Impressions: Craftopia
A lot of developers, even in the indie space, like to play things safe. Even if the genre is something out of left field, a lot of the basic game design still feels like +10% skill bonus here, clearly defined tutorial there. Early Access is treated as a soft launch – which it definitely is – of the final product instead of an opportunity to just go nuts.
Meanwhile, Craftopia is the nuts. I don’t remember the last time I played something where you could just feel the devs sitting around a whiteboard saying “That sounds cool, let’s try it out.” And since the team is from Japan, they are already coming at design from sometimes extra weird angles.
On the face of it, Craftopia is… well, let me just post this from the Steam store page:
Craftopia is the brand new multiplayer open-world survival action game.
We have imagined what would happen when we combine our favorite video games altogether.
Chop trees and mine stones as in Sandbox,
Explore the world as in Open-world,
Fight the hunger as in Survival,
Cultivate and harvest as in Farming,
Collect loots in dungeons as in Hack-and-slash,
Automate activities as in Factory management,
Hunt monsters and creatures as in Hunting action,
Cast magical spells as in Fantasy RPG.Now we have a utopia for all of us. That is Craftopia.
After destroying the world in the opening credits, your character emerges from a tutorial cave and you can basically do whatever you want. The game looks like Breath of the Wild and/or Genshin Impact, including the ability to gecko-climb up every surface from the get-go (and build a glider soon after). Following the breadcrumb quests will take you to some NPCs and a small town where you can get acquainted to the crafting. The thing to know is that you can basically build anywhere, which will be important later.
Before the big Seamless World update in late June, the game was basically a series of instanced islands and you needed to unlock things to open portals to other places. Now, you can basically go anywhere you want right off the bat, although you will of course encounter higher-level enemies the farther afield you explore. One of the principle progression mechanics is unlocking special pillars across the landscape using crafted goods. Once you supply the necessary ingredients and then press the button at the top of the resulting pillar, you progress the “Age” and unlock new crafting possibilities.
Let me talk about the pillar for a second though, because it was amazing to me. I supplied the ingredients and then it shot up into the sky. I started climbing the pillar, which is something you can just do, but I started getting nervous halfway up because the ledges were very tiny and, admittedly, the game has a lot of jank. So I threw down a wood platform so I wouldn’t fall off. And then I slapped my forehead with the realization that I could have just built a spiral staircase to reach the top. Which I then did. There’s a floating island you need to reach to get some upgrades, and I presumably would have learned that lesson had I done that earlier, but whatever.
Aside from the crafting aspect, there is a lot of experimentation in the Skill trees as well. You can choose to use Magic of various flavors, enhance your normal weapon attacks, unlock basic movement skills like double-jump, and more. When I played, a large portion was simply unselectable placeholders, but what exists is plenty inventive and makes me feel excited for the possibilities. One Skill lets you throw a knife and then teleport to that location. I was a tad disappointed that its range is limited, but it reminded me how much fun I had with Rogues in WoW with Grappling Hook and Shadowstep.
Also, apparently there is an entire Pokemon element in the game wherein you can capture and breed anything in the game, including NPCs (!!), and ride them into battle (!?!). Actually, I haven’t tried to see if you can ride the NPCs, but I have ridden a cow and what looked like a Shy Guy from Mario 2, so I wouldn’t be surprised.
Also also, there are dungeons with traps and boss fights. Building is more limited inside, but there was a sequence where you had to come up with something to avoid fireball turrets and infinitely falling giant iron balls that roll down the main ramp. I hesitate to call the boss combat Soulslike, but you do need to dodge and counter-attack at precise moments to avoid damage. Or summon a bunch of pets/NPCs and spam attacks? Didn’t try that, personally, but maybe it would work.
What I will say though, is that currently Craftopia has a lot of jank. Like, a lot a alot. When I played, damn near half of the NPC dialog was in untranslated Japanese, and what was in English was very clearly machine-translated. According to one patch note the untranslated dialog was due to a bug, but let’s just say that this isn’t exactly an AA game experience at the moment. It certainly is A game experience, and definitely a BBB game if I ever saw one.
And that’s fine. What I love about Craftopia already is that it can improve in so many different ways and directions from here. That sounds like a backhanded compliment, perhaps, but my point is that these guys threw the entire box of spaghetti at the wall, instead of just a normal amount. With what they got going on so far, I am not worried about them necessarily cutting features and/or nerfing certain builds into the ground. Which means we could just have fun for once in completely unique ways. How many times does that happen?
