Add Julian Gollop’s once brilliant Chaos Reborn, a precious relic of another time, to the list of games that didn’t have confidence in their original design. Today’s update adds something called law mode. Which drastically overhauls the gameplay without bothering to explain the changes. It’s furthermore how the single-player campaign mode plays now. How does it work? Who knows. The developers can’t be bothered to include an explanation. All I know is that whereas units used to exist in a binary state of either fully alive or fully dead, now they have a hit point bar. Gone are the days of dramatic reversals of fortune at the hands of a ruthlessly random random number generator, which is exactly what random number generators should be. Instead of a dragon dying on a die roll as surely as a rat, now you have to whack away at it. Now I’m calculating attack power vs hit points. I think that’s what I’m doing. Until someone gets around to actually explaining how law mode works, I can’t be sure.
To be fair, this overhaul isn’t mandatory. You can play Chaos Reborn one of two ways. Either the way it was designed, or the way it was redesigned to pander to people who didn’t understand the design. There are advantages to game design being an ongoing process. There are also disadvantages. Chaos Reborn is an example of one of those things.
First they gave us Arizona, then they gave us trucker sex. Now, the very land itself is getting larger in American Truck Simulator. SCS Software says one of the most frequent complaints about their hard-truckin’ sim is that it’s just not big enough. You know how us folks like everything huge? Big Macs. Whoppers. Family size pizza with stuffed crusts. We like ’em big here in The States. The developers are re-scaling the current game from from 1:35 to 1:20, making road distances longer, adjusting time progression, and revamping problem areas. For example, the new version of Golden Gate Bridge in the above image features six lanes of traffic instead of four.
The benefits are clear – you’re going to get a free “take 2” on the West-coast states that you already have in the game, and roomier game world for future expansions. In addition, this expansion will come with new road segments to explore and updated technology for the old roads.
The developers say it will take several months to complete the project, but that they will grow their studio to deal with the additional load while working on the next set of DLC states.
I’ll get around to finding my lost baby in Fallout 4 when I get around to it. Right now, I’m helping Cate kick her drug habit. I couldn’t care less about rescuing some captured rebel leader in Homefront: The Revolution — what was his name again? — which frees up plenty of time to liberate patches of territory. In Dying Light, uh, something about secret files. Who can be bothered to care when there are safehouses to be cleared, parkour races to run, and skills to level up? Name a game by Ubisoft that isn’t called Far Cry 2. I probably can’t tell you the first thing about the main storyline. All the better for all the Ubistuff that needs doing. There’s hardly a game with as rich a setting for side quests as Watch Dogs. One of the best things you can do for the side quests in an open-world game is a lousy main quest.
No one likes losing, but sometimes you need to experience loss to learn. Overwatch players don’t like to learn. Or, if they do, they want to learn without loss.
Blizzard’s Jeff Kaplan posted a long forum message explaining the ins and outs of Overwatch matchmaking. There’s a little math, some wizardry, and luck involved. The main concern for the developers was that matchmaking should result in the best experience possible for everyone. Buried in the post is an example of how Overwatch players abused the “Avoid This Player” system to make things easier for themselves at the expense of others.
One of the best Widowmaker players in the world complained to us about long queue times. We looked into it and found that hundreds of other players had avoided him (he’s a nice guy – they avoided him because they did not want to play against him, not because of misbehavior). The end result was that it took him an extremely long time to find a match. The worst part was, by the time he finally got a match, he had been waiting so long that the system had “opened up” to lower skill players. Now one of the best Widowmaker players was facing off against players at a lower skill level. As a result, we’ve disabled the Avoid system (the UI will go away in an upcoming patch). The system was designed with the best intent. But the results were pretty disastrous.
In another example of how Overwatch players are big crybabies, a teenage girl in Korea, using the handle Geguri, was completely destroying her opponents by using Zarya to dominate matches. Her performance was so good that she was widely accused of cheating. Blizzard determined she wasn’t a cheat, but Geguri was still being accused of using hacks that Blizzard wasn’t able to detect. It took a live demonstration of her skills at the Nexus Cup to shut her harassers up. Babies!
One of the benefits of the Warhammer license being handed out like candy is that some of the games that use the Warhammer license will be good. Perhaps even very good. And some of those games will keep on giving. Today, the Space Marines arrive in Battlefleet: Gothic Armada, the Witch Hunters arrive in Mordheim: City of the Damned, and the Eldar arrive in Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade. All on the same day! Space Marines cost $7, Witch Hunters cost $10, and the Eldar are part of the ongoing process of adding content to Eternal Crusade’s ongoing early access. Which I wouldn’t normally mention, but it’s worth mentioning any time space elfs show up.
You’re up, Creative Assembly. Not that Total War: Warhammer is hurting for content, but we’re all eager to hear who the new kids in class will be. Skaven? I bet it’s the skaven.
