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Valheim “Exploration”
I’m going to come out and say it: Valheim’s “exploration” is shit.
It may come as somewhat of a shock, but I am not an Explorer. Per se. I enjoy survival crafting games, and one of the biggest decisions you make in them is where you want to build your base. As such, I will happily traverse the world in search for the perfect location, and am always reevaluating the merits of better ones. Coming across rare resources, especially ones that regenerate, tickles my fancy. Nary a waterfall escapes examination for secret caves. I do pause for sunsets.
At the same time, rearranging a room with four objects doesn’t generate an infinite amount of novelty.
Valheim will procedurally generate a world for you with appropriate biomes scattered about, and then randomly populate those biomes with progression-required resources/POIs (points of interest). It is not enough to find just any Swamp, you must find a Swamp with a Sunken Crypt, before getting access to enough Scrap Iron to build better gear. This particular aspect is annoying, but not backbreaking.
What quickly becomes backbreaking is the additional layer of RNG: locating the randomly-assigned boss-locator tablet, which only appears in certain randomly-distributed POIs a percentage of the time. It is not enough to find an abandoned stone tower in the Mountains, you must find enough to get enough dice rolls to have one spawn the tablet.
The variability is a problem, but not the biggest one. The problem is how you can be “done” with all the progression in a biome and yet still have to spend several real-life hours “exploring” for these POIs. Meanwhile, there is nothing new for you to encounter. Is the terrain different? Sure. But that’s it. Maybe you find a better location for reconstructing a Plains base or whatever, but are you really going to move everything right as you’re looking for the Plains boss so you can head to the next biome? Certain POIs will have treasure chests, but the contents of them are all standard resources. None of the hostile mobs you encounter will be any different than the ones you defeated hours ago with worse gear.
The initial foray in the unknown? Premium tier. Walking into a new biome for the first time is a terrifying experience. What should you be looking for? How deadly could a “Deathsquitto” really be (spoilers: very)? Progression feels good as you slowly upgrade your armor and weapons, making the dangers a little bit less so.
But then… there’s a gap. Sometimes a gulf, between you and even locating the boss you have prepared yourself to tackle. And Valheim nevertheless requires you to drudge around for… some reason. Ambiance? Hubris? Maybe they expect you to die and lose all your gear and then need to re-smelt all the ore and collect all the resources all over again somewhere else? It’s dumb.
I did not think it was possible to create an exploration system worse than Starfield, but the Valheim devs did it. Because at least in Starfield, it wasn’t required.
I’m currently in the Mistlands, and do you know how things have went thus far? The very first place I docked my boat had the POI that you need to raid for progression material. And inside that same POI was the tablet that showed me the boss location. Do you know what it didn’t have? Enough progression material to actually build the crafting tables to make the new weapons/armor/etc. Sounds like the reverse problem to what I had earlier, right? But this time I will be rewarded for my hunt for another POI with access to all kinds of new weapons and armor. Even if I have to go to a completely different Mistlands area, the carrot is still on the stick. In just about every other biome up to this point, the carrot was long gone, and it was just all stick. And that’s shit design, IMO.
I do (thus far) appreciate what the devs have been able to accomplish with Valheim given its spartan design. This does not feel like a game that only takes up 4.23 GB of space. Nevertheless, I do feel like they have hewn things a bit too much to the bone. If it goes against their design principles to have a sort of “pity timer” that will guarantee the boss tablet by the third POI or some way to spend a bunch of resources to divine the location yourself, it would be helpful to at least pepper some random useful shit across these biomes we slog through.
Valheim’s Subtle, Genius Design
I am going to complain about Valheim later, but before I do so, I wanted to get some words out in praise of some of its subtler elements of genius design. Specifically, there are two main elements: food and base-building. I’m going to talk about both as someone still in the Plains biome.
Counter-intuitively, in many survival-crafting games food is usually an afterthought. There might be a time period right at the beginning where you are scrounging for edibles anywhere you can, but thereafter hunger is just another meter you manage. Or more accurately, a meter you forget about completely until it is actively flashing at you. Certain “late-game” foods might provide specific buffs to damage or whatever, but it is clearly a bonus reward to encourage you to treat the design with more seriousness than it ever truly merits.