The one negative I’ll say is that it’s difficult to justify playing exactly right now. For one thing, there is apparently some kind of critical Save Game bug, which is about the worst thing that can happen with a survival-crafting game. But more than that, I worry about playing through things, getting my fill with the novelty, and then them releasing a whole bunch of new elements that I don’t get to experience because I’ve moved on. That’s a Me problem, 100%, but it’s there. The roadmap suggests that an official release may come in or after September, which isn’t too far away, and may be just as well considering that’s when Starfield comes out.
But overall, if you want to experience a game where it feels like almost anything can happen, Craftopia is where it’s at.
Dog Days
I have a tag called “ennui” and that’s what is currently going on over here:
a feeling of listlessness and dissatisfaction arising from a lack of occupation or excitement.
Usually the ennui I experience comes as a sort of post-game depression after-effect of spending 6+ hours a day on some particular videogame and then beating it. That is not the case currently – in fact, I have found myself incapable of completing anything lately. The motivation just isn’t there. The proximate cause in these situations is typically that I really want to play X game but cannot, for whatever reason. You know, because the game isn’t on sale or some equally asinine thing.
This time around, it’s possible there are two things going on. First, I have a number of games in my “Early Early Access” Steam category, which I am deliberately not playing. Well, deliberately stopped playing in some cases. The second is that we have the imminent release of Baldur’s Gate 3 and some other titles, to which I want to play quite a bit. Hard to enjoy an independent experience when you know you’re under a time crunch to finish before heading to something you are anticipating more.
We’ll see where things go. By many accounts, BG3 is supposed to be 75-100 hours of playtime just for the main story, which is a bit absurd. On the other hand, I’ve been “throwing away” about a dozen hours on 7 Days to Die (and some other random titles) these past few days. I feel guilty doing so when I have Elden Ring and other meaty games waiting for completion, but that’s just the mood right now.
7 Days to Die, Again
7 Days to Die (7DTD) received a new patch a few weeks ago. So I had to boot it up.
If you haven’t heard of it, or read any of my posts, 7DTD is a zombie survival-crafting game that has been in an alpha state for almost 10 years. It has survived this long because A) it’s a fun, more realistic zombie Minecraft, and B) it continues to receive updates, albeit on a more yearly cadence. I came in around Alpha 15 or so, and this most recent release is Alpha 21. Supposedly the game will go gold with Alpha 23, but the dev team never had anyone with project management skills, and it kind of shows.
Case in point: the devs have spent a majority of A21 overhauling the leveling system and mucking with the early game. Again. For the 3rd/4th Alpha in a row. When I started playing, the skill system was a “learn by doing” sort of Oblivion system, wherein you crafted hundreds of stone axes to increase the potency of future stone axes. Then they moved towards a Skill Point system, so you needed to focus on leveling up and assigning points into Skills that improved your crafting ability. With A21, you now need to find and consume skill magazines in order to level each of dozens and dozens of skills. The Skill Points are still there, but are more focused on 10% (etc) bonuses, although you will find more corresponding skill magazines by spending points in specific areas, e.g. Spears, Shotguns, etc.
Are these changes bad? Yes and no.
In principle, I am fine with devs trying to figure out their preferred method of player progression. This is what Alpha states are supposed to be about, after all. The problem with the Fun Police Pimps (their actual studio name) is that they are almost actively hostile to the way most people play their game. Over the years, the Minecraft elements have been nerfed into oblivion because they didn’t like players just basically digging into the ground and smelting iron and crafting all corresponding items (guns, etc). So, they nerfed the XP gains from digging and tied blueprints to either levels or loot (Skill books). When players still Minecrafted their way to castles, the devs started adding things like “gun parts” as uncraftable items you had to loot. Which, fine, whatever, but that also leads to ridiculous situations like how you need “baseball bat parts” to make a wooden bat, but can engineer a working gyrocopter out of scrap metal just fine.
Meanwhile, over the years the devs started adding “dungeon” Points of Interest (PoIs) into the game. Whereas existing homes and shops were set up in a logical manner, these new PoIs were designed around players going along set pathways and encountering zombies in scripted ways, with extra loot at the end. These are cool… the first time you encounter them. Unfortunately, the devs has since turned every PoI into a dungeon, making looting a bit of a slog. Until/unless you have memorized where the main loot in located and can just break through doors/walls/ceilings to bypass everything.
