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An invincible wolf man, who is like a wolf in every regard save for the fact that he can fly.
(Note: This might be misinformation)
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Same. I really enjoyed what I played of it (~4 hours), but as one of the biggest fans of the franchise on this planet, I am torturing myself instead by postponing my first playthrough until A-life is properly implemented. It’s worth the wait. I’ve waited this long already. For now, I’ve gone back to my long-term Anomaly character and have been having a fucking blast.
I loved the six hours or so that I played, but have tabled the game until the A-life is (hopefully) fixed, the mutants are better balanced, and (hopefully) the timescale can be adjusted. Bonus points if they can stop my cutscenes/dialogue events from dropping to 10 FPS. But I want to be playing it and I think about it a lot. Until then, I’ve started over fresh in Anomaly and will patiently inhabit the Zone there.
It’s the warm blend of its cozy art style, ambient audio, and the unparalleled soundtrack. You go through the grandpa intro and observe his strangely thin bed all over again. Then the Jojamart corporate hell scene. You open the letter and reading it even for the fifteenth time gives you an immediate sense of peace and relief, because you know you’re going back to the valley. It’s all good vibes from here.
The music fades away and you’re greeted with a quiet scene in the mountains, watching a grumbly coach bus speed past the sign, and you’re left with a moment between you and the countryside. There are a few trilling birds and one lands in the sign. You arrive at your stop and immediately that uplifting little song starts playing and Robin’s cute-ass face appears, probably with wood shavings in her bangs, and she still has that voice you crafted for her in your head after all these years. The mayor will too. She’s an old friend.
She ushers you away to your first long view of the farm. Now, you’ve already been here several times in the last decade, but that music. That warm, orangish pallete. That overgrown little cabin on that rugged patch of land. The music grooves on and right away you get butterflies in your stomach over the prospect of getting to be here everyday, cleaning it up and carving your own little life and operation. There is a sense of joy and freedom, and a million possibilities laying under that brush-strewn mess that used to be a field. It never fails to bring you right back and feel that magic again.
It’s like the developer perfectly captured our most innocent human desires in a tiny bottle.
It irks me greatly that it takes place ~2,000 years before the main series, but architecturally and technologically they appear to be on par or perhaps even ahead of the 3rd/4th eras. The entire game just feels like a giant fan-fiction blunder. There is a near zero risk of death in the overworld due to an obnoxiously low difficulty, and the class system being bound to stupid themes like Templars and Dragonknights rather than just using the original skill/magic trees is one of the worst parts of the game to me. Base classes could have easily been signs of the Warrior, Mage and Thief, and then specialized to your hearts content from there.
Other than being one giant wasted potential in general, this is reminiscent of ESO. That game was packed full of expensive mounts (among a million other things) that didn’t fit in with the lore of the Second Era whatsoever, though fans of the game will certainly argue that the lore has been so muddied by Zenimax at this point that maybe the Second Era really was packed full of superheroes with glowing eyes, dragon wings and mechanical unicorns.
Prices were also designed so that no matter how many crowns you purchased, you always had some bullshit amount left over that couldn’t buy anything of real value, driving you to purchase even more crowns so that your leftovers aren’t wasted. I don’t think any of them were this expensive, but definitely just as frivolous.
I went through a brief Asmongold phase about a year or two ago where I enjoyed just listening to him rant and bitch (mostly) about the video game industry. He was surprisingly articulate at times and not quite how I had perceived him. I watched him take a political alignment test and he was dumbfounded that he was fairly left-wing. I thought that might be a turning point for him, but then election season came around and he went right back to being an obnoxious Trump-supporting Texan. I don’t think Asmongold even knows who he is deep down or what he stands for. I think he just spews vomit from his brain and doubles-down on all of it because he’s incapable of dropping an argument or admitting he was wrong. It’s kind of his shtick, but I’m long since done with it.
