What game are you playing?

[keydemographics]

I uh… don’t recommend checking out Crysis 3. It’s such a cowardly little compromise game that still does all the big explosions and vistas of the second game but with half the levels, awful pacing, and none of the enthusiasm for disaster movie excess. I can’t put my finger on what this game is doing so much worse than Crysis 2 except that it feels like they didn’t have an idea for this game. The aesthetic treatment is a straight-up attempt at making Crysis 2 look like the first game.

This game feels like it actually had a budget, whereas Crysis 2 felt like it had an entire national deficit behind it. All the weapons are the same but slightly reskinned and occasionally doing different things. There’s an air of cheapness to the entire endeavour versus how lavishly produced the previous game was. It’s a about half the length and yet I am struggling to want to see what’s next because it just isn’t impressing on that “look at this expensive ass shit” level that a Crysis game should.

Also, go big or go home with the soundtrack. If you get Zimmer to write you a cheesy banger you cannot have something as limp as the Crysis 3 theme playing in your menu. I’m not sure how you top the chromed excess of the second game’s theme, but if you’re not going to even try then maybe you shouldn’t be making a Crysis game.

[DarthTythus]

Was Crysis 3 the year of the ill-advised Fourth One Of These?

[anarchobama]

I looked at the Rain World wiki for tips on getting out of the miserable little corner I’m stuck in only to find out that the path I was following is not the intended path. I took the path I was one due to a tip I saw on steam that said “dont go up” in the beginning because it lead to an overly difficult area, when actually you are meant to go up, but not too far up. The fact the beginning area leads to TWO areas that will torment beginners makes me want to scream. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m best off restarting, which is super deflating and maybe I’ll do that some other time.

Started NORCO instead and I’m enjoying it so far! I’m really enjoying the tone of it where the setting is like super depressing but thats balanced out by just some freaky guys and some good jokes, in a way that doesn’t feel disrespectful to the seriousness of the the real life issues being portrayed. In real life and in my experience when things get dire people get weird and this really captures that but now theres a robot.

Also playing Nobody Saves the World during zoom recovery meetings to occupy the part of my brain that can’t sit still but still wants to pay attention. This game feels built for it, very little story, a fairly simple loop, and built in grind. But its scratching that MonHun Spicy Grind itch where its more than Numbers Go Up and how your grinding is impacting by whichever goal youre working towards.

[Velocirapture]

Feel like Crysis 3 was what if we smooshed the jungles of Crysis 1 into NYC of Crysis 2. Also it came out during the year of the bow.

My main cultural touchpoint was Cara Ellison’s RPS writeup back in the last days of ye olden video game preview. Cara Vs. Crysis 3 Was Never A Fair Fight | Rock Paper Shotgun

[keydemographics]

2013 is a graveyard of games released a year after nobody wanted to play games made for the 7th gen anymore and GTAV.

Crysis 3 is actually fascinating in that it looks the most dated of the three games despite being the most visually advanced. We have seen the dilapidated post-apocalypse overgrown with nature so many times in the past decade, and Crysis 3 sits at the awkward crossroads between the animation complexity of a game designed to run on a PS3, and all the flashiest post-processing effects CryEngine 3 can muster. The result is a game looks like a really impressive triple-Indie game running in UE4. It’s obviously so much more expensive a production than that, but the advanced graphical technics they are using would become 3D game visuals du jour on the PS4 and Xbox One. Very strange but fun to think about.

Anyway, they’re making a Crysis 4 apparently. I hope they can get some of that Hunt: Showdown confidence into the game. Crysis as a series is such a non-entity that a really good sequel would put it back in the conversation like it never left.

[epigraph]

I’m a bit of a sucker for ‘bows in places they don’t belong’, so I have some fond memories of Crysis 3. I don’t think any game (even Horizon) has given me such a thoroughly over designed high tech bow since.

You’re completely right about the rest of it, though. I can’t imagine it aged well.

[heaterhands]

Finished Tunic? Maybe?

Going into this, my understanding was that Andrew Shouldice made this thing to harken back to adventure games pre internet, when players were forced to butt their heads against an impasse until figuring it out. So I decided to play the game with that spirit in mind, and didn’t look up anything along the way. The only small lapse I had was when I resorted to the WP Discord’s Tunic channel to ask whether or not the game expects you to decipher the cryptic alphabet on your own.

