Category: Video Games

The first Borderlands game had a pretty generic shooter plot and got a bunch of attention for reskinning itself into one of the first magenta games. It didn’t go full magenta untilt he sequel, and I like the light sprinkling better than the more concentrated doses later games had, especially the Pre-Sequel (and I’m slightly worried about how bad it’s going to be in 3, which I have not played yet). I’m not here to talk about line-by-line dialogue, though. This post is about the tangled plot of Borderlands 1 and how it could’ve been much smoother without really changing anything except a bit of expository dialogue.

Borderlands has two recurring problems in its plot. The first is that it doesn’t tell you the significance of what you’re doing until it’s already done, with characters like Angel (whose motives for helping you aren’t even explained or even hinted at in this game), Dr. Zed, Marcus, and Patricia telling you what to do and then explaining how it gets you closer to the end goal of finding the Vault after you’ve done it. The first and obvious rewrite, then, is to move an explanation for why you’re doing what you’re doing to up front.

And second, which is that you are always proceeding directly towards the Vault, which means the path to the Vault is ludicrously convoluted. And although the Vault is talked up as the central MacGuffin, it and its Eridian creators are barely in the game. You don’t encounter the Eridian aliens who built the thing very much until the very end, just outside the Vault, and when you do encounter them, it’s not any more significant than as a new enemy type. It’s an interesting new enemy type and I’m glad it’s in the game, but you do not spend the finale learning ancient Eridian secrets. You spend it fighting the Crimson Lance mercenaries. The only Eridian secret is that they actually built the Vault to contain some tentacle monster, not to hold treasure, and that tentacle monster stabs the only built-up villain of the entire game to death to yoink the final boss fight for itself.

The actual gameplay of Borderlands isn’t about Vault hunting at all. It’s about defeating bandit chieftains and later the Crimson Lance. So rather than bothering with all this Vault key fragment nonsense in the first place, maybe it’d be better off to cast the protagonists as bounty hunters and mercenaries. The Vault is Patricia Tannis’ obsession, and Commandant Steele’s (Commandant Steele being the commander of the Crimson Lance). The player’s got a list of bandit chiefs to take down and that’s their MacGuffin, only dragged into all this Vault business because everyone else cares about it.

Continue reading “Borderlands 1 Plot Workshop” →

I probably don’t need to introduce Borderlands, y’know, the looter shooter game. I’m giving the complete series a playthrough from 1 to 3, including the Pre-Sequel but not Tales, unless I decide that some number of these games are actually Regrets. I like gun roulette and I like shooters, so probably even some really awful writing isn’t going to bring me down to Regrets, but I haven’t tried Borderlands 3 yet and the overall trajectory of the series’ writing is to get steadily more magenta over time, so we’ll see if it manages to cross the Regrets threshold despite its gameplay.

But today I’m talking about enemy spawns. Using the very early part of Borderlands as an example, the starting town is Firestone, the first villain is a bandit captain named Nine-Toes, and one of the first quests is to go and clear out a bandit outpost just across the road from the gate into Firestone. Perfectly good little quest with one problem: The bandits respawn, so if you ever revisit that outpost for any reason, it’s inescapable that you didn’t actually accomplish anything. On the other hand, you don’t want all enemies to never respawn, because that both makes maps uncannily safe as soon as you’ve cleared them (because enemies never patrol or reoccupy cleared territory unless you want to write in an entire AI for trying to take and hold territory) and it means you can’t have the fun of returning to an area you’ve overleveled and obliterating the opposition (something the Borderlands series is already bad at, since it has a nasty habit of leveling enemies in old regions after breakpoints in the story – but doesn’t even do that consistently, so sometimes you get sent back to an old area that you’ve out-leveled by 5+ but sometimes you’ll find all the enemies just got juiced up to about your level).

If I were put in charge of a remaster/make/boot of the series, I’d give it four types of enemy spawns based on two toggles: Story flags and character level.

Some enemies would stop respawning after a certain story flag has been set. This is reserved mainly for named boss enemies, and the story flag is killing them. Once you kill Nine-Toes, he doesn’t come back. Some unnamed enemies also qualify, if the story makes a point that you’re clearing them out to get some tactical or strategic advantage. Those outpost bandits, for example, would stop respawning after the quest to clear the outpost is complete. The story made a point of clearing that outpost in particular to stop Nine-Toes from seeing everyone who goes in and out of Firestone through the gate, so it stays cleared. The story flag doesn’t have to be relevant to the main plot, necessarily. Zephyr Substation is a wind farm that the bandits have overrun which you visit while acquiring a key to a stronghold that holds a key to another stronghold, which is not amazing quest design, but the important thing for purposes of this post is that there is a side quest to get the wind farm operational again and the bandits occupying it should keep spawning until the side quest to reactivate the farm is completed, not the main quest to fetch a key from it.

Some enemies should stop respawning after you reach a certain level, regardless of what story flags are flipped. Borderlands is already one of those games that cuts the XP given by enemies based on the level difference, and about 5-10 levels over the enemies they stop giving XP entirely (there’s no hard cutoff, it just gets cut into a smaller and smaller fraction of the default until it rounds down to 0, so it can be 5 levels for one enemy and 15 for another, but 5-ish is about the point when enemies stop being relevant). They’ll keep respawning if you’re underleveled even if the local plot is complete and stop spawning when you reach a certain level even if the local plot is incomplete.

