If you’re like me, you’re thrilled about today’s update to Hand of Fate 2, the deck builder meets brawler meets RPG that does some of the cleverest stuff with cards this side of a Now You See Me movie. According to this Steam post from the developers, the update is designed to “empower players of all skill levels”. We all know what that means, right? There’s no need to sugar-coat it. That’s the code phrase for “waaah, you thought the game was too hard, so now that it’s been out long enough for the real fans to enjoy it, I guess we’ll dumb it down for the rest of you losers”. Not that I’m complaining. It’s just that I know how to translate developerspeak.
For instance, the update includes “improvements to player character responsiveness and evasion.” That means “okay, some of you guys are slower than we realized, so we gave you more time to press the buttons.” You can use the bad-ass magic items called artefacts more often. The attack that used to bust armor is now useful for knocking dudes back and stunning them. This is all great news. As someone who’s barely unlocked half of the campaign, I’m grateful for the opportunity to not die so often when I play. And if the above changes aren’t enough, I can always just throw in the towel and play in the new “apprentice mode”. When you play this way, the stuff with tricky timing just happens automatically. Hey, look, I just riposted that guy who was trying to attack me! Aren’t I quite the accomplished swordsman?
I like a punishing rogue-like as much as the next guy, and so long as there’s some steady trickle of advancement, I’m fine with unrelenting death. But I really appreciate it when games like Hand of Fate 2, Enter the Gungeon (see this update), and Darkest Dungeon decide to ease up on me after a while. The people who are really good had their chance. Now it everyone else’s turn.
Sometimes one new idea can stifle decades of opportunities. Solitaire wargames were almost unknown when On Target Games — basically a one-man operation in West Allis, WI — published B-17: Queen of the Skies back in 1981. A game you played yourself, by rolling dice and generating a narrative about your bomber crew, was oddly compelling in an era when many gamers were forced to solo games for lack of opponents. Avalon Hill saw the obvious potential and acquired it, and published a much nicer-looking version in 1983. Despite the fact that it was, as Greg Costikyan described it at GDC in 2009, “little more than a series of tables on which the player rolls dice,” it seemed to have some essential magic that designers chased for years. Thirty-five years later, in 2018, Legion Wargames released Target for Today, an essentially “upgraded” version of B-17 (after having published a similar bomber-centric game, B-29 Superfortress, in 2011). In between, games like Patton’s Best and The Hunters — and others — helped codify the “story through charts and tables” design school that exempted designers from having to think too hard.
The idea of piloting a bomber through a series of missions is such an obvious story hook that there have been plenty of cardboard and digital entrants in the genre, from 50 Mission Crush to B-17: The Mighty Eighth to the very recent Bomber Crew. But tabletop depictions of the skies above wartime Germany can’t recreate the frantic action of air combat the way a digital game can, so boardgame designers have anchored their games in the desire for mission-to-mission progression, flying repeatedly over the terrain of occupied Europe in an attempt to weave stories out of the unvarying path of a single aircraft.
The key realization that Jeremy White (designer of The Dambuster Raid and The Doolittle Raid solitaire games) and Mark Aasted, designers of Skies Above the Reich, forced on me was that there was nothing wrong with following a bomber on a series of missions. There was, in fact, nothing wrong with following a bunch of bombers on a bunch of missions, as Dan Verssen’s B-17: Flying Fortress Leader and Erik von Rossing’s A Wing and a Prayer did. The problem was the missions themselves: as soon as you knew where you were going, your bombers just had to take off and go there. Meaning you could react to events, but couldn’t drive them. But who could possibly drive events in a game about the bombing of Germany? The bombers are certainly a designer’s last hope.
In all the RPGs I’ve ever played, you cast Fireball and it does whatever d6s of damage it’s going to do, along with whatever damage-over-time fire inflicts. Easy as you please. Okay, maybe there are some games that require some sort of casting time, during which my wizard might get interrupted while he’s reciting the Fireball incantation. Fair enough. At least the warrior can just straight-up do his Shield Bash and the cleric can use her hammer for a Hammer Slam. Do the action, roll the damage, apply a dazed effect or whatever, done. Easy as you please.
Prison Architect is testing a multiplayer building mode. The surprise Update 16 for the 2015 sim from Introversion is currently in testing for the Steam version and adds co-op online multiplayer that lets budding wardens run their penitentiaries together. In the video, the developers explain that the 8-player multiplayer feature is very much an “early alpha” run and does not use the full build of the sim. Wiring and reports aren’t functional in the Steam test build, but that may change later. It’s not a “prison industrial complex” without other people in on the business.
Baoz Yakin’s last movie, Max, was about Kate Mara saving a disabled dog. When the name of the movie is also the name of the dog, you know what you’re getting. Fun for the whole family, assuming the whole family enjoys saccharine animal movies. But now he’s made this bloody burlesque? Don’t be fooled by the prosaic title. Boarding School is a delighfully macabre coming-of-age freak show, in which each development is weirder than the next.
