What I love about Early Access games is that by and large, they are experimental. Or at least, the only ones I’m ever interested in. EA gives small teams the ability to grow an idea. Darkest Dungeon, Planet Crafter, Hades… all games that would not exist without EA.

Sometimes though, sometimes a dev has a small-ish idea and just goes straight to the deep end quickly. The game starts in one area, and then takes a massive turn into something completely different. In most cases, these “twists” generate a lot of negativity, which modifies the EA promotion algorithm, and then the devs have paved their way to obscurity.

I have three examples, of varying degrees here, all in the same factory-automation genre.

Dyson Sphere Program : an absolutely stellar game from start to finish, where its taken years to get the “math” right on optimization. PvE combat has always been in the roadmap, though the implementation is only half way there now, and has some rather obtuse requirements. The other half is sorely needed, and it’s taking the time it needs to bake. A result is that the reviews have gone from Overwhelmingly Positive, to Very Positive. It seems like a minor thing, but that has effectively removed it from many lists.

Techtonica : The game as it is now appears to be missing a fair chunk of content (like 2 more zones) and a lot of optimization (mid-tier? resources are not balanced). They had a somewhat clear roadmap and a very accelerated release framework – something close to every 6 weeks had a major patch. And then v0.5 released, with PvP laser tag and teleportation (this is akin to putting a garden simulator in CoD). A name for v0.6 was provided, but nothing about what was in it. Reaction to this has been extremely negative, where the devs have provided a mea culpa on poor communication and held a live stream to explain what’s next – which unfortunately had much more “we can’t talk about this yet” that folks wanted. It went from Very Positive to Mostly Positive, which frankly means only word of mouth can save it now.

Foundry : Only released a bit more than a month ago. The devs put out a journal asking for feedback on some system development, namely more time spent in the resource simulator of selling space stuff. Feedback on this was clear and unanimous – fix the game first. Devs responded that they heard loud and clear, and the reviews have stayed stable as Very Positive. I would like to think that this approach is a result of watching what happened with Techtonica.

EA is an interesting space. Devs get to test ideas and are in turn subsidized for that exploration. This is a two-way street, where there are now expectations on that funding. Clear communication is required, and the timing of it it matters. Satisfactory may have the gold standard here, but DSP is darn close – the language barrier here is why it’s all text, but it is fullsome text. Techtonica has a similar structure to Satisfactory, which does give me some hope that they can recover from this mistake. (And for clarity, the Laser Tag / teleportation is not the mistake, it’s that they didn’t communicate why they launched it instead of the clearly missing content.)

I’d like to think that the golden age of EA is moved on, where free money and loose promises are drowned out by a more realistic relationship with the community that keeps the devs afloat. Like it or not, there’s a recipe to success in EA, and it is much much more than simply pumping out a product. Given the lack of investment stability, EA is likely to be the place to get most funding, if you can figure out how to cheat the algorithm and build crazy word of mouth.

This post likely won’t hit as well if you haven’t played Hades, which may be my favorite roguelite of all time. Developers (Supergiant Games) have never made a bad game… heck, I’d go so far to say they’ve only made good games.

Hades 2 is certainly in EA. There’s missing half the content of Olympus (2 zones, 2 bosses), some NPCs have early art, and there’s still some rather “interesting” balancing bits to work out. So, what do you get here ?

• 6 zones, 6 bosses. (2 more zones/bosses should come)
• Fully voices NPCs and gifts/relationships. There are a good 30 NPCs in here, with hours of voice acting.
• 5 weapons (there should be 6), with alternate forms.
• Harvesting systems (mining, souls, seeds/farm, and importantly – fishing!!)
• A ton of random upgrades (boons, upgrades, etc..)
• Chaos challenges – preset loadouts in specific zones to meet increasingly difficult challenges

If you played Hades, then most of this seems familiar. Hades 2 does add some interesting changes though.

• Combat is much more strategic instead of tactical. Zagreus was all about melee attacks with speed. Melinoë is about spell casting, which takes longer and requires placement. Some weapons are frankly atrocious if you’re not using an alternate form.
• Weapons are a mixed bag. The staff is weak, but has good casting options. Blades deal cat scratch damage in a very small area, and require a specific boon set to work. Wands are insanely OP when you figure out how to use them. The axe… feels amazing. The gun is undertuned right now.
• Boons had preferences for certainly attack styles. Some are always good, some are extremely particular. The secondary effects (burn, blast, push) are generally weak until combined with something else.
• Boons can have infusions. Each has an affinity, and collect enough affinity to unlock more powerful options. There are times where it makes more sense to take a bad boon to unlock a good one.
• A new type of boon, called a Hex, that provides a powerful effect when you’ve used enough magic points per fight. I really dislike this boon type, as the effects are too weak (except the healing option), and don’t allow infusions.
• Rather than clear unlocks, you get Arcana Cards for passive boosts to future runs. You select which cards you want to use, limited by Grasp (an upgradeable resource). You can upgrade cards too. I really enjoy this system, as you pick what fits your style.
• The enemies + sub-bosses are all decently balanced with some minor exceptions. I would avoid all sub-bosses in the last 2 zones. They don’t provide enough rewards for their HP amounts / speed challenge.
• The bosses are fun and hectic. Hecate, the Sirens, Cerberus are all solid fights. Polyphemus (cyclops) is anti-melee, and therefore quite hard with blades – some fights are fun, others very painful. Eris takes a bit of learning to figure out (use the posts) but then gets a lot of fun when you do.
  • Chronos – this guy is something else. He hits like a truck (with inconsistent hitboxes), has a mountain of HP, there’s nowhere to hide, and his 2nd phase has so much AE (the hourglass adds, ugh) that it hurts my eyes. There are times this fight feels unpossible. That’s right.
• The Chaos Challenges are cool. Small packaged challenges that force you to learn the ins/outs of a given weapon. More bite-sized.

