Blog Archives
More Impressions: Slay the Spire 2, pt 2
My original Impressions post for Slay the Spire 2 was about a month ago. At the time, I was merely whelmed with the experience. Since then, my time /played has reached 80 hours and I now have all five characters up to Ascension 10 (the highest) while playing on the beta branch. Suffice it to say, my overall impression on the game has improved quite a bit.
Incidentally, many people apparently agree. There are reports that Slay the Spire 2 has sold over 5 million copies while still posting some respectable concurrent Steam numbers:
So, what changed from my perspective? Well… my perspective.
There is the obvious point that this is an early access release of a game in which even minor balance changes can make or break the experience. Some things were indeed over-tuned and have since been nerfed and the gameplay feels better for it. But the real change for me was internal: I needed to “unlearn” habits and inclinations from the first game. Many of the cards and characters were seemingly ported over wholesale from the original, but that did not mean they could/should be played the same. Once I let go of the baggage and muscle memory, I was free to enjoy all the nuances that this series such a genre titan.
Ironically, one of the biggest personal shifts came about from Reddit memes. Meet Snakebite.
Explaining a meme kinda takes all the fun out of it, but the short-ish version is that everyone was absolutely clowning on Snakebite as a F-tier card. I also felt it was absolutely terrible, especially considering Deadly Poison is a card that costs 1 less and almost grants the same amount. Then, one of the most famous Slay the Spire streamers, Jorbs, started posting videos about how Snakebite is actually a good card. The memes intensified. At some point during a random Silent run, I was offered Snakebite as a card reward and I was like “fuck it, let’s see how bad it is.” And, well… it wasn’t, actually.
It’s not an earth-shattering revelation that the community sometimes gets it wrong. It is also not uncommon for specific cards/abilities in games to be overlooked or work better in specific situations or with certain combos. In Snakebite’s case though, I legitimately felt dumb for how wrong I was about the card. To be clear, I’m not like excited to see a Snakebite being offered. But now I have a better understanding on why some cards are built the way that they are, and the niches that they occupy.
[Edit]: Briefly, what makes Snakebite much better than it appears is the “Retain” keyword. Retain means it stays in your hand instead of being discarded at the end of each turn. So, at a basic level, Snakebite helps improve the consistency of your turns by being available any time you happen to draw mostly defensive cards when the enemy isn’t attacking. Would two Strikes dealing 12 damage right away be better? Okay, play those Strikes then. Snakebite is for when you only draw one Strike, or the enemy has Thorns, or if you can leverage the full value of Poison (28 damage over 7 turns).
In any case, if you like deck-building roguelikes at all, Slay the Spire 2 is your endgame, even in Early Access. It will only get better from here.
CanvasGate
In today’s Two Minutes of Hate, we’re once again getting very angry on other peoples’ behalf for something we find them stupid for buying in the first place:
In short, the $200 Power Armor edition of Fallout 76 is advertised as containing, among other things, a canvas bag. But the bag that arrived was actually nylon instead. When someone wrote into Bethesda support to complain, they were greeted with the meme-worthy:
We’re sorry that you aren’t happy with the bag. The bag shown in the media was a prototype and too expensive to make.
We aren’t planning on doing anything about it.
An actual Bethesda PR went on to clarify:
Thanks for tagging us in this post. We’re not sure if you’ve seen this make the rounds on various areas of the internet, yet, but we’ve made an official statement about this issue and included it below:
“The Bethesda Store’s Support member is a temporary contract employee and not directly employed by Bethesda or Bethesda Game Studios. We apologize to the customer who took the time to reach out. The support response was incorrect and not in accordance with our conduct policy. Unfortunately, due to unavailability of materials, we had to switch to a nylon carrying case in the Fallout 76: Power Armor Edition. We hope this doesn’t prevent anyone from enjoying what we feel is one of our best collector’s editions.”
