Category Archives: Commentary
Broken FOMOmeter
It’s really sad to see games at 40%+ discounts still end up being almost $40.
I guess it’s not that much of a difference back (in my day) when games MSRP’d for $60, but psychologically… nope. Not doing it. Dragon’s Dogma 2 is probably not the best example either.
Even with all the other sales going on, it was ironically Satisfactory that most recently broke my internal FOMOmeter. I typically try to stock up on cheap games to assuage my ephemeral gaming moods, as not doing so can lead to ruining an experience by forcing myself to play something else. In the depths of mainlining Satisfactory though, I would throw some discounted games in my Steam cart… and leave them there. A few days later, I would check back and realize they were no longer on sale. *Empty cart*.
A few cycles of that and the spell was broken.
We’ll see how long it lasts, but so far, so good. If nothing else, the fact that Satisfactory is an indie game that consumed my life for 120+ hours whereas I have a literal graveyard of half-finished AAA titles should give me pause. Or maybe I’m just fully into survival-crafting/deckbuilding/roguelike/automation territory now. It can go either way.
Decemberiment
Trying an experiment for December: just post stuff as I go.
Finished a second session of 1000xRESIST. It’s been a long time since I’ve taken so many screenshots. Looks like… 58 total, so far. Not really because of the visuals, although those are good, but rather the sometimes hilarious, sometime brutal dialogue.
And then you get into stuff like this.
That’s not really brutal, but most of what I’ve taken have spoilers so, yeah.
The experience has been great overall, although it is absolutely a walking-simulator style game. You walk around, talk to people, get pulled into crazy sequences, do some very light puzzle work with time skipping, and, uh, fly around by shooting at glowy purple things? It’s kinda weird.
The other thing I wanted to briefly talk about here is that I really, really enjoy the general weirdness of the made-up words/phrases it has. “Hekki ALLMO,” “Sphere to Square,” “Six to One,” “Hair to Hair,” and so on. A lot of games and/or media stick in random crap into dialog to enhance the “realness” of the fictional world, but many times it feels forced or otherwise a token effort. Think of all those fantasy games where people exclaim “By the [#gods]!” and basically nothing else. A Handmaid’s Tale did a fantastic job with its phrases; Game of Thrones had a lot of phrases, but, eh, sometimes felt more (ironically) rote than meaningful. 1000xRESIST lands much closer to A Handmaid’s Tale. Maybe it’s the repetition or something like the smaller scale of interaction.
Or maybe it’s just fucking catchy and evocative. “Hair to hair” is nonsense, but you could make sense out of it. Standing back-to-back? Being linked genetically? Regardless, it’s cool.
Game Passed
As you know, Game Pass has been good to me over the years. I haven’t been playing as much, but it definitely still feels worth the subscription. Recently, I even started playing through the last portion of the Starcraft 2 campaign (Protoss) which I missed back in the day. Definitely looking forward to STALKER 2 as well… maybe a year from now when they work out all the bugs.
Then again, I recently logged in and saw this message:
Specifically, that message was regarding Coral Island. I enjoyed my time well enough, got decently far within the game’s narrative and just sort of trailed off. Which was strategic in a way, because the game wasn’t actually done – there was a very obviously cordoned-off Savannah biome, among other things. And here I am, a year later, and the game is leaving.
There does appear to be a convoluted method of finding and porting your save file over to the Steam version. Or, you know, just buying it from Microsoft. Either way, the value proposition in that is a bit dubious. I’ve already played for 46 hours… am I really going to pay $25+ to reach whatever “endgame” is available? On the other hand, it also feels bad losing access. Which, of course, happens all the time with Game Pass. It’s just that I haven’t actually been burned in quite this way before.
Oh well.
Welp – 2024 Election Edition
I suppose they do say you get the government you deserve. And apparently we deserve to be fucked.
For my own grief processing and prognostication, let’s speculate for a presumed posterity:
- Certainty – End of all US support for Ukraine, eventually leading to a “negotiated peace” whereby Russia annexes even more of the country. Ukraine will not be able to join NATO, of course.
- Certainty – Full-throttle support of Netanyahu’s Israeli government and the continued purge of Palestinians. This is arguably already happening, but it will be dialed up further.