The rest of the game is pretty much Hades, but all the edges sanded down. No more fighting the RNG gods a dozen times to get that 1 drop, you can queue it to craft based on other drop. There are menus that explain where things come from. The artifacts you get, in almost all cases, are useful. You generally have more control of choices before you start a run, though you still may want to end a run quickly if the first 3-4 rooms have truly bad RNG. High fear runs (Heat in Hades) do require specific builds… a piece that has yet to be sorted out yet (re-rolling rooms/boons are in cards, which cost too much to select in most runs).

Oh, it also plays amazing on the Steam Deck, with superb battery life.

If I was to guess, we won’t see the full release til 2025. What’s here has more polish than most of the stuff I’ve played this year, but given the prior track record of these devs, there’s still a fair chunk to go.

2020 feels like a generation ago and this particular game game at me for my first playthrough when my grandfather passed from COVID issues. As a result, it has a very particular place inside my skull, which results in overly rose-tinted glasses. The game is not perfect, but it’s so much better than its contemporaries that even 4 years later it’s a gold standard for open world story-telling.

Without really rehashing the core plot, you play as Jin Sakai, a samurai who is trying to find a path of redemption after his known world is turned inside out by the Mongol horde. It takes very broad strokes on the concepts of honor & duty being more important that results, and through Jin, you navigate multiple storylines that see how you and other NPCs try to find a viable future. Some people are blinded by rage, others by love. Some make a set of bad decisions that simply snowball to evil. If I were to truly summarize the entire storyline, it’s how people manage grief and find peace with themselves and others. So… a tad on the nose given my state of mind when I first played this game.

The PC re-release doesn’t add any new content (assuming you played the original and Iki Island), but it does add a ton of visual enhancements. Straight to the point here – Ghost of Tsushima is friggin’ beautiful. It takes large strides to force you to slow down and appreciate the environment, with very long vistas. Many of today’s games add a ton of stuff on the screen, and make it look realistic, but few decide to give you the horizon as a goal. If the Switch actually had processing power, the closest comparison would be the recent Zelda games.

Mechanically the game still feels ahead of it’s time, with an open world with relatively minor icon sprawl. You could play most of the game without the map, as there are plenty of in-game mechanics show you a way forward. A golden bird brings you to interesting content. Following white/black smoke plumes brings you to new quests. You see a lighthouse on the horizon, you can get there. Follow a road, you’ll encounter a chunk of content das a result. Combat is focused on the parry/dodge/counter mechanics of the time. Sure, you can opt to sneak everywhere (and honestly, it’s the only option when hostages are in the mix), but you can just run right into a camp and take everyone out “with honor” if that’s your choice.

The natural flaws here are in the set of values being presented. As a modern, western society, our core set of values conflicts with what’s presented. It seems simplistic and naive. Each NPC espouses a specific set of views that are monochromatic. Taken together they paint a complex painting, but as individual pieces there’s just not much there. (Do I think that Ubisoft’s AC Shadows, set 200 years later will do better? Hell no. AC is as historically accurate as a Dan Brown novel and purposefully built that way.)

4 years later, Ghost of Tsushima remains a shining example of open world design and story structure. It is meant to be experienced, rather than played. Not too many games fit that definition. And it still hits me as hard today as it did then. Feels a bit like time travelling…

A final post here, as I’ve killed Dracula and have a huge backlog of games. A point of issue in a prior post is the need to farm material in order to craft things that aid in progression. In a multiplayer game, many people make short work of any farming route and it’s pretty easy to split the work. As a solo player, there are some rather substantial farming bottlenecks. As Azuriel pointed out, this hits hard at the Power Core unlock.

To counter this, V Rising has a servant & mission system, where you can send them out to collect material for you.

Servants have multiple factors, where they are collected, their blood type, and their blood quality. Their location matters, as it improves the amount of material collected from the same location. Their blood type matters, as it reduces the difficulty by 100 of a given battle type (monsters, battles, etc). The blood quality has a minor impact as it impacts their power level, but as long as you have 70% you’re fine. Keep the 100% blood for merlots.