This is not at all the case with Valheim: your next meal is always top of mind at every stage of the game. And it achieves this, ironically, with no technical penalty for not eating. You will never starve to death in Valheim. Instead, you will… just have the default amount of HP and Stamina. Which is fine for a minute in the early game, but becomes a brutal setback nearly anywhere else.
In Valheim, you have three “slots” for food. Each piece of food grants you some amount of extra HP, Stamina, and healing per interval. However, you can’t just eat the same thing three times, as the food slots are mutually exclusive. This automatically elevates the food/cooking system way past almost all traditional survival crafting games, into the realm of Green Hell and similar ones that track individual macros like Protein and Carbs. Unlike the super technical ones though, Valheim doesn’t care if you eat the same three (unique) dishes each day, nor does it bear the same burden of UI overhead. Food just gives the same three stats in varying amounts, for varying amounts of time. Want to subsist on just Turnips and Onions and Onion Soup? Go for it… but good luck not getting one-shot in the next biome.
As a sidebar, I also appreciate what Valheim does (thus far) when it comes to obsoletion of materials as you progress. After defeating a boss, you typically unlock something that allows you to process the next biome’s materials, which you need in order to take on the next boss. That’s pretty standard. What has been nice though, is that food/equipment still makes use of older ingredients in fairly rational ways. Some might find this grindy to have to head back into the Swamp for Iron or Blood Bags or whatever, but I appreciate the (usually) measured approach of some items requiring older mats.
Finally, I want to talk about the meat (ahem) of the genius design: the campfire.
Real talk, Valheim slaughtered the sacred cow that almost every survival game raised without even knowing it, e.g. fires producing smoke. In almost every other game, you start by building a 2×2 box for a base, and throw everything inside… including the campfire. After all, rain will put a camp fire out, and you cannot fast-forward the night without being within a certain radius of a lit fire. In Valheim, however, unventilated fires also produce smoke, which creates a damaging debuff which can kill you.
And that’s it. One simple change elevates the game beyond many of its peers in the genre. Not because it’s realistic (it is), but because of what it changes about how the player approaches base design. My own progression went something like this:
- Builds a 2×2 square box… ouch, getting smoked out
- Builds a 3×3 box with the center tile open… and it rained
- Get annoyed, place the campfire outside with a janky lean-to protecting it
- Get annoyed standing in the rain to cook my own food. Hmm.
- Put campfire back in the middle of 3×3 box, create a 1×1 elevated roof. It works!
- Get annoyed accidentally walking into campfire so many times
- Tear down wall in back corner, place campfire there, with a “range hood”. It works!
- ???
- Realize why (fantasy) Viking architecture all looks like the way it does
It may not seem revolutionary that a game with Viking-themed set pieces ends up encouraging players to build Viking-looking bases. But consider how the genre’s bar for successfully encouraging anything beyond a wooden survival cube is practically nonexistent. The closest I have felt to such an inspired synergy between mechanics and aesthetics was Nightingale, which wore its Valheim inspirations on its lanternpunk sleeve.
In any case, my compliments to the devs on these two, specific points.
E33: How It’s Done
I am not particularly far in Claire Obscur: Expedition 33 (E33) – about 12 hours or so in – but I did want to briefly highlight one fantastic customization system that it has in comparison to, say, Avowed, The Outer Worlds 2, or frankly any game that professes to have player agency/customization at all. That system is of Pictos.
In many ways, Pictos feel like OG Final Fantasy 7 Materia: they are an item you equip that grants both stat bonuses plus a passive ability. Once you complete four combats with a given Pico equipped, the passive ability is permanently learned by everybody. Each character then has a pool of “Luma” they can use in a point-buy way to equip the passives. Some effects are cheap, like being able to gain +1 AP on a Perfect Dodge for 1 Luma; more powerful passives can cost 10, 15, or more. Oh, and of course you can freely move Pictos and Luma around at no penalty (there are respec items for base stats though)!
What gets the juices really flowing are the synergies and tradeoffs. Each character can equip three Pictos apiece, and while so equipped, the passive is granted without spending Luma. Thing is, there is usually an inverse relationship between how much Luma it would otherwise take to get the passive, and the raw bonus stats on the Picto itself. A given Picto might have +50 Speed and +15% Crit Chance, for example, but contains a passive that only saves you 3 Luma. Meanwhile, that 20 Luma passive is attached to like a +300 HP brick.
