In the ever expanding catalog of games I’ve had the chance to play, few ever come across as art without feeling artsy.   It takes a special kind of blend to present game mechanics wrapped up in such a fashion that it plays more like a movie.  Shadow of the Colossus has been at the top of that list for a long time.  What Remains of Edith Finch is pretty darn close to that level.

Presented as an anthology of short gaming segments relating to the Finch family, and the possible curse that has caused all family members to pass away, you play the teen Edith looking for the root cause to all the story.  The actual Finch house is something to behold, as it’s not presented as a set piece but feels like it’s an actual house.  All the various bits and bobs look like they belong to someone, and were placed for a specific reason.

As you progress through each short story, you get to understand that individual person and a very stylized telling of their passing.  There are some simple enough game mechanics to be had, but the point here is more about the interpretation of the story and how the game mechanics reflect the state of mind of the person in question.

Personally, when I finished most segments, I needed to take a breather in order to collect my thoughts.  I needed to digest the person, the message, the medium, and how it all fit into the larger picture.  I’d scour their room for some additional personal tidbits.  I’d imagine how the rest of the family felt at the loss, and how it motivated them in their stories.  The point here isn’t so much how they died (everyone dies eventually) but how their lives were beforehand, and the trickle effect unto others.

The game is only a couple hours to go through, and you will only get out of it what you want to.  My wife took a stride through the game after I did, and you could see the wheels turning when it was all over.  Highly recommended.

When a game reaches multiple top 10 lists, my eyes tend to shift over.  When said game blends X-files, Lost, Fringe, Twilight Zone, Metroid, and Zombies… I’m doubly in.

Built in a New Weird setting, you play as Jesse who’s trying to find her brother within a secret government organization.  As you finally get through the front doors, you realize everything is going sideways, with a small war underway.

Cue the various exploration bits, and additional powers.  You have a weapon that can transform to other styles (full auto, sniper, shotgun, grenade launcher, handgun).  Powers are relatively simple.  Dodge and shield for defense.  Seize to convert low-health enemies.  Levitation to explore a pile of areas and make combat go full 3D.  And Launch – which is the bread and butter skill that picks up almost anything to throw it at targets.    The variety of items that can be thrown, and the distance… it makes for some extremely satisfying combat.

Enemies generally look the same, humanoids.  They are quite a bit different though.  Some are basic grunts, others launch grenades, some fly, some explode on death, some stealth and then shoot you at close range.  Then you have various elite enemies, and some exceptional boss fights.

Which does bring me to likely the largest hurdle for many gamers… this thing is hard.  Not to the level of Dark Souls… but enough that I died a solid 50 times before the end.  Sometimes it’s just bad luck and you end up between two grenades.  Sometimes you miss an important jump.  Most of them were the boss fights, in particular the last one and the few optional fights.  Levitation, dodging, launching, shooting.  It feels like pure chaos, but then you look back and go “holy shit”.

In fact, there’s one sequence near the tail end where Jesse says “that was awesome” and I cannot recall any game sequence that actually felt that awesome to get through.

There’s some RPG-ish elements here.  You get skill points to increase various powers/health/energy.  You get mod to modify yourself (better throws, less energy per use, more health, etc..) and your weapons (accuracy, rate of fire, ammo return, etc..)  There’s a huge amount of RNG here, and a massive difference between rank 1 and 5 items.  If you like min-maxing, there are some options here.

All of that stuff works, and generally works well.  But you’ve seen that before.  The extra bits here are the lore/setting.  There are dozens of lore items to pick up and read, listen to, or watch.  Some of it is absurd, like a rubber duck that teleports on it’s own, or a traffic light that teleports users when it’s red.  Some is freaky, like mold that takes like candy and transforms people.  There are various hidden puzzles too, like one where you cheat on a roulette table.  Piles of side quests that add extra flavor and bring you to the weirdest of places.  An extra dimension phone line.  The amount of effort and quality world building here is stunning.  You want to explore every nook and cranny.

And I want more Ahti.

Long story short, yeah, Control is one of the best games I’ve played this year.  That was awesome.

Goals.  I need to set more of them.

Progress in Warframe is an odd measure, since it’s like saying you’re done with the soup section of a buffet and moving to seafood.  Ain’t no measuring stick for that!  But Warframe has a conceptual value called Mastery Rank, and it’s based on the rank of various pieces of loot.  Get a sword to rank 30, get some MR.  Same with companions, pets, main weapons, side weapons, and archwings.  Right now, I’m at MR7.  The max is MR28, though MR16 is where the final content is unlocked (Riven).

That makes one set of goals of getting more stuff.  There are 42 main line Warframes.  27 of them have Prime variants (better stats, much harder to obtain).  I’ve gotten all the ones that drop from planets up to Neptune.  I’ve got the main blueprints for Chroma and Octavia as well.  That also means I have a fair chunk of main weapons, secondaries, and melee choices.  I’ve leveled a fair chunk of them, though it bears note that leveling them is not the simplest of things.

