When I was a wee(er) lad, I can recall E3 being a time of amazement.  Most years were giant reveals, amazing gameplay, and neat ideas.  I’d buy gaming magazines and surf what was the dredges of internet 1.0.  It was like entering a candy store of new things.

As time has worn on, E3 has lost it luster.  The breaking point for me was the XBONE / PS4 presentations.  One was of head scratching boneheaded moves, followed by another that was just continual *mic drop* moments.  Maybe I was just naive but until that time I truly thought E3 was about the gaming culture and way forward.

Now, not so much.  E3 is full of bullshots.  Not exactly new to the world, but in today’s market of “good looking games” it’s annoying to see something gorgeous at E3 and then comes out looking like a potato.  Or to see gameplay mechanics that in no way resemble the actual game.  Or to announce a game, then never release it.

That’s not even talking about the tone-deaf presentations.  The FIFA presentation is a good example, where you could download a demo of the game right now! and that fell to complete silence.  Or the headshaking in the crowd on the EA presentations.  Not that every game has to have people yelling at the top of their lungs, but it really seems like there’s a growing disconnect between the companies and the gamers supporting them.

The days of new ideas and IP are long gone.  Most of E3 is sequels or bandwagon hoping.  The sense of wonder and amazement is just drained when you’re seeing Gears5, SSB:U, or Battlefield5.  Some of the mechanics may be tweaked, but I know what to expect otherwise.

Side note – hats off to Microsoft for realizing that games sell consoles, and focusing on cross-play.  They have a heck of a hill to climb, and some of the stuff there looked interesting.

I think as I get older, the less I care about what happens in a year from now in the gaming world.  I have much less time to game, so it’s not like I am at a loss of quality games to play today.  Not to mention the fact that I’ve played all these games before.  I’m not disappointing, or even looking forward to it.  Just apathy really.

Until the game gets closer to actual release, and people I trust (odd term for the internet) have sunk their teeth, I choose to dwell on other items.  And given today’s gaming mantra of “day 1 patch to fix everything”, in most cases I’m better off waiting a few weeks after release to actually play it.

I played the original, and Tyranny as well.  I’m a few hours in, and PoE2 is good with a few hiccups.  I have not reached Nekataka because I like exploring too much.

I mentioned the bit about character creation in a previous post.  There’s a wide gap between that and Tyranny’s more open-ended character builder.  PoE2 is a throwback to more traditional D&D games, and the mechanics within.  It feels more restrictive here, and the choices matter more.  It works.

• Combat is faster and more open ended that previous.  You’re not as limited with attacks/spells between rests.  It also feels smoother and more meaty than previous games.
• Itemization and crafting is still not fun.  I’ve yet to find any RPG where crafting was fun, so it’s 99% me in this case.
• Multi-classing is great for the main character.
• Less so for companions as you don’t get to pick their “best” 2nd class, you don’t get specialization options, and you get they at a specific character level with existing skills.
• The companion AI is good enough for most combat.  They won’t fireball your party.
• The new AI companions I’ve met so far are all interesting. Xoti, and Serafen.  They fit the setting well.
• The boat I’m 50/50 on.  I think the concept of exploring islands is neat, and mini locations to explore.  It’s a bit of “choose your own adventure” which works well.  The minutia of managing the boat is much less fun.  At the start when money is a bit tight, you are restricted in food/water.  Eventually, it becomes so cheap that it’s nothing but busy work.
• I have yet to experience true ship combat.
• I like the overhead map for travel.  It gives you something to look at.
• I do not enjoy the concept of movement in this game.  At least 80% of the game so far is just walking.  I am heavily spoiled on fast travel.  It is just annoying having to wait minutes of travel to talk from one NPC to the next in a chain.  Boat travel seems longer still, with a very large map.
• The overall setting feels like a Knight in King Arthur’s Court compared to the previous game. The main character and setting do not appear to fit well – like they’ve traveled in time.
• I like the individual story lines and quests.  Nearly all have multiple options that are skill dependent, great voice work and a lot of grey responses.  In nearly all cases I had the necessary skill to pass a given test… with 1 exception where I was clearly 10 levels below.  I am chalking that up to bad design as the game leads you to this place very early.
• I am a fan of the ant vs the god story trope, where you are the ant.  Blizzard has made mint off this, GoW is entirely about that struggle, Horizon hits that out of the park.  That wasn’t dug into in the first game until the very end.  It is core of this story and I think it works really well.
• No bugs so far!

