Gaming Tuesday
Apr. 15th, 2025 10:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraWhat I really want to do is either play a new Horizon game or a new FFVII game, and the world has yet to cater to my whims. (Horizon III Nemesis does have a trailer but no release date, and part 3 of FFVII is another two years away at least). In the meantime I am doing a hard mode playthrough of FFVII Rebirth, which is indeed hard (no items for healing, tougher enemies etc). I’m up to chapter 12 and I can actually feel myself getting better at playing it - especially blocking, which in most fighting games I neglect in favour of stuffing myself with food/healing items to regain HP - and I do love everybody in the game. Do I love them enough to attempt platinum? Hmm. It is less a question of my undying affection and more my doubt in my ability to conquer ALL of the minigames. I am still traumatised by the piano and I have yet to get better than a B on Two Legs, plus I am avoiding that Shinra Party Animal sidequest at the Saucer that is All Minigames.
For contrast, I then played through Thank Goodness You’re Here!, which is a totally barmy surrealist dark comedy where you play as a (literally) tiny junior salesman, sent to the northern English town of Barnsworth to solve all their problems. It is disturbingly brilliant and very funny (and very, very, localised). Then I played The Stanley Parable, which is also disturbingly brilliant and about agency in gaming, and then I decided to go for something slightly less disturbing and played Astro Bot.
This cheerful platformer won GOTY last year and it is, indeed, fantastically well-designed (the haptic feedback is incredible) and a lot of fun to play. You are a tiny Sony bot who has crashlanded on a planet with your damaged PS5 spaceship, and you need to gather up your scattered bot colleagues from various other worlds and repair your spaceship. It is a love letter to Sony games, with bots and souvenirs taken from their extensive back catalogue. After each system boss, you get a world based on a franchise (Uncharted, God of War etc) and the last one I unlocked was Horizon, where I play as an AloyBot with bow & arrows, clambering up a Tallneck, zooming through cauldrons, and battling giant robots, with intermittent clusters of focal ghosts and even what I think is a skeletal bot Sobeck on a bench with flowers at the end.
I am not a natural platformer but I played this determinedly until I had the 300 bots needed to get all the achievements. I still have three levels I haven’t done in the main game (there are speed levels coming out as DLC), but they are unforgiving ones where you have to get every single move right, with no checkpoints, and the amount of actual enjoyment I get out of them diminishes. But it’s such an easy game to pick up, and so enjoyable.
I had planned to replay Horizon Forbidden West after that (especially due to the AloyBot!) but then Playstation Plus put out Dragon Age: The Veilguard as their March free game. This is a game that was in development for a long time, initially intended as a multiplayer before switching to solo RPG, and it’s been hit heavily by culture warriors on release aggrieved mainly by the nonbinary companion and the character customiser, all of which makes it a little difficult to judge. And my background with the series is patchy; I played Origins once and liked it a lot, despite feeling burnt out on conventional western fantasy (Mass Effect was more appealing on that front), I played DAII for a bit (maybe until the first major timeskip?) and then put it down for too long, and then I played quite a bit of Inquisition but could not get the hang of the combat when it came to fighting bosses and left it unfinished.
I am now in the final few act of Veilguard and I do like it but it definitely has issues. The opening sequence has some astonishingly clunky writing and although it does improve there is a lot of telling you things you already know, as well as a lack of conflict between you/companions/each other. Everyone good wants to stop the Big Bad! Everyone bad wants to help it! I’ve only walked in on one really heated argument among companions (Taash and Emmerich) that, again, settled quickly. I don’t feel like I’m balancing loyalties in the way I did with the Chantry/Mages/Templar themes in earlier games.
The romance system locks you into exclusive relationships but then provides you with very little romance content after you’ve committed. I am playing an elf female Grey Warden warrior/reaper (lower pitch American voice) and romancing Harding, a dwarven female scout; I flirted briefly with Lucanis (male human assassin, possessed by demon) and Taash (nonbinary Quinari fighter/firebreather), but Taash’s romance trigger is super early and frankly I found it hard to see them as an adult (I don’t know if they have an age in canon but facial expressions, behaviour etc meant I saw them as late teens) and Lucanis, although pleasant, was lacking in the tortured demonic possession angst/assassin role qualms that I would really like from that role. But even after picking Harding, there were remarkably few romance moments (you can buy your companion one gift only, for example) and a canon plotline about Harding’s strange new powers and their effects on Rook suddenly went nowhere. I would look this up but am currently avoiding spoilers until I finish.
