Sekiro and Difficult Games

I was gonna make a twitter comment about this when I saw a Kotaku article about how an easy mode have never ruined a game but after noticing that a twitter post wouldn't be enough to properly express my take I decided to put down my thoughts in a blog post. To be clear I've never been a fan of super difficult games like the Dark Souls series and I have no intention to buy Sekiro due to the difficulty, but I still wanna defend games that don't include an easy mode. 

I suppose that the heart of the debate whether or not games should have an easy mode boils down to if you consider yourself a casual or hardcore gamer. It's really kind of a childish argument at face value but after giving it some thought I don't think you can really boil it down to just saying that the game is meant to be challenging or that an easy mode wouldn't be hard to implement and would just help casuals to play the game. That a game is hard doesn't say much, you really need to look at what makes a game hard to really start thinking about if different difficulty modes make sense.

As an example I see a lot of people talking about how gaming was so much better back in the days because they were so challenging and getting through them was a real accomplishment. To that I say, yes and no. Nostalgia is big these days and since I don't find a lot of modern gaming in the form of "games as a service" all that attractive I've spent some time going back to older games and you know what I've noticed? They sure are hard, not because they offer some brilliant challenge that only the best can handle, no, most of the time they're hard because they're just poorly designed. That might be the wrong way to put it, like they were hard because movement didn't feel good, aiming wasn't as smooth, AI wasn't as complex and so on. Like of course games are going to feel easier today when you're not struggling with movement and the camera/aiming and AI are allowed to vary in behavior. I played one of the old Medal of Honor games and it was difficult because movement was sluggish, aiming was even worse and the enemies came at me in hordes and were always aware of where I was and had pinpoint accuracy from the other side of the map to name an example. That's not difficult because of a well balanced and thought out challenge. Take a more modern example, The Last of Us which I'm currently playing you have enemies that don't operate like a hive mind, movement is smooth enough and aiming is actually made difficult on purpose because you're not meant to have that but that also reflects in the enemies. I mean to me it still feels good and it is satisfying to hit a headshot but they've made it sluggish so you don't run and gun like in Uncharted. See, the difficulty these days are much easier to base on deliberate choices, not just technological shortcomings.

I'm ranting a bit here but like if we mention Uncharted a bit more, there the difficulty scaling comes from the amount of enemies, how much damage they take and how much you can take before you go down. It's a pretty simple game and scaling that difficulty isn't hard, or I imagine it's not. Here's the point that I'm trying to make here, games aren't all like Uncharted, games like Dark Souls don't rely on just turning enemies into bullet sponges or giving you less health to make it hard. Games like that rely on very specific gameplay mechanics about precise movement and attacks and the whole point of those games are to be tough but fair. It's hard to put that type of challenge into words, especially for someone who don't have any real experience with those games, but like to balance that challenge out in a way you have to do way more than just up the damage and health stats. It's not impossible, of course not, but really if a developer have a very specific vision in mind and want to spend their time on balancing out that experience as well as possible who have the right to tell them they need to split up their time to also make sure there are easier and harder modes that offer the same type of balance that the game is based on? Like again, games today are able to have more depth in terms of moment to moment gameplay that if a game comes along that tries to take advantage of that no one should stand there and say you also need to make this accessible for people from other walks of life. Just consider the vast amount of factors that go into this, frame rate, visual clues, precise input, a plethora of moves, so much that a simple difficulty scaling system is just not viable. I mean in the same way hardcore gamers shouldn't go around demanding tough combat out of something designed to be a walking simulator.

I know this blog post was pretty much an incoherent rant that I'm not really qualified to give any real takes on and was most about my distaste for people with nostalgia goggles on praising the difficulty of older games because they were fighting the mechanics as much as the games. If someone did read this I hope my point came across on some level. I'm not interested in Sekiro, and I'm ok with that, I'm not exactly a casual player but I'm not really a hardcore player either. I'm just a gamer who knows not every game is made for me personally.

Fallout 76, Who is this game for?

