Videogames: The Sequeling

[Fez]

I'm currently in the middle of the Citadel DLC for ME3 and have otherwise done everything up to the point of no return, and I've decided I'm definitely going to just declare that I'm done with the game when the DLC party is done. If, whenever the next Mass Effect game comes out they announce there is a save import feature from the legendary edition I'll go back and finish the game, but otherwise  having a good time on the citadel while the war continues is my canon end.

All in all, it's been a really good 95-ish hours replaying the trilogy for the first time in years. I've posted enough about it already, so the only thing I'll add now is actually a negative: I'd forgotten that the entire 3rd act of ME3 is extremely weak. It's not just the ending itself, or even just all of the final mission. The entire act is the one place, in my mind, where the time constraints the game was made under became extremely obvious. And I did some background reading, which I hadn't seen back in the day, about some of the original plans. Apparently the Cerberus coup attempt, which is that single oddly placed mission between Acts 1 and 2 in the final game was originally going to be the whole third act. And some of the short, kinda random missions given by ME2 party members, like Kasumi and Zaeed's, were going to tie into it. But it all got scrapped to meet the release deadline and what had already been developed was slotted into the game where it could be. And what is the third act, besides the final mission on earth, (which is really just Thessis, Sanctuary, and Cerberus HQ) were quickly pulled together with some loose connective tissue.

Still, overall I have no regrets spending so much time experiencing the trilogy again. What I likely will end up regretting is that I've decided I'm definitely going to give ME:A another shot. Maybe not immediately, but sometime this summer at least.

[Werthead]

Company of Heroes 3 announced and confirmed. Italian Theatre. Looks very nice, with a Total War-style campaign map, greater focus on naval units and a move away from CoH2's insane tank spam back to mixed unit battles. Lots of new infantry features, like breaching and in-building battles rather than units turning cottages into impenetrable fortresses.

Tanks have been revamped to have side armour and are being re-emphasised as tough battle-swingers rather than being plentiful (which made sense on the Eastern Front, but less so in Italy).

Snagged a pre-alpha demo key, so will be giving that a whirl later on.

[Kalbear]

Tried Old World for a bit. It's not super intuitive, but the storyline with the leaders combined with civ rule is pretty awesome. 

[Fez]

Well, I did in fact decided to jump into ME:A rather than buy Monster Hunter Stories 2 (I think I will get it at some point though). Apparently I actually played ME:A for 63 hours back in March/April 2017, which is way more than I remember. Especially since I'm pretty sure I stopped well before even the halfway point of the game; possibly I played a lot of the multiplayer. And also I might've gotten suckered into wasting my time with the open world fetch quests.

But, regardless, I started a new game and, I'm actually not hating it so far. In fact, I'm having fun. Still early going of course, but I'll take this as a good sign. In one big plus, sometime post-launch they seemed to have fixed all the bugs I encountered before. They also fixed the faces, at least the human ones (except default fem Ryder, but I made a custom char that looks fine); aliens are a bit more mixed (Salarians look great, Turians vary, Asari are bad, and I've only seen one Krogan so far so I can't comment). And those changes alone make a big difference.

Also, going straight from the Legendary Edition of the OT to this (and with the bugs gone), I can better appreciate that they did actually make a bunch of smart changes and improvements to the little stuff. Things like companion codex entries updating as you get to know characters, a much cleaner UI for modding and upgrading weapons and armor, dialog using your first name (so long as you keep the default), and so on. I also think the environmental visual design is really nice, the Tempest is a great looking ship.

The two big issues of course are the writing and the open world aspects of the game. I only just got to Eos, the first big open world map, so I can't comment on that part yet. I'm hoping though that if I stick to my plan of truly ignoring literally every single 'Task' quest (except the ones that are just on the ships and never touch planets) and never exploring an area unless a bigger quest takes me there, the game won't be too much of a grindy mess.

As for the writing, I'm trying to keep an open mind. What I've seen so far won't win any awards, but it hasn't been terrible either. I can't remember if I hated the early game writing my first time though, or if it was only later on, once the logical inconsistencies starting piling up. So far it has all been a bit flat, but nothing actively bad (except that first Addison conversation). My biggest issue isn't with the writing, but the voice acting; specifically Director Tann. Kumail Nanjiani is aggressively bad at voicing a Salarian; the only positive is that at least he's not a party member.