This category is for patrolling bad guys, like the bandits and alien wildlife you find moseying around the roads and trails connecting points of interest to one another. If they’re not worth XP, that suggests they’re also not worth the players time, so stop respawning them. These enemies are now so weak that the player can walk right past them while ignoring their bullets if they don’t want to go to the effort of mowing them down, so just don’t bother. Most areas have a level range, so when you’re right on the cusp of outleveling that area, it’ll despawn the lower end of the range as you outlevel it completely, but leave the upper end of the range, which is only 3-4 levels below you, which organically gives a sense of areas starting to thin out as you progress. It’s not directly tied to how many of them you’ve killed, but it’ll feel that way.

Some enemies stop respawning only if you reach a certain level and flip a relevant story flag. For example, some patrolling enemies I would normally give a purely level-based despawn are required for a kill-ten-rats kind of quest, and while that is also not amazing game design, you definitely don’t want to make it possible to softlock yourself out of it by overleveling until the patrols stop spawning. Also, the bandits in various bandit strongholds holding bosses like Nine-Toes and Sledge should keep respawning until you have outleveled them by 5+ and you’ve defeated the relevant boss. If you show up to the boss dungeon ridiculously overleveled, you still have to fight the whole dungeon for pacing reasons, and if you defeat the boss at a normal level (or while underleveled) you can still revisit the dungeon for level grinding purposes and/or for funsies for as long as the enemies there are powerful enough to be remotely relevant. Only after the dungeon has served its purpose in the main plot and ceased to be remotely meaningful opposition does the general bandit population stop spawning.

Finally, you want a handful of stray enemies who keep respawning no matter how overleveled you get or how far into the story you get. The bandit strongholds, for example, might have one or two rooms that remain fully stocked with bandits no matter how powerful you get, and while some of the absurdly hostile wildlife moseying about the map might stop spawning when you get too high level, others might continue to suicide rush you when they see you walking or driving down the road. This allows a player to do the whole “obliterate some low level enemies to see how far you’ve come” thing without obligating them to do so whenever driving around lower level areas (especially since both the first and second game have a few quests encouraging you to return to much earlier areas of the game).

In a previous post I talked about how Far Cry 4 is two really good games combined into a single just okay game. Here I’m going to elaborate a bit on how it could’ve been really good at just the one thing by editing the story a bit.

The game opens the same way and can retain the “wait for Pagan Min to get back” ending. If you don’t take that, you flee the palace with the Golden Path and end up in southern Kyrat. Your goals now are to inter the ashes of your mother at the shrine with Lakshmana, honoring her last wish, to kill Pagan Min and his lieutenants, honoring the last wish of your father as relayed to you by the Golden Path, and to get out of Kyrat alive. You can get intel on Pagan Min’s three lieutenants (Noore, de Pleur, and Yuma, all good enough characters to retain even if none of them are particularly spectacular) by completing side quests: Outpost raids, assassinations (including for the one CIA guy), destroying propaganda, hunting, you can even do the drug thing if you can find some excuse why Yogi and Reggie have dirt on Pagan’s lieutenants (and they do have some kind of connection to Noore). Some side quests are general purpose, adding small amounts of intel for all three, some side quests are for a specific lieutenant.

We’re putting all three of these lieutenants in southern Kyrat (in the game as it is, Yuma is in the north, so we’re moving her). The Kyrat International Airport is also down there, and at any point after the tutorial you can go there, steal a plane, and Just Leave(tm), fulfilling your goal to escape Kyrat alive but failing to honor the dying wish of either of your dead parents.

The revelation that your father killed your toddler sister and your mother killed him for it is being moved way up to the halfway point of the game, when you open up the bridge to northern Kyrat. The Lakshmana shrine is also going somewhere in this area (Pagan Min’s palace might get relocated here entirely, or maybe there’s a shrine near the bridge that the protagonist’s mother had some personal connection to, whatever). Pagan Min’s forces are running scared, the Golden Path are ascendant, and Amita and Sabal’s vicious sides really start to show.

In the game as it is, if you side with Sabal, he kills a bunch of people for vague sins against the gods to usher in his new oppressive theocracy, and if you side with Amita, she pressgangs a bunch of people into the Golden Path against their will, in both cases in an epilogue scene that is hinted at in a drug-induced hallucination/prophecy. Outside of this drug trip, there’s no strong indication that Amita and Sabal aren’t perfectly heroic freedom fighters (despite some differing values about the importance of Kyrati religion and whether or not drugs are cool). The game definitely isn’t devoid of hints that these two are budding dictators of their own, but it’s easy to reach the end of the game and feel like you chose the wrong leader, which obscures the game’s strongest point: The theme that you can’t wring a free and prosperous nation out of every war just by identifying the bad team and killing all of their doods. Sometimes there’s a side fighting for democracy, but sometimes there isn’t and in the latter case there is nothing you can do. You can’t impose liberty on people by force.

So in the revised version of the game, you go into northern Kyrat having already interred your mother’s ashes and knowing that your father is a child murderer, while Sabal and Amita are splitting off to fight one another and the Royal Army remnant still led by Pagan Min. You now have the option to Just Leave(tm) having fulfilled your mother’s dying wish, leaving your father’s unfulfilled, or you can fulfill your father’s dying wish by hoovering up more intel from both Amita and Sabal (further spotlighting just how evil both of them are in the process) to locate Pagan Min and kill him.

Key to the general vibe here is that you aren’t a major factor in the war. The Golden Path was already ascendant when you got here and continues to be throughout the first half of the game. Your connection to founder Mohan Ghale and handiness with a knife means you get assigned to kill some of Pagan Min’s lieutenants, and you can sack Royal Army outposts as a side quest, but the Royal Army can recapture sacked outposts and the Golden Path regularly captures enemy outposts without your involvement. Outposts stay captured long enough that you don’t get the Far Cry 2 problem where they respawn after thirty fucking seconds, but you are not repainting the map by attacking outposts, you are just shoving the front line around in a way that doesn’t leave a permanent mark.

