Time and Place
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:
To put it into perspective, when work began on WildStar, World of Warcraft was still in its vanilla era. When WildStar finally launched, we’d seen The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria, and Warlords of Draenor was just around the corner.
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.
Balatro
If you haven’t heard about the latest indie darling, Balatro, let me tell you: it’s legit. Balatro is available on both Steam and now on mobile, the latter of which is what I recommend picking up, as there aren’t many non-exploitative mobile games out there.
Fundamentally, Balatro is a deckbuilding roguelike based around making poker hands using a standard deck of cards. Your overall goal is to clear eight “levels” (Antes) that consist of three “battles” (Blinds) apiece, one of which is a boss that has negative modifiers. Battles are won by exceeding a score (Chips), which is generated based on the poker hands you play… plus any modifiers. For example, let’s say you have two pairs: a pair of Queens and a pair of 5s. A two pair hand is worth 20 Chips x 2 multiplier by itself. You then add the face value of the cards used to the Chip value, so it ends up being 50 x 2, or 100 Chips. The very first Blind requires 300 Chips or more to beat, so you would be well on your way to success there. Under normal settings, you get to play a total of 4 hands to beat the Blind, and get a total of 4 discards (up to 5 cards each time) in order to make said hands.
Winning battles gives you a base level of money ($3-$5) with bonuses based on unused hands remaining and “interest” on unused cash from prior rounds. You use this money in-between rounds in a shop phase that lets you purchase various things.
The twist with the game comes from the modifiers available.
The Jokers are the most famous elements of the game, and they truly run the gamut. The most basic Joker grants you +4 to your multiplier; if we had that with our earlier two pair hand, the Chips score would have been 300 by itself (50 x 6). Some Jokers give you a scaling buff, some revolve around increasing your economy, some focus on enhancing specific suits or poker hands, some give bonuses to other Jokers, and so on. You get to equip up to five Jokers under default settings. Then there are Planet cards. These are consumables that permanently (for this run) upgrade the scoring of poker hands. Then there are Tarot cards, which are consumables that do a bunch of different things, including giving you more Tarot cards, more Planet cards, changing the suits of specific cards, etc. Oh, and the deck of cards itself can be enhanced or augmented to a variety of ways – cards can be deleted, added, changed to give +4 multiplier when scored, give more points when not played, etc. etc.
As you can probably tell, the dopamine hits come from the combination of regular poker RNG along with Joker RNG, boss RNG, shop RNG, and generally shenanigan RNG. You could be just scraping by, hit an amazing shop, and walk into the next round flush with cash and scaling Jokers. You could be breezing through the game and then hit a boss modifier like “Diamonds are debuffed” and do a ShockedPikachu.jpg when your “turned all the cards into Diamonds” deck is shafted. And, yeah, while I mentioned the word RNG a bunch previously, at the end of the day it is still about poker – there are strategies and probabilities that you can leverage to improve your expected outcomes.
Perhaps the best part of Balatro is the simple fact that it is a complete experience. There are no micro-transactions, no DLC, no real-world money intervention. I purchased it from Google Play for $10 and that’s that. Overall, I would still claim Slay the Spire to be the best deckbuilding roguelike, but Balatro certainly jumped out of nowhere to land in the top-5, if not second place. Not bad for a 1-man team.
1000xRESIST Complete
I finished 1000xRESIST about a day or so ago. Verdict: it’s very good.
Also, fair warning, it’s longer than you think. I kept getting into sequences where I’m like “oh they’re wrapping things up” and… nope. Another entire section. And then another. Total playtime for me was 13 hours. The game doesn’t overstay its welcome or get too diluted necessarily, but it’s one of those things you should keep in mind as you play.
Speaking of “playing,” as previously mentioned, 1000xRESIST is definitely on the walking-simulator side of things. You have to talk to certain people to move the story forward, but you can also run around and talk to a bunch of different people too. I very much encourage you to do so, because there were surprisingly poignant side stories that were tucked away in unassuming spots. That said, there are definitely some really cool time jump sequences where you can bounce back and forth to navigate around obstacles. Plus, the devs really mix things up with perspectives at times.
So… what’s it all about? It’s tough to go in deeper than a surface level without getting into spoilers.
Essentially it’s a sci-fi story wrapped in a coming-of-age story wrapped in generational trauma and real-world (Asian) political events. Specifically, the Hong Kong riots of 2019. At times, this both worked and didn’t work for me. There is a kind of banality when it comes to political metaphors in fiction, IMO, especially when things are so on-the-nose. The 3-Body Problem book series starts out with Mao’s Cultural Revolution, but it’s not about the Cultural Revolution. With 1000xRESIST, the game is mostly about the Hong Kong riots back in 2019 and ensuring diaspora; not only were the parents of Iris protesters who eventually fled, but the alien beings who invade are labeled Occupants, the deadly disease they bring causes you to leak water from your eyes (tear gas), etc, etc.
