Tyler F.M. Edwards's Blog, page 8

Gaming Round-Up: Summer Doldrums

Haven’t done one of these in a while, but I had a lot of things that seemed worth talking about but not worth devoting a whole post to, so let’s do a quick round-up of what I’ve been playing lately.

(I also considering doing a review of Across the Spider-Verse, but it doesn’t need my help. It’s one of the best movies ever made; if you haven’t seen it, go get on that instead of wasting your time reading about my gaming.)

New World

As you might have surmised from my columns on Massively Overpowered, New World has been my main game for most of the time since it’s launch. I think I’m finally ready to declare it my new “home” MMO, something I haven’t really had since The Secret World went into maintenance mode.

I don’t love New World as much as I did TSW, but it does scratch a lot of the same itches, albeit to a lesser degree, and I’m finding it feels more comfortable and welcoming the more time goes on. As I said in a recent column, it’s not perfect, but it is special.

That said, I have reached a bit of a plateau with it lately. I’ve finished all (solo) quests in every zone, and I’ve got two level-capped characters now. As the raid-focused season two doesn’t have a lot to offer my playstyle, I’m putting the game on the back burner until the fall expansion. I haven’t stopped playing entirely, but I’m giving it less time in favour of other things.

Star Trek: Resurgence

Considering the franchise has traditionally been more about talking than fighting, it’s honestly surprising it took until now for someone to make a Star Trek narrative game. For me, this Telltale-style take on TNG era Trek was an immediate purchase.

I did see beforehand that reviews were a bit mixed, and having finished it, I can see why. “Mixed” is probably the best description for it.

As a video game, it’s rough. I didn’t encounter many of the reported bugs, but the controls were messy, and the animations more so (what is wrong with the eyebrows of people in this game?!?). You can tell it was done a very strict budget — though you could argue low budget jank just makes it even more of an authentic Star Trek experience.

As an installment of the Star Trek franchise, it’s a lot better, but still imperfect. I loved the first three quarters or so of the game, which were an excellent love-letter to The Next Generation and its more sedate style of story-telling. Nearer the end, though, it starts to fall into the trap of modern Trek: trying way too hard to be epic, shocking, and dramatic. Not every story needs to involve galaxy-ending stakes and heart-breaking tragedies at every turn.

It also felt like a lot of my choices in the story didn’t really matter. This is a criticism that basically every “choices matter” game gets, and I usually feel like people have unrealistic expectations for much their choices should effect the game, but this feels like a particularly egregious example. It’s okay if some outcomes are unavoidable, but don’t give the player numerous opportunities to try to prevent something if none of them are going to have an effect.

Still, I liked it a lot better than any of the modern Trek shows other than Prodigy. I’d probably buy a sequel if they make one.

Dragon Age: Inquisition

I’ve been thinking about doing another replay of Inquisition more or less since I finished the last one. I had a brief abortive attempt at a Solasmance run aways back, but early on I lost a bunch of progress due to the corrupted save bug, and I got so discouraged I never resumed that run.

The extreme length and grind of the game has always been intimidating, so I finally decided to do something I’ve only done once before (also with a Dragon Age game) and turn to the modding community for help. I installed a bevy of mods to reduce grind and improve quality of life, from infinite crafting mats to faster out of combat movement to a mod that lets you mutli-class.

It’s helped a lot. You can burn through the endless side quests far quicker when you don’t need to bother looting bodies or gathering materials.

Since I don’t think I have two more runs in me, I decided to make this my “canon” playthrough where I make all my favourite choices. This is mostly the same as my first playthrough (Dalish mage, side with mages, romance Sera, befriend Solas, etc.), with the one major difference being I’m going to make Cole more spirit-like this time, which I did on my second playthrough and found I preferred.

I still have somewhat mixed feelings on Inquisition and its overwhelming scale, but it is always lovely to be reunited with your favourite characters whenever you return to an old Bioware game. Sera! Dorian! Solas! How I’ve missed you.

