Blog Archives
Un-Necesse-ary
Necesse recently graduated from Early Access to full 1.0 release. I had played it previously for almost 10 hours, so I wanted to give it another go to see what had improved. As it turns out… not much.
I’ve heard the game described as “top-down Terraria meets RimWorld,” but that is criminally misleading. Yes, it is a top-down, open-world survival crafting game with RimWorld-esque colony management functions. But what it’s actually more like is a lower-budget Keplerth. Now, in my Impressions of that game I called it a knockoff Necesse, so there’s some circular referencing going on.
The point is to not go into Necesse thinking you are going to get the same tight, engaging gameplay loops of Terraria or… like anything at all related to RimWorld’s subtle genius. The NPCs you recruit to your village can be assigned tasks like chopping wood or shearing sheep, but they have zero personality, relevant moods, or any necessary functionality at all. Hell, most of the crafting you can do is itself pointless in comparison to random drops.
OK, let’s back up. What’s Necesse and its gameplay loop?
In Necesse, there is a large overworld with various creatures and hazards and biomes to explore. Additionally, there is an underground “layer” full of much more dangerous monsters and random loot. The loose goal is for you to summon bosses using specific item drops, defeat them, and use the resulting drops to unlock the next tier of progression. As you might expect with the top-down perspective, most of the bosses are bullet-hell style affairs with multiple phases.
There is crafting in Necesse, but it feels largely perfunctory and unsatisfactory. Yes, you can collect wood to make a Wood Sword, smelt copper into copper ingots to make a Copper Sword, and so on. You can also just buy weapons from NPCs too, skipping multiple tiers in the process. Indeed, the underground portions of the game feature loads of enemies that have a chance of dropping gear that vastly outstrips anything you could reasonably craft. So, rather than feeling like you are earning your way through escalating challenges, most of the time you are better off just running around under-geared until you very suddenly are not.
There is technically hunger in Necesse, but it is the sort of half-baked nonsense that is unfortunately typical in this space. Are there dozens of food recipes? Yes. Are any of them necessary at all? No. More complicated dishes can grant you larger bonuses to damage (etc) and you can even automate some of the cooking via the NPCs you recruit to your base. But… why? Just eat a bunch of coconuts or berries or whatever else is nearby. Perhaps this sort of thing becomes more required on higher difficulties. It all just feels rote, like designers going through the same motions just because “everyone” builds games this way. It’s 2025, guys: if food isn’t going to be super-scarce resource, then it needs to have a more integrated game function (increasing HP, etc) ala Valheim or similar. Otherwise, just leave it out.
To an extent, it’s a bit unfair to be too harsh on Necesse considering it was largely developed by one dude. Counter-point: Stardew Valley. Also: maybe it’s worth bringing on more people to make the game more engaging? There was a graphics overhaul at one point, which certainly improved things, but the UI itself is still hot garbage. Could they make the icons even tinier? [Fake Edit:] Just found the option for UI scale, but it still looks bad even when scaled up.
Anyway, that’s Necesse.
Impressions: Icarus
TL;DR: Empty wildlife murder simulator.
To understand what Icarus is all about, you need to know what it was about. At release, Icarus was intended to be a sort of survival roguelike, where you are dropped off at a location, fulfill a mission before the timer expired, and then bailed on the world (including anything you built) within a few days. In fact, it was originally so hardcore that if the timer expired before you left – and it counted down even with the game turned off! – your character would straight-up be deleted. Successful missions granted you a currency that could be used to both research and then later buy items that you could then bring with you planetside in the future. For example, instead of starting at zero every time, you could start with an upgraded spacesuit, a backpack with bonuses, weapons, etc.
As you may imagine, that novel approach didn’t sit well with many people. Indeed, it’s difficult to imagine a worse genre mashup… although I suppose 7 Days to Die somewhat pulls it off (e.g. eventually enemies get too tough). But generally, the beginning stages of punching trees is the least interesting part of survival games, and losing progress is the worst. Icarus had both. The developers suddenly had to pivot, and so they eventually released a more traditional open-world survival mode.
The pivot has taken some time, although the developers have sustained a weekly update schedule for over two years now, which is impressive. Or would be, if the game was fun or interesting at all.
