#a lot of the actual in game world of the witcher 3 is entirely built on algorithms and was then fixed up and made liveable by artists

[zevranunderstander]

okay im off work now, so i can explain: basically for most jobs in the games/film/animation industry the art isnt just there to give you the *aesthetic* of a thing. I mean, yeah, you might also want to convey a *vibe* but that is the LEAST of what you want to do. any given moodboard made by a completely unskilled person can convey a vibe. concept art has a LOT of thoughts behind it - if you just wanted to do storyboarding you didn't need a fully rendered picture in the first place because that's just a massive waste of resources.

so what DOES a concept artist (let's say for a game) think about when making a concept? This is probably not everything but just from the top of my head:

What is the scale of everything? How does the player character scale compared to each object? What are the exact measurements of objects? (you need to model all of them, you need pretty precise details when it comes down to it) What ramifications does the the game camera have on the scale of the level? (= If you want a really tight space, the camera would constantly clip through walls, so you need to adapt space to common game design knowledge. Other examples of this would be that doors usually need to be a lot bigger than they are irl without looking weird or that if your character moves reeally fast through the levels, small details become completely confusing and unrecognizable, so they need to be WAY bigger than they are irl without looking goofy)

What kind of design/style choices need to be applied to this image? Does the game have a specific color scheme? How does worldbuilding influence the environment (building styles/specific types of plants/fonts used in the world/etc)?

What kind of technical ramifications do you need to consider? if you create an environment you need to think about having an asset set that is reusable (= how often can the same tree model be in this scene without people noticing)? does modeling each of these objects work? how to texture these efficiently (texture is like, a whole post in itself)? can the team's shader artists/the engine actually DO this effect?

and MOST importantly: what are your thoughts on level guidance in a shot? Is it readable where the player can step and where they can't? Is it readable where a player would die if they would step there? Is it readable where the player is supposed to go? where is this shot you just made on the map? what other landmarks can the player see from this place?

i want to do this on an example, so take this piece of concept art for fallout new vegas:

this probably took an artist 1-2 days. an AI would be way quicker, right? So what does it matter that the artist put more thought into this, you might ask. sadly i don't have access to midjourney right now to try and recreate this in there, but i tried to find something at least remotely similar on google right now (and i tried to be fair here, and tried to find something that is actually good and not the super unspecific images you get from midjourney *most* of the time when you ask for something complex):

like, the first image is basically production ready, you give this to the team and the 3D artists can think about what models to build out of this so they can reuse as much as possible, the picture shows what textures are needed, its shows how the town should be built up, etc. etc. etc.

it is also worth to note that the image shows Primm, one of the locations in fallout new vegas, which is based on a real small town in Nevada. you can see the visual research that went into this, as this is clearly a post-apocalyptic version of real-life Primm, not 1:1, but adapted to the game's level design. It has the sights Primm has, it shows the quest-relevant locations, it shows WHERE Primm is located and what the surroundings look like - the desert is intentionally flat, because the designers of the game wanted the Lucky 38 tower (seen in the background) visible from almost every place in the open world, because of how central it is to giving you a sense of location and a goal to reach.

And I cannot talk about EVERYTHING on here but this picture holds a lot of information. It shows us exactly what material everything is made out of, it shows us where a player can reasonably stand and where not, it shows us how big this settlement is supposed to be. I will quickly concentrate on the "Motel" sign in the foreground, to show what this image does in a microcosm:

the sign shows a type of sign design that fits into new vegas's style identity of having a 40s vibe

it indicates that this place used to have a motel but the sign wasn't needed anymore

there having been a motel means that this place was probably close to an open road/highway (it is)

the way it is placed indicates that it is used to reinforce an old fence, meaning that the fence in this picture is not just an ancient remnant of Primm, but something that still protects people behind it

...and so on. and you can probably find that much thought in a lot of these props.

now look at the midjourney one. the ai doesn't have any context for the world. you would need to give it *all* that information - for every attempt to generate an image - the story of your world, the concrete setting, the 40s influence, the specificities of the town Primm, the overall world design and conceptualization, the idea of texture and asset modularity, every small detail about the motel sign would be needed to be described. it would need to build a logical structure for a town, and so on and so forth. even if you wrote a perfect description of this picture, midjourney wouldnt be able to be that precise in what you really want to see. it's good for getting a pretty picture, but it's not very good at giving you a specific picture you want.

i will not go into this too long, but look at the midjourney image and imagine you have to make a video game scene of this image, the more you look at it the less sense it makes because midjourney doesn't understand what it is showing per se. where should the player walk and where not? what are ANY of these textures supposed to be? what can the signs tell us about this place? *where* is this? what even *are* most of these items? - answering all of these questions is EXACTLY what an artists job *is* in a game. generating this brings you about 5% further in conceptualizing the world, because you still don't have designs for signs or props or anything. you don't need a *vibe* when making a video game

and managers and CEOs who know jack shit see this now and go "oh? a way to save money and be more efficient?", while having NO idea that the program is ENTIRELY unsuited for the job. like, midjourney couldn't even produce a consistent style for a visual novel where you would get the same character with different expressions in the same artstyle, it can't produce a consistent style in UI elements, i can't do concept art, it can't do any asset sheets that are more unique than a set of rocks. it might be able to give some general inspiration and it might be able to be used as a very rough base for painting over to save some time & already have an atmosphere (artists already do that, thats why its also called "photobashing"), but outside of that it is practically useless

as someone in the games industry and as someone who tried midjourney id say i give it about 5 months until project leaders come crawling back to beg to rehire all the artists they fired

[into-the-afterlife]

Why I Ship Johnny/Female V Part 3: V, and You, and Me

[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3]

I’ve spent a lot of time in this essay series so far focusing on one half of the pairing. Johnny is fascinating, but he’s only one half of the dynamic. So what about V is interesting? Why does she stand out as a character, in the context of this pairing?

Across different ships, I’ve noticed a consistent pattern. There tends to be one character that the fandom focuses in on to thirst over and one that the fandom imagines themselves being. In this ship, the thirst-character tends to be Johnny, while the self-insert character tends to be V. And that’s not surprising, considering that V is essentially our self-insert into the world of Cyberpunk 2077. It’s also worth noting that people who engage in shipping and transformative fandom tend to be predominantly AFAB, myself included, and it makes sense that when writing sexual stories we’d want a self-insert who has our anatomy.

But fans being AFAB doesn’t usually impact what ships are popular. Shipping is infamously dominated by M/M couples who are, ninety percent of the time, cis. Usually, that impulse to self-insert results in an exaggeration of top-bottom dynamics rather than genderswaps or increased focus on M/F couples.

And the thing about V is, she isn’t just a self-insert. In fandoms focused on open-world RPGs, there tends to be some focus on the player character. However, that focus tends to be limited to the Tumblr-ish, transformative end of fandom. One of my other favourite video game fandoms is The Elder Scrolls. There, people avidly draw and discuss their versions of the protagonists on Tumblr and AO3. But on Reddit and Facebook meme pages, the focus is much more on the other characters, the lore, the worldbuilding.

In this fandom, though? I’ve seen more Vs on Reddit than I have on Tumblr. On Reddit, you’re bombarded with beautiful screenshots of V after V. On Tumblr, there’s tons of new names for V, lovingly thought out backstories and more. And when I see V being shipped with Johnny, V is almost always depicted as female, despite there being an option for a male V and despite the norms of shipping favouring a male V.

So it’s clear that female V inspires more affection than most RPG protagonists. Part of that is to do with Cherami Leigh’s voice acting that I covered in Part 1. But I also think there’s a lot in V’s writing that influences things this way.

CD Projekt Red’s writers are known for focusing on character and plot over worldbuilding in their writing. There’s no, ‘I used to be an adventurer like you...’ in their games, no blank-slate hero or awkward, generic background dialogue. Instead, their other protagonist, Geralt, reacts to chasing after goats and weird children and ancient beings as his own person. The world he inhabits is similarly richly drawn, with even the most bland of background guards discussing gimps and birthdays.

There’s also no black-and-white morality. Even in The Witcher games, their fantasy series, the morality leans much closer to Game of Thrones than The Lord of the Rings. This means that their characters are always three-dimensional. Their first true RPG is actually Cyberpunk 2077. Oh, sure, they’ve done games with rich worlds and lots of sidequests, with skill-trees and moral options, but they’ve always had an authored character, with his own slants and biases. Even when Geralt picks the moral option, he’s likely to be cynical about it, and he always leans towards being a grizzled libertarian who’s Done With This Shit at heart.

Despite their provision of a relatively blank-slate character in this game, this influence lingers on in Cyberpunk 2077. One of the big critiques of the game at launch was that the much-hyped lifepath system felt clunky and didn’t have much of an influence on later gameplay. It’s true that the backstory sacrifices some smoothness of plot and introduction to the world.

But what it gets rid of in those aspects, it makes up for in characterisation. No matter what path you choose, V is never an anonymous prisoner, a mysterious courier or a long-forgotten colonist. She has a clearly defined context, and real roots in the world around her. Even after you move past the prologue, V has the network of people around her you’d expect for someone already embedded in the world. After you’re shot, you don’t just go to some random ripperdoc; you go to Vik, her regular ripperdoc and friend. You don’t get the tarot sidequest from reading an anonymous shard; you get it from Misty. Jackie dating Misty suggests that he introduced V to Misty and Vik. V getting to know them through Jackie feels natural, and just like the kinds of close communal networks that spring up in large cities. Meanwhile, the unique dialogue options for each lifepath keep reminding you that V had a life before you met her.

And that’s true even for the other dialogue options. Here’s a minor, early-game set of dialogue choices from Cyberpunk 2077:

And here’s a similarly minor, early-game set of dialogue choices from a recent RPG that shares a lot of tonal and thematic similarities with Cyberpunk – The Outer Worlds:

Notice the difference in attitudes allowed by each set of dialogue options. The player character of The Outer Worlds has the opportunity to respond compassionately, snarkily or lie for their own advantage. Deception is specifically highlighted and controlled by a skill tree, and each dialogue choice has its own tone and flavour. Meanwhile, all of V’s dialogue choices can be interpreted as some kind of attempt at deception. They’re also all written in the same voice. While The Outer Worlds offers matter-of-fact kindness, brevity and colourful imagery, V’s dialogue choices all share sentence fragments, spunkiness, bluntness and emotional volatility. No matter what choices you make, V’s attitude and voice always stays the same.

The way dialogue choices are controlled is also worth examining. There seem to be more choices on the surface in Cyberpunk, but a full half of them are controlled by skill trees. Level V up differently to this YouTuber, and they may not even be available. The skills themselves also betray a lack of choice here. While speech is split into five different skills in The Outer Worlds, and the skill used here is directly named ‘Lie’, in Cyberpunk 2077 the skills are simply named ‘Reflexes’ and ‘Cool’. That’s partially due to differences in RPG mechanics, which is beyond the scope of this essay. But look at the names themselves. While The Outer Worlds singles out deception, and bluntly names it for what it is, Cyberpunk 2077 frames quick thinking and bluffing as simply part of the reactions and social attitudes required to survive in Night City. Even the very names of the game mechanics are coloured by V’s attitudes.

While V’s status as an independent character is coloured by CD Projekt Red’s previous experience, it’s definitely not an accident. They had an entire trailer dedicated to answering the question of who V is. For the question of whether V keeps her own personality to be compelling, V has to have a personality in the first place. And in the Temperance ending, the emotional impact of seeing V as an NPC in cyberspace, as well as the final, long shot of V’s face on the bus, depends on you having built up a relationship with her as a separate character. She’s a fascinating mix of self-insert and defined character, and purely from a writing perspective, breaks a lot of new ground for RPG protagonists.

But back to the subject at hand: shipping. She’s just self-insert enough for you to imagine yourself as part of a heightened reality, as someone blisteringly witty, quick-thinking and intelligent. And feeling competent and confident, whether in the real world or in-game, brings you back into your body and makes you feel confident enough to pursue what brings you pleasure. But V’s also just enough of her own person that you can care for her and want her to be happy. That combination of affection and wish fulfilment is what the best ships are made of.

Another huge part of V’s popularity in the Cyberpunk fandom comes from the way gender, or the lack of it, interacts with her characterisation. Of course, you can make her look and dress however you want; that’s one of the beautiful things about RPG protagonists. But her lines and interactions with other characters, thanks to them having to be voiced by male V as well, are refreshingly gender-neutral. To understand this further, let’s take a look at some concrete examples.

Cyberpunk 2077, particularly during the prologue and Act 1, takes a lot of inspiration from Grand Theft Auto. Fast cars, exciting crimes, the obligatory strippers and prostitutes; they’re all there.

These kinds of gritty, sexualised game worlds have attracted criticism from feminist media analysts for normalising violence against women and normalising extreme violence as the default and desirable way of responding to the world. What I think about these takes would take its own essay to get into. But the part of these critiques I do agree with is this. By having protagonists in these worlds always be hypermasculine cis male protagonists, and by having victims of crimes and sexualised characters always be cis women, these worlds repeatedly and unnecessarily sideline anyone who’s not a cis man from imagining themselves having power and agency.

However, where Cyberpunk 2077 differentiates itself from other examples of these game worlds is its lack of gendered differentiation for its protagonist. Ninety-nine percent of the time throughout the game, male and female V voice exactly the same lines. This means that if you choose to play as female V, female V is characterised exactly the same way as male V.

Let’s take a look at some concrete examples of this. The biggest is V’s relationship with Jackie. It’s rarely that you see a male-female friendship that stays as platonic as this one does in media, and I welcome it. The quest called ‘The Ripperdoc’ demonstrates this, in the conversation when Jackie and V drive to see Vik:

Jackie [with relish]: ...I got a date - me and Misty.

V: You don’t say...

Jackie [confidentially]: She’s soooo sweet. Really gets me, y’know?

Jackie describes his relationship with Misty in respectful terms, and isn’t afraid to detail the emotional aspects of his and Misty’s connection. But he doesn’t hold back on the macho bragging either. In these lines, and especially in the pleased, suggestive tone of the first line, it’s clear he’s proud to be the kind of guy who could date someone like Misty. The presence of both of these attitudes together shows that Jackie both trusts V and considers V a part of his traditional-masculinity-valuing world. It’s less ‘not like other girls’ and more ‘not like other mercs’.

Similarly, while V’s first interactions with Johnny do draw from highly gendered relationship dynamics, the actual content of V’s responses undercut any feminising this would give her. Here’s one exchange from ‘Playing For Time’:

Johnny: The fuck kinda joytoy are you supposed to be?

V: Fuckin’ ghost off!

Johnny calls V a whore. Before and after, he physically hurts her in ways that, in my opinion, have a highly sexual undertone. But the crucial bit is how V responds here. She neither responds in a helpless, damsel-in-distress sort of way, nor in a defiant, sassy heroine way, where she might take the gendered insults and own them or prove them wrong via physical prowess. In fact, she doesn’t react to the gendered aspect of Johnny’s comment at all. Where a game with a Strong Female Character (TM) would use gendered jabs to refocus attention on said character, Cyberpunk blows them off to focus on the reality of this particular character’s situation.

Outside of V’s closest relationships, this gender neutrality can also be seen in the wider world of Night City. Dexter DeShawn is one of the most tropey, Grand Theft Auto-esque characters you meet in the game. As such, he’s one of the best barometers for how gender interacts with the ‘usual’ state of the world. And how does he react to a female V?