…which can be still be helpful if one of your characters is wielding a weapon that doubles as damage taken in exchange for another bonus. The downside of which you are mitigating with a passive that reduces damage taken by 50% but you cannot be healed by spells. No worries, just stack a bunch of +HP Picos and practice your sweet, sweet dance (dodge) moves.
Now, think about The Outer Worlds 2 in comparison. There is none!
Yeah, these are not the same type of games, so of course they are not set up in the same way. But there will be people who argue that you choosing Engineering and Medical on the character select screen in TOW2 is some deep gesture of customization when it is, in fact, an a priori straightjacket that railroads your entire playthrough. “I’m roleplaying though!” Roleplaying… what? Arbitrary Man?
Anyway. All I’m saying is that I am wherever I am in the game, and already have more than 40 Pictos to choose from. And unlike in TOW2, I am actually choosing builds and testing them out, because I am not expressly penalized for doing so. That’s some good, engaging game design.
Maybe Obsidian should take notes.
More Impressions: FF7 Rebirth
I am still plugging away at Rebirth. Don’t worry, no story spoilers here.
What I did want to talk about (again) is just how baffling the game systems are. There are some things that are just awkward and annoying, but true to the original, like having to meticulously move Materia around every time your party is forced to change. Mercifully, the devs do allow you to equip Materia into a slot from someone else, eliminating some of the tedium.
But then there is all the new stuff. Which exists for… some reason, to the detriment of the game.
Weapons have Weapon Skill slots, which act like Materia (e.g. slot them), but I honestly have no clue where they come from. Maybe I missed the tutorial for that part and they automatically unlock? Anyway, they are pretty minor and largely inconsequential fiddly bits you have to mess with on occasion. Then you have the Folios, which reminds me of the Sphere Grid from Final Fantasy X. Or would if any choices there mattered either. Yes, the Folios are where you unlock Synergy Abilities and special magic attacks that don’t require MP. But along the way you have to spent points on things like “increase MP by 3” and “increase whatever by 5%.” Filler by itself is not always bad, but this is just one of a myriad of new systems introduced, again, for what reason?
And by the way, what Rebirth has done with spellcasting makes me wonder why they bothered with it at all. One of the issues of the first game (Remake) is wandering into a boss fight that hinges on you exploiting an elemental weakness that none of your team has equipped. With the Folios, all characters can unlock specific abilities that allow them to cast most elements without needing the Materia or even MP. That’s cool. However, the introduction of Synergy Abilities – which require two characters to perform ~3 ATB actions apiece – places a huge emphasis on executing actions that “count” towards them. What doesn’t count? Spells and those abilities that cast spells. Which… why not? Seriously. Combined with characters that have elemental-based ATB attacks like Cloud’s Firebrand, the whole spell system feels de-emphasized.
The other element (har har) that is becoming more annoying to me over time is the disparity between the characters themselves. Specifically, Tifa and Red XIII versus Yuffie. Both Tifa and Red XIII are melee-only characters that end up facing what feels like 80% flying enemies thus far. Not only can they not hit these flying mobs to gain ATB, many of their abilities won’t hit either. Enter Yuffie: primarily a melee character, that can also throw her Shuriken at distant/flying foes as a secondary attack. If it hits, a second tap of the button will teleport her to the Shuriken and allow her to start melee attacking the target, even in mid-air. Alternatively, if you start hitting the regular attack button, Yuffie will start attacking with her elemental ninjitsu, which is an instantaneous ranged attack. Did I mention she can change the element of the ninjitsu to target weaknesses?
I will concede that perhaps the devs feel a bit boxed in here. Tifa has the same attacks she did in the first game, as does Yuffie… who was released as a solo DLC character, and thus needed to have a broad spectrum of attacks to make up for it. At the same time, with all the craziness of Remake, I don’t think anyone would bat an eye at Tifa/Red having some way of engaging flying foes. Whatever the case, the end result is that while I want my party to be Cloud, Tifa, and Aerith, the classical trio is way outclassed by Cloud, Yuffie, and Barret. Sure, I could just do what I want and just take the OG crew, but that will make the enormously boring fights take even longer.
There are two final things I wanted to talk about, that are possibly only “me” problems. I’m very important, of course, so these are major issues. Those issues are Pacing and Tone.