Particularly in northern Kyrat, it’s now a three-way war in which (assuming you don’t Just Leave(tm)) you have to help both Amita and Sabal against each other for the intel on Pagan Min’s final hideout to track him down and kill him. You’ve got some targets to hit and a shrine to locate and if you’re following the objectives the interface nudges you towards, you can’t have any long term loyalties.

Once Pagan Min is dead, you have another chance to Just Leave(tm), or you can stay behind, pick a side between Amita and Sabal, and see the war through. You can also give up on finding and killing Pagan Min to side with one or the other of them by completing all of their missions in northern Kyrat and none of the other’s, and then choosing to give up on killing Pagan Min to side with one of them. This is a bad idea. Amita is a ruthless power-monger who doesn’t need the son of the founder of the Golden Path hanging around as a threat to her legitimacy, especially not one who’s a capable enough warrior to have won the respect of the troops (you might not be winning the war single-handedly, but you’re still a very deadly fighter). Sabal is a murderous traditionalist who thinks you’ve been corrupted by having been raised in the West and are on the list of people to be killed to purge Kyrat of its sins. If you help one of them win, the map is covered by their faction, they’re all hostile, and now you need to get to the airport anyway to flee the country. It doesn’t really count as Just Leaving(tm) anymore because you got chased out of the country rather than deciding you’d done what you came to do and departing.

The level of personal involvement of your family in the Golden Path is probably still too much to carry the theme properly, so this might be better off if, like in Far Cry 2, you’re a mercenary who’s being paid to kill Pagan Min/his lieutenants, or if you have some personal grievance with Pagan Min and are coming to Kyrat for revenge. A total revamp of the plot, without making use of much of the pieces of the existing game, would dramatically expand the length of this project and no one is particularly salivating to see the result, but doing this properly would probably require a major overhaul to the protagonist. Ultimately, “returning to your roots” is more of a vacation-y tourist-y kind of arc, more suitable to the Murder Vacation version of Far Cry 4 than the Murder Can’t Help version I’m laying out here.

Usually, in Far Cry games, you are fighting some kind of enemy militia. Far Cry 4 and, if I understand correctly, Far Cry 6 are the exceptions so far, where you fight an actual national military. And at least in Far Cry 4, it’s a disappointingly small difference as compared to the militias and pirates of earlier games. Now, sure, these are the national militaries of tinpot dictatorships, presumably not even regional powers, let alone superpowers with a bottomless backlog of tanks and jets on the bleeding edge of military engineering. You wouldn’t expect them to necessarily have much in the way of nightvision, it’s not super out of place that they communicate mainly via radio signals you can intercept, and it’s fine that the standard issue assault rifle is the AK-47 rather than the AK-74 or tacticool rifles from recent years like 2009’s FN SCAR (the efficacy of things like the FN SCAR over older weapons is debatable – after decades of paying arms manufacturers for new assault rifle designs, the US army has decided to use the M16 forever – but certainly the only armies still using AK-47s are armies who can’t afford AK-74s).

But you would still expect these tinpot dictatorships to have tanks at all. Not to mention IFVs, which are just perfect for video game bad guys. An IFV is essentially a light tank which also carries a squad of infantry into battle, so it’s something you can slap onto your existing infantry squads to upgrade them into a miniboss. And yet, they don’t appear in Far Cry 4. It’s not like Far Cry 4 doesn’t already have vehicles with turrets, so it doesn’t seem like it’s a technology problem.

Tanks have the problem that it’s very difficult even for a supernaturally durable lone attacker to take them out, as modern tanks are basically immune to frontal attacks from most shoulder-mounted anti-tank rockets. There’s plenty of solutions, though. First of all, it’s a Far Cry game, so you can decide to ignore realism and let an RPG-7 blast straight through the front armor of a T-72 for no better reason except that it’s cool. Secondly, when you picture an RPG in your head, you are picturing an RPG-7, and that is a 1959 weapon ineffective against modern tanks. But it’s not like the whole world gave up on anti-tank weapons and just kept using RPG-7 forever. Far Cry 4 has a secret unlockable weapon which, the Wiki tells me, is some Biblical reference because the arms dealer who gives it to you is a Christian zealot, but it looks like an RPG-29, which punched through the front armor of a perfectly modern Challenger 2 in Iraq. But also, third, you could always have tanks be nearly impossible to destroy from the front and have fights against them focus on hitting their weaker top and rear armor.

Instead, Far Cry 4 gives us exactly one new enemy type (not counting wild animals), the hunter. The hunter is a very good addition to the game, a stealthy enemy who doesn’t show up on radar and if you tag them (which normally allows you to see enemies through walls) they only stay tagged for maybe five seconds before becoming untagged, plus they can take control of nearby animals, which are normally hostile to both sides. Hunters plug up a lot of Far Cry 3 enemies’ most consistently exploitable weaknesses (luring in or releasing an animal is way OP, tagging all enemies so you can see them all through walls makes stealth pretty easy and makes you almost impossible to flank), and if Far Cry 4 were about fighting warlord militias or pirates or religious terrorists, that would’ve been fine. But Pagan Min’s army is supposed to be an army, and the absence of any armored vehicles is a disappointment.

Far Cry 4 has an arena that you reach about a third of the way through the game. It’s thorough but standard arena gameplay: You fight in a small enclosed space against a bunch of enemies who are split up into different teams, some wild animals get mixed in, you have to be the last one standing, you start with a pre-defined weapon but can loot more from defeated enemies. You start out at rank 1 and each rank has a different arena battle associated with it, including your starting weapon. My first issue is that your starting weapon doesn’t have a clear trajectory. You start with a revolver, then get a glock that seems to mostly be a lateral move, and then you get a machine pistol which sounds better but is actually much worse because individual bullets deal way less damage and it’s way harder to line up headshots. I wonder if you’re supposed to get worse and worse starting weapons as you rank up, to increase the challenge? But if that were the case you’d think they’d start you with an AK-47 to make the downward progression more obvious.

