Tyler F.M. Edwards's Blog, page 5

WoW: Pandaria Remix After Action Report

My World of Warcraft subscription has now run out. For the last month before it did, I spent almost all of my time on the Mists of Pandaria Remix event, which proved far more enjoyable than I ever expected. After two months of Dragonflight, I was starting to wonder if maybe WoW just wasn’t for me anymore, but the Remix made me realize it’s still a game I can enjoy.

This is partly down to the systems of the Remix itself, which showered rewards from the heavens, but also a lot down to the inherent strength of Pandaria as an expansion. It had some of the best story, music, environment art, and dungeon design of any expansion. Really it’s only flaws were in its endgame systems, none of which are relevant in the Remix, which has its own systems, so this is just peak WoW across the board.

It really struck me while playing that the Remix had fixed almost everything wrong with World of Warcraft. Too grindy? Anything you’d want to achieve in the Remix can be done almost effortlessly. Too much irrelevant older content? Everything scales to cap; literally nothing is ever irrelevant in the Remix. Restrictions on flight got you down? You can fly, including dragonriding, right from character creation.

Too much focus on raids? Well, that one was still a little true, with normal raids being all but required to get XP threads for your cloak in a reasonable timeframe, but doing the bare minimum of them needed was trivially easy, and every form of content awards bronze, threads, and gems, so again there’s no content that isn’t relevant and rewarding, even at endgame. It’s not like raids are the only game in town, at least not once you’ve got enough XP threads for fast leveling.

I was also reminded how perfectly scenarios fit into the eco-system of WoW’s endgame as a lighter alternative to dungeons and raids. I still can’t believe they ever stopped making them. I hope delves in War Within will scratch the same itch, but we’ll see.

Also, does anyone else feel like Pandaria is far more suited to dragonriding than the Dragon Isles are? There’s enough verticality to feel interactive, but not obnoxious. I’m not fighting with my vigour to slog out of the lowlands of the Azure Span or bashing my face into trees every five seconds like in the Emerald Dream. Suddenly dragonriding was actually fun.

Giving the event seems to have been wildly popular, it feels all but certain that we’ll be getting another remix event at some point, though perhaps not for a while, as it seems tailor-made for end of expansion doldrums.

I’m calling it now: Legion will be the next expansion to be remixed. Like Pandaria, it’s a widely popular expansion that’s old enough to be feeling a bit nostalgic these days but not old enough to feel too dated. The class stories make it an ideal expansion for alt-leveling, and the Pandaria Remix cloak was based on the tech from Legion’s artifact weapons, so it should be pretty easy to convert it back to artifact weapons. They just need to make progress shared across specializations.

Whether the remix will have an impact on mainline WoW I’m not sure, but I’m cautiously optimistic that it will. I know we can’t just copy and paste remix mechanics into the main game, but it’s general attitudes of flexibility and making all content relevant would benefit the main game immensely. I dare to hope that one day we’ll look back at the Pandaria Remix as a turning point in WoW’s history.

The Remix did have its own problems, different from those of mainstream WoW. Mostly the insane power creep. And yes, that is meant to be part of the appeal, but for a three month event I think it should have taken more than a week or two before the high end players became able to solo every dungeon without effort. I wish there had been some kind of matchmaking based on cloak level so us mere mortals didn’t have to end up picking up scraps in the wake of some demi-god if we didn’t want to.

Thankfully not all groups were like that, not even a majority. Just enough to put a mild damper on an otherwise nearly perfect experience.

My main goal was to at last fulfill my decade-long ambition to level a Blood Elf paladin to cap, and I achieved that pretty early on. The paladin class is much as I remember it from Legion, which is largely a good thing. Holy is now once again a lot more like how it played before Legion, which is definitely a good thing. Healing is kind of a mess in the Remix, though, so I mostly played Ret and Prot.

These are both specs where absolutely every ability has a cooldown, which is not something I usually enjoy, but somehow it doesn’t bother me as much where paladin is concerned. The cooldowns are so quick there’s no downtime, and I was able to settle into a decent rhythm.

