I guess I was in the right mindspace for this run.

PoE2 is an interesting game for a whole lot of reasons. Most importantly, it is clear that it was designed and developed by people who are passionate along with a clear vision. The game is consistent from start to finish, with some really impressive writing and decision making along the path. An RPG without a main villain is hard to keep on track, but this game does a wonderful job at it. Oh, there are bad people in the game, but no mustache-twirlers. And while there are a few opportunities to make what would be considered a lawful-good choice, most of them are in the neutral space.

Mechanically there’s enough detail and complexity here to add nuance to the quests. It’s not possible to truly fail a quest (aside from a game over death), just a bunch of different paths to accomplish them. Your teammates can boost your skills to help pass some checks, and aside from 1 specific case, these are mostly flavor options that may or may not avoid combat. As with most RPGs, it’s nearly always favorable to talk / skill check your way through an event instead of brute force. That said, the combat is rather snappy, at least up until the last couple levels.

I like the classes and diversity the game offers. I like the subclasses. Up until level 13 (of 20 max) there’s clear distinction between them. Multi-classing is, as with all D&D game, the core issue. There are a lot of benefits to multi-classing, and in nearly all cases it’s a better choice. There are exceptions – notably the ranged attackers. The skills you get as a pure class for melee are not very good in the later portions, usually passive upgrades to existing things. Wizards, Chanters, and Druids though… they get god-level powers.

Which is a core issue with all D&D games honestly. Melee characters start strong and get weaker as enemy armor/avoidance increases. The last mainline quest and all the DLC has enemies that have crazy defensive abilities, which you either chip away or debuff. Beasts of Winter (DLC) has a final boss that took me nearly 8 tries to beat, eventually lowering the difficulty because my wizard was multi-class and no one had the skill to debuff the 90% damage reduction the boss had.

There are other mechanical challenges. Enchanting is a great idea, but resources are so rare/expensive and you know you’re going to get something better than you avoid it. Consumables are great, but poorly implemented in turn-based mode. Stealing has only niche value, and stealth just doesn’t work. This is nit-picking honestly, and it’s been an issue in every RPG I’ve played.

Eoran Gods

The setting of Pillars of Eternity is the true joy. An older race of soul magicians determined there were no actual gods, so they went about transforming themselves into gods instead. And not like a god-race, I mean the entire race sacrificed themselves to make 11 gods. And then they killed everyone who knew about it, and directed the world on it’s eventual path. PoE1 is about you learning the truth. PoE2 is about you chasing one of those gods who is hellbent on breaking the cycle that keeps the gods in power. Basic RPG stuff.

Religion is a tough subject and nearly every RPG hits on this specific topic with varying results. Here, it’s the crux of it all, the foundation on which every other part exists. You quite literally converse with a god in massive statue form at multiple points, traverse to the otherside to have a coffee, or kill their avatar. The stakes are much higher here than before, and everyone in the game knows it. Quite honestly, most of the quests had me moving forward just to discover the next bit of story, which is not a very common thing.

Wael has to be my favorite of the gods. The weirdest one at least. Imagine if D&D Beholders had their own god – they’d look just like Wael.

Obsidian Entertainment

I still have a few golden dev studios, and Obsidian is right in that pack. The short list of games:

• Knights of the Old Republic 2. Play with the lost content mod, best Star Wars game I’ve ever played.
• Neverwinter Nights 2. I don’t think this game gets enough credit. D&D mods exist because of this game and the prequel.
• Fallout New Vegas: The best 3D version of Fallout. Notorious for Bethesda not paying them because of the 1pt missed on Metacritic.
• South Park: Stick of Truth. This game is great, way better than the sequel.
• Pillars of Eternity 1 & 2: I honestly don’t think Baldur’s Gate 3 would exist without these 2 games.
• Tyranny: A great game with an even better concept – you’re the judge for an evil warlord. Still amazed that pitch got a game!
• The Outer Worlds: Avowed exists because of all the lessons learned in this game. This is what Mass Effect 4 could have been.
• Grounded: A survival RPG. Think Valheim but you being shrunk down in a backyard.
• Pentiment: A murder mystery in the style of 1600s art work. What other dev studio could actually do this, and do it this well?