Finally there has been meatier gameplay videos for Bethesda's next game, Fallout 76. However I'm not any less puzzled about who this game is for, it doesn't seem built to attract regular Fallout fans, certainly not the old school ones. Suppose one might as well take a closer look at Bethesda's first dabble with multiplayer. 

Fallout 76 is the name of the game

So what type of game even is Fallout 76? Well, according to their own statement; "Bethesda Game Studios, the award-winning creators of Skyrim and Fallout 4, welcome you to Fallout 76, the online prequel where every surviving human is a real person. Work together, or not, to survive. Under the threat of nuclear annihilation, you’ll experience the largest, most dynamic world ever created in the legendary Fallout universe." So judging from that it's a survival game, where you work with other players, or not, to rebuild, or not. I don't know.

Anyway, as I mentioned there has been longer gameplay videos out now and it does seem pretty straightforward if they're accurately depicting the game. You create a character who can only communicate with emojis since there are no real NPC's to interact with, only other players, and you seem to follow in the steps of the Vault 76 overseer who has left tapes for you to listen to. Riveting main quest I know. You also seem to get objectives like killing a certain amount of ghouls in a location. You know like those procedurally generated quests in Fallout 4 that you hated. Apart from the sorry excuse for quests you also build stuff, crafting seems like a central part. You craft your camp, weapons and armor. Overall it seems like you'll be looting a lot to craft better gear so you can loot more dangerous locations.

I think I'm starting to understand what sort of game it is, problem is, if I understand it correctly it's not really doing a lot to stand out in the genre. You know, the one Minecraft dominates. That really seems to be the foundational gameplay loop they're going for, which to be frank I don't think is going to be enough. Not only is the building and crafting mechanics much more restricted than other games in the genre the gameplay is just not good enough for combat and looting to be the only real mechanics. Like we've for a long time been having arguments about how Bethesda needs to update their engine (preferably make an entirely new one) because their animations, graphics and combat are painfully outdated. Thing is, in the past with games like Skyrim and Fallout... Lets say Fallout 3, yes the gameplay was nothing to write home about but they had deep worlds filled with interesting quests, characters, decisions that had consequences in the world and not to mention actual RPG mechanics. That's why Bethesda has always been excused for lagging behind in the gameplay, graphics and animation department. Now they've stripped it all away, and I do wonder if co-op is going to be enough to make fans happy. Not that I know what fans want this, as mentioned earlier, it doesn't seem like it's for Fallout fans since it lacks everything that was good about Fallout. Fallout isn't just about a huge world with lots of potential for crafting. When people ask for co-op in Bethesda games is this really what they want?

To get a bit petty about the lore involved I have a few things to day with the disclaimer that I'm not a huge Fallout scholar so I might be a bit off but... How does the concept make sense? Like no people around? At all? In every other game we meet ghouls who survived the initial blasts, not to mention entire communities who didn't turn into ghouls but instead just survived generation after generation. So why is this world so empty? Would make sense if it was in the middle of a blast crater but the world is green, buildings barely scorched, yet the only humanoid creatures around are the scorched ghouls. I just don't understand why this was done, would it really have been that hard to add human NPC's in the game? Just Raiders? Like I've read that they want human players to make up raider factions you usually see in Fallout games, problem is that there aren't enough players to make up those kinds of raider factions and with them taking steps to avoid griefing it's not even a viable role to play in the first place. Though fine, it's a spin-off, non-canon, I can dig the lore being off (if that's truly the case, I'm not so sure that it is).

In conclusion, it seems like this game is trying to do things that have already been done and better, not pleasing fans of their old games and not being able to compete with fans of similar games. I'm curious to see how this game will end up doing, might be a huge success (which would surprise me) or it might end up being a huge flop. Either way it's going to be interesting to see the consequences from how this game ends up performing. Bethesda at least seems confident considering they've gone on record saying they intend to support this game "forever".