Something I do appreciate about Retribution is that it has an unusually high number of ways to customize your rotation, while sticking to its core identity of building holy power with short cooldown abilities and then spending it on your big nukes. More classes should work this way — lots of ways to add, remove, or alter the core abilities of your rotation within the context of the spec’s identity.

I ended up taking the talent that removes Crusader Strike in favour of your auto-attacks periodically generating holy power. I was worried it would add a lot of downtime to the rotation, but it didn’t add any at all, and somehow I felt it created a good flow.

After the paladin, I leveled up two more characters to max: a Blood Elf hunter using the new “dark ranger” customizations from Shadowlands, and an Undead death knight. I was a little mixed on both these classes, which perhaps isn’t surprising considering I’ve struggled to enjoy them in the past.

Marksmanship was the hunter spec that most appealed to me in theory, but I found it painfully dull in practice. Survival is actually pretty fun nowadays, but I didn’t roll a dark ranger to not use a bow.

That left Beast Mastery, and despite my usual dislike of pet classes in tab target MMOs, I ended up liking it pretty well, though I do find maintaining the buff from Barbed Shot unnecessarily stressful, and there’s still a bit too much fiddling about with short cooldown abilities. The plethora of instant cast abilities is nice, though.

I don’t like ascribing negative motivations to game devs, but I really get the vibe no one on the WoW team actually has any passion for the concept of an archer class. There’s never been another ranged weapon spec added to the game in the twenty years since launch, Survival got changed into a melee spec in Legion, Beast Mastery barely uses its weapon for anything, and every Marksmanship ability is just “you shoot an arrow.”

“But what else is an archer spec supposed to do?” you may ask, but you can give things more flavour and flair. Look at warrior, the most vanilla melee weapon user. Even they have crazy, dramatic abilities like stomping the earth so hard it shatters, shouting so hard you rupture the enemy’s blood vessels, and getting so angry you literally catch on fire. The only exciting or flashy button Marksmanship gets is Wailing Arrow… and the WoW team didn’t even come up with it! It’s originally from Heroes of the Storm!

Or look at archer classes in other games. Marksmanship hunters weep tears of bitter blood as they look upon the glory of Aion rangers.

Anyway…

Death knight’s kind of in the “I almost really like this” limbo it’s always been for me. The big problem is that right now there’s only spec I particularly enjoy, Frost. I don’t dislike Unholy, but it feels a little too clunky to grab me, and Blood is suffering from severe rotational bloat these days.

What I like about Frost is that it’s a very simple rotation with just a couple buttons, and it’s almost entirely resource-limited instead of cooldown-limited. It’s got a natural flow, and I can actually look at the game world and my character rather than watching cooldowns on my action bar the whole time.

And yes, it is a bit mindless. To be fair, nothing in WoW really takes a lot of thought. Even the most complex rotations are more like a test of your ability to rub your belly and pat your head at the same time than anything requiring tactical decision-making… but even still, I won’t lie and say Frost isn’t totally mindless.

I do wonder if I’m just losing the mental acuity to learn more complex playstyles as I get older. There’s probably a bit of that. But I think part of my reticence to invest in learning any more complex WoW specs these days is that any one I pick is probably going to be completely different next expansion anyway, or if not then the expansion after that.

A few years away has really impressed upon me how incredibly extreme and Not Normal Blizzard’s obsession with reinventing its own class design is. Balance tweaks and even the occasional full revamp are necessary parts of any live service game, of course, but WoW’s approach is far beyond what other games do. Really makes me feel like there’s no point in expending too much effort in learning any particular specialization, which does lead me to gravitate toward simpler ones.

So, yes, give me Frost’s mindless button spam. At least it’s still not as braindead as Arcane mage was in Cataclysm, or so I tell myself to get to sleep at night.

I also found the death knight is one of those characters that immediately came to life for me in terms of role-play. My concept for the character was basically, “Well, I was a paladin when I was alive, and I’m too damn old to change my ways now!”

It’s a bit sillier than my usual character concepts (which usually don’t involve any levity), but I did picture some genuine pathos behind this seemingly eccentric old man. He’s made a conscious choice to turn away from being the monster the Scourge made him, and it’s a struggle every day.