- Certainty – Climate is fucked. Not only has the current Supreme Court already gutted Federal agencies’ ability to regulate environmental impacts, Trump has vowed to cut things further. We may already have hit some inevitable tipping points, but inaction – let alone acceleration – is not something we can afford.
- Certainty – Massive increase to federal debt. Despite tax cuts never paying for themselves, Republicans will approve Trump’s corporate/income tax cuts and the government will generate less revenue as a result. Weird how that works.
- Certainty – Trump will escape all legal accountability and revel in naked, in-your-face corruption. For example, elevating Judge Aileen Cannon to Attorney General or, you know, having an open bank account pipeline directly into Trump’s pocket via DJT stock.
- Likely – Economic recession and/or collapse. Trump has vowed to implement broad, across-the-board tariffs (e.g. regressive taxes), including potentially replacing Federal Income taxes altogether with tariffs. Additionally, Trump will appoint Elon Musk to a potential cabinet-level position with a broad mandate to cut government spending from… somewhere. The only real place to do so with any impact would be from Medicare and/or Social Security. Meanwhile, Trump is also promising mass deportation which, regardless of where you fall on the issue, will result in economic upheaval. See: Florida.
- Likely – Rollback of mandatory vaccines and general societal health initiatives, and increase in childhood polio (!!!) and measles. Trump has invited RFK Jr (aka brain worm guy, aka dead bear cub prankster, aka whale decapitator) to “go wild” on health in his administration. RFK Jr is deeper in the conspiracy tank than even Trump, and will use the platform to broadcast nonsense further. Only the best people.
- Likely – Continued attacks on the legal rights and general humanity of LGBTQ+ individuals. In particular, banning (directly or indirectly) gender-affirming care for all ages.
- Possible – Nationwide abortion ban via Comstock Act and/or removal of FDA approval of mifepristone.
- Possible – Elimination of the ACA and general upheaval in the health insurance market as a result. Reminder: the ACA was “saved” by John McCain back in 2017. Other reminder: “Preexisting condition” used to be a thing that denied you coverage and can absolutely be a thing again. Other other reminder: having COVID is absolutely a preexisting condition for dozens of things.
- Possible – All the absolutely batshit crazy Project 2025 ratfuckery.
There are some people – a majority, apparently – that may consider all this alarmist. After all, we had four years of Trump already, and he did not build a wall that Mexico paid for, among other things. I guess we will have to see. Because isn’t that fun? Chaos at the highest levels! What will the aggrieved mind of a 78-year man with a family history of dementia think of next? Stay tuned!
Hi-Jacked
Guys. Satisfactory has hijacked my brain. I’m not entirely sure what’s going on, but I have played basically nothing else in the last two weeks. I’m not into this genre, but I’m apparently into this game.
And I’m not even done. I mean, probably kinda sorta close? Still got two endgame items to factorized in this phase, neither of which I can build yet, and have spent the last three days working my way to harnessing Nitrogen gas. I think there is one more phase after this, but maybe not. Who knows.
Regardless, for now this shit has me wireheaded something fierce. Bounced off Factorio, didn’t get too sucked into Dyson Sphere Program in the days before it left Game Pass, but Satisfactory is apparently my jam. I doubt that I’m into it enough to like start another playthrough or whatever, but goddamn.
Looking at that list though, I don’t think it matters much. It has already joined an esteemed company.
In any case, that’s where I’ve been and/or will be for the foreseeable future.
Autobivalence
I have a love/hate relationship with automation games, like Factorio, Dyson Sphere Program, Satisfactory, and others.
On the one hand, they mostly satisfy the survival-adjacent itch of accumulating resources, building a “base,” and otherwise growing stronger each play session. Any game where you can think about it offline and come back the next day and be better off for having pondered, is a huge win in my book. These games should be localized entirely within and up my alley.
I also hate them.