From a Pacing perspective, Rebirth effectively has none. What typically happens is that you get to a new area, have a few Main Story Quests (MSQ), and then the next stage is far away into a blank map. Some of the time it is possible to make a direct approach and ignore the 20+ map icons and side quests and towers and collectibles and so on and so forth. There was even a time when the MSQ was almost directly in sight and you had to go out of your way to leave the area to hit up all the extraneous stuff. Other times you do have to unlock a certain amount of things and/or need to hit certain level milestones to not be stomped by the next boss. Regardless, I’m not a completionist or an achievement hunter, but I do actually care about extracting every drop of interaction I can from these characters that occupied so much of my youth, so I end up finishing everything I can stand.
Unfortunately, the end result is that I spend 2-3 play sessions doing busywork with this awful combat system and just can’t bring myself to push further into the story until I mentally recharge.
Double-unfortunately for me, the Tone for this game is all over the place. The original FF7 had extremely weird sections and comic relief at regular intervals, of course – the entire Wall Market sequence, for example. But I feel like the devs decided that every air pocket created from stretching the game into a trilogy needed to filled with nonsense. And not just a little nonsense, but ridiculous nonsense. Which again, fine, comic relief is a thing. However, the game isn’t that heavy to justify this amount of relief. Indeed, it’s hard to take much of anything seriously based on the in-game presentation. For example, there is a section in which Shrina soldiers are gunned down and everyone is somber and clutching pearls. Fast-forward past a bunch of filler quests (god, I wish I could have), you face off against a bunch of Shrina soldiers… that you gun down. What.
If it sounds like I’m not having a good time, you would be correct. I am currently sitting at 46 hours and sort of wish things had ended 30 hours ago. In the interest of plowing ahead, I have started to actually ignore the more Ubisoft-styled busywork, but it’s still tough.
This game is not the follow-up to Remake I was hoping for.
Impressions: FF7 Rebirth
I started Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth, middle-child of the “break glass in emergency” remake gambit trilogy.
The first game started extremely strong, with an overdose of weapons-grade nostalgia straight to the jugular. Midgar exceeded my expectations (and formative memories) in a way I thought would have been impossible. I mean, when they say “you can’t go home again,” the implication is usually not that the today home is so outstandingly better that it blows the old home out of the water. The personalities, the dialog, the little mannerisms… chef’s kiss. Has it really been three years?
However, you’ll note we’re now in paragraph three without saying anything about the current game.
Visually, Rebirth an outstanding feast for the eyes. The level of detail in random corners of the city of Kalm is mind-blowing considering how (presumably) little of the game will be based there. The setting of FF7 has always been one of my favorite parts of the game – the juxtaposition between technology and magic and a world in decline – so seeing Cloud walk past vending machines and people taking pictures while he has a huge Buster Sword strapped to his back somehow hits all the right notes for me.
However, there is some significant trepidation on my part. One of the first big post-tutorial reveals is… the Grasslands! You know, the like… generic overworld between points of actual interest in the original game. While I appreciate that the devs were perhaps trying to recapture the 1997 experience when you realized that Midgar was only the opening sequence in the game, my own reaction was a heavy sigh once a big gray map popped up. I further massaged my temples when I later saw 37 different icons appear all over the map. You cannot have nostalgia for doing the same open-world checklists that exist for every modern open-world game. While it is presumably possible to ignore everything else and just hit the next Main Scenario icon, that leads me to the next source of concern: the battle system.
It’s still extremely early on, but as far as I can tell the battle system has only gotten more complex and even less fun as a result. The ATB system is still there, which means actual combat revolves around you spamming light attacks until you fill a meter and can use exciting features like Item or Spell or Ability. Low on health? You better… attack the enemy some more and hope you live long enough to undo a small amount of the damage you took trying to fill up the meter to allow you to heal. But, be careful: just like last game your precious ATB action can be interrupted, or miss entirely if it’s an attack. Which I could understand if this were a Souls-like or whatever, but it is not.
The new combat system additions are Synergy Skills and Synergy Abilities. Once unlocked in the “Folio,” Skills can be used while pressing the Block button and allow two party members to do a special action without needing the ATB gauge. Which is good, giving you at least some extra buttons to push aside from X spam. Synergy Abilities are super-Abilities between two party members that are only active once each character has used enough ATB actions. Some of these are cool, as they result in unique buffs that last quite a while, like giving characters infinite MP. Which, now that I think about it, isn’t as cool considering you still have to have a free ATB bar built up to utilize.