Aside from those main three characters, I also made a pair of Tauren, a shaman and a warrior, but I didn’t level either very far. I’d like to play Tauren more, but I already have more alts than I know what to do with. And yes, I know I already have a Tauren death knight from back in the day, and there’s no particularly good reason why I couldn’t play him instead of just making all these new characters. I’m complex.

Speaking of excessive alts, the one other thing I did in my final month besides frolic through Pandaria was play a bunch of my warlock and her demon hunter alter ego during a Timewalking dungeon event.

Demon hunter hasn’t changed much, but with other specs slipping a bit, I think I’d crown Vengeance my favourite tanking spec in the current state of the game. Still, it’s probably not new main class material, even if it’s one I definitely enjoy.

Warlock, though… I started to kind of regret I haven’t really played my warlock since I’ve been back. I think I had more fun playing Destruction than any other spec since I’ve been back, and Affliction feels pretty good, too. Again, nice simple rotations that are mostly resource-focused.

It’s kind of sad how warlocks and Frost DKs play more like rogues than any of the actual rogue specs these days.

I think they revamped the spell animations for warlocks since I played last, too; I don’t remember them being anywhere near this dramatic. They really capture the reckless rage I always felt was driving my warlock.

Anyway, I’m still waffling a bit on if I’ll be resuming my sub, but if I do, I may have to abandon my plan to keep the warlock in mothballs until Midnight.

Song of the Month: July Talk, Paper Girl

A few weeks back bhagpuss featured a song by Toronto’s own July Talk in one of his music posts. Wondering if I’d shared it myself, I was shocked to discover I have apparently never featured July Talk in my Song of the Month segment before.

It is true that I haven’t liked the direction the band has taken in their more recent albums, but their first two albums are absolute killers, so you’d really think I would have posted something by now.

There’s also an amazing live band, by the by. When I saw them, Leah spent most of the song Guns + Ammunition crowdsurfing, brought her mic with her, kept singing the whole time, and didn’t miss a beat. To say nothing of the provocative poses and raw sexual energy that make their performances feel as much burlesque show as rock concert.

Anyway, here’s possibly my favourite song of theirs, though Summer Dress and Beck + Call are also strong contenders.

Seeing that this video is eleven years old has done me serious psychological harm.

New World: Having a Blast, Despite the Bugs

In theory, New World should finally be unveiling their Big Mysterious Announcement at the Summer Game Fest today. Before that, I have some musings on my recent adventures in the game.

Full disclosure first, though: I wrote this post about a month ago. I’m currently working on a new TTRPG project (for another company, not my own work), and I pre-wrote my blog and Massively posts for several weeks so I could focus on that. So it’s possible that some or all of what I say in this post is now wildly out of date, but you can at least consider it a time capsule of my experiences in New World a month ago.

My focus lately has mainly been on playing my Covenant alt, who as I’ve probably said before is now more of a co-main, as often happens with me.

While I still love her traditional bow/spear light armour build, I’ve also been spending a lot of time with a heavy armour set that stacks strength and wields a sword and shield alongside a greatsword. Whereas her original build is all about not being hit, this one is all about being able to take whatever enemies can throw at me and just keep fighting. I even tanked my first dungeon recently, although it was a story mode, so that hardly counts.

The greatsword is a weapon I always wanted to like in theory, but struggled to enjoy in practice, despite its incredible (arguably excessive) power level. I still wish its attack speed wasn’t quite so slow, but I do think I’ve finally found a set-up I enjoy with it.

After going back and forth between the two skill trees and their associated stances, I’ve settled on a build that allows me to weave both stances. I’m mostly using the Defiance tree, but I added Crosscut from the Onslaught tree. The idea is to open with Crosscut for a big burst of damage, then my options diverge depending on the situation.

On harder fights, I immediately follow up with Calamity Counter to activate Defiant Stance, then throw in a Steadfast Strike and stay in Defiant Stance for the extra survivability, repeating the rotation as necessary once my abilities are off-cooldown. When facing weaker foes, I can stay in Onslaught Stance after using Crosscut and swiftly finish them off with the faster heavy attacks.

