master of Orion were a Star Wars game. It came from the folks behind Civilization II Test of Time and essentially brought you into galactic conquest with a 4X style map. It wasn’t near as polished as Civ or MOO but it was still enjoyable because it let me do things I had always wanted to do with my then favorite franchise. This came from Coolhand Interactive which far as I am aware only really created the two games mentioned here. It however is still available through steam and gog.
Super Star Wars Series
I am going to lump the three games in this series together because effectively they were direct continuations of the same game and same mechanics. I probably played Super Empire Strikes Back the most of the three, but I loved them all the same. They were published by JVC but were developed by Acclaim via Sculptured Software and featured a very loose retelling of the original three movies in side scrolling 16 bit form. The biggest thing I remember about them is that they were extremely tough and had several moments that you just sort of had to memorize a pattern. None of that mattered because it let me run around with a lightsaber in a 16 bit game and it was my beloved Star Wars. There was a cycle of Nintendo Entertainment System games that predated these but I never really spent much time playing them.
Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic
There are not words enough in the galaxy to fully explain just how much I love this game. During the prequel era I had started to fall out of love with Star Wars as a construct. This means I missed a lot of games that were probably pretty solid, because I felt betrayed by those movies. Looking back in hindsight they are far better than I gave them credit for at the time, but I was a jaded GenXer mad at them for fucking up my Star Wars. Knights of the Old Republic brought me by to the fold by fully realizing the comic book setting in glorious 3D roleplaying action. This is still my favorite setting in the entirety of Star Wars and now that we are entering this time of boutique Disney Plus series, I am hoping that maybe just maybe we will get something in the Old Republic Bioware setting. Star Wars the Old Republic is also phenomenal, but I largely think of it as a direct continuation of this same game. I do hope at some point we will get a KOTOR 3. I don’t consider any of this an EA game even though EA gobbled up Bioware, because KOTOR and SWTOR date back to a storied past of Bioware that I don’t think exists any longer.
Jedi Fallen Order
I’ve talked a lot about this game recently, and as such I am probably not going to talk at length about it right now. Suffice to say this is the only Electronic Arts Star Wars game on the list. Even at that this is probably a game that should not have existed were it not for the willpower of Vince Zampella and Respawn Entertainment. This game breaks all of the things that EA was setting out to do at that time. It is not a service based title, it has no micro transactions and it tells a single player narrative story. However it is probably the best game to come out of the Electronic Arts hive mind during the last decade. My hope is that the overwhelming success of this title along with the critical acclaim it garnered makes EA rethink their business practices.
A Bright Future for Star Wars
I hope we are just about to enter a new era of greatness for Star Wars games. I am giddy at thinking about what the team at Massive can do in creating a vast open world Star Wars adventure. I love the detail of the world of Division 1 and 2 and could see that applied to a gritty Star Wars setting. Image a game like Cyberpunk set in a setting like Nar Shaddaa where you operate in an out of all of the gangs in that city as a free agent ultimately carving your own path through the city. That seems like an experience that would be firmly in the wheelhouse of that team and I would absolutely be excited to play it.
What were some of your favorite Star Wars games that I missed on my personal list? Drop me a line below and let me know. I realize there are a lot of games that I never touched during the prequels era due to general fatigue in the franchise.
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