Yes, my decision to go it alone was in line with the spirit of the game’s design, but it made for an experience that was at times intensely frustrating, and in the end – I’m assuming the ending I just saw was the “bad” one – pretty disappointing. I know, it’s a staple of the genre, but when making a game this opaque, which requires so much of the player to even close out the main path, Shouldice’s decision not to serve up any sense of conclusion or resolution (beyond the relief of beating the final boss, I guess) feels incredibly churlish. Especially when there’s no clear path to a different outcome. After the credits, you’re informed that you can pick up the game pre final boss to try to find the manual pages you’ve missed (I’m guessing this is a hint towards what I need to be doing to change things?), but how am I supposed to do that when I’m dropped into a endgame world state where several areas are inaccessible?

There were several occasions during my time with Tunic where I felt elated to have bypassed a bottleneck, giddy to feel the world open up for me. As in the opening hours, during those spells, I marvelled at the atmosphere and craft on display, and found it easy to appreciate its intricate mysteries. For the game to end not on that feeling, but instead on one that evoked all the times along the way where I felt like I was wading through treacle… I guess it’s apposite, but that doesn’t make it any less disheartening.

Not every game is for everyone, and in the end, Tunic turned out to be a pretty bracing reminder of just that. I admire Shouldice and his collaborators for making a game this uncompromising and devoted to its principles, even though I wish they’d made a few concessions to players falling outside their specific wavelength.

[Gjallarsean]

@heaterhands

but how am I supposed to do that when I’m dropped into a endgame world state where several areas are inaccessible?

Just an FYI, nothing is inaccessible. There is a bed in the little house you find early on where you can sleep and it cycles to daytime.

[keydemographics]

You’ve opened up a can of worms here because this means I need to do a definitive ranking of bows in The Year of the Bow.

Let’s start by establishing parameters. The Year of the Bow was a termed coined by the Giant Bomb crew during E3 2012, so it technically covers a raft of games shown at that convention that had bows. I’ll be ranking them in order of worst to best bows and bow implementation below:

Assassin’s Creed 3 - While this is probably the most appropriate appearance of a bow in any of these games, it’s also the most lacklustre. The Year of the Bow is somewhat defined by the bow’s anachronistic presence, so the lack of anochronicity docks points. This bow also sucks as you have to stand up and expose yourself to fire it. Ubisoft is too enamoured with the animation of drawing and firing the bow to make it much more than a novelty. When your bow is upstaged by your rope darts, you have failed to honour The Year of the Bow.

Tomb Raider - Dogshit bow I will not apologise. Too many arrows and no ability to recover them make this a glorified gun that you have to charge up to fire. The "pluck’ sound of you loosing an arrow is weak and underwhelming, and the bow doesn’t do actually modeled damage to enemies. The arrows don’t penetrate and stick in their targets, they just appear to do generic damage. Also the bow is part of the whole white woman survivor overcoming adversity by becoming a vicious murderer thing that game has going on, I think there’s an animation where she sticks an arrow in a guy’s throat? Normally I’d find that cool but Tomb Raider is such cringe ass execution of the character arc from The Descent (multiple visual references in the game, all dumb) that it sours me on the neck-stabbing, which I would otherwise enjoy. Lara looks stiff and awkward holding the bow, so the bow itself is not being given the reverence it is due. Subsequent Tomb Raider games would also do the bow better, which counts against the bow in this game retroactively because I say so.

Crysis 3 - Not really a bow so much as a railgun you can retrieve ammo for. I enjoy that you can adjust the draw weight to change how long you want the draw time to be versus the velocity of the shot. Leaving it on the heaviest draw weight is actually detrimental to your stealthiness because it will catapult your target around the level and alert other enemies with the completely broken ragdoll physics. Also, this is the only bow in this list that will pin enemies to the environment, which is key. Not a vital bow requirement, but it’s an inclusion that emphasises bowiness and makes up for the fact that Crysis 3 doesn’t require you to really account for arrow travel and drop-off. Also uses other types of arrows quite well, especially the thermite arrows which have a timed-delay on the explosive, so you get to watch the goon lose it as he realise he has been stuck Halo-style. Probably the best thing about the game.