I love the versatility and decision-making, and I regret not going this route sooner. The idea of weaving between greatsword’s two stances always seemed so intimidating, but in hindsight this combination of active skills feels obvious, and I feel dumb for not figuring it out sooner.

I’ve also been working towards buying her second house, which will be in Brimstone Sands. I waffled for a long time, as I don’t like desert zones much, but New Corsica is a gorgeous town and its houses are arguably the best in the game, being both beautiful and spacious. It’s also still the zone with the most challenging and fun open world solo content.

I’m still deciding how to decorate the house, but I was thinking of setting it up less as a private home and as more of a chapterhouse or mission for the Covenant. I see this character as a real true believer in their cause; she could use a place to preach to the converts. It’s a shame there isn’t much in the way of faction-themed furniture, but I’m sure I can come up with something.

Now is an odd time to play New World. Even as a die-hard cheerleader for the game, there’s a definite storm cloud hanging over it. I think the chatter about “no content” on social media is pretty out of touch with reality — I’ve got more to do in-game than there are hours in the day — but the developers also seem to be running scared, and that does have me worried.

Aside from the strange radio silence punctuated by the mantra of “wait for the June announcement,” they seem to have all but raised the white flag when it comes to bugs. The Slayer Script update that was supposed to make the game more stable only added more problems, which could be explained as growing pains, but it’s taking what seems like forever for anything to get fixed. Probably it will all be fixed by the time you’re reading this, but it’s already taken longer than it should have. There’s a definite sense that the live game has been abandoned in favour of whatever today’s announcement will be.

It’s all so strange because a few short months ago I would have said the game was in a great place. Aside from the bugs it still is. It always had the best moment to moment gameplay of any MMORPG on the market, and mounts and the cross realm group finder really were the secret sauce New World was missing to take it to the next level.

I had already started the draft of a Vitae Aeternum column about how New World had finally found its footing and was entering its golden age. Then season five got delayed, and it’s kind of all been downhill from there.

I do still hope to finish that column at some point, but it doesn’t quite feel appropriate in the current climate. I’ve now also got outlines for a column in the event the game goes free to play, and in the event it shutters, though I certainly I hope I won’t need the latter any time soon.

I suspect what happened is that Rise of the Angry Earth didn’t bring back as many players as they hoped, and that sent them scrambling on a hail Mary plan to do something else to boost player numbers. I wonder if the current population is truly unsustainable, or if they’re just still chasing the probably unrealistic idea of getting back to their lofty launch numbers? Even the latter could still threaten the game’s future if Amazon’s upper level management are sufficiently heartless and greedy.

(And if any of y’all come into the comments talking about how the game only has seven thousand players, please go look up the definition of “concurrent” before I forcefeed you my boot, because I spend way too much time lurking New World social media and I can’t take that nonsense anymore.)

I don’t know what to predict at this point. At the start of 2024 I would have said New World’s future looked bright, but things went off the rails real fast.

And even then, it does need to be said that the game still kicks ass in so many ways. I’m still playing almost every day and enjoying the hell out of it. Even with the bugs, I think this is the best MMORPG still in active development by a pretty commanding margin. Which is both very high praise of all New World does well and a bit of an indictment of the rest of the genre.

I hope whatever gets announced today proves to be the win the game needs. Stay tuned to my column at Massively Overpowered for coverage of that in the near future. I’d be perfectly happy with some bug fixes and for the content cadence to continue as it has, but something needs to be done to improve the game’s reputation. I think a lot of its bad press is underserved (not all, but a lot), but regardless the negative image exists, and it needs to change.

Because regardless of what you’ve heard, there’s a great game here, and it’ll be even better once the bugs get fixed.

Song of the Month: The Naked and Famous, Higher

Apropos of nothing, I’ve been on a real Naked and Famous kick lately. Sometimes you forget about a band for a while until they pop up on shuffle and you remember why you love them so much.

WoW: A Partial Changing of the Guard

I continue to walk the tight rope of what to post on my blog versus what to write as paid columns on Massively Overpowered. As you may have already seen, I’ve got a four part series of columns covering my big thoughts on the state of World of Warcraft that will be releasing on MOP over the coming weeks, but I’ve got some more personal thoughts to share here.

