Hey Folks! Yesterday was a big Sony State of Play event revealing a good number of games to be released largely in the remainder of this year. It has been a while since I have done a post where I talk about a game presentation so I thought I would do so this morning and cover my personal highlights. There are some big-name games that I am not going to spend much time on. For example, a remake of Metal Gear Solid 3 was announced… and given that I hate stealth gameplay that series is very much “not for me”. Similarly, a new Assassin’s Creed game was announced that is supposedly a return to the stealthy gameplay form of the original games… but again… not my jam, and I preferred the more Witcher-3-inspired Open World gameplay.
You can watch the full presentation in the above link, without anyone annoyingly talking over it. Maybe this is just Old Man Bel talking here… but I detest the modern tradition of streamers milking these things for content and giving their moment-to-moment commentary. I’m largely frustrated by this because the Streamer SEO is way better than the official companies and it is much harder to find a “clean” stream link than any number of “talking head” ones. Right now Sony is winning the console power struggle… but that might change rapidly as folks shift to more and more cloud gaming options like Gamepass. At the moment… Sony is well behind the curve in their cloud gaming options and needs to rapidly catch up. However, the majority of the show really plays towards their strength of console domination.
Teardown
The show started off with a rather bland heist game called Fairgame$, but what caught my attention was a voxel destruction-based heist game that appeared not that far after it. I know nothing about Teardown but it looks outrageously fun. The idea of rampant voxel destruction combined with smash-and-grab gameplay looks like it would be a heck of a lot of fun to play. One of the games that I remember the most fondly was Midtown Madness 2, and the “capture the gold” gameplay mode where you had to pick up the loot and make it back to your base before someone crashes into you and steals it back. Teardown looks like it might be a similar style of multiplayer gameplay. I’m on board with this particular brand of nonsense.
Tower of Fantasy
I am calling this one out only because I think it is probably good for the longevity of Tower of Fantasy as a whole. I’ve written at length on this blog about how much I enjoyed my time spent playing TOF. It is my hope that I will be able to link my existing PC account to my PS5… which is not a thing I can do with Genshin Impact given that I played it exactly ONCE on the console and as a result cannot undo the fact I have a different account on the console. I personally liked TOF much better than Genshin Impact, and the pull rates and freebie currency were much more beneficial to the players than a Hoyoverse game. If you’ve never played TOF then you might check it out when it launches here.
Granblue Fantasy Relink
I know next to nothing about the Granblue Fantasy universe because while I have downloaded it a few times… I’ve never really gotten into the mobile game. I am just not much of a mobile gamer at the end of the day. That said I think this game looks awesome and I am looking forward to its release. I greatly enjoy the Genshin-Impact-style action combat gameplay, and based on how many people are gaga for this setting… it would be an interesting way to learn about the world of Granblue Fantasy. That said… this game has been teased for years at this point so I have no real confidence that we will actually see it this year.
Dragon’s Dogma II
I feel like I largely missed the boat with Dragon’s Dogma as a franchise. I’ve attempted to play it a few times and largely enjoyed what I played of it. That said the general clunky nature of the original game… made it hard for me to attach. It is my hope that maybe Capcom has learned a thing or two about system design in the intervening years. However… I also played Monster Hunter World and we loved that game in spite of its completely scuffed UI and multiplayer settings. I am somewhat taking a wait-and-see approach for this one. I will have to see what else I am playing at the time to determine if I am going to give it much attention when it ultimately releases.
Spider-Man 2
Okay, this trailer looks really freaking cool, and I am excited to see Symbiote Peter Parker in action. That said I should probably actually play Spider-Man and Spider-Man Miles Morales before getting too excited about this one. I am not sure why but it has never really been the right time for me to dive into these games, and I should fix that. Essentially it feels like I have homework to do before I can look forward to this game. We will see if that actually happens before it launches. Still looks freaking cool and I dig the setup for Kraven. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out given they are blending a bunch of existing storylines.