That said, the rest of the dialog and interpersonal relationships within the game make it worthwhile. Seriously, I ended up taking over 100 screenshots throughout the game from when the writing shocked me and/or made me abruptly laugh. The banter is witty, biting, and sometimes all too real. The shifting gameplay elements are unique and kept things interesting. I’ve mentioned it previously, but I also extremely enjoyed the world-building language of the game as well. Still want to use “hair to hair” IRL.
Overall, I enjoyed my time.
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.
Review: Zero Sievert
Imagine a top-down pixel STALKER roguelite with a dash of Escape from Tarkov and that’s Zero Sievert.
The general gameplay loop is:
- Take a train to one of six randomly rearranged zones
- Loot, kill, maybe complete some radiant-style quests
- Stay alive long enough to get to the extraction point
- Offload junk back in base, buy/craft things, prep for the next scavenging run
- Repeat
That may sound a bit reductive, but honestly, that’s the game. And I can say that out of the 40 hours that I played, I had fun for almost 30 of them. Which is good! Probably. I just wish that all of the hours were fun, rather than slowly succumbing to an aching grind and increasingly vague story progression.
In the beginning, everything is dangerous and exciting. Wildlife can kill you in seconds, you have no armor to speak of, your weapons are likely terrible in comparison to Bandits or others you encounter. The first time you kill a Bandit and realize you can just take their (damaged) gun and armor though? Exhilarating. You will end up needing to loot a whole bunch of related items to earn enough cash to make repairs, but the feedback loop goes hard. Death means you lose all progress since you arrived via train, with the harder difficulty options actually resulting in your losing everything you had equipped too. Don’t worry, just losing your time is punishment enough, as there is no guarantee that the enemies you face will even have the gun you are hoping to see the next time around.
After a while though, the veneer rubs off. You cap out progression-wise, with the guns and armor you wanted, and you’re still slogging your way through story missions increasingly filled with hundreds of mutant foes. Then there are times when a late-game quest says to explore a lab, but what it meant was talk to a dude first then go to the lab, as otherwise you spent 40 minutes to accomplish nothing. And once that’s done, your next mission is to explore the last zone… but it’s not an option until it’s unlocked. Somehow. No, seriously, there was no active quest that indicated how to unlock that last zone. According to forums, you have to complete some random number of missions to finally get it to populate. Which… nah, I’m done.
Overall, I’m not mad with Zero Sievert. It was fun until it wasn’t. The v1.0 release happened just last month and it’s very clear that, like a depressingly large amount of Early Access titles, it was released more for dollar reasons than design reasons. For example, you can talk to friendly factions out in the world and you have the same Talk/Quest/etc options that you would back at base, but they never have anything to say. Although such NPCs have very short lifespans, I could see future updates fleshing out that mechanic a bit better.
In any case, that’s Zero Sievert.
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.
Review: Satisfactory
I have finally completed Satisfactory after 123 hours.
Satisfactory is an automation game in the same vein as Factorio, aside from taking place in a first-person perspective of a very detailed 3D world. Like all of the other games in the genre, the goal is to craft a series of production buildings to harvest, smelt, and otherwise produce an ever-more complicated string of widgets to achieve certain milestones that unlock fancier widgets that require other widgets to produce, et cetra. The joy and satisfaction comes from planning and then executing these complicated production lines and witnessing the factory coming to perfectly efficient life.
Well, mostly efficient. 80/20 Rule applies.
I’m not an expert on the automation genre. Previously, I played Factorio for a few hours and bounced off; Dyson Sphere Program was starting to get good, but then it left Game Pass. So, coming into Satisfactory, I was a bit skeptical. It is difficult at this point to tell whether it was the genre itself that finally clicked for me, or whether Satisfactory itself had enough tweaks to the formula to break through, but… it did. In a big way. I played nothing else for almost four weeks straight. The genre jury is still out for me, but thus far the evidence points to the latter.
The first thing to understand about Satisfactory is that resources are infinite. When you find an Iron Vein and plop a Miner Mk1 on it, you will receive 120/minute of Iron Ore. Forever. Believe it or not, this is not actually common in the genre. What this certainty allows for is the construction of permanent supply chains. That 120/minute Iron Ore can be fed into enough Smelters to output 120/minute Iron Ingots, which then get split into different conveyer paths leading to Constructers outputting X/minute Iron Plates and Y/minute Iron Rods. The only time things would slow down/stop is if your power grid goes down or if there is nowhere for your end products to go.