Meanwhile meanwhile, the devs have also been tweaking zombie AI over the years to counteract players. The eponymous 7 Days horde is a bunch of zombies who attack at a sprint, always knowing your exact location. When I started playing, they couldn’t dig straight down, so if you found or built a bunker, you were basically immune. Clearly, that was a bit too easy. Zombies were then allowed to dig, making underground bases problematic. Players then started just driving around all horde night on motorcycles, so devs made zombie vultures move at 300% speed when you’re in a vehicle. People then started making zombie mazes. Devs wildly overcorrected and gave all zombies perfect omniscience as to the block HP of everything between you and them, so that they make a direct beeline towards the weakest part of your base. Not only was this nonsensical – how does a zombie know this concrete block has 495 HP instead of that one? – but it invalided all “real-world” defense strategies like installing spiked walls everywhere. Players then made zombie obstacle courses that end in impossible-for-AI jumps, so the devs reduced zombie fall damage and made them “rage” a bit, attacking any nearby blocks (e.g. support pillars).
Oh, and new to A21: glass jars and tin cups have been removed from the game. The stated goal was to make water a more important concern in the early game, as otherwise you could craft/find tons of containers, fill them up at a nearby lake, and boil your way to eliminate thirst. I mean… sigh. Maybe being able to craft glass jars in a Forge with just sand is a bit much. But that just makes bodies of water useless, throwing out another element of rational post-apocalypsing in favor of abstract game design. Instead, we must imagine you drinking bottles of water and throwing the container away, while you desperately collect enough coins to purchase a Water Filter from vendors, which you use to craft Dew Collectors, which generously grant you 3 Water (containers!) per day… from the aether.
Games change over the course of Alphas, especially when they have gone on for ten years. But at a certain point, you have to question whether the devs even want to finishing make the game they started. One of the leads once admitted on the forums that if they could go back in time, they would not have allowed players to dig into the ground. Which… is kind of a big deal for a voxel-based game.
All of the changes mentioned above though make digging immaterial to begin with. There used to be a tension between looting buildings and still saving enough time to build your own base to survive horde night. Now the optimal, dev-directed course is to spam quests from vendors – oh yeah, quests were introduced a few Alphas ago – to get PoI loot + quest loot, and just camp on the roof of a bank or whatever for the hordes. The zombies will eventually tear down the building after a few weeks of hordes, but by that time you will have enough high-level loot to kill them with ease, especially after creating a little obstacle course.
The good news is that 7 Days to Die has already attracted some quality mod authors over the years that have put out some transformative overhauls. So even if the Fun Pimps continue to go all-in on making the game just a series of scripted zombie encounters, there is still hope for an experience more akin to the game it used to be. Which is more than can be said for many titles out there.
Microsoft (All But) Acquires Activision-Blizzard
The FTC has lost its injunction case against the Microsoft and Activision-Blizzard merger. Minutes later, the remaining regulatory holdout in the UK appears to be in back-room discussions with Microsoft. Although the FTC can still technically appeal the decision, in all likelihood things will be buttoned up by the time this post goes live.
I have not been following the court case itself too closely. The armchair legal experts on Reddit though suggest that the FTC’s arguments were weak, but don’t really go into convincing detail as what alternative arguments would have been stronger. On the face of it, everything seemed to hinge on Sony – who currently owns 45% of the entire console market – being negatively impacted by the merger. Considering Xbox is just 27.3%, one might surmise that the merger would actually increase competition in the console space. At least the UK’s argument was about cloud gaming… something that basically doesn’t exist, with even Google and Amazon unable to get it to work.
I am sympathetic to the argument that buying publishers and game companies is detrimental generally. There are no doubt millions of PS5 owners who probably wanted to play Starfield on their console of choice. Sort of like how I would have liked to play Ghosts of Tsushima on PC, which isn’t even considered a console by Sony/courts, but nevermind.
Perhaps it’s a bit myopic, but I’m obviously in Team Game Pass. I don’t care about Call of Duty and I doubt WoW will change, but potentially seeing Diablo 4 show up without having to spend $70 on it is a welcome surprise. No doubt the good times will come to an end at some point, especially considering the recent subscription price hikes, but it’s still worlds better (and cheaper) than the alternatives.
Will everyone come to regret this outcome 10 years from now? I kinda hope so. Because that means things are normal enough in 2033 that we can still give a shit about video games and not play Fallout 5 by walking outside our front doors.