What’s really fascinating is how story drives all of these. They aren’t experimental in the mechanics department, in fact I’d argue they are all AA-level attempts at best – with plenty of bugs. But the ideas are the gold mine. There are people at Obsidian who are paid to write down these ideas, stretch them out to see how far it can go, then translate that for us gamers to experience. And these ideas are coherent too!

I am clearly over-excited for Avowed. I know there are parts of that game that will not meet my expectations, in particular the mechanical parts. I don’t really care, they are simply a means to an end. I want to explore more of Eora. I want to see how people have adapted after Eothas’ world-shattering events. And I’d like a good news game development story, we’ve been short of those.

So far, early reviews are where I expected. Let’s give it a go!

The art of saving and reloading.

Save Scumming is a rather simple concept. You save the game, perform an activity that has a random outcome, and reload the save if the outcome is not favorable to try again. Not all games support this, and quite a few struggle with the concept of ‘favorable’. Others do a great job here.

XCOM2 is probably the best example. The RNG itself is set before you perform the action, so save scumming doesn’t actually change the results of an action, you need to take a different action altogether. Second, the failed results rarely lead to ultra negative outcomes, often simply an added difficulty modifier. I mean, that’s why Iron Man mode exists (1 save, can’t reload). Favorable outcomes in this case become ‘optimal’ outcomes.

Many RPGs can find difficulty here, either in that failures cause massive failure (e.g. failing a roll = the whole map turns aggressive) or that the favorable outcome is so powerful that it changes the rest of the game.

The answer lies in complexity and flexibility. In that the positive and negative outcomes have a marginal impact on the overall progress. BG3 and PoE2 tend to hit this one well. Impactful outcomes are less about a random role than a clear decision. Flavorful outcomes (more lore, cosmetics, alternative paths) are unlocked through the RNG machine. Example: I need to pass a speech chest to get access to some gloves. If I fail that check, I then need to steal them through a different set of skill checks. The final destination is still the same, but the paths to get there are different. Heck, Fallout 1 nailed this nearly 30 years ago – you could talk the final boss into taking themselves out!

I’m still noticing behaviours in my PoE2 playthrough though. I naturally press F5 when I enter a new zone, as you get little context as to what awaits the next step. Nekataka (the capital city) has a location that is miles above your level, and they will kill you on sight. Turning an entire zone hostile = I will die and need to reload, so less scumming than simply accepting defeat and moving on. The game also generally hides skill checks, only truly presenting them if you can pass. This is different than BG3, where you roll a die and can clearly see that you failed. I can still clearly recall needing a very low number to pass, and rolling a critical failure – right at the start! The good news is that the outcomes of those rolls are very rarely full failures.

The absolute best example I can think of is Disco Elysium. The entire game is rolls to determine outcomes, and nearly all of them are glorious in one way or another.

When a game uses RNG to determine fixed outcomes that are objectively bad/horrible, and paint you into corners you absolutely do not want to visit, save scumming is needed. If your roll relates to a marriage proposal that goes poorly, and you end up in a bar drinking your misery away and meet an entire crew of ragtag space misfits, isn’t that a positive thing?

It’s an interesting mindset that is only possible in today’s gaming age of non absolutes. And in the broader sense, I think it’s a good thing for people to accept that failure of one small act does not mean that the world is going to end. Experimentation gets you so much more enjoyable experience, so that the next time you give something a try, your skill + experience has raised enough to pass that check. Oh yeah, I went there.

Avowed comes out in a week. The setting is shared with the Pillars of Eternity games, and I played the heck out of the first one. I enjoyed every aspect of that game, warts and all. There were small issues to solve and a very large and complicated lore setting that was gradually revealed. And honestly, the twist at the end really put the rest of the game into perspective.

Not really spoiling here, but the concept of fantasy games having active gods isn’t new. What was interesting was that these gods were not actually gods, but members of a precursor race that elevated themselves to godhood due to the lack of gods. There’s a good primer on this that was launched a few days ago.

