In what is seeming to be the continued tradition of writing disclaimers at the top of my blog posts. I am still fine even though everything around me seems to be going batshit crazy. I officially cannot travel to see my parents right now as the highway between me and them is blocked with flood water. In my suburb the water has receded, but the city of Tulsa proper is struggling. I am getting pulled into some support of the flood prep effort, which is why I did not blog at all Friday. I got up for work at 4 am and was in the office at 5:30… which left me no time at all for my traditional blogging.
Yesterday was of course a holiday here in the United States, and I contemplated writing a post… but could not bring myself to actually do so. Instead I more or less spent the weekend recuperating from the madness that has been our life over the last several weeks. Saturday night we had another string of Tornadoes, and there is a high chance that tonight will be a repeat of that process again. My wife just happened to be up and around at 1 am when the warnings started happening, so my slumber was briefly interrupted as we lay there in bed trying to determine if we need to worry about it. It managed to touch down in a few places but nowhere near us so we rolled over and went back to sleep… still leaving the television on just in case.
As far as gaming goes I have been all over the place. Some years ago I backed the Crowfall kickstarter, in part because it seemed like it was gaining a bunch of steam within the greater internet zeitgeist. I figured either I would really like the game or else it would at least give me a cheaper copy to try it as is often the case with kickstarter pricing. However over the period of time since Alpha went live the game itself has seemed more of a tech demo than an actual game Periodically I would poke my head in and think to myself “yup that is an unfinished mess” and move on with my life. This time however I am starting to see the early signs of a functional game, and as a result I spent more time playing it this weekend than I have to date.
Crowfall itself is this bizarre amalgam of Dark Age of Camelot, Eve Online and Everquest Landmark all sorta rolled into a single game that neither explains itself nor really gives much in the way of breadcrumbs as to how you should be approaching it. As a result I personally found myself perplexed by the game each time I had logged into it in the past, and this time I resorted to actually watching a tips and tricks video to somewhat ease the transition into the mindset required to be playing it. Effectively there are three modes to play the game and each have their own specifics. Eternal Kingdoms is effectively sandbox mode where you have total control over the world and can fiddle around and build til your heart iscontent. God’s Reach is effectively newbie mode, which is a largely PVE experience that allows you to get a taste for how the game will feel. Campaign is the PVP conquest mode which resets every so often and pushes the players back to square one. At this point I have only dinked around with the first two modes, and my allergy to PVP will largely keep me out of the third mode for some time.
Where the comparison to Eve Online comes in is the fact that the game has decided to have offline skill progression. This means that probably the very first thing you should do in the game is decide to make a primary and a secondary path which will allow you to begin accumulating skills in a sort of alternate advancement system that is independent of your characters. I have no clue how fast this acquisition is, but it always feels like I have a ton of points anytime I have logged out of the game for awhile. Right now I am working my way through the Crafting and Combat basics… with a focus on crafting to in theory be able to build better stuff for myself.
The above image represents the tree within “Crafting Basics” and I am nowhere near maxing it out, which I assume is required to move on to the next sub tree in the master list posted two images above. All of the pips seems to largely focus on efficiency and success of the patterns, and over in the combat tree they largely focus on increasing your stats and less on granting abilities which are done at a per character level. Right now I have spent most of my time on a Guineacean Knight aka Sword and Board and a Stoneborn Champion aka the big axe wielding warrior. The one credit I have to give them is that the character models they have created are glorious. The character animations however leave a little something to be desired.
The gameplay largely involves a mix of combat and crafting and you sort out how to make yourself the tools necessary to navigate the world and its combat system. It all starts out by gathering wood which then allows you to make the most basic of crafting implements. From there you can work your way through tiers of materials and at least cobble together some basic armor, and once you find the next tier of uncommon materials and a crafting bench some decent armor. I’ve not encountered anything I would call a unique drop, and effectively everything seems to come from crafting. This is going to be a key point in a few moments.
Up until this point everything was a fairly pleasant experience, but the game was just about to hit me with a sucker punch. As I expanded out from the starter areas I started encountering more difficult monsters. At which point I stumbled across this trio of skeletons… and took my very first death. In Crowfall when you die apparently everything that you were carrying in your inventory and that was not equipped on your person stays at the point of your death in a grave marker form. In order to get back your stuff, you have to get back to wherever you died… and tediously loot your items one by one with no bulk loot option. If you read the forums this is designed to purposefully lead to some tension surrounding if you can successfully loot your corpse before trouble arrives.
I spent a good hour and a half trying to clear the camp of 3 skeletons… that if I was super careful I could split a single mob of that pack. I could not however managed to take down two of them at a time… which meant that I would ultimately die again… strand another tombstone and have to repeat the process. I finally Leeroy Jenkins’d my way into looting enough stuff off my corpse to be able to get started again, but I have to say the entire experience put a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. That said… once I got back some basic crafting tools there really was nothing on my body that I could not get back given enough time harvesting which I guess is the one golden takeaway from the experience. Death is a loss of time and opportunity, but doesn’t really do anything to permanently impact your progression.