I know enough about him to attempt a deep-dive into his psyche in regards to his decrepit home, his mother’s death and his unwillingness to seperate from his lifestyle, but at the end of the day his sad circumstances unfortunately don’t excuse the abborant shit he sometimes says.
I had just mentioned this in a similar post, but Discord culture has really killed multi-player games for me. Especially guilds in MMORPGs. I remember joining one before 2010 felt like this very regal thing. They were these sacred orders of gentlemen with cool names like “The Iron Wolves”, “The Order of Light”, or “The Knights Templar”. Upon initiation you were inducted into a fellowship and granted access to private forums to stay in touch and keep up with the guild. You’d get to know the more productive members who would forge you equipment and look after you. You would gather in great halls beneath the severed head of the world dragon and discuss official guild business. Somewhere along the way that magic just died.
Now the guilds are all edgy and gamey, like “HATE”, “FURY”, “APEX”, “FIRST IN”, and “METHOD”. Initiation involves two paths. You either remain in relative obscurity in the fringes of the guild, never really growing much or forging meaningful relationships, or you take the other fork; walking closely with the sweaty, most egotistical edge-lords of the guild who don’t actually care about or support you, and spread toxicity throughout the ranks. Both paths tend to require you to live in Discord, partaking in constant banter with a group of perpetually online sigma males. It’s like plugging yourself in directly to the guild hive-mind and permanently altering the game’s atmosphere. You’re just playing “ENVY” now, or whatever your dumb guild is called. I’ve joined guilds that want you to have Discord on your phone so you are connected even while offline. That’s fucking nuts.
Anyway, that garbage doesn’t exist with single-player games. I can read dialogue at my own pace, toggle walk through the entire village to take in the sights/sounds and slow down the pacing, and truly absorb every last bit of that wonderfully thick atmosphere. Single-player games are so much deeper for me.
Take a heavily modded playthrough of Skyrim for example, with camping/tenting mods. Dusk begins to fall and you hear the call of a northern flicker in the forest around you. Better make camp. You find a clear spot outside or town and pitch a tent, raise a tanning rack, and build a fire. Now it’s getting dark. You walk to the river’s edge to fill your waterskin and return with a large salmon to cook over the fire. Now the stars are out. The score is swelling to inspiring highs that move your soul. The aurora dances above you in brilliant colors. You sit beside the fire and thumb through your inventory, deciding which lore book to read first. After some time you study a spell or record your thoughts into your journal, then quell your fire and sleep.
That’s my shit right there. That’s a single-player game.
Nearly every server is different, but the ones my friends/wife and I always did (10+ years ago) were like role-playing kingdom building maps. Server owner (usually me) would hold the title of King/Sovereign and appoint their friends to specific roles. I would oversee the general development and expansion of the kingdom, as well as decide and manage a system of ore-based currency (or would at least create the mint and appoint someone to running it). Afterward I would introduce and gradually roll out phases of a larger storyline for anyone who cares.
My left and right hand would build/manage the keeps/barracks/military structures, or the government buildings/libraries/cultural centers, etc. These would all be injected with their own lore and staffed by the person in charge of them. Everyone else would receive more minor roles, but typically be given monopolies in certain types of goods or commerce. Maybe Bob wants to be a trapper. Sure, anyone else can legally go and gather leathers and animal parts, but Bob is the only one permitted to sell those items in his shop in the city. Things like that just to try to keep it interesting. When Bob isn’t trapping or trading or being involved with the kingdom, he’s pretty much just playing Minecraft on his homestead.
The idea is to open it up to the public (via applications and careful vetting) and watch people run amock in the simulated medieval economy. We used to have a blast doing it. Especially with mods installed that added skill progression, abilities at milestones and other MMORPG-esque mechanics.
Normal people, however… They just do what they do in single player but occasionally trade, work together, tackle bosses, and show each other their latest creations.