In Dying Light, another game I’m catching up on these days, I can make five fire shurikens with a blade, some gauze, and a can of aerosol. So far, the blade and gauze are easy enough to find. But I also need the gauze for medkits, so tough choices must be made. The real bottleneck is the aerosol. I’m constantly on the lookout for aerosol. I’ll even buy it from merchants if they’re selling it. Every time I find an aerosol, I think, hey, now I’ve got five fire shurikens! Conversely, every time I throw a fire shuriken, I think, well, I’m going to need to find more aerosol. This fits well enough with a post-apocalypse. When the world ends, I expect to scavenge. I accept non-renewable resources as a facet of any apocalypse.
It’s obvious by now that Crows Crows Crows are playing with form. Rather than push out games in which you shoot or collect things, they create short (free!) experiences that ask players to engage with gaming in subversive ways. The studio, started by William Pugh of The Stanley Parable, has yet to do anything conventionally. Their first game, Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist was about messing with player expectations and anticipation.
Their newest game, The Brave Explorer, The Jungle of Doubt, and The Temple of No is a simple text-based game written in Twine. Beyond being a twee little adventure, the game plays with the way text and formatting work. It’s only a few minutes long and free, so why not let Crows Crows Crows collect some data and run some tests on you?
A black and white foreign movie that’s over two hours long? Who among us is such a base philistine that he can’t appreciate this best foreign film nominee from Columbia? At the 1:11 mark, we look into cool eyeglasses in movies.
Since this game diary will progress alongside my playing time with The Witcher 3, I should warn you there will be spoilers. Never before the jump. I’d hate to ruin anything for the casual skimmer of Quarter to Three who hasn’t played The Witcher 3 yet. But anything after the jump is fair game. I wouldn’t recommend going there unless you’ve made progress in the game yourself.
For some people, the ending of Commander Shepard’s galaxy-spanning journey was a controversial one. The outcry over the perceived weakness of the multiple-choice ending was vocal enough to spur Electronic Arts and BioWare to patch further exposition into the climax and epilogue. Fans wondering how Mass Effect: Andromeda would handle the end of the last game can rest easy. It’s not going to address it. Instead, BioWare’s Aaryon Flynn explained to Eurogamer that Mass Effect: Andromeda’s setting is far enough away in terms of distance and time from The Milky Way, that nothing you did really impacts the new game.
“We’ve done it in such a way that allows all of those decisions you made to remain intact in the canon of the universe, but also allows a new story to begin.”
That’s one way to negate persistent fan theories about star-children and mind wipes.
Early on in the The Witcher 3’s Blood and Wine expansion, a man is killed right in front of the player character and a chase ensues as the murderous “Beast of Beauclair” runs away. There is a fight, a complication, and the killer escapes. Instead of returning to the person that started you on the investigation to report what happened, or going back to look for clues on the body, (the victim is literally gone from the crime scene if you return to the site) the game instructs you to go wander off to meet an old friend or make some renovations to your new house. So goes Blood and Wine.
It’s hard not to like Overfall. It’s has such an eager-to-please enthusiasm. The way it talks to you in tiny snippets so as not to wear out its welcome. The ingratiating pop culture references. The simple breezy battles with a thick gooey center of complexity. Its archipelago busy with criss-crossing little boats going about their business. All these cute NPC classes waiting to join you. Ice Maiden. Wrestler. Knife Juggler. Kirinborn, whatever that is. Unlockable weapons like Bloodfang, Nightbane, Harvester of Sorrow, Deepest Ocean, The Butterflies. The elliptical hints for how to unlock them. Overfall is playful, sly, sleek.
I have to really like a game to read its books. Actually, that’s true of pretty much any flavor text. But it’s especially true of ingame books. I suspect game developers think they’re tricking me by putting backstory into ingame books. They think I’ll read every single ingame book just in case it teaches me a spell or gives me experience points. They’re right. Finding a book and not opening it to see if anything happens is like finding a chest and not opening it. You just don’t do it.
Deep cuts. Three-sixty quick-scope balls-out badassness. No shits to give. Farming Simulator 17 is on the way for PC and consoles. Listen, I was farming all the crops before you were a gleam in your daddy’s eye. Don’t start nothing, and there won’t be nothing. You think them crops harvest themselves? Son, get yourself in check. I’m dropping mad cultivation. Farming Simulator 17 is going to be the mac-daddy of agricultural gangsta tricks.
Among the many new features to be announced in the coming months for Farming Simulator 17, we are happy to unveil that modding support – which is exceptionally popular on PC – is making its grand debut on consoles!
Stories are weaker when they have a blank slot where a protagonist should be. MMOs are a worst case example of this, because the developers — the storytellers — have no way of knowing what race, class, sex, or morality you’re playing. What sort of story would Star Wars be if George Lucas asked you, “Hey, should Luke give the droids to the Imperials or should he fly them to Alderaan?”
After the jump, how many paragon points are we talking about here?Continue reading →