The answer is, not at all. He addresses her as ‘Ms V’, but that comes across as less about her and more about him being high up enough in the world that he can afford affectations. Her gender simply isn’t relevant. While this is increasingly common in pop culture, it’s still rare in worldbuilding like this, where gender is all too frequently used as a lens through which to explore violent, chaotic worlds. In a type of world and tone where gender roles are traditionally emphasised , V slips past those roles and is allowed to exist beyond them.

But why does gender neutrality make V more appealing to ship? To answer that fully, it needs to be combined with my next point.

V is also compelling to ship because her characterisation gives a safe platform from which to imagine her being vulnerable. What I mean by that is this. The main aspect of V’s characterisation in canon is her status as a merc. How you experience her life, through gameplay and through the situations she gets into, is through her skills at hacking, sneaking and killing. You don’t just witness her competence, daring and toughness; you share in it.

When writing fiction that focuses on romantic relationships, one of the toughest balances to get right is that of competency and vulnerability. Any good romantic arc involves watching a character’s barriers come down, seeing how they react to the other person when they lay aside their protective pretences. But this can’t happen too soon, or too much, for either the protagonist or the love interest. Competency and assuredness are huge parts of what makes someone attractive, and they’re also huge parts of feeling like you can come out and play, sexually speaking. Even for the biggest submissive on the planet, the submission has to be a deliberate choice to be hot.

Taken together, V’s canonical characterisation and the possibilities and conventions of fandom provide the perfect balance of those two qualities. Canon makes it clear that V is capable and strong. When you or I imagine our Vs with Johnny, that buildup of ‘competence capital’ makes it feel safe enough to imagine V vulnerable.

And that safety is vital when shipping any character with a character like Johnny. This is where the gender neutrality I talked about earlier comes into play. Imagining V vulnerable feels safe. So does imagining V in a dynamic with a guy who’s a tropey bad boy. Because V is written in such a gender-neutral way, it lets the player enjoy all the deliciously dangerous aspects of her relationship with Johnny without the distractions that may come from feeling disempowered. It also refreshes all the clichés of Dangerous Guys, making their impact feel fresh and new again. Her ability to walk the line between wish fulfilment and independent characterisation inspires simultaneous identification with her, affection for her and boosts in confidence for the player.

This is why she’s compelling to ship. Johnny brings in the familiar emotional arcs of classic tropes, while V makes them new. So what happens when you put these two characters together? Just what about the way they bounce off each other has inspired the majority of fic and art in this fandom?

That’s what I’ll talk about next time.

[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3]

[adastraperfortuna]

I Played Cyberpunk 2077

Ultimately, Cyberpunk 2077 is an excellent video game. It’s hard to talk about it without acknowledging the backlash that it received around its launch, but the backlash was directly proportional to the amount of marketing that it got. This happens to a lot of games – and frankly, a lot of my favorite games. If I were working at CD Projekt RED and I was responsible for the kind of marketing that resulted in the kind of expectations that they built for themselves, I’d have to take that sort of stuff into deep consideration. But, as someone who bought the game, enjoyed the game, and desperately wants to talk about the game, I’m not sure that it matters. So, to reiterate: Cyberpunk 2077 is good.

There’s so much game to Cyberpunk that it might be easier to start by talking about my favorite part of it that isn’t a game: the photo mode. I’ve joked before about my favorite gameplay loop in Star Citizen being “taking screenshots,” and that’s not my intent here, but some of my favorite games in recent memory have made it easy to look over the memories I made during their runtime. Interspersed within this review will be some of my favorite screenshots that I took – the inclusion of precise controls for things like depth of field, character posing/positioning, and stickers/frames helped to make my screenshot folder feel less like a collection of moments in a game and more like a scrapbook made during the wildest possible trip to the wildest possible city.

And what a city it is. Night City is my favorite setting in a video game in recent memory. It’s not incredibly difficult to make a large environment, but to make a meaningful environment where every location feels lived-in and the streets are dense with things to see and do? That’s a challenge that very few studios have managed to step up to. More than that, Night City feels unique in the landscape of video game cities – whereas a city like Grand Theft Auto V’s Los Santos is rooted in a reality we’re familiar with, Cyberpunk’s retro-futuristic architecture (and overall aesthetic) help lend it a sensibility that we’re unfamiliar with. It really feels like stepping into another world - fully fleshed-out, fully envisioned.

The environment is obviously beautiful and unique, but I was surprised by just how ornate it was. The thought and consideration that went into details as minor as the UIs you’ll encounter in and on everything from car dashboards to PCs and menus both diegetic and otherwise helps the entire world feel diverse, detailed, and cohesive. While everything feels of a kind and everything is working towards the same design goals, the sheer amount of variety was shocking.

The biggest thing that stuck out to me about Night City itself within just a few hours of playing was how vertically oriented it was. Not just in the “there are tall buildings” sense, though there certainly are tall buildings – I’m talking about the way that Cyberpunk uses verticality to tell stories. The first time that you end up high enough above the skyline to see rooftops will inevitably be during one of your first encounters with Night City’s elite. The hustle and bustle of street life fading away as an elevator climbs up the side of a building and you emerge into a world you aren’t familiar with was astounding. That claustrophobic feeling of being surrounded by monoliths isn’t only alleviated by attending to the rich, though – for similar reasons, my first journey out of the city limits and into the “badlands” will stick with me. Cyberpunk successfully manages its mood and tone by controlling the kind of environments you’ll find yourself in, and while that may seem like a simple, sensible, universal design decision, its consistent application helped ground the world for me in a way that made it feel more real than most of its contemporaries.

Something else that makes Night City feel real is how Cyberpunk implements its setpieces. In a decision that reverberates throughout the rest of the game, CD Projekt was clearly all-in on the notion of immersion and seamless transitions. While it was consistently surprising and exciting to find bombastic moments embedded in the world’s side content (one standout involves Night City’s equivalent of SWAT descending from the sky to stop a robbery in an otherwise non-descript shop downtown), it never took me out of the world. And, on the other end of the experience, the number of memorable, exciting story moments that were located in parts of the city that you had wandered by before helped make the world feel almost fractal, this idea that every building and every corner could house new adventures or heartbreaks.

One thing that did take me out of the experience, unfortunately, were a few of the celebrity (or “celebrity”) cameos. While I think that the core cast was well-cast, with Keanu Reeves as Johnny Silverhand in particular being an inspired choice, the game, unfortunately, wasn’t immune to the tendency to include recognizable faces just because they were recognizable. Grimes plays a role in a forgettable side quest that felt dangerously like it only existed because she wanted to be in the game. There are also an almost concerning number of streamer cameos (“over 50 influencer and streamers from around the world,” according to CD Projekt), and while most of them completely went by me, the few that did hit for me only served to disrupt the world. The only perceived positive here is that most players won’t have any idea who these people are.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the only thing that broke immersion in the game. Due to what I can only assume are particularly harsh memory restrictions imposed by the game’s release on last-generation hardware, the game has some of the most aggressive NPC culling that I’ve ever seen. While NPCs don’t strictly only exist in screen space, it often feels like they do, as simply spinning the camera around can result in an entirely new crowd existing in place of the old one. This is obviously rough when it comes to maintaining immersion in crowded spaces on-foot, but it gets worse when you’re driving. Driving on an empty road, rotating the camera, and finding that three seconds later there was an entire legion of cars waiting for your camera to discover them, far too close to slow down, was always a deadly surprise. It doesn’t help that your cars take a while to slow down.

Cyberpunk’s approach towards cars in general is interesting. While I certainly had trouble with them when I began playing, I eventually began to get into their groove. If you want to learn how to drive effectively in Cyberpunk, you have to learn how to drift. After the game’s latest substantial patch, the team at CD Projekt finally fixed my largest problem with the game’s driving – the minimap was simply too zoomed-in, making it difficult to begin to make the right decisions on when and how to turn when traveling at speed. Now that that's resolved, however, whipping and spinning through the streets is fun, and the cars feel appropriately weighty. I’ll still occasionally boot up the game just to cruise around its streets and listen to the radio.

Speaking of the radio, did I mention that Cyberpunk 2077 has one of the greatest game soundtracks that I’ve ever heard? The radio is filled with great original songs from some pretty great musicians, but that’s not where the soundtrack’s beauty starts and it certainly isn’t where it ends. The original soundtrack (composed by P.T. Adamczyk, Marcin Przybylowicz, and Paul Leonard-Morgan) was consistently beautiful, moving, and intense. The world feels gritty and grimy but ultimately beautiful and worth saving, and a great deal of that emotion comes from the soundtrack. While the heavy use of industrial synths could’ve lent itself towards music that existed to set tone instead of form lasting memories with memorable melodies, the sparkling backing tones and inspired instrumentation helped keep me humming some of its tracks for months after last hearing them in-game. I’m no musical critic, I don’t know how much I can say about this soundtrack, so I’ll just reiterate: it’s genuinely incredible.

It certainly helps that the encounters that so many of those tunes are backing up are exciting as well. I was expecting middling combat from the company that brought us The Witcher 3, and while the experience wasn’t perfect, it was competitive with (and, in many ways, better than) the closest games to it than I can point to, Eidos Montreal’s recent Deus Ex titles. Gunplay feels tight, shotguns feel explosive, and encounter spaces are diverse and full of alternate paths and interesting cover. My first playthrough was spent primarily as a stealth-focused gunslinger, using my silenced pistol to cover up the mistakes that my feet made when trying to avoid getting caught. Trying to sneak into, around, and through environments helped emphasize how complex the environments actually were. While it’d be easy to run into a wealth of the game’s content with your guns loaded and ready to fire, that may contribute to a perceived lack of depth in the game’s world design. I’m trying to write this without considering what other people have said about the game, but this particular point has been something of a sticking point for me – there are individual, completely optional buildings in Cyberpunk that have more interesting, considered level design than some entire video games, and the experience of evaluating and utilizing them was consistently mechanically engaging and exciting.

The sheer number of abilities that the player has can be almost overwhelming. While leveling does encourage the player to specialize into certain traits, especially when said traits can also serve as skill checks for the dialogue system and some traversal opportunities, every trait houses a bundle of skills that each house a sprawling leveling tree. Far from the kind of “three-path EXP dump” that you’ll find in a great number of AAA titles, Cyberpunk’s leveling experience can be legitimately intimidating. It’s difficult to plan the kind of character you want to play as when you’re trying to project eighty or a hundred hours forward for a character that will be constantly encountering new kinds of challenges. I certainly didn’t begin my playthrough by wanting to be a stealth-focused gunslinger – in fact, I was originally aiming for a melee-focused hacker build. While I was drawn to what I was drawn to, hearing stories from other players about the kind of builds that they ultimately considered to be overpowered made one thing exceedingly clear: Cyberpunk is a game that rewards every kind of play, possibly to its own detriment.

Cyberpunk’s main story is notably short. I wouldn’t consider this to be a problem, considering the sheer amount of engaging, exciting, heartfelt side content, but it might be the core of the difficulty scaling plateauing so early on. As you progress deeper into the game you’ll find that almost every build, as long as you are willing to commit to something, is more than viable. Look around long enough and you’ll find people saying that every single build is overpowered. For me, that fed into the central power fantasy in an exciting way. By the time that I rolled credits a hundred hours in I was more or less unstoppable, walking into rooms and popping every enemy almost instantly. For others, this was a problem – it can be frustrating to feel like all of your work to become stronger wasn’t met with an appropriate challenge when the time came to put it into practice. This is a difficult problem to solve, and I don’t have a solution. I’ll fondly remember my revolver-toting, enemy-obliterating V, though, so I can’t complain.

Regardless of the scaling, however, the content you play through to arrive at that pinnacle of power was consistently, surprisingly robust. While the differentiation between “gigs” and “side quests” is confusing (word for the wise: gigs are generally shorter and more gameplay-centric missions that are designed by CD Projekt’s “open world” team while the side quests are made by the same team that made the main quests and are generally longer and more narrative-centric), both kinds of side content are lovingly crafted and meaningful. Of the 86 gigs in the game, every single one of them takes place in a unique location with a hand-crafted backstory and (almost always) a wealth of different approaches. These don’t exist separately from the rest of the game’s design philosophy, even if they are made by a separate team, and you’ll often find that decisions made outside of gigs will reverberate into them (and, sometimes, the other way around). I’ve played a great deal of open world games, and never before has the “icon-clearing content�� felt this lovingly-crafted and interesting. While the main quests will take you traveling across the map, the side content is what really makes it feel dense and real. You’ll be constantly meeting different kinds of people who are facing different kinds of problems – and, hey, occasionally you’ll be meeting someone who has no problem at all, someone who just wants to make your world a little bit brighter.

It’s surprising, then, that one of the most obvious ways to integrate that kind of content in Cyberpunk is so sparsely-utilized. “Braindances,” sensory playback devices used to replicate experiences as disparate as sex, meditation, and murder, play a critical role in some of the game’s larger quests, but they almost never show up in the side content. You would imagine that the ability to freely transport the player into any kind of situation in a lore-friendly way would’ve been a goldmine for side content, but its use is limited. This isn’t even a complaint, really, I’m just genuinely surprised – I wouldn’t be surprised if they used them more heavily in 2077’s expansions or sequels, because they feel like an untapped goldmine.

Another thing that the game surprisingly lacks is the inclusion of more granular subtitle options. While the game does let you choose the important stuff – whether or not you want CD Projekt’s trademark over-the-head subtitles for random NPCs, what language you want the subtitles to be in, what language you want the audio to be in – it doesn’t include something that I’ve grown to consider a standard: the ability to turn on subtitles for foreign languages only. As the kind of player who avoids subtitles when possible, I went through most of Cyberpunk with them off. Unfortunately, a tremendous number of important cutscenes in the game take place in languages other than English, and I didn’t know that I was supposed to understand what these characters were saying until I was embarrassingly far into one of the prologue’s most important scenes.

NOTE: I was pleasantly surprised to discover after replaying the ending of the game earlier today that they've fixed this issue in a patch. Nice!

I can only complain about the game’s language support so much, because there’s something important that lies between the player and the story they’re there to experience: a fucking incredible English localization. Ironically, it’s so good that I can’t help but imagine that most players won’t even think about it. It’s easy to notice and talk about an excellent localization when it’s from something like a JRPG, something with a clearly different style from what you’d expect from a work made in English, but never once in my entire playthrough did I even briefly consider the idea that it was natively written in anything other than English. I knew that CD Projekt was a Polish studio, but I just assumed that they wrote in English and localized it backwards. The language is constantly bright and surprising, the jokes land, the characters have memorable quirks, everything feels natural, and the voice acting is legitimately some of the best that I’ve ever heard in a video game. Both versions of the main character’s voice were damn-near instantly iconic for me, landing up there with Commander Shepard in the upper echelon of protagonist VO. I can’t praise it enough.

That said, even if the localization was incredible, it’d be hard to appreciate if the meat of the story wasn’t up-to-snuff. I was ecstatic to discover, then, that Cyberpunk 2077 has an incredible story. Every great story starts with a great cast of characters, and Cyberpunk hit it out of the park with that. The core cast of side characters are some of my favorite characters in years. Judy, Panam, River, and Kerry are all memorable, full, charming people. Kerry Eurodyne in particular is responsible for my favorite scene in a game since the finale of Final Fantasy XV. The quest “Boat Drinks,” the finale of Kerry’s quest line, is quietly emotional and intensely beautiful. He, and the other characters like him, are more than the setting they’re in, and the way that the game slowly chews away at the harsh and bitter exterior that the world has given them as it reaches to their emotional, empathetic core consistently astounds. Night City is a city full of noise, violence, destruction, and decay, but you don’t have to participate in it. You don’t have to make it worse. You can be different, and you can be better. You don’t get there alone, you can’t get there alone, and Cyberpunk is a game that revels in how beautiful the world can be if we are willing to find the light and excitement in the people around us.