Post E3 2018 Thoughts and Highlights

So E3 2018 is done, games have been shown, interviews have been done, articles have been written, so much info out there for coming games many look forward to and so little time to pay attention to everything. As I'm not paid to do just that I will just share my thoughts on the stuff that stood out to me and that which I care about. I will cover as much as I can but don't expect this to be a full review for everything. 

EA started off E3 with their conference, and what can I really say about it. Not much to be honest, it's one of the few conferences I didn't watch live, in fact I didn't watch much of it at all. I skipped over the boring parts so I think I ended up watching maybe 5-10 minutes of it. I saw some Battlefield V, not a lot of footage but the Nordic looking map that was shown off was thrilling as I like seeing environments that remind me of where I actually live. Same reason I liked Alan Wake as the forests reminded me of the forests back home when I didn't live in an urban environment. It's oddly satisfying to me. As far as Anthem goes, the gameplay that was shown didn't do much for me, looks like another sci-fi shooter revolving around multiplayer and I just can't be bothered with that.

After EA Microsoft was up, and oh boy, I'm no MS fan, in fact I've never owned an Xbox and likely never will, but this was the best conference of E3 to me. It was entertaining, had a good flow, and most importantly, they showed off both Dying Light 2 and Cyberpunk 2077. Now I didn't get too excited for Cyberpunk 2077 since it was once again just a trailer showing off the world, sure it was nice looking but that's about it. Still want to see actual gameplay but everyone who has seen it has had their mind blown so it does sound interesting. Dying Light 2 was the real highlight for me as it has Chris Avellone behind it and that's all I need to know. I loved the gameplay in the first game, if that gets improved and gets a high quality story with impactful decisions then you can count me in.

Bethesda was next with their showing, now they probably had the cringiest conference during E3 and to be honest, I wasn't particularly wowed. Rage 2 looks fine if not a bit stale, not sure about it yet but I liked the first game (believe it or not) so I'm keeping an eye on it. There were a bunch of announcements I don't really care much about, I mean there were vague teasers for Doom Eternal and I think a Wolfenstein expansion but I don't have any particular opinions on them except "okay". The big thing was Fallout 76, an always online game with no NPC's centered around.. Something. I don't get what that game is about, is it about combat and crafting? I mean who asked for this game? Who have ever said that their favorite part of the Bethesda Fallout games were shooting and crafting? Sure, I get that many people wanted to play Fallout with a friend, but do they even want this? Is it really a Fallout game without a well told story, heavy decisions and a world populated with interesting intrigue? I don't know, because Bethesda have been frustratingly vague when describing it. Todd Howard and Pete Hines are annoyingly good at giving non-answers. Though enough of that, they also announced Starfield as a next gen game and Elder Scrolls VI, interesting they would do that when they're so far off but I agree with the people who have been saying they did it to soothe over the worries that they're going online focused with Fallout 76.

Then I watched Devolver Digital and Square Enix back to back. Now to be honest I didn't watch the Devolver conference for the games but for the crazy show they put on. I just loved how they made fun of casual gamers who spend crazy money on silly microtransactions. Just a lovely show with a few games that honestly do look kinda fun. Don't remember any of their names though. As far as Square Enix goes I liked the Shadow of the Tomb Raider gameplay, looks really interesting but after that my attention went elsewhere and I missed most of it. I didn't even look away for long it was just that their showing was really short. Oh well.

Moving on to Ubisoft next, their conference was decent but out of all the things they showed what stood out most to me was the games they didn't show. I was hoping to see a new Splinter Cell game and Watch Dogs 3 but they were nowhere to be seen. Suppose Assassin's Creed: Odyssey looked fine and all but I am yet to play Origins so I have some catching up to do on that front. Still miss Aisha Tyler, she was a real highlight of Ubisoft's past  conferences but it seems like she's not returning. Which makes me sad.

What about the PC Gaming show then? Well, I didn't watch it. Don't care.