Many people are hammering on this response as well, for essentially restating the first message while throwing the other employee under the bus. After all, is there much of a difference between “unavailability of materials” and “too expensive to make”?
Well… yeah, actually. Enough canvas might not have been available in order to reach the distribution date, whereas enough nylon would have been. Sometimes you can throw money at a problem and make it go away, and sometimes you can’t. Or maybe it truly was a $1 vs $5 decision and they scrapped the plans for canvas based on that alone.
Speaking of $5, Bethesda put a little extra squirt of acetone on the PR fire by offering 500 Atoms to anyone who purchased the Collector’s Edition of the game. It’s difficult to imagine this amount not having been selected due to $5 being the actual value of the canvas bag in question. In any case, the gesture itself only inflamed the nonplayerbase further, who then took to the streets of /r/fallout to advise others to not accept the Atoms, lest they forgo their potential class-action lawsuit payouts.
I was originally planning on making a joke about how my food never looks like the pictures on the menu, but this older article on false advertisements is making me think people might have a case. The ad says canvas, it wasn’t canvas, case closed. I’m no expert in bird law though.
That said, I get it. If I were a nonplayer of Fallout 76, I’d be bored enough to be outraged too. As an actual player of a game that has become a punchline however… well, shit. It’s tough defending an otherwise fantastic game (IMO) that’s going to get better with each patch when the company behind it can’t seem to stop embodying (hilarious in the abstract) metaphors of their own products. “We were promised canvas, but the game we got was nylon.” Shit literally writes itself.
Ultimately, Bethesda will be fine. “I’m not going to buy Elder Scrolls 6 at release based on Fallout 76!” “Bethesda’s reputation is ruined forever!” Yeah you are, and no it’s not. Skyrim sold 30 million copies since 2011. Fallout 4, which was widely panned before and after release, sold 12 million copies the first day. This doesn’t mean that Fallout 76 is safe from being dropped, but as controversies go, this will be forgotten (and forgiven) the moment we get another 5-second video clip of some mountains overlaid with monks singing. Or by Christmas. Either/or.
I just hope that, you know, there continues to be Fallout 76 patches until then.
In An Age 
Well, That Was Quick
Dec 4
Posted by Azuriel
Welp, Bethesda will be sending out canvas bags eventually:
There is an interesting paragraph in the VentureBeat article of the same news:
As VentureBeat notes in the very next paragraph, and everyone in /r/fallout notes half a dozen times each thread, this doesn’t mean Bethesda didn’t fuck up. As with most things, it’s not so much about the crime, but about the cover-up. Canvas too expensive? Fine. Alert the buyers, give them the opportunity for a refund, continue on with life. Not enough canvas can be sourced before the release date? Sounds fishy, but keep in mind that the Power Armor edition was shipped late even with the nylon replacement, which indicates that this probably wasn’t the nefarious plan from the start. In any case, alert the buyers that they will get nylon now, and that canvas bags will be coming later.
What you shouldn’t do is what Bethesda did. Which was this:
Because, absent any further communication, what it appears to be is that some suits at Bethesda chose nylon because it was cheaper, didn’t tell anyone because they didn’t care/thought no one would notice, thought $5 in cash shop currency would suffice to shut people up, and then got real scared when they realized that although my Big Mac might not look like the picture, McDonalds can actually get sued if the beef patties were replaced with chicken.
If I were them, I’d ask Todd Howard to put out a short mea culpa regarding the communication failure, and then move on with life. Otherwise, we’re on to the next two panels:
Or maybe Bethesda does nothing more. The meme will last longer, but again, everyone will be buying Elder Scrolls 6 regardless of whatever happens with Fallout 76. I was browsing some of the reaction to the canvas bag replacements, and someone leveled this “threat“:
That moment when people desperately want to boycott your games but they just can’t stop themselves from playing them. Viva la revolución! Or something.
Posted in Commentary, Fallout
6 Comments
Tags: Bethesda, CanvasGate, Controversy, Fallout 76, Meme, This is Fine