Reddit Protests, pt 2
Almost a month ago, there were a series of protests on Reddit concerning a pivot to essentially ban all 3rd-party apps via charging a ridiculous amount for API calls. These 3rd-party apps were not just better from a user-perspective, they also made moderation easier (or even possible for blind users). However, these apps did not run ads, so the revenue (if any) Reddit received was minimal. There can be a debate as to whether the Reddit admins were “justified” in basically shutting them all down, but I think in the aggregate it is/was clear that a better approach of A) charging less, and B) giving the apps more time to adjust to changes would have cooled things down.
So, what is the status of Reddit two weeks after the implementation? Simmering to boil.
The subreddit blackouts clearly did not effect much change in of themselves. However, the admin overreaction to the blackouts – mainly in the form of threats and disparagement of mods – has emboldened said mods into new forms of malicious compliance. Seriously though, the Reddit CEO went on NBC and said this:
If you’re a politician or a business owner, you are accountable to your constituents. So a politician needs to be elected, and a business owner can be fired by its shareholders. And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.
“Landed gentry.” It is difficult to imagine a bigger slap in the face from someone who gets paid for what he does (spez) despite producing zero content, to all the unpaid (!!) mods who spend donate dozens/hundreds of hours of their time to ensure that subreddits aren’t just filled with trolls, hate-speech, and/or porn. According to this article, Reddit mods are (very conservatively) doing work worth $3.4 million per year. But, sure, they are all easily replaceable via “democratic processes.” Like… how?
The new front in the guerrilla protests is making subreddits NSFW. The notion is that by changing the classification to NSFW, Reddit will no longer be able to monetize that subreddit due to advertisers not wanting their product ad displayed next to something graphic. I have heard a few different arguments that this doesn’t actually work, e.g. ads are still displayed, but the reaction from the admins clearly suggests otherwise.
The first step was made by the mods of /r/interestingasfuck who basically all-but-encouraged their users to submit porn. Which they did. While I don’t believe it was a default subreddit, it does have 11.2 million subscribers, so what ended up happening was a flood of literal porn started appearing on peoples’ homepages. The Reddit admins quickly removed all the mods from the subreddit and essentially archived the whole place; there has not been a single new post there in 18 days. Presumably new mods will be installed via “democratic processes” at some point, but who knows when.
Other major subreddits are taking less explicit, but still hilarious routes. /r/Pics is default sub with over 30 million subscribers, for example, and the mods changed the subreddit rules such that “All posts must feature John Oliver.” This was done in a democratic fashion, just like the admins doubtlessly wanted. The mods also changed the overall subreddit category to NSFW with the justification that what constitutes NSFW by the admins themselves applies to the subreddit (profanity, potentially “offensive content”). Unfortunately, the admins have threatened the mods with removal for changing the subreddit category against its historical norms. While the mods are debating their next moves, they have let everyone know that all /r/Pics users can now label any post as NSFW.
True to their name, the mods on /r/madlads took it a step further and basically gave every one of their 1.7 million subscribers mod privileges. Now everyone is landed gentry! /r/politicalhumor did it too with their 1.6 million subscribers, but it’s less funny.
The admin threats do appear to be resonating in some ironic circles. For example, /r/NonCredibleDefense flipped back to SFW despite the purpose of the subreddit being military memes that frequently display graphic blood/gore. /r/DnDMemes mods also blinked, despite demanding an Intimidation check from spez. There will still be goblin smut and related porn allowed there, but apparently all is well as long as the individual posts are labeled NSFW.
The fundamental issue is that mods are not (easily) replaceable, but neither are the communities. Back in the day, there was a lot of concern that when /r/FatPeopleHate or /r/the_donald got banned, there would be “contagion” insofar as the users would migrate and infiltrate other subs. This basically didn’t happen – deplatforming works.
A 2017 study published in the journal Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, examining “the causal effects of the ban on both participating users and affected communities,” found that “the ban served a number of useful purposes for Reddit” and that “Users participating in the banned subreddits either left the site or (for those who remained) dramatically reduced their hate speech usage. Communities that inherited the displaced activity of these users did not suffer from an increase in hate speech.”[12]
When you zoom into a micro level with just your own life, it makes sense. How you act with one set of friends is typically different than how you would act with a spouse, your extended family, work friends, etc. Everyone has masks for every occasion. So, I do not begrudge the mods who blinked in the face of potential subreddit annihilation, as there are often times nowhere else to go.