Now the final conference I watched was Sony, no I didn't watch Nintendo, their style of games just don't appeal to me so I'll only be talking about Sony from here on. Their conference or show, whatever they wanna call it, was poorly structured and boring, but man were the games they showed off impressive. We finally saw gameplay for several of their titles for the first time, The Last of Us: Part II being the first on the line. Truly impressive stuff, the animation was top notch, so much so that a Tomb Raider lead called it fake, but the gameplay was improved upon as well. I really look forward to playing this bad boy in whatever distant year they please to release it. Of course, there was some controversy about the kiss between Ellie and Dina. As far as silly controversies go this is a silly one, not only should people have expected it as Ellie and Riley kissed in the Left Behind DLC but ND, and Druckmann specifically, have openly said that Ellie is indeed gay. The only thing I could think about when watching it, seeing Ellie so warm and happy, is that Dina is super dead. Like she has to die, and I can't wait to see the Youtube reactions when they play that part. It's gonna be spicy stuff, my dudes and dudettes.

I believe Ghost of Tsushima was up next, now this game looked absolutely stunning. The visuals are to die for. Not only that, the gameplay looked really nice, I'm not a fan of over the top hack and slash games so seeing a more slower paced and grounded combat system was pure joy for me. One thing that kinda put me off was the very American sounding female ally that shows up during the demo so I'm glad to see there will be the option for Japanese voice overs. Overall, I liked everything I saw from it. There were other games shown off as well, but I wasn't really impressed, not really into Spider Man and as far as Kingdom Hearts go both the more realistic graphics for the Pirates of the Caribbean characters go and the weird choice to mute all sound but the voices in the trailers to highlight the music was jarring to me. Death Stranding looked neat though, gave off some walking simulator vibes but I don't care, I want this game and I want it ASAP. It looks delightfully weird and I'm very much into it.

Final words, I wasn't blown away by E3 this year but one or two games did make me squeal from delight which is really all you can hope for. I think this year's event was really... Safe in some regards. It upheld the status quo of EA being disappointing, Bethesda getting all sorts of attention, Ubisoft being Ubisoft with all the cringe that goes with it, Devolver being memes incarnate, Sony making weird decisions but ultimately leaving people satisfied, Microsoft flexing their wallet, PC Gaming and Square making little noise. Not the best E3 but certainly not the worst.

So I finally finished The Witcher 3...

So I bought The Witcher 3 back when it released, hyped about it, then I played it for like an hour max and I just couldn't get into it. Then I played it again some a year afterwards for a few hours that I liked more but still didn't get me hooked and it was still very early game. Finally, a week or two back I once again started playing it determined to finish it, and boy did I really get hooked this time. Playing hours on end, every day. 

The start was slow but once it got interesting it really got interesting. There's so much depth to the story and gameplay that I just haven't seen in any game before. Yes yes the combat itself is a bit on the simple side but it was surrounded by so much more than that like preparing yourself for fighting witcher contracts. Figuring out which potions, oils and signs to focus on before a fight made it so much more interesting than just walking in hacking away which at times works for sure but other times it will be an easy way to die without doing any damage at all to the monster. 

Story was also beautifully told, the main story was decent but the main draw to me was the side stories. They were so interesting, well written and more often than not had a twist that went somewhere you couldn't have predicted. While you could argue that if it always has a twist that it's no longer surprising but it's very appreciated that they did play with expectations to keep it interesting. While I was a bit disappointed that the consequences weren't quite as fleshed out as I was led to believe, it did leave a strong impression when I had made a choice that resulted in an entire village being wiped out becoming a ghost town. 

Now the things that they did really well that I would like to see more companies do is humor, deeper relationships and enemy variety. Witcher 3 is a mature game for sure, blood and guts, sex, tragedy, but it also knows to relax every now and then. Geralt's sarcasm always brought out a chuckle and partying with your Witcher friends was so much fun and a welcome break from the action, I wish more devs figured out to do this so it's not always just hours and hours of action and angry grunting. Now I know this is the third entry in the franchise but it was a breath of fresh air to see Geralt managing a current relationship, which is of course something you can choose to engage in or not but when I played it he and Yen were like an old married couple which is in stark contrast to say, Bioware games where a romance is a quick end game "reward" or Bethesda where it's basically a background perk. 