But that’s mostly a nitpick, regardless of the details you start with a weapon that sucks and have to make do with that until you’re able to loot something better. No, the way Far Cry 4’s arena goes out of its way to suck is that instead of having you complete each rank’s battle once, you instead have to fill in a progression bar. But there’s next to no variation in the arena battles at any given rank whatsoever, so the higher ranks don’t have you fighting three or four randomly selected arena battles until you rank up. You fight the exact same arena battle three or four times until you rank up. There’s some connection to one of Ubisoft’s tie-in apps that they tried to push in the mid-2010s, and it looks like the app still exists, but Far Cry 4’s multiplayer doesn’t exist anymore so whatever impact the arena app had on the experience is gone now, and was ill-conceived to begin with.

If you want to do a tie-in app you have to go whole-hog with it, connect the two games to each other at such a fundamental level that they are two different modes of the same game, like, maybe the mobile app is a realtime game of managing a business or country or whatever and the PC/console game allowing you to rampage through the map to cause and/or solve problems for the mobile users. If you balance it right, it could probably be fun, and if it’s a major premise of your game, the people who play that game will be the people who want that. Admittedly, that would be a weird as Hell entry into the Far Cry series so probably don’t call it that.

But regardless, Far Cry 4’s tie-in app, like the tie-in app for Assassin’s Creed Unity, is an afterthought that the core game is better off without and which is almost certainly no fun to play on its own.

God, I’ve gotten a lot of posts out of Far Cry 3. I didn’t even play it for that long. I played it on PS3 due to technical difficulties on PC, so I don’t have Steam keeping track of my playtime, but it might’ve been as little as 15 hours (the console controls meant I wasn’t eager to take on many side quests).

Today’s post is about Far Cry 3’s ending. It’s really badly rushed. The entire southern island has exactly one character in it, an infiltrator of the evil mercenary company backing up the evil pirates you fought on the north island. He’s a reasonably fun character, but he doesn’t really have an arc. He just helps you infiltrate the mercenary company alongside him, set up an assassination of the big bad Hoyt, and then Hoyt plays an Uno reverse card and kills him instead. Which is then followed by Hoyt’s two bodyguards inexplicably vanishing so you can have a quick time event knife fight with him, and after that you’re dumped into a room filled with not only a dead Hoyt, but several dead guards. It’s clear that there was supposed to be more to getting you from the point when Sam (the south island’s one character) is killed to the point when you knife fight Hoyt, and they just didn’t have time and money for it, so they clumsily stitched it together with the next complete section of the game, where you rescue your little brother from being taken off the island to some unknown destination.

And the final final mission is so rushed it basically doesn’t exist. Throughout the first half of the game you’ve been saving your friends from Vaas’ pirates one by one. Riley, your little brother, was allegedly killed, so as far as you know all survivors are safe on the north island and ready to flee in a boat they’ve been repairing while you do all the protagonist-y murdering. But Jason Brody, the protagonist, decides to stay (in a cut scene, so it’s not really “you” doing it the way it’s you, the player, doing the murdering) in order to join the Rakyat warriors he’s been fighting alongside and take out Hoyt’s operation on the south island. It’s not framed like Jason just wants to finish the job, either, he’s leaving his old life in America behind to become a Rakyat.

Side note: There’s shades of mighty whitey in all this, where Jason Brody, American upper middle class failson, finds his calling, and that is to be a better Rakyat warrior than any of the natives of Rook Island who grew up in the culture. In fairness to Far Cry 3, though, I don’t really get the impression that the Rakyat are really an indigenous institution. They’ve clearly got connections to the native culture (the name “Rakyat” sure isn’t English), but they also seem like a weird and creepy cult, they’re obsessed with defeating Vaas and Hoyt, and you’re not even the only foreigner to become a prominent Rakyat – your first Rakyat ally Dennis seems to be the most prominent warrior before Jason shows up, and he’s from Liberia. It’s possible that the Rakyat are supposed to be a genuinely indigenous culture of vaguely menacing brown people, but it’s also possible that they’re supposed to be a terrorist cult formed in the wake of trauma inflicted by Hoyt’s mercenaries, one whose historical roots are, as is the case with most nationalist movements, one part aesthetic and two parts delusional.

On the one hand, “native culture who gets taken over by reactionary cult of personality in response to colonialist violence” seems like way too much nuance and depth for Ubisoft writing. On the other hand, nothing in the game oversimplifies to the point where that’s not a plausible interpretation, so the Rakyat actually are a very nuanced and interesting faction, even if I suspect that it happened by blind luck rather than deliberate story decisions.

But regardless, that’s the setup of the game going into the final mission: You make friends with the Rakyat while saving your friends on the north island, you decide to remain with the Rakyat and let your friends leave without you to head to the south island, and while on the south island you learn that your little brother Riley is actually alive and resolve to save him, much to the dismay of Citra, the Rakyat’s high priestess spiritual leader lady.

Continue reading “Far Cry 3 Had A Rushed Ending” →

Bookkeeping note that probably no one but me cares about, but which I find kinda funny: After nearly running out of backlog a bit ago, I switched to weekly posts for a bit, and while rebuilding the backlog, I’d sprinkle in new posts as they came until I had a 2/week schedule, then back up to 3/week. This meant that the posts relevant to the game I was discussing at the nadir – Far Cry 3 – wound up scattered all over the place. We were nearly through that era, but then the April Humble Choice dropped and I’d forgotten to leave room for it in the schedule, so rather than shifting every blog post by a couple of days, I just picked up the next post in the queue and dropped at the end, then put this post in the free spot. This post is timely (I don’t have much of an audience, but at least in theory people might read this post before deciding whether they want to sign up for the Humble Choice this month) and Far Cry 3 thoughts are very much not, so this makes sense, but it does mean that Far Cry 3 posts are spread out across like three months now.