As with Phase 1 of the protests, we will have to see where things end up with Phase 2. Is it another flash in the pan, to be smothered by the wet towel of admin threats? Or will things continue to boil under the surface, with mods “laying flat” and/or “quiet quitting” and/or “acting their wage”? And what of the meat of Reddit, the user-submitted content? Will people get over it and move on to the next meme, or have things been permanently overcooked?
I myself have deigned to download the official Reddit app so as to continue consuming memes and information away from my PC. Amusingly the 3rd-party Reddit is Fun app still technically works, but I cannot log in, so all I see is the myriad of default subreddits and popular posts with no customization possible. Which means it is functionally useless to me. I have been following Wilhelm’s reviews of other social media sites with interest though, to see if any might possibly be an overall Reddit replacement despite not really being advertised as such. Discord sure as shit ain’t it, after all.
But as mentioned earlier, it’s likely that no replacement is possible. Both Reddit and Twitter are apparently not profitable as-is, so who in the world is going to try (and succeed) at making a replacement? I mean, other than the half-dozen venture capitalists doing exactly that. I have the various subreddits I enjoy but I am not married to them to the same degree that mods might be. If something is better, I will go there today. Unfortunately, it’s looking more like “you get what you get, and you won’t throw (much of) a fit.”
Impressions: Elden Ring
God damn.
I do not necessarily want to rehash everything about Elden Ring, as you probably have already heard loads about it. As of May 2023, Elden Ring has sold over 20.5 million copies, which made it the second best-selling game in all of 2022 (with Call of Duty taking the top spot). This is truly a stupendous achievement considering the type of game FromSoftware makes and where the Dark Souls series has come from. Although, yeah, this isn’t a Dark Souls game per se.
The overall formula has been shaken up quite a bit. Yeah, combat is still super tough, requiring patience, precise reflexes, and usually trial-and-error. Death still results in all your souls runes dropping on the floor and you possibly losing them if you die before picking them back up. You still level up in a deeply unsatisfying way, raising stats one at a time and getting vague bonuses on even vaguer secondary stats you will probably never actually use at any point in the game.
At the same time, the game feels entirely different. Dark Souls offered freedom of a sort once you got to the first main area, but nothing like Elden Ring. After unlocking three bonfires Sites of Grace, you get a double-jumping magical horse that you can call at a whim and even engage enemies while mounted. As a spellcaster, there is essentially zero downside for me to not be mounted 100% of the time. Your foes can knock you off the horse, but the mounted shenanigans fundamentally change how I approach open-world combat. I never felt comfortable just running past everything in Dark Souls, but here? Anything you actually engage is on purpose.
Amusingly, there are even pseudo-stealth mechanics at play. Clicking the left-stick (these games demand a controller IMO) will cause your character to crouch, and there’s even a tutorial screen about hiding in tall grass. Again, you could backstab mobs sometimes in Dark Souls, but it typically only occurred during combat after they missed an attack, or with certain mob pathing. Now, you can practically Solid Snake your way through many areas, up to and including firing arrows at walls to make enemies turn around and investigate the sound.
I also appreciate that combat feels a lot… tighter? And more gamey at the same time? Dodge rolling is super important as always, but unlike in Dark Souls, I actually saw several times where my character clearly was hit by a sword or whatever but I had i-frames and thus took no damage. Enemy attacks seem to be telegraphed a bit better, or at least it feels that way.
At the same time, some of the weaknesses of the Dark Souls series are amplified in Elden Ring.
I already mentioned leveling feeling unrewarding, but exploration (thus far) feels both encouraged and kinda punished. Caves act as Skyrim-esque mini-dungeons, filled with enemies and traps, with a mini-boss at the end. If you are successful, you are accumulating runes that you will need to spend to level up or upgrade your gear, lest you lose them. But the freeform exploration means you can never really tell where anything is, or what you are building towards. Do you spend resources upgrading your starting gear, to help you in the encounters to come? What if the very next chest or body holds a vastly superior item? What are the Intelligence requirements for spells you find soon? Where the hell even is the Sorcerer trainer?
These known unknowns are part of the “mystique” of Dark Souls and certainly would sell a lot of game guides back in the 90s, but it’s all part of the sort of design bullshit I hate. I don’t need to be optimizing for the endgame from level 1, but I do need to feel confident that the devs aren’t being obtuse on purpose. Can you miss crucial game mechanics (Ashes of War) for not fully exploring one of the beginning camps? Yes. Could you technically get by without using them? Yes. Can you complete the entire game just using Glintstone Pebble? Yes.