Far Cry 3 - strong bow showing. Maybe not as straightforwardly fun as the Crysis 3 bow, but the fact that FC3 retains the fire-spreading tech of FC2 moves the needle on this one. If you specialise in the bow, you can become a cackling little fire-demon loosing burning and explosive arrows from afar and causing mayhem. The feeling of loosing an arrow in this game is solid and respectable, and the fact that it’s key to your hunting activities means you’re using the bow all the time. May not be best bow but certainly Most Bow in this list.

The Last of Us - absolutely goated bow and bow implementation. This bow is so good they fucked it up in the sequel, because they tried to change perfection. The use of a reticle that actually shows the arrow’s flight is absolutely masterful because it encourages you to try and land shots that are outside your effective range. Holding the draw destabilises your aim, so you need to think about when you draw before doing so. It’s hard to use, like a bow! How did every other game in this list not get that?? Stealth is obviously a big factor, as is resource management, and the bow adds a new meta-game to your tactics as you try to kill as many people and recover your arrows as you go without being seen. The upgrades tranform the utility and functionality of the bow to make it incredibly powerful, yet you’re still constricted by the availability and recoverability of your arrows. Basically once you get the bow, you’re all about the bow. The bow feels great. It looks great. It’s the greatest bow in a game and it came to us in The Year of The Bow, which seems like kismet. May as well be called The Year of The Bow from The Last of Us because that’s how hard this bow stunts on all the other bows. It’s a wash. A massacre! There was no contest!

If you have read this far, thank you for taking an interest in bows.

[DevJ]

Do crossbows count…?

Actually scratch that. To your point about anachronism, a crossbows tend to be deployed more thematically appropriately than bows.

[Fyrtail]

List crucially missing Big Bo (Binary Domain), who now takes his proper place at as the only Bro Bo Bow, and the only one that can tell you how “Sahweeet!” your headshots are.

[heaterhands]

[crumbles into a pile of very frustrated dust]

“Jokes” aside, I actually was about to write something about this in my original post, but I felt it was just reiterating a point I’d already made too many times. To wit: After rolling credits, I didn’t really feel like looking up anything online, because I had a sneaking suspicion I’d just end up more frustrated instead of more motivated. And your pointer (which was much appreciated, regardless of my problems with Tunic, tbc!) just confirmed that suspicion for me. I’m definitely not in a headspace right now to engage with the game in the way it wants/needs me to, without it feeling like pulling teeth. Or it might be that I’m flat out just not able to vibe with it, regardless of mental state.

[keydemographics]

Big Bo is neither a bow, nor does he wield a bow, and thus has been included in The Year of The Bow discussions with a degree of irony both disrespectful and unbecoming to lifelong bow-appreciators like myself.

Big Bo has a squad automatic machine gun, which is the philosophical opposite to a bow. It is stealing bow-valor to suggest otherwise.

[diglett]

I’ve been in a bit of a haze after finishing Elden Ring, which happens whenever I finish something that really dominates my time. I tried out Kirby and the Forgotten Land and it’s… pretty fun? Though it’s doing the Mario 3D World linear levels with collectibles thing that always triggers my anxiety in a really unhealthy way, so, not ideal for the moment. Will probably chip slowly at it.

So uh, because apparently like Christopher Walken I am just in need of more cowbell (Souls games, in this metaphor), but because rebuying actual Souls games on my PS5 would run me like a hundred bucks, I rolled a new Bloodborne character. It’s been almost exactly two years since I first replayed the game at the very beginning of the pandemic and fell so deeply into it that it went from my least favorite Fromsoft game (by a pretty wide margin) to the first game I ever platinumed. And now after a good 250 more hours in these games, I killed the intro wolf with my fists and then kicked Cleric Beast’s ass on my first try.

That might not sound like a big deal, but I hate Cleric Beast. That thing used to be harder for me than Gascoigne. And I did it without having to level. I’m genuinely more proud of that than most of my Elden Ring boss fights. It was simple, but I really, actually feel like I’ve learned something. It felt really good.

That all said… hoo boy, I kinda see why people really want a performance patch for this game. The last time I played it, it was on a non-pro PS4 on 30 inch TV that outputted, max, 1080p. Now I’m playing it on a PS5 outputting to a 4k TV more than twice that size and… it looks and feels pretty rough. The visuals seem grainy in a way I don’t remember them, and the feel just isn’t quite right because the framerate is rough. To the point where I don’t know if I’ll continue this run.