You start in the SW Ruins.  It takes 2-3 minutes of real time to travel straight to Neketaka.

I’d guess I’m only about 10% of the way in.  Level 5/20, and the majority of these games have a very long tail end with side quests and whatnot.  First impressions are good, just not stellar.  I enjoyed Tyranny quite a bit more, and thinking about why really contrasts PoE2.  The choices in Tyranny were much more interesting, the pace was frantic, and the character development options were wider.

Maybe PoE2 is just a slow burn until that part opens.  I’m certainly enjoying the game, which is the entire point of this adventure.  I’ll keep focus on that.

Online Survival Game.  Who’d have thunk it?

Given my previous low expectations, this met them brilliantly.  May have even exceeded with the line of “coop/solo” mode too.  Maybe that’s more in the line of EQ: Landmark.

• Online-only likely means no mods
• Focus on building, which was my least fun part of Fallout 4.
• PvP, though as mentioned it appears optional
• Fire nukes at others…which seems beyond stupid given the context of the game.  Maybe launching Death Claw attacks would be a better way
• Set in West Virginia, 4x the size of Fallout 4
• It’s due in November, which is much faster than I would have thought
• If it gets more people playing the Fallout franchise, maybe it will fund the next core game

The 4 Lone Wanderers.

In the end, it sounds more like they took the generic survival game and slapped on the Fallout IP.  Doesn’t mean the IP doesn’t fit, it is about survival after all.  It’s the core mechanics and what came before that makes this seem so odd.

A bit like that C&C re-imagining on mobile devices.  It’s so different that core players feel disillusioned, and potential new ones (from that genre) don’t quite get it. Then again, not sure what EA was expecting after the Dungeon Keeper fiasco.

I was certainly interested last week.  Now, not so much.  It’s not the game that I wanted, but it’s probably the game that someone else did.  I’ll keep it on the calendar for launch and see what happens.

Kids have a way of making time seem ephemeral.  I’ve had pets, I’ve been single, I’ve been in relationships.  There is nothing in my day that makes time fly by more quickly than kids.  DINKs, that’s the way to go!  I have a few friends that are in that boat.  They can put in as many hours as they want at work, spend time with their S/O, travel, relax.  Have a lot more money.

And this isn’t about fulfillment.  I know quite a lot of people who are happy and feel fulfilled without kids.   Just like I know people with or without kids who are depressed.  It’s just another piece of life.

In my case (as I can’t write about yours), my kids are a window into a different way of thinking and being.  I have a passion for learning, and they are nothing but sponges.  Mundane items are spectacular to them.  They have zero concept of time – “are we there yet”, “is it lunch time?”, “bed time already?”  they just flit from one thing to the next, with no cares and a focus on just being happy.

The heck is wrong with us adults?

What with work, eating, mandatory chores (washing, groceries) I am down to about 6 hours a day to work with.  That gets filled by time with the kids, a workout, a guitar lesson, optional chores (garden), hockey, fishing… and at some point games and sleep.  And the older I get, and the older my kids get, the less overall free “me-time” is there.

But it’s not a bad thing.  Spending more time with the family, and the kids, means that more stuff is shared.  Simple example is just having dinner together and listening to the banana reactions from the kids.  Or asking my eldest what happened on Trollhunters.  She lit up and explained everything over 15 minutes.  I get to play hockey / basketball with the kids.  We go fishing as a family.  We play really interesting zombie boardgames.

I’m rather enjoying this phase of life.  It’s a thousand times hectic than before, and I always feel like I could use a nap, but that’s a fair trade.  I’ve passed on things that make only me happy and now can do things that make me and other happy.

As I grow older, I find myself more content with the general chaos.  Or perhaps just growing used to it.  And as long as I go to sleep and wake up with a smile, things are working out just fine.

Now for some nice weekend weather!

I love me some good RPG.  That feeling you get when the dice roll your way, the story is working, and your character is built the way you want to play… like ice cream on a hot day.

Only few console games allow you the freedom to truly build a character.  You may customize a character, in how they look and a few of their skills.  Actually building one is something usually reserved for PC games in the D&D vein.

Open world games like Elder Scrolls/Fallout do have some building, but aside from what you look like and a few initial perks, you aren’t painted into a corner down the road.  You can eventually unlock the majority of the character skills.  You can, with time, become a master of all.

