I don’t like it.  More specifically, I think it’s a very dishonest practice, with limited consumer protection.  Anyone can name a dozen “games” that were in early access and that never delivered.

Kickstarter is something different.  You are not paying for an early version of the game, you are paying to help developers.  Early Access, the STEAM kind, is you paying to be an alpha/beta tester.  Landmark did this, collected oodles of money, and they took a sunset.  A large amount stay in early access for years.  In practical terms, the difference between pre-ordering and early access is that there’s a date on the former.  And I have a massive dislike for pre-orders.

I am going to harp on ME:4.  I know that Isey is in love with the game.  Metacritic does not share that attitude.  The difference here is that if you enjoy the story/lore, then you can look past the technical hurdles.  The fact that EA had a rather large patch to address the technical items, in a short time frame, is fairly indicative that they knew this was a problem beforehand.  How many games now have day 1 patches?  Or week 1?  That measure in gigs?

I played D3 on release.  I avoided SimCity like the plague.  I won’t buy any EA game on release day, or release week.  These are broken models.

I understand the marketing gimmicks of release windows.  I get that software development is hard, and only gets harder as you close in on due dates.  I also understand that a game that releases in a buggy format is remembered for that failure, while a game that is released late is remembered for working.

We gamers need to stop rewarding this horrible business practices.  We are so consumed with instant access to everything that we’ve lost the ability to wait for quality.  Being a tester is not a privilege that we should be paying for.  It’s a privilege that developers should be paying us, as we’re doing their jobs.  We need to spend our money on quality, rather than quantity, and reward ethical behavior.

Money is the only thing that makes this world go round.  Let’s use our wallets to get voices heard.

The 3rd and final game I picked up with the PS4 was Uncharted 4.  I have to say that 10gig network installs are a level of stupid I thought we had moved on from.  Horizon was the only game where the install was rather quick.  FF15 was 12gigs.  As a PC gamer for the past 5 years, I just let the install work itself out since I don’t buy disks.  I guess the disks themselves are just betas and the full game is downloaded afterwards.

Back on track.  Uncharted 4 plays quite similar to the previous games.  Lots of climbing, some nominal puzzles that require moving things, and enemies that can take an entire clip of ammo to drop.  Rare is the game that takes as much ammo as Uncharted.  The aiming controls are not as precise as Horizon, as there’s a noticeable spread and lack of accuracy with weapons.  It’s annoying to have a headshot lined up, only to miss because of RNG.

Two neat additions are better stealth controls (tall grass hides you) and a grapple hook to swing like Tarzan.  The former works most of the time, but can act a bit buggy.  The latter really opens up gameplay to make spaces a whole lot bigger.  Speaking of which, past Uncharted games had rather linear corridors, with a single path to traverse.  This game seems to have 2-4 different paths that branch out and give you a different experience.  It feels a lot more like Lara Croft’s open zones than I expected.

This particular game introduces a new character, Sam, as Nate’s brother.  Troy Baker is the voice behind the character, and I have to say that the banter between both is exceptionally well written.  It feels a lot like the way I would act with my brother (or sister for that matter).  The sarcasm, the jibes, the worry… it all works.

I’m at chapter 13 now, which is a return to the beginning of the game that started in media res.  The bad guy is unfortunately 1 dimensional, which is somewhat disappointing given previous bad guys in the series.  His lead aide is impressive though, and the South African accents throughout the game help to add some realism.

The plot itself feels like the Goonies, but with 3 characters.  You are literally chasing after a pirate, who hid their massive wealth in a cave system, and need to follow clues and deadly puzzles to get there.  All I’m missing now is a wishing well.

All told, it’s a well put together package.  The characters you interact with are solid.  The controls are ok.  The visuals and audio are above par.  The story is familiar but not trite.   I prefer it to Uncharted 3, but still hold the 2nd at a higher level.

The really good news in all of this is that I’m having fun.  And that is a hundred times more important than anything else.

I tried.  This reminds me a lot of The Witcher 3, where I just cannot get into the game.  I’m getting old!