This is also the first time I’m playing it online, and while I think online is the way to play Dark Souls, I really, really dislike it for Bloodborne. The messages and bloodstains feel like they just muddy up the world in a way that’s not at all beneficial, especially considering the color palette the game already draws from. Souls games really do benefit from the camaraderie of their multiplayer, but I want to feel alone in this nightmare world.

[DarthTythus]

Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands has an Overworld you traverse (as opposed to the vehicular traversal of previous games). It has the possibility for random encounters, various camps and dungeons you can enter for loot, and Shrines that have pieces missing (which can be found at the end of Overworld side quests or dungeons). Find all the pieces, get a permanent boost. I just wish there were more side quests and fewer dungeons because it’s starting to turn into a slog.

[Wazanator]

I’ve been playing Weird West and I want to like it but it’s a really flawed game in both mechanics and style.

I’m from Texas and as such you basically get water boarded with cowboys and all that from a young age even if your family is not from Texas such as mine was. You would have things like learning to square dance and cowboy day in elementary school where you dressed up in boots and everyone brought a horse made from a cardboard box. Cowboys and the Wild West are heavily flawed and romanticized but I think you can enjoy it if you understand why they are flawed and are willing to acknowledge things like Native Americans are stereotyped in awful horrible ways in most Cowboy/Wild West themed material.

The thing is I don’t think Weird West really does anything stylistically great with weird west as a genre in the way say Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare or Shadows of Brimstone do. Shadows of Brimstone in particular is basically doing what Weird West wants to do but in board game format. Shadows of Brimstone has major narrative flaws I feel especially in the way Narrative Americans are treated which is weird in it’s own right because the game goes out of it’s way to be progressive in other parts but I won’t get into it because that could really be it’s own whole other discussion. Instead I just want to talk about how the game uses the weird west genre compared to Weird West the game.

Shadows of Brimstone as a game understands what players want out of a weird west genre game. It knows you want other worldly horrors and mutated animals that have been corrupted by evil. It understands that yes bandits and such can be enemies but if you are going to run into them there should be something other worldly about them such as having embraced the corruption and have tentacle arms or massively mutated rock like bodies to make them interesting enemies to fight. Weird west as a genre is built right into the mechanics where your character can become mutated from picking up what are essentially radioactive evil rocks and items made from them. In one adventure as an example our group was riding back to town after having sealed a mine shaft where portals had opened up and were unleashing zombies and other nightmares out onto the neighboring town when we got struck by malevolent lighting caused by the evil in the area. My character had just gotten a cool tentacle sword and because I rolled poorly the sword became fused to my characters hand meaning I could no longer unequip until I could find a doctor to hopefully safely remove it. Cool weird encounters like that are what makes something weird west.

Weird West the game however feels at the point I’m at only weird in the barest of ways. There are hints at maybe it gets stranger later on but right now there’s not a lot there in theme. Cannibal cult lead by a demon is meh. Every single enemy I have found so far seems to be a normal run of the mill bandit. Animals you encounter that are outright hostile are not interesting. If you are going to use the weird west as a setting why would you use animals that are as boring as coyotes, deer, and bears? Why are they not weird demonic bears? What about giant scorpions? Why are there no weird enemies amongst the bandits that can do things like use magic especially named bounty targets?

On top of this the game just isn’t that fun. None of the abilities feel particularly great and because your action points do not regenerate on their own it feels bad to use them. Stealth as an option might as well not exist because it is so incredibly punishing to use. The first ability I took was for silenced long range shots and using that can feel great but then you realize pretty quickly that you have maybe enough to kill 3 or 4 people and after that you need to use a consumable to regenerate the action points. Buying the consumable is incredibly expensive, about $27 IIRC and by comparison selling the basic pistol an enemy drops gives you $2. You can get a bow that is of course silenced but it requires charge up and does not seem to do nearly as much damage as a gun. When you screw up stealth all hell breaks loose and everyone just starts shooting and if you get caught out you can expect to go down fast. So right now the best strategy I’ve found is get to a good spot and try and stealth kill as many people as you can before you then open up with something loud. The shooting itself feels okay but the combat just overall isn’t fun. Nothing feels particularly hard even when played with a controller.