Would this lead to a richer, more fulfilling gaming experience? No.
It’s a fine line to walk, I get it. It’s also useless to complain about degrees of hand-holding in a FromSoftware title… although they clearly do give way more hints with the “lines of grace” on the map (or having a map at all). But I bring all this up because the end result is that I hit up the Wiki or Youtube to get one minor frustration answered and end up seeing “How to become OP in the first 15 minutes without fighting a single enemy.” Which, cool, good job constructing your game in such a way that it rewards technique and mastery in learning routes. But also, WTF, mate? I’m over here playing Elden Ring like a standard videogame with progression when I clearly should have been running past every mob just yoinking all the upgrades off the ground from horseback.
I dunno, man. The problem is: when does that stop? When do you start “playing the game” and actually tackling bosses? I encountered one open-world mini-boss recently and got clobbered, even on horseback. The typical Souls solution is to Git Gud and/or farm some more levels. I did the latter, but also spent an hour riding around and getting two additional flasks plus one flask upgrade before coming back. Beat that mini-boss and was rewarded with… crap I’ll probably never use. Not quite as bad in some RPGs wherein you can out-level gear rewards entirely, but certainly not at all on par with how powerful I had become to beat the boss. That’s certainly a unique sort of freedom, but I don’t exactly want to praise the freedom to make the game experience worse for myself.
We’ll have to see where things go from here. I’m 15 hours in, zero major bosses down, still dithering in basically the first map of the game. Will things improve? Will it get worse in new ways? Who knows. If I’m casting the same two spells another 30 hours from now though, I’ll be very disappointed.
Mid-Year Game Plans
Finally, with the Summer Steam Sale, my wait is over:
Of course, the best part of seasonal Steam sales these days is that it leads to 3rd party storefronts offering even steeper discounts. For example, I won’t be purchasing Elden Ring on Steam for $41.99, I will be purchasing it from DLGamer for $36.99. Using 3rd-parties has bit me in the past, but “Steam Activation” are the magic words. Well, provided there aren’t delays in getting the keys. The only real downside is losing the ability to refund the game within the 2-hour window, but I’m thinking that won’t be relevant here. Probably.
Aside from Elden Ring, there are a number of items on my wishlist that are on sale. Unfortunately, I cannot trust any of them to not just magically show up on Game Pass by the time I get around to playing them. For example, My Time at Sandrock is currently 20% off with an estimated 1.0 release date of September. The devs have stated that once the game is out of Early Access, it will be more expensive. I really enjoyed My Time at Portia to the tune of 107 hours. But here’s the thing: My Time at Portia is already on Game Pass right now. Is Sandrock currently listed as an upcoming Game Pass title? No. Does the original game being there make it more likely that sequel will be too? I’d like to think so.
It helps/hurts that Game Pass is becoming the new hotness for survival/crafting games, including Early Access ones. Coral Island, Grounded, Little Witch in the Woods, Homestead Arcana, Farworld Pioneers (ugh), Stardew Valley, 7 Days to Die, Disney Dreamlight Valley, No Man’s Sky. Story of Seasons: Mineral Town just hit the service too. Meanwhile, my Steam wishlist has:
- My Time at Sandrock (EA)
- Stoneshard (EA)
- Scrap Mechanic (EA)
- Travellers Rest (EA)
- Roots of Pacha
- Sons of the Forest (EA)
- One Lonely Outpost (EA)
- Forever Skies (EA)
- Survival: Fountain of Youth (EA)
- Voidtrain (EA)
- Life Not Supported (EA)
Which of those will land on Game Pass? Or in a Humble Bundle, for that matter? Who knows.
What I do know is that it will be difficult to find time to play all of the things anyhow. Just look at this:
- Hearthstone: Titans (Expansion) – August 1st
- Baldur’s Gate 3 – August 3rd
- Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure (expansion) – August 22nd
- ARK: Survival Ascended (Remaster) – August 2023
- Starfield – September 6th
- Lies of P – September 19th
- My Time at Sandrock – September 26th
- Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty (DLC) – September 26th
Needless to say, August and September are a little stacked. It was even more stacked on the September side until the devs for Baldur’s Gate 3 decided to release it a month early to avoid competition with Starfield. Of course, I do not necessarily plan to purchase all of these games… huh. Actually, both Starfield and Lies of P will be on Game Pass, and I’m eagerly anticipating the Cyberpunk DLC. And Hearthstone is Hearthstone. And GW2 is GW2.