There are a lot of titles that are nostalgic about various aspects of games gone by. Crowfall is very much a game that is nostalgic about the realm versus realm game play of Dark Age of Camelot and having to do corpse runs. That is not at all something I am nostalgic about other than being able to tell the gamer version of “in my day” stories about how rough we had it. Death is a bad enough set back… I just don’t feel like we need additional penalties tacked onto it, especially when it effects the items that I had spent the previous two hours of game play fastidiously assembling. Ultimately I find what Crowfall is doing interesting… but I also figure at this point it is pretty certain that the game that exists is not really in my wheelhouse.
All of that said… I am glad the game is progressing and has turned into something more than a tech demo. I will continue to watch it evolve into whatever it is planning on becoming. It isn’t really my jam but I figure it is someones out there. If you have deep nostalgia over the way Dark Age of Camelot used to be, then you might want to check it out. Otherwise you can just keep watching me as I poke my head back in periodically.
Last night I had a bit of a pleasant surprise, in that I came home and noticed that Rage 2 in my Bethesda launcher had 30 minutes left on the countdown to being ready to play. I was fully expecting it to unlock somewhere around midnight, meaning that I would not be playing it last night at all. However in theory the Bethesda launcher unlocked the game at the earliest playable time instead of Steam which I believe unlocked it at Midnight Eastern Standard time. Quake Champions alpha was the game that got me to install the Bethesda Launcher so when Fallout 76 forced me to use it… it was no big deal given that I already had it installed on my system. For Rage 2… it just seemed like a decent idea to go ahead and order directly from the company for fear of there being some last minute storefront shenanigans like there have been recently with the Epic Games store. One thing that you have to know going into this discussion… I loved the original Rage, just felt that it was too short of a game that felt like the opening act of a story and not a complete experience.
So going into Rage I was already familiar with the basic story of how the world went wrong. That said… I do think they did a good job of prefacing the major points through some slightly unreliable narration. Given that if you have not played Rage yet you like area not going to… so here goes my quick rundown of the events as I remember them. Essentially a planet-killer scale meteor named Apophis fell and destroyed the world… and you are one of the representatives of mankind’s best hope that were buried in Arks underground in order to survive the impact. However on the way to earth the meteor bounced off of the moon causing a large chunk to break off… and also causing the impact to not be quite as devastating as originally predicted. So in the first game you encounter survivors of the old world both good and bad… and fight your way through the paramilitary power of the time called the Authority and trigger all of the other Arks to rise to the surface in the final events of that game. However at some point between those events and that of Rage 2 some terraforming satellites have fallen to earth and caused pockets of the world to become a lush oasis… as was in theory the goal of Project Eden to help reclaim the broken world.
There is a thirty year gap between the events of Rage 1 and Rage 2 and in that time a number of major settlements have arisen and solidified their hold on the world. You play as your choice of a male or female character from the Settlement of Vineland. Within moments of starting the game you are thrust into a battle with the Authority that is now returning after a lengthy absense to begin reclaiming the wastes for themselves. Through a somewhat creepy sequence you scavenge a set of ranger armor from a dead body and that is apparently all it takes to make you one? You are sent out on a mission to make contact with three other city states and start something called Project Dagger going. And thus begins the first of the comparisons to Fallout… in that from the moment you leave that tutorial sequence you are no longer fettered by any constraints as to what you should or should not be doing.
Just like your first footsteps out of the vault… you can roam the world freely and do anything that suits your fancy. You have markers on your map directing you to each of these major settlements but also a bunch of other micro objectives that will gain you favor with various entities. The original Rage was essentially “what if Fallout were more like Quake”, and this game is more like “what if Fallout were a better shooter”. I am somewhat cautious on the Fallout comparisons however because Bethesda games are massively different for each of the players that choose to play them. For me that core Fallout experience is going off into the wilderness to be a murder hobo and bring back stacks of blood drenched armor to sell for caps… and then repeating this over and over until I have explored every bit of the world that suits my fancy and done all of the quests associated with them. In those terms Rage 2 feels very Fallout to me, because I can roam around the map and tick off objectives while looking for tasty loot.
Much like the first game you have a trusty steed in the form of a Mad Maxian road war vehicle… this time around it is something called Phoenix equipped with an Alexa style AI that talks to you as you do things. The game also gives you a decent waypoint system that shows up in game as a series of neon pink chevrons directing you towards your target. While on the road there are a number of random encounters… bandit camps of sorts or other vehicles that might try and run you off the road. One of the first objectives that you encounter is a bridge that has been blocked off by bandits and you need to clear the camp and flip a lever to raise the roadblock. That is more or less the sort of level involvement you should expect from the encounters in game… more or less go to an area… murder everything… search for hidden loot boxes and then profit. If Fallout was a deep role-playing experience for you… then maybe Rage 2 won’t feel like a reasonable simulacrum.