PoE2 takes next steps from there, allowing you to import your decisions from the first game. And there are a lot of them, with meaningful impacts to the game. The story has a simple driver, a god takes physical form (a giant statue), steals part of your soul, and you need to chase them to reclaim it. Where there’s difference is in the factional warfare that you’re living with, which adds a more political / ethical structure to the game, with a ton of grey area between.

Mechanically, real-time combat with pause was a big change, where speed had a massive impact on outcomes of combat – turn-based was added later, which made some skills useless as a result. Classes were tweaked, with optional subclasses that had pros/cons attached – a min/maxer’s dream. Your home base is a ship that travels between islands, with crew, morale, food/water, equipment, and pirate battles as interesting content. The story, companions, skill checks, quests and so on are extensions from what was in the first game, and those work well.

I never completed PoE2 when it launched, but it’s been in my list of things for a long time. So I’m giving it a go now, and in the mindset to absorb more of the lore rather than the mechanical pieces. I’m honestly enjoying it more than prior attempts, the characters are more interesting and closer in terms of integration that was seen in Baldur’s Gate 2. From a practical perspective, it means there’s often a reason to backtrack to a previous area as more is available to discover, instead of simply moving from town hub to town hub.

It is, by nearly all measures, a great game. I honestly feel bad I didn’t give it a stronger go in the past.

I doubt very much I’ll be done my playthrough in time for Avowed, at least not in the way that I tend to play these games. I do however plan to buy Avowed on release, as that financial decision will have long-term impacts for Obsidian, a company that has an amazing track record in scratching my interminable itch. If they can maintain brain trust and not have layoffs, I think everyone wins.

I like Dragon Age. Clarifying statement… I like the Dragon Age setting. Dark fantasy is rather uncommon in the gaming space, and wasn’t really present outside of The Dark Crystal until Game of Thrones took off. I get that D&D had this locked down before, but I am specifically talking about dark fantasy at large. Where there are no real good guys.

Dragon Age as a gaming platform I have not enjoyed, excepting Origins. That game had a new story twist atop older mechanics which provided compensation for the misses. DA2 I tried for about an hour, and moved on – mechanically it was not for me and felt like a step back. DA:I had all the failures of an MMO framework, without the people. It had a few interesting characters, but still very frustrating to get through the mud in order to touch diamonds. I won’t bother talking about the tangent games…they were more like precursors to the main line versions.

Dragon Age Veilguard came at an interesting time. Bioware had lot the majority of its brain trust due to multiple missteps, including Anthem. Before Anthem, I would have bought the game without much though. After, I am not a fanboy to justify that and wanted to see where the cards lay. Reviews were ok and then it went on sale in the first month, both less than positive signs. To be clear again, this isn’t bad news it’s just not glowing.

EA CEO Andrew Wilson was kind enough to pipe in. DA:V ‘sold’ 1.5m copies, half of the target of 3m. Given the investment in promoting DA:V (I saw it everywhere), I can see how this would not have a terribly good ROI. DA:I may have sold like 12m copies. I would think than anything coming out of EA that took years to build would be seen as a failure when those numbers are shared.

Sidebar: Kingdom Come 2 sold 1m copies in a day. Manor Lords sold 2m copies in 3 weeks.

To point, Mr. Wilson mentioned that the core audience was in fact a success, but that the broader audience was not (akin to the magic 4 quadrants in movie media). To hit that other group of gamers, they should have applied live service components, which is where EA makes 75% of their money. I can’t see how a lockbox / gambling approach would have helped here, but I guess maybe cosmetics? Should DA have been a multiplayer game, which is functionally the only way live service games can work? I don’t see how the hero’s journey aspect of DA would have translated to that model.

And now that EA has fired (note: a minority have been moved) everyone who had any DA knowledge, the brand is all bud dead outside of fanfic. So I guess this is it. Hats off to those who did their best, unfortunately not enough for the $$$ overlords.