Marathon
So this is the fastest I have gone from excited to uninterested in a long while. I am not and have never been an “Apple Guy” and as a result, Marathon is just a piece of gaming history that I have no real context for. I was absolutely a rabid ID Software fan and Bungie devouts have told me that Marathon was effectively “better than Doom in every way”. So when I saw that this funky trailer I was watching was for a reboot of that franchise… I was admittedly pretty pumped. Then those hopes were immediately dashed when I read some more information about the game and saw that it was a: “sci-fi PvP extraction shooter”. I am just completely uninterested in a PVP-only game full stop, no matter how cool the universe looks. After the recent Overwatch 2 debacle… I won’t hold out hope for a PVE version of the game either. I guess I will follow this one from afar.
Alan Wake II
This was one of my highlights of the show, seeing more footage of the continuation of the Alan Wake story. I’ve become a zealot of the “Remedyverse” and I am so on board with more of this game and more of the funky shared universe they have created across multiple titles. I did not love the flashlight gameplay of the first Alan Wake game, and I am happy to see folks roaming around with more “traditional” weapons in this game. I have so much hope for this title and I am ready to geek out about the deep lore of this series once again. I want even more entangling with Control which is my favorite of the games in this series. I would LOVE it if the agent we see in the trailer crosses paths with the Federal Bureau of Control or even Director Faden herself. So pumped folks!
Revenant Hill
This was the highlight of the show for me. I love beyond love A Night in the Woods, and this is from a studio created by the two remaining creators of that game. The cat that you see in the trailer has deep Mae vibes and there is absolutely a statue from NitW about 10 seconds in. I have no clue if this will actually connect up to that game, or if those are just easter eggs for the faithful… but whatever the case I am here for it. If you have not played A Night in the Woods, please stop whatever you are doing and proceed directly to whatever platform you probably already own it for thanks to copious giveaways. It was a relatively short game and honestly… I kinda hope this one is as well. In reading there are books that I consider a “comfy read” or a “light read” and NitW was sort of the gaming equivalent of that. I really need to mix in more games like that as palette cleansers between my bigger titles.
The Not-Vita-2
On an investor call on Tuesday, CEO Jim Ryan indicated that Sony was about to announce some aggressive plans for cloud gaming. When you combine this with the fact that in the show they announced Project Q a game streaming handheld… my guess is that Sony is about to make a bigger play for the Gamepass/XCloud market share. The biggest problem with that is that right now… their product offering is pretty lousy. I have access to the rebranded PlayStation Now which is now confusingly called PlayStation Plus… and it isn’t that great. The gameplay hitches constantly and there is zero support for auto-resuming your last progress like you can with XCloud. Fundamentally if Sony wants to make a play for this market they need to update their infrastructure and improve their overall product offering.
That is not to say that they can’t do precisely this… and honestly, I HOPE they do. What I want from Sony is the ability to stream every single game that I own on my account over a PC or Mobile device with full access to the latest save state for all of them. That said I likely won’t be buying this device that looks like Earl from R&D sawed a PS5 controller in half and J-B Welded it to an Android Tablet. A device like this needs to come in around $100 for it to really be successful, and knowing Sony we are probably looking at another $300 appendage to an already $500 console. Until then it will just be better to keep buying cheap Android devices for this purpose.
What were your favorites?
I am sure I missed some that were crowd favorites. Like I did not talk about the Destiny 2 expansion trailer that shows the return of Cayde-6. I am not entirely certain how I feel about that one. If they can bring back a character that they spent so much time killing off… maybe they can bring back all of that content that I paid for that is now cut from the game. I’m largely checked out of Destiny 2 so I didn’t spend much time on this one. What were some of the games that I did not talk about that excited you? Drop me a line below. I think for the most part it was a very strong showing for Sony, and with the news coming out that it is likely going to be three or more years before exclusives release on PC… I guess I will have to suck it up and learn to enjoy playing on a console with a controller so I can experience some of these games.
