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.

There’s still a fair amount left to complete.  2 more zones, a bunch of Valkyrie (in a later post), a dragon, some quests.  But the story is done.  Minor spoilers I guess inside.

I’ve talked about the early parts of the game.  Kratos and his son Atreus have a quest to spread their wife/mom’s ashes on the highest peak.  They directly meet the world serpent, Mimir, Baldr, Magni and Modi along the travels.  They also meet a pair of dwarven brothers who help with crafting.  The story seems small but ends up growing into a really neat epic tale, that explores the Norse mythology before vikings.  It works.

The meme of “BOY” makes sense in this game.  As much as it applies to Atreus and Kratos’ rough exterior, it also applies to Kratos.  Atreus ends up learning a whole lot given his sheltered upbrining, but it’s Kratos that finally understands his place in the pantheon.  He hides his story from Atreus for most of the game, and in a cathartic moment finally reveals it all.  It’s Atreus’ response to that, and Kratos’ acknowledgement of his past sins that makes this entire arc work.

Along the path they learn about the various nordic gods – in particular about the marital woes of Odin and Freya, the destructive will of Thor, the higher learning of Tyr, and the fate of the Jotun (giants).  You get to see the Bifrost and Yggdrasil.  You get a great feeling that the presented world is integrated and cohesive.  The underlying efforts to integrate the lore – in particular with Mimir’s stories while on the boat – make it feel like the world is lived in, even if there are only a handful of NPCs.

It is also a beautiful game.  I cannot recall any other PS4 game where I saved as many screenshots.  The final shot of the game…wow.  That was someone’s imagination, and someone else’s skill to make it reality.  Superb.

There are 2 main twists in the story.  After the first, there’s a bit of a dip in how Atreus is portrayed, without much justification.  It rights itself eventually and grows a lot from that point.  The final twist I saw coming from earlier on (given that I like Norse mythology and a main part was missing from this story), but the actual reveal is very impressive, and quite sad.  There’s no credit screen either, just a somber Kratos telling Atreus the origin of his name while they walk back towards home.

Scene shortly before the end – these murals are great

You don’t actually visit all 9 realms, and I’m ok with this.  The 3 remaining realms are way more complicated and lively than the rest of the game, at least in terms of lore.

I agree with the lead dev, in that the game is story complete and does not need any DLC.  I don’t see how that could ever be adequately contained in typical DLC.  It’s not like Odin’s house is DLC – that’s more like sequel territory.

God of War is so far beyond what the previous GoW provided, and clearly has taken the new single-player story driven mechanics to heart.  It bears note that Naughty Dog bears the burden of this trend swap, what with Uncharted and Last of Us.  Games since then have improved on that model – Horizon and now God of War included.