Nextfest demos

Another Steam Next Fest is upon us, bringing with it a wave of demos. I don’t like that these demos are often temporary, but it’s a lot better than having no demos at all, which has sadly been the status quo for the gaming world for some time now.

With so many demos, a lot of them are going to be irrelevant to my interests, but a few have caught my eye.

First, there was Jusant, an eccentric climbing simulator from Dontnod. Much as I love Dontnod, I couldn’t get into this one. The controls were far too awkward. Maybe it would work better with a controller, but on a keyboard and mouse, it was borderline unplayable.

Second, there was En Garde, a goofy action game inspired by the likes of Zoro and the Three Musketeers. While I found the humour hit and miss at best, the colourful graphics were appealing, and the gameplay was pretty fun. Will probably get the full version at some point — maybe even right at launch if it’s not too pricey.

Finally, there was the oddly named Gord. Not, as you might expect from the name, a Canadian life sim, but a dark fantasy city-builder loosely based on Slavic history and mythology. This one felt a little slow (yes, even for a city-builder) and a bit rough in places, but I did enjoy the gloomy aesthetic and emphasis on a small group of NPCs rather than a sprawling populace. This feels like a “maybe when it’s on sale” title.

Card games

My obsession with card games continues, albeit at a slowed rate.

Sentinels of the Multiverse and Lord of the Rings LCG remain my favourites. Indeed, despite some significant flaws, I believe LotR LCG has become my gold standard for Lord of the Rings adaptations in the realm of gaming. It does such a good job of expanding the lore while feeling faithful to Tolkien’s vision, and unlike pretty much every LotR video game I’ve ever played, the gameplay actually captures the desperate last stand feel of LotR, as opposed to just being a generic game with a Middle-Earth skin.

My feelings on Arkham Horror and Marvel Champions remain more iffy. I almost sold off my Arkham Horror collection, but I wasn’t quite ready to give up on it, so I just sold some. Maybe I’ll just replay what I have occasionally, maybe I’ll try another full campaign at some point.

As for Marvel… I feel like this meme is already played out, but I still feel the best thing to say is that of all the card games I’ve played, this is one of them. It’s easy and low stress, unlike most of the others, so that keeps it in the rotation for now at least.

On the digital front, I’m still playing Eternal as well, but that’s starting to feel more like a habit than a joy. Partly this is the inevitable consequence of the fact I’ve played about 300 hours of it in less than a year, but also the Gauntlet difficulty does tend to get pretty brutal at the higher levels, and it’s wearing me down.

If I had another option, I’d probably move on, but this is really the only halfway decent digital CCG with robust PvE content. I couldn’t get into Shadowverse or Elder Scrolls Legends. For now, I’ll stick with Eternal.

Song of the Month: Dragon Age Inquisition OST, Sera Was Never

I started another replay of Dragon Age: Inquisition recently, which means this song is going to be stuck in my head for the next six months or so at least.

So now it’s stuck in your head too.

It does make me happy seeing all the praise for Sera as a character in the comments on YouTube. Most people I know aren’t particularly fond of her, and I get why, but I really think she’s one of the best characters BioWare’s ever created (which is saying a lot).

Gaming’s Culture of Outrage has Rendered Word of Mouth Worthless

I’ve been keeping one eye on the vampire-hunting shooter Redfall for a while. The colourful art style and vague whiff of The Secret World-style surrealism are intriguing.

Of course, if you’ve been paying any attention, you know that Redfall has had an overwhelmingly negative reception. The problem is that in the current climate that doesn’t really tell me much.

Clearly the game has flaws. I don’t think the complaints came from nowhere. But there’s no way for me to tell if those flaws are minor hiccups, or if the game is genuinely a dumpster fire. These days, the gaming community seems to see both those things as one and the same.

Nowadays any time a game stumbles even a little, the brigades charge in to rage and foam at the mouth. Anything less than flawless execution is dubbed an unforgivable disaster.