Consider this a bit of a follow-up to my previous post, where I wondered what characters I would be bringing forward into this new WoW era.

I started out leveling my rogue through Dragonflight. But it soon became clear that the rogue class had been butchered like a hog (A hog I tell you!) in my absence. More on that in my MOP column series, but suffice it to say it was time to return to her to the sad role of neglected alt.

I then spent my “enhanced” level seventy boost on my monk, who has become my main for this expansion. Despite my bringing her to level cap in every expansion I’ve played since the inception of the monk class, this is the first time she’s worn the mantle of “main.”

I’m glad to have done it once, but I’m not sure I’ll do it again. Monk is an excellent class, but I’m not sure it’s quite my absolute favourite.Windwalker is probably my vote for the most fun DPS in group content currently, but they’re kind of suffering from success when playing solo. All you do is one-shot everything with Touch of Death and Rising Sun Kick, and while WoW’s open world content is never challenging, it’d be nice to at least use more than one button while playing.

Brewmaster was my preferred spec in the past, and it’s still okay, but it’s never been quite the same since Blizzard took chi away from it. Also tank damage in general seems to have gone done since I played last, so questing as a tank is once again kind of a slog.

Meanwhile Mistweaver still feels a bit odd to me. I don’t dislike it, but it’s never really clicked for me. I’ve actually mostly been Fistweaving (healing through damage) when I play it in raids this expansion, which I haven’t done before. Fits my backstory for the character better, and it’s not an unpleasant playstyle, but it doesn’t really feel like healing at that point. You’re just a discount Windwalker.

I’ve also gotten my warrior to cap. I’m a bit ambivalent on whether I’ll actually be playing The War Witihin (again, more on that on Massively in the coming weeks), but if I do it feels like a good time to go all-in on playing Dwarves. Underground expansion and all. And I did have a surprising amount of fun with the warrior class back in Legion, but didn’t spend a huge amount of time actually playing it.

It hasn’t changed much since, so I’m still having a lot more fun with it than I’d expect given my dislike for warrior as an archetype in most games, but it’s not quite what I’d call top tier fun-wise, so I’m not sure she’s “new main” material. Was fun to spend more time with the character, at least. It baffles me that almost no one plays female Dwarves in WoW. They’re absolutely adorable, and their animations are full of personality.

On that note, we have had our first major new addition to the cast. I’ve created a Dark Iron Dwarf shaman to replace my aged Orc shaman. Tentatively thinking she’ll be the new main if/when I play War Within. Elemental and Restoration remain extremely fun specs, and I’m quite enjoying the voice overs for the female Dark Irons. Again, why no love for the Dwarf girls?

Otherwise, I’ve toyed around with leveling some of my excess alts from Legion just enough to get a feel for how classes have changed and unlock the heritage armours for their races.

The heritage armour quests are pretty hit and miss. Most are a bit forgettable, but I did enjoy the human and Orc ones considerably. Especially the Orc heritage quest; that’s now one of my favourite quest chains from the whole history of the game.

I played it on my old shaman, and this felt like the perfect swansong for the character. He had always been about restoring the honour and spirituality of the Orcish people, and bringing back the traditions of the Kosh’harg festival is the ideal representation of that.

I’m not going to delete the character — maybe I might even dust him off for timewalking now and then — but for now I consider him retired, and in the story I tell to myself in my head, he’s reached the end of his days. I like to imagine he laid down on his furs the night of the festival, drifted off to sleep, and joined the spirits of his ancestors, his wartorn heart having found peace and redemption at last.

One thing I haven’t done much of this expansion is play Blood Elves, aside from a few timewalking runs and the heritage quest, and that does make me feel something is wrong in the universe.

Although I enjoy the current state of both classes, my warlock/demon hunter remains in moth balls for role-play reasons. If I make it that far, I’d thought of dusting her off for the Midnight expansion, which is supposed to be about defending Quel’thalas. That’d certainly get her out of retirement. I’ve also thought of playing her again with some sort of (cosmetic?) change to reflect her finding some form of emotional healing, but I haven’t settled on anything.