Long-term readers know that I very frequently engage in “optimizing the fun” out of the games I play. There are two corrections to make here. First, “optimizing the fun” is a strange way of rephrasing “leveraging my full mind towards achieving success.” By no means am I implying that I’m some genius or whatever, but I do enjoy not having to handicap myself in Perk/Skill/Talent/Strategy selection because the designers left in some obviously OP power. If a given move is powerful, I’m going to utilize it, even if the game is less fun as a result… because the game is already less fun if I have to ignore imbalanced shit. Looking at a list of available choices and finding the surprising synergies of given combinations is precisely the fun I’m looking for. Optimization is fun.
However, this is where the second correction comes in: I dislike trial-and-error, e.g. reinventing the wheel, e.g. the grunt work. This is where all the automation games lose me. While it is technically optimization, I do not find it at all fun or engaging to spend hours rearranging conveyer belts to increase production by 5% or whatever. That’s assuming I would even know how to make things better, which I honestly do not. Indeed, it irks me every time in these games’ tech trees when Blueprints are unlocked, as it confers the assumption any of my macaroni factory art is worth copy & pasting. But I also know that just copying the perfected blueprints of others would “rob” me of a lot of the gameplay of these titles. So… I usually just struggle, flail about, recognize I’m not having fun, and uninstall.
Having said that, I am playing Satisfactory in 4-hour increments every evening for the past few days.
I was playing Dyson Sphere Program (DSP) a few days before that, as I saw that it was leaving Game Pass and so I wanted to give it a whirl. While DSP was fun enough, it really reminded me a lot of Factorio which I had bounced off of. Conversely, Satisfactory improves (IMO) a lot on the general formula. For one thing, the “tech tree” unlocks by consuming regular items rather than abstracted science cubes. The actual tech unlocks are are immediately grokkable too, like a faster conveyer belt, new building, unlocked resource, or whatever. In DSP, I would research 5-6 things in a row without actually understanding what (if anything) they did or how it would impact my factory until later.
The main thing though is that I “cheated” in Satisfactory. More specifically, I watched a Youtube series on compact, scalable blueprints of various buildings. I’m assuming someone out there would consider that cheating. But here’s the thing: it actually unlocked the game for me. I have heard of things like “main bus” and “manifold” and similar jargon before, but all that did was make me feel as though there was a secret language that everyone was just supposed to know. After watching the series of Youtube videos and recreating them inside the game, I understood. Even better, the designs weren’t 100% efficient. Which meant I had a choice: sacrificing Efficiency for Quality of Life (i.e. simplicity).
That’s the secret about optimization: it’s always in relation to something else. Maximum widgets/min? Sure, there’s one answer to that. The most widgets/min while also maintaining your sanity and/or having fun? Something something Sid Meier interesting decisions!
Anyway, I’m at 30 hours in Satisfactory and counting. There are some elements I’m not too fond of – it’s hard to justify exploring the map before you spend dozens of hours setting up a factory to output stuff in your absence – but overall it has been surprisingly… satisfactory.
Running Out of (Fae) Road
I am done with Nightingale, (presumably) for now.
I stand by all of my prior reporting, including the original Impressions post. There is a lot of potential with the game and its central realm-walking conceit, the ability for it to introduce fantastical creatures, an absurdly complex crafting system, and how great it feels to move around and exist in these magic(k)al worlds. Overall there is a lot to like here, and Steam tells me I spent 39 hours playing Nightingale. That’s pretty good for any game, let alone an Early Access title.
That said… there is still a long way for Nightingale to go.
The first problem is the consistently uneven difficulty spikes. Right after completing the tutorial island, you are shuttled off to Sylvan’s Cradle, a realm suffering from corruption. This corruption impacts you as well, with a realm-wide massive debuff to passive healing. You are then confronted almost immediately with a new type of Bound enemy that is insanely aggressive and hard-hitting, along with all mobs in general being at “level” 20. Your own gear progression is dependent on collecting higher-tier Essence and spending it to unlock new recipes and crafting tables. And therein lies the rub: you must suffer through being wildly underpowered until you grind enough T2 Essence to spend to craft gear to get back you on par.
And, spoilers, you will smash into the same wall again two realms later with T3 Essence.