So, uh, yeah. Maybe I will just wait on any more deal purchases until the Winter Sale.
Cyberpunk Expansion
Cyberpunk 2077 is receiving an expansion called Phantom Liberty in September 2023. And even though I never finished the base game a single time… I’m excited. In fact, it’s hard for me to remember how excited I have ever been for any DLC for a game.
Why? Because the designers are actually addressing my deepest disappointments in the main game: the Skill/Perk tree and cybermods more generally.
The devil, as always, will be in the details. But we have some clues that they realize that hundreds of nodes of +3% Headshot damage is goddamn stupid. This screenshot shows how the current “Skill bush” will resemble a proper Skill Tree, with more consolidated abilities.
Then there is this hands-on Kotaku post:
CD Projekt Red has completely overhauled growth progression in a way that feels in-line with what the game always promised. If there was an alternate version of Cyberpunk 2077 where you can actually craft playstyles that don’t inevitably end with a shootout, this is it. The expansion brings new character builds and revamps old ones, and is geared toward build-defining abilities and augmentations, rather than the base game’s tedious numbers-go-up grind of incremental but meaningless stat boosts.
[…] For the hour I spent in Phantom Liberty, I played a build centered around agility, doing things I couldn’t have pulled off in the main game. I was able to dash on the ground and in the air, deflect bullets with my sword, and execute devastating finishers when I got in close. I was practically Genji from Overwatch, slashing my way through the militant forces of Dogtown. This was only one of the builds the demo offered, but a cursory glance at Phantom Liberty’s updated skill trees was enough to send my mind racing to the new possibilities.
Thank. Christ.
I’m a systems kind of guy. I enjoy thinking about possibilities, synergies, optimizations. And while it is very easy to reduce things too far and otherwise be overly prescriptive… the true danger is building your system to be boring. And Cyberpunk’s current system is extremely boring. It is full of “perks” like “Reduce draw time for pistols by 50%” and “Reduce time to aim down sights with Rifles and Sub-machine guns by 10%.” Even if the design argument is that there needs to be speed-bump perks to soak up excess points, would it kill them to make it more interesting? Why not make those perks affect all guns? Or have pistols get a 5% chance to cause bleeding, and then allow that to synergize with a different perk in another tree that increases critical strike chance by 10% on bleeding targets, and combine with a third perk that increases bleeding duration?
I wasn’t a fan of The Secret World generally – having to tab out to a Wiki to get through “basic” quests was not much fun – but its synergies between talents and such were top-shelf.
Now, is “Genji from Overwatch” potentially a bit too far? Maybe. That said, right around when I abandoned my playthrough I stopped using sniper rifles because I could already instantly kill people from similar ranges with Quickhacks without having to worry about bullet drop. So perhaps having a little Genji up in here is precisely what Cyberpunk needs more of.
In any case, the new system sure as shit can’t possibly be worse than what Cyberpunk already has. And yeah, I dare the Monkey Paw to try and jinx that one.
AI Presidential Debate
Oh boy, the future is now:
Welcome to TrumpOrBiden2024, the ultimate AI generated debate arena where AI Donald Trump and AI Joe Biden battle it out 24/7 over topics YOU suggest in the Twitch chat!
https://www.twitch.tv/trumporbiden2024
It’s best to just view a few minutes of it yourself, but this rank absurdity is an AI-driven “deep-fake” endless debate between Trump and Biden, full of NSFW profanity, and somehow splices in topics from Twitch chat. As the Kotaku article mentions:
The things the AI will actually argue about seem to have a dream logic to them. I heard Biden exclaim that Trump didn’t know anything about Pokémon, so viewers shouldn’t trust him. Trump later informed Biden that he couldn’t possibly handle genetically modified catgirls, unlike him. “Believe me, nobody knows more about hentai than me,” Trump declared. Both men are programmed to loosely follow the conversation threads the other sets, and will do all the mannerisms you’ve come to expect out of these debates, like seeing Biden react to a jab with a small chuckle. At one point during my watch, I saw the AI stop going at each other only to start tearing into people in the chat for having bad usernames and for not asking real questions.
It’s interesting how far we have come as a society and culture. At one point, deep-fakes were a major concern. Now, between ChatGPT, Midjourney/Stable Diffusion, and basic Instagram filters, there is a sort of democratization of AI taking place. Granted, most of these tools were given out for free to demonstrate the value of the groups who wish to eventually be bought up by multinationals, but the things developed in such a short time is nevertheless amazing.
