Nothing blew up at the cottage this weekend.  And the weather was great for 2 of 3 days.   All smiles from that front.

Spring cleaning was in full effect though.  A fire burnt all day Sunday while we got rid of dead plants, cleared some space, and chopped some wood.  Moving more stuff around and re-organizing was a workout in itself.  As much as the body is tired afterwards, I need the physical work and sunlight to stay sane.  Office work sucks the life out of me sometimes.  Now nearly everything is set up as we need, only need to drop the boat in the water and we’ll be good for the season.

Three bits of gaming to be had.

God of War

Spoiler.  I found a dead giant whose fingernail was larger than Kratos.  That was cool.  A bit more story progress, including a large plot reveal came about.  There’s an overall dip in the character of Atreus for a while, which has yet to be explained properly.

Of more interesting note is that I’m able to attack Valkyries now.  I’ve taken down 4 now, and they are a heck of a battle.  It’s 90% defense, and counterattacks, meaning a lot of memorization.  It is a massive thrill to take one down.

Friday

The boardgame.  It’s like a combination of solitaire, war, and deck building.  Except the deck building is more RNG than I like.  I’ve gone through a dozen or so rounds now, and only hitting the halfway mark about half the time.  It’s a good fun, but some extremely painful to see a good run come to nothing due to 1 bad card pull.   Still, it’s fun to try new strategies, and for the price you can’t go wrong.

Escape: Zombie City

A manic dice roller, with coop to boot.  I much prefer coop games than competitive ones.  Mainly because it takes more thought and planning for those games to work, and like it or not, even in coop there’s some competitiveness to the game.

Here you are given 5 dices, items to collect, zombies to kill, a map to explore, and a van to drive away.  And 15 tense minutes to accomplish it all.  The base game is ok, but it really requires the expansion pack to shine.  The addition of classes, skills, and more complex map tiles adds some much needed replayability.  The delivery girl and grandma are extremely useful.  Funny that.

I’ve lost a few times, but more often than not end up winning with 3 players.  The rules can be simplified for kids, though they are not all that complex to start.  You can increase the difficulty by changing some of the cards, and that’ll be for the next few runs.

There’s something to be said of 2-4 people rolling like mad against a clock.  Then someone asking for help all the way on the other side of the map.  Controlled chaos is a blast!

I’ve unlocked the 2nd part of the Lake of Nine in GoW, which allows access to most of the side areas.  I know I’m missing 2 abilities – hitting green orbs, and burning some roots without explosions.  Not a big deal.

Rather than continue with the main quest, I decided to take my time to explore the lake.  There are a dozen or so docks around the place, a similar amount of side quests, treasure maps, realm tears to close, chests to loot, and orbs to collect.  There are good and less good parts to this.

The less good to start.  There are some enemies that are dramatically more powerful than me and can (and have) kill me in a single hit.  Most of those battles had me re-try a dozen+ times.  I’ve been able to take them all down, with the exception of Travellers.  Those buggers are walking death machines.  The other fights were all extremely challenging, and I had to get extra creative to get through them.  Atreus being fully upgraded is a MASSIVE benefit.  I should have invested in him earlier.

The good is multi-part.  First, I am much better at the game due to the above difficulty.  When I started exploring, I would end up getting hit every so often.  Now, I can avoid 3 killer enemies at the same time, dodge through multiple hits, and still get in some solid damage.  That feels really good.

The next boost is just plain power increases.  There are some items I’ve collected that improve my baseline stats, extra gear, and extra runes to get stronger.  Numerically, I would say I’m twice as strong as I was before I started.

I’ve also unlocked a bunch of portals that will eventually allow me to teleport across the map, meaning faster travel in the future.  GoW is a big game, so fast travel would be quite beneficial.

Finally, I’ve seen some pretty inventive quests and areas.  There’s some broken pirate ships and an interesting elevator puzzle.  There’s a sea giant that “drowned” out of the water.  There’s the council of Valkyries which looks straight out of a movie.  Fafnir’s quest has you freeing a dragon.  Thor’s statue is next.