Of course, Cyberpunk is a video game, it’s an RPG, and the story is more than a linear progression of memorable moments. Something that struck me while making my way through Cyberpunk’s story was how expertly and tastefully it implemented choice. I’m used to games that give you flashing notifications and blaring alarms whenever you're able to make a decision that matters, so I was initially confused by how Cyberpunk didn’t seem reactive to the things I said and did. The game would give me a few options in conversations, I’d select one of them, and then the story would progress naturally. However, as I continued, I began to notice small things. One character would remember me here, a specific thing I said twenty hours before would be brought up by someone there, an action that I didn’t even know I had the choice to not take was rewarded. The game slowly but surely established a credibility to its choices, a weight to your words, this sense that everything that you were saying, even beyond the tense setpiece moments that you’d expect to matter, would matter. It was only after going online after completing the game that I realized just how different my playthrough could’ve been. While nothing ever reached the level of the kind of divergent choices that The Witcher 2 allowed, there were still large chunks of the game that are entirely missable. Three of the game’s endings can only be unlocked through the completion of (and, in one case, specific actions in) specific quests, and multiple memorable quests were similarly locked behind considerate play. This isn’t really a game that will stop you from doing one thing because you chose to do something else, most of the choice-recognition is simply unlocking new options for the player to take, but it always feels natural and never feels like a game providing you an arbitrary fork in the road just for the sake of making it feel artificially replayable. CD Projekt has already said that they made the choices too subtle in Cyberpunk, but I deeply appreciate the game as it is now – more games should make choices feel more real.

It helps that the dialogue system backing up some of those choices is dynamic and the cutscene direction backing those scenes up is consistently thrilling. The decision to lock you in first-person for the entire game was an inspired one, and it resulted in a bevy of memorable scenes made possible by those interlocking systems. There are the obvious ones – being locked in a smoky car with a skeptical fixer, getting held at gunpoint by a mechanical gangster with his red eyes inches away from your own and a pistol’s barrel just barely visible as it presses against your forehead, having to choose between firing your weapon and talking down someone with a hostage when in a tense, escalating situation. There are also a million smaller ones, situations where the scale of the world becomes part of the magic. The first time that I sat down in a diner and talked with someone I had to meet or the first time that I rode along through the bustling downtown of Night City as a politician sized me up will stick with me because the perspective of the camera and the pacing of the real-time dialogue interface combine to make almost everything more powerful. There’s so much effort put into it – so many custom animations, so many small touches that you’d only see if you were staring intensely at every frame. All of that effort paid off, and the controversial decision to strip third-person out of the game was ultimately proven to be one of the smartest decisions that CD Projekt has ever made.

Another decision that helped power an exciting, engaging story was how the game freely manipulates the time and weather during key story moments. It’s a small touch, it’s one that you won’t notice unless you’re looking for it, but every once in a while you’ll walk into a place during a crystal-clear day and come out five minutes later to discover that it’s a cold, windy, rainy night and you have a city to burn. Along with the first-person limitation, this initially feels like something that could only harm immersion, but when it’s backed up by a story that motivating and scenes that thrilling you’d be hard-pressed to notice it outside of the flashes of telling yourself that this scene or that scene is the best that you’ve played in a long time. This also helps avoid a problem that games like the Grand Theft Auto series consistently face – instead of letting scenes happen at any time, compromising direction, or doing something like a timelapse, sacrificing immersion, Cyberpunk manages to always keep you in the action while also presenting the action in its most beautiful and appropriate form. There are moments where it truly feels like it’s meshing the kind of scene direction that’d be at home in a Naughty Dog game, the gameplay of Deus Ex, and the storytelling of the WRPG greats, and in those moments there is nothing else on the market that feels quite like it.

I sure have talked a lot about this game’s story, considering the fact that I have barely brought up its central hook. The early twist (unfortunately spoiled by the game’s marketing), the placement of a rockstar-turned-terrorist-turned-AI-construct firmly in your brain after a heist goes wrong and your best friend dies, helps establish a tone that the rest of the game commits to. Johnny Silverhand starts as an annoying, self-centered asshole with no real appreciation for how dire your situation is, but by the end of the game he had more than won me over. Reeves’s performance was really stellar, and the relationship between him and V is incredibly well-written. More than that, his introduction helps spur on a shift in the way that you engage with the world. The first act is full of hope, aspiration, the belief that you can get to the top if you hustle hard enough and believe. After you hold your dying friend in your arms and are forced to look your own death in the eyes, though, things begin to turn. Maybe the world is fucked up, maybe it’s fucked up beyond belief. But there Johnny is, telling you to fight. Why? Every time you fight, things get worse.

But the game continues to ruminate on this, it continues to put you in situations where fighting not only fails to fix the problem, but it makes it worse. Despite that, it’s positive. For me, at least, Cyberpunk’s worldview slowly came into alignment, and it’s one that I can’t help but love. Cyberpunk 2077 is a game about how important the fight is, how important believing in something is, even if you’re facing impossible odds, even if there’s no happy ending. It’s a story that posits that giving up is the worst ending of all, that your only responsibility is to what’s right and to the ideals that you and the people you love want to live up to. The game uses every story it can tell, every character it can introduce you to, and every encounter it can spin into a narrative to drive that home. And, when the ending comes, it was phenomenal. All of the endings were powerful, effective, and meaningful to me, but I’m more than happy that I went with what I did.

Cyberpunk 2077 is an excellent video game. It’s not flawless, but no game is, and at its core it's one of the most fun, beautiful, narratively engaging, and heart-filled games that I’ve ever played. I couldn’t recommend it highly enough, and I sincerely hope that everyone who has skipped out on it because of what they’ve heard is able to give it a shot someday. Maybe they’ll love it as much as I do. Wouldn’t that be something?

[eljackinton]

Jack's End of Year Video Game Round-up.

There were many things I couldn't do this year, being in lockdown and all, which in turn meant I played a hell of a lot more video games than I normally do. Here's a quick rundown of what I thought of them.

Hitman 2

IO have sort of perfected the Hitman formula now, so future entries in the series simply have to ask the question of what new directions you can take that formula. In that regard Hitman 2 is a resounding success, setting sneaking and assassination in scenarios around the world from race tracks to holiday resorts, and thus making it the best entry yet. It's possible one day the Hitman conceit will wear thin, but today is not that day.

Thronebreaker

Most people will go into Thronebreaker just wanting a stand-alone version of the Gwent we played during Witcher 3. Thronebreaker is not that. Indeed, even beyond the changes to the mechanics brought in by the online version, Thronebreaker is more of a puzzle game which uses the mechanics of Gwent to concoct unique scenarios. Still, the story is pretty good and it is fun overall, even if it didn't end up scratching the itch left by Gwent.

Black Mesa (Xen)

I returned to Black Mesa after Xen was finally added, eager to see what the team had come up with. My feelings are complicated. The Xen portions of the game are really well designed, great to play and visually beautiful. However the levels hew so far from the Half-Life originals that it kind of stops feeling like Half-Life. I would have like to have seen a more faithful recreation to be honest.

Neon Struct

If you've been wanting a spiritual sequel to Thief that actually used the mechanics of Thief, here you go. Though low budget, and therefore having somewhat uninspiring visuals based on reused assets, it's still a really impressive game from what the team had to work with, and it's short enough that it doesn't outstay it's welcome.

Acid Spy

I'm generally usually okay at stealth games but this one was well beyond my skill level. Got through the tutorial but just got frustrated and quit on the first mission.

Salting the Earth

A wonderfully put together visual novel about the legacy of war and the nature of national identities. Also you date buff orc women. One of the best VNs I've played, but it does have some pretty bleak potential endings that clash somewhat with the rest of the story's tone.

Hedon

Speaking of buff orc women, Hedon is a vivid, perfectly designed retro-shooter that really uses the most of it's engine to bring it's world to life, with shades of Thief and Strife thrown in there. Wears its hornieness on it's sleeve, but if you can roll with that you'll have nothing but a good time.

The Painscreek Killings

I really really loved this immersive narrative game, where you explore an abandoned town to piece together a series of suspicious deaths. My only gripes are the town looks very British despite being set in the US, and the final confrontation adding a chase scene felt a little over dramatic.

Deus Ex Mankind Divided

There are many problems with Mankind Divided. Trying to find another story to do with Adam Jensen. Making the game more of an open world by taking away the usual Deus Ex globe-trotting. The clumsy use of racial metaphor being applied to cyborgs. All in all the game just didn't really come together, which is a shame, because the DLC showed such promise, and hinted at the real Deus Ex game we could have had.

Warhammer Armageddon DLC

I managed to complete the Salamanders DLC and got stuck near the end of the Blood Angels one. All in all it's simply 'more' of what the base game offered, and I'm not sure it really needed it.

Unavowed

Easily one of the most interesting games I played this year. So good It inspired me to write a cheesy fanfic. Sure the mechanics of applying squad mechanics to a point and click are interesting, but it's the world, the art and the characters themselves that really make this game. Highly recommended.

Devil Daggers

The ultimate distillation of classic shooter mechanics. One platform, one weapon, endless enemies. I didn't get all that far into it and I think most people won't, but I'm not going to complain for the price. Overdue a revisit.

Dream Daddy

A fun and fluffy dating game that actually does a good job of putting you into the mindset of a recently bereaved bisexual dad. Come for the hunks, stay for the really affecting story of a strained relationship between father and daughter.

Greedfall

Greedfall falls short of the mark in most aspects, but I have to give it credit for being one of the few games to give us a Bioware companion-centric adventure during this drought of Bioware games. It lacks the zing of something like Dragon Age, and handles the subject of colonialism really problematically, but if you can get past those issues, it's a fun ride, and a world I'd like to revisit.

Endless Legend

I've been wanting a game to scratch the Alpha Centauri itch for decades now and Endless Legend finally did it. There is a risk of being overwhelmed by the sheer number of unique factions to play, and I know I still haven't really scratched the surface even after 4 full campaigns. Is that a criticism? I suppose it depends if you think you can have too much of a good thing.

Space Hulk Deathwing Enhanced Edition

A valiant effort was put in to make a faithful FPS of the Space Hulk experience, but ultimately it falls far too short. The visuals look great and the game-feel of stomping around as a Space Marine really works, but the game lacks charm and character. Up against Vermintide, there's no comparison.

Sunless Sea

This is a game that feels like a bottomless abyss of secrets and mysteries tied up in a very brutal one-life-only system. I really enjoyed my time with Sunless Seas, with the music calling me like a wailing siren every now and again, yet in many ways I did find it a bit too unforgiving, and it could have benefited from having a bit more of a progression between lives than the almost solid reset it leaves you with.

Age of Empires / 2 / 3 Definitive Editions

The first Age of Empires has an important place in history, but is borderline unplayable by today's standards. Almost every aspect was improved in 2 and going back now feels like trading a car for a horse and cart. It's clear that the game was intending your slow crawl out of the stone age through hunting and gathering to be part of the game in its own right, but today it's just tedious, and the rest of the game is just so slow.

There isn't much to say about Age of Empire 2 that I haven't already said, but I will point out that multiplayer AOE2 has kept me sane over the course of the lockdown, and I'm glad the Definitive Edition enhanced that experience.

Age of Empire 3 tried too hard to reinvent the wheel. Instead of taking 2 and building on it, it instead contorted it around a colonisation theme, and it didn't really work. On top of that, the mechanics really felt they were built more for single-player story missions. The maps are too small, and the expansion factions clash with the rules badly. Still, there is fun to be had, and I'll be checking out the campaigns next year.

Hand of Fate 2

This game takes the original Hand of Fate and adds way, way too much into it. While I appreciate the addition of companions, a longer story mode, and optional side missions, the game is far too experimental with it's formula, and leaves me struggling with complex missions around being lost in a desert or evading barbarian hordes, when all I wanted was a straight forward dungeon crawl. I tapped out two thirds of the way through the campaign.

Wild Guns Reloaded

I love the style and aesthetic, but I just don't have the reflexes (or the gamepad) for these fast paced arcade games.

Vermintide 2 Drakenfels

Fatshark gave us an entire Vermintide campaign for free this year, at the cost of having to be subjected to obnoxious cosmetic micro-tranactions. Hard to say it was worth the price, but Fatshark really do continue to improve, bringing new scope and ideas to every new mission. As good as it gets.

Pendula Swing

A fun little game that apes the visuals of a Baldur's Gate style RPG but the mechanics of a point and click adventure game set in a fantasy version of the roaring twenties. A strong introduction to it's setting but definitely needs building on if we're to see a continuation. A lot of the world-building feels too simple and half-baked at times, and the gameplay feels like too much is going on too fast. Still, a charming story though.

The Shiva / The Blackwell Series

At first I had no idea that Unavowed was connected to a host of other Wadget Eye adventure games, so naturally I had to check them out. I'd known about The Shiva and the Blackwell games for years, but never actually thought about picking them up. Playing them all back to back was a great experience, and almost felt like a prototype to the episodic storytelling many games do today.

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light/Temple of Osiris

Guardian of Light is a fun, inventive co-op game for killing some time with a friend. The puzzles are often unique and interesting and get you thinking, and the story, while nothing fantastic, is fun enough to keep you interested and have a laugh about with your co-op partner in a B-Movie kind of way. Temple of Osiris adds way too much to the formula, with more characters, mechanics and more open exploration and it absolutely loses the charm of the first game, and even then it's buggy as hell. Skip the second one.

Command and Conquer Remastered

Big chunks of my childhood are taken up with memories of playing Command and Conquer and Red Alert, so it's difficult to really gauge my thoughts on the remaster. On the one hand the art direction looks great and preserves the feel of the original, and the quality of life improvements to the gameplay help make it more playable. The nostalgia hit is also palpable. That being said, the mechanics have not aged all that well, with much of the game being far, far too hard. Probably the best way to experience the genesis of the RTS genre but just know what you're getting in for.

Superhot Mind Control Delete

I wrote a lot at length about how unsure I was about Mind Control Delete at the time, and that's because it does feel a little unsure about itself. Is it a continuation of the first game? A fun bonus mode? A mediation on the nature of addiction? A critique of video game content? A joke on the player? I don't know, but I do know one thing, and that is that Superhot is still as addictive as hell.

Opus Magnum

Zachtronic's steampunk alchemy game requires far too much maths brain than I am capable of , and so I had to rely on guides a lot of the time, but that being said, it's still amazingly put together and vividly presented. Really feels like a game that could be used in schools.

Necromunda Underhive Wars (Story Mode)

I'll be checking out Underhive's Campaign mode in the new year, but for now I just want to talk about the story mode. Much like Mordheim, this is a game that's not going to work for everyone, but I really dug it and like it's unique take on a squad based TBS. However, in many respects the game does feel like a missed opportunity. The storyline is fun enough, and the arsenal robust, but much of the character of the tabletop game, the weird, chaotic, and sometimes comical things that can happen over the course of a battle seems to have been lost in translation, as has the quirky character to a lot of the gangs.  

Outer Wilds

There is little I can say about Outer Wilds that hasn't already been said by others, particularly that one should go into the game as blind as possible. A beautiful piece of interactive art, words would fail me in describing it anyway.

Life is Strange 2

Fantastically written, amazingly animated, wonderfully acted, and grim and depressing as all hell. I really love Life is Strange 2, but it it a tough game to bare witness to, especially in 2020. It treats it's subject matter with great maturity, but is so dark it's hard to motivate yourself to continue each gruelling episode. Also, I really think it would have fared better if it had not named itself Life is Strange 2, as not following Max and Chloe turned a lot of people away from a game I think they'd have otherwise enjoyed if they'd named it Wolf Brothers or something.