From 1-30 takes just under an hour.  You can level multiple items at the same time, though most weapons level faster if you use them.  Helene on Saturn is a defense mission against Grineer, and is the go-to place for people to level everything.  Easy groups, generally small room, plenty of drops.  It can get repetitive though, so I try to interlay some other missions to break the monotony.

Upgrading items is done with mods, which work like points-based bonuses you can slot into gear.  You can upgrade mods, which increases their point value, but each piece of gear has a max amount, so it turns into this interesting (?!) puzzle at times.  Many mods are useful, though the best are quite hard to come by.  A full leveling run (from 1-30) can get me ~250 or so mods, though 99.9% of them are sold.

If I was to set myself some goals for the next month or so, they would be as follows:

• Get to MR10
• Complete all nodes up to Neptune
• Complete Octavia & Chroma
• Acquire Titania & Grendel
• Complete Pluto missions (which should unlock lots of quests)
• Get into a Dojo (guild)

Some of those are more achievable than others.  Octavia in particular requires a random drop from a 20 minute mission, which are level 25-35.  Guess that will depend on luck for groups.  Even completing all nodes can be a major pain.  Archwing missions aren’t all that muchr fun, and I have a large dislike for Mobile Defense missions.

Still, if I can complete at least MR10 and up to Pluto, I guess I can consider the basic stuff all complete.  Then I can start worrying about factions and whatnot.

XCOM of attrition.

I rather enjoy the tactical/strategy squad genre.  I played the heck out of the original XCOM (even wrote my own mouse driver for it).  I’ve played every iteration since.  JAG was decent enough.  Syndicate is a top 20 all time game.  There are a half dozen in that vein every year that seem to pop up.  Sattelite Reign was a recent one.  Hard West.  Phoenix Point is a bit different, in that it’s designed by the same guy that made the first XCOM.  And hooo boy does that show throughout.  Couple thoughts after a few missions.

• Squads?  Check
• Alien bay guys?  Check
• Research & manufacturing?  Check
• Geoscape? Check
• Factions?  Check
• Action points in tactical mode? Check
• Classes?  Check

The foundational parts are all there, it’s a relatively familiar system.  What Phoenix Point (PP) does differently is apply the concept of time management to equation.  One effective strategy in XCOM is to take a more defensive approach to combat, primarily due to the rather low hit points, and extremely long periods of recovery after damage.  Losing a top-end Sniper for a couple weeks due to really bad luck rolls was super painful.

PP instead puts the clock front and center for a lot of actions.  You need to collect material to build things, and you get more material if you finish a mission quickly.  You are presented with multiple attack choices at the same time, but never really enough soldiers to complete them all on time.   There will be times when you simply run out of ammo.

PP also adds a fair chunk of hit points to every enemy, so that it takes 3-4 attacks to take out even the lowly grunts.  Rather than throw a half dozen enemies at you, there are less of them, but they last longer.  The net effect is that each map is the same time duration, but there’s always something going on, and usually more than 1 active target.

Free Aiming

Everyone has missed a point blank shot in XCOM.  It’s absolutely infuriating when it happens, and often at a key point in battle.  Hip shots still exist in PP, but it also adds a Free Aim mode, which is a much more realistic combat mechanic.

Dead to sights

In most cases, you can bring up your sights and find 2 concentric circles to assist with aiming.  There’s a 100% chance of it hitting the outer circle and 50% chance of the inner one.  As you get closer or farther from the target (or swap guns) the circles change in size.    Picking a part of the enemy has differing effects.  Maybe it disables an attack, maybe it restricts movement.  For some shielded enemies, maybe you can get by the shield and hit an exposed part.  Or perhaps you just want to take out the wall of the building to get a better shot next time… that works too.

This customized shooting makes a tremendous difference in combat.  XCOM sometimes felt like Excel with graphics, just a pretty pain on top of a number crunching machine.  PP says enough with that, and puts a lot of control in the player’s hand.  Yet with that control comes a suprising amount of challenge.  If you aren’t attacking the right enemies, what seems like a sure win can easily turn into a loss.

It will take some time to come to terms with PP.  There’s a lot to unpack here, and it’s going to take some time to get through it all.  From what I’ve seen so far, it should be a fun ride.

At work, we’ve gone through psych profiles (NOVA, Insight, Myers-Briggs), and for a long time I’ve been super dominant in one aspect.  I am not a cheerleader, I am a trailblazer.  I see broken things, I want to fix them and find more broken things.  We have an annual review of these profiles, and that allows any new staff to better understand the drivers of teammates.  Which then makes for much more pleasant conversations where both people are aiming for common ground.