I had vaguely given some thought to leveling up my mage. The RP justification for him stepping out of the spotlight doesn’t feel as strong, and Fire spec is actually quite fun these days (even if I do hate that they gave Living Bomb a cooldown). The hero talents for mage in the upcoming expansion also look quite cool, which is more than I can say for most classes’ hero talents. Not sure I want to level through Dragonflight again, though, and there’s no real need for another max level alt right now.

We may soon see some other new faces appear with the upcoming Pandaria Remix leveling event. Still not sure if I’m going to play a lot of that or not. I do love Pandaria, but I played plenty of it back in the day, and it remains to be seen how much I’ll appreciate the “remix” aspect.

I’ve been thinking of making a Blood Elf paladin to replace the old human one for a while, so that will likely be my first priority. I’ve also considered making a new death knight. Nothing really wrong with the old one, but he’s another character where I kind of like the idea of him getting to retire. Becoming an undead vessel of disease and violence is so far against what the Tauren hold dear it feels a bit depressing playing him sometimes.

Paradoxically, I do still kind of want to play a Tauren (especially now that I have their amazing heritage armour), but I’m not sure what class they’d be. I don’t really need another warrior or shaman, which would feel the most appropriate choices. I thought about a Survival hunter, but the current incarnation of that spec has them constantly chucking Looney Tunes bombs, and that just doesn’t fit a Tauren at all.

All that’s a lot of rumination for a game I’m still not sure I’ll be back to once my current sub expires, but for good or ill, it seems WoW can still get me obsessing like nothing else.

Song of the Month: Monowhales, Hear Me Out

Toronto power pop band Monowhales recently announced they’re splitting up. This is quite a shocking revelation, as they seemed to have just hit their stride as a band, and the announcement came mid-tour, with remaining shows needing to be cancelled as a result. While the announcement is full of positive language about wanting to go out on a high note and pursue other projects, the sudden nature of it does lead me to believe there was some behind the scenes drama.

While I wouldn’t call myself a massive Monowhales fan, I’ve generally enjoyed their work, and it’s been gratifying watching them continually grow as a band, so this is disappointing news. I thought I’d honour their legacy by sharing another of their songs — this is now perhaps their final big radio hit.

Fun fact: I once stumbled across Sally, the singer, on a dating app. Her profile said she wanted some song recommendations, so I told her to check out Efflo, who were still a thing at the time. She never responded, not that I expected her to. No harm in trying, eh?

Growing Frustration with Stormgate

After an releasing an intensely mediocre Steam Next Fest demo, Stormgate developer Frost Giant Studios has continued to court controversy. The developers have caused confusion over what “fully funded to launch” means, they’ve flirted with the idea of using generative AI to run its story NPCs, and they’ve launched an equity crowdfunding campaign.

I think equity crowdfunding is a bit of a dodgy road to go down in the first place, but what really raised my eyebrows is that in the documentation around said campaign they claim StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty was their previous release.

This is problematic because — and I can’t stress this enough — Frost Giant Studios and Blizzard Entertainment are not the same company.

Yes, some people at Frost Giant are ex-Blizzard, but the extent to which they have anointed themselves Blizzard 2 is getting really questionable, and they certainly can’t claim to have been the same team that launched WoL.

I’ve seen some seemingly well-researched claiming that actually had a major leadership role in the development of SC2. Certainly as a long time SC2 fanatic I can confirm that the only names I recognize at Frost Giant are Micky Neilson, who is just doing lore and not even a full-timer at FG, and Kevin Dong, who only joined the SC2 co-op team well after its launch (and in hindsight co-op’s quality dropped significantly under his leadership).

When I think of the main brains behind SC2, I think David Kim, Dustin Browder, Chris Metzen, Brian Kindregan, and Valerie Watrous, none of whom are employees at Frost Giant to my knowledge. Metzen is supposedly doing some consulting for them, but we have no idea how big his role actually is.

I’m generally in favour of not ascribing to malice that which can be explained by incompetence, and I think calling game devs shady is an over-used trope, but I find it really hard to frame Frost Giant’s claim of ownership over Wings of Liberty as anything but deliberately disingenuous.

At this point I’ve lost pretty much all hope for Stormgate. There’s just way too many red flags around the game, not the least of which being that its current version just isn’t fun.