By itself, uneven difficulty isn’t that big an issue, although the devs have gotten themselves in a bit of a pickle with the hard T1/T2/T3 Essence delineations. To me, the more relevant problem is a lack of consistent vision when it comes to crafting more generally. There are stats like Injury Resistance that sound important (damage reduction?!), but end up being worthless (prevent sprained ankle). Under Alchemy, they have things like a potion that fills your hunger meter. Literally, why? Food is everywhere and the importance of food buffs means you must be eating all the time. There are other potions to reduce being hot, which is also easily solved by equipping an umbrella, nevermind the fact that heatstroke or whatever simply limits your Stamina regeneration.
One aspect that is also utterly bizarre is the very thing Nightingale cannot afford to fuck up: realm-walking. Specifically, the absolutely nonsense direction they are heading with the Minor Realm cards. Shortly after completing Sylvan’s Cradle, you get the recipe to start building your own portals. Opening a portal means crafting and consuming a Major Realm card to one of the three available biomes (Forest, Swamp, Desert). Minor Realm cards can be used at a Realmic Transmuter within that realm to tweak “the rules” and usually the weather in the process. At first glance, there appears to be a lot of Minor Realm cards, but the more you look at them, the more questions you end up having.
The first group of Minor Realm cards are environmentally cosmetic, which is fine. Cleansing makes the realm turn back to default settings, Foresworn Skies makes it look like a black hole is overhead, Tempest makes it rain all the time, and so on. Then you have some pure upside cards like Feast/Tavern that boost food buffs, Angler makes fishing easier, Treasury lets you farm Essence. Then come the tradeoff ones like Dragon’s Hoard, that boost treasure chest contents but increases damage taken. Fine.
But then you see Blunderbuss that literally says:
Play this card to increase the damage you deal with shotguns, the yield when crafting shotgun ammunition as well as the damage you deal with magickal ammunition, while reducing the damage from other guns.
What? The devs included realm cards for pistols and rifles, by the way, so don’t feel left out. Additionally, there are realm cards that improve the yield of refined building materials, of wood, of ore, of crops, of meat/hide. All separate, of course, and occur only after the realm visibly shatters into a new form from the use of said card.
I’m honestly struggling to identify the design goal here. Is it intended for players to radically remake the realm in order to craft extra shotgun shells, and then revert it to another form to increase the yield on Wheat? Or should this encourage players to turn their primary residence into the City of Doors with portals to themed realms and otherwise endure the loading screens for marginal gains? Why are there output-related cards at all? Tempest makes it rain all the time, which means your crops will always be growing without needing to be manually watered. That sort of thing is what I consider good design – it’s subtle, intuitive (after a fashion), and atmospheric (literally). But then you have Greenhouse/Farm card which just straight-up increases plant growing speed and yield “for reasons.” Are these placeholders? Please tell me these are placeholders. Although placeholders for what I have no idea.
By the way, realms can only have one Minor Realm card at a time. Again, WTF mate? When I first heard about this portal system, I imagined being able to mix and match cards to craft bizarre realms like a very mountainous swamp or whatever. No Man’s Sky this ain’t. Instead, it’s just three procedurally-generated biomes with different skyboxes and min-max bonuses. Granted, there is a Trickster card that lowers gravity and shuffles up resources sources – chopping down trees give meat, skinning creatures gives ore, etc – but most everything else is rote. Safe. Sanitized. Much like with Starfield, you also end up seeing the same POIs and ruins over and over again.
Technically, there’s still time to right the ship before Nightingale runs out of road, to mix metaphors. Well, maybe. I doubt the realm generation code is flexible enough to accept blended biomes. Or maybe the original three will stay as-is and we’ll see others like Snow, Volcanic, and maybe some kind of Chaotic realm. Actually, I just found a quote:
“I think once we get a new biome out there, that will cement the last piece of the puzzle in terms of how we will create content going forward,” Flynn muses when asked about 0.6 and beyond. “There’s a volcano biome, there’s an Arctic and a jungle biome, all currently in discussion right now as to which one we’ll do first.”
Well, there you go. I do think that if they keep the bizarre Blunderbuss-esque Minor Realm cards around, they need to have it as an augmentation to an environmental-style Minor Realm card. That may lead to clearly-optimized combinations like Tempest + Farm, but they should either lean all the way into the nonsense or throw away half the cards immediately. When I think “Victorian gaslamp-fantasy adventure,” what does not come to mind is rewriting the rules of fae realms to make just my pistols better. Now, opening a realm to where all the Bound are wielding pistols and/or there are giant enchanted pistol enemies? That sort of thing is interesting.