Direction

Finding the balance between directed and open gameplay is very tough.  FF14 wasn’t much fun until it opened up.  FF15 wasn’t fun because it was so open.  AC:O has levels, which provides some framing – just that the activities are too similar.  I’m not saying GoW is perfect in that balance, as it clearly wants to have players backtrack later in the game.  I am saying that the open gameplay is purposefully designed, rather than just a bunch of random icons thrown on a map.  It makes it so that there’s additional puzzles around every corner, rather than repeating the same 4-5 steps ad-infinitum.

Kind of relates to what I like in real life truthfully.  I like a foundational stability (structure) but also need the continual challenge of exploration and growth.  Too much structure bores me.  Too much volatility exhausts me.  Always forward.

I will say it’s a lot different playing God of War after Assassin’s Creed: Origins.  Combat in both follows the same concept of 1v1, but the mechanics are wildly different.

AC:O has 3 types of enemies.  Archers, melee grunts, and shielded bosses.  Small variations within, but those are the big ones.  The first two are dumb and can only take you down in numbers due to a stun-lock effect.  Shielded bosses are bit tougher, since you either have to break their defense, or dodge attacks to counter.  There are only a few of them in the game.

GoW has melee grunts, sure.  It has ranged attackers as well.  Even shielded bosses.  Then it has ghosts, exploding eyeballs, fast poisoners, kamikaze enemies, flyers, ogres, and trolls.  1 or 2 mistakes and you’re dead.  The game rewards smart play, and severely punishes dumb moves.  And it continually adds new challenges, by adding new enemy types and group combinations.

That’s just enemies.  Then there’s you.

In AC:O your power is directly related to your level and the weapons you have.  The skills are useful, but more as tweaks than pure numbers.  It doesn’t matter what skills you have, if you’re 5 or 10 levels under the enemy, you’re dead.  Some moves you simply can’t avoid (due mainly to Ubisoft’s loose combat controls).

GoW doesn’t care about levels, it cares about gameplay.  I’ve gone into battles against clearly more powerful opponents and still come out the victor.  Investing in runes (special attacks that do AE, Stun, or Damage), gear that has different stat sets and bonuses, or just plain more skills for extra combat options is the way to go.

Example is one skill that let’s you block a ranged attack and shoot it back at an enemy.  Huge quality of life boost.  Or another than let’s you tag 3 enemies for a ranged attack.  Or more stuns from Atreus, or extra healing, or… plenty of things.  It honestly feels like the game provides you a toolbox of options, and it’s up to you to see what fits your style.

In the Mountain

Better example is a recent troll battle.  Normally trolls are drawn out affairs, with a few stages where additional grunts/ranged show up.  It feels like it’s raining fire.  In this particular case, I was able to throw some axes at his head, enter rage mode for some quick damage, then used some high damage runes to bring him down.  Atreus used his Wolf summon to take out the grunts, and I picked up the pieces.  What would normally take 5 minutes was done in 20 seconds, because I used the right tools, at the right time.

Extremely rewarding.

Quick article regarding EA + loot boxes, in particular after Belgium/Netherlands have banned loot boxes.

Two items stick out to me.

which has helped the company grow year-over-year to $1.25 billion during its last quarter even without releasing a major new game.

Make no mistake, EA is a publicly traded company with a sole goal – making money.  Anything else is bonus.  That they can pull in such a large sum of money is impressive.  I’m actually quite surprised that EA hasn’t jumped 110% on the Battle Royale bandwagon yet… seems a market prime for the taking.  Then again, they’ve avoided MOBAs like the plague.

EA, of course, says it doesn’t think FIFA Ultimate Team and other video game loot boxes are equivalent to slot machines.

First, players always receive a specified number of items in every FUT pack,” the executive explained. “Second, we don’t provide or authorize any way to cash out digital items or virtual currency for real-world money. And there’s no real-world value assigned to in-game items.

I argued the same point in the past, at least in terms of gambling from a legal perspective.  There’s a flaw in this argument though – in that the law itself is changing.  Just like online gambling was unregulated for a very long time, laws eventually caught up.  It’s naive to think that this massive cash cow would not have regulations applied to it.