I mentioned before that the game had minimal instruction and that the various systems seems to serve no unified purpose.  I stand by that, more so now than before.

First, the world is small in content, but massive in scale.  There are wide swaths of nothing to do.  I rented a chocobo (more on that later) and ran for 15 minutes before finding the next settlement.  In the dark, managing to get lost in the field a bunch of times.  15 minutes of nothing.  No enemies, no loot, nothing to examine… just walking.  The scenery looked good, but there’s no gameplay.  I’ll concentrate on my last 2 play sessions.

I found the chocobo HQ of sorts, and they started assigning me quests.  The first one was to hunt a behemoth, a FF stable of large size.  I was level 19 at the time (not sure what the cap is) and thought this would be an interesting challenge.   First, it took me 10 minutes to realize where the entrance to his lair was, given that the map marker was at the incorrect location.  Once I entered, it was 5 minutes in a linear corridor with 1 minor fight on trash, nothing else of note.  I finally find the bugger, and I’m tasked with tailing him in the mist.  I can see the tail and just need to stay X amount of distance away.  For another 5 minutes.  There’s no hiding, no line of sight, just stay out of his range.  Once that part was done, I got to fight him proper.

Well, not really.  Instead, the game left some exploding barrels on the ground and instructed me to blow them up with fire magic when he was in range.  There are 3 issues here.

First, magic is considered a weapon.  You need to build it from materials.  It is entirely possible to run out of said materials, then you need to find a spawn point, collect more and get back to it.  Magic also has a cooldown, somewhere near 30 seconds, between uses.  The second issue is that these fire barrels require the monster to be next to them, and that only happens when he chases me.  So I have to be next to the barrels.  I mentioned that those barrels explode?  Yeah, they take off more than half my health.  And with a big demon next to me, I lost all my HP numerous times.  The third issue is targeting.  It is awful.  There were 6 spots to target on the behemoth and actually targeting a barrel felt impossible.  And if I missed, then there was 30 seconds wasted.  I ended up wining the fight, with 2 AI dead (full dead) and me with ~15% of max HP left, basically 3 hits from a game over.  Multiple systems at play, none of them working together, making for a massively frustrating experience and I turned off the game for the night.

The next session was bounty hunts.  These are small quests that ask you to kill a certain amount of enemies nearby.  Well, nearby can mean a 10 minute walk of nothing, but it’s nearby.  This particular mission was listed as level 12, and I was 22 at the time.  I had spent time upgrading my weapons and skills too, figuring I was “at part” for the power curve for this level.

And I was wrong.  I needed to kill 9 wolf-like creatures, who ran around like they were on crack.  Each took about 20-30 seconds of continuous damage to take down, while the other 8 were launching attacks at me.  I kept blocking and parrying, but that doesn’t really deal damage.  I used Glad’s AE attack too, at least to knock them back a bit.  I lost Ignis (he dies every 3rd fight it seems) and by the time the last wolf was down, I was left with 20% max HP.

I don’t get it.  I cannot find weapon/power upgrades beyond what I have.  I see no extra skills.  I’ve eaten food to get stronger.  I used 5-10 potions a fight.  I am getting continuously attacked by swarms of enemies and cannot get any consistent damage out.  My teammates are a few cards short of a deck when it comes to AI.  And I’m about 10 levels higher than my target.

I play games to de-stress and have fun.  I certainly like the adrenaline of a good fight, where I feel some level of control over what’s going on, and if things go sideways, I can adapt.  I cannot find that feeling in FF15.  I have no idea what’s going on in the story (king is dead, I need to move across the map).  There are massive empty spaces of nothing.  Combat controls are a bad mix of action and RPG.  I’m just not having any fun.  Time to move on.

Lots.  I’ve spent lots of time in Horizon.  I’ve collected every statue, vantage point, cleared every bandit camp and corruption zone, explored every cauldron and every village, I’ve killed more robots that I could count…and I am very happy with that entire voyage.