Getting devs to gamble on “interesting” is not easy. Especially not when they’re already on their heels.
Complex Crafting
I dedicated a paragraph to Nightingale’s crafting system in my initial Impressions post, but after spending some more time with it and going up the Tiers, it deserves its own article. In short, I haven’t seen a more (optionally!) complex, min-maxing crafting system anywhere else.
At the base level, all the resources that you collect – wood, ore, meat – have attributes. If you craft something using a resource, that item inherits the attributes. That’s… actually it. That’s the system. The key is that as you unlock higher Tier recipes, they call for more complex ingredients, which have intermediate crafting components. In most games, these intermediate items are just a resource sink. The trick Nightingale pulls off is that every crafting steps allows for more opportunity to stuff the end product with extra attributes.
Let’s use a real example. I recently unlocked the first part of Tier 3 items, and I want to upgrade my old gloves to Calcularian Gloves. The recipe is:
Fairly straight-forward, no? Let’s look at Leather. To make Leather, you need Hide, which comes from skinning creatures out in the world. Hide (Prey) grants +Stamina and Hide (Predator) grants +HP, which is fine, but there is also Fabled Hide that drops from bosses and special mobs that have an assortment of bonus stats. Pick one, craft the Leather, and move to the next ingredient.
…or maybe add a little more juice? As it turns out, Nightingale crafting has an additional unspoken feature in that higher-tier components can be substituted for their standard varieties. In this example, the recipe calls for Leather, but you can use Reinforced Leather for that slot. What’s that? It’s Leather x2 and a Fastener, the latter of which is crafted from Ingots. Now we can bring in some (m)ore stats. I’m a fan of Brass Ingots, as it has Melee Damage +4%, Ranged Damage +6%, and Durability +20. Craft the Fastener (Brass), combine with Leather, and we now have the first (!) ingredient ready for those gloves.
Next is Thread. What, you thought I was just going to “yada, yada, yada” this away? Thread requires Fiber x2. How complicated could that be? I’m glad you asked. There are a lot of sources of Fiber, starting with the grass you can punch in minute 1 of the game, to high-tier plant nodes, to drops from the Bound enemies. Something else that counts as Fiber is Animal Fibre (as spelled in-game). Animal Fibre comes from meat. Meat comes from skinning, but also from those Fabled beasts you slew for their Hide. So rather than cooking the meat for temporary buffs, you can instead craft it into Animal Fibre, and then into Thread for more permanent buffs. Neat.
Lastly, we have Textiles. Which is basically… most everything. I could use Reinforced Leather again for this component, but I wanted to look at other things. What I found on Tier 3 was Durable Cloth. This is made from Cloth + Lining. Cloth is Thread x2 and Lining is… Cloth + Thread x2. Talk about Threadception. Or maybe Fiberception is more accurate. To break this down, Durable Cloth is created using Cloth + Cloth + Thread, which are three opportunities to stuff in more stats. “Opportunity” is the key term here, because Lining by itself satisfies the Textile requirement, as does Cloth. The only reason to complicate it is precisely because it allows us to utilize more resources and multiply their attributes.
The best part is that, again, all of this is optional. If I wanted to fully min-max, I’d make sure that every Thread was crafted from Animal Fibre that came from Fabled Meat (e.g. bosses) that I farmed. Or I could walk outside my shack on tutorial island, skin the first deer I shot, punch some grass, and craft the Tier 3 gloves like that. The stat delta between the two would be incredibly vast, of course, but most reasonable players will probably just craft what they can using the best ingredients they happened to have squirrelled away at that moment. Or maybe they will be driven to go farming for more mats. Either way, that a win-win in the design department… provided you didn’t scare anyone away.
Anyway. Congratulations, you have just made a pair of gloves!
By the way… I hope you arranged the augmentation decorations to maximize your bonus attributes before crafting though. Oh, and be sure craft and apply an Infusion and appropriate Charm. Glad this was just an item of clothing and not a melee weapon, as you’d have all of that plus Enchantments.