EA is an american company and has plenty of lobbying power in that country.  Apple, Google, and Microsoft are much larger and lost to a massive degree when trying to fight EU countries when it comes to money.  I am having trouble seeing how this goes any other way that tight international regulations.  That, or the EU stops being a viable gaming market.

That said, I do look forward to EA trying to keep pushing lockboxes.  I have a lot of popcorn around here, and this will be a fun show.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that the PS4 had clearly won this generation’s console wars.  It’s been 2 years of home runs.  Then God of War comes out.

Side Track

I play on a projection screen in my basement.  I’ve set up the entire thing a long time ago to get a full experience.  The week before my bulb burst (kapow) and I needed to order a new one.  It arrived on the weekend, but it’s pretty clear that the projector itself is busted.  Useable, but there’s a blue band meaning that the internal wheel is broken.  It’s also too dim.

I thought about getting a TV.  The projection screen is about 120′ diagonal.  55′ screens are very cheap.  65’+ are twice the price.  Something even close to comparable was $3000.  I’m good.  A new projector is sub-$1000, assuming you have all the setup available.  Input lag is about 30ms, which isn’t great for twitch work, but enough for 90% of all games.  Research + Amazon = new project here on Friday.

Setting

There are 3 large pantheons that have influenced the west and are no longer “actively” practiced.  Egyptian, Greco-Roman, and Norse.  There are more of them, but they are either smaller (Mesoamerican) or still actively practiced (Hinduism/Buddism).  We don’t see much of these in gaming, except for perhaps Tomb Raider / Uncharted.

Back on track.  Nordic gods are very interesting.  In English society, we celebrate Tyr’s day, Woden’s day, Thor’s day, and Freya’s day.  French, being a Latin tongue, is Greco-Roman instead.  Lots of people are familiar with the term Ragnarok, though few know the level of detail that story actually holds.

Well worth the week or so of Wikipedia sleuthing to dig more out of it.

Start

Kratos is up north in the cold, with a small boy (memes abound), after the death of his wife.  He still has rage issues, though they are focused in this case.  There’s something to be said about the parent/child structure in gaming.  Last of Us really hit this one strong… and God of War is hitting all the right notes.

The tutorial is smooth enough, where you get a basic grasp of the controls by walking around through a temple and back home.  Combat is directed to 1v1, rather than 1vsMasses.  It makes it a lot harder when groups attack you, since you need some situational awareness.  Even more so when you’re facing weak enemies, tanks, and ranged foes at the same time.  It isn’t about button mashing, but about timing, priority targets, and understanding which attacks work on which foes.  I am not ashamed to admit that by the time I unlocked the Lake of Nine, I had died a dozen times.

There are sub-systems of course.  You have skills that are unlocked over time.  Runic attacks that act as special attacks.  Talisman’s for some boosts.  You can craft/upgrade equipment slots in order to make numbers bigger.  I’m sure it’s important, but for the initial portion, it’s superfluous.

There are chests in most nooks.  Most are simple.  Some have minor puzzles – such as smashing targets, or chaining bell strikes.  There’s a benefit to exploring.

And exploring really provides more than item benefits.  The world building here is astounding.  Where Horizon focused on the open world, God of War is like zooming in on a painting.   Each area is crafted with purpose – pits and spiked to hurt enemies, stones to avoid line of sight, twists to make chasers stumble.  All of it beautiful.  All of it massive.

This picture does not do justice to the size of this wyrm.

The entire game is a single shot take.  From the start menu until I stopped it for the night, it felt like a giant film.  It doesn’t feel like you’re playing a game, as it lends a level of intimacy to the game.  It can be tough when you spin around to dodge something, as the screen shifts quickly, but you get used to it.  Long story short – it works.

I mentioned I reached the Lake of the Nine portion, if that means anything to players.  I met another god along the way, a nordic dwarf, a forest witch and 2 massive creatures.  This portion feels like a hub, as its the first time I found a spot I could not traverse.  Meaning backtracking at some point.

I stopped playing because of that big thing above.  I won’t ruin it further but that was enough for my brain to handle for a night.