Half Life 2 / Episodes / Portal / 2/ Mel

After playing Black Mesa earlier this year I decided to revisit the entire Half Life 2 and Portal series. What I concluded is that Half Life 2 is not really all that good. A well told story wrapped around weak combat and average encounter design. This much improves across the episodes of course, but in the end I rather feel Half Life 2 is pretty overrated.

Portal, on the other hand, still feels fresh, though I was surprised I'd forgotten just how much was added in Portal 2, to the point Portal feels more like a game demo. That being said, I think the slowly growing mystery and menace of Portal has aged a lot better than the gagfest the series became with 2. Mel, a stand-alone mod that feels like could be a Portal 3 in it's own right, returns to a more serious tone, and feels all the stronger because of it.

Control

Control has gone from a game I didn't really care about all that much to one of my favourites of the year, if not the decade. Sure there are criticisms I could make, but the world has so much depth, the characters so much potential, and the gameplay such perfectly designed chaos, that it wouldn't really matter. A great time was had.

Icewind Dale 2

Finishing Icewind Dale 2 was the final banishing of the old ghosts of Infinity Engine games I never finished as a kid. Sure there was the nostalgia, but Icewind Dale 2 also feels prefect for the Baldurs Gate era's swan song. Beautiful environments, a well written story and great interface and design, only pulled down due to some overly long busywork at various points and the plot being dragged on a little too long. Still, sad to know I have no further Infinity Engine games left to conquer.

Elsinore

The first half of Elsinore is an absolutely great time-loop mystery, which seems to be an interesting interrogation of Shakespearian tropes and asks the question of how much of a Shakespearian tragedy remains the more you change it. The second half, however, quickly devolves into a cosmic horror story that feels a poor fit for the genre and far too grim for the art style, and that's even before it basically devolves into trying to do the same thing Undertale did but worse. A well put together game whose ending did not sit well with me.

Gwent: The Witcher Card Game

Since Thronebreaker didn't sate my appetite I started playing competitive Gwent. It is a wholly different game than the one that appears in The Wither 3, but is certainly fascinating in it's own right. After 200 hours I am officially addicted, somebody please send help.

And that's that. Not doing a top 5 games of the year because I played too many this year and I've spent too much time thinking about them already. Here's hoping I play less in 2021 and can get back to a more normal life.

[kyndaris]

“99 Little Bugs In The Code...”

With the release of so many titles during the holiday season of 2020, I was barely able to keep up. But, what I was saddened to learn were the plethora of bugs and glitches that permeated the video games I enjoy. In fact, after researching ways to resolve an initial issue where a cutscene refused to load but Eivor was unable to move, I discovered a series of different problems that could possibly prevent me from wrapping up the story of the video game. Cue the anxiety.

I am quite proud to admit that most games I have started, I have actually finished. If not the platinum trophies, then the main story and many of the side activities along with a hefty amount of trophies to showcase my dedication to the game. Often, when I’m writing up impressions/ reviews/ analysis of the narrative in video games, I’d have explored nearly every nook and cranny of the fantastical world I’ve been thrust in. While some people prefer to power through the story and finish the game like The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt in approximately 50 hours, I spent almost an entire day just sailing around Skellige, seeking out the treasure chests and vanquishing any and all question marks that remained on the world map.

A game is not finished until the credits roll. But until that happens, I’ll be doing all that I can to take in the sandbox developers have built around me.

As such, when I encountered a game-breaking bug in Grand Theft Auto V, I was devastated. No matter what I did, the mission circle would not appear. Even as I scoured the internet for a solution, I was unable to make the yellow circle appear in order for me to continue the story. 

My only recourse would be to start the game afresh.

But I had already invested so much time and energy to get where I was. Could I handle another 30 or 40 hours to reach the point where I was at?

It was a hard thing for me to do, but in the end, I simply let it go. It is disheartening for me to admit, but I never finished the story in Grand Theft Auto V. I had neither the time or the energy to go through what I had done before. After all, what if the same error occurred? Then I would have put in so much effort, only for it to go unrewarded.

Besides, I still had a mountain of games to get through.

As I have gotten older, I’ve also become more appreciative of the time I spend with each game. And though I’ve not many other commitments, besides my writing and Netflix, I still feel that my time is quite precious. So, why would I want to waste it on trying to repeat the same things if it might not resolve the problem I faced? 

What’s worse is that I also feel the pressure to get my hands on the latest and greatest video games. Developers are pumping these monsters out in record speed and it is hard to sink my teeth into each and every world. I also feel bad, as someone that blogs about the video games I play, that I’m not keeping enough of my readers entertained with my thoughts on the latest releases. But, because I’m not recognised as a video game reviewer, I don’t receive any of these earlier than other people. In fact, I often have to go out of my way just to pick them up, pop them into my console and start playing on Day 1 or Day 73 (depending on the other titles in my relatively imposing pile of shame).

But maybe I just simply put too much expectations on myself and you, the few readers that I have, are content with anything that I put out. Even if it doesn’t arrive as timely as it can. 

In any case, I’m somewhat heartened by the latest patches for Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla because it was incredibly frustrating to know that I had a treasure hoard I should have been able to collect, but not being able to loot anything in Ledecestrescire. And by the time I finally get to Cyberpunk 2077, it’ll hopefully look a lot better on my PlayStation 4 Pro and most of the kinks will have been ironed out.

I dread to think when I’ll finally be able to play Trails of Cold Steel 4. Why, I hear you ask? Because I still haven’t even STARTED Trails of Cold Steel 3.

Then there are the new games I’m eagerly looking forward to such as Kena: Bridge of Spirits and Horizon: Forbidden West. 

[latin-dr-robotnik]

Netflix’s Castlevania Season 3 - final thoughts (spoilers ofc)

Last night I finally finished up watching the newest season of Castlevania, and I think it’s probably my favorite so far, just for a simple reason: the suspense.

After season 2′s big fiery climax, life in a post-Dracula world could’ve gone wrong pretty easily in this season, either by being too boring (due to the main force behind the first two seasons being resolved) or by bringing the old man himself back too early (showing a potential lack of identity for the series beyond Dracula vs Belmont). Season 3 does neither, and instead opts to take the (mostly) happy ending of season 2 (except for Hector and Isaac) and twist it so fucking much throughout the season in such a way that it felt like psychological horror in some places. Take the whole “Visitor” thing as an example, the beast itself is more of your typical big demonic baddie, yet it’s shown only during a flashback, and then is hidden for most of the season while the characters wonder about what’s going on with that thing, and the reveal is so stressful due to a lot of suspense built up from the monks’ secret agenda, their awfully unsettling looks, and a wonderful sound direction (that theme used for The Visitor reminds me of the synths used in Celeste to show Madeline’s panic attack, and here it’s just as distressful as there). Stuff like this make you feel the dread of lots of bad things coming by the end of episode 8...

...and bad things came indeed.

The lenghty buildup pays off in a two-episode long climax that fires on all cylinders from the start. And while season 3 as a whole isn’t as violently graphic as previous seasons, the climax gets brutal really quick, mostly through psychological means. That’s not to say this season isn’t violent, hell no, it’s still fucking nasty (which is par for the course for a series that started its runtime by burning Dracula’s wife by the fucking Inquisition and showing the entire process), it’s just that the psychological component is way stronger in this season, specially the way they used sex as a manipulation conduit. That’s a big highlight to me. 

Another example: Isaac’s attack on the magician’s tower isn’t nasty because of sheer violent power, but because the sole thought of the magician controlling all the people and “turning them into ants” is scary as fuck. The same goes for Hector and Alucard, who went through a lot of emotional pain and manipulation (they have two of the biggest top 10 anime betrayals moments ever), and then, well... let me unpack first.

I can safely say that the climax blew my expectations out of the water. Although I saw some things coming (like Saint Germain’s purpose being fulfilled by the end of the season, or Hector ending badly, again), most of the stuff I predicted was overshadowed by the actual twists of the climax. The fight with the monks and The Visitor is the usual Castlevania epic demonic fight climax I’ve grown used to by this point: it’s flashy, hyping and it’s once more a “we almost didn’t make it but we did” type of deal; yet Trevor, Sypha and Saint-Germain’s victory is immediately undermined by the biggest twist of the season: the Judge’s secret. I mean, I think we all knew there was something up with that man and his apples, but I never expected it to be that disturbing. That’s some Witcher levels of fucked up (it reminded me a lot of the best sidequests from the games, that’s why I mention the series :P), and another one of the “people are fucking monsters” moments this series has always had. It’s also the second biggest gut punch of the season (you already guessed what’s the biggest one). With that twist presented, the heroes’ victory is no longer a thing to celebrate, but a “let’s get the fuck out of this village and never return” situation, something I really like to see for a change. Sypha herself is a perfect representation of this season: from a happy-go-lucky adventurer to a tired, upset woman that has seen some of the most disturbing shit so far. She’s fucking pissed, and Trevor is too, his closing "we’ve been living your life, now we’re living mine” is just fulminating.

That’s not to say this is a perfect season, though. My biggest gripe is that the big season 2 cliffhanger (Carmilla betraying Dracula and looking like the next big baddie to beat) went this entire season just setting itself up for the future, something that -admittedly- was interesting as ever to see (the character arcs and motivations are so well done), but underwhelming to find out the big plan is still being, well, planned. Isaac’s journey in this aspect was way better developed, but I’m still thinking about how it ended pretty abruptly. Idk, I feel like I don’t get it yet, or that we are supposed to be left with that weird empty feeling.

Another thing that I didn’t like was how Dracula was teased. I mean, I miss the old man, I really do. I miss his drama and melancholy. I miss his wonderful acting. But like I said earlier, bringing him back at this stage could’ve potentially set this season up for failure. Still, I got hyped when I saw him, embracing his wife once again on the hellish representation of their burned down house. I screamed and I cheered when he looked back at us, and when it seemed he was going to reach the portal back to Earth, he got instantly denied, and Saint-Germain’s purpose was fulfilled instead. Why tease him like this? Just to remind us how far we’ve come from the series’ original plot points? I felt jebaited so hard.

But I think that’s it. All in all season 3 has been a great time once again. Well, actually it’s a mostly painful and sad to see experience, just for the shit the characters we grew to love went through (our poor boy Hector hasn’t made a good choice since, idk, he originally joined Dracula I think? And, oh boy Alucard is in such a hurtful moment to be), but I loved it. Lots of drama and suspense, with a bad ending that is perfect for this moment in the series’ life, and with a healthy amount of questions to answer in season 4 (except for Carmilla’s season 2 unresolved shit). I can say season 3 is a worthy experience to watch through.

(also, is it me or is Lenore setting herself up for something bigger? I mean, I don’t fucking trust her “hey sisters if you put this magical ring you’ll control Hector and his beasts like I currently do, and it’s not like I’ll totally screw over all of you and subject you to my will.” I know she’s loyal to her sisters and they all already have rings of loyalty and yadda yadda, but idk, I don’t have a good feeling about her. That could be a cool S4 twist tbh.)

[jeanvaljean24601]