There are also the Perks which are permanent upgrades that all characters you play as will get access to. You gain points by finding golden cards hidden in levels or as rewards however all of these perks are the most boring unimaginative Perks I’ve seen in a immersive sim to the point that I think they should have reworked the game to not need it. Case in point IGN’s guide suggests taking perks that make you have more max HP, your party have more HP/dmg, better healing, more damage to unaware targets to make stealth better, a chance to not break your lock picks, and finally the ability to jump higher. These are the most milktoast perks in video games. These should be the perks you take last because you have nothing else to dump points into because you wanted the one that let you do a cool move first. If your player opens up the perk menu to pick an upgrade and they can’t decide because they are all so incredibly boring you have a problem especially in a game set in the weird west where wild shit can and does happen.

Then there’s the looting and selling of items. It’s awful. Someone mentioned it on the podcast about how terrible it is you need to go looking through everything to find the good items and I thought that maybe that was a bit hyperbole but they’re not wrong. If you do a bounty you will often kill the target on one part of the map and if you search that part of the map you will often find one of the upgrade points but often enough there are 2 more hidden in the map but they are never in a spot that makes sense. They will just be in random barrels or bookcases. You literally have to search through everything to find the good loot and that can take close to 30 minutes. Which then makes me wonder why there is no upgrade in this game that gives you something like a treasure hunting sense that does something like highlight the containers with the good loot that you can dump points into to highlight at further distances. That would be a good Perk to have in your loot based game! Then we get to the terrible time that is selling items. During your adventure you probably picked up so much random garbage you gave some of it to your party members so you could pick up more. In town you need to visit specific vendors to sell certain items. I understand why you would do this for buying but for selling that is just annoying. On top of this remember that you are juggling possibly 3 inventories. So you might sell all your guns off that you picked up but now you need to talk to your other party members and get their excess guns to now sell off. This gets worse when you get to the General Store and you just want to sell everything that is classified as junk. The game gives you the option to sell all junk labeled items in your inventory which as you guessed means you now need to start pulling junk manually out of other characters inventories into yours so you can then sell it. There is no junk that is not worth selling unless it is objective specific and the game already knows not to sell that. So why then when you press the Sell All Junk button does it not sell all junk carried by the other two characters?

Finally my last complaint is the reputation system. Like a Mass Effect or a Star Wars Jedi Knights game you can build either positive or negative reputation points. That’s neat! However I did a mission where the shitty mayor wanted me to basically go steal land for him so he could grow tobacco. It is made very clear this is not a good guy. They want you to know this guy sucks. So I decide I’m not going to do his dirty work I’m going to find another way to get what I need so I sneak around his mansion and knock out some guards as one does in an interactive sim and while I’m at it I steal their guns/loot along with other loot in the rooms. The game warns you that if another character sees you doing this it is a bad thing and you will lose reputation and could get in trouble but these people suck and the people who would know are knocked out and never saw me. Well I find the information I’m looking for and I can progress the quest however when I leave I find out I lost all of my good reputation I have built up to this point. The only thing I can think of is it was caused by a party member? Anyway I lost all my good reputation and have to now build it back up again because I stole from the garbage mayor who was literally dealing with human traffickers that plan to feed people to demons/cannibals.

I’ll continue to play it because I’m obligated to given the genre and I want to see how I feel about it after beating it but so far all it is making me want to do is figure out how to play Undead Nightmare again. I hope it gets weirder because right now this just feels like an excuse to include a few weird things.

[diglett]

Played more Bloodborne. I’m maybe 75 minutes into my save and I’m already in Cathedral Ward. Gonna do a strength build and mess around with some of the early DLC weapons (Amygdalan Arm and Whirligig Saw specifically), so I’m mainlining it to Amelia. The performance issues are a lot less apparent, weirdly, when playing offline. The low framerate and graininess is still there, but without phantoms and bloodstains and messengers everywhere, it’s much less aggravating. After a few minutes I was able to get past it pretty easily.