This post is focusing on the more traditional RPGs, where your initial decisions reduce the options of your character – in terms of power, skills, and story.  A solid game provides a lot of options, where poor decisions can be negative but not painfully so.  I would argue that Divinity: Original Sin has “correct” builds, and if you do not select one of those you are unduly punished for it.  Other games simply have builds that aren’t optimal – but are still playable and fun.

A long time ago, I wrote a guide for Dragon Age: Origins (still on gamefaqs if I recall) about character builds.  I spend a stupid amount of time crunching numbers and seeing what I could make out of the various characters.  I replayed that game half dozen times from start to finish, to unlock every secret and every advantage.  My blood mage tank was a wrecking ball, with near full immunity.  But if it wasn’t built just-so, it would break under the first sneeze.  And this was a game with only 3 classes.

Compare that to something like Baldur’s Gate… and you may have spent more time at the stat rolling screen than the combat.  And I know way too many RPGs where I reached 10-12 hours and realized I made a mistake at the start… usually because I didn’t even know what the choice actually meant.

Enter Pillars of Eternity 2.

All the classes and subclasses

Without a lie, I spent 2 hours going over this list and the various previewed skills to get an idea of the character I wanted.  I played the original a few times through and preferred both the Monk and Cipher roles.  They had interesting mechanics, and good damage potential if played smartly.  If played poorly, then you face tanked the ground.

With multi-classing, it was then about picking 2 classes that complemented each other.  I started looking at the Cipher and then it’s lovely 3 lovely sub classes.  One was a spell battery, where it took time to charge but then entered god mode.  Another was increased damage on targets vulnerable to stealth (paired well with Rogue).  The last was a glass cannon that blew all its spell points on a massive attack.  My focus was on that last one, and shoring up the weakness of not being useful before that shot was available.

There are therefore two modes to be used here… one is to generate Focus (points to use the cannon shot) and then a strong weapon for that shot to be based upon (two-handed weapon).  Focus is generated based on hits that connect with targets, so Perception (accuracy) is key.  That means that I need a sub-class that excels in two-handed weapons (fighter/barb/paladin) and that have a decent chance to hit.  Interestingly, the Paladin has a subclass that has a single strike attack with +10 chance to hit – a perfect fit.  That meant an Inquisitor.

All that time was spent looking at the skill preview trees and trying to see if the pieces fit together.  Call me crazy, but I found this process a lot of fun.  PoE does a solid job of presenting a lot of data early on, so that while you may spend lots of time thinking, it doesn’t feel like you’re picking in the dark.

Which is a tad ironic given that in the traditional pen & paper RPGs, you had a dozen books to refer to nearly 50 years ago.  It’s taken this long for the PCs versions to catch up (ignoring wikis that are not part of the game).  Progress.  Fun progress.

Full disclaimer, I am not a fan of the genre or either game. That said, I can appreciate the development approach to both games.  And is it ever an interesting approach.

PUBG is licensed off Epic.  It’s a B2P with micro transactions.  It was first to the party and was the king’s poop for quite a while.  Unfortunately, it was poorly optimized (read crashes and bugs), had long and empty stretches of nothing happening, and a struggle with customization/individual play styles.  Going for it — it was the only one on the market.

Let’s not dismiss that fact.  PUBG was first to market and spend nearly a year making more money than I could ever count.  It was proof that early access games could work.  It was also proof that early access games require a lot of polish to get ready for prime time.

Epic came in only a few months ago.  It already had the engine and needed a few tweaks to get the BR mode working.  By being 2nd (ish) to the game, they had the ability to play a ton of PUBG, read all the forums, parse their noted, and build something that addressed every single gap.

Let’s time travel a bit shall we?  EQ was the first “major MMO”.  It was on market for a while and made a lot of money.  WoW wasn’t much of a thought at first, but they did something smart.  They hired the EQ top-end guild members to help build their game.  These people came in with minimal game development expertise, but a ton of actual gaming know-how.  WoW addressed nearly every single issue that EQ presented to gamers and provided a level of polish that wasn’t found before.

The irony here is that EQ had plenty of feedback to help address their gaps.  The choices they made to address some and not others is what paved the path for WoW.  It was like a giant beta test for Blizzard’s benefit.

And here we are now, looking at the PUBG vs Fortnite development teams making dramatically different design decisions for the playerbase.  PUBG missed nearly every single development milestone, and is grasping to stay relevant.  Fortnite is going full bore in marketing, the lowest possible denominator.  You know you have a winner when schools are talking about banning it during class.