The post May 2023 Sony State of Play appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! It was in June of 2022 that I first saw the teaser trailer for a new Warhammer game called Boltgun, and I could already tell that I was probably on board with its particular brand of nonsense. Very rarely is a video game so directly targeted at my soul. In the mid-90s when I was obsessing over making levels for Doom 2, I was also obsessed with assembling plastic “beakie” Space Marines with my friend Jason and waging epic battles on his ping pong table semi-permanently converted into a battleground full of scratch-built terrain. That Proto-Bel would have been all over this game… in fact I kept trying to pretend that the EA-released Space Hulk PC game was actually a Doom clone at the time.
About a week ago the Boltgun trailers started to make their way into my feed and I remembered how much I wanted to play this game. Yesterday it officially released and I picked it up over on Steam, but it appears to pretty much be available for all platforms. Having spent part of my evening playing through the first half dozen levels or so… it very much feels like more of an actual spiritual successor to Doom and Doom 2 than the extremely excellent 2016 Doom release. As someone who cut my teeth on Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Blake Stone, Rise of the Triad, and of course Duke Nukem 3D… this FEELS like you remember those games feeling. Modern audiences probably won’t really appreciate this fact, but even the sprite work in this game FEELS like it is 2.5D in the way that the transition of the model animations is ever so slightly abrupt.
You start off with just your chain sword and a little way into the first level you pick up your holy Bolter seated on top of an altar… with the reverence one would expect a holy instrument of imperial might. The chain sword takes some getting used to because effectively it throws you into a sort of bullet time as you line up your attack. You charge your sword, which pauses the game and then your character leaps forward and attacks with the blade. Essentially low-level minions will be finished off in a single hit… for higher-level minions, you will need to wait until they only have a sliver of life before it becomes a really effective attack. Essentially it can also be used as a movement ability of a sort where you charge forward and can sort of do a mid-air charge if you time it just right.
While the game lovingly replicates the feel of “random doodads all over the place for you to pick up” that was common for this era of shooter, it also has a lot of modern messaging. For example, the Chaos Cultists have lovingly painted platforms with yellow paint so you can know where you should be leaping to in order to kill them more efficiently. The game also features a “ledge pull-up” parkour system so if you leap across a gap, you can catch on the lip and pull yourself over onto the next platform. This isn’t over the top but feels pretty natural even within the framework of a “retro-inspired” shooter. There will be no blinking arrow telling you where to go… but I feel like a game like this doesn’t really need it. In some of the larger maps, there will be a bit of fumbling around and looking for the exit, but that also comes with this era of the genre.
What is so pure about this game is the fact that you get an endgame summary screen just like you did in Doom. The only thing that I feel a little iffy about is what it seems to count as secrets are not what I would have called secrets back in the day. Generally speaking, so far it is finding your way to a hidden powerup or something that is just off the beaten path… and less opening up new chambers and finding new areas of the map. I guess gone are the days of “humping” the wall while spamming your open key looking for a hidden door… and instead, it is just efficiently clearing every corner of every level. I admittedly missed several secrets on each level so maybe there were hidden doors that I just didn’t find.
The story is a bit on the light side, but really… did we care about the story in Doom? The story was largely an excuse for us to kill more demons, and the story in Boltgun is the story of EVERY Space Marine game… PURGE! There is a lovingly crafted number of chaos mobs that you will end up fighting along the way from mere cultists to Chaos Marines… to Chaos Terminators… to even Chaos Daemons like the Great Unclean One. Basically don’t expect high art here… this is a game with just enough story to keep it from falling on its face… as it should be for any 90s-era shooter. If you are also of this era then you will probably love it. If you were NOT from this era… I have no clue what you will think about this game. It’s a relatively fast-paced retro shooter with weapons that feel powerful and combat that feels visceral. For me personally… it really hit the spot.
The post Boltgun Initial Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Folks! I thought I would take a detour from my usual ARPG nonsense to talk about something else I have been playing the last few nights. I realize that practically everyone has been talking about Honkai Star Rail, but I’ve also dipped my toes into those waters. In truth, I started playing shortly after the game launched but apparently did not play long enough to save my progress. This was a little weird to me but it seems you have to complete the entire first tutorial segment… which is not exactly short… before the game actually saves your account. I am not exactly certain at what point this takes place, but my guess is once you’ve defeated the first boss and been presented with the choice of staying on the station or riding the rails.
