CodexArcanum
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The runbacks don’t bother me too much so far. I do think there’s some skills in the runback, but it relies heavily on the level designer as well. An ideal runback:
- is relatively short, you should have time to reflect on the boss, but not get sidetracked
- has enemies that drop currency, so repeated runs slowly build you up (assuming you always collect your shade)
- has enemies that train you on the bosses timings or counters (if the boss is parry heavy, put a tricky-to-parry enemy enroute back)
- has a “speed route” that let’s you bypass most or all of the run once you’ve figured it out
These factors make a run both interesting game play and still a form of progression. A badly designed run lacks these factors, being just a slow slog to get back into the boss fight.
My biggest complaint so far is the double damage. Every boss and so many common enemies do nothing but double damage. Why even have 5 HP instead of 3? And it being 5 (and bind healing 3) have compounding effects with this problem. Taking a single hit on the way to a boss actually costs you an entire “boss hit” so runbacks are worse all around. Trying to heal mid boss only gets you “one and a half” hits back which takes a lot of silk to build up and probably is a worse deal for you than just using the silk to power more attacks.
Double damage would suck a lot less (and be a better mechanic) if you had 6 HP to start, or if you healed 4 at a time, or if bosses didnt always do 2 damage. There’s no tension to avoiding punishing hits because every move is equally punishing. It makes fights feel very conservative which is maybe intentionally meant to evoke Hornet as a careful hunter, using traps and plans to take down big foes.
I find the opposite though, she feels fragile and reactive. I wish starting damage was higher too. I had this issue in Hollow Knight as well, everything takes too many hits. Common enemies are spongy, bosses take at least 33% too long across the board. Especially it gets annoying since a lot of bosses so far get spammier and faster towards their final phases, so you spend so much time dodging the same attacks and looking for openings to chip hits in. Skills and traps don’t do enough damage to feel especially useful either.
I also hate, and this is another compounding factor, the complete lack of enemy HP bars. On regular enemies this is annoying (gotta count my hits) but on bosses it feels negligent. Bosses have multiple phases and take so long to kill, it would be nice to know if my last run was just a hit or 2 away from the end or if I still had a 3rd phase to plan for. It adds to the poor perception of skills and traps as well. Sting Shard and Thread Storm both seem to hit several times, around a half-dozen, but neither seems to do much more damage than a couple of regular hits.
Overall I’m really loving Silksong, the art and music are top notch. The DLC for HK convinced me that Team Cherry and I disagree about some fundamental ideas in game design, and HKSS bears that out.
For those who needed some news catching up also:
https://www.ign.com/articles/take-two-shutters-kerbal-space-program-2-studio-amid-layoffs
The publisher, Take Two, laid off the entire staff of KSP2. This pissed off many fans, who had paid full price for Early Access to an unfinishee game that now didn’t have a Dev team.
https://www.polygon.com/news/475635/private-division-sold/
Then T2 sold off the studio to this other company. And staffing up for Dev work when none if the original creators are around: 1. Sucks and is miserable work and 2. Almost never works out to produce a quality product.
So yeah, instead of that debacle, they opted for the Disco Elysium 2 debacle where the publishers steal the IP from the original creators and then fail to ever deliver anything with it. I love this debacle because you get a shitty publisher with a disappointing game AND embittered developers who will probably leave game making or go on to make less involved projects. It’s great they can both financially ruin an industry with bad practices while also tearing out the soul of the medium.
This is great news! I love these 2 games, especially Hexen! Be a lot easier to play them on steamdeck now!
Looks like mods are just starting to go up. Hopefully Jimmy (or a fan I guess) uploads his Faithless trilogy for Heretic. It mixes some elements from Hexen in and is one of the better fantasy boomer shooters I’ve played. Highly recommended when it’s available.
Alright, so here’s my case for Thief, the Looking Glass Studios game.
Thief, on its own, is a great game and basically shares the claim to originating a lot of ideas behind stealth in games along with MGS, which came out the same year.
What many don’t know is how incredibly innovative what they were doing with their engine tech was. In another timeline, id software were mildly successful action game makers while LGS became the industry defining mega success. The Dark Engine refines a lot of ideas present in Ultima Underworld and marries them to tech that was decades ahead of its time.
Check out the opening and closing of this long talk: https://youtu.be/wo84LFzx5nI
Thief had, probably, the first ECS in gaming. They also had their own rendering technique using “portals” that was a bit slower than id’s BSP trees but allowed for insane geometry. They also had an incredible system for events called stimulus-response that was doing things like Breath of the Wild’s “chemistry engine” again, decades before it would be rediscovered.
They weren’t just making games, these were really simulations of a limited world with complex interactions. If the rest of the industry had caught onto their good practices, who knows what the landscape would look like today!
Imagine creating one of the best, most important pieces of media of your generation. Being a rock star of a new medium, defining genres, shaping history and the world.
Then imagine struggling to keep a job, find work, and create more works in your medium. And now imagine that you were barely in your 20s when you broke out, so that the rest of your life is always in the shadow of your first masterpieces.