It’s like, what even is this combat system? Spam tiny attacks to fill a meter and then slow down time to select Abilities/Magic, then switch between multiple characters to do the same, then you eventually get to cast Summons (ATB-based), or Limit Breaks, or now Synergy Abilities.
I’m only 7 hours in, so maybe combat gets better this time? Please tell me it gets better. Sigh.
In other words, it’s a rough start to FF7 Rebirth. I’m going to stick with it because Junon, Golden Saucer, and Costa del Sol – along with the overall direction – but Square Enix ain’t making it easy to get there.
Avowed – Veneer Off
I have added another 16 hours into Avowed (total: 32), clearing the entire second zone. And while some of what I reported earlier is still accurate – traversal is fun! – the game’s veneer is definitely rubbing off.
Combat, which hitherto has been fun, is now very rote. For the first half of the second zone, I respecced into a Ranger gun build and almost ended up abandoning the game entirely. There was… just no buttons to press. Sure, Ranger has a sort of vines CC ability, but aside from that, it was power attacks from pistols and nothing else to actively press. Technically I could have grabbed some more active buttons from Wizard as well, but Ranger is the only real splash-class, and trying to elevate your Intellect stat to the point where spells are relevant is a fool’s errand without just being a Wizard.
During the last half of the zone, I went into Fighter, first with a 2H weapon focus and then 1H with shield. Fighter had some more buttons to press – including a very satisfying Charge – and was a more dynamic experience overall with the Parry mechanic and blocking. The issue is that the DPS was just not really there. Avowed loves to throw groups of 5+ enemies at you, which is understandable considering Rangers/Wizards will nearly one-shot most of them from range in the opening salvo. As a Fighter, it’s not satisfying at all spending all your Stamina trying to block/dodge so many enemies. Although you do have two squad mates to help spread aggro around, the reality is that so do Rangers/Wizards, and those classes can actually eliminate enemies quickly. Which technically goes against the “gameplay” of Fighter, as if things die before you get into Parry chains or full attack combos, a lot of the Fighter-based weapons are useless. Which they are anyway, since they don’t kill quickly.
The other major issue that I glossed over previously was the world in general and interactivity in particular. Avowed is not Skyrim. Which is fine, most games aren’t. But as a first-person fantasy game that came out 14 years after Skyrim, Avowed is incredibly static. NPCs barely move (if ever), there is no world reactivity, there is no “stealing,” and every object out in the world is bolted onto the floor, aside from some breakable crates. To be fair, this is more an intellectual criticism, as I hardly noticed anything amiss in-game. But now that I have, I see signs of a Hollywood set everywhere. Which might have been fine, if this were not a fantasy RPG released in 2025 for $70 MSRP.
The final thing that is really dragging me down is the upgrade system and Unique weapons. I have been playing the game “as intended” when it comes to looting and experimenting, but have come to find out that the devs punish that playstyle. For one thing, all the respeccing I have done required me to upgrade several weapons that, oops, I am no longer using. Then I found out that all unique weapons in the world scale to the highest upgraded weapon you own at the time of pickup. What this means is that if the best weapon you have is Fine (blue quality), all the uniques you discover will be Fine. However, if you funnel all your upgrades into one particular weapon and get it to Exceptional (purple), those same uniques would have been Exceptional. And this works all the way into Superb (red) and Legendary.
Do you like exploring the map and picking up things organically, doing a few upgrades here and there? Punished! Because now if you decide to go with another weapon or playstyle, you will need to double (or more) the upgrade materials required to level them up. Which, let me remind you, is very necessary because weapons and armor get a debuff if they are more than a few “tiers” below the enemies you are facing. Also, remember that enemies and money is finite in this game, so it is very possible to just screw yourself and be locked into something that is no longer fun.
Which might just be the entire game itself for me, at the moment.
I don’t know, guys. Not everything I play needs to be Game of the Year material; lord knows I play plenty of trashy survival games for hundreds of hours. But, truly, Avowed feels like a game that would have been really great… in 2015. Or maybe 2010. Obsidian is not Bethesda, yes. But this also ain’t New Vegas. And between this and Outer Worlds, I’m thinking that Obsidian needs to stick to what they do best: iterating on the shoulders of better games, rather than trying to make their own.