Assassin's Creed Valhalla Hands-On Preview

I guide my longship along the waterways of East Anglia, one of the regions of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla’s Anglo-Saxon map. Ahead is the shoreline of Beodericsworth, which will soon be the stage for one of this Viking-themed entry’s flagship features; raiding. With the blow of a horn, my crew begin bailing out, charging up the sands and crashing into the shields of the village’s unprepared guards. Wood splinters, blood gushes, and heads drop from shoulders. It’s exactly the kind of skirmish you’d expect from a Norseman raid. Inside, we hack apart the guard leaders defending the village’s treasures and take it for ourselves. Amongst our findings are two caskets so large it takes multiple vikings to get them open, filled with raw crafting materials. It’s a bounty that will, at the very least, get a knowing nod from Odin, if not a smile.Raiding in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla feels smaller scale than I expected, but is nonetheless good fun, and a vital part of fulfilling the Viking fantasy at the heart of the game. It’s also not the only way to pillage a Saxon settlement. The first time I approached a raiding target in a recent three-hour hands-on with Valhalla, I actually bailed out of the longship on my own, snuck around the back, and crept from guard to guard, taking them out silently. Stealthing the entire camp was overly easy due to the enemies standing perfectly still at their posts - something I hope will be upgraded with patrol paths by the time of full release - but some satisfaction remained thanks to the fact that Assassin’s Creed’s iconic hidden blade has been restored to full power once again, killing instantly with a generous splash of crimson. Preorder Assassin's Creed Valhalla Post-raiding party, I take protagonist Eivor to meet up with fellow clansman Finnr, who sets us on a course to assault Burgh Castle in Northwich, where we’ll face a rival clan. This transitions into what is effectively the boss fight version of raiding; Valhalla’s siege assaults. This one begins with a Viking variant of D-Day, with landing craft exchanged for longships and machine gun fire swapped out for volleys of flaming arrows. As the boats hit the shore and the first set of walls are blown apart, I become tangled up in the first phase of the main assault. It’s here where Valhalla’s combat really shines, despite the rough edges of the work-in-progress build. It’s an iterative upgrade of the system first introduced in Assassin’s Creed Origins, but one with enough Norse-flavoured garnish that it feels just right. Active abilities return, including one that has Eivor hurl half a dozen throwing axes into a collection of nearby enemies, and another that’s basically a charge-and-tackle manovre that lasts for as long as there’s still yards left to sprint. Such abilities can only be triggered by spending adrenaline, which is built through performing standard attacks and parries. But the moments between those super-powered blows are no less entertaining. Enemies have a stun meter, which when worn down allows you to follow up with finishers such as beating them over the head with their own shield, or swinging your axe up through their chin. Foes knocked to the floor can be leapt and stomped on as if they were a bed at a child’s slumber party. And if they refuse to fall over, they can be gleefully booted across the battlefield with the Kick of Tyr; essentially Odyssey’s Spartan Kick in all but name. In moments like these, the spirit of the berserker really starts to shine through. With the first courtyard clear of enemies, I’m able to use a battering ram to break down a timber perimeter fence and progress up to the gate. There are three phases in the assault (frustratingly without checkpointing in this preview build, meaning a full restart on death) with each introducing a new wrinkle of complexity. At the next gate, contained within a stone archway, archers fire arrows from wall-mounted ballistas and pour gallons of burning oil over the ramming crew. On the other side in the final courtyard, the castle’s hardiest occupants do their best to scupper your assault.By this point, I’m feeling fairly exhausted (I’m on my third attempt) and Eivor is feeling the burn. There’s no regenerating health in Valhalla, nor an HP boosting ability like Odyssey’s Second Wind. Instead, you have rations; effectively health potions made up of food gathered from the open world. While the grounds of the castle have a few mushrooms to nibble on, by the last phase of the assault I’ve picked both the land and my pockets dry of food, and have sustained a dent to my HP meter. In other words, I’m not well equipped for the boss battle the game then throws me into. Rued is a rival Viking armed with a longsword he can set ablaze, and is accompanied by a pet wolf. Like with many of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’s boss fights, it’s in this battle where you can detect some potential Soulsborne influences. Eivor has a stamina meter, depleted by dealing heavy melee damage, dodging, and absorbing enemy strikes with your shield. While light attacks may come for free, in a tight boss fight arena populated by a walking mountain and a ravenous wolf, it means stamina is constantly in need of attention. The wolf is able to grab hold of my shield in its maw, opening me up to heavy cleaves from Rued while I try to wrestle my arm free. A few well-placed strikes and some throwing axes knock the wolf out of the fight, leaving just Rued and I to dance it out atop the castle wall. As the fight progresses Rued begins to throw his weapons at me, but the combination of his attack patterns and the gap between us means there isn’t enough time for me to pull out my bow and strike back at range. With the screen fading to black as my health drops to critical levels, I’m just able to dodge a blow and generate enough adrenaline to perform Dive of the Valkyries; a leap that brings both my axe and shield down on Rued in a bone-crunching slam. He’s done for. Before I can bury the hatchet in his skull, though, my hand is stayed by Oswald, an Englishman ally who we’ve saved from Rued’s clutches. He preaches of fair trials before God, and I’m offered the choice to kill or spare my enemy. h96 max tv boxI do the sensible thing and slice open Rued’s neck with an axe, much to Oswald’s distaste.A bug in the demo - something not uncommon in pre-release builds - means I have to reset the game. I continue from where I left off, but am told that in this save game Eivor has abided by Oswald’s request and spared Rued. Fair enough, I think, that’ll keep him happy for his wedding, which is Valhalla’s next quest. Very much following in Odyssey’s footsteps, Valhalla - at least in this showing - has a well-judged balance between light and dark. h96 max x3After a gloomy castle siege I’m treated to a wedding filled with fun conversations and mini-games. I’m challenged to shoot a field full of targets after downing a flagon of ale, and take part in a drinking competition in which I need to neck no less than three horns of beer and not fall over in the process. It’s a delightful time to celebrate Oswald uniting with our clan as he marries Norsewoman Valdis. At least, it is until Rued crashes the party. It appears that Valhalla has ambitions to take the RPG side Assassin’s Creed up a notch; this moment feels like the kind of narrative consequence akin to what we’d see in games like Dragon Age. Because Rued had been spared, he turns up at the wedding looking for vengeance (had he died, I’m informed I’d instead be enjoying a race around the town). But rather than my blood, it’s Oswald’s he’s here to claim. At this point I’m offered another choice; I can let Oswald fight, or I can be his champion and kill Rued on his behalf. I take the latter option, and while I cut down Rued for good this time, Oswald seems slightly disappointed in me taking his place. I wonder if, in later hours, this will have a negative effect on our relationship. I also wonder if this is not just a one off event, but a promise that Valhalla is filled with these kinds of choices and repercussions. Along with narrative choices, Valhalla also iterates on the RPG stats systems its predecessors added to the Assassin’s Creed mix. Alongside the familiar active abilities is a constellation-style map of skill upgrades that provides a variety of passive upgrades. Some improve your basic stats - higher damage, increased health - while others unlock new combat moves such as stun attacks and finishers; those additional attacks that make the combat that extra bit more flavourful. Together, all of your upgrades increase your Global Power rating, a numerical indicator as to how powerful you are that replaces standard levelling. h96 max x3Alongside the introduction of further RPG mechanics, Valhalla’s world is also significantly more traditional of the genre, too; when galloping around it on my horse, or sailing down rivers on my longboat, it was easy to mistake England for The Witcher 3’s Velen. This means, visually, Valhalla is less striking than Odyssey or Origins, with its practically Tolkien colour palette feeling less fresh than the sands of Egypt or mediteranean greenery of Greece. Yet, perhaps because I’m English, I can’t help but get a thrill out of exploring just-about-recognisable versions of my own homeland.h96 max x3It should also be noted that Valhalla embraces British folklore perhaps more than it does Norse Mythology; as I explored this small chunk of the world I came across Black Shuck, a huge black dog that’s part of classic East Anglian folklore, as well as two members of the Daughters of Lerion; Gaelic women dressed in skulls with a fondness for sacrificial rituals and the supernatural. As with Odyssey, exploring uncovers optional bosses and other fun activities, although this time it’s all a lot more goth. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla looks to be, as is the tradition of the series, an iterative update on its predecessors. If the new approach to RPG design and gear-based progression has put you off the series, this slice of the game indicates that you’ll likely be unconvinced by Valhalla’s barely altered direction. But the few changes it makes to those systems suggests developer Ubisoft Montreal may have a newfound confidence in its RPG abilities, and a willingness to embrace more of the genre’s toolset. If its branching story points are frequent occurrences, it may be that Valhalla’s real innovation comes from player agency in the narrative, rather than any mechanical revisions. Provided the game delivers on that promise, my only genuine concern is that the return of the lethal hidden blade hasn’t resulted in instantly satisfying stealth. h96 max tv boxIt currently feels underbaked due to those stationary guards, and so needs some extra challenge to make it a worthwhile alternative to the entertainingly barbaric combat encounters. Fix that, and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla might well be able to both reclaim its lineage and further its admirable RPG ambitions.Matt Purslow is IGN's UK News and Entertainment Writer.

[imaginativecrime]

7 reasons The Witcher series is a mess (or damn I need to vent)

Unpopular opinion time! For the record, I’ve read the books, played the games, hell, I’ve binged the Polish movie and series (because my love for Michal Zebrowski and Zbigniew Zamachowski is undying, sue me), and I was super hyped. Then I spent the entire series yelling at the TV, so I made a handy numbered list of the reasons why I personally consider it mediocre at best.

Because I’m fucking disappointed and I’ll never not be bitter about it. Fact.

Be warned, there are all sorts of spoilers below.

Let’s look at some of the issues that affected the show as a whole:

1) Adaptation is hard work - but you have to do it right

Adapting a story from one medium to another is difficult, you inevitably have to change things to make it suitable to the new form of expression and also, everybody wants their adaptation to be unique, to emphasize points they think are important, to reflect on the current times, you name it. But changes in an adaptation should make sense and lend themselves to the storytelling.

Many changes in the series were arbitrary, nonsensical and contributed absolutely nothing. One such example is the Battle of Sodden Hill, a terribly executed “siege” with not enough extras to fill a classroom instead of a battle of 100 000 people. Writing out Redania, Aedirn and the Brotherhood of Sorcerers from the conflict doesn’t seem to have a point to it, while the delayed arrival of the armies of Temeria and Kaedwen is both unexplained, unlikely and underwhelming, not to mention that it completely undermines the Nilfgaardian threat as a whole. This, of course, is just the tip of the iceberg of all the things that are wrong with Sodden Hill in the series. 

Or take Foltest and his affair with Adda. It is perfectly clear in the books that after seven years of wizards, witchers and all manner of frauds coming and going while Foltest is obsessed with breaking the curse instead of killing his daughter, even the very last blind and deaf peasant knows about his shenanigans. It’s only logical, too. The story is relayed to Geralt in no uncertain terms at the very beginning. Now in the show the whole episode is too short to set up a murder mystery that requires Geralt’s incredible detective skills (uhuh) to unravel. What is worse is that you cannot make a big reveal of something that your audience actually has previous knowledge about. So why even bother to have Foltest deny it and have Geralt beat it out of Ostrit? 

Which brings us to point two:

2) We all know which way to Temeria, don’t we?

Even if you have popular source material, you cannot expect everyone to know it. An adaptation has to consider people who are just getting their first introduction to the sandbox. When your lore is as rich as that of the Witcher, you need time and careful effort to set up your world. The show made a total shit job of this one. As in the above example, sometimes the show ignores that we, as an audience, know things. 

Another example is Vilgefortz. We know him, his plans, abilities and allegiances, we have very specific expectations of his character. Besides completely failing these expectations (and doing a very unconvincing early reveal of his true colors), the show goes as far as taking Vilgefortz’s iconic sentence (You mistake stars reflected in a pond for the night sky.) and putting it in Fringilla’s mouth. Like did they actually think we wouldn’t notice? Or not be pissed?

At other times the show expects us to fill in its glaring blanks exactly by knowing our lore and characters. One obvious, overarching example of this is the issue of the separate timelines, that sometimes left even fans a little confused. Also, fun fact: one of my friends (who has no idea about anything in the Witcher’s world) for instance needed some time to realize Pavetta wasn’t, in fact, a grown-up Ciri, and he remains to this day very confused about Blaviken.

Basically, we are on a swing here, which is actually made even worse by another thing: bad pacing.

3) Hold your Roach for a moment

The first season wants to cram too much into its limited time and it has a severe negative impact on worldbuilding and character development. By bringing in all three timelines from the beginning, the show has to juggle time allotted to each. 

To be frank, Ciri’s timeline at this point consists of a lot of running and screaming, which in itself hardly merits all the time we spend with her. It could have been utilized in part to provide us with a view of the war from ‘below’, to show that beyond the high politics and heroic battles there are burned villages, dead peasants, people who lost everything, cripples, deserters, ruined fields, and so on. Instead, we get one refugee camp of neat tents, actual beds, food and complaints about Calanthe (though not of dead husbands, lost homes or winter). Though I guess it should come as no surprise that the shock value of paint being made from a woman’s reproductory organs (that never happened in the books) is more important than actual large scale human suffering.

Now giving Yennefer an extended back story is great. But by that level of extension once again time is being consumed that is taking other opportunities away. Opportunities like giving Geralt himself a bit more background, clarifying points for fresh faces in the audience, giving characters more time for meaningful interaction. Because there is not enough time to let the story breathe and progress naturally, episodes are often rushed, choppy, and shallow. 

4) Reverse worldbuilding, aka welcome to nowhere 

Another serious issue with worldbuilding is what I suspect to be a deliberate departure from the game visuals and aesthetic. One of the things I adore most about the games is that it built heavily on Eastern European history and folk tradition. Nothing compares to the feeling when you ride into a village and you feel right at home because things are inherently familiar, or you go out into the woods and hear the exact bird song you are used to.

Netflix is very careful not to even offer a whiff of this particular identity to its show, but it doesn’t seem to have a clear artistic vision beyond that. Thus while landscapes are nice enough, other settings such as cities, taverns, ballrooms and the like are horribly bland in that “this is how we imagine the middle ages in Hollywood” way and look exactly what they are: sets. While one is not likely to quickly forget the red rooftops of Novigrad or the wild beauty of the Kaer Morhen pass from the games, there is nothing memorable about the locations presented in the series. (Even more bewildering is the depiction of the elite boarding school of Aretuza as a creepy dungeon with elf skulls everywhere. I cannot even begin to address this one unless it is all in caps.) 

Point being that the show lacks an actual visual identity that would distinguish it from any other dime a dozen medieval fantasy.

5) My kingdom for a decent wardrobe

Sadly enough, the bland and flavorless visuals have a terrible effect on something else: clothes and armor. While some costumes are well done, there are way too many examples of the opposite. One very obviously is Nilfgaardian armor, which looks like fossilized trash bags with sad dick helmets. The fact that armor in the show is treated as the equivalent of cardboard is doing no one any favors. Please do your homework next time. Please?

Another inexplicable departure from the books and games is the appearance of the nobility, and most jarringly, sorceresses. That dress Yennefer picks out the first time? It’s literally the drabbest, ugliest thing I’ve ever seen, and the others are not much better. When it comes to period-accurate choices, the range is just so wide: we are talking cambric, velvet, silk, cloth of gold and silver. We are talking luxurious furs, embroidery, colorful feathers, bright dyes, coats of arms and jewelry. Brooches, necklaces, bracelets, rings, hat badges, belt buckles, hairpins, you name it. People wore their wealth. Making them look like sad orphans will not make them look any more medieval.

Peasant clothes also had their decorations, though to a lesser degree than nobles, obviously. But I guess it’s too much to hope that those would get any attention when queens are dressed like they lost a bet.

6) I see your people and I raise you mine

Including people of color in the casting choices caused a lot of heated debate amongst the fans, but at least it means that the show cares about minority representation, right? Right?

The world of the Witcher has its own minorities, and what we have seen of them so far is so incredibly pathetic that I haven’t the words. For one thing, they look so terrible that elves in the Polish series actually look better, and that was so not a high bar to exceed. To make matters worse, they again seem to lack any sort of distinguishing visual identity (except for the Dryads. I’m also willing to make an exception for Chireadan, as he actually looks right and he’s a settled elf.)

Sadly, unlike the games, the series also fails to establish even the beginnings of a compelling narrative for its minorities, which definitely needs to be in place by the time Thanedd happens at the very latest. What is more, we seem to be given something called the Great Cleansing, which is plenty obscure but comes across as a Night of Broken Glass sort of thing (though that could be just me). While still salvageable at this point, this shift in narrative is cause for some concern, and so far doesn’t make much sense.

7) Your villains are not my villains

Unlike the books and games, the Witcher series sadly doesn’t seem to excel at presenting opposing sides without the need to vilify one (which again, makes me worried about what they are going to do to the Scoia’tael later). 

Nilfgaard is now an Empire of Evil (TM) that lives for killing and religious fanaticism, Fringilla is a psychopath, and Cahir... Well, Cahir is a thousand shades of wrong all on his own. Stregobor and Istredd are now assholes of a whole different caliber, and even poor Eyck of Denesle gets to enjoy his five minutes of fame as a madman frothing at the mouth instead of a paragon of knightly virtue.

This is going so well.

[cutegirlsaremyfavorite]

So I finished the Outer Worlds today and it was great. I would talk about it more but I’m sure most people who care about it know that the Outer Worlds is a fantastic game. Instead what I want to talk about are the different things I enjoy about different games.

I like different games for different reasons so it bothers me when people criticize other games that they aren’t used to for things that I would say are irrelevant. For example, there’s a big different between story games, art games, and games that exist almost entirely for cheap thrills and even with those differences sometimes they blend together well. 

It’s not to say that games made for cheap thrills are bad at all, quite the opposite in fact as those games are well made, have the most money and manpower put in, and encompass the majority of the gaming population. But lets be real here, brain dead shooters, mobas, RTS, and mobile games are mostly built around systems that are designed for addiction and sensory overload. They’re cheap thrills and there’s nothing wrong with that at all. Video games are for people to enjoy after all.

Then there’s art games and story games. Games that use games as a medium to share a vision. Whether it’s to tell a story or just for people to enjoy as a visual/audio/sensory spectacle. Sure these games are often meant to be enjoyed but more so they exist to be an experience. And I think that’s where a lot of people go wrong with those games. Like I remember watching a review of NieR: Automata and the first thing they did was replace the music with their own and make jokes at every possible turn. I don’t want to tell people how to play their own games but it’s pretty clear that they won’t get the experience the game was trying to portray. Another game that might be worth mentioning is Going Home. People gave it shit for not being a real horror game and totally denied the experience it was trying to offer the player. Also, lets be real here, most horror games fall into the cheap thrills category here.

People have different tastes and interests and I think it is in poor practice to judge every game based on them. For example, I didn't really like the Witcher 3 game but I can at least recognize that the game is actually pretty good and it just doesn’t suit my personal tastes. I’m not gonna be like, I didn’t enjoy it therefore it’s bad. I think it’s unfortunate when people do though.

[caithyra]

Vampire Game Reviews Part 1

This Halloween I sat down and played a bunch of vampire themed games and decided to review them. First up, Vampire Legends: The True Story of Kisilova, Dracula: Origin and Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. I might get around to Vampire the Masquerade: Redemption and Dracula: Love Kills in a later post.

I use my own 5-scale gradation in this:

0: Either I couldn’t force myself to finish it, or I was more relieved it was over than anything else. 1: I had no fun, but there might have been something fun in there… maybe…? 2: More bad than good. 3: About evenly good and bad. I actually start having more fun than not. 4: A solid entertainment piece. Has it’s blemishes, but despite that I like it. 5: Almost perfect (perfection is a myth). I had lots of fun and am satisfied.

(Semi-minor spoilers below. Unless you’ve gone quite far into the games, you likely wont suss out what’s happening until it’s happening.)