Romero seems like way too nice a person, too good of a being, to be treated with such indignity. In a lot of ways Bill Gates and his company have been fucking over Romero for like 30 years now.
Preservation, while perhaps idealistic, is about keeping every version that we can. Doom is a great example. Because Carmac released the source code, source ports have proliferated. That means anyone can play the original Doom on just about any machine. Varying degrees of accuracy to the original DOS release exist thanks to ports like Chocolate Doom, GZDoom, Eternity Engine, et al. As do varying degrees of accuracy to Doom 95, the Windows 95 rerelease. Or to the version running on Xbox packed in with Doom 3.
Ports cover the engine, but we also have an archive of all the doom.wad files, the contents. We have demo and prototype versions. The dos release. Officially patched versions. The win95 release. The Xbox release.
But a preservationist also wants the original Bethesda Unity release, wad and engine. The Kex release with the new engine and new episodes. Neither of those Bethesda engines needs to exist but why not keep them too? They’re a part of the Doom legacy, an ongoing chapter in the endless story of Doom.
Its good that in this community we’ve gotten to preserve so much. It keeps the history of one of the most important video games alive and relevant. It keeps the game itself relevant. Without the original source release, there’s no GZDoom and there’s probably no Bethesda rereleases. The impact that source release had on the gaming community, gaming as an industry, modding and indie gaming, is incalculable.
That Crysis–also a landmark game in its own time–deserves any less is laughable. The original release of the game should always be present and available: as an artifact of its time, as a fine game in its own right, and as a piece of living history that can be stood up against its remakes, sequels, and the games it inspired.
Ah man, I’d been holding off on setting up another TES game on my PC since going to Linux. Now I’m going to have to go pre-emptive mod shopping for the essentials, and do it for so many games!
It’s a real shame that between crypto currencies, federated servers, and bittorrent we still haven’t come up with a fair and robust system for hosting large content archives.
The need for corporate-funded servers is killing video sites, mod sites, emulators, streaming, libraries, and so much more. Even the “self-hosted” crowd is like 90% dependent on cloud-hosting companies.
Commandos to me is the start of a different lineage of real-time tactical stealth games, which goes on to include Desperados, Shadow Tactics, and Shadow Gambit (yes, most of those were made by the same team).
Outside of the OGRE-alikes (FO Tactics, FF Tactics, Disgea, and so on) some other options for tactical games that are a little different:
- Nexus: The Jupiter Incident - sort of a 4X game mixed with tactics, or like Homeworld with a lot fewer units
- Myth: The Fallen Lords (and sequels) - classic pre-Halo Bungie titles that mix RPG and strategy. Somewhat defining for the RTS genre too.
- UFO: Aftershock and sequels - a series that tried to revive XCom before Firaxis rebooted it. Not as good, but pretty interesting and fun, a little easier than old school xcom but not as polished as the newer ones.
- Cannon Fodder - a UK classic, very arcadey but very fun and lighter than all these other “serious” games
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Works for me. I got stuck on the puppet king second phase and gave up. Not like rage quit, I just never went back to the game after like a dozen attempts, uninstalled it months later to free up space.
I love difficulty adjustments. Tuning a game to be right for every audience is impossible, better to let the end client have some control over fine tuning their experience.
Control is an excellent example of this for me. My GOTY when it came out, still an all time fav. I love the story and setting, but the combat is tedious after a while. In that case, lowering enemy health made the game less boring without being substantially easier, giving me the kind of experience I could enjoy.
“The addition of Polygon not only strengthens our editorial muscle but also amplifies our ability to deliver unmatched value to both audiences and advertisers,” said Valnet CEO Hassan Youssef in a statement.
That seems like it really won’t be true when you’ve laid off all the writers and editors who were doing that.
Yeah, I’m excited for this to be documented. I got burned on Wrath: Aeon of Ruin by this. Fun game but it only has checkpoint saves. You can make checkpoints (from a limited pool) when you want, but only to respawn from if you die. If you turn the game off, it’s back to the beginning of the zone. And each zone (which is basically a boomer shooter mission) can be multiple hours long.
Its basically unplayable for me because I have to clear out an afternoon to beat the whole level in one sitting.
The YouTube algorithm has been real weird lately. It suggested a video to me and I had no idea why until now. I watch a lot of Doom stuff, so it wasn’t off base, I just didn’t have context for it.
It’s Coincident (the streamer this is about) commenting over a “lost” demo of Okuplok playing the map themselves. Spoiler: they do not finish it! But it was neat hearing Coincident discuss his own strategies for the map in comparison to how the creator (allegedly) approached it.
I’ll have to watch the actual stream now I guess!
What if I told you that there are roughly 4 million steamdecks in existence. Ref
And that this is about 1\3 of the Steam Linux market. Ref and about half of the entire handheld PC market. Ref
Of course, we dont know how many MAU GOG has so maybe 4 million new customers is baby numbers, but Steam seems enamored enough of that market segment to commit huge new UI and store features (deck verification, “Runs on Deck” filters, other deck specific stuff) including the game controller mappings which do help with non-deck also but were clearly a necessary element for handhelds. Maybe deck users, it being a committed gaming platform, spend more on games?