As for the enemy variety goes it was one of the best things about the game. Really puts to shame everyone else doing similar kinds of games that just doesn't put in the effort that a small Polish developer managed to pull of. When going to hunt a monster you never really knew what it was, thanks to the variety of types and the fact that many enemies are more rare made sure hunting something unknown could be tense even late in the game. Not to mention the awesome monster designs. Contrast this with Bethesda as an example who use a very limited amount of enemy types that you fight often it's never tense or surprising when finding yet another Draugr lord, dragon, ghoul or deathclaw. 

There's so much more I could praise like the beautiful world they built but I wanted to mention bugs as a closer. I did have a few annoying ones like sound being messed up, music would disappear and voices wouldn't be heard. Not to mention Roach who when not glitched would get stuck on a tiny piece of terrain sticking up. Wasn't ever anything that ruined the game, though I reckon it used to be in a worse condition around release. 

TL:DR, I finally finished Witcher 3, loved it, can definitely see now why it got so much praise. 10/10 best game this gen so far. Though I remain open for something like RDR2 or TLoU2 to dethrone it. 

Red Dead Redemption 2 - Second Trailer Reactions

So the second trailer for Red Dead Redemption 2 dropped today, I'll leave a link at the end for those interested but for now I wanted to give my first reactions on it in words. I know it's a novel concept to write about it instead of making a whole video on it but lets get to it.

Mr. Arthur Morgan

First off, we find out that the protagonist is one Arthur Morgan, a dude who sure looks the part of a capable outlaw. Now I do wanna note that he does in every way appear to be an outlaw unlike the protagonist of the first game, John Marston. He is indeed quite the contrast to Mr. Marston, not only does he seem to enjoy being bad more but he's also a different figure, that is he's more physically intimidating. I do look forward to seeing him interact with the world as he doesn't really seem like the kind of guy to be pushed around easily.

I do think there's a reason for such a seemingly dark character, I wouldn't be surprised if he at some point was a more redeemable character but the changed up a bit after the release of Gta V. What I mean with that is that with Gta V Trevor Phillips was introduced and his psychotic persona became extremely popular so I wouldn't be surprised if this fact influenced Morgan of RDR2. Now I don't think he'll be going full psycho but I do think Trevor did encourage Rockstar to make a meaner character than they'd normally do. Personally, I like him, I've seen some negative comments towards him but I'm excited to see more of his persona. I suspect he's not all around bad but perhaps put on a tougher persona when in "outlaw mode".

Outside of Morgan, we didn't really see that much as it was a short trailer. I mean we did see glimpses of hunting (with a bow no less), horse taming and heists. Though the heists did look quite cinematic so I hope you can still rob stuff outside of main missions. We did see one big thing though, Dutch van der Linde, which with other released info has confirmed that it is indeed a prequel that is centered around Dutch's gang. I was skeptical there would be a lot to explore but it does seem to be so far back with plenty of colorful characters to make it interesting.

Not sure there's that much more to comment on story speculations. I do however want to comment on the types of comments I've read in the comment sections on Youtube, Twitter and so on. Fun conspiracy theories that I will hastily debunk. Lots of comments about Abigail being the mysterious blonde woman, to that I say, Abigail had black hair and wasn't a badass gunslinger. Next, lots of people are thinking the boy Morgan threatens in the trailer is a young Marston, first off John's mother died at childbirth and he was found by Dutch while in an orphanage so no dice. I've also seen comments linking Morgan to MacFarlane, that he would be related but as his name is Morgan it's also quite unlikely and reaching to make a connection. As are all the comments calling anyone with a beard Uncle (the drunk hanging around at Marston's farm towards the end of RDR).

That would be all, if you haven't already check out the trailer and get back to me perhaps if you see something interesting. Here's the trailer for those interested;
RDR2 Trailer 2