Vampire Legends: The True Story of Kisilova: You’re an investigator for the Hapsburg Empire going to the small town of Kisilova, recently beset by a killer leaving bloodless victims behind them. Rumors of vampires abound. After a series of mishaps the rumors do not feel so farfetched. Especially not when a mysterious, young woman enters the picture.

(Left: The Beginning of the Adventure with our buddy and hint machine. Right: The first of many, many hidden objects screens in this game.)

Okay, it is a point-and-click visual novel adventure thing that’s really short (less than 5 hours, and I think I left the game — and the clock — running for a while at some point), and also cheap. It was enjoyable enough, the music was forgettable but good enough, the graphics nice and atmospheric enough and the story was short and serviceable. The problems mainly came through the game-play; this game relied faaar too heavily on hidden object minigames, and those were unskippable, while all others were skippable after a short while. Fortunately, your partner can give hints to speed things along. As for my final decision in the winter-themed bonus chapter? Well, it was Halloween so I thought “why not?” and that was that for Europe. I always try to pick the most supernatural decision whenever I can lol (see Squirrel Elves in the Witcher franchise, or picking spell-sneaking classes in the Elder Scrolls).

My biggest problem with this game, however, is that I need to resize the resolution on my ultrawide monitor to play it without horizontal stretching distorting the art. The Options menu is seriously lacking in Options (actually, that whole menu is a mess that looks more at home in a Free-to-Play mobile game).

All in all, I generally liked it and its short nature meant that except for the hidden objects minigame, most of it didn’t outstay its welcome and it was really cheap (less than 4€ when I bought it, which is about the right price IMO. I think regular price is something like 9.99€?) so worth it. 3/5.

Dracula: Origin: You are Van Helsing. Yeah. That guy. And you have a missing friend, Harker, who had something to do with Dracula, and you have a pretty friend named Mina who ends up targeted by Dracula and now you must rush across the Old World to save her from a curse.

(Left: Yup, same dev as the Sherlock Holmes games. Middle: Vampires don’t like garlic breath. Right: Dammit Mina, I gave you ONE job. One. Job. All of this slow walking could have been avoided!)

Ah. Frogware. I generally like their Sherlock Holmes games, but this game… It felt more like a waste of my time. Oh, I’m sure there is a good game in there that isn’t a waste of time. Unfortunately, it is hidden behind the biggest time-sinks in the game: Van Helsing walks at half the speed of a normal person at all times and speaks really slowly, in conversations that has no branches, yet they will periodically be interrupted so that you can click on the next topic in the list (that wont reveal the next topic until you’ve listened to the topic listed before it). There’s this scene during a cave in when he says something like “quickly, we must make haste to escape!” and then you click on the exit and he waaaaaaaaalks slooooooooooooowlyyyyyy through it. It certainly doesn’t help that he must cross the entire span of the screen and backtrack locations many times and… AGH! RUN YOU FOOL!!

And, well, Frogware adventure game with its strange clues and non-clues and objects. There’s this bit in the first outdoor area when you have to capture some flies. Now, if you have followed the story logically, you will have a jar and a lid in your inventory. Easy, peasy, just click the flies with the jar, right? Nope. You must find a mourning veil hidden in the cemetery (that is large and that Van Helsing waaaaalks sloooooowlyyyyy through), use it on the flies and then combine the fly-ridden veil with the jar to get a jar of flies (I wont say what for because of spoilers, but, well, I don’t recommend eating during the Cemetery/Mansion part of the story if you have a phobia against bugs). There are also several objects that are basically five pixels on the screen because of the angle we’re viewing them at that we must find to pick up, and on the whole, I had more frustrations than fun with this story. Like, there’s even this puzzle minigame with a picture of Minos, the Labyrinth and the Minotaur and you find thread/string in the same house and wouldn’t you know it! The thread/string has nothing to do with the minigame and the minigame has nothing to do with the legend of the Minotaur!

On top of that, well, lets just say that the Egyptian section has quite a bit of stereotyping (think Victorian stereotypes of Egypt and its people in a modern game. Also, potential racism against white people must be prevented at all costs, including lying to a bereaved family), and when we run into our first, unliving female vampire she of course wears a top made of strips of cloth and a sheer skirt (you’d think a rich vampire’s favorite mistress would own a nice dress at least, but nope), and every woman (including dead of non-vampiric variety) have their beauty commented upon (and, of course, a young, pretty girl’s defilement/death is a tragedy, which is why it is so important to include that she was pretty).

And, well, this game markets itself heavily with Dracula at the forefront, not Van Helsing, yet while Dracula is the main antagonist, he only has a few, brief scenes, which were disappointing. All in all it was a 1/5.

Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines: You are a fledgling of one of the Camarilla clans, recently thrust into the secret world hidden by darkness, and more specifically into one of the most fucked cities of the World of Darkness. After your illicit embrace into the undead by your executed sire, the Prince of the City has graciously offered to adopt you, provided you prove yourself worthy to the exacting clan of rulers. Except the prince’s domain is built on quicksand, and this is Los Angeles; the birthplace of the modern Anarchs, and one of the domains of the Kindred of the East, on top of the eternal, political dance all Kindred must dance, and you, baby vampire as you are, have no allies and no clue as how to proceed except to survive.

(Left: Told ya Velvet is a mascot in this game. Middle: Did you know that Mercurio was meant to handle the Voerman sisters and we wouldn’t have to go through sewers and a haunted hotel if he did his job? Right: Apparently the Chinese are masters of Japanese swords and the Ventrue need no neckbones...)

Here’s the thing about VtM:B: It is a very enjoyable game and definitely the definite vampire game out there. It also has no story for your character. “What about the Ankaran Sarcophagus?”, well, your character participates, but it does nothing to answer the questions we are immediately confronted with in the opening of the game: Why would our unknown sire, an upstanding member of Kindred society, break one of the Traditions (pretty much laws set in stone for all Kindred over the entire world) to embrace us? Why would the prince, whose sole job is to uphold the Traditions, then break one of the Traditions and allow the ill-begotten progeny live?

Except for the opening of the game, we never hear from our sire again, nor the questions raised during the opening. And that makes our player character a bit superfluous when any random neonate could serve just as well.

So if not story-telling, what does VtM:B do that makes people sing its praises? In short? Characters and the World. It is incredibly atmospheric and while characters don’t develop (vampires are static by nature in this world, and most characters in the game are entrenched in their places and wont be shaken by some random baby vampire showing up), they are all very distinct and written in different tones. However, if you’re not role-playing as an ignorant fledgling, but meta-playing with some Vampire the Masquerade lore known, you will feel extremely railroaded (if your character had any inkling of who Smiling Jack is in the World of Darkness, they would never believe his coarse but kind uncle-figure thing he’s got going on. Because even before a certain hugely Biblical spoiler got involved, Jack was an imposer, liar, manipulator and mass-murderer who has sired many, many thin-blooded vampires and abandoned them to their fates. There’s a reason why only ignorant neonates like Nines’ gang admires and likes him. What I just said is not a spoiler for the game, btw, because it never comes up because your character is an ignorant fledgling being manipulated and deceived by literally everyone. Maybe Velvet and Bertram don’t, but Velvet might seem so sweet when she convinces you to be her knight because of Presence and acting, and Bertram is a Nossie and they have major secrets within secrets).

And while it is easy to sink into the world of the game and roleplay, thus mitigating the railroading feeling above. This game was clearly written with an audience of White Male Teens in mind. We have Velvet (of the fashion-conscious Toreador clan) show up at the prince’s court in Elysium in only a lacy basque, g-string and thigh high fishnets, tall heels and not as much as a peignoir thrown on top. Yeah, she attends an important society function in her fetish underwear. Then we have the explicit sex life of game cover-girl Jeanette (yeah, the one dressed like a dilapidated school girl), and those two are THE female mascots of the game.

The less said about the Orientalism and the Kindred of the East the better, but that segues into how around the time you reach Chinatown, the game starts losing its luster and strengths. Okay, so if you’re sensitive to that kinda thing, you might notice it a little bit in Hollywood, but by the time Chinatown rolls around, you might notice how it is less immersive and how it starts to feel more and more gamey (specifically, Action gamey), and you get less options that isn’t some variant of “kill it”.

On top of that the game has technical issues if you do not use the fan-made patch (I always use Patch Plus, which restores cut content and quests, as well as ReShade for better anti-aliasing and sharpness), and it still has a few cropping up from time to time. At least it works perfectly well in ultrawide resolutions?

Still it has that charm, and despite its flaws and how I can think of a dozen complaints at the drop of a dime, I still love playing it. So it’s a 4/5 from me.

[myupostsheadcanons]

Myu Ranks Books Read in 2018

I made one of these posts last year.... So here is one for this year.

These are not ranked based on objective literary quality, but by how much I enjoyed reading/listening to them.

Legend of the First Empire (Michael J. Sullivan)

Age of Myth, Age of Swords, Age of War

It isn’t as bleak as “The First Law” books. There is still hope, but i don’t expect a happily-ever-after ending when the series wraps up in a few years.

I would place it on par of the Cycle of Arawn books.

The characters are well written and will be put through the ringers emotionally and physically.

My fav died at the end of the 3rd book so... there is that.

The Dematr Saga (Jack Campbell)

Part 1: Dragons of Dorcastle, Hidden Masters of Marandur, The Assassins of Altis, Pirates of Pacta Savanda, The Servants of the Storm, Wrath of the Great Guilds

Part 2: The Daughter of Dragons, Blood of Dragons, Destiny of Dragons

A healthy dose of World Building and Realistic action.

“Chosen One” trope and YA romance plot dropped down in the middle of it, but not in an insufferable way.

You will want to visit many of these places and actually visualize how this world works.

Does not shy away from the violence of war, even though rated a YA series.

Brief Cases (The Dresden Files)

It was so refreshing returning to the world of Dresden after finishing Skin Game a few years ago. I was thirsty for some more.

The final story with Dresden taking Mouse and Maggie to the the zoo was one of the best ones in the series.

Fred the Vampire Accountant & Undeath and Taxes

While I was missing Dresden, this series feels like “Dresden Lite”... for the Young Adult Crowd.

However, the main group of characters are all adults, no “young kid saves the world” tropes to worry about from the main cast.

From the same writer as the NPCs book.

Genesis Fleet: Vangard and Ascendant (Jack Campbell)

Jack Campbell going back to the Lost Fleet universe and giving us more space battles, politics, and likable characters.

Very Hard Sci-Fi.

Season of Storms (The Witcher Saga)

Geralt is having a bad few weeks, the story.

If you liked “The Last Wish” and “Sword of Destiny” you will like this story, as it is more or less a novel-sized version of one of the short stories.

Lord of The Rings: The Hobbit, Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers

A Classic, and I am going to get to the Return of the King and Simirellion soon.

Frodo and co. run into a retired Elder God in the Fellowship... wtf.

The Punch Escrow

Get the audio book. Mat Mercer reads it.

The book itself is written well.

A think-piece on teleportation, cloning, and morality of killing people. 

Differently Morphious, Jam, Mogworld (Yahtzee)

Parody of the world as seen through the eyes of sarcasm.

Yahtzee reads the books and he does a really good job at it.

DM goes a little too hard on criticizing SJW internet culture. But sets up a good basis for a sequel with characters that are likable enough and mysterious enough.

Shift (Silo Saga, Book 2)

I liked this one more than the first book Wool.

You find out why the Silos were built and why they were in them.

Things aren’t going to end well for the main protag. 

Halloween (1978) Novelization:

If you want to know where all the weird witchcraft came from in the middle movies...

More about Michael as a Child and about what he was doing in Smith’s Grove before he decided to give no more fucks and shut up for 40 years.

Alien: Out of the Shadows, Alien: River of Pain (Audio Drama)

Well acted, though i should’ve prob liked listening to the proper audio book version of them more than the radio drama version.

No Country For Old Men

If you like the move, you’ll like the book. They follow each other beat-for-beat.... Tommy Lee Jones and Javier performances are prob the main reason to watch the movie.

La Morte D’Arthur

It takes a minute to get over the “modern English” language. And after that your brain would be randomly speaking in it for the next week.

Dead horses.

Lots of Names being tossed around.

Nobody knowing who the hell the other person is, because of helmets.

Parable of Sower

Post-Modern, fall of civilization.

Main character a WOC

Heavy on religion, even one that is being made up in the book.

Maisie Dobbs

WW1-era and post era story.

Deals with PTSD/Shellshock and what happened to the injured from the war.

The crime mystery part isn’t difficult to figure out.

Till we Have Faces (CS Lewis)

From the writer of Narnia, one of his final stories to write.

Puts some realism in a classic Greek/Roman myth.

The Soul of an Octopus

you will cry for an octopus.

The Good Girl

Sorting out what is truth and what isn’t is perhaps the bigger draw of the book.

The ending hands us the answer.

The Handmaid’s Tale

First season of the show follows the entire book and is more an expansion on the book.

There isn’t a sequel to the book. Get the Anniversary edition with the “Post Fall” historical account to get some speculation as to what could have happened next.

I am Number 4

Neil Kaplan read the Audio book... and that is why i got it

It is average in just about every other reason what so ever.

Lies my Girlfriend Told me

that bitch.

if you are wanting teen drama and LGBTQ rep that isn’t sugar coated.

White Fang

segments from the wolf’s pov are really good.

some things can’t be translated well onto screen.

The Left Hand of Darkness

Gender-neutral society.

Not much else to set it apart from other science fiction to come out at the same time or after it.

I am Legend

Man Pain

Science Vampires

Typical story of Who is the Man and Who is the Monster?

Stinker Lets Loose

The voice acting is good.

Trying too hard to sound like a Politically Incorrect comedy movie made in the 60′s and 70′s.

Willful Child.

Another example of trying to hard to be Retroactively funny.

If you want to follow a poorly written Zapp Brannigan around for an entire book.

Moby Dick

Too long. No Fun.

The middle 200 pages could be taken out and would still read just fine.

Endurance: Shackelton’s Incredible Voyage

It droans on way too long in places.

Not a pleasant subject.

Non-Fiction.

Free book. If you like tragic realistic stories that are a slog to read, else-wise don’t buy it.

Books in Library that Hadn’t gotten to yet:

A Christmas Carol

The Spear of the Stars (Cycle of Galand, book 5)

Bloody Acquisitions (Fred the Vampire Accountant, book 3).

Extinct (Extracted, Book 3)

Return of the King

The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe

Stephen Fry’s Victorian Secrets

The Lady of the Rivers

[uwannagamewithme-blog]

Here it is, My Top 5 game logos of E3

There were a lot of surprising showings this year it was almost too much to parse. All of the hype-inducing trailers and teasers were full of little Easter eggs meant for gamers to slowly piece together clues as to what game they were watching. But there was always a moment at the end of each clip where the screen faded to black and a bright and shiny logo appeared. Confirming your suspicion that, yes, they are bringing back Battletoads. These are my favorite logos from the conference.

5. Tunic

Tunic is an adorable isometric rogue-like style game, developed by Andrew Shouldice, in which you play as a small warrior fox and fight your way through droves of enemies while solving puzzles and traversing the world’s box-like terrain. Throughout the trailer shown at E3 there were messages written in strange language foreign to the viewers like the writing shown around the logo above. This seems to be in line with the trend in these games where the main character speaks a language that no one knows, further driving home the idea that we have traveled to a mysterious world far away. The game’s art style is beautiful yet simple and to me everything about this logo really embodies that.