The combat gameplay is good, though I feel like that's the one positive pretty much everyone agrees with (except those folks who loved ME1's combat and disliked the direction things went starting with ME2)

[Corvinus85]

36 minutes ago, Fez said:

The combat gameplay is good, though I feel like that's the one positive pretty much everyone agrees with (except those folks who loved ME1's combat and disliked the direction things went starting with ME2)

I am not a fan of the ME:A combat, because I don't like not being able to pause and give orders to my squad mates. ME2 and 3 have the best combat, imo.

ME:A continues the annoying tradition of putting non-sensical loading screens when boarding the ship and in other places. Why does the ship have to take off and leave when all I want is to have a conversation with a squad mate and then return to the planet? 

[Fez]

17 minutes ago, Corvinus85 said:

I am not a fan of the ME:A combat, because I don't like not being able to pause and give orders to my squad mates. ME2 and 3 have the best combat, imo.

ME:A continues the annoying tradition of putting non-sensical loading screens when boarding the ship and in other places. Why does the ship have to take off and leave when all I want is to have a conversation with a squad mate and then return to the planet? 

Fair enough. I never issue commands to companions to real time RPGs, I give the AI full control and  let it go to town. So I never even noticed that change. 

As for the later issue, yeah, that's an annoyance; albeit one that ME2 and 3 also had, so I won't hold it against ME:A. 

[Corvinus85]

20 minutes ago, Fez said:

Fair enough. I never issue commands to companions to real time RPGs, I give the AI full control and  let it go to town. So I never even noticed that change. 

As for the later issue, yeah, that's an annoyance; albeit one that ME2 and 3 also had, so I won't hold it against ME:A. 

Wow, I didn't think the AI was remotely capable of being effective. When your companions run right into enemy fire, all you can do is shake your head.

 

[Fez]

19 minutes ago, Corvinus85 said:

Wow, I didn't think the AI was remotely capable of being effective. When your companions run right into enemy fire, all you can do is shake your head.

 

Well, I generally play these games on Normal, and it's fine at that level. Sometimes a companion suicides, but it's not really that common. And in a game like DA:I, I just set the AI script up for self-heals and it's all good. And in ME3, medi-gel is plentiful; also I only ever had issues with Liara dying, because of how low her health is.

But this is why I don't like real-time-with-pause games. Because in those you do need to control the companions. And if that's the case, just make the game turn-based instead. Pillars of Eternity 2 was vastly improved by making that switch. I love a tactical turn-based game. But in real time games all that pausing just feels tiresome and breaks up the flow of the game to me. I want to just be controlling my character at all times; it's more fun, and also helps with immersion for me (though in games where you are directing companions rather than taking control of them that at least isn't an issue).

[Soylent Brown]

Finished Death Stranding the other day, after starting it months ago, taking a break, and then putting another 40 hours into it over the past couple of weeks. Lots to like, it's beautiful, the music is great, and I often enjoyed the slow pace of getting from A to B, but the shitty combat sections and the boring bullet-sponge bosses sucked. I was very ready for the game to be over, having sat through 2 fucking hours of cutscenes at the end.

Played Cloudpunk too, which I guess is a little like Death Stranding in some ways. Much lower budget, but the voxel graphics are beautiful, the music and atmosphere is great, and I really enjoyed the story. No crappy combat in it either!

I'll be playing Season 24 of Diablo 3 next week, so just playing through Beyond: Two Souls for a bit of variety at the moment, which is very meh. I'm not playing it chronologically, and a few of the chapters left me cold because I had absolutely no idea what the fuck was going on at the time. I'm going to finish the game, but it's probably going to be an irritating journey.

[Werthead]

2 minutes ago, Soylent Brown said:

Played Cloudpunk too, which I guess is a little like Death Stranding in some ways. Much lower budget, but the voxel graphics are beautiful, the music and atmosphere is great, and I really enjoyed the story. No crappy combat in it either!

Did you play just the base game or the DLC campaign as well? Need to pick up the latter.

[Soylent Brown]

25 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Did you play just the base game or the DLC campaign as well? Need to pick up the latter.

Just the base game. I realised just after I finished that there was a DLC pack, but I'd uninstalled by then. I put it on my wishlist to remind me to get it at some point.

[IlyaP]

Picked up the ARPG The Spirit on Steam today, which I'll try out once I get sick of Diablo 3. Which, uh, I guess might happen sometime next year?