Me-Haul
Ever have a birthday, say, two weeks ago and then just ask yourself “what about second birthday?” That’s where I’m at right now. So, I bought some games and now I’m going to talk about them.
- Enshrouded – $23.99 (20% off)
- Nightingale – $17.99 (40% off)
- 1000xRESIST – $15.99 (20% off)
- killer7 – $4.99 (75% off)
The first two items there are survival crafting games I’ve had an eye on for months.
Nightingale in particular is interesting because the developers are pulling a full FF14 Realm Reborn angle called, er, Realms Rebuilt. It is not uncommon for Early Access games to have to completely retool after realizing they drove off a design cliff – Icarus will forever be my go-to example – but a total progression wipe and pivot towards non-procedural generation seems a bit weird when the central conceit of your game is ever-changing fae realms. Also, the CEO straight-up said: “We are not satisfied with where the game is at, we’re not satisfied with the overall sentiment, we’re not satisfied with our player numbers.” The Art Director then went on to say:
“Ultimately, what we realized about the procedural nature of the realms was that the procedural generation and procedural assembly of these things is really all in service of telling stories, and of letting players discover stories,” Nightingale studio director Aaryn Flynn told PC Gamer. “When you peel it back, when you recognize that that’s why we built all this tech and did all that is to tell stories, you can then ask yourself, ‘Well, are we doing that?’ Are we being successful in that?’ And we’re being only moderately successful with that.”
“We went through Enshrouded, Palworld, V Rising, we went through a lot of the bigger, quite successful survival crafting games, not just in terms of sales but in terms of player perception. And it was really the structure that stood out as something they offered that we were not offering,” Flynn said.
Gotta say, I appreciate the candor. At the same time… I can’t quite pin down why it all feels strangely off. Nightingale getting an offline mode two days after “release” was a hard pivot based on overwhelming player feedback. That’s good. Changing the narrative structure of your game based on the sales figures of other Early Access survival crafting competitors? That’s… certainly one way to do it. Hopefully it works out, considering I just bought the game, but I also hope it works out for the people who already enjoyed how the game was up to this point. Although it certainly seems like they’re saying there’s not enough of them to matter.
The second two titles are both truly random picks based on A) being on sale, and B) me hearing effusive praise for them on Reddit. Who says advertising doesn’t work? 1000xRESIST is not a game I could easily describe, and after reading the IGN 9/10 review for it, I somehow feel like I know even less than before what it’s going to be about. From what I’ve read about killer7, that one may be even more incomprehensible. But, well, I’m a simple man, and if you invoke Evangelion, Neir: Automata, Kojima, and/or Disco Elysium enough times, my wallet will appear. Provided it’s not MSRP.
Time and Place
Dec 19
Posted by Azuriel
Wildstar is one of those failed MMOs I have a bit of (perhaps misguided) nostalgia for. Granted, it’s a lot easier to remember only the good parts of something when the thing no longer exists to remind you of the bad. Wildstar’s terrible combat system, banal questing, radically tone-deaf developers pushing a hardcore experience for no one all seems to fade away with time. Meanwhile, the evocative art design, hoverboards, and astounding home building/decoration options springs right to mind.
I bring this all up because of an interesting article I read the other day about Tim Cain spending 6 years working on Wildstar. And that wasn’t even all of it, as the game took another three years to release from there. Then the author drops this bomb:
No fucking wonder, dude. I had really never understood why the Wildstar devs believed the hardcore angle was a winning strategy in an MMO. Yeah, the original MMOs had that hardcore element to them and were successful. Were they successful because of the hardcore-ness? I would argue “clearly not.” But if the Wildstar devs were laying the groundwork for the game back in the age of vanilla WoW, their stubbornness nine years later makes perfect sense. That level of difficulty was what they were familiar with and wanted to “compete” against. Or perhaps even bring back.
Alas, the zeitgeist had since moved on.
Posted in Commentary, Wildstar
Comments Off on Time and Place
Tags: Armchair Game Development, Difficulty, Game Design, Tim Cain, Wildstar