Of course, this all may well be the calm before the storm. Elon Musk’s lawyers tried to argue that video of him claiming that Teslas could drive autonomously “right now” (in 2016) were in fact deep-fakes. The judge was not amused and said Elon should then testify under oath that it wasn’t him in the video. The deep-fake claim was walked back quickly. But it is just a matter of time before someone gets arrested or sentenced based on AI-fabricated evidence and when it comes out as such, things will get wild.
Or maybe it won’t. Impersonators have been around for thousands of years, people get thrown into jail on regularly-fabricated evidence all the time, and the threat of perjury is one of those in-your-face crimes that tend to keep people honest (or quiet) on the stand.
I suppose in the meantime, it’s memetime. Until the internet dies.
In An Age 
Asset Flip
Aug 3
Posted by Azuriel
One of the games I was looking forward to during the previous Steam sale was one called Grand Emprise: Time Travel Survival. The trailer was amazing, the premise novel, the gameplay was survival-crafting, it had it all! So, imagine my dismay when I read this review:
You can read the full review yourself, but the gist is that the one-person “dev” downloaded a bunch of Unreal marketplace assets and just dumped them as-is into his game. These environmental assets have demo areas already built, along with tools to customize that area or create new ones, but apparently the dev just used the demo areas. Other reviews point out that the dev has a very cynical marketing mindset wherein he publishes a lot of similar asset flips in Steam trying to determine how to generate traffic (and revenue) using as little effort as possible.
This is further supported by the fact that “Karagon (Survival Robot Riding FPS)” – yes, that’s the actual name – was another indie title this dev released three months ago. I had been looking forward to Karagon too, as a sort of ARK substitute to hold me over until the remaster/sequel got released. The reviews further reinforce the notion that the dev swoops in, dumps a game with recycled assets, and swoops away with whatever cash wasn’t refunded.
The concern about asset flips is not limited to this one specific dude, of course. In my last post, I was talking about Craftopia and all the cool things (and a lot of jank) going on there. What I had not realized was that the devs of Craftopia are the same ones as the upcoming Palworld. If you haven’t seen the amazing trailer for Palworld, take a quick peek now, because it’s worth it. Big publishers can have multiple teams working on different products, but something tells me that that isn’t exactly the case here. In PocketPair’s defense, Palworld is slated for an Early Access release January 2024 and Craftopia has a roadmap that ends in September of this year.
In PocketPair’s non-defense though, their latest trailer showed this area for a split-second:
Is it exact? No. I suppose there are only so many different ways you can construct a stone bridge. And, you know, if you need to put out a trailer for an alpha game to generate buzz, you may as well use whatever you have laying around in any case. That said, the shenanigans with Grand Emprise have made me a bit sensitive to this situation. Was Craftopia’s “Seamless Update” really intended to enhance the game? Or did they want to beta-test their Palworld alpha?
There is potentially a conversation to be had as to whether asset flips are bad at all. Things like microtransactions and DLC put the monetary side of the industry front and center, but it is easy to forget that these things that bring us joy are a product being sold. Therefore it is a bit presumptuous of me to characterize someone as being lazy and cynical when that can technically describe all capitalistic aspects of product development. I’d very much prefer devs to have a passion for the game they are making, but as long as it’s fun, who cares? There are apparently many people who played Grand Emprise and had fun with it.
…yeah, no, can’t do it.
I try to have at least one paragraph where I take the opposite side of the argument just to see if there is something I’m missing, but I don’t think so in this case. Asset flips are shitty and it’s especially frustrating to be a fan of the survival genre when it’s apparently ground zero for this chicanery. We are indeed deep in this bizarro world in which even “completed” games feel like abandonware, but Grand Emprise is a whole other level of nihilism.
I suppose we as gamers are not “owed” the same level of passion as ConcernedApe (Stardew Valley) or the people behind Terraria, but it’s still just sad. We become invested in these gaming experiences in a way that we don’t for other products. So, to me, exploiting that investment oftentimes diminishes my very capacity to be invested in things in the future. That is… just restating the definition of being jaded, but the actual diminishment feels much more personal somehow.
Oh well. Caveat emptor and all that.
Posted in Commentary
2 Comments
Tags: Asset Flip, Craftopia, Cynicism, Grand Emprise, Palworld, Survival