There are analogies to gaming.  Bartle posits a 4 quadrant player profile, including Social, Killer, Explorer, Acheiver.  Everyone has a bit of each profile within themselves, though there are certainly dominant aspects.  In that space, I am strong in the Achievement section, with some exploration bits included.  I have next to no drive for the Killer persona, and the Social one is fairly weak as well.  In both of those cases, people will play shitty games because either they are dominating other people, or the other people are the reason to log on.  Generally speaking, an FPS is much more about the Killer model, and an old-school MMO (UO, EQ, WoW Classic)  is more about the social aspect.

I tend to strike more in the Exploration & Achievement sections.  Not in the absolute sense of finding every nook and cranny, and the obscure/grindable achievements though.  Both of those have very long tails.  I have little interest in ever getting a 100% complete, or a Platinum only to have a badge show up.  Now, if content is gated behind the activity, then sure, it’s a tad more interesting.  Things like FFX’s Monster Arena is a good example, and WoW’s pet menagerie is a bad example.

When I “finished” Jedi: Fallen Order, the rest of the game was about unlocking new cosmetics.  Meh.  No real interest.  Outer Worlds I had done nearly all the quests and explored all the zones, but only in the context of playing a specific character build.  To get “more” content, I’d need to restart with a different build.  I’m giving myself time to forget my first playthrough to make it more enjoyable the next time.

SWTOR is in an interesting spot.  There’s piles of content I missed (the near entirey of the Republic 1-50 storylines), so there’s a fair chunk there to face through.  I don’t have much interest in the end-game.  There was a time that I used to.  I raided a lot in early WoW.  I was runing dungeons a-plenty until WoD.  WoD’s implementation made me reconsider my gaming choices, and that meant looking at my gaming catalogue.  Instead of spending a few hours dungeoneering for extra gear, I would rather play something like Shadow of Mordor, or Slay the Spire.  I get why people would commit to a single game, and the social bonds therein.  But I’m good with having to go through 5-6 other GotY candidates instead.

Reviewing what I have left on deck game-wise, that leaves:

• SWTOR Republic class quests to 50.  Maybe, just maybe, get one of them out to Onslaught.
• Warframe. Not much more do to here until I get a Platinum coupon, allowing for a much larger inventory.  There’s a post here about online pricing…the coupon is the actual price.  Everything else feels like a penalty.
• Phoenix Point.  The XCOM successor of sorts from Julian Gollop who created the series.  I don’t expect it to be at the same level as XCOM2 at launch, but then again XCOM2 took it to another level with War of the Chosen (DLC) and the Long War (mod).

Part 2 of the dev watercooler discussions is up, and it deals with thoughts on itemization.  Since ARPGs are typically driven by the desire for better items, it’s worth a read.  First though, some history.

Diablo 2’s character power structure was a combination of items and skills.  The point investments in skills has a generally larger impact on gameplay than items did, yet there was still a lot of value in grinding for that perfect drop.  I won’t even get into the insanity of Runes.

Diablo 3’s character power is entirely driven by items, and the scale of randomness on rolls made some drops “god tier”.  Legendary items were eventually buffed to apply skill bonuses that impacted gameplay, and some bad luck protection with Kunai’s Cube.

Diablo 4 appears to be aiming more towards D2’s model, with skill point investment and items making up the power levels.  They are planning to eliminate the RNG on top of RNG (Ancient drops) from D3, yet still maintain some element of greater power structure.

The addition of horizontal stats to grant additional skills is an interesting touch.  Get 50 Demonic Power total across all items and get +2 Fireball sounds interesting.  Clearly they want to keep the zero DPS (ZPDS) support roles as viable, and there’s some diversity here in the choice between +proc and +damage.  Balancing those two seems a near impossible task mind you.

There’s also some drive to make rare (yellow) items viable, by having a random drop provide legendary affixes to non-legendary items.  Which, I guess is ok.  But that would require the difference between Rare and Legendary items to only be affixes.  If they have the same stat ranges, then this is reasonable.  If legendaries can roll say 20% better stats, then this is a useless system.

I’ve made a point recently that added complexity does not necessarily make for more interesting gameplay.  There’s a benefit of doubt here since the D3 live team has done some solid work.

This does beg the question relating to player progression, which is still a bit mysterious to me.  I think I understand the intent, but the devil is certainly in the details.  I guess another month before more clarity is provided.

In the larger lens, these types of conversations show that D4 is long ways off.  These are not minor questions, they are the fundamental to the game.  The sort of questions that Anthem should have asked themselves and avoided a horribad launch.  So both a yay in the fact that D4 is taking the planning seriously, but also a oooh in that Path of Exile 2 is most definitely going to launch prior.  Should be an interesting 2021.

I’m in a reflective mood of late.  Usually happens when I’m overloaded and the brain simply turns inwards for some rest.