It’s frustrating because the RTS genre really needs a new champion right now, and Stormgate seemed to be the best candidate. Age of Empires IV has stumbled a lot post-launch. Godsworn is fun, but too small to be the Next Big Thing. ZeroSpace and Immortal: Gates of Pyre both have great ideas, but I don’t think either has a very good chance to deliver on their lofty ambitions. ZeroSpace so far looks far too complex to appeal to casual gamers, Gates of Pyre has been all but silent for a worryingly long time, and both are from small teams with little to no mainstream name recognition.

I want to be clear I’m not saying this to hate on Gates of Pyre or ZeroSpace. I love the ideas both games have presented, and I would be incredibly happy to see both survive and thrive. I’m just worried they won’t be able to.

Still, I have more faith in them than I do in Stormgate at this point.

Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden Review

I meant to write this several weeks ago when I actually finished playing Don’t Nod’s latest, Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden, but I’ve had a dearth of spoons to spare. Still, I didn’t want to go without covering the game at all.

This is a game I’ve been hotly anticipating for a long time. I’ll say upfront: Ghosts of New Eden is a solid game that I definitely recommend, but it isn’t quite the masterpiece I’d hoped it would be.

Ghosts of New Eden is the tale of Red Mac Raith and Antea Duarte, a pair of 18th century ghost hunters who are also lovers. While investigating a particularly terrible haunting in New England, Antea is killed and becomes a ghost herself. The two must then grapple with the question of whether to fulfill their oath and grant Antea her final death, or use dark magic to try to restore her to life, all while continuing to contend with the powerful spirit who killed her.

Fantastic premise. In practice it feels very much like Don’t Nod’s earlier game, Vampyr, with the player given the choice to sacrifice people to Antea or spare their lives during a series of “haunting case” side quests. Indeed, this feels like it is essentially Vampyr 2 — there’s even an Easter egg that confirms Ghosts of New Eden is set within the same universe as Vampyr.

I enjoyed that kind of moral decision-making in Vampyr, and it’s executed even better here. Almost none of the cases offer clear black and white answers; each is a gripping self-contained narrative, and the game is worth it for the haunting cases alone. It’s genuinely one of the best examples of “choices matter” game design I’ve ever seen.

Unraveling the mystery behind the ghost at the heart of New Eden’s curse is also highly compelling. The Nightmare is one of the most memorable antagonists I’ve seen in a video game recently.

Surprisingly, though, I did find Red and Antea’s story a little less compelling. Not to say it was boring or anything, but it didn’t tug at my heartstrings as much as I thought it would. A lot of this boils down to the fact that Antea isn’t actually a very likable character. She’s not a bad person or anything, but she’s frequently abrasive and often hypocritical. This is realistic; nobody’s perfect, and she does feel very three dimensional as a character. It’s good writing. But it didn’t leave me desperate to save her the way I was with Chloe in Life Is Strange.

Red is an absolute sweetheart, though. My efforts to save Antea were mainly for his sake.

I do also enjoy the simple fact that this is a story about an established, mostly healthy couple. That’s so incredibly rare in media, and it’s something I’ve long been hungry for.

This is also another case where I got the “bad” ending, but didn’t really mind. It was a bad ending for the characters, but a good ending for me as the player, answering many questions.

So the story isn’t quite the emotional tour de force I was expecting, but it’s still very good, and easily justifies the game’s price tag. My true complaints lie more with the gameplay.

At this point I expect the gameplay of a Don’t Nod action game to be a bit janky or underwhelming, but Ghosts of New Eden has what I would say is the worst combat of any Don’t Nod game to date.

It’s not even that it’s actively unpleasant or anything. It’s just… kind of boring. Nothing about it stands out. I like the idea of being able to swap between Red and Antea to combine physical and ghostly powers, but they didn’t give either character a clear role or mechanical identity. You can kind of give them those things with the build system (which is surprisingly deep for this kind of quasi-RPG), but it still never really came together for me.

So the combat isn’t terrible, but it isn’t that fun, either, and gods, there’s so much of it. You can’t walk ten feet without fighting something. And there’s very, very little variety of enemy types, so it starts to feel incredibly repetitive after a while.