Grounded was great though, so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Avowed – Early Impressions
I have played about 16 hours of Avowed via Game Pass. Early impressions: mostly great!
Although I have not yet stepped outside the first area, Avowed is a very gorgeous game. More than that, it is a joy to walk around in. It cannot be understated how much I like a first-person perspective in exploration games, which is elevated further when the character actually feels competent within it. There are marked ledges with the stereotypical yellow ropes, but there is almost no areas in which I felt I could not reasonably scramble up. This isn’t climbing sheer cliffs BotW/Genshin Impact-style, but it’s enough to feel like the world is explorable. It honestly feels one step below Dishonored in how good it feels walking around – if more games could have shadowstep-like abilities, that would be great.
Combat also feels really, really good. I am currently focusing on a Wizard character which gives me, honestly, too many options. The great thing though, is that there is a lot of variety in builds (on default difficulty) and how you engage with enemies. For example, I was rocking the standard wand + spellbook loadout, but I didn’t like how short range the wand ended up being. So, I have a pistol + spellbook. Plus, I have chosen a spellbook that allows me to conjure up a magic staff to beat people with if things get too hairy in close-quarters. Honestly, I kill most things with alpha strikes from a bow and follow-up pistol shots, so I’m leaning towards respeccing more into the Ranger class altogether. Which is easy to do, as it only costs a small amount of currency to respec, which is another plus.
I’m not going to comment much about the story, especially given how early in the game I am. What I can say though, is that I like how the game takes itself seriously without also being too far up its own ass. Being able to view a glossary of all the Proper Nouns during a conversation is helpful, but it’s not always necessary either. Which is great! I did play the original Pillars of Eternity enough to get some of the references, and there were plenty of references to the second game I did not get, but still understood from context clues. I never fully expected Avowed to follow The Outer Worlds irreverence, but nevertheless I am glad the slapstick is relegated to only minor side quests.
Having said all that… yeah, I do have some criticisms.
First, enemies are finite – once you clear an area, it stays cleared. I’ve seen some people praise this as being “immersive,” but it honestly leads to un-immersive player behavior. For example, I was walking in an area and saw some of the lizard creatures battling with spiders. That is great dynamic happenstance (assuming it wasn’t scripted)! But instead of letting them duke it out and attacking the weakened victor, I immediately jumped into the fray because I realized that any incidental monster deaths was a permanent reduction in my possible XP. Now, I am assuming that there is a level cap that can be reached way before the end of the game proper. But this is also a game that gives you more abilities than you have points for, and thus I want to get any many as I can, as soon as I can.
It did occur to me that the original Pillars of Eternity – and most CRPGs – also have the “feature” of finite battles. So perhaps that is not entirely out of place. But even aside from the metagaming aspect, combat itself is fun enough to want more of. I’m seeking out more of these random battles because it’s fun to push the buttons. Which is great! But I hate the idea of knowing they are a dwindling resource.
Another metagame aspect I do not enjoy is the carryover of The Outer Worlds’ “unique item” system. Essentially, the progression mechanic in Avowed is to choose amongst the the items you pick up and then upgrade a few of them over and over. Indeed, almost all of the loot you get from battles and hidden treasures are simply upgrade materials. The problem is that Avowed is also peppered with unique items that have bonus effects that regular items do not. What this means is that if you really like using Bows as a weapon, you are wasting upgrade materials on any regular bow, and should use something else until you get a unique Bow. The problem with that strategy is that weapons are debuffed against enemies of “higher quality” than the weapon used, because… reasons.
So, remember how I said I was using guns instead of wands for my wizard character? Aside from my range concern, what pushed me towards guns was the fact that I found two unique pistols and no unique wands. Without looking it up, I don’t even know if I’ll find a unique wand in the second area either. Which means I either waste upgrade materials on a regular wand so I can keep up with mobs, or I do something else. Similarly, upgrading spellbooks feels bad because you are locked into getting bonuses to just four spells. You can spend your precious few skill points to memorize spells without needing a spellbook, but you don’t get those bonuses that come from an upgraded spellbook.
Pressing buttons feels good, but each level up (and item upgrade) leaves me feeling unsatisfied.