[Fez]

Played a bunch more ME:A yesterday (also briefly launched the multiplayer and saw a huge number of unlocks, so yeah, I think most of my previous 63 hours were in that). Something I began to realize, and I confirmed after looking around online for a bit, is that, despite it supposedly be an open-world game, there's actually an extremely linear path it wants you take. If you follow that path, everything makes a certain degree of narrative sense. Some of it is extremely lackluster, but at least you can follow how things go A>B >C.

However, if you don't follow that path, which is really easy to do since it is open world, everything falls apart. The devs did not account at all for doing things outside their set order, which can lead to massive logical fallacies in the plot and mood whiplash as character relationships jump around in their arcs. And I've realized this happened to me my first attempt at the game. That time, I went to Aya as my fourth planet, which kinda broke everything; now I went to Aya as my second planet, and things make more sense. It's still not great, due to both not-great writing and hiding too much explanation for why things are the way they are in easy-to-miss side content. But it is better.

And so, I'm now following a guide telling me what order to go to planets in, and how much to advance the story on each planet when I'm there. Which is a really dumb thing to need to have for an open-world game, but is necessary here.

[Gorn]

43 minutes ago, Fez said:

Played a bunch more ME:A yesterday (also briefly launched the multiplayer and saw a huge number of unlocks, so yeah, I think most of my previous 63 hours were in that). Something I began to realize, and I confirmed after looking around online for a bit, is that, despite it supposedly be an open-world game, there's actually an extremely linear path it wants you take. If you follow that path, everything makes a certain degree of narrative sense. Some of it is extremely lackluster, but at least you can follow how things go A>B >C.

However, if you don't follow that path, which is really easy to do since it is open world, everything falls apart. The devs did not account at all for doing things outside their set order, which can lead to massive logical fallacies in the plot and mood whiplash as character relationships jump around in their arcs. And I've realized this happened to me my first attempt at the game. That time, I went to Aya as my fourth planet, which kinda broke everything; now I went to Aya as my second planet, and things make more sense. It's still not great, due to both not-great writing and hiding too much explanation for why things are the way they are in easy-to-miss side content. But it is better.

And so, I'm now following a guide telling me what order to go to planets in, and how much to advance the story on each planet when I'm there. Which is a really dumb thing to need to have for an open-world game, but is necessary here.

Bioware games are never truly "open-world", and even when you have a choice between different places, you are still intended to take them on in a certain specific order. At least they previously had either visible recommended levels (Dragon Age: Inquisition, Old Republic), or "beef gates" at the beginning of "later" areas, meaning enemies that would easily wipe out a low-level party, giving you an indication that you should do some levelling elsewhere and then come back.

Not doing either is just crappy design.

[Fez]

15 minutes ago, Gorn said:

Bioware games are never truly "open-world", and even when you have a choice between different places, you are still intended to take them on in a certain specific order. At least they previously had either visible recommended levels (Dragon Age: Inquisition, Old Republic), or "beef gates" at the beginning of "later" areas, meaning enemies that would easily wipe out a low-level party, giving you an indication that you should do some levelling elsewhere and then come back.

Not doing either is just crappy design.

Oh for sure it's bad design. My still-early opinion is that ME:A isn't as bad as I remember, but it's only a mediocre game at best. It's got some nice design features going on, but is badly let down by the writing.

In addition to gameplay cues like you mention, other Bioware games would make light adjustments based on your choices. For instance, in ME1, if you do Feros last, Liara thinks you're a hallucination because she's been trapped so long. But in ME:A, the planet stories are set in stone and do not adjust at all. The crew will act like they just discovered something, because the devs assumed you would there, when in fact you learned about it on a different planet hours ago.

And also, Bioware never before tied party story progression to main story levels. For instance, in ME1 you can do the early planets in whatever order you want; and you get Garrus conversation #1 after recruitment, #2 after doing a planet, #3 after doing another planet, and so on. But in ME:A, you get Vetra conversation #2 after doing planet #2 and conversation #3 after doing planet #3, and so on. And the problem is that in ME:A you can do planet #3 before #2, which means the character progression happens out of order.

Now in truth it's a bit more complicated than that in ME:A, because while the dialog isn't great there is a huge quantity of it. So you'll get some in the right order because it's tied to something else and some in the wrong order and it's just a huge mood whiplash. Unless you do everything precisely in the order ME:A wants. Bad design.