Anyways, the April Humble Choice dropped on the 4th. What’s in the box?

The Death Stranding Director’s Cut is something I’m very 50/50 on. Hideo Kojima is a mad genius and Death Stranding is the point where he’s completely off the leash. Sometimes the results of this sort of thing are glorious and sometimes it results in the creator disappearing up the ass of their own very niche interests and creating a game that nobody but them is interested in. Death Stranding’s reviews make it clear that it’s not maximum trainwreck but equally so that it’s not maximum genius. I’ll definitely throw it in the backlog and see the results myself.

Aliens Fireteam Elite is a space marines vs. xenomorphs game. These games always struck me as deeply misguided. Xenomorphs are horror monsters, and while Aliens puts the emphasis on a swarm whose individual members are fairly expendable rather than a single killer creature, it was still about a team of cocky protagonists slowly coming to realize how much danger they’re in and breaking down as they’re picked off one by one, until only a small handful of survivors make it out in the end. And being a singular creature type with a striking design facilitates this horror really well and high-octane shooty action really poorly. If the protagonists are wading through the xenomorphs rather than the other way around, then you need really divergent enemy types amongst the xenomorphs to keep it interesting. While I could imagine someone doing that, there’s no sign that this game has done so, and I’m not going to sink 8-10 hours into it to double check.

I’m playing the Borderlands series right now, and so far as games about shooting cool looking alien monsters with a variety of firearms goes, I can’t imagine anything based on the Alien franchise will ever compete. Having a single really cool monster design seems like it would give Alien a headstart over Borderlands’ knock-off creatures, but if the premise of your game is simple visceral fun, then Borderlands’ simple visceral designs work better than something like the xenomorph, despite the xenomorph’s vastly superior cultural cache and artistic merit, because Borderlands’ monsters are purpose-built to be blown up with rockets and the xenomorph is very much not.

If you want to make a game that captures the feeling of Aliens, it needs to be about taking a squad of space marines in or near a xenomorph hive to complete some mission, with the expectation that completing one out of three objectives in exchange for losing half your squad is a pretty typical result, one that emphasizes variety in your team over variety in the enemies (although you don’t have to go with a perfectly lore accurate version with only three different enemies – facehuggers, standard xenomorphs, and the queen – but you do have to have a setup where the standard xenomorphs remain a significant threat from one end of the campaign to the other).

Rollerdrome is my new gold standard for indie games on a limited budget. It sells itself on the weird mechanical concept of being a shooter where you’re on rollerskates and do mid-air tricks to get more ammo. That’s a weird and cool concept and I would like to check it out, but I don’t want to spend more than a few hours on it. How Long To Beat clocks its completion time in at 5 hours, so this is something I can fit into a single lazy afternoon. It doesn’t seem to have much more to offer besides that weird and cool concept of a roller blade shooter, but it’s short enough to plausibly not wear out the welcome of that idea.

Life is Strange 2 is the sequel to the award-winning game where you walk around as a hipster. This one stars a different hipster, I guess. I’m not down on the walking simulator genre in general, I think there are some valid experiences to be had where the only significant mechanic is walking around a place. Return of the Obra Dinn, most notably, is a walking simulator attached to a bit of paperwork, and while the paperwork does add some kind of pass/fail metric, it is not the primary mechanic. The primary mechanic is walking around observing things. Obra Dinn is sufficiently opaque that some kind of checklist of things to figure out is needed to pull a player in deep enough to understand just how much there is to explore here, but you can imagine a game (or some kind of interactive experience, anyway) that drops you into a crime scene that’s sufficiently straightforward at least in what the crime was, and then leaves you to piece out what happened without any mechanic for checking if you were correct. It’d be a very internet-era thing where the fun would be in the conversation happening around the game, either within small circles of friends playing the game together or a broader sub-culture if the game manages to become the flavor of the week, but we are in the internet era so that could work.

The Hipster Walking Simulator series, however, uses its mechanics to deliver a linear plot with the illusion of choice (the first game had exactly one real choice at the end). It feels like another one of those things like Gris that should’ve just been a film but Kickstarters for films don’t do as well as Kickstarters for video games so they slapped on some dialogue choices that alter nothing.

The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante is a narrative-focused game where you are a sad knight. It has a text and illustrations format that looks interesting and beautiful, but, I mean, it’s about being a sad dude in a medieval dystopia. “What if you had to struggle against unfair odds to make something of your life” is not some weird experience I need to play a video game to experience, and while there’s a lot to be said for a relatable story, it’s really not clear what else there is besides this game being about a guy who must struggle against unfair odds to make something of his life.

I’m going to pick up Monster Prom 2: Monster Camp because I like the writing of this series so hey, why not, but I’m not putting it in the backlog. I said earlier that Rollerdrome is my gold standard for an indie game not stretching its content thin, but the Monster Prom series is also good for this (although the quality is in a steady decline from the original, as it struggles harder and harder to make its thin mechanics apply to new situations, and they don’t seem to have any proper game designers on staff to write new ones). In fact, Monster Prom is really good at simultaneously having an extremely low time to complete (about 45 minutes) but an extremely high time to 100%, which means it can plausibly be the one video game bought in a month for someone with more time than money and who really likes Monster Prom without holding closure on its story hostage to 20+ hours of gameplay for people who like it enough to engage with as a distraction but not as the main game played for a full fortnight.