I am but a smidgen into the game and already extremely impressed.  I would never have imagined that gaming could be this good when I was a kid.

I was Ubisoft-ed.

More specifically, I was impressed for a long time… then the game dragged on with too much clutter.  Like a book with a 6 chapter epilogue.

Plot

We’re far enough in that spoilers don’t really apply.  The game is about the origin of assassins in ancient Egypt.  You play Bayek, a father out for revenge for the death of his child.  You sometimes meet up with your wife Aya (who in a nice twist is better than you at pretty much everything), and go about taking our the pre-Templar Order.  You’re smack in the Ptolemy/Cleopatra timeframe, which is probably the most well-known for most people.  The bad guys have some interesting motivations, and some you can empathize with.  Some go to absurd lengths to “be bad”.  Eh.

The game starts with 5 targets to take out.  Then you realize there’s another 5.  Then you get told there’s another 2.  Then another 2.  Enough already.  There are some ties to the “advanced civilization”, but they are more easter eggs than anything else.  What’s here instead is promise of something better.  Like a new foundation to grow.

I will say that I was disappointed when I played as Aya.  You are restricted in ability and weapon types – all the while knowing that she is by far the better assassin of the two.  It feels like you’re hobbled, rather than empowered.

World Building

Ancient Egypt is a very interesting setting.  This is not that time setting, but instead at the time of Ceasar.  Guess it’ll do.

The actual map of Egypt is massive and impressive.  There are large amazing vistas throughout.  Running through a desert feels exhausting and beautiful at the same time.  The pyramids, tombs, and Pharos lighthouse are well constructed.  It’s impressive to think that these large items were in people’s backyards for thousands of years.

The downside to this setting is the sheer amount of open space.  Where more recent games had a decent mix of horizontal and vertical exploration… AC:O is almost entirely horizontal.  I like the climbing and parkour, and there’s only a bit of it here.  Not much they can do about it really…

Mechanics

It’s level based, and unless you complete side-quests and side-areas, you’re going to be drastically underleveled.  In fact, if you’re not 5+ levels above the current area, you’re in for a bad time.  Phylakes will take you out in 2 hits.  Any fight with more than 3 enemies is likely to do the same.  It’s not fun.

When you are the correct level, and have the necessary tools to be an assassin (sniper bow, chain assassinations, boosted overpower), then the game becomes fun.  Taking out a giant base of enemies from the shadows does not get boring, even after the 50th time.   That part works.

The other parts of the game – like animal hunting, or treasure hunting – I could do without.  There’s no challenge here.  You just go into combat, or press  the scan button to find the loot.

War Elephant battles are a fun mess.  There’s 4 of them (not counting a boss), and they are each a decent challenge in their own way.  They are stupid in their own way as well, since it is the complete opposite of a sneaky assassin.  Instead you’re a single guy, taking on a 15 foot beast, mounted by archers.  Small doses works.

There are tombs to hunt and extremely simple level puzzles.  They have value from a historical perspective so that players learn about Egypt.  Aside from that…

The Stone Circle puzzles are simple “square peg in square hole” events.  They eventually unlock a giant puzzle in the Sphynx for some neat-looking armor (with no in-game effect).

At later levels you can take on the gods themselves (or rather computer generated glitches of them).  All are the same model of shoot arrows into the chest, avoid the red spots, kill the waves of bad guys.  Good way to get gold-level gear I suppose.

I’d guess there are a couple hundred of the map icons with things to do.  Some areas are dense, others sparse.  For a long time it’s fun to just complete a bunch of activities while you’re moving forward.  After a bit, you start having to backtrack or go out of your way. By the time you wrap back to Siwa…you’ve had enough.  I’m sure there are another 10 hours of activities here but I’ve killed enough Hyenas, explored enough tombs, cleared enough guardposts to keep me satiated for a good 2 years.

Overall, the mechanics work ok, but it seems more like the devs were testing ideas than really knowing what to do with them.  It feels like a buffet of options, with hot pockets in one corner, and filet mignon in the other.