Which gets me into the next piece – Mass Effect 5. I honestly had to think about 4 for a while, then remembered Andromeda. BioWare is all hands on deck for the next instance, and it begs the question as to what goals they are trying to achieve here. If EA only wants live service games… well that’s certainly possible in the ME ecosystem. You could argue that pretty much every battle royale or competitive shooter could be reskinned to Mass Effect pretty easily. There are plenty of battles in those games… and bio powers are cool I guess. If they want to make an actual RPG, then I am not quite sure how you monetize that long-term. I’d guess that BioWare isn’t quite sure how to square that round peg either.

So here we are at the end of a long journey. Such a strange road. Far from the end of epic RPGs (BG3 is clear evidence, among others), but a cautionary tale of knowing what your clients want, as well as your bosses.

One of my (and I would gather many of your) coping mechanisms with *waves arms at everything around us* is gaming. For me, it’s a distraction that allows me to focus on something tangible, with relatively controlled outcomes. I can trace my actions to consequences, and my enjoyment is therefore mostly in my hands. Probably why factory automation games are so much fun, as you need to build up tons of small actions to get world-changing results…

I wouldn’t go so far to say I’m in a gaming drought, I still have a backlog to hit through (Lorelei is waiting for me). I’m popping through them methodically, and giving them each a chance to hook me. State of mind is a big deal, so not everything will work at any given time. I’ve still not been able to move beyond chapter 2 in Baldur’s Gate 3, and that feels like a slight on my gamer cred.

Of the upcoming games, the following have my interest:

• Avowed. I have played every Obsidian game, rough edges at all. They know my soft spot I guess.
• Monster Hunter Wilds. I’ve played a LOT of this series. For sure going to repeat here.
• Ghost of Yotei. Ghost of Tsushima has an exceptional place in my psyche due to real world events, this one feels required as a result.
• Outer Worlds 2. I’ve played this game to completion about 4 times. Another Obsidian game. The anti-capitalist bend here is like brain candy.
• Fable. This one I’m curious as I played the xbox versions before. Curious as to how this will play out.
• AC: Shadows. I have played nearly all the mainline games since the first one, and did enjoy the simplicity of Mirage. Given this one game is likely to make/break Ubisoft, feels like getting tickets to a backstage show.

That isn’t a terribly long list, but you’ll notice that none of them are games that are 10hrs or less in content. Further, these are the ones with tons of marketing behind them, and generally seen as AAA. Truthfully, I tend to keep an eye elsewhere for the indy gems that pop up with barely a squeak or a couple week’s notice. They tend to fill in all the gaps.

And right at this very instance, there’s a gap. Avowed is 2 weeks out. And Obsidian being Obsidian, there’s likely some kitchen sink / stabilization patches that will be needed too. MH: Wilds is end of month, and that one is likely to suck up time just as Factorio: Space Age did in the fall. Capcom has figured out the magic of patch cadence with this series, my expectation is content releases on a regular basis.

There’s some smaller studio stuff coming out too. Citizen Sleeper 2 is likely a go-to. I’m sure there are a dozen metroidvanias along the path. Maybe a few more open world survivals. Heck, deck builders are due too. I’m sure the majority will keep in the rogue-lite/-like structure as those allow content to be reused, therefore bringing down dev costs.

I got a hankering for something to distract me. Let’s see what ends up clicking.

I bought Pacific Drive on release and put in about 12 hours before I had enough. Conceptually, it was really good. A great setting (sci-fi anomalies), solid art, exploration, rogue-like, and a good story. There were issues with the details. You couldn’t functionally save mid-run, and runs took upwards of 45 minutes. Death was a complete wipe of that time. Even a successful run had you spending nearly half your resources repairing and preparing for the next run. I put it on the shelf with a promise to return when it got the QoL patches I needed.

Well the good news is that the game got a ton of patches, most of them a while ago. There are now multiple difficulty multipliers, from effectively a tourist mode to iron man. You can toggle a ton of options along the way.