As a result, I have a much high UID in the sequence than I thought I did, because my account was not actually finalized until over the weekend. I need to install the game on my phone to see how well my roughly five-year-old device handles it. In order to do that I will probably need to uninstall a bunch of junk that I am no longer playing. I have this bad habit of randomly installing games when I am bored… playing them for a day or two and then wandering away like a bored toddler. I think this game will probably work much better as a mobile game than Genshin did for me, given that everything is turn-based and high-speed inputs are crap on a touchscreen device. I remember when Genshin launched there was talk of a Switch version… and I really wish that had come to fruition because I also feel like Honkai Star Rail would be a perfect fit for that device. I suppose I could sort out how to launch it on my Steam Deck because there is very likely a solution for that just like there is for Genshin.
Anyways if you are playing feel free to friend me up: UID – 604908816
I think what I dig the most about Star Rail so far is that it feels like a really good turn-based JRPG. You can definitely see how far Hoyoverse as a company has come since the release of Genshin. Admittedly I have not played Genshin Impact really since maybe the first or second major content area was added to the game. The last region that I explored at length was Liyue and I never really got into the big mountain region that they added after that. I am sure that likely Genshin has also improved its storytelling, but from someone who heavily played that game at launch and then walked away… Star Rail feels like a massive boost in quality levels. The combat and designs are also pretty great and so far I am pretty happy with the default cast of characters that you get handed to you along the way.
I am not very deep into the game and have just landed on the first planet after the tutorial space station. So far I am digging the story enough that I would probably keep playing the game just for that alone. I am also really enjoying the turn-based combat and setting up combos that feed off each other to try and burn through encounters quickly. I do however wonder if part of the reason they decided to go turn-based with this game was so that they could add the ever-present mobile game auto-battle option. I’ve not turned that on so I have no clue how successfully it actually does at managing combat. What I really dig is that the game is a TRUE turn-based, and not that active time battle type system that Final Fantasy games shifted to. You can sit there mulling over your next move for as long as you like and the game does not seem to hurry you along in the process.
Combat is flashy as heck, and this goes for your moves as well as those of the enemies you are fighting. This makes everything feel sufficiently epic, and I really dig the main character this time. Pretty much the entire time playing Genshin Impact I was using a cast of side characters and never actually using the default Traveler. The game gives me enough options in the dialog to feel like I am having some impact on the type of character that I have chosen to be, without getting bogged down doing so. I also really like that I am a melee… but that is probably not going to sit so well with my finger-wiggling friends out there. You can of course create a party NOT including the main character just like you could in Genshin but you will ultimately have to wait until you get enough side characters to make that functional.
I think ultimately my fate with Honkai Star Rail will be determined by if I can manage to play it casually. I do not want to spend any significant sum of money on this game, which means I will be relying on the slow drip of cash shop currency and free pulls in order to get additional characters. I’ve picked up a few new options but so far none of the much coveted five-star champions. I think my frustration with these games in general is the power difference between getting a five-star and sufficing with the much more common four-stars. Since you spend so much time and resources in leveling characters up in a game like this… getting a very powerful character early on really improves your overall experience in the long run.
If I can manage to play this as a casual story-driven turn-based RPG… then I think I will be happy. However, I have this bad habit of trying to go deep into the game as I did with both Genshin Impact and Tower of Fantasy, and when that happens… I get frustrated by the artificial walls that are put up as barriers that require you to dig into your pocketbook in order to get through them. So long as I can keep the mindset that this is like a Final Fantasy single-player game… I think I might just be okay. It does not really FEEL like an open-world loot-grinding game which probably helps my enjoyment. We will have to see what this game looks like once I have depleted the main campaign for content. I noticed there is a similar system to Genshin in that you can only do so much in a given day without paying for additional turns, so we will see how badly that impacts my progress.