Some of my favourite games from the last few years were considered to be disasters. Anthem and Mass Effect: Andromeda both come to mind. Both had issues, but those issues were relatively minor in the grand scheme of things, yet word of mouth would have you believe they were utterly irredeemable. The Secret World is perhaps the best game I’ve ever played, despite its rough edges, but mainstream opinion is that it was an unplayable mess.

Nothing’s perfect, and as I’ve often said, the mark of true greatness isn’t a lack of flaws, but excelling in a way that allows you to forgive the flaws. But according to the modern gaming community, no flaw can ever be forgiven.

Maybe Redfall really is completely terrible. There are definitely still games out there that just plain suck. But we now find ourselves in a living parody of the boy who cried wolf. When everything is called a dumpster fire, there’s no way of knowing which games are actually dumpster fires.

We’ve all seen the supercuts of bugs and bad AI behaviour from Redfall, but are those representative of an average session, or just cherry-picked to harvest clicks? When this all first blew up, one of the top posts on the subject I saw on reddit was a screenshot of someone who’d crawled up onto a roof, looked down a chimney, and found that the chimney had the roof texture at the bottom.

What an incredibly petty, trivial thing to complain about. Maybe the game really is bad, but throwing hissy fits over over meaningless things like this make it really difficult to take any of the other criticisms seriously.

(As some wiser minds on reddit point out, purely decorative chimneys like this are a real thing that some houses have, which makes the whole furor even more absurd.)

Social media and the toxicity of the gaming community itself are huge drivers of this culture of outrage, but the media isn’t helping, either. Outrage sells, and flamboyant headlines about disastrous launches and dead games bring in the clicks.

As a minor member of the gaming media myself, I’m not immune to this. I genuinely do make an effort to not be overly negative in my writing on Massively Overpowered, but honestly I’d forgive you if you never noticed. It’s human nature to focus on the negative, and it’s just much easier to write about what’s going wrong than what’s going right.

But that doesn’t mean all this is inevitable. It’s always going to be easier to talk about the bad than the good, and we should call out games when they stumble, but the culture we have now is beyond counter-productive. It’s all noise and no signal. Word of mouth, unless perhaps from a trusted friend, is less than worthless.

For my part, I’m probably going to hold off on getting Redfall at least for now, but not because of the bad reviews. I’m just hesitant to spend triple-A prices on any new game unless there’s a demo or it’s a franchise I’m familiar with.

Now, developers neglecting to offer demos, that’s something worth getting angry over…

Song of the Month: Chvrches, Forever

As happens every few months, I’ve gone another kick of listening to Chvrches’ Love Is Dead album a great deal. Not that I ever really stop listening to the songs from that album, but sometimes I do it more than others.

It’s my favourite of their albums to date, and I don’t think it’s likely to be dethroned in the future. This isn’t so much of a criticism of the band’s current direction as it is just an acknowledgement of what a high watermark Love Is Dead was. It may have gotten some hate from some in their fanbase (for reasons I cannot grasp), but for me, this is as good as it gets.

There are any number of great songs from Love Is Dead I could have chosen to share, so I pretty much just picked one at random.

Savour the pain.

There Is No Valid Argument Why Games Shouldn’t Have Difficulty Settings

Now that Wyrd Street is out the door, I hope to find the time to return to some more traditional blogging, though my work with Massively will remain my focus. I know I’m very behind the times on this, but there’s an issue that’s been sticking in my craw for months, and now that I have a free moment, I’d like to finally address it.

Last year, a developer for Elden Ring spoke on the lack of discrete difficulty settings in it and the company’s other acclaimed titles, saying that the extreme difficulty of these games gives “meaning” to the experience as justification for not including any kind of easy mode.

I never had much interest in Elden Ring or other From Software games, but as a fan of the art form and occasional dabbler in game design, I find this point of view deeply illogical, and I’d like to take a moment to break down just why I find it so toxic.