Anyway, trying to get subscribers (always a teeny fraction of your free users) ahead of converting new non-customers into customers, seems like bad econ to me.
If GOG is so hot for game preservation why not see if they can score an emulation deal to bring lost handheld titles to PC\deck? Sega might be down, NeoGeo is owned by the Saudi’s, I’m sure they’d love some free money for their back catalog. That’s in line with Lutris’ mission of being the one game launcher for your entire library. A few strategic investments and partnerships could open up GOG as the gateway to classic gaming across devices, but that would require some vision to carry through.
Thanks for the fun summary! (Oh hey, its Atomic Poet, I follow you on Mastodon too, love your work!)
I played the newer trilogy on PC years ago and really enjoyed them, great little action games. I’m too young and American to have enjoyed the Amiga in its day, though a Commodore 128 was literally this baby’s first computer. Big Team17 fan currently too, I adored Yoku’s (sent me down a digital pinball spiral that was finally slaked by Xenotilt) and love them as a publisher too, being behind great indies like Blasphemous and Dredge!
The new Prince of Persia is the worst for this! There’s no auto-cloud save, so you have to manually manage uploading and downloading to the one cloud save slot between your three on-device slots.
And no matter what, no matter how long it’s been, it asks about it, like: “Your last save was 0 minutes ago, as you sure you want to exit?”
If you liked SupCom and want to recapture the magic, do check out Zero-K! It’s free (like actually, no weird micro-transactions) and open source (though buried a bit on the site) It’s based on SpringRTS, which is great to see something cool being done with Spring!
In my mind the RTS genre hit major twin peaks with SupCom and CoH1. SupCom is the best of its subgenre (massive rts? actually the recent and free Zero-K hits real good in this genre too!) CoH 1 is the top of the Dawn of War family of more tactical RTS.
I haven’t played in a long time, but I recall the story being good. The mechanics though were just so top notch! Great squad controls, not too much micro, vehicles feel really impactful, the nature of control point capture means every skirmish is very dynamic. Ah, what a classic!
I think I ended up buying HM 1, 2, and 3 individually in GOTY bundles over 3 or 4 consecutive winter steam sales. I did end up with all the missions (I think) but I’m surely missing some premium cosmetic dlc that I couldn’t possibly care less about.
Admittedly, if Steam puts out a “finish your collection” bundle that costs me like $.97 to add a few cosmetics in, I’d probably buy it just to feel like I’d “finished” the collection.
Hitman is truly the worst though (also a truly emblematic case of shit publisher, hero studio). Especially when you consider all thr pre-WoA games, I’m not sure it’s even possible to be sure you have all the games. Only like, Wolfenstein, has more confusing reboots.
DRG and Warframe also hit the critical requirement of actually being games that are fun to play!
I haven’t played a lot of WF, but I’ve got hundreds of hours on DRG. There is no grind. Getting holiday loot takes 5 to 8 matched total, and the Seasons are long and very relaxed. I maxed out XP for this season already and the next probably won’t start until at least this summer.
The community is going strong, the game is fun, Ghost Ship seems stable and like a nice place to work. It’s so stupid that more companies don’t see that they could run like this instead of chasing “get rich quick” corporate schemes that always alienate the fans.
The first time I played Crisis, I was already in awe because of that brilliant sunrise opening scene. As I’m creeping through the jungle towards the next objective, I hear loud running water and decide to see what it is.
They put in an absolutely stunning waterfall off to the side, complete with rainbows and ferns growing up around the base. One of those few memorable, special times when a game had the right art direction, graphics tech, and hit at just the right moment for me to all culminate in a real feeling of wonder and joy.
I tend to be very cynical about games being able to do that to me anymore, and it is much rarer with how commonplace high-definition but artistically uninspired assets have gotten. But it still happens now and then, the last time being Elden Ring which did have impressive art and design, and did “wow” me several times.
I’m pretty early into the game as well, so I almost didn’t say anything. But even if theres a charm that adds HP bars later, I would be annoyed about it. Why wait so long? I’m over 10 hours in. Why take a slot with it? I get similar annoyances about the compass, but at least that one I can understand because maybe some people like the challenge of landmark navigation using just the maps. There is a skill there, and it is part of the skillset of Exploration (a major pillar of design in any metroidvania).
The yellow tools, in general, I’m iffy about the design of. So far I only have 3: compass, more shards, and auto-collect beads. Of these, auto-beads is the most obviously useful. You need many beads, and they get lost pretty easy. Shards are super common and don’t have many uses. But none of these are essential, and all of them get less useful the later into the game you get. The tradeoff is only meaningful early game, and seems to encourage a balance between memorizing the levels and grinding, neither are amazing activities.
Having the compass charm tied to ALL map markers would certainly up the utility of it, though it’s gating another feature behind both a purchase and a charm. I’ve also only found 1 semi useful trap\red-charm so far. Maybe having more traps and skills that required shell bits would put more pressure on needing them and make the charm that gives extras more appeal for a trap-heavy play style?
Again, I grant that maybe I’m too early in the game yet, but I feel like these systems should be coming together and cohering more after a half-dozen bosses and 10 hours of play.