The fundamental issue with Icarus is that there isn’t much going on. There is a relatively solid survival crafting framework in place, with XP and levels and recipe unlocks and talent points and such. The world is gorgeous and thick with trees, bushes, rocks. There is even a semi-voxel thing going, with fallen trees being satisfyingly split into logs, and ore/rock nodes deforming exactly where you are hitting them. All of which will sustain genre fans for a few hours past the refund window.
But after a while, you start to realize what you have in Icarus is basically the window dressing of other games. A forest with deer, rabbits, wolves, goats, moas, bears? A desert with hyenas and scorpions? Snow biome with polar bears and mammoths? Other titles like 7 Days to Die, The Forest, ARK, etc, have those things… aaaaand the rest of the game game. Without the parameters (and timers) of Missions, the Open World aspect falls flat. Technically, you can craft a radio that opens up both short and longer-form Missions even in the Open World, but you still run into the issue of “why.”
“Why do anything at all in any game, eh?” Because shooting zombies and looting things is fun? Because delving into caves and uncovering mysteries while running from mutants is (supposedly) fun? Because dinosaurs are fun? With Icarus, what you see is literally what you get. Kill thousands of animals to farm XP and unlock more crafting benches so you can kill more animals efficiently. Or build a quaint little abode in the woods. Which is fine for the people that want to do that, but you can also do that in (cheaper!) games that have more meat than potatoes.
In an effort to be totally fair, I did go ahead and run a few Missions, e.g. the way the game was designed to be played, once the open-world lost its luster. And… it was pretty much as bad as it seemed. After the tutorial one, the next Mission was to collect up meat and vegetables into two different drop pods. Cool. What they neglected to mention was the fact it was going to be like 150 Pumpkins, 200 Carrots, and so on. The only possible way of gathering that much was going to be setting up a farm, and then hanging out for a while. Which I did. Next was the meat, which was something absurd like 300 meat, 400 hide, and 300 fur or whatever. I got about halfway through murdering literally every single mammal that moved before the tedium overtook me and I uninstalled.
Having said all that… is there anything good going on in Icarus? Sure. Although it is a limiting factor, the existence of oxygen as a necessary meter to watch gave texture to the survival experience. It helps that Oxite Ore is in most places, so you aren’t as constrained as in, say, Breathedge. The storms in Icarus are also interesting. Staying outside in one fills up an Exposure meter that begins hurting you when full, and the storms themselves do damage to most buildings. Now, you usually just spend the storm inside your base running around and smack-repairing things with a hammer, but it elevated “weather” from a pure, ambiance detail in most games to one that you must account for. And you do have to account for it: your walls will collapse if they take too much damage from the weather or anything else.
That’s about it, though. Part of me feels bad for the devs since they likely had to scrap a lot of their post-release plans when they pivoted to a more traditional open-world structure. But then I look at how much they are charging for the game + DLCs in its current state and those feeling go away.
Horizon: Zero Dawn
I was stuck in a gaming funk for a while. An embarrassment of riches at my fingertips and I couldn’t muster the energy to choose anything. On a whim, I remembered that I had specifically bought four games to go along with my new PC. With two of them down, why not see if a third could break me out of the funk?
Horizon: Zero Dawn certainly did.
It was a fun experience going into this game effectively blind. Like, I knew the general premise of the game, as will anyone who has ever seen any screenshots: you are a tribesman hunting robot dinosaurs. Basically.
What I was not particularly expecting was the general level of fidelity to the premise. You really are walking around with a bow, arrows, and a spear. After dying a few times on Normal difficulty (!!) in frustrating ways, I took a mental step back. Although things certainly look like a sort of Action Adventure game, this was not Grounded wherein you Perfect Block the attacks of a house-sized spider. You are hunting machines made of metal – you cannot hope to parry with a spear. Of course, you do have a dodge roll with infinite i-frames, but nevermind.
Instead, I started approaching the game as the hunter I was supposed to be. And the game got worlds better. Unlocking the ability to set down elemental tripwires and such certainly helped, but even before that I started approaching from cliffs, and using other terrain to my advantage when possible. Did I still occasionally get one-shotted and lose 20 minutes of progress due to the annoying checkpoint system? Yeah. But I also realized that I was one-shot because I got cocky and wanted to finish off one robot instead of retreating once I aggroed the second. It all sort of reminded me of PvP games and the adage that if you died with cooldowns available, it was your own fault.