Romance aside – bits of it are great. It looks fantastic (some of the environments are amazing, but I also want to take a moment to appreciate everyone’s hair and fabric choices). The dialogue/intent match is smooth, and romantic options are clearly signalled (but do I always want that? I can see the advantages but I also remember trying really hard to romance Alistair as a male Warden and getting really close with dialogue options before he totally shut me down, as he won't do gay romances - it was frustrating but it was also immersive). The set piece missions do work well, the Hero companion missions are generally particularly strong, and the finale bits I’m in at the moment, where you have to pick companions for missions à la Mass Effect, are genuinely emotional in their uncertainty and feeling of high stakes. There’s a nice horror aesthetic going on with the blight and demons, and the battle in a bath of blood was great. The combat in general is much more intuitive than Inquisition, and the skill trees are good. I do enjoy flinging my shield at enemies and having them explode with necrotic stacks.
But the combat is also a problem. I have now hit the level cap and can one-shot most mob enemies. Mini-bosses take only a fraction longer, and while the dragons were scary initially, they all have the same fight pattern and I can now take them out pretty quickly. I get to pick my companions’ tactics, but I don’t fight as them, and they never die. I really miss Rebirth’s combat system, where you can fight as any of the characters, where each boss needs a different approach (and often dozens of attempts!) and where a good part of the fight is keeping everyone alive.
The puzzles are also less challenging and less varied than I’d like. At least half are sequence-based (destroy these crystals/blight boils, light these braziers) and the maps could be more helpful at indicating when you can’t actually access areas. Also, unless I’m missing it, you can only get the names of areas by going to them, not by hovering over the map, so I’ve spent quite a bit of time squinting at youtube frame stills on my phone and trying to work out which bit of the map I’m looking at. Stuff gets locked out by events and I spent a very weary two hours trying to find the last seven mementoes I needed to fully upgrade a workshop before the final act, because I couldn’t tell which ones I was missing (there are about 180, so it’s a long list and I have to check all the names, it doesn’t tell me which ones aren’t there) and at least half of the ones I didn’t have I couldn’t get anymore. I don’t mind stuff being locked out! I like things to have consequences. But I need to know what those consequences are.
And a tiny thing - I really like that when Rook jumps between platforms, she often ends up just making the edge and having to lever herself up – it looks good and it helps immersion. What doesn't work for me is that the second Rook gets into water deeper than ankle-level she drowns with a lot of flashy spluttering and I respawn on the adjacent bank. The similar respawn when I jump from too high is better, as it's just a fade to black.
I do think it's taken an unfair battering online, but I don't think I'm going to do much with it once I finish other than look up all the possible endings. It does make me want to go back and finish one of the others, though.
For contrast, I then played through Thank Goodness You’re Here!, which is a totally barmy surrealist dark comedy where you play as a (literally) tiny junior salesman, sent to the northern English town of Barnsworth to solve all their problems. It is disturbingly brilliant and very funny (and very, very, localised). Then I played The Stanley Parable, which is also disturbingly brilliant and about agency in gaming, and then I decided to go for something slightly less disturbing and played Astro Bot.
This cheerful platformer won GOTY last year and it is, indeed, fantastically well-designed (the haptic feedback is incredible) and a lot of fun to play. You are a tiny Sony bot who has crashlanded on a planet with your damaged PS5 spaceship, and you need to gather up your scattered bot colleagues from various other worlds and repair your spaceship. It is a love letter to Sony games, with bots and souvenirs taken from their extensive back catalogue. After each system boss, you get a world based on a franchise (Uncharted, God of War etc) and the last one I unlocked was Horizon, where I play as an AloyBot with bow & arrows, clambering up a Tallneck, zooming through cauldrons, and battling giant robots, with intermittent clusters of focal ghosts and even what I think is a skeletal bot Sobeck on a bench with flowers at the end.
I am not a natural platformer but I played this determinedly until I had the 300 bots needed to get all the achievements. I still have three levels I haven’t done in the main game (there are speed levels coming out as DLC), but they are unforgiving ones where you have to get every single move right, with no checkpoints, and the amount of actual enjoyment I get out of them diminishes. But it’s such an easy game to pick up, and so enjoyable.
I had planned to replay Horizon Forbidden West after that (especially due to the AloyBot!) but then Playstation Plus put out Dragon Age: The Veilguard as their March free game. This is a game that was in development for a long time, initially intended as a multiplayer before switching to solo RPG, and it’s been hit heavily by culture warriors on release aggrieved mainly by the nonbinary companion and the character customiser, all of which makes it a little difficult to judge. And my background with the series is patchy; I played Origins once and liked it a lot, despite feeling burnt out on conventional western fantasy (Mass Effect was more appealing on that front), I played DAII for a bit (maybe until the first major timeskip?) and then put it down for too long, and then I played quite a bit of Inquisition but could not get the hang of the combat when it came to fighting bosses and left it unfinished.