Revita, meanwhile, continues the blight of indie games that stretch themselves thin with Roguelite gameplay. Neat pixel aesthetic, gameplay that looks unexceptional but fun, aaaaaand a 10 hour completion rate for just the main story on How Long To Beat with nearly 30 hours for main story + side content (and five hundred hours for 100%, although given how round the number is, I’m guessing that’s one guy submitting what may or may not be a wild guess – HLTB doesn’t make any effort to check that people reporting completion times have actually acquired relevant achievements, and while liars get washed out by numbers in popular games, Revita’s not that popular).

I have mixed feelings about passing on Founders’ Fortune. The premise of a cute little village-building game where each villager has a randomly generated personality and develops relationships with other villagers sounds like fun, and I’m mainly passing up on it because I’m worried this will end up like Little Big Workshop where it’s very frustrating in play because it’s poorly balanced or has UI issues or in some other way lacks polish. These kinds of city builder games have a steep demand for effective polish which means indie games can fuck them up easily, which can result in a game that I play for 20+ hours but ultimately walk away from unsatisfied because it was slowly smothered by its technical limitations as my little workshop/village/whatever scaled upwards past the limits of what the game could handle while still only reaching half of what the game’s objectives tell me should be possible. I’m worried enough that Founders’ Fortune might do this that I’m passing on it even though I have no particular evidence that it actually will.

That’s two new games in the backlog bringing me to 168 total, meaning I am finally below 170 games even after a monthly restock from the Humble Choice (although partly I got here from moving the Forest to Regrets after realizing that, for all that I really want to play the game that the Forest promised, I’ve already played enough of it, and read enough of their wiki, to know that they didn’t make that game, and also Die Young when I realized that the game they were promising sounded a like what the Forest actually delivered, which I evidently don’t like enough to sink more than 5 hours into). I’ve been hovering at around 170 games in the backlog for a long time, with dire implications for what games I might never get around to, but it is starting to look like that was mainly a consequence of 1) working out the kinks in how selective I should be with what games go into the backlog and 2) the OGL crisis devouring all of my free time in January and February of this year, to the point where I had zero game completions in all of January.

Let’s rewrite Fobia to focus on the things it does well and cut the things it does poorly. I’m using time traveling witch rules here, so I want to keep the plot at about the same level of resource-intensiveness but I am going to assume that it costs me nothing to tear out a finished piece of the game and replace it with another piece of approximately equal spectacle and complexity.

The goal here is to focus the plot on the well-designed hotel and the two iconic monsters: Gasmask Girl and the game’s boogeyman, which according to achievements is probably supposed to be called the Red Light (he has a reddish-orange lantern he carries around). Gasmask Girl haunts the protagonist throughout the hotel but turns out to be friendly. The Red Light periodically pursues the protagonist through the hotel and is plainly unfriendly, not only kill-on-sight hostile like the other monsters but much more willing to pursue the protagonist for long distances. At the same time, he’s very easy to fool by taking circuitous routes, so let’s not talk up his intelligence too much.

We also need some reason why the hotel is full of puzzle locks, and “a cult built the place” is a tried and true means of accomplishing that. The cult doesn’t necessarily need to still be active, though. They never appear as enemies, and may appear as a voice on the phone, but don’t have to. The cult doesn’t need to be relevant to the plot because it doesn’t have any compelling characters, just a well-established motivation for building a hotel full of puzzle locks. Likewise, we need a bunch of zombies and mutant bugs to prop up the combat end of level design, but we don’t need the reason for their creation to be at all central to the plot. It should be a result of the same forces driving Gasmask Girl and the Red Light rather than being totally unrelated, but it doesn’t need to be a major focus. Much like “cults build puzzle locks, it’s just how you be a cult,” it’s fine if the monsters are explained by “the supernatural shit concerning Gasmask Girl and the Red Light also caused a bunch of monsters to show up, these things happen sometimes.” Puzzles and monsters are an important part of the hotel’s level design, so we need an explanation for them, but we can rely on tropes to carry us over the bumps in those explanations as long as we don’t spend much time on them.

Finally, we need to explain the camera. The camera is very important to early gameplay, giving the player a means of interacting with the environment without having anything to fight. This contributes significantly to the game’s slow build, where you begin with a ghost train where you’re haunted by Gasmask Girl and you end by using chemical weapons to weaken Red Light until he can be killed with two shotgun blasts to the face.

Side note: There’s an argument to be made that starting with an homage to Silent Hill and ending with an homage to Resident Evil is a bad idea, but Resident Evil 4 had that basic arc (although its early bits are less informed by Silent Hill, they still have a much more horror-focused tone compared to the second half of the game) and while a lot of people hated the tone shift, other people loved it. For this rewrite I’m going to assume that the escalation from Silent Hill straight horror to Resident Evil action horror is a worthwhile artistic goal, since it takes the player on an arc from being helpless before the monsters to strong enough to confront the most deadly of them all, and even does so in a way that relies more on the player learning about the Red Light rather than simply getting bigger guns. You do learn about the Red Light by reading someone else’s notes rather than with any kind of experimentation, but that still carries the theme of brewing up a bespoke weapon to defeat him, not just using a rocket launcher.

So that’s four objectives a rewrite needs to hit:

-Why did the cult build this hotel?
-Who is Gasmask Girl?
-Who/what is the Red Light?
-Where did the camera come from?