That sort of subtlety of design ended up being the secret sauce for me. Is perfect efficiency required? Nope! It may just take longer, and maybe you’re okay with that. Progression in the game comes from taking ever-increasing volume (and complexity) of goods and blasting them into space. If they want 1000 of something and you’re making 5/minute, well… it’s your choice whether to do something else for 200 minutes or try to pump up the other number(s). Maybe you need to tap another Iron Vein somewhere to increase supply. Do you know of an untapped node somewhere close, or will you need to explore? Do you transport the raw ore back to your home base, or just the finished products? Have you unlocked alternate recipes via Hard Drives found in the world that could change entire production chains? I swear to god, Civilization’s “One More Turn” got nothing on this game.
It is hard to identify downsides, as this genre is new to me and I obviously had a lot of fun in this one. Something I will say though, is that there was somewhat of an insurmountable dissonance between the need to automate and the need to explore in Satisfactory. Hitting Milestones and unlocking new resources like Coal? Absolutely, let’s prioritize setting some Coal Generators up. Inbetween that though, there is an entire alien world you can (and should) explore. Not just for its own sake, but because there are Hard Drives that unlock (unfortunately) random alternate recipes, and alien artifacts that will similarly change the way you play the game later. But when can you explore? Those “wait 200 minutes” Milestones I mentioned before don’t arrive till later, so it’s more of a dilemma between “wasting” potential factory output time or just turtling up at your base and exploring only after 80+ hours.
The latter of which, ironically, is very possible because the devs actually over-engineered the world.
Seeing YouTube videos of other peoples’ massive factories and dozens of train track lines made me originally believe that sort of thing was going to be required. Surprise! Not at all. Part of the reason the world is large is because the devs give you the option of several different starting locations. But also… just because, apparently. The sheer size of the world naturally encourages you to invest in the more advanced transportation options, although you can certainly just run conveyer belts everywhere. Or be like me and spend 80 hours along a little tiny slice of the coast until more esoteric recipes required me to branch out. I guess my point is that you have options in exploring early if you want. Or not.
What more can be said? Satisfactory is great. I’ve spent more hours playing it than Skyrim, Fallout 4, Dragon Age: Origins, and actually most other games. Is it better than all those? Nah. I would personally rate a good survival title over Satisfactory any day, let alone a meaningful RPG experience. Buuuuuut… if you want possibly 120+ hours of almost-pure wirehead experience, this game has you covered.
And sometimes that is exactly what you need.
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!
In An Age 
Winter Sale Radar
Dec 20
Posted by Azuriel
There is zero reason why I should be thinking about new videogames for myself. But if I were, here is my list of current deals, snipped from IsThereAnyDeal:
Sons of the Forest, ASKA, and Soulmask are all in there because survival-crafting. I never actually got around to finishing the original Forest though, as horror is not really my jam as it turns out. A sequel that probably doubles-down on the same thing probably isn’t the best idea, but… well, I did get ~25 hours out of the original. I’m hesitating on ASKA because it seems more of a colony sim than survival per the user reviews. Soulmask is more solidly in the strike-zone, if only it was more than 20% off.
Not much to say about Fields of Mistria. It has a Overwhelmingly Positive rating on Steam (10k+ reviews), it’s cute, and a farming sim. It is also very much one of the situations where you’d be better off waiting until it’s out of Early Access and the rest of the game is implemented before diving in.
Stoneshard is one I’m really debating. It is apparently a very punishing game, including having a dumb save system in which you can lose a lot of progress. At the same time, sometimes you feel like being punished, you know? I enjoyed Zero Sievert and its own “lose everything if you die” schtick, so maybe it would be enjoyable too.
Elex is a weird one to include, as I have never played a “Gothic” game or really have any sort of idea why they’re famous. In fact, all of the videos I have watched on the subject lead me to believe it has terrible combat, jank galore, a mid story, and few redeeming features. One of said features is the “freedom to do anything,” but that doesn’t seem especially well-defined. Like, more freedom than any Elder Scrolls or Fallout game? Still, Gothic-likes get talked about and I did notice a few overhaul mods on Nexus that appear to smooth some of the rough gameplay edges.
Not listed above, but Guild Wars 2 is having an expansion sale. I have literally not played in over a year, I believe, certainly not since the latest expansion Secrets of the Obscure came out. The sale makes the latest expansion cost $20, which isn’t terrible. The challenge is always that you end up playing GW2 again, e.g. consume the story content, then farm metas for pocket change to convert into gems to play dress-up. That’s… probably every MMO, to be fair. The problem with GW2 though is that it’s a bit harder to avoid the whole “log into 8 alts to open chests every day before you really start playing” time sink. Plus, you know, I missed months and months of cheap Legendary goodie bags from when the expansion first came out. Feelsbadman.
In any case, I’m going to be sitting on these deals for a bit. The Steam sale continues until January 2nd, so that gives me about a week and a half to see if Epic or Amazon ends up giving the games away for free, or if they appear in a Fanatical bundle, or if I just lose interest altogether.
Posted in Commentary
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Tags: Analysis Paralysis, Crafting, Gothic-Like, Steam Sales, Survival