I am now in the final few act of Veilguard and I do like it but it definitely has issues. The opening sequence has some astonishingly clunky writing and although it does improve there is a lot of telling you things you already know, as well as a lack of conflict between you/companions/each other. Everyone good wants to stop the Big Bad! Everyone bad wants to help it! I’ve only walked in on one really heated argument among companions (Taash and Emmerich) that, again, settled quickly. I don’t feel like I’m balancing loyalties in the way I did with the Chantry/Mages/Templar themes in earlier games.
The romance system locks you into exclusive relationships but then provides you with very little romance content after you’ve committed. I am playing an elf female Grey Warden warrior/reaper (lower pitch American voice) and romancing Harding, a dwarven female scout; I flirted briefly with Lucanis (male human assassin, possessed by demon) and Taash (nonbinary Quinari fighter/firebreather), but Taash’s romance trigger is super early and frankly I found it hard to see them as an adult (I don’t know if they have an age in canon but facial expressions, behaviour etc meant I saw them as late teens) and Lucanis, although pleasant, was lacking in the tortured demonic possession angst/assassin role qualms that I would really like from that role. But even after picking Harding, there were remarkably few romance moments (you can buy your companion one gift only, for example) and a canon plotline about Harding’s strange new powers and their effects on Rook suddenly went nowhere. I would look this up but am currently avoiding spoilers until I finish.
Romance aside – bits of it are great. It looks fantastic (some of the environments are amazing, but I also want to take a moment to appreciate everyone’s hair and fabric choices). The dialogue/intent match is smooth, and romantic options are clearly signalled (but do I always want that? I can see the advantages but I also remember trying really hard to romance Alistair as a male Warden and getting really close with dialogue options before he totally shut me down, as he won't do gay romances - it was frustrating but it was also immersive). The set piece missions do work well, the Hero companion missions are generally particularly strong, and the finale bits I’m in at the moment, where you have to pick companions for missions à la Mass Effect, are genuinely emotional in their uncertainty and feeling of high stakes. There’s a nice horror aesthetic going on with the blight and demons, and the battle in a bath of blood was great. The combat in general is much more intuitive than Inquisition, and the skill trees are good. I do enjoy flinging my shield at enemies and having them explode with necrotic stacks.
But the combat is also a problem. I have now hit the level cap and can one-shot most mob enemies. Mini-bosses take only a fraction longer, and while the dragons were scary initially, they all have the same fight pattern and I can now take them out pretty quickly. I get to pick my companions’ tactics, but I don’t fight as them, and they never die. I really miss Rebirth’s combat system, where you can fight as any of the characters, where each boss needs a different approach (and often dozens of attempts!) and where a good part of the fight is keeping everyone alive.
The puzzles are also less challenging and less varied than I’d like. At least half are sequence-based (destroy these crystals/blight boils, light these braziers) and the maps could be more helpful at indicating when you can’t actually access areas. Also, unless I’m missing it, you can only get the names of areas by going to them, not by hovering over the map, so I’ve spent quite a bit of time squinting at youtube frame stills on my phone and trying to work out which bit of the map I’m looking at. Stuff gets locked out by events and I spent a very weary two hours trying to find the last seven mementoes I needed to fully upgrade a workshop before the final act, because I couldn’t tell which ones I was missing (there are about 180, so it’s a long list and I have to check all the names, it doesn’t tell me which ones aren’t there) and at least half of the ones I didn’t have I couldn’t get anymore. I don’t mind stuff being locked out! I like things to have consequences. But I need to know what those consequences are.
And a tiny thing - I really like that when Rook jumps between platforms, she often ends up just making the edge and having to lever herself up – it looks good and it helps immersion. What doesn't work for me is that the second Rook gets into water deeper than ankle-level she drowns with a lot of flashy spluttering and I respawn on the adjacent bank. The similar respawn when I jump from too high is better, as it's just a fade to black.
I do think it's taken an unfair battering online, but I don't think I'm going to do much with it once I finish other than look up all the possible endings. It does make me want to go back and finish one of the others, though.
no subject
Date: 2025-04-15 11:09 pm (UTC)Hmm, maybe I should try the FFVII Remake, it's out for Windows...
I still haven't bought or played Veilguard - oddly your comment about lack of conflict is a plus for me, I don't like having to make Big Choices like Mages vs Templars, heh. But not a fan of getting locked out of things by choices, boo.
no subject
Date: 2025-04-22 11:59 pm (UTC)Ha! If you don't like conflict between companions then Veilguard is definitely the one for you. If you poke around the shared space you come across notes from their bookclub night and shared cooking etc :)
(I am completely unreasonable about FFVII and you should definitely try it)