Also amazing? The visuals. Yeah, I have a beefy PC so I’m playing a max settings and everything, but the visual direction itself is spectacular. Running around in the machine bases in particular has been a treat. Some of the larger robots are extremely intimidating, even after you are experienced enough (and have the proper tools) to take them out with ease. Plus, as before, even “routine” encounters with robots you have killed dozens of times can quickly turn against you if you aren’t careful. Any time I see a few Snapjaws (robot crocodiles) swimming around, I say “Nope” and go a different way.
Near as I can tell, I’m about halfway through the game. And unfortunately, I fell into the Open World trap of exploring the Open World instead of plowing through with the main story. I say “unfortunately” because at this point I have unlocked all the Skills I was looking forward to, and unlocked all the best weapons. The game is still fun for now, but I’m worried about whether or not I’ll stick around long enough for the ending. I had 80ish hours in Cyberpunk and never actually beat that game, for example. So we’ll have to see what happens with Horizon: Zero Dawn.
Review: Far Cry 5
I completed Far Cry 5 a few days ago.
The visuals are quite amazing.
Mechanically, this is the best Far Cry in the series. The gunplay is smooth and tight, weapons are reasonably varied, and vehicles are generally fun to drive. Many of the more rote Far Cry-isms have also been removed. You are no longer forced to climb towers to explore the landscape, nor hunt down sharks to craft a bigger wallet. The whole map is available to explore right away. Screen clutter is practically non-existent, and what quest markers exist are fairly subtle.
Narratively, I feel it is one of the weakest in the series.
That dog ends up being a very Good Boy.
I have no problem with the Christian iconography, the political parallels to present day, the rehashing of Spec Ops: The Line-esque navel-gazing about who the real demon is (hint: it’s you), or the sometimes absurdly comical cruelty. A lot of that is part and parcel to the Far Cry series. What is fairly new is the simple fact that the player is kidnapped NINE TIMES over the course of the story. The purpose is obviously to engineer a scenario in which the player can interact with the cult lieutenants and witness some exposition first-hand. The frequency though, and the ham-handedness, obliterates any semblance of story cohesion.
Seriously, one time I completed a mission, got the “You’re Being Hunted” message, and was apparently taken out by a blowdart… while piloting an attack helicopter hundreds of feet in the air. Cue cutscene and sub-boss taunting, in which it was revealed I had been imprisoned for seven days (!?!) undergoing psychological torture and starvation. Then (spoilers) I broke out of prison for what had been the fifth time at this point, and went back to what I had been doing originally.
Walls, eh?
I think the principle problem is that Ubisoft simply cannot outrun the shadow of Far Cry 3. That game had an insufferable trust fund frat boy as a protagonist, but it also had a narrative arc with some progression, substance, and you know, a main character that talks. With the lack of any sort of internal dialog, the devs leaned real hard on Vaas wannabes and contrived capture scenarios. Hell, the main character might have been captured just as many times as in Far Cry 3, but it never felt this arbitrary before.
In any case, after 15 hours, that’s that. Far Cry 5 has good gameplay and a stunningly beautiful open world playground to blow up stuff in. But… so do a lot of other games these days. What sets the series apart isn’t the open world or general shenanigans, it’s the story and general narrative experience. And that’s unfortunately lacking this time around.
Open World, Closed Story
Having made it well into hour 30 of The Witcher 3, I am beginning to realize something about the plot. Namely, it is entirely incongruent with the actual gameplay.
Take your time, the Wild Hunt is not going anywhere.
The basic premise of Witcher 3 is that Geralt is looking for his adopted daughter, Ciri, who is also being chased by The Wild Hunt. So already there is a trajectory here to the plot, which is “quickly follow the clues to find Ciri.” But every other single element of the game clashes with any sense of urgency that the premise should be bringing.
For example, during a beginning segment of the game, Geralt finds out the baron of the area has met with Ciri. However, the baron refuses to give Geralt any details until he finds the baron’s own missing wife and daughter. Before you can do that though, you will likely need to gain some levels completing other side quests in the area. So you complete quests, level up, go find the wife, then daughter, then head back to the baron to get the full story, 15+ gameplay hours later. The end result is, spoiler alert, Ciri is no longer in the area.
Which of course she isn’t. Literally nobody is the world expects to find Ciri in the very first area indicated by the quest objective. It would actually be incredibly novel for a videogame to feature a “quickly chase down this person” plot structure and actually allow the player to find them in the first area if they are quick enough. It would also make said game really short, and almost punish the player by removing gameplay, but very novel just the same.