For me however the world is interesting and filled with quest givers that want me to help them out either to retrieve items or get much needed revenge on someone who did them or their family wrong. The feel of the world is also excellent, and not at all what I was expecting given the trailers and neon punk aesthetic leading up to the release of this game. Sure there are hot pink flares burning in the distance at times, but the world itself feels significantly more subdued and is filled with the sort of broken people you would expect from a broken landscape. There are no dialog prompts… just click on an NPC and get their story as well as a quest showing up in your journal… which admittedly is perfectly fine for me. I am always going to be the hero and help everyone out… so it isn’t like I need a red or blue option to the dialog to make me happy. That said for some the game will feel like it isn’t giving you any options other than killing everything… but again… it is a shooter first and anything else second.
Probably the most interesting aspect of the game is that each Ark can teach you a super power of sorts. From the first Ark located in Vineland you learn the ability to dodge out of the way of things… which comes in handy in many places. Last night before I shut down for the evening I found an Ark that effectively taught me the ability to double jump, and before that another one that taught me how to take my dodge and turn it into a body slam that can break armor off enemies. All of the abilities have their own skill tree of sorts that allows you to pour resources find in the wastes into leveling them up. As you start gaining these the game begins to feel really interesting and unique in that you are given was to both traverse the world but also interact with its combat. Now so far it is nothing in the way of the types of movement Tam generally craves… but double jump should at least make Ash as happy as it does me. I deeply appreciate the fact that the game has a ledge system that allows you to pull up if you get close enough to it… meaning that traversing areas that at first glance that you might not be able to make becomes a little bit more reasonable.
All in all I am deeply pleased with the experience so far, and all I really wanted in truth was more of the first game. Rage 2 however gives me enough tweaks to make that prospect significantly more interesting. The challenge the game has in front of it however is that so far… the game plays NOTHING like the trailer. The trailers were all so over the top and filled with Neon Punk aesthetic and thus far at least… I have seen very little of it apart from the occasional colored flare. The trailers would make me expect that a rainbow shat on my screen… and so far at least that isn’t exactly the case as you can see from what is a pretty common vista of junk strewn across a wasteland. This might be a turn off for folks expecting the former… for me personally I am completely fine with this as like I said before I loved the original.
I mean I guess the screenshots get a little more over the top when you factor in the photo mode that you can apply to things and add all sorts of neon nonsense to the sides. However that same aesthetic doesn’t really carry over to the gritty world that I have been experiencing. If you like playing murder hobo in Bethesda games… then Rage 2 might be a game for you. If you like post apocalyptic gopher mission shooters… then Rage 2 might be a game for you. If you want deep role-playing choices and feeling like you have some effect on the story… then Rage 2 might not be a game for you. If you were expecting a carnal bullet ballet in a neon punk wasteland… then it is probably a coin flip if this game will be for you because there are definitely those elements but as I said before it is nowhere near as over the top as the trailers would lead you to believe. For me personally… this is a positive but it won’t be for everyone.
I will say that the latest trailers for the game are playing down the elements from the earlier ones… so MAYBE the style changed over time? It is a really fun game that I am definitely enjoying, and if what I talked about seems interesting to you then maybe check it out. I am not about to say the game is going to be for everyone, but for me… I am completely down for this nonsense.
This weekend was very light on gaming for various reasons. Saturday I scurried around in the morning and cleaned the house so that I could be done in time to hit an 11 am matinee of Detective Pikachu. My wife was busy doing an AP Statistics review session they call “Super STATurday” where they prep them for the upcoming AP exam and then the students take a mock test. Since my wife does not generally go in for the nonsense that I enjoy like Pokemon… I figured it was easiest if I just went by myself. First off… Detective Pikachu is adorable and if you need something pure in your life you should totally go see it. I am not exactly a diehard Pokemon fan but I have been around it enough to get a general feel for the movie doing an excellent job of representing the various critters. Secondly… Ryan Reynolds was perfect in the role and make the entire film feel like a G rated Deadpool… which admittedly Once Upon a Deadpool is my favorite version of Deadpool 2.