Each servant must be equipped, and the gear level has a flat *10 applied. 45 gear level = 450 power. Add blood quality (at most 30) and there’s your score. This score matters based on the area you are sending the servant. You can select various durations which increase the odds of success but give diminishing returns. 3 sets of 4 hours give much more than a single 12 hour run, but they will be harder to do.

The challenge here is that you need to MAKE the equipment, and at the end game, you’ll need a some rather strong armor/weapons to max out the locations. Most locations can take 2 servants, though some are 1 to 3. So even if you did max it out, you’re likely only going to get 30-60 of any particularly meaningful foray. In nearly all cases, this is the equivalent of you personally farming for 10 minutes. In practical terms, this means that while a clan may send out multiple servants, a solo player is unlikely to find much value. It is not helpful for progression, but I can absolutely see it being helpful for repairing in PvP battles.

Once exception. At ~75 gear level if you capture an 80% draculan servant, they can do a mission on the far east of the map to collect a few hundred Greater Stygian Shards. Now, a single rift run should give you about 1500, but this allows you to supplement with not much hassle.

I do think it’s an interesting system, as it can’t be too rewarding or people wouldn’t go out of their castles. Finding the appropriate balance here is hard. My only true gripe would be that if you dramatically overpower a location that you get more materials as a result. What you get instead is shorter missions and therefore more rewards, but that means more logging in to collect them. Maybe allow a queuing option?

There are many cool ideas in V Rising, and almost all of them work. Clearly it is designed for group play and PvP at the end game, every system funnels into that concept. But that there’s a decent PvE game here too, wow. I really wasn’t expecting this and am beyond surprised.

Most APRGs that people have played are 2D constructs that are in the vein of Titan Quest. V Rising is quite similar to that model, with a few differences. One of the most substantial changes is that PvP is baked in from the front, which really changes the larger context of the game.

Players are provided some standard tools to keep the gameplay varied, which are unlocked gradually throughout the game. At the start, you’re given a dodge (with i-frames) and options for basic melee weapons with basic skills per weapon type. As you progress, you unlock magic skill points that unlock various abilities that fit into the ‘attack/defend/ultimate’ constructs. You can equip 2 core abilities (5-10s cooldown each) and then 1 ultimate (2 min cooldown). You can use gems to modify these abilities, like more healing, more damage, added stun and so on. Chasing perfect rolls isn’t all that meaningful. Eventually as you progress through bosses, you unlock other weapons – pistols, whips, reapers and so on. Higher quality items also unlocks a 2nd skill per weapon, so by the mid-40s you’ll have the core tools for the rest of the game.

In the 50s and then the 80s you get access to rifts, which drop shards. These are used to unlock passive skills that add some rather strong benefits to the game – more damage, more summons, more speed. Those shards can also be exchanged for stronger weapons… and the 80s version of the shard exchange has a chance to unlock legendary weapons. Combined, these make a massive difference in overall power levels.

Another factor, in the vampire theme, is that you need blood to survive. There are various blood types (worker, brutes, scholars, etc..) and each provides a different set of bonuses. The higher quality of the blood, the higher the bonuses. Early on, you get the ability to ‘farm’ blood and if you find a 100% quality blood, you absolutely want to collect it. Later, you get the ability to use that farmed blood in the field. It is worth every second invested to have 100% blood quality farms – Scholar for magic attacks, Rogue for physical damage, and Warrior for defense.

There are stats – this is an RPG after all – measured through gear level. Every level you are below a target, you suffer 4% more damage and deal 4% less. Every level above, it turns to +1%. So 5 levels under, you’re 20% in the hole, and 5 levels above you’re +5%. This is important for farming, but ultra important for boss fights.

In terms of outright player power it generally goes – gear level > blood >>> abilities > weapon skills

Combat itself falls into 4 different categories. Farming, Bosses, Rifts, PvP. Farming is simple enough, combat is against multiple targets that are protecting resources – it is very AE focused, and sunlight considerations are required. Bosses are bespoke battles, that progressively add complexity, and where you will face a lot of challenge throughout the game. In most cases, these are 1v1 battles, and the wide majority of your time playing will be here. Rifts are a combination of both farming + bosses. Two AE fights, followed by a weakened boss enemy. End game is almost exclusively focused on this activity. Finally is PvP. As much as there are sieges (attacking other castles) the wide, wide majority of PvP will be while rifts take place as the resources are coveted. The majority of that combat will focus on burst + movement restrictions.

I’ll close this post by saying that the ARPG parts of this game are really well done. The incentives for progress are constant. There is continual risk due to the gear level math. All enemies progress in difficulty (though NOT equally). And rarely have I ever played a game that did such an amazing job at multiple meaningful and memorable boss fights. I would argue that because you will unlikely beat any boss on the first pass, it forces you to pay attention and therefore memorize that character. Really impressive work here.