The lesson here is that it’s meaningless to be first out of the gate if you aren’t actively trying to stay at the top.  PUBG had an unexpected amount of success and no plan to manage it.  Epic played it smart, saw all the foundational mistakes, and built a better product.  Given their size and history, they certainly have a much better chance at staying #1.

That is, until the BR craze dies down and the next big thing hits us all in the head.

PCs are dead.  RPGs are dead.  MMOs are dead.  Everything is dead.  In the gaming world, nothing ever dies, it just gets transformed.

God of War (and Isey) put this into perspective for me.  There was arguable a large drought of single player games for a long time.  The big-bandwagon for nearly 10 years was MMO or competitive shooters.  The former genre seems to have peaked, while the latter is moving into the Battle Royale flavor-of-day.

Side-note: I would guess that the large amount of player toxicity in multi-player games is pushing people away.  The big companies are trying to address it, but we’re still plenty of years away from that getting better.

That’s not to say we didn’t have quality single player games – we most certainly did.   But they fell into one of two main categories: shooters or RPGs.  The Mass Effect series (I only count 1 & 2) moved between these 2 models.  Uncharted went from puzzle focus, to action movie mayhem.  Divinity: Original Sin, Pillars of Eternity, Planescape, Tyranny are all quality examples of pure RPGs.  XCOM and Civ are outliers that nearly dominate their own genres.

Not too many puzzlers, though Firewatch and The Witness certainly shine.  Or add a massive indy library of puzzlers.

Why though?

Technology

The obvious one here is that technology has progressed so far that imagination can be transcribed to a game.   Complex numbers can be crunched in fractions of a second.  Amazing AI can provide a level of realism that was not possible only a few years ago.  Graphic fidelity is almost absurd today.  I mean, compare something like Avatar to God of War, Monster Hunter, or Horizon.  The line between game and experience is being blurred further.

Stories

The snowball effect of quality storytelling is taking shape.  Mass Effect, BioShock, Uncharted – all are great examples of risk taking in the story.  Some of them play more like interactive movies but others feel like a choose your own adventure.  Hundreds of hours of options and dialogue are created for a game, and only a small portion will ever see the light of gameplay.  Developers are willing to put in hard branches on the story.  Killing off everyone in town means that you lose all the quests in that town for the rest of the game.  Real, actual, permanence.  Something that nearly all multi-player games are incapable (EvE and perhaps UO excluded).

Cohesion

The kitchen sink approach to gaming was all the rage for a while.  A whole bunch of systems, things to do, but none of it linked together.  Games like Fable tried to bridge that gap, with only marginal success.  Most JRPGs are a single story, joined by multiple smaller settings.  One long corridor where the background changes every few hours.

The forward progress here is in the experience provided to the player, through the characters.  The worlds are fleshed out.  The story line has logic and the areas are thematically linked.  Take the Tomb Raider reboot.  If you took the mechanics/visuals and applied it to previous games, it still wouldn’t work.  What does work, is how the island setting (or mountain in the 2nd game) feel like they exist in a real world.  The set pieces flow with the story, and Laura experiences something memorable in each.  I will remember that zipline down from the tower for a long time.

Choice

Given the player choice, or agency in the game, brings the player into the experience.  There is a very large difference between a sandbox (e.g. any Ubisoft game) with a bunch of tasks, versus an open world with a toolset to deploy as you see fit.  I’ll pick on Horizon here.  Sure, there are tasks and they are thematically similar – hunt, discover, hide.  It could even be the same task; kill a bear-cat robot for example.  It’s the setting and your set of tools that determines how you approach that task.   Are there other monsters around?  Do you have stun ammo?  Fire Arrows?  Is there cover?  Do you have a mount?

God of War provides a similar amount of choice in the various battles.  You can go full offense, play defensively, use Atreus, dive into deep damage from skills, or head the stun route.  Each option is viable, in a given situation.  That level of complexity, variety, and choice means that the game doesn’t feel stale.  The variety of events that you’d get from a human player can now be simulated to great effect in a single player game.

Don’t Call It a Comeback

Single player games never really left.  The cheap availability of networking allowed for multiplayer games to move from the living room sofa to the Internets instead.  That growth shadowed the single player realm, and it kept puttering along.  Now that the multiplayer market has neared (if not passed) it’s peak, it’s a great time to pay attention to excellently crafted single player experiences once again.