I opted for two changes, and that was for full repairs when returning to base and lower crafting requirements. It still required a lot of repairs in the field, and barely getting through a few runs. Saves happen between zones, meaning I only lost 10 minutes of progress, much more acceptable. The crafting material one seems simple, but you still need two dedicated runs to get the material needed for some items (coral is great example). All told, it still took about 25 hours to get through it all, so not like this was a full cake walk. Quite the opposite, plenty of times where I just simply died due to some random effect. Which reminds me…

In the base game, you could (and certainly would) acquire quirks through regular gameplay. A quirk is some random effect that can have a random cause. The simple stuff is like turning left and the wipers turn on. The bad stuff is more like you move forward and the car shuts down. Resolving a quirk was a guessing game, where you needed trial and error and a specific machine back in your garage to resolve. In my original playthrough, I tried this mini-game and didn’t find it enjoyable. The full repair setting means no more quirks (well, you’ll get them temporarily still), which means much cleaner runs.

I will say that having completed the game, and looking back, I realize that only 1 item is actually required to reach end game, and it’s an item given to you as part of the storyline. If you simply complete every task offered, you can pretty much speed run to the end. It will require some rather impressive driving skills and more in-mission repairs than I’d like, but 100% doable. For those looking for a rather ‘hard to kill me rig’ that doesn’t require end-zone farming:

• 4 off-road tires (cheap to make, works on everything)
• Armored doors, panels, bumper (dirt cheap and super effective)
• Rear bumper will be the quest item above, which should be active 100% of the time (blocks nearly all environmental effects, but drains battery)
• Roof rack + roof fuel tank (massive increase in overall fuel and integrated, so no need to fuel mid-mission)
• 2x side rack wind turbine battery chargers (cheap to make, works while driving, easily offsets battery drain item from above)
• Optional: roof rack resource scanner if you do plan on farming end-game materials. It is stupidly effective.

The end result is still an engrossing experience that is quite a bit different that what other games have on offer. With all those patches, you have even more flexibility as to what portions fit your specific gaming preferences as well. I think we were somewhat blessed in 2024 with smaller dev studios able to find space to showcase games like these. Well worth the pickup.

I’m of multiple opinions on this game, nearly all positive for the game proper but also questioning the industry as a whole as a result.

IP games are notoriously difficult to manage, moreso when they are cross-media. Raiders of the Lost Ark came out in 1981 – over 40 years ago. It’s had a slew of films, a TV series, as well as numerous games. It’s the clear inspiration for multiple other IPs, such as the National Treasure series and obviously, Uncharted. Suffice it to say, it has a damn high bar to hit.

And it pretty much clears it with ease.

This is a game that manages to get it right. You get rewarded for exploration, and get nothing for combat. You get to explore dark catacombs, ancient crypts, discover long lost secrets, and thwart Nazis along the way. This is the closest you’ll get to playing the movie (the first 3 films that is) without an actual VR helmet.

The real beauty here is the mix between organic and led discovery. Walk around to find new things to do and discover, one of the more interesting ways to gain experience and new areas + disguises. Pay attention to what people are saying, or read the proper letter, to find a way through a tough spot or crack that safe. You’re also lead through the main storyline, with what feels like a few dozen puzzles along the way, none that are truly taxing. Well, at least none as confusing as some of the safe combos!

It ends up being an interesting tale, with just the right amount of smug villains and massive set pieces to keep you wanting to push forward. Honestly, it’s a GotY contender for me.

Industry

The sad part about this, or perhaps the reflective part, is what this shows to the industry at large. This game comes from the team that build Wolfenstein, and you can see that thumbprint everywhere. While this may be a game with a minimal use of guns, everything else fits into their M.O. This is a studios that took a step sideways and leaned into their strengths to deliver an amazing game.

Looking at the recent slew of AAA games released, how many can truly say that? I’m certain The Great Circle was not an easy game to develop, but it’s evident it was developed with a clear vision and strength. Maybe, just maybe, there’s some hope for AAA games in the future if companies can stop chasing the live service garbage that none of them can actually deliver.

So if you want to vote with your wallet, here’s a game to do it with!