I do think this game is making me reevaluate the conclusion a lot of us seemed to come to that Elden Ring was less challenging than previous Fromsoft games because of the many combat options it gave you, because even compared to a boss like Margit, Father Gascoigne — famously a “wall” fight — felt incredibly tame. Even early-game Elden Ring bosses are far more punitive with a) the amount of damage they do and b) the sheer complexity of their movesets, especially when it comes to long combos and delayed attacks, and I am unsure if the availability of things like Spirit Ashes or overpowered weapon arts makes up that distance as much as it’s just… a different system. I’ve never beaten Gascoigne without the Music Box before, but this time I didn’t even feel like I needed it, because his attacks were so simple to reflexively dodge and there was a clear amount of distance I could keep from him where none of his quicker ones would hit me. The only thing that’s killed me in this game so far is, funnily enough, the big mob in the middle of Central Yharnam, and a cane dude I got too cocky about parrying.

This is also I’m sure a matter of me having played an exhaustive amount of these games at this point, but the contrast is just so apparent because Bloodborne was easily the one I struggled with the most the first time through. And two years since my last playthrough it’s just… easy.

[NotThePars]

As a Soulsborne noob who only started seriously playing the series with Elden Ring I found Father Gascoigne maybe the fairest early game “wall” boss I’ve encountered in as much as I could learn the tells from his attacks and anticipate the fight and use the environment to my advantage. In Elden Ring I’ve got much further (30 hours and to the second of the “main” bosses) in but I’ve overcome most of the fights through shenanigans and utilising the many, many additional resources the game gives you to stack fights in your favour. I don’t feel I’m actually learning the bosses I beat in as much as I spam damage for short stacks and run away for the rest of it. Or I just learn a way to cheese the fight.

I’m not sure how sustainable this is to completing the game but having watched Limmy’s “broken OP Sir Craig” build I’m also (hopefully) convinced that I just badly specced for this run. He doesn’t look any better than I am but has the equipment and stats to batter through enemies one on one.

[Breadtopia]

@keydemographics

[Crysis 3 stuff]

I feel vindicated in thinking how boring Crysis 3 is lmao. It’s ridiculous how Consumer Guide types both after release and rerelease were enthusiastic about how competent it is, while usually showing footage from the first two hours of the game and never mentioning how boring n rote it becomes.

@Wazanator

[Weird West stuffs]

Yuuuuup. All this remains true for a long time except the weirdness gets a bit weirder? But so much of it’s built on a boring foundation that it dulls any creativity they try for, aside from maybe the reactivity ambitions. And writing-wise, even when it’s acting weird it becomes clear how incurious it largely is, perhaps in ways that would’ve flown in the Fallout 1/2 era it’s so envious of, but nowadays just land with a thud.

The one breakaway from that is the stuff Elizabeth LaPensée worked on, but even then it’s hard not to feel like she was pretty limited in scope and impact. And it sucks her story had to go after (CW for abuser ousted from dev staff, same as alluded to in earlier post) what I swear is chris avellone’s contribution, based on a some sudden bad sexual theme writing and, more specifically, the self-flagellating abuser protag that’s an obvious echo of Planescape Torment’s insipid self-aware abuser themes, but this time it’s more directly about a literal woman-abusing guy with a ~complex ending~. barf.

Who knows, maybe the late game does pick up and do cool things with the narrative, but it’s been difficult to care enough to find out after that + the gameplay losing even more steam with the next story reset.

[Jimbot]

I’m playing Summoner on PS2. It’s such a fantastic game. Yeah, the models look like something from the PS1, it runs at a sub-30 constantly, dipping down to the teens in the cities and the sound is buggy as all heck but damn does this game have top-notch world building.

Its whole creation myth is intrinsically tied to the plot of the game and understanding the world. It’s such a weird and fascinating world with super good designs. You learn all these legends and just think of them as stories the clergy concocted to explain how the world was created but then you find artifacts or go to areas that confirm that no, these events actually happened and it’s amazing. “oh, this god rose this island from the sea and buried himself under it” then you go to that island and visit the catacombs and it’s built around a colossal skeleton.

They don’t get too weird with the world either. It’s just medieval fantasy land but changes the fine details to make it something wholly unique.

Wish this game got another sequel or a remake. There’s a PC port but the controls are so weird and bad. So you have to either put up with long load times and bad frame rate or low resolution and bad controls. I own Summoner 2 but remember not enjoying it as much but I have no memory of it at this point and may give it another go after this.