I tried to get into it a number of times, and the three major things that always wear me down are, first and foremost:
The obscene lack of difficulty in overworld content (next to running completely gearless or taking on group content/bosses solo to create an artificial sense of risk or danger). Most enemies are so easy that you never need to maneuver or use your full array of combat abilities. You end up mashing the same two or three hot keys on every single enemy while your HP remains at 99%.
The weird choice of classes and themes that do not accurately reflect what The Elder Scrolls has always been about. Rather than building classes based on my preferred weapon class, skill sets (Sneak, Lockpick, etc.), and magic classes (Alteration, Restoration, etc.), I have to be locked into a holy javelin-chucking warrior of light, a lightning-slinging daedric sorcerer, a fire magic dragon warrior with wings and spikes growing from my back, or some other weirdly themed class that didn’t need to be a core archetype in the Second Era. Like, fuck man… Base classes could have easily been born under the Warrior, Mage, Thief, etc. and then built upon from there.
The absolute clusterfuck of major/DLC quests that start the moment you walk into town or pass an NPC. It feels like navigating a fever dream as a new player, and it’s overwhelming. A thousand tangled threads and no room to breathe. Even the main quest no longer has level requirements at each stage, so the Prophet will bid you goodbye and immediately call out again the moment you leave the cave. It’s an absolute mess.
I could go on, but these are the worst three.
Isn’t 30 the standard on console anyway? Doesn’t seem too bad if they’re getting close. Either way, every time the game is delayed it gives me renewed hope that the developer at least cares about getting it right. And hey, if they fuck it up, the modders will have Anomaly 2 or something similar coming down the pipeline within a year or two.
Those oldest memories of Minecraft are the most peculiar of them all. I still remember starting with either the last Alpha release, or the earliest Beta release. I had come across a comic (using screenshots from the game) of Steve looking out into the night and seeing a single pair of red eyes in a distant hill. He looks out again and a monster is looking back in (or something like that). Always wanted to find that comic again. Anyway, that was my extent of knowledge going into the game. I knew there was mining, night time, and monsters.
I remember digging a hole into a hillside to survive my first night. There was a single torch placed outside of the hole, and throughout the night I watched various animals gather around the entrance to look in at me. I remember feeling awful, thinking they wanted shelter from the monsters outside, but realized while looking back much later that they were just spawning in my torchlight.
I also recall finding sort of a canyon or mountain pass with lava flowing into it. There was a small doorway or opening on one cliff face, and several flaming poles between it and the other side. It looked like an altar of some sort. This was back when lava/fire burned leaves and left the stumps to burn eternally, but in my inexperience I thought these were pyres placed deliberately by some entity, and began to worry there was truth to the Herobrine myth. Maybe other players were in my world.
Early Minecraft was a trip.
I’ve tried to get into ESO multiple times, always hyping myself up to just ignore the combat/difficulty and pacing and do it for the story alone, but it wears me down quite quickly every time. The vibe is just entirely off in every way. It’s like playing with a cheap McDonald’s toy with stiff legs and a weird button that makes it move it’s arms vs. a licensed action figure.
Save for my issues with the lack of real risk or challenge anywhere outside of running end-game group content solo, I always get irritable with the weird class themes the developers went with. I think if they had three guardian base classes (Thief, Warrior, Mage) and allowed players to spend their limited pool of points into other Elder Scrolls trees (Destruction, Alteration, Restoration, Conjuration, Blunt, Blade, etc.) it could have been balanced well enough and felt true to what we’ve come to expect from that universe. But instead it feels like they made the game as an entirely different MMO, then at the last minute agreed to put an Elder Scrolls skin on it.
I’d like to be a Warrior with minor specialization in Restoration and Alteration, but if I want to play that sort or archetype I basically have to be a Templar who uses sun spells and does all of his fighting with aetherial javelins, maybe joining the Mage’s Guild or something to simulate some sort of Alteration type buffs. Or I roll a Dragonknight who is themed entirely around fire and lava spells. Or I run around labeled a Sorcerer and use daedric spells/buffs to simulate Alteration, and ignore the rest of that classes abilities to branch out into melee and armor abilities. It’s all just so convoluted and unusual.