But, the moment-to-moment gameplay is fun, there are some neat features to appreciate, and the game actually has a bunch of cool lore hidden away that ties back to the original trilogy. And, I suspect, those lore pieces will be how Bioware ties the next ME game to both the OT and ME:A. For instance, even if the next game is only set a few years after ME3 (and everyone in ME:A is in cryo for another 630 years) an important ME:A tie-in would be finding out how the Andromeda Initiative obtained so much Geth technology back when all Geth were either hostile or isolationist to the rest of the Milky Way. And that's just an early hook, my understanding is that ME:A sets up a lot of these kinds of unanswered questions that connect back to the Milky Way. And actually experiencing them myself is one of my big motives for pushing forward.

[Ghostlydragon]

On a 00s gaming hunt atm. Rebought a bunch of gamecube and wii games I got rid of years ago before they get even more expensive. Paper Mario 2, Mario Kart Double Dash, Wind Waker, Resident Evil 4 Wii Edition, and the Wii U Wind Waker too.

[RumHam]

https://store.steampowered.com/steamdeck

Interesting, I hadn't heard anything about this. I wonder how hard they'll be to get. 

Edit; Reservations start tomorrow at 10AM PDT.

Quote

Why is there a reservation fee?

The main reason for reservations is to ensure an orderly and fair ordering process for customers when Steam Deck inventory becomes available. The additional fee gives us a clearer signal of intent to purchase, which gives us better data to balance supply chain, inventory, and regional distribution leading up to launch.
 

Why is my account not able to place a reservation until Sunday?

We are aware of potential unauthorized resellers, and as an additional safeguard to ensure a fair ordering process, we’ve added a requirement that the reserver has made a purchase on Steam prior to June 2021 for the first 48 hours of reservation availability.
 

How does the reservation system work?

When you submit a reservation, you will be put in a queue. Once inventory is available, you will be emailed in the order the reservations were made.
 

When will I be able to order?

We are aiming to start sending order invitations by December 2021. We will make every effort to convert all reservations to orders but we are not able to guarantee availability.

So hopefully that will cut back on re-sellers. What the hell I'll reserve one. 

Edit again: 

Quote

Steam Deck is a PC so you can install third party software and operating systems.

That's...pretty cool! Definitely going to get one if I can put emulators on it.

[Rhom]

1 hour ago, RumHam said:

https://store.steampowered.com/steamdeck

Interesting, I hadn't heard anything about this. I wonder how hard they'll be to get. 

Edit; Reservations start tomorrow at 10AM PDT.

So hopefully that will cut back on re-sellers. What the hell I'll reserve one. 

Edit again: 

That's...pretty cool! Definitely going to get one if I can put emulators on it.

That's pretty impressive.  I really like the effort to cut back on scalpers and such.  I long said that Sony should have sent an exclusive link to order a PS5 to all PlayStation Plus subscribers.  Reward your most dedicated players and also ensure that you are getting hardware into the hands of a demographic that is known to actually purchase games.

[Rhom]

Mind if I explore an aspect of the Mass Effect "Green" Ending that bugs me amongst the online community?

Spoiler

Okay.  So we all know the famous problem of the ending of the ME Trilogy being distilled down to four choices. 

1)  Red Ending.  Destroy everything.
2)  Blue Ending.  Control the Reapers.  (Otherwise known as the one that the Illusive Man was advocating.)
3)  Green Ending.  Synthesis.  The entire Galaxy becomes a hybrid of machine and organic.
4)  Sort of hidden option.  The "Do Nothing" ending where you shoot the kid in the face and the cycle continues.

I am a member of a Mass Effect community on Facebook that is very active.  From what I see, a lot of bleeding hearts on there love their EDI and Joker relationship.  They did a lot of work to mend fences between the Geth and the Quarians.  To them, the Green ending is the mega happy ending and they can never envision anything else.

The obvious problem with that is that it completely ignores the free will of an entire galaxy of species.  All consent is taken away.  To me, there are apparent problems with this as a comparison to taking away choice.  A complete violation of another sentient beings body.  It is rape of a sort and I don't see how any other argument can be made any other way.

On the FB community that I mention however, any discussion that touches on rape comparisons are flagged and removed.

This feels intellectually dishonest to me.  From a philosophical discussion of what is the "right" ending, I don't see how you can have a full discussion without bringing up the ethical issues with this and the obvious parallels.  

This isn't to say that other endings are much better.  As noted, if you mend fences with the Geth, the destroy ending ends up with the genocide of an entire sentient species.  Control is likely just a lie perpetrated by the child.

Yes, I get it.  Any sexual assault is a violation of a sort that is beyond any comparison to a fictional game of aliens and robots; but isn't that what Sci Fi is at its best?  An allegorical way of approaching topics that are too uncomfortable to discuss in real life?
  