The last quest is an interesting one and I’m not sure if it played out that way due to previous quests or not.  I was equipped with what essentially was a grenade launcher to take out a massive swarm of robots.  I took out Helis, one on one.  I then had a final fight against a Deathbringer, with minimal cover and plenty of additional enemies.  That was a super fun fight.  The final scene works and closes up the story really well.  Without getting into spoilers, the good guys win and you bring peace back to the land.  Typical.

Except… the post-credits scene throws logic out the window in order to set up a potential sequel.  Against character and against lore, a choice is made that goes against nearly everything that preceded.  People who are dead should stay dead (like the others who have died before them), and people who have ruined the world and atoned for it, should not double-down on ruining the world once more, especially when there’s an alternative way forward to reach the same underlying goal.

So aside from that 30 second cut scene, I stand impressed and happy.  It is my top candidate for game of the year…and we’re only 1/4 of the way in so far.

FF15

When I bought the PS4, I received Uncharted 4 and FF15 (used), so those are up next.  I know what to expect with Uncharted, but FF15 was an outlier.

First, games should not have 10 gig installs over the internet.  The heck.  Second, I did not expect to have an emo band as my main party out of the gate.  Third, there is a poor blend of action/arcade combat where defense is 90% non-visual.  If FF13 was “press A”, then FF15 is “press O”.  Finally, I am hoping this is a bug, but the random drop ships of 12+ enemies with guns, and spawning every 3 minutes, seems a bit much.

Ok, game proper now.  I’m about 4 hours in I guess, enough to have acquired the first 2 of 13 rare weapons.  Where FF13 was laser-focused for the first dozen hours, FF15 loses all focus within 5 minutes.  There are mini-quests everywhere.  Combat is ok, but the toolset is quite poor to start and clipping is beyond annoying, especially with groups of larger enemies.  The teleport function in combat is neat.  The main story seems to follow the traditional FF fare…you’re somebody, someone important dies, you become important, blah blah blah.

I truly do not understand half of the systems in the game.  I don’t understand the car (or its upgrades), I don’t get the differences between weapons (and their upgrades), I don’t understand character skills (cooking, photos, scavenging), I don’t get the point of bounty hunts…nothing is explained, just given out.  It gets marginally better as the story progresses, but there are large level swaths where I am more confused than anything.  One quest had me take out 5 cat-like beasts, 5 levels below me.  They tore me to shreds from physical damage, only for the afore-mentioned enemy drop ship to show up and clean house.  There’s no feedback to see what I did wrong, no way to really improve without information.  So it’s a continuous trial/error gameplay that is growing frustrating.

The world itself looks great, as to the various characters and enemies.  The music is solid.  There’s fishing, which is always a plus.

The game just feels like a bunch of random ideas thrown together without any purpose.  90% of my activities have nothing to do with the main quest line, and don’t appear to provide any benefit other than a higher character level.  FF15 was well reviewed, so I am clearly missing something.  Maybe it will get better over time.

I have a soft spot for sci-fi, in particular the socio-psychological stuff.  Give me Clarke and Asimov any day.  I’ve read a pile and a half of books on space exploration and the impacts on people.  There’s a fairly solid foundation of possibilities when that topic comes up, as well as a whole lot of tropes.

Space, as it is, is immense.  It would take years to reach the next star, let alone the next viable solar system.  Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem series tackles that issue wonderfully.  The time to reach that space would be time-locked, where you would not progress but everything around you would.  Haldeman covers that in the Forever War.  You just have to look at the past 10 years of progress, to see that we grow at a near exponential rate.  People from the 1800s would consider us magicians.

And there’s Robinson’s Mars series (Clarke’s Rama series to some extent) on the effects on sending the brightest people you have to a remote area without direct supervision.  It doesn’t ever bode well.  The reason these people are trailblazers is exactly because they don’t follow the rules.

So when I read about Mass Effect’s “space colonization” plot line… I can’t help but shake my head.  It’s like a bad Star Trek (TOS) episode.

• The trip takes 600 years and the expectation is that nothing changed (space telescopes!)
• Of course they land on a planet with existing humanoid aliens
• Of course the humanoids speak a language we can understand
• Of course they are hostile
• Of course there’s some “magic god race”
• Of course some massive disaster that occurred
• Of course the lead protagonist gets thrust into a god-like role early on
• Of course everyone accepts this fact without question and without ensuring you’re qualified to do the work
• Of course everyone wants to sleep with you

This is pulp fiction, not science fiction.  People are up in arms that the possibilities that this concept had were wasted.  So what?