I wrote a lot about Anthem. There are many reasons for that, mostly due to the pedigree and seeming simplicity of the genre. BioWare had some jank in their games, but they still knew how to put pieces together and actually think things through. If you’ve ever played D&D with a friend who loved to ‘think outside the box’, the DM who navigated that is the exact same type of person Bioware used to hire. (They probably work at Larian now…)

Anthem was promised to be many things, but at the core was a 3D looter shooter, which is an advanced version of an ARPG – most of us think of Diablo in that vein. There was some story promised, but frankly that mattered little in the moment to moment gameplay portions. Boiled down to the basics, it was slot machine with pretty graphics. It’s the slot machine part that really threw Bioware out of sorts.

I also wrote a whole lot on Diablo 3, including guides on making real world money back when it launched. I’m time travelling back 10+ friggin’ years here, but there was a time when you played Diablo not by killing monsters, but by sorting tables in an auction house. I did it as an experiment, and the $ per hour was honestly much higher than expected. The main reason the auction house worked there was because the actual game didn’t actually optimize the slot machine part. The game was overturned in difficulty, and undertuned in terms of rewards. It took much less time/effort to farm gold in-game and to buy the gear than it ever would to actually get a decent drop in-game. The incentives were broken.

Anthem launched in a buggy state in 2019. Today, we would call that Early Access. It also launched on the EA game service, and nearly everyone I know purchased it that way as it was ~$20 instead of full price. Bugs aside (one locked you out of all content and took 2 weeks to patch), the gameplay itself had challenges.

Combat had 2 parts, one was focused on exploration and emergent gameplay. Unfortunately this mode was in a massive map with no indicator of your teammates, and a max of 4 people on a map that could fit 50. The second part was mission based, and while mechanically fun at the start, it became obvious quickly that core shooter mechanics were missing, notably how cover/line of sight seemed to not really work. The balance between classes also wasn’t working, were tanks were the be all/end all with other classes being relegated to glass cannon status.

The loot portion came out even worse. Loot was 100% random, with nearly 10 rolls per item. Sure, rarity is always there, but the real issue was the items themselves. You could roll any item, even if you couldn’t use it (which was 75% of all items). If you did get an item you could use, the stat rolls on that item could be for any class, so you could get a gun you could use that boosted skills/stats you didn’t have. And if by chance you did get an item you could use, with stats you could use, the range of stats was absolutely massive. More to the point, you could easily get a legendary item that was much worse than a regular version.

It took a few months and stat weights came into being, as well as quite a few quality patches. Next to no one returned to the game, and the idea of Anthem 2.0 was born. The ideas in that pitch were really good, with a very strong focus on what makes those games successful. Unfortunately, it was a skeleton crew of ideas and EA made the choice to cut their losses.

I won’t even get into their cash stop. Good news, it was cosmetics based! Bad news, no one used it.

I bring up Anthem for a few reasons. First is that the looter shooter genre appears to be well past expiry now. Destiny 2 is arguably content rich and it’s still not enough to keep people coming back for a 0.1% stat increase. It’s the only successful one left – I’m still kind of ticked that Outriders couldn’t find a footing… that game is incredible. Second is that Bioware made a game really outside their wheelhouse, using an engine that wasn’t made for multiplayer. They bet the farm on something they had never done, and lost big. They managed to alienate a die-hard user base that would have bought anything, effectively impacting their long-term stability. Third, there was a general lack of awareness of the market needs and listening to player feedback.

Looking back at 2024, does that not seem to ring a bell? Kill the Justice League, Concord, Skull and Bones are all very high profile games that have suffered tremendously due to all three of those pieces. Star Wars Outlaws is almost exclusively in the third point (somehow, BG3 sold more copies in 2024 than Outlaws did, what?!) The challenge for larger companies is that the details don’t matter, everything gets summarized by the time it hits the decision makers. The genres are defined by the games, not the other way around. We use the genre terms to explain similarities, but the games themselves are so complex and integrated we never do them justice.

Would Anthem have been successful it it was more than a looter shooter? If it moved from the abstract and really nailed down the core systems? We’ll never know. But perhaps, just perhaps, there’s a chance that the next big wig looking to make a buck actually thinks about what it means to make a successful product being more than just a label.