 

[Fez]

11 minutes ago, Rhom said:

Mind if I explore an aspect of the Mass Effect "Green" Ending that bugs me amongst the online community?

  Reveal hidden contents

Okay.  So we all know the famous problem of the ending of the ME Trilogy being distilled down to four choices. 

1)  Red Ending.  Destroy everything.
2)  Blue Ending.  Control the Reapers.  (Otherwise known as the one that the Illusive Man was advocating.)
3)  Green Ending.  Synthesis.  The entire Galaxy becomes a hybrid of machine and organic.
4)  Sort of hidden option.  The "Do Nothing" ending where you shoot the kid in the face and the cycle continues.

I am a member of a Mass Effect community on Facebook that is very active.  From what I see, a lot of bleeding hearts on there love their EDI and Joker relationship.  They did a lot of work to mend fences between the Geth and the Quarians.  To them, the Green ending is the mega happy ending and they can never envision anything else.

The obvious problem with that is that it completely ignores the free will of an entire galaxy of species.  All consent is taken away.  To me, there are apparent problems with this as a comparison to taking away choice.  A complete violation of another sentient beings body.  It is rape of a sort and I don't see how any other argument can be made any other way.

On the FB community that I mention however, any discussion that touches on rape comparisons are flagged and removed.

This feels intellectually dishonest to me.  From a philosophical discussion of what is the "right" ending, I don't see how you can have a full discussion without bringing up the ethical issues with this and the obvious parallels.  

This isn't to say that other endings are much better.  As noted, if you mend fences with the Geth, the destroy ending ends up with the genocide of an entire sentient species.  Control is likely just a lie perpetrated by the child.

Yes, I get it.  Any sexual assault is a violation of a sort that is beyond any comparison to a fictional game of aliens and robots; but isn't that what Sci Fi is at its best?  An allegorical way of approaching topics that are too uncomfortable to discuss in real life?
  

 

The issue with discussing the ME3 endings in detail is:

Spoiler

 

They are so poorly thought out that it's difficult to ascribe meaning to them. I doubt the writers wanted the Green Ending to be read as a body violation of everything in the galaxy, but they didn't do any sort of work to explain why it's not. And since the Green Ending is the one that's technically the hardest to achieve, I suspect the intention was for it to be the "best ending", other than the fact that Shepard sacrifices themself for it rather than living (so it's not exactly a happy ending for their love interest either). However, Bioware skipped all the steps to explain why it actually is the best ending.

On top of that, they didn't do any of the work to explain why the Red Ending, the thing that has been your goal for 3 games is not the best ending. On the surface, it's the one that maintains life as everyone knows it. There's no telling how altruistic a Shepard AI controlling the Reapers actually is in the long run; versus eventually being a harm. And Green Ending is such a massive change, there's no telling what it might bring. It's also not just a change in situation, but of people themselves; to the point that you could argue that the Green Ending actually kills everyone in the galaxy and replaces them with a similar-looking version. That's especially the case if the Green Ending is supposed to mean there's no more conflicts; which would only occur if you are massively re-writing everyone's personality.

Lastly, even if you ignore all these potential downsides with the Green and Blue Endings and they actually are utopias, especially the Green one. That's still bad. Consider what Mordin says in ME2:

All scientific advancement due to intelligence overcoming, compensating, for limitations. Can't carry a load, so invent wheel. Can't catch food, so invent spear. Limitations. No limitations, no advancement. No advancement, culture stagnates. Works other way too. Advancement before culture is ready. Disastrous.

If Shepard actually creates a utopia via the Green ending, he's either dooming the Milky Way to stagnation and decay or he's uplifting them in a way they aren't prepared for at all.

And yeah, EDI and the Geth dying sucks, but there's one big reason Shepard shouldn't care in the moment. S/he is given absolutely no reason to trust the Catalyst; no reason to trust that Control or Synthesis do anything at all and no reason to trust that other synthetics die if Destroy is picked. Now it turns out the Catalyst isn't lying, but in the moment Shepard should absolutely be assuming that it is. So, when playing the game, there's zero reason to do anything but pick the Red ending.

Also, on a meta-layer, EDI and the Geth dying feels like a lazy throw-in when Bioware panicked and realized everyone would pick Destroy if they didn't add a downside. Although, they also then undercut that by having Destroy be the one ending where Shepard can live.