The problem in Witcher 3 goes deeper than just using a false sense of urgency though. The problem is actually having any plot whatsoever in an otherwise open-world game. Every time I decide to strike out on my own and investigate every abandoned shack in the woods, inevitably I encounter the end-result of some quest I have yet to accept. For example, I spotted a shack, looted it, found out there was a cave system beneath it, explored and looted that, noticed all the red-highlighted spots (indicative of quest markers), then left the area. An hour or two later, I got a quest to investigate the same shack, “discover” a monster nest in the cave below, and then fight said monster. I ended up feeling punished for exploring on my own.
I didn’t want to complete that level 4 quest anyway.
The irony here is that Witcher 3 would have been screwed either way. It’s bad the way it is. It would almost be worse if there was some kind of plot lock on the cave system, because it would engender a feeling of false open world-ness. “Go anywhere you want! …except here. And there. And over there too.” It wouldn’t be much of an open world if you could only explore the empty bits.
The other thing that Witcher 3’s open world is demonstrating to me is how much I do, in fact, loathe fixed-level monsters in open-world settings. It is getting beyond frustrating to be exploring and exploring and all of sudden, skull-level monsters. I mean, it makes sense that there might be monsters out in the world that are super-deadly and Geralt would need to become more powerful to overcome. But quite often there is no delineation going on – you’ll be killing level 10 Drowned one moment, and then 50 ft away is a level 20+ monster. I suppose that it is more “organic” than just having all the monsters coincidentally more powerful near the edges of the map, but again, it feels bad to me as a player wished to engage with the “open” world. Especially considering all this really tells me is that the “right” way to play is to not explore anything until level 20+ so I don’t have to skip areas.
I don’t know. I suppose the conclusion I am coming to is that if a game offers an open-world setting, I almost want it to have little-to-no plot, or really level-based progression of any kind. Fallout 3 allowed me to explore every corner of the non-DC map by level 3 (and had scaling monsters), which is probably why I enjoyed that game so much. Minecraft of course lets you punch trees anywhere. I don’t remember being too put-off by Dragon Age 3 either. In the Witcher 3’s case however, I may as well go back to treating it as the hemmed-in, plot-centric game its two earlier iterations were.
Impression: Firefall
When we last left Firefall, it was in the beta and I was labeling it “Firefail” in a moment of supreme cleverness. Basically, an early tutorial quest that required me to pick up a handgun wouldn’t complete, and a later re-attempt at playing the beta found me unable to download the final 0.04 MB of the file.
This time around, everything worked and I have spent ~13 hours across last week getting a feel for the game.
Booty Shorts are the future.
Firefall is a F2P 3rd-person shooter MMO, vaguely reminiscent of Mass Effect + Borderlands. You play as an ARES pilot, a sort of mercenary with the ability to swap in and out of battleframes, which are themselves the equivalent of classes. Different battleframes have different abilities and primary weapons, and each battleframe levels up independently of each other. At certain levels, you unlock Perks which can (usually) then be applied to your character no matter the battleframe you are wearing.
There are story quests of sorts you can follow in Firefall, although the main thrust of the game has more to do with random, open-world questing than normal MMOs. For example, a 15-minute story quest and a 2-minute quest to repair a generic Thumper generally give the same amount of XP.
The open-world part of questing is emphasized by the literal open-world: aside from needing to click on towers to push back the “Melding” – and the level-based mobs, a huge change from the early beta – you can generally run anywhere. And the world is absolutely HUGE in this game. Huge and vertical, even. Considering every battleframe has a jetpack (of differing quality), this lends itself quite nicely to exploring.
One of the better Glider jumps I’ve encountered.
As always, there are downsides. Although the world is huge, it also feels relatively empty. Part of this is literal emptiness, but part of this also comes from the vast distances between quests and the cash shop-based restrictions to moving around. For example, you can purchase a cash shop vehicle right away, or wait until level 25 to get one with a cooldown. Technically you can craft 1-time use transportation solutions (Gliders) too, but it’s generally easier to just turn on auto-run inbetween waypoints as you browse Reddit on your phone.