Continue reading “Fobia Rewritten” →

Fobia is a first-person survival horror game about being trapped inside a haunted hotel with a bunch of monsters. The game is a love letter to at least two different survival horror franchises, those being Silent Hill and Resident Evil, and there’s mechanics with a camera that lets you interact with some kind of parallel universe or something which might be inspired by Fatal Frame, but I haven’t played any of those games so I don’t know. I know enough about Fatal Frame to know that Fobia isn’t lifting anything wholesale, but I’d miss the subtle similarities to Resident Evil and Silent Hill if I weren’t more familiar with those franchises.

My fears that the name was Welsh proved unfounded – the game actually takes place somewhere in Brazil. You are a journalist staying at the titular hotel while investigating the mysterious happenings about town. Your contact in the town never meets you, and a strange black hole looking thing knocks you out. When you awaken, the hotel is in ruins, overrun with strange monsters, and there’s some kind of cult involved because of course there is.

The similarities to Silent Hill are partly in that they have their very own Pyramid Head knock-off boogeyman and partly in that you can use the camera parallel universe thing to walk through a hole that was here but now it’s gone. The game particularly takes inspiration from the playable trailer for Silent Hills, and while a lot of those inspirations could also be taken from Resident Evil VII, the game is full of Hideo Kojima references. The main ghost early on is the “gasmask girl,” and while not every spooky person in a mask is necessarily a Psycho Mantis reference, the game goes on to have a gear puzzles that requires you to gather up three metal gears. “Metal gear” is their actual name in the inventory, even though you’d think the metal nature of the gear would go without saying.

Fobia evidently wants to make sure anyone who’s paying attention knows that it’s here to put a moratorium on the whole Why Did Silent Hills Have To Die?! genre by not just aping the trailer itself, but trying to make the game it was a trailer for – a survival horror game. There are ghost train bits in Fobia, especially early on, but there’s also puzzles and combat. The puzzles are fun to figure out, though not very difficult and often bizarre and inexplicable (good to see Trevor & Chamberlain is still getting work), and the combat is exactly the kind of slow, resource-hungry thing that it should be. The standard enemy of the game is the zombie, whose exposed heart forms a weakspot. You can kill a zombie with just three or four pistol bullets if you aim carefully, but of course, it’s hard to do that while they’re lurching towards you to claw your face off, and it can take 10-15 bullets if you’re spammy with them.

About 80% of the game takes place in the hotel, and that part is really good. You slowly explore the hotel and unlock new routes to new places and shortcuts to old ones, revisiting old locations with new tools to find new secrets. It’s another affirmation that almost every genre is improved by also being a Metroidvania, and survival horror in particular has an obvious benny to give out to players who discover secrets, since limiting ammo and healing to the point where you might actually run out is a key part of the genre.

Fobia’s not without its flaws. It uses the survival horror style save system, where you can only save at certain points, and there’s just no reason to do that in the modern world. The tension of being far from a save point is a real thing that games like Dark Souls use to their advantage (although even then, there’s more to it than just having limited checkpoints), but it grates badly against the kind of immersive horror that the survival horror genre aims for. Thinking of save files and how long it’ll take to redo all the progress you’re liable to lose if you die in a boss fight isn’t scary at all.

The game over screen is so perfunctory that it looks like a placeholder, which is a pretty forgivable offense for a genre where actually killing the player is usually ill-advised, but then those boss fights are liable to do just that. They’re not extremely hard, but the bosses are absolute bullet sponges, and if there’s enough ammo in the boss arenas to kill the bosses, it has to be exactly enough, because I found that going into a fight without a decent bit of ammo to start meant I would lose not by running out of health, but by running out of bullets. There’s no melee attacks to use as a backup, so if you’re out of bullets, you are done fighting. In normal combats, you can run away and rearm, or tank a bit of damage while squeezing past an enemy to reach your destination. In a boss fight, you’re locked in the arena, so if you’re out of ammo, you may as well load a save.

The worst problem is probably the inventory system. You have limited inventory slots, but ammo and healing items all stack while puzzle items, being unique, do not. So rather than asking you how much health versus ammo you want to pack, already not much of a choice due to the lack of a melee attack which means that if you run out of ammo you may as well headbutt a railroad spike anyway, all the inventory slot system really does is force you to go back and forth between a storage chest any time you need to swap out puzzle items.

Plus, the last 20% of the game takes place in a secret underground bioweapons lab (there’s that Resident Evil influence breaking in) completely disconnected from the hotel map. I think the idea is that this would be a final gauntlet to cap off the game? But I’d spent the entire rest of the game navigating the nine floors of the hotel, and while a cellar level had been implied before (restoring floor buttons to a damaged elevator is a mechanic for unlocking shortcuts, and there’s room on the panel for basement levels – although it turns out you don’t actually use that elevator to go there), it’s much bigger than I expected, totally detached from the rest of the hotel I’d been exploring, and noticeably harder.

Difficulty spikes are always a dangerous thing. I’m much more forgiving of a game’s rough edges if it’s easy, because it means I can roll over the bland parts without much thought and linger on the good bits. If the bland parts are also hard, they demand time and focus, and the last thing a developer should want is players spending time and focus on the parts of the game which are bad.

The ending is pretty lackluster, as well. I didn’t really have any idea what was going on at the end. The backstory of the main villain Christopher was pretty well explained, as is the deal with this game’s boogeyman, but Stephanie’s motivations are opaque. Why is she searching for the main character by his initials (she doesn’t even seem to know he’s male), and since we know she isn’t following any other character’s agenda, what is her actual goal? Where did the camera come from, who left all the “we are connected by a camera” messages on the walls, and was the player character the intended recipient of those messages? Does the camera connect the player to 1960 or to an alternate 2010 (the year the game takes place, for some reason)? The camera’s version of the prison beneath the hotel looks the same as what we see in the 1960 prologue, but the camera also shows lots of smart phones and modern computer monitors, a bunch of hotel damage that presumably only occurred during the outbreak, and sometimes (including the time when the mechanic is introduced) displays gaping holes in the architecture that aren’t there in normal vision, all of which suggests that the hotel is in a similar but distinct warzone state rather than being tied to 1960.