Overall though, I do anticipate playing Avowed to completion. Perhaps the Wizard life is not for me, and the Ranger will be straight-forward enough to feel satisfying to level. It also helps that I have those unique weapons for the ranger already. Will I grow bored of using just those though? Well, it hasn’t happened yet. And perhaps I’ll accumulate enough Wizard uniques by the time it does.
…and hopefully I’ll still have enough upgrade materials to get them up to speed.
Let’s see how it goes.
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.
Disappearing Features
Oct 16
Posted by Azuriel
Tim Cain has a new video out titled “RPG Features That Are Disappearing” (link below).
To save you 12 minutes, Tim is largely talking about how RPGs 20+ years ago used to have a lot of hidden, unexplained, and/or missable content. The disappearing features are:
Towards the end, Tim says:
There is a ongoing zeitgeist that gaming executives across the industry are, in fact, destroying the industry. Chasing trends, designing by committee, general enshittification, and so on. For a large part, I agree. How many
subscription MMOsbattle royaleshero shootersextraction shooters do we really need in 2026 and beyond? How anyone with an MBA expects to be able to chase a trend with a product that takes six years to produce, I will never understand.At the same time though… are the managers always wrong?
The original Fallout was made in 3.5 years and cost $3 million to develop. Even if we assume 1993 money, that’s still just $7 million after inflation. Fallout 2 was basically completed nine months later. How was that possible back then, and not today? Well, have you seen Fallout 1 & 2? Of course it is going to be easier to slap a few extra companions and unique endings when everything is a 2D sprite, a prerendered background, or some text.
Games are not really made that way anymore. Hell, Tim used Vampire: the Masquerade – Bloodlines as one of his examples of “dumb” (e.g. alternative) dialog features that are disappearing, specifically the Malkavian clan. If you never played Bloodlines, the vampire clan choice during character creation really can change the entire way you approach the game. Pick Malkavian and you will get all kinds of unique, crazy dialog through the entire game (because they’re crazy). Pick Nosferatu and all of a sudden you can’t interact with regular human NPCs. Having such radically different options is (conceptually) good!
Unfortunately, a conceptual good is no match for an objective bad, which was Bloodline’s commercial failure. The game was overbudget, underdeveloped, and its limited sales was the last nail in the, ahem, coffin for the entire studio, which shut down shortly afterwards. Would things have been different if the Malkavian and Nosferatu options did not exist or were watered down? Maybe, maybe not. It’s possible that Bloodlines was doomed at the start for using the prototype Source engine instead of something else… like 2D sprites and just text. Then again, the developers certainly spent a non-zero amount of time working on those clans, balancing them, and so on, all in an environment in which the game was already struggling to be completed on time.
My point is this: sometimes things disappear for a reason.
It would not take me more than 30 seconds to find someone who genuinely feels like Bethesda ruined the Fallout franchise by pivoting to 3D. Counterpoint: Fallout 3 sold 12.4 million copies. OK, yeah, well Fallout 4 was an immense dumbing down of every aspect of what made the franchise great, especially the dialog. Counterpoint: Fallout 4 sold 25 million copies. I am not saying there is a 1:1 causation between sanding down the design edges of a game, and it selling better. Nor do I want to imply that Candy Crush is the pinnacle of game design simply because it made billions of dollars. But… if not proof, there’s something in that pudding. And that sure beats empty pockets.
I do feel like gaming in general is on a bad trajectory. Regardless of causes, AAA games costing $300 million and taking an entire console generation worth of time to release is unsustainable. I can empathize with executives’ desire to water down everything in a desperate attempt to broaden the potential appeal of these all-in games; it’s not going to work, but I can see the logic. It’s also very possible (and likely) that if these auteur developers (like Tim) were left to their own old-school devices, the games would still fail. Failure, in this case, meaning that the game was unable to recoup its costs.
On the bright side, we do have the continued maturation of the indie scene/AA space, the occasional Baldur’s Gate 3, and the fact that all these old games still exist. You can go play them right now, if you want. Assuming you can bring yourself to do so. I don’t know about anyone else, but whatever part of me that was fine with spending my vanishingly small gaming time aimlessly wandering around to achieve intentionally (!) vague objectives died long ago.
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Tags: Enshittification, Fallout, Game Design, Tim Cain