The other big takeaway I have from the movie is that Sonic the Hedgehog as a movie is going to do just fine in the box office regardless of how much us nerds are raging against it. The representation of Sonic bothers me greatly, but I was in a theater crammed full of kids on Saturday and they cheered and laughed when that trailer came on. We are not the target audience of that movie, and it instead is designed for the same demographic that all of those Spykids movies were. As much as it pains me to say it… our opinion of that Sonic doesn’t really matter if the kids are engaged. I do however think Pokemon Detective Pikachu was a more faithful recreation of both the look and feel of the Pokemon setting with deep call backs to lots of other settings from the games. I think it was also genius to be handing out packs of Pokemon cards to everyone that bought a ticket… I saw lots of kids excited to be getting these. I am pretty sure that Pikachu was in every pack, but I also pulled a Bulbasaur which is probably my favorite of the starters.
For this next bit I don’t have any photos taken of my device, but I picked up a new tablet and spent a good deal of the weekend messing with it. I’ve had android tablets before and always the experience was less than ideal, at least compared to what I was used to with my old Ipad 2. As much as I hate to admit it… Apple makes damned good tablet devices and I have always wanted something akin to that on the correct marketplace. After a good deal of sifting through product reviews I wound up going with the Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 and so far am exceptionally happy with it. Ultimately my constraints were fairly simple… I wanted to be able to run mobile games on it fluidly, I wanted to be able to read comics on it at a resolution friendly to my aging eyes, and I wanted some sort of a pen device so I could maybe start sketching on it. After looking at a bunch of different options I landed on either the Tab S3 or S4 and wound up finding a decent deal on the S4.
Then for awhile I thought Amazon had lost my order, as it failed to show up during the original delivery estimate and shifted into “maybe your package will arrive someday” mode. The original tracking code is seemingly permanently stuck on “label created” mode. It did however arrive one day late and seemingly no worse for the wear, and I was able to spend most of the weekend getting things set up on it. As such I have been spending a lot of time juggling between Marvel Unlimited and reading up on comics there and the handful of CBZs that I had laying around from various Humble Bundle deals. With those I am using a piece of software called ComiCat that seems to do a good job of both showing an attractive news stand mode and letting me flip through the comics seamlessly.
So far the battery life is excellent as I have not charged it past the first day and used it pretty much every night to go through my dailies in both Dragalia Lost and Marvel Future Fight as well as spending a good deal of time reading comics. At this point I think the battery is somewhere around 85% which fares significantly better than my phone which can be drained by Dragalia Lost in what feels like a few minutes. It is light weight enough to be able to fairly comfortable hold one handed, though I am contemplating investing in a pop socket to make that process a little easier. Side note… as I have said before I have really stupidly large hands so I am not entirely certain if the average human being could hold the tablet one handed, but it works for me. I do however fear dropping this on my face considering I have done that with my phone… given that mobile time is generally my getting ready for sleep activity. All in all however… I am super happy with this tablet and it also cost considerably less than a modern Ipad so bonus points there.
I had one of those nights where I was bouncing around between games. First off I spent some time working on RetroArch trying to get things configured as I wanted them. I made some very minimal progress, but I do at least have MAME games launching from underneath it. I still think I am going to have to go through the process of manually setting up playlists for the best possible experience. In part why I like RetroArch/Libretro cores so much is the excellent controller support and the way whatever I happen to have plugged in seems to automagically work. I also like the various shader effects which is another reason why the whole manual playlist idea is probably a good one. From there I popped over into The Surge for a bit but ultimately bounced out of it pretty quickly. I like the concept of this game… but Dark Soulsian games so far really aren’t my jam.
When I ultimately settled in to a game for a bit I wound up playing some Sunless Skies. Fallen London is probably one of my favorite game settings and for a long time I made a daily practice of logging in and playing through my adventures. After the success of the web based game a couple of standalone titles have been released, Sunless Seas a game about travelling out into the black abyss of the Unterzee a subterranean ocean the size of Europe that surrounds the city. Sunless Skies however is a direct sequel set ten years after the events of the first game in which you pilot a sky train of sorts around the region known has the High Wilderness way above the world of both Fallen London and Sunless Seas. The truth is I have never made it terribly far in Sunless Seas… or at least nowhere near far enough to know anything about the events that play out in that game, I just decided I would rather pilot a locomotive than a boat last night.
There is something deeply relaxing about puttering around and visiting the various islands and having locomotive battles. The game more or less features a lot of the same elements in that you move around through the darkness looking for things to interact with. When you do interact you have various quests to keep you engaged in the story line and various crew members to pick up and have dialog with. I seem to always go down the path that involves being combat ready, but this game seems to favor the subtlety checks way more than was the case with the web based game. It seems like every time I take down a marauder train… boarding and looting it is a subtlety check which makes me want to start pushing that up a bit more than I have.
I guess it was the sort of game that my brain was needing last night, but it unfortunately did not lull me into a sense of peace as I spent most of the night tossing and turning and not quite getting restful sleep. As a result this morning I am feeling groggy and assume I am going to have to push through with copious amounts of caffeine to make the day function. I have a fairly packed day so here is hoping that I make it through unscathed.