Overall

Each AC has one particular item that defines it.  It could be a gimmick, but it’s something that you can stick your memories to.  In AC:O, that item is the level-based structure.  It’s experimental and flawed, but certainly has potential.  The highlight of the experience is the setting.  Egypt is absolutely beautiful, and the devs went to great lengths to put pieces of history and context throughout.  Quite impressive.

The rest of the game is ok – vanilla in a way.  It kept me busy for quite a long time, always wondering what was over the next hill.  I’m happy with the purchase, and overall curious as to what Ubisoft will do with this interesting experiment.

Relevant article

More specifically, they have come to the decision that loot boxes are gambling, with a particular finger pointing to

• FIFA 18
• DOTA2
• PUBG
• Rocket League

Further, they need to remove the “almost winning” animations, the ability to chain open loot boxes, and prevent “vulnerable groups” from using them.  This is very similar to a casino effect, where a picture is on the wall.  That doesn’t always work, curious how it will apply to virtual games – user ID I suppose.

This doesn’t mean that lootboxes are illegal, oh no.  It means that selling lootboxes without a gambling license is illegal.

I’d be curious as to the process of getting a license in Belgium.  Canada it’s a rather tough slog, since all gambling is owned by the government (or native tribes).  The US is more about bribes than it is about getting an actual license – plus a massive aversion to anything considered online gambling.

The worst outcome for gaming companies is always legislative compliance.  Governments are notorious for putting everyone through the wringer to get the last cent… and tax evasion is the easiest way to get after a company on international terms.

How game companies comply with this change will be interesting.  Either they modify the entire game, modify it for that region, or stop offering the game in that region seem the most likely scenarios.  My guess is to stop offering based on IP would be the simplest.

What I’m interested in is how this trickles into other nations.  The US was all bluster on this front but no action.  If I was a gaming CFO, I’d be worried about this type of change.  Loot boxes are programmed to prey on the addictive tendencies of players.  There’s a reason they are such a massive cash cow.  Unless China or the US decides to take similar strides… I’d be quite curious to see how this plays out in the long run.  Maybe it’s just a blip on the radar, which would be quite a shame.

There’s a story that Nintendo has enough money stashed away to be unprofitable for a dozen years with no impact.  That works out since every other console seems to have less than ideal sales numbers.  It’s hard to say that they are even in the console wars… aside from connecting to a TV they are really living on their own planet.  I would hazard to guess that people don’t think “PS4, XBOX or Switch”.  They instead think “PS4 or XBOX… and might as well get a Switch”

XBONE

All joking aside, Microsoft took some rather dumb risks at the launch of their console and followed up with rollbacks.  Kinect and always on internet anyone?  Instead of focusing on the ease of gaming experience, they went for integration into other services.  Don’t get me wrong, that’s hyper useful and an actual cross-platform system (XBOX to PC), but it shouldn’t be the focus.

They do have a solid set of free games when you are a subscriber, but is that enough?

Quick, name me 3 games that are only playable on the XBOX?  I’ll help

• Forza
• Halo
• Gears of War
• PUBG
• Sea of Thieves

All of which are also on PC, but that isn’t exactly a stellar list.

PlayStation

Sony is hyper competitive and anti cross-platform.  They are often at the front of the “quality media” trend, but that’s expected when you have a backpocket billion dollars in the media / movie business.

Instead, let’s look at the game front.  When the PS4 launched it had a smattering of quality games, and a very large independent game base.  It’s moved on to 1st party exclusives.  Here’s a sample of top tier games.

• Uncharted
• Hellblade
• Yakuza
• Nioh
• Street Fighter 5
• Final Fantasy
• The Last Guardian
• Shadow of the Colossus  (remake)
• Nier Automata
• Persona
• Horizon Zero Dawn
• God of War

Spiderman should be around soon too.

Winner

The ideal state is both quality games and the ability to play with anyone else.  Microsoft does the latter, while both Nintendo and Sony do the former.  Hard to pick a winner here.  Games > integration in my eyes.

But if you’re looking for hours of quality entertainment, it is really hard to dismiss the PS4.  It can play any XBOX game (except the above list) and has a dozen “must own” games to boot.  Then go out and buy a Switch.