I will compare to Horizon, given that it has some similarities.  Space isn’t the factor, but time certainly is.  You start as an outcast and only gain admittance so that you can prove them wrong and get answers.  You deny that you’re any kind of savior and are generally bitter than you’ve been given that mantle.  The previous generation has a logical growth of issue, decision, action – and you live with those repercussions.  The overall lore makes logical sense, given the data at hand.  Even though the plot revolves near entirely on gods in the machine, that is not the plot device.  Every decision/action is based on human choice.  There’s a logical flow to events.  It isn’t complex, and it doesn’t take large tangents, but it is cohesive.

I’m not upset that ME4 is taking this approach, not in the least.  Pulp fiction has it’s place. The irritant here is that expectations for Bioware games are higher.  People expect some level of “great” when playing the games, and expectations are always a challenge to meet.  If the game was made by anyone other than Bioware, I’m rather certain that there’d be half the fuss going on.  Maybe it’s just time to realize that the glory days of amazing games from that studio are long gone, and that they are aiming for breadth rather than depth.  Nothing wrong with that at all.

First, there are many more highs than lows.  There’s a reason that it’s the best selling PS4 game in a long time.

I’m about an hour’s worth of game left to complete the main story.  There’s a particular achievement I want, in order to try and get the platinum trophy, so I’m delaying that a bit in order to complete some side quests.  So I consider this the “long tail” of the game.  I’ve seen it and done it, then did it again.  And I’m going back for more.

Highs

• The world building is solid.  Zones feels distinct and planned.  Towns/cities feel representative and have character.  The flowers/statues/vistas to collect make for some fun exploration.  Exploration just feels good, without the nitty gritty of continuous collection of crap (looking at you BioWare).
• The underlying story is some solid sci-fi.  Borderline plausible, which is pretty eerie.  Most characters make sense – except Ted Faro.  He takes a turn that doesn’t make much sense.
• Aloy is just plain awesome.  The writing is well done, Ashly Burke (HAWP!) does some fine voice work, the animations are solid, and the feeling of walking death grows continuously.  A character arc, who would have thunk?! One of my favorite leads in a long time.
• Combat mechanics work.  All the weapons have a purpose and fit a particular style.  The bow feels like an improvement on Tomb Raider, which was the top notch.  Using 2 triggers to shoot just makes sense.  It is a great feeling to bring down a giant robot T-Rex.
• The various enemy weak areas to exploit make for some strategic decisions.  Some parts are a pain in the butt to hit though.
• The game is a continuous challenge.  Until 1 particular event.

Lows

• The lip sync can feel like Ashley Simpson at times.  It’s distracting but at the same time not a killer since the “face to face” conversations are pretty minimal.
• Stealth only works in tall grass or large rocks.  Trees provide no cover.  So you end up looking for a prime stalking location, and then all hell breaks loose.  I should note for bandit camps, stealth is the way to go by luring and silent strike each opponent.
• Overriding robots doesn’t provide much value aside from a distraction as the enemy AI is pretty bad when converted.
• 95% of all combat is about dodge rolling, slowing down time, sniping a piece of equipment, then dodging again.  It’s fun and intense but can wear after a while.
• Fights against large enemies can feel draining when there are 4-5 more robots around.  Getting chain stunned is not fun.  I end up pulling enemies away in order to take them down.  Which I suppose is like real hunting…
• The various sub-quest/errands don’t appear to have payoffs.  Clearing bandits camps doesn’t do much.  Corrupted zones either.  Hunting quests give you gear that you dramatically outclass by the time you get it.  It’s fun, but busy work.
• Weapon modifications are so-so, with no real choice, just larger numbers.  Modifications on armor are useless (actually, all armor is useless with one exception).