The key to this horror show is Luke Prael, an aburdly pretty child actor whose prettiness was one of the running jokes in the movie Eighth Grade. But he’s no joke here. Although he’s a bit stiff, he’s admirably fearless. He needs to be since Boarding School plays subversively with gender identity and sexuality. This isn’t the Spielburg/King homage you might expect when the title card says, “The 90s”. It’s dressed to kill at sleepaway camp. It wants to let the right one in. This stuff can be dicey when it involves kids. It can be even dicier when the kids have serious disabilities. And even dicier still in a movie about murder, ghosts, monsters, vampires, Nazis, and Will Patton’s malevolent smirk.
Patton’s having a great time in Boarding School, and he’s squarely in the “giving no fucks” stage of his career as a character actor. He affects a pinched voice and an old coot demeanor. Such weird choices given the Dickensian cruelty of his character! But because the payoff comes down to conversations and decisions, weird works. Any ol’ horror movie about the demented principal of a scary boarding school can culminate in gratuitous bloodletting. Boarding School certainly isn’t shy about gore (a throat-slitting scene is uncomfortably memorable). But Yakin has been writing long enough to know that blood and fire are no substitute for conversations and decisions. And he writes well enough to ask, “Why not both?”
Penis creatures. That’s all gamers were looking forward to ten years ago. Penis creatures, penis buildings, and penis vehicles were hotly anticipated in the shared worlds of Spore. In 2008, “dickbutt” wasn’t even a thing, but thanks to the way we thought Spore would download random bits of other players’ creations, people expected nothing but crude approximations of genitalia to wind up in their games. While the rare phallic entity did show up from time to time, we mostly got goofy Technicolor blobs that looked like everyone else’s goofy blobs.
The real tragedy of Spore was the overenthusiastic marketing and crazy expectations fans had before the launch. It was going to be a Will Wright-designed sim from Maxis that featured life itself from the beginnings of single-cell organisms all the way to interstellar conquest. It was going to have everything. Procedural generation! User-made asset sharing! An in-game YouTube clip feature! Oh my God, imagine all the penis-monsters! In many ways, it was the harbinger of the industry. Shame about the gameplay. It was as shallow as the tide pool it started in.
In 2013, Soren Johnson, more famous now for being the lead designer of Civilization IV and co-founder of Mohawk Games, reflected on his short stint on the Spore team. Even now, his blog post is fascinating and instructive.
Spore’s biggest issue was that the play at each stage was fairly shallow because the team was making five games at once. (At one point, Will described each of the game’s five stages as light versions of classics – cell is like Pac-Man, creature is Diablo, tribe is Populous, civilization is Civilization, and space is Masters of Orion.) However, making five different games at once is a bad idea; making one good game is usually hard enough.
Ten years later, it’s easier to be charitable to Spore. It’s silly and engaging in the first few stages. The janky real-time strategy stage is terrible, and the interplanetary stuff is pure hogwash, but there’s something satisfying about collecting animal parts and wandering your Teletubbies Spore world. If you just stay in the animal stage, it’s a decent lark. Check it out. This is the penis monster I made.
If you’re hoping for a bunch more Star Wars tables for Zen, well, yeah, you’re getting some of those. But you’re also getting a whole lot more, and it’s like nothing else Zen Pinball has done.
Of all the action RPGs out there — sheesh, there are a bunch of them! — you’ll find plenty that know how to situate the mindlessness of hack-and-slash in a larger and less mindless context. Soldak’s Zombicide drops you into evolving worlds to navigate a web of creatures and factions chasing their own agendas. The hand-made geography of Grim Dawn, a game built to encourage you to explore its nooks and crannies, trumps any procedural arrangement of dungeon tiles under forest paths next to castle walls. The intricacy of a Path of Exile character build, wending its way through that ridiculously complex chart, like some advanced celestial navigation. The breadth, personality, and dynamism Guild Wars 2 brings to traditional MMO world-building.
All of these action RPGs offer compelling reasons to wade through potentially repetitive slaughter to level up a character. They all understand how to answer the question “Why?”. But none of them compares to Diablo when it comes to the moment-to-moment hack-and-slash. The animation, the rhythm, the variety, the information-rich chaos. Where the blade meets the bone, where the arrow meets the artery, where the fireball meets the flesh, that’s where Blizzard truly excels. The why of Diablo falls away before the glory of its what.
The latest update for space survival crafting game, No Man’s Sky, features community challenges. Starting today, explorers can fulfill special fetch quests that reward players with quicksilver. Instead of giving you mercury poisoning, you can trade quicksilver in for stuff like a “mind blown” gesture for the rare times you’ll use an emote in multiplayer, cosmetic decals, and exclusive base components. The initial wave will have a small selection of community challenge items, but Hello Games will add more as the season progresses.