The fast travel system is also a problem. It’s one of those ones where you can only teleport from one fast travel point to another, and there aren’t very many of them. This is a game that involves a great deal of backtracking and revisiting old areas, which I actually like in theory (makes the world feel more cohesive), but it really shines an unwelcome light on the limitations of the fast travel system. And with so much hoofing it through the wilderness, you’ll need to be subjected to a lot more of that endless, repetitive combat.

There’s also an absurd amount of collectibles and non-story side activities, all of which add basically nothing to the game since most of the rewards are crafting materials that you will soon have far more of than you could ever possibly need. At least you can skip those with minimal consequence.

It’s not a great video game, but it is a great story, and the strength of the writing is sufficient to make it worth wading through all those wolves and ghosts.

Overall rating: 8/10

Thoughts on Halo’s Bizarre Second Season

I was sure I had posted about the Halo TV series when the first season aired, but I can’t find the post now, so presumably it was yet another thing I’ve let fall through the cracks recently.

The short version is I was a big fan. I haven’t technically played the games, but I did watch through them on YouTube for the stories. I found the plot of the original trilogy largely enjoyable, in no small part due to the massive influence it clearly draws from StarCraft, but I don’t view it as an unimpeachable masterpiece with no room for improvement.

The first season of the TV series felt to me like it took the source material and elevated it, adding a level of depth that a first person shooter can’t deliver. It was a great deconstruction of the super-soldier trope, illustrating in exquisite detail just what a horrible idea turning humans into weapons actually is.

After an interminable wait of several years, the bite-sized eight episode second season has finally arrived (modern television is a miserable hellscape). Between seasons, they completely changed the showrunning team; I was concerned this would make the show feel different, and good lord did it ever.

This is scarcely recognizable as the same series. This is especially true in the early part of the season, where they go out of their way to avoid addressing season one’s cliffhanger or continue its plot threads for several episodes before finally circling back around to continuing the original story. What an utterly bizarre way to do things.

Even once things do meander back to the original plot, it never quite feels the same. Many cast members have wildly different characterizations. Even visually, the show feels radically different. Once a very bright and colourful show, the pallet has become dominated by grey and gloom.

The style of writing is different, too. Season one felt shockingly smart considering the source material. I wouldn’t say season two is dumb, but it does hew a lot closer to standard media tropes and generally feels more safe and predictable.

It’s all even more confusing because if you were going to reset the direction of the show, you’d think it would be to bring it more in line with the canon of the games, as season one deviated from it a lot. But that’s largely not the case. Things do start to trend a bit more towards the events of the games, particularly near the end, but it’s still diverging pretty wildly from original canon.

I am, as I said, a big fan of season one, but a criticism I can agree with it is that it had far too little focus on the Halo itself, and on Cortana. Some dudebro gamers may disagree with me on this, but I’ll die on the hill that Cortana is the real main character of this franchise. Master Chief is her sidekick.

But bafflingly these are mistakes season two continues to make. The Halo isn’t even mentioned for the first several episodes, and Cortana is barely there.

It’s not a bad season, to be clear. I’m griping a lot, but it’s still a largely enjoyable action series. It’s mostly the comparison to season one that makes it suffer. Season two isn’t bad, but season one was better, and the jarringly abrupt transition between the two styles is so hard to overcome.

Mind you, it does seem like most of the fanbase prefers this season, so once again I appear to be the lone voice in the wilderness on this. One day it would be really nice to have a normal opinion on something…

I’m invested enough in the show that I’d like to see another season (which given current trends will probably be three episodes long and take five years to make), but I do really wish we could have seen the original showrunners deliver on their vision.

Song of the Month: Lauren Mayberry, Change Shapes

Having enjoyed seeing it performed live a few months ago, I’ve been eagerly anticipating the studio version of Lauren Mayberry’s Change Shapes.

I think I liked the live version a little better, but this is still pretty catchy.

But why not decide for yourself? Here’s the video I recorded of her performance of the song when she last visited Toronto. The sound quality isn’t the best, but I think it still captures the energy of the performance pretty well.