They are smaller details that really only become apparent when you stare at it or take a step back for a while.  It may be busy work, but it’s fun in doses.  I wouldn’t clear corrupted areas all day for 2 days, but as I come across them it’s a fun challenge.

Now for the turning point.  After completing the second to last mission, you can get access to Ancient Armor.  Up until that point, the armor you get has marginal value.  A Thunderjaw will kill you in 3 hits instead of 2.  Ancient Armor makes you invulnerable to a LARGE chunk of damage (slightly over a health bar), and then takes 5 seconds to regenerate.  In practical terms, it changes the way you play the game.

There’s one corrupted area that has 5 Chargers and 1 Fire Bellowback.  A single Bellowback can kill you in a couple hits.  Combined with 5 Chargers stunning you, it’s a death trap.  The armor makes it almost a joke.  I meleed the Chargers to death, then took the Bellowback face to face and won.  I took down 3 Stalkers without using the bow.  It’s crazy.  Where before you were a glass cannon, after you get the armor you become a massive tank.

It’s not exactly god-mode, but it’s as close as I’ve come in any non-RPG.  The issue has nothing to do with power curve, that works.  It’s the defensive curve.  If regular armor had any appreciable effect, then the last piece wouldn’t seem so out of place.

I’m still having fun though, and I’m looking forward to the conclusion of the story.  Still very highly recommended.

In Horizon, Cauldrons are these mini-puzzle areas that you need to navigate in order to unlock the ability to “convert” larger robots to fight for you.  They follow a general pattern.

• Finding the place, which is shown on the map but the entrance isn’t straightforward
• Surviving the front door.  Each Cauldron has a patrol in front of it.  The last one I visited had 3 stalkers (giant invisible cats).
• Work out the interior puzzles.  They are climbing and/or avoid patrol puzzles.
• Um, avoid the above patrols.  You should be able to get to the last room without the need to kill anything.
• Enter the final room and kill the local mini-patrol.
• Kill the boss encounter.
• Cleanse the Cauldron.
• Leave without dying to the front door patrol.

The front door and last boss are the real challenges, mostly because you’ve probably never encountered that particular set of enemies before.  I don’t consider it spoilers to say that the enemy on the cover of the box is one of those bosses.

The Thunderjaw is impressive.  It’s pretty much a mechanical T-Rex, but with lasers, a mine launcher, fire breath and super speed.  Feels like I’m fighting Grimlock.

This particular fight took about 40 minutes.  The successful run was under 2.

I have a particular arrow that is quite effective at shedding enemy armor and equipment.  The Thunderjaw has multiple things to remove.  2 mine launchers, radar, protective heart panels, shock panels, heat panels, 2 lasers beams on his head, his tail that takes 90% of your health, and finally his head protection.  When you take off a piece, the enemy changes strategies to attack you.  At first, he’s likely to stay at range and attack, but when you take those tools away, he charges non-stop and swings his tail.  Take the tail away and he seems to enrage.

I stripped every piece off the guy and that only dropped him to about 75% HP.  I threw hundreds of arrows into his weak spots, barely a dent.  I could never get his shock or fire canisters to explode, no matter how much I shot them.  Add to the fact that every physical hit I took was 75-90% of my HP pool, I was barely scrapping by with rolls everywhere.

Remember that camera issue from before?  Well a giant T-Rex that’s charging at you, and that you can’t see, that’s not much fun.

After more than 20 attempts, I decided to change strategies.  Some of the pieces that are knocked off can be used – in particular the min launchers.  The downside is that it takes forever to pick up the item and you move like molasses when you have it.  I took a practice run to figure out that – ah to hell with planning.

I died, and the next go, I simply shot off the launcher and stood next to it.  When he charged, I rolled, picked up the launcher, turned on slow-mo-mode, and shot the entire clip into the bugger.  I repeated the same steps with the other launcher.  I didn’t take a single hit.  It almost felt like a staged run.

I went from feeling like I was going to throw the controller in frustration to a perfect run.  There’s a certain feeling of euphoria that comes from those types of events. Having to keep trying different things until it just clicks. It’s moments like those that clearly show why I like games.  I’m going to remember this particular gaming event for a long time…