Over the coming weeks this will expand to 50+ items, including further base parts, emotes, customisations, exocraft, and more.
Hey, that’s not a submarine in that concept art from the Subnautica: Below Zero teaser site. That’s not even underwater! Hmm. What could the folks at the aptly named Unknown Worlds have planned for the next step in Subnautica? Dry land? Or at least wet land that’s frozen? We’ll know soon enough when it enters beta, and for a longtime thereafter we’ll have to make the hard choice between playing Below Zero in whatever state it’s currently in or waiting until it’s finished. It seemed like it was forever before I could play a version of Subnautica willing to call itself v1.0. And based on this comment…
In the coming months, we will release Below Zero in Steam Early Access. Then, we will begin releasing consistent content updates, carefully crafting the game based on player feedback – Just like the original Subnautica.
…it sounds like it’ll be another forever before a version of Below Zero is willing to call itself v1.0.
There are a lot more people on the roads of Afghanistan since I was there about a year ago. And by Afghanistan, I mean Afghanistan ’11, the brilliant hearts-and-minds strategy game that explores the overlapping roles of combat and nation-building. I was just poking around in the new Royal Marines DLC, which adds British units from a time when Brexit sounded like the name of a wheat cracker. It also adds cars. Lot of cars. It’s bumper to bumper out there. Whose cars are these? What are they doing out and about while I’m ferrying soldiers, dropping airstrikes, refueling helicopters, and trying to patch up another leaking water tank for some village that won’t even tell me where the opium is at.
This page announcing the DLC says that some cars are carrying car bombs, and I can intercept them by setting up roadblocks. Eventually I can recruit local police to man the roadblocks. The Afghanis trying to get someplace in their cars can be hassled by locals instead of foreign soldiers. I wasn’t sure how all this worked, so after Alpha Company spent a few turns loitering around in front of concrete barricades, I told them to pack it in. They went back to base. Meanwhile, my political capital had plummeted because I’d forgotten how to play. The game over screen came along shortly thereafter. To the manual! Unfortunately, none of this is in the manual yet. In fact, the manual hasn’t been updated to include any of Afghanistan ’11’s new features. There are plenty of them, starting with convoys, then MOABs, then new rules for politics, combat, garrisons, villages, special forces, and now new UK units, car bombs, and so forth. Afghanistan ’11 has gotten plenty of updates, including a bunch of new content. Yet the manual still says “this feature is coming soon” in the place I went to remind myself how convoys work. Convoys were added over a year ago. As far as I can tell, you won’t find any documentation for anything released after the game first came out. Post-release support should include reminding guys like me how to play when we come back after a long absence. A couple of tersely worded pinned posts in the Steam forum don’t cut it.
The Royal Marines DLC comes out September 6th for the PC. It will be available for the iOS version at an unspecified later date. Between now and then, I’ll be trying my best to figure it all out.
With this week’s release of the zombie DLC for Far Cry 5, Ubisoft has fulfilled its commitment to folks who bought the season’s pass. So how did it all turn out? What did you get for your $30? This is not a good week to ask that question. The latest add-on, Dead Living Zombies, is unmitigated junk, and that’s especially clear if you’re playing Rebellion’s surprisingly smart Strange Brigade.
Spelunky 2 is coming in 2019. Creator Derek Yu spoke to the official PlayStation blog and explained some of the terrifying new gameplay features for his hard-as-nails roguelike platforming sequel. Along with the expected stuff like new enemies, traps, and areas, the sequel will have liquid physics like waterfalls and lava flows, mounts, and each level gets a second layer to explore. Ana Spelunky, daughter of the first game’s protagonist, will have so many exciting ways to meet her end! With the addition of online multiplayer, you can even have live witnesses to your ignoble demise.
Marvel’s Spider-Man from Insomniac Games has a post-launch content roadmap. Sony and Insomniac Games have published the schedule for their City That Never Sleeps DLC installments. The first content release, titled The Heist, will be on October 23rd. Turf Wars, the second pack, will launch in November. The final bit, Silver Lining will grace PlayStation 4 drives in December. The three-pack bundle can be purchased for $24.99, or you can pick up each pack separately for $9.99 each. The Heist’s action centers around Spidey’s on-again, off-again, love interest and thief, Catwoman! Or maybe it’s Black Cat.
As you play the base game, you’ll realize that Felicia Hardy, aka Black Cat, is back in town and she’s leaving clues around town to toy with Spider-Man. In Marvel’s Spider-Man: The Heist, she finally reveals herself.
Marvel’s Spider-Man launches for the PlayStation 4 on September 7th.