Release date: TBD Xbox One, PC

4. Tetris Effect 

This one was a surprise to me. Not that there is a new Tetris game coming out but more of the overall beauty of it. Tetris is a game we all know, and a game I’m sure we’ve all played or experienced. The Tetris Effect, as stated in the actual E3 trailer, is a reference to the psychological phenomenon of the same name in which people who played tetris for hours on end found themselves thinking of ways to get objects in their daily lives to fit perfectly together and even reported hallucinating blocks falling down from the sky. In other words the game blended with their reality. Pretty cool concept to base your VR game off of, Sony. The logo pulls from these themes by blending real world imagery into the blocks shown in the trailer...or wait...am I just imagining that? Have I been playing too much Tetris?!?!?!

Release date: Fall 2018 PS4, PSVR

3. Devil May Cry

I’ve always wanted to wear a duster coat. But I’m short, kinda chubby and it’s like Summer. Devil May Cry has always had a very campy aesthetic that I think is welcomed by the game’s hardcore fans but a lot of gamers in the west seem to be into a more serious tone. That being said I FUCKING LOVE DMC. It’s over the top in all the ways it needs to be and when this was revealed I jumped up on my couch like Tom Cruise in an outdated reference. The game picks up where the 4th installment left off, following the plucky protagonist Nero who apparently has set up his own “demon hunting agency” with an equally plucky Southern woman who claims to have built Nero’s new arm. The wing artwork on Nero’s back could maybe have served as a Roman Numeral V instead of the 5 maybe but hey, I’m not a graphic designer. I do like blue and red as a nod to Nero’s arm in DMC4. 

Release date: Early 2019 PC, Xbox One, PS4, 

2. Sable

Did you guys watch the PC Gaming show? There were some real gems in that conference. Sable is one of them. Sable looks to be an open world exploration game set in an alien desert landscape. The trailer captures this gorgeous world as a girl, presumably Sable, as she rides her hover-bike looking vehicle through her world. The art style is akin to that of the cell shading of the Borderlands series and reminds me of Matt Fraction and David Aja’s 2012 run of Hawkeye for Marvel Comics randomly. The mysterious symbol centered behind the title coupled with the beautiful desert sunset is giving me some mystical Mad Max vibes and I am digging it. backdrop I am a huge mark for exploration based games so I am very excited about this one. 

Release date: 2019 Xbox One, Microsoft Windows

1. Cyberpunk 2077

Been a long time coming but last month we finally got to see CD Projekt Red’s latest with the trailer for Cyberpunk 2077. I’m not even sure what to say about this game and its logo etc. other than the fact that it looks fucking rad. I have been a huge fan of the Cyberpunk genre even though it never really got the same kind of resurgence that Steampunk has. Films like Akira and Ghost in the Shell are prime examples of Cyberpunk done right and of course Western films like The Fifth Element and Blade Runner have similar influences as well. Cyberpunk 2077 takes place in the same world as the tabletop RPG Cyberpunk 2020 which has a similar logo as shown below.

The absence of any sort of people in the logo for Cyberpunk 2077 is an important choice I feel because the developers have stated that the main character is completely customizable and the game takes place entirely in first person. Unlike the Witcher Series which was a 3rd person RPG following the story of Geralt of Rivia. I look forward to exploring all of Night City and playing as a buff cyborg man with a large laser gun. 

Release date: TBD (hopefully soon)

THESE LOGOS ARE ALL COOL

[aion-rsa]

Best PlayStation 5 Gifts: PS5 Games and Gadgets for Holiday 2020

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

The PlayStation 5 is essentially sold out everywhere, though sporadic restocks are expected at retailers between now and Christmas. If you’re lucky enough to snag one, you’re going to make the gamer in your life very happy this holiday season.

If you have managed to track a PS5 down, there are plenty of accessories and games that would make perfect companion pieces to Sony’s next-gen console. To help you out a bit, Den of Geek has picked the best PS5 gifts to get this holiday:

PlayStation 5

$499.99 with disc drive, $399.99 without disc drive

The hottest gift of the holidays, Sony’s hulking white monolith, actually comes in two varieties. The more expensive version includes a disc drive that plays physical PS5 and PS4 discs, plus 4K UHD Blu-ray movies. For $100 less, you can pick up the exact same console minus the disc drive, meaning all games will have to be downloaded digitally.

Regardless of which console you pick up, the PS5 boasts fantastic 4K graphics at 60 fps for most games, backwards compatibility with almost the entire PS4 library, the very fun pack-in game Astro Bot Rescue Mission, and the most revolutionary controller released in years.

Buy the PS5 on Amazon.

DualSense Wireless Controller

$59.99

At first glance, the DualSense looks a lot like previous PlayStation controllers, but after just a few minutes, it becomes clear that it provides a much more immersive experience than anything that’s come before. Thanks to haptic feedback, every in-game movement has its own distinct feel. Running on a solid floor makes the controller rumble with tiny taps, while getting hit by an enemy causes a much stronger vibration.

Adding to the immersion are the adaptive triggers. You can actually feel resistance while attempting to perform certain actions in a game. The new Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War has made fantastic use of this feature by giving each gun in the game its own amount of “pull.”

And if all that wasn’t enough, the controller had room left over for a built-in microphone for quick in-game chat if you don’t have a headset handy. While one DualSense is included with the console, you’re definitely going to want to pick up a second one for multiplayer games.

Buy the DualSense Wireless Controller on Amazon.

DualSense Charging Station

$29.99

Once you have two DualSense Wireless controllers, keeping them charged and ready to game at all times can be a bit tricky due to the limited number of USB ports on the PS5. The DualSense Charging Station is an elegant, inexpensive solution that can be connected to any outlet in your home, freeing up the console’s USB ports for other devices.

Buy the DualSense Charging Station on Amazon.

Pulse 3D Wireless Headset

$99.99

While it hasn’t received as much attention as the PS5’s graphical upgrades and faster loading times, 3D audio is poised to be another game changer this generation- if you have the right set up for it. With the Pulse 3D Wireless Headset, you can actually hear where in-game movement is coming from, so that if something sneaks up behind you, that should come through the headset almost like someone is in the room with you. This one should definitely make horror games more interesting. 

Buy the Pulse 3D Wireless Headset on Amazon.

HD Camera

$59.99

With the next generation of consoles allowing even more options than ever before for capturing screenshots and video, streaming is going to be a bigger part of gaming in the coming years. If you know a gamer who likes to broadcast their PS5 sessions to Twitch or YouTube directly from their console, Sony’s HD Camera provides a crystal clear picture for streaming. And considering that Sony has a long history of coupling cameras with unique game mechanics or peripherals like the PlayStation VR, it’s probably a good idea to get one now before they’re really in-demand in a couple of years.

By the HD Camera on Amazon.

Media Remote

$29.99

As fantastic of a controller as the DualSense is, it’s not really optimized for media playback. Thankfully, the Media Remote offers much better functionality in that department, especially if you’re someone who uses the PS5 to stream movies or TV shows. This handy little peripheral includes buttons for easily navigating menus, rewinding, and fast forwarding. A few other buttons even go directly to some of the most popular streaming apps like Disney+ and Netflix. While not necessary for every PS5 user, it’s definitely a useful gadget to have on hand.

Buy the Media Remote on Amazon.

WD My Passport 4TB Portable Hard Drive

$89.99

All PS5 games must be played off of its lightning fast internal SSD. Unfortunately, that 1 TB SSD only really comes with about 665 GB of usable storage out of the box, which means fairly small library of PS4 and PS5 games can fill it up fast. Sony has promised a solution to this issue down the line, although external SSDs fast enough to meet the PS5’s specifications aren’t yet available. In the meantime, a good old-fashioned mechanical external hard drive is a really good idea if you plan to play PS4 games on your next-gen console. Backwards compatible games can be played directly from the external drive, and they still benefit from the PS5’s increased resolution.

Buy the 4TB Portable Hard Drive on Amazon.

Demon’s Souls

$69.99

The original Demon’s Souls on the PS3 has always been well regarded, but it’s also a little janky and hasn’t aged particularly well. Fortunately, the PS5’s biggest launch title has solved those issues with an absolutely stunning remake that cranks the graphics up to 11 while adding several quality of life improvements that make the classic feel as smooth as any modern title. Plus, new weapons, armors, and rings offer surprises even for returning players who explored all of the original’s secrets.

Just like the original, the PS5 version of Demon’s Souls is a difficult game, but it’s oh so satisfying once you’ve finally conquered all of the game’s tough hulking bosses. This game is a must-buy for those who aren’t easily frustrated.

Buy Demon’s Souls for PS5 on Amazon.

Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales

$49.99

Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales isn’t quite a full-fledged sequel to Insomniac’s acclaimed 2018 Spider-Man game, but it’s still a fantastic follow-up. The new focus on Miles Morales, who was introduced in the comics less than a decade ago, is a fun way to explore a younger Spider-Man growing into his powers. That’s something that’s always been an integral part of the character but the first game ignored due to its focus on an older, more experienced Peter Parker. The switch in protagonists also means you’ll get to check out some of Miles’ (arguably) cooler powers like electric shocks and temporary invisibility. It’s the ideal gift for any superhero fan.

Buy Miles Morales for PS5 on Amazon.

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Sackboy: A Big Adventure

$59.99

Most of the PS5 launch hype has been focused on Demon’s Souls and Spider-Man: Miles Morales, but don’t sleep on Sackboy. Unlike the 2.5D creation-focused LittleBigPlanet series that the adorable little mascot hails from, Sackboy is a full-fledged 3D platformer featuring tight controls, surprising power ups, and an incredibly charming story. Sackboy is a lovely throwback to the lighter platformers that used to accompany console launches, and it may end up being the most underrated game of the year.

Buy Sackboy: A Big Adventure for PS5 on Amazon.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla

$59.99

For years now, the Assassin’s Creed series has been pumping out absolutely massive adventure games where players can live out their historical fantasies. The first next-gen installment, Valhalla, is a fantastic exploration of Viking history and culture in the ninth century, effectively mixing some of the best combat and stealth features of prior games in the series with violent battles for control of Medieval England.

But let’s be real here: the biggest selling point is the graphics. Valhalla’s open-world looks absolutely stunning in full 4K on the PS5.

Buy Assassin’s Creed Valhalla on Amazon.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War

$69.99

Call of Duty games are a reliable choice for those who enjoy multiplayer gaming. While the series has had its ups and downs, this year’s offering features a solid selection of multiplayer maps and a chaotic new 40-player mode called Fireteam. The crowd-pleasing Zombies mode also makes a return and looks better than ever on next-gen consoles. If that isn’t enough, Black Ops Cold War features one of the best Call of Duty campaigns in years, even if it doesn’t have the staying power of the multiplayer modes.

Buy Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War on Amazon.

Cyberpunk 2077

$59.99

Arguably the most anticipated game of 2020, Cyberpunk 2077 will finally hit shelves in December. This sci-fi RPG takes place in a massive open-world in the distant future where bio-organic implants are the norm and tech-enhanced crime gangs rule the streets. It also features Keanu Reeves in a supporting role in case you’re wondering if this game takes any cues from The Matrix. If you enjoyed The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, you’ll definitely want to pick up CD PROJEKT RED’s latest.

Buy Cyberpunk 2077 on Amazon.

The post Best PlayStation 5 Gifts: PS5 Games and Gadgets for Holiday 2020 appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3lfgXE6

[enrychan]

so after 146+ hours of the witcher 3 i’m starting to understand why i like this game but i don’t love it and i’m not so into it like so many people are. i probably think about it waaaaay to much, but since the game had a ton of perfect scores from many reviewers i wanted to understand why it didn’t click so well for me. and I mean, on a purely rational point of view the game is incredibly good and lovingly crafted in every detail, from the writing to the graphics, from the soundtrack to the animations.... it’s all really good. so why can’t i bring myself to love it?

- the first problem I have with the game and with the series as a whole is... uh, geralt. i don’t hate him, and sometimes i love his dry humor, but for the most part he is too generic and bland and also, well. a man. a straight white guy like 145482554 other in every video game ever. the dialogue options are also very few. this is a “role playing game” (in theory) where the role is not mine to play at all. granted, in other RPGs there is only the illusion of choice, but it’s there. i can play along. with geralt the confines are way too restrictive, and the role the developers impose on me is too different from myself and/or whatever character i would like to create, for me to enjoy the experience as i should

- then there are the women and how they are treated in this universe. first, all the women geralt has some relationship with are apparently top models, and all have the same kind of beauty: white, skinny, perfect hair, perfect face, small nose, plump lips... you get the idea. i love Yen, I adore Ciri, and i like Triss, but honestly they all look like barbie dolls to me. on the other hand I can’t remember even one male character of some relevance so perfectly and conventionally attractive except maybe for geralt himself. but this is not even my biggest issue with the women in this game, my biggest issue is how they are treated by the narrative. from beginning to end, a lot of female characters are violated, brutalized, humiliated... men experience violence for a variety of different reasons but women are constantly targeted for their femininity and/or their relationship with men. that’s honestly exhausting after a while. especially for a person who had and still has very serious problems within the family like me, and plays games to escape - not to face other similar situations all over again in a fucking video game

- there is almost no diversity at all. I get that this land is supposed to be similar to medieval europe, but black people and brown people were always there, they were just much less represented in art. in the witcher 3 everyone, and i mean everyone is as white as snow. the only poc i remember were the ofieri from the hearts of stone dlc, and they are extremely few. also no LGBT at all. like I remember I met a character i thought was gay at some point, but then nope. the writers made sure he had his chance to clarify that he wasn’t gay, because that’s important

- the sex scenes are shoved down your throat, and sometimes that’s even detrimental to your roleplaying. I wanted my geralt to stay faithful to Yen, but the hearts of stone dlc almost forced me to accept the sex with Shani. like i rejected her a number of times in a number of dialogues and STILL the game insisted to put me on those rails - in the form of gaunter o’dimm of all people - telling me to “seize the day” or whatever. what’s worse, just minutes before the ghost of vlodomir von everec called geralt “a pederast” because I choose the dialogue option “she’s just a friend”. that’s... some pretty bad and offensive writing right there, for my standards? is it just me?

- the last point came to my mind only recently, while playing the blood and wine dlc. toussaint is aesthetically amazing, and it made me realize that for my taste, the entire game should have been like this. and I don’t mean “set in a fairy tale world”, i mean “set in an interesting world”. that’s one of the reasons why i love The Lord of the Rings and its movie adaptations so much. you get your epic scenery, high snowy mountains, enchanted forests, a beautiful white city built on seven levels, an immense, desertic region dominated by an enormous active volcano.... but even its most “domestic” set, the Shire, has beautiful bright colors and weird little houses with round doors. the diversity keeps the public engaged. i have a lot of problems with dragon age inquisition but for the first time in the series it gave me something like that. for the first time i actually thought “thedas is wonderful and diverse, i want to see more”. on the other hand, the witcher 3 has way too much muddy countryside to do that. for me, fantasy must be wondrous, it must transport you into another world, a different world. it must make you look at a landscape and feel emotions you would never feel irl. obviously that depends a lot on where you live. i imagine someone who lives in the US would feel very differently from me. but for someone like me who lives in europe and specifically in italy... pretty countryside and small/medium medieval towns are extremely common. they don’t make me go “wow”. toussaint finally gave me that, it made me think “this is amazing” and “I want to stay here”. too bad it’s only a DLC and not the entire game.

and that’s about it, more or less. this post is much longer than i intended, but whatever. i still like the game. these are just a few but unfortunatly kind of important issues that ruin the experience for me, at least in part. it makes me kind of sad because i adore the rpg genre so TW3 is so close... and yet so far. I hope CD projekt red will do better with their next game, even in areas they didn’t consider much in TW3 like diversity and respect of the player when it comes to romantic/sexual matters.