I have to ask, what harm would have any easier option actually do? If you’d still play on the current, hard difficulty, what is an easy option taking away from you? If you feel your experience of the game is cheapened by someone else getting to see the whole game with less effort… grow up.

A less elitist argument I have also heard in defence of these games is that people don’t want the easier difficulty because it would tempt them too much. If they had the option to easy mode through the game, they wouldn’t be motivated to overcome its extreme challenges as they do now.

But if that’s the case, is it really the challenge you enjoy? Or is more that you just want the bragging rights to say that you overcame it? Whether ego is the motivation or not, if the difficulty is really what brings you joy, an easy mode won’t tempt you away from it.

I am not much of an adrenaline junkie in games — I play most things at around medium difficulty — but there have been a few occasions where I’ve sought a greater challenge. In particular, my great love for StarCraft II and the fair and balanced challenge it provides sent me through all three of its main campaigns on brutal, the highest difficulty. I’ve also completed hundreds of co-op missions and dozens of co-op mutations on brutal, even completing one or two brutations solo after my partner disconnected on the load screen.

StarCraft II is quite generous with its difficulty settings, though. Brutal lives up to its name, but there are three levels below that, going all the way down to “casual,” a mode so easy I’m not sure it’s even possible to lose.

And never once has the presence of casual mode made me feel as if my struggles in brutal were cheapened. It did not make me crave the challenge any less, and I do not resent anyone who made it through the campaign without ever reaching so high as normal mode. Why would it? What someone else does with their game has no effect on me.

But let’s go back to the original comment, that the difficulty is what gives “meaning” to the experience. It’s a fundamentally flawed concept.

These are video games. There’s little to no meaning to playing them. They’re entertainment. You’re not accomplishing something great by beating up a pre-scripted artificial intelligence, no matter how challenging it may be.

What meaning can be found in games is found in the ways they affect us, the relationships we form through them, the stories they tell, the stories we create while playing them. Difficulty contributes only slightly to that, and in many ways it detracts from it. Perhaps Elden Ring’s story is powerful and moving, but no one who can’t handle its difficulty will ever know (unless they watch it on YouTube or something). Where’s the meaning in that?

And what about disabled players who simply can’t play better? Yes, some people do manage to play hard games despite their disability, but that isn’t possible for everyone. How can you justify locking them out of a hobby just to stroke the egos of your able-bodied customers?

I’m used to this kind of tiresome, exclusionary thinking in the gaming community. MMORPGs have always been rife with it (despite being some of the easiest games around). What continues to baffle me is how people got these ideas in their heads in the first place.

No other medium of story-telling has this kind of elitist thinking. No one’s expecting tests of skill to let you experience any other kind of story, and when you start picturing what that would look like, you start realizing how absurd this whole thing is. Imagine if you weren’t allowed to see Avengers: Endgame unless you were able to actually beat up Josh Brolin.

Now I do want to offer one significant caveat to all this. While I firmly believe there is no valid argument why games shouldn’t have difficulty settings, there can be sometimes be valid reasons for why they can’t have difficulty settings.

Developers don’t have unlimited resources, especially the small ones, and implementing a variety of difficulty settings does take at least some effort. There are also some games whose nature makes implementing separate difficulties challenging or downright impossible.

MMORPGs are a good example of this. With a shared world occupied by many different players, there isn’t a clear way to allow each person to adjust the difficulty to their desired level.

In those cases, I do lean towards using difficulty levels that best align with the vision of the creators and the fantasy of the game, even if it means some people must be excluded. But even then an argument can be made that aiming for the lowest common denominator is better, and indeed that is what most MMOs seem to do. The two main exceptions I’ve played — The Secret World and New World — both wound up as fairly niche games, and I think their difficulty contributes to that.

So there are some cases where catering to every type of player may not be feasible, but all reasonable efforts should be made to be as accessible as possible. If you’re excluding people by choice, you’ve lost my respect as a developer.