I was thinking back on the various games I’ve played this year, and while quite a few had actual endings, most of them had more stuff to show.  Yet I tend to move on from those games and with no real regrets.  I was asking myself why and came to the conclusion that I’d hit plateaus.

I could have kept playing Jedi: Fallen Order and collected all the extra stims and cosmetics.  I could have completed every side quest in Outer Worlds.  Those are more achievements than actual content.  The parts I liked were closed, and I’m sure at some point I’ll give it another go.

The living games are a bit different.  Dauntless I went full in for a season pass, and took the next one off.  I’ve completed every single hunt, and the Beast Mastery system is an insane grind.  Drips and drops moving forward.  I’m more than content with the hammer, fists, swords, and guns as weapons.  I could learn pikes and axes, but I would need some serious crafting investment to make decent weapons.

Warframe is still there, but right now I’m simply looking for a 75% coupon for Plat to expand my inventory.  It’s like a buffet that never ends, and my ability to focus my goals is the real hurdle.  With Frost Prime and Soma Prime, I have one of the strongest setups.  Pretty much any other mix/match (for MR gains) is going to be a downgrade, or relearning.  I guess I should focus on getting all the nodes open for the first half dozen planets.

SWTOR I’ve done the main story quest for my dark side sorcerer.  Daily Onderon quests are there.  There’s at least 5 years of content that’s there for me to dip my toes into.  Plus the entire Legacy quests for the Republic side – on full opposite alts (e.g. Jedi Shadow).  I could run flashpoints til my eyes bleed for 306 gear, but then what?  I’m sure just regular bits will get me there eventually.  I am looking forward to the crew skill (crafting) update coming, cause woowee, is it ever a painful process currently.

I think this applies to a lot of stuff in my life.  I tend to go full speed until my main goals are achieved, never really striving for 100% but enough to consider myself a journeyman of sorts.  I’ll try things I absolutely have no interest in, a few times as well, and see if perhaps there’s something more to it.  Or, I’ll jump full to something I think looks really neat, only to see that the deep end is way deeper than I have time for.  Even at work, I generally only do one job for a couple years before I’ve learned everything I want to learn.  Not to say that I quit something, just that I’ve moved on to something else.

Hockey is a good example.  I’ve been playing since I was 5.  I’ve played all sorts of levels, and on a dozen+ teams as an adult.  If I don’t feel challenged, or that the team itself is “healthy”, I move on.  I took up coaching duties this year, and it’s certainly giving a different perspective on the sport.  Lots to learn, lots to share.

I still play games. That won’t end any time soon.  It’s just that the various goals I set for myself are achieved, even if there’s more to learn.  I hit my self-set plateau and choose to move on.

Life is ups and downs.  It’s full of contrasts and contradictions.  Canada loves the sun because we get bored of our dark igloos after a few months.  Utopia would drive me crazy, and certainly make it so that I wouldn’t appreciate it.  I need the challenging parts for me to properly recognize all the good I have around me, so that I don’t take it for granted.

And therein lies an interesting feature of top quality gaming, or at least what I consider top quality.  The ones that have stuck in my mind for ages are those where there are spots of reflection.  Spots where the story takes some time to breathe, to recall some of the adventure, and to prepare themselves for the next step.

I’m not talking about the calm before a storm, like the room before a boss piled with ammo/health packs.  That quiet is foreboding, it’s meant to build anxiety for what’s coming.  FPS games are all about that, and one of the main reasons they don’t click for me.  I mean those where the game simply stops being a game and turns into a story.

The gold standard

It doesn’t have to be a single time either.  While FFX certainly has the fire scene to both open the game and close the 2nd act, there are numerous other places where the game just stops to tell a story.  God of War opts to only have shorter versions (using the boat) while the major cutscenes are built for stress.  The Outer Worlds does it on the ship.  Celeste has quite a few interspersed scenes where she talks to her other half.

The best of those pauses allow you to take a few steps back and consider the world the developers are trying to build.  Some keep player agency (Dragon Age:Origins) and let you direct parts of the story.  Others turn to vignettes, where the characters take a breath and come to terms with what’s going on.  As graphics have improved, so has the ability to tell a story with facial expressions.

This set of clips from Jedi Fallen Order is what made the game for me.  This is just after Order 66, where all the jedi are gone, but it never really hits.  You visit various planets trying to find a list of Force sensitive kids, seeing how those planets lived.   Dathomir in particular has no respite, and feels oppressive. Every part of that planet wants you dead.  Then you meet Merrin, and the world turns into one of sorrow.   You’ve been playing for 8 hours by this point, then in a 2 minute scene you get it.  It’s also the point where Cal starts to question his place in the world, and the actual goal of his quest.

I’m sure everyone has a particular game and scene where their appreciation for it changed.  They make good games great, and have them stick in your brain for a very long time.