I like how you have one character that swaps battleframes rather than a stable of alts, but in practice everything ends up feeling more restrictive than less. If you’re playing Assault, I hope you enjoy your grenade launcher primary, because that’s the same weapon you’ll be using forever. If you swap to Engineer for a change of pace after 12 levels, suddenly you’re going to need to hoof it back to the starting zone and kill level 2 mobs again, assuming you even have low-level weapons to use. Since the story missions aren’t particularly rewarding, the end result is you repairing Thumpers 200 times just to get back to where you were in the first place.
CardioFall
The shooty bits are fun for fans of shooty bits, but… it’s hard to describe, but there’s some essential element missing. “Substance” is the best word I can use to describe it – you feel like you are shooting at ghosts all the time. There is technically collision, mind you, it’s just that the enemies never feel like they belong anywhere or behave particularly rationally. On some of the random missions you will walk into a room that is filled with 30+ enemies and get mowed down without understanding why the room had 30+ dudes in it. Was it intentional? A bug? Was it actually a hidden group quest? I actually survived that cave, but mainly by abusing the poor AI rather than any sort of fancy shooting on my part.
Overall, I don’t anticipate playing Firefall for much longer. The game is F2P and it does seem like you could get a lot of gameplay in legitimately without feeling too much like a 2nd-rate citizen. Hitting level 40 (the cap) supposedly gives you the ability to purchase one of the 10 cash shop classes, although you can technically get them off the AH for in-game currency as well. That said, it’s hard to imagine hitting the cap and playing the same routine missions again and again, this time with a different primary gun.
So… Firefall. Certainly not the worst F2P game I have ever played, but there are better options.
In An Age 
Light Some Fires
Dec 12
Posted by Azuriel
There were some interesting reveals coming out of the recent Games Awards, but Light No Fire was one that immediately piqued my interest. Here is the release trailer:
In case it was not obvious by the trailer style or esoteric title or the logo with a mysterious red thing in the middle, this is Hello Games studio’s upcoming follow-up release to No Man’s Sky. Sean Murray was back onstage to give a sort of intro to the reveal, and history sort of repeated itself with some amazing claims. “[We’ve been working on] something very different, something maybe more ambitious.” Something more ambitious… than a goddamn procedurally-generated galaxy? Even the host chimed in with a “Ha, here we go.”
Indeed, the jokes started coming in from all corners afterwards:
Now, you can certainly take some umbrage with how both the Cyberpunk and Hello Games devs are making light of releasing broken games that took multiple years (or longer) to fix. You are well within your rights to be screaming from the rooftops about Sean Murray in general, and warn about the dangers of hype. Hell, we don’t even have a release timeframe or hints that it will come out this decade.
But. But!
…I’m excited for Light No Fire. For two reasons.
First, it’s a survival-crafting sandbox. You might think there are dozens of these sort of games on the market already, and you would be correct. And I played them. Pretty much most of them, actually. So, I’m excited that another one is coming out from a team that I trust*.
That leads me to the second reason: trust. Do I trust that Hello Games will deliver everything Sean Murray said at the Game Awards? No. Do I trust all the things written on the Steam page? No. But what I do trust is the No Man’s Sky that exists already. And when I saw that Light No Fire trailer, what I saw was mostly stuff that you can already do in No Man’s Sky.
Climb mountains? Check. Go underwater? Check. Build stuff? Check. Fly around? Check. Ride creatures? Check. Survival elements, collect rare resources, care about environmental dangers, build persistent buildings, explore things with friends, fight big monsters? Check ^ 6. About the only thing you can see in this trailer that you don’t already see in NMS are trees swaying in the breeze and a world with more than one biome. We can imagine them stitching together a bunch of planets onto one larger planet, and that is solved straight away.
The “danger” is getting hyped on what a game could be. Will there be dungeons, will there be raid bosses, will there be a “reason” to go to the tallest mountain, will there be PvP? I suppose there is also danger in assuming that when they say “one world” that it will actually be one, non-instanced world. I actually hope there isn’t one world because, if ARK has taught us nothing, it’s that prime gameplay for many people includes obstructing all available real-estate with pillars and/or phalluses. I don’t care if the world is larger than our own 197 million square miles – if you build it, people will come take a shit on it, if possible. If there are no building limitations, I give it six months, max.
Anyway, that’s Light No Fire. I will be closely following this one.
Posted in Commentary
Comments Off on Light Some Fires
Tags: Crafting, Hype, Light No Fire, No Man's Sky, Open-world, Survival