[bltngames]

Game Review: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017)

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild might just be one of the best games Nintendo has ever made. Ever. Is that too hyperbolic? Should I reign it in a little?

So where does that put us? The Nintendo game I hold in the highest regard is Super Mario 64, which on top of just being a really good game, basically defined 3D character movement for the entire game industry. Everything from Uncharted to Grand Theft Auto and NieR Automata owes something to Super Mario 64 for establishing how to use an analog stick to control the action on screen. It was a revolution.

Breath of the Wild isn’t a revolution. This is a game cut from the same cloth as Skyrim or The Witcher 3 — an open-world fantasy game, with towns full of people and quest logs designed to distract. You’ve technically seen this game before, or at least parts of it, and on the surface it can be easy to brush it off as nothing more than a thinly veiled “me too” clone by way of The Legend of Zelda.

But here’s the deal: you’ve never played Nintendo’s version of this. Those other games I mentioned often prioritize production quality and narrative depth. A quest’s story in my examples is often more important than what you actually have to do in it, with the worst example being multiple quests in Skyrim that send you from one edge of the map miles away to the other edge just to kill a single enemy and then hike the entire distance back for your reward. Even on horseback, a quest like that would take hours of mind-numbing transit. The obvious (and likely intended) solution is to use the game’s fast travel system to teleport to the destination, complete the objective, and then teleport back, turning an all-day gameplay excursion into a something that takes less than 15 minutes. The problem is that this creates a disconnect where everything stops feeling real, because there’s no reaffirmation that these are places that exist. You come to view the world as nothing more than a piece of software that lets you materialize at your destination. There’s no sense of distance, no journey.

That’s simply not true with Breath of the Wild, which goes out of its way to make you feel like a part of the land of Hyrule. Not only does it feel like a real, lived-in space, it feels like one with thousands of years of tangible history. Ruins of what used to be litter the land, some more recent than others, but all purpose-built with a legacy of their own. The environment of Hyrule is as much a character here as anyone else, and its battle-scarred vistas tell a lonely, somber tale.

Zelda is one of Nintendo’s most narrative-rich franchises, which allows it to slip into Skyrim’s skin with ease. Just the same, Breath of the Wild is a game about journeys. It’s a game where you look over your shoulder and think: an hour ago, I was on top of that mountain. I have come so far, done so much, and seen so many things. Yes, it has fast travel and horse riding if you really need to get somewhere quickly. But why would you? Breath of the Wild is a game where there’s always something on the horizon calling out to you. Horses and fast travel might get you in the general vicinity of where you want to go, but never close enough. Eventually you have to take matters into your own hands (often literally) and venture forth by yourself to discover Hyrule’s mysteries, one cliff face at a time. Literally the entire point of this game is to meticulously sift through the world inch by inch, and it manages to feel like magic basically the entire time.

You also connect to this world in other ways. Breath of the Wild features surprisingly robust artificial intelligence and physics systems, and you’re given tools perfect for playing around in this space. Rather than acquire a stable of items from dungeons (as in past Zelda games), Breath of the Wild gives you five core abilities during its tutorial and then turns you loose on the world to use them as you please. Unlike, say, Ocarina of Time’s hookshot, which could only be used on specific hookshot targets, these five abilities are far more utilitarian in their approach. They allow you to interact with the environment in ways most open world games shy away from, like picking up physics objects or generating platforms over tricky terrain. In addition to helping you solve puzzles and navigate the world, many of these abilities have combat applications, leading to fun games of cat and mouse with Ganon’s minions.

In one particular example, I came upon a camp of pig-like Bokoblins that had set up inside the ruins of an old building. I had mostly cleared the place out, but there was still one lone Boko on patrol outside completely unaware of what had happened to the rest of the camp. From the door, he peered inside. Bokoblins don’t have great eyesight, so from the distance he was at, he didn’t really have a chance to identify me before I darted out of sight. He obviously knew he saw something suspicious, so he walked over, grabbed a club from the camp’s weapons pile outside, and then headed inside the ruins to investigate. By this point, I’d climbed on top of the ruins and was watching him from what would be the roof, if this building had one (it did not). He headed to the last place he saw me and sniffed around, hoping to figure out what he’d seen. By now his back was turned to me, so I jumped from my vantage point above him and came down on his head with my spear for a quick kill. This kind of emergent gameplay is a first for The Legend of Zelda, and it makes every combat encounter feel unique.

Perhaps Breath of the Wild’s greatest strength is its willingness to embrace this kind of emergent player expression. Nintendo could have very easily locked a lot of its puzzles and encounters down, discouraging all but the one “true” solution, but they didn’t. It brings to mind the elements that made a game like Minecraft so captivating; the only thing stopping you from getting somewhere or doing something is your own ingenuity. Nothing in the game ever has just one solution, and it fully embraces whatever ways you can find to bend its rules. Previous Zeldas were full of jigsaw puzzles that had to be assembled in the same way every single time. Breath of the Wild is more of an actual test of problem solving skills, and one where my answer might be different from your answer and neither one of us is wrong.

Of course, even the best games have their flaws, and Breath of the Wild is definitely not a perfect game. In particular is the game’s performance — I played on the Wii U, and there, Breath of the Wild suffers occasional choppy framerates and sometimes more significant stuttering. Knocking down a Moblin can sometimes make the whole game freeze for up to two full seconds. Zelda is undoubtedly simulating a lot of stuff behind the scenes, between physics, climate systems, fire propagation, and artificial intelligence, so it’s understandable when the game threatens to buckle under it’s own weight, but it’s still a problem worth talking about. My understanding is that the Switch version is also affected by many of these technical issues, but with less severity. But, even on the Wii U, I found them to be momentary annoyances and not anything to really cast the game in a negative light. For 75% of my time in Hyrule, the game performed just fine (and it’s worth mentioning that during the process of writing this review, Nintendo published a patch for Zelda that optimizes the game just a little bit more to reduce framerate drops).

The other elephant in the room deals the game’s systems, particularly in weapon durability and weather. If you use a given weapon too much, it will eventually shatter. Often, I’d leave a combat encounter with fewer or worse weapons than when I started, but once I learned not to get too attached to any given sword, shield or bow, it ceased to be an issue. Breath of the Wild is a game about making do with what you’ve got and building an ever-changing strategy around that. Enemies also scale in strength over time, providing you with a drip feed of slightly more powerful gear as you play. That being said, the game definitely could have benefited from ways to repair fragile weapons, because just about everything breaks after only a few minutes of use.

Weather, on the other hand, was probably the single biggest point of frustration for me in Breath of the Wild. You’re given an on-screen weather forecast, presumably so you can plan accordingly should something like rain come up, but sometimes it can be unpredictable as you move through the world and suddenly shift into a new biome with different weather patterns. In one particularly ridiculous scenario, I found myself stranded on a rocky alcove because if I climbed up even ten feet it would trigger a biome change and begin raining, making it too slick to continue upwards. The moment I’d drop off the cliff (or more likely slip off), the rain would suddenly vanish. Sometimes, it doesn’t make any logical sense at all, such as the time I had to light fires as part of a quest and it began raining just long enough (about six seconds) to snuff out my flames and make me start over. Nothing in the forecast called for rain, nothing on my HUD changed, it just started pouring rain and then instantly stopped. You very quickly learn to dread rainstorms, because there’s not a lot you can do about them except wait for the weather to clear.

Regardless, these problems barely register as a blip on the game’s radar. I know it can be easy to sometimes get frustrated with Nintendo’s output and design philosophies, specifically with regards to past Zelda games like Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword, but when this company pulls together and fires on all cylinders, the end result is something truly incredible to behold. Breath of the Wild is a tremendous game; even after finishing the game and putting in more than 140 hours, I wasn’t ready to leave Hyrule. I was still finding new discoveries. New places I hadn’t been to yet. No game that I can ever remember playing in the 30+ years since the NES has gotten its hooks into me this deep for this long. It may not be a revolution, but with Breath of the Wild, Nintendo has still run circles around the industry just the same. Under no circumstances should you allow yourself to miss this game.

[maculategiraffe]

When you get this, post ten facts about yourself and pass this ask along to ten of your favorite followers. If you feel like it! This is a friendly, low pressure meme. :D

1. I have grapheme-color synesthesia, meaning I perceive (Roman) letters and (Arabic) numbers in color.  A is yellow, B is orange, C is pink, D is red, etc.  I didn't realize this wasn't a universally shared experience until sixth grade, when in language arts class we were discussing a story we'd read and I got two characters confused, "Mary Louise" and "Cynthia Parker," and by way of explaining my confusion offhandedly said, "sorry, they're both pink and blue" and everyone was like "...what."  I had a whole lot of trouble studying Greek because the alphabet wasn't in colors that made sense to me.

2. I find horses unnerving on, like, an existential level.  They give me the whole-body shudders, like one of those Lovecraftian things that Simply Ought Not to Be, that offend mine eyes and sanity by their proportions. The first time I watched the movie Willow and there was this scene where "unicorns" (white horses) galloped in slow-mo towards the camera, I let out this involuntary scream and hid my face and my viewing companion was like "wtf is wrong with you."  This is one of the 16 reasons I cannot tolerate the Western genre under any circumstances.

3. I sometimes play tabletop role play games, mostly World of Darkness, with my boyfriend and a small group of friends.  The two characters I've grown most attached to are a) a vampire named Alethea who was a bonny lass named Polly Cooper working in an Edwardian-era flower shop when she was Embraced (vampired) by a beautiful seductress calling herself Josephine who was later murdered by a serial killer raised by werewolves, and b) a daughter of the god Hephaestus named Chloe Smith (geddit?) who built an engine so efficient it accidentally tore a hole in the fabric of space-time so she had to team up with a few other gods' children and a human mage-hunter named Anthony who's one of two people she's ever actually (platonically) loved to defeat the eldritch abominations that came through the gap.  Alethea is currently trying to wrangle a wealthy and psychotic vampire hunter she Embraced as part of a Machiavellian scheme involving the vampire city council, who adores her so much he's constantly having people he perceives as obstacles to her murdered behind her back, and she's like "Kaspar for fuck's sake, I'm not ambitious, I've lived this long by keeping my head down" and he's like "but now that you have ME you can assume your rightful place as Queen of All Vampires" and she's like "I don't WANT to" and he's like "because you're so endearingly humble and self-effacing but we can fix all that."  Chloe failed to save Anthony's life from a cabal of mages so she called in nineteen favors from every supernatural being she knew and went to Hell Itself (kind of?  long story?) to get him back, and succeeded, and now her one goal in life is to kill the insanely overpowered mage who killed Anthony in the first place.  She's trying to get the other person she loves (her Russian half-brother Kostya, the son of Svarog) to help, but he's like "Сестренка, не будь дураком, this mage is the fucking worst, let well enough alone" and she's like "HE MURDERED MY WITCHER DAMMIT."  (Anthony has amnesia about the whole thing and Chloe's fiercely determined to make sure it stays that way so she's barely seen him since the Thing but she watches over him from nearby and it SEEMS like no one's going after him again? but we'll see)

4. I was raised in an incredibly toxic fundamentalist evangelical Christian church, which imploded just before I went off to college because the (married, with five kids) pastor was discovered to have been having a passionate affair with the wife of one of the elders (who also had five kids, everybody was very quiverfull), and have gone through a lot of Spiritual Seeking since, but I adore my current Episcopal church, which takes it as a given that our primary duty as Christians is to love and look after anyone who needs it, in the ways they need it most, as best we can.  As such, we educate ourselves and others, which I also love since the Christian culture of my youth was like "don't think about it don't think about it you'll go to hell if you think about it."  Also women and "Practicing Homosexuals" (the parlance of my youth) are allowed to be priests and bishops (we have two female priests and three male ones at my church) and the current bishop of the entire American Episcopal church (the first black man to hold that role) is the former bishop of my own diocese, so hometown diocese represent 😀

5. I love swimming in the ocean.  I'll stay in the ocean all day until somebody drags me out.  I think I have some kind of sense-memory of the womb that activates in the ocean when I'm weightless and being gently rocked.  If I'm ever eaten by a shark just know I died as I was born: being agonizingly and unexpectedly ripped from a state of mindless bliss.

6. When I was a kid I had a hamster named Butterscotch, who lived in a tank from which she was constantly escaping.  She would take her little hamster wheel, pack the bottom of it with cedar shavings, pee on them to affix them in place, climb the now-stationary wheel, muscle-lift the top of the tank, and squeeze herself out to freedom.  She'd do it right in front of me, like, "So?  Watch this." She also climbed the stairs in my parents' house by reaching up, gripping the edge of one with both paws, muscling herself up over the edge, and repeating until she reached the top.  She was the original American Ninja Warrior and I loved her so much and I cried so hard when she died.  

7. I had terrible, debilitating nightmares as a child, which led my mother to purchase a book called Helping Your Child Overcome Nightmares, which was about guided meditation and taking control of your dreams, and I immediately took and read the book myself because it sounded interesting, and I vividly remember the first time I successfully took control of a dream.  There was a striped rug in my room and I dreamed that a tiger materialized on it and growled at me, and I said aloud, in my dream, "Pretend the only thing he's afraid of is not being able to see" and threw my blanket over his head and he yelped and kicked and vanished.  I used these techniques to great effect after my husband died, when I was horribly, horribly afraid that I'd dream he was alive again and it had all been a mistake, and then wake up and absolutely be unable to stand it, so I'd dream of him and say "I'm really happy to see you, but you're dead, you're not really here" and it seemed like it sort of hurt his feelings but I knew if it was really him he'd understand I had to protect myself.  

8.  Speaking of my dead husband: we agreed before he died that if there was an afterlife he wouldn't hang around and haunt me, he'd move on to whatever new adventures might await and I'd catch up later if necessary.  I explained this to a grief counselor who asked if I'd had any Experiences of the dead one since he died (since apparently that's quite common) and I was like "oh no, we agreed he wouldn't hang around" and she was like "oh well that's... good, then?" and I was like "damn skippy, hopefully he's got better things to do"

9. Speaking of weird dreams: while we were on the transplant waiting list and living in hellish limbo, I did a lot of exploratory dream work, and one thing I did was establish a kind of little shop in the dream world that sold tea and tarot cards and geodes and this lady worked there who would help me with what I needed and supply me for my various exploratory missions in dream space.  It was like... near the "entrance" to the dream world, so when I'd lie down with guided meditation I'd go to sleep and come up "near" it.  Now hear me out because I swear this is true: years later, YEARS later, I went to New Orleans for the first time-- I'd never been near the place before-- and THAT SHOP WAS THERE.  It was the same EXACT shop.  Sold tea and tarot cards and geodes and there was a back room curtained off, which was where the lady from my dream always was when I came in, and I was too fucking terrified to ask what was back there and I hightailed it out of there and it's still the most overtly Weird thing that's ever happened to me in real life.

10. The first video game I ever played was Dragon Quest VIII on the PS2, and there was a subplot about a king whose wife had died and he'd been grieving and weeping for two years and the whole kingdom was sad and depressed because the king couldn't deal with his grief and we the adventurers had to go on a quest to find the Moon Shadow Harp and bring back a memory of his wife telling him he was stronger than he knew and him saying "I'd be lost without you" and her saying "no you wouldn't, you're strong and also no matter what I'll always be with you because you love me so much you couldn't ever lose those parts of yourself, the ones that love me, and so I'll always be with you" and I bawled like a friggin' baby, and then I tried another video game (Final Fantasy X) and was like "ugh, so it was just that one video game that was good, never mind" and that was the last time I played a video game until Fallout 4.