Ultimately this is like every other one of these Gacha games in that they are free-to-start, but likely not free forever. We will have to see just how much FOMO is baked into this particular game, and how hampered I feel by things that I can ultimately gain for free. It isn’t that I mind spending money on games, I just don’t like the sort of spending that is attached to gacha mechanics. I would rather a game like this launch with an honest $50-$100 price point that allows you to feel like you have everything you need in the game. That is unfortunately fundamentally against the design of this type of experience because they are “Gone Whaling”. So instead my mindset has been to try and get as much fun out of them as I can until I hit that paywall and then wander off for a while, maybe to return at a later date to gobble up more free content.
Like I said above, if you are also playing this game feel free to friend me. Not sure if there are any passive interactions between players like there are in something along the lines of Pokemon Go or not. I can’t guarantee to be terribly active because this is absolutely a side game for me right now.
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Hey Folks! I hope you all had a most wonderful weekend. I’m now beginning the weird phase of working at home while my wife is off for summer break. I took advantage of this nonsense by sleeping in until 6:30 instead of my usual 5:30… and as a result, everything just feels “off” this morning. It was a bit of a busy weekend, but when I did play games I spent some time playing Last Epoch. Coming up on the 25th Eleventh Hour Games is going to be dropping the 0.9.1 patch… which I mistakenly called 1.0 in a video I recorded. I’ve been trying to get back into the swing of the game and I spent some time playing captain toilet brush, seen above. While I love the feel of “mapping” on the Paladin, fighting bosses as a melee character that has its entire damage centered around having a big third hit… feels awful. So this sent me back to the drawing bin in trying to find a comfy new character to spend time on.
When I set aside Last Epoch for diving back into Path of Exile at the launch of the Crucible League, I was spending a lot of time playing a Beastmaster Primalist character. More specifically this was a character that I had intended upon doing the “Squirrel Build” where essentially you get a unique helm called the Herald of the Scurry and then it transforms every wolf that you can summon into two squirrels. If my calculations are correct it will mean that I have an army of twelve squirrels following me around and shredding my enemies. The only problem with this is… that in spite of spending a lot of time on my level 90 Necromancer farming for the helm… I’ve never seen one drop.
Over the weekend I recorded some gameplay of my build in its current state doing a monolith… or map as I will likely keep referring to it. So essentially I have focused my entire passive tree on making my wolves stronger and making them deal a lot of bleed damage and then I run around with a pack of six of them. I don’t have an active skill really, and the way I deal damage is whenever I leap it fires off an Upheaval when I land. However, my Upheaval is specced in such a way as to generate a totem that fires off six upheavals in a row. So essentially I leap around making totems and then use Warcry and Frenzy Totem to buff my doggos who are actually doing the damage for me. I had to go so far as to remove Upheaval from my bar because I kept hitting it periodically and screwing things up. Instead, I have Tempest Strike on my bar, which mostly sucks… but it keeps me from resetting the Upheaval Totem duration.
I have most of the key points in the build at level 74 and am largely just “gilding the lily” when it comes to putting additional points in to slowly flesh things out. It’s a fun build, but also a fairly squishy one. I’m hoping to improve that over time as I get better gear, but right now I am just trying desperately to avoid getting hit while leaping around and letting my doggos shred things. I think in theory the build will improve feel-wise when I can finally get a Herald of the Scurry and double the total number of minions that I have on the field. Essentially my goal right now is to work my way to empowered monoliths and then spend all of my time in the second one… Black Sun… until I get a helmet to drop.
Alternatively, I could just log into the Necromancer and see how it feels now, and farm Empowered Black Sun until I get the helm. Admittedly I have not played the Necro at all since coming back to Last Epoch over the weekend. That might be a good option to see what I think about the character and the current state of that build. I mean I enjoyed it quite a bit while I was leveling it, and I am already in Empowered Monoliths… and I think I will probably have a much easier time GETTING TO Empowered Monoliths on the Beastmaster if I have the helm. Anyways… Last Epoch is still a lot of fun and it was pretty fast for me to get back into the swing of things there. I’m looking forward to this week’s patch and seeing what all gets tweaked and changed. More specifically I am curious what new content gets added to the game as that has been teased and potentially today we will get some answers in the last of the hype week blog posts.
I hope you all have a great week and for those in the United States… a good lead-up to Memorial Day weekend.
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