Beautiful soundtrack, though… Moth, Butterfly and Torchbug really does things to my heart, and leaves me hopeful that even without Jeremy Soule, TES6 may still have the type of score it deserves.
After watching the Fallout series, I had the itch again so I fired up Fallout 3. I immediately fell in love with that older Bethesda-style dialogue, with so much to discuss and so many skill checks throughout… But the more I played, the more I realized how absurdly easy and jam-packed the game was with weapons, chems, and ammunition. I installed a couple of mods to improve the difficulty and scarcity of items, but it wasn’t enough. Something was missing. I realized that after having played through Fallout 1 a few years ago, my beloved Fallout 3 no longer quite scratched the itch. So I fired up Fallout 2, and I’ve fallen in love with that little game again. I love the slower pace of it all. I love inspecting every little detail of the environment, and the assortment of skills available at my fingertips to apply to my surroundings like a Swiss army knife, if I have the aptitude, of course… (Perhapsh I should join the mage’s college in Winterhold)
Now, I have no hate here for Fallout 3, because the flaws I pointed out above are not why I enjoyed the game in the past. It’s the atmosphere of the DC ruins, the satisfaction of taking shots and exploding heads in VATS, and the haunting melodies of Galaxy News Radio echoing softly from my wrist. I just have to figure out how to make it play a bit more like the classic entries. I want to leave the Super Duper Mart without combat armor, 40 stimpaks, and damn near every weapon in the game.
Conservative? What in the fuck? The game is a soulful, anti-capitalist love letter to the earth, growth, love, hardship, seasons, animals, and personal relationships. The only thing conservative about it is a reverence for small community and a simpler way of life. I’m left-wing as hell and even I long for those things. It’d be different if the villagers were xenophobic or something, or if the main plot was to keep a Sikh family from settling down into the valley…
Same with DAoC. I have so many vivid memories from playing that in my adolescence. It was extemely influential, and the way it made me feel was unmatched. The various town jingles still pop into my head regularly. Especially Cotswold and some of the little Hibernian villages.
I miss sitting out in Salisbury plains during the night cycle with a group of random people, casually chatting and listening to the chattering of insects. Game had great ambience.
The best WoW clone I’ve played was RIFT, hands down. That game was surprisingly well-polished. But unfortunately the last time I had returned to play it, they followed suit with other popular MMOs and nerfed the overworld content into oblivion, effectively ruining the experience.
I did appreciate their angle on the class system, though. By combining Pyromancer and Elementalist, I was able effectively mimic a Fire Wizard from DAoC, but with a bad-ass greater earth elemental as a tank pet. One of the most satisfying characters I’ve ever played in an MMO.
Still, Classic/Vanilla WoW was a better experience overall.
The sequels just felt too busy, as though the developers tried to jam so many activities and variance into every inch of the map that it wound up feeling extremely chaotic as a result. Even the soundtracks of 2 and 3 seem to reflect this feeling. It’s like they had a lot of pressure on them to deliver everything bigger and better than before, and it took a lot of focus off of what made Spyro so charming in the first place. The games have no chill.
Spyro 1 levels felt like mystic worldspaces to explore, with room to breathe and pretty sights to enjoy. 2 and 3 just feel like dense puzzles, with ladders and layers and tunnels and ledges, and this thing tieing back to this thing, and this thing opening up later once you get this other thing, and it just didn’t feel very organic or authentic. It was like running around in the inside of a clock.
Spyro Reignited is a beautiful remake. The vibe and ambience of some of those levels is absolutely unreal. This has to be my favorite one, hands down. Spyro 1 was on an entirely different level in terms of mood. 2 and 3 just don’t hit the same, but there is still some great atmosphere.
STALKER 2