Song of the Month: lovelytheband, Sail Away

Wyrd Street Odd Jobs: The Tarnished Ring

Odd Jobs is a series of short adventures prompts for my indie RPG Wyrd Street. You can incorporate these prompts into your Wyrd Street campaign or potentially adapt them to other RPG settings.

If you haven’t already tried Wyrd Street, don’t forget we have a free starter edition!

The Tarnished Ring:

From the job board in the Rose Garden common room:

“Need capable for investigators for personal matter. Discretion required. Compensation available.”-Shao Ping, proprietor, Happy Dumpling Tavern.

The Happy Dumpling is a cozy establishment on the banks of the River Skarflud, near the Quarantine. Inside, the air is warm and filled with the smell of delicious food. Shao Ping is a thin, nervous-looking man minding the bar. When the party approaches him, he asks them to join him in a back room, once again implying that his request of is of an embarrassingly personal nature.

Once within a quiet stormroom, and upon checking at the small windows to see that no one is listening outside, he explains that his request isn’t actually personal at all. He’s even been spreading the rumour among his customers that his wife has been seeing someone else to maintain his cover — in reality his wife is quite loyal and in on the deception.

The actual issue concerns the Azure Ring. Once a mercantile guild, the Ring has become a vigilante group protecting the Tiahnese minority within the city. The problem, as Ping explains, is that the particular Azure Ring group in his neighbourhood has taken it upon themselves to move from protection to “protection,” and Ping and his neighbours are on the verge of being bankrupted by their supposed saviours.

Ping is quite convinced that the leader of this extortion ring, a woman named Lu Chin, is doing so without the permission of the Ring’s leaders, and that they will crack down on her if proof of her crimes is presented, but Ping hasn’t the means to find it himself. Thus it falls to the party to stop Chin’s reign of terror, either by defeating her directly or by finding proof of her crimes to take to the Azure Ring.

Tips for running the adventure:

This adventure suits itself well to intrigue and stealth, but of course you can also take the direct route to dealing with the rogue vigilantes.

The Azure Ring are tougher than your average Greycap thugs, so this is an adventure best-suited for mid-level parties of roughly level 4-6, though it can be adjusted for levels beyond that range by adjusting the number and type of enemies fought.

You could even consider reskinning some other NPCs to help adjust the difficulty of any combat encounters. For an easier fight, reflavour some Greycap stat blocks as Azure Ring members, or for a high level adventure, do the same with agents of the Divine Legion.

Want more like this?

More adventures like this can be found in Wyrd Street’s Quicksilver War campaign, which includes five Jobs that can be run as part of its story arc or inserted into other campaigns. Available as part of the Wyrd Street complete bundle.

Song of the Month: The Balconies, Street Fighter

It never rains, but it pours, eh? The last few months I’ve struggled to think of what song to pick for this segment. Now we’ve got new songs from Chvrches and Meg Myers I could feature… but lately I’ve been listening to the Balconies a whole lot, so I decided to go with them instead.

Nothing brought this on. I’ve been listening to this band for years. In the fact they’ve been defunct as a band for quite some time now, sadly. Just been in the mood for them, I suppose.

Wyrd Street Physical Books Now Available

As of today, the physical versions of Wyrd Street’s three rulebooks are now available. Those who backed at the appropriate level on Indie Go Go should be receiving codes to order copies at-cost, and anyone else can order them via their Drive Thru RPG store pages.

Core Rulebook

GM’s Guide

Quicksilver War campaign

Song of the Month: Jon Charles Dwyer, Panthers on the Mountainside

A few weeks back I finally got all the way caught up on the horror podcast Old Gods of Appalachia. While the show can be a little hit and miss at times, I found the recently concluded third season to be by far the best to date.

The last few episodes also had the virtue of featuring a lovely little tune by Jon Charles Dwyer, Panthers on the Mountainside. Apparently written specifically for the show, it appears to only be available on Old Gods’ Bandcamp page, so forgive me if I don’t have the neat little YouTube embed this time, but just follow the link on over and enjoy some nice folk music.