The identity of Gasmask Girl is technically revealed, but Gasmask Girl’s actions don’t make any sense in the context of her true identity. If she has an existing personal relationship with the player character and is locked in a deadly struggle with Christopher to be the only psychic god on Earth, why the fuck does she spend the first fifteen minutes of the game haunting you ghost train style? What is Christopher’s ultimate plan? He clearly wants to prevent Gasmask Girl from becoming a psychic rival, but he’s also got some kind of chip on his shoulder about free will. Presumably something relevant to “if we redefine free will to mean something stupid, then we don’t have free will!” idea that is somehow considered a defensible philosophical position, but what does Christopher think he can do about that (and this question is particularly hard to solve because there’s no getting around how stupid the philosophical “dilemma” is when you start asking what would change if people had “free will” accoridng to the stupid definition – presumably people would start taking actions totally at random, not influenced by their environment or their own personality, and this would be good somehow?)?

A check over the internet suggests no one else has figured any of this out, either, and I’m not convinced that the developers actually have answers. It’s possible that they do have it all worked out, but stuck to the Silent Hill method of lore-that-requires-deciphering so hard that there’s not actually sufficient clues in the game for anyone to figure out what’s going on. But it’s also possible that they had a vague idea of what’s going on (Christopher and Gasmask Girl locked in psychic power struggle, protagonist stuck in time loop) but a lot of the details of the time loop got away from them and they were running out of money or the parts of the game they’d already developed had too many contradictory loose ends to tie together or they just gave up on untangling the knot and shipped a game with a nonsense plot.

What plot elements are nailed down in the game as it is have a lot in common with President Evil’s lore explanation for the original Silent Hill. There is a small child with supernatural powers who is battling a sinister cult (in Silent Hill, Alessa is supposed to birth a dark god but doesn’t wanna, in Fobia, Gasmask Girl has psychic powers related to Christopher’s and he’s trying to contain her so that he will be the only psychic god on Earth), the child has a personal connection to the protagonist through supernatural shenanigans (the protagonist’s daughter is the reincarnation of Alessa, and Gasmask Girl is the protagonist’s daughter from the future with psychic time travel powers), there’s a time loop in Silent Hill according to President Evil’s explanation, which posits that the New Game+ is actually diegetic, and it is explicitly the case in one of Fobia’s two endings that you are kicked back to the start of the game for a diegetic New Game+.

I believe President Evil’s interpreation of the first Silent Hill is not accurate to what the developers originally intended. Rather, I think Team Silent made a vague game about a sinister cult torturing a child to birth an evil god and didn’t bother keeping track of the details much while also littering the game with references to their favorite horror authors, and the sheer density of references allowed President Evil to pull in basically as many new plot elements as he needed to make the story make sense under the guise of the references being obtuse clues. That’s not to say that I think President Evil did this on purpose – I think he naively assumed that Team Silent had an actual plot figured out (rather than a vibe), and Team Silent had left enough references to other horror media lying around that he was able to assemble a theory.

Does anyone still have that guy’s email? We’ve got another job for him.

Hero’s Hour is an indie game that’s basically Heroes of Might and Magic but for mobile, except then for PC again. It’s got pixel art so it can squeeze under 1GB and fit into the spare space next to all your photos and videos and stuff, and while its interface was resized for PC and isn’t obnoxiously massive on a monitor, it does come across like it was designed for a smaller screen. I borrowed a disc of Heroes of Might and Magic from a friend for a bit in Elementary school and then never played it again after I gave it back –

Okay, actually, brief aside, because I can’t let this story go past without expressing some rancor. I actually traded for the game with a game called Lego Island that I couldn’t get working on my family PC anyway. The kid I traded with gave me a burned copy of HoMM II, and when my babysitter at the time found it, she pressured me into trading it back because I’d given away an original copy of a game for a burned disc and the dipshit thought I’d been scammed. Of course, if you think about it for all of two seconds, you realize that what I’d actually done is given away a game that doesn’t work on my PC anyway (and as an eight year old I had absolutely no hope of upgrading) and in exchange got a copy of a game which both worked and was also much better. While it was indeed pretty shady of the other kid to trade outright for a burned disc instead of throwing in a burned copy of the original Lego Island game after the fact so that we both get both games, the deal he offered me was still a good one from my perspective, regardless of the other kid’s ability to offer a better one at trivial cost.

Plus, what I didn’t realize until afterwards is that fucking obviously the other kid burned a copy of Lego Island before giving the original disc back to me in exchange for the burned copy of HoMM II, so it’s not like this was even preventing him from benefiting from his arbitrage (and if that was the goal, then I should’ve been told to demand a copy of Lego Island, since he’s clearly capable of making them), nor did it impede his piracy in any way (I didn’t even know he was planning to trade me a burned copy until we made the trade and he still wound up with copies of both games – the only one who lost anything was me, the one who bought Lego Island with my allowance money and then traded it fair and square). Fighting piracy was certainly not the motive regardless, because that babysitter promised to work out how to burn a copy of Lego Island so that we could trade copies instead of an original for the copy, and then she didn’t. I was moving to the other side of the state in just a few weeks and she knew it, so the time window on this was pretty narrow. I wish I’d tried just hiding the HoMM II copy and lying about having traded it back. I wouldn’t have been able to present the Lego Island disc as proof, but maybe she wouldn’t have called my bluff, and even if she had, there was relatively little she could’ve done about it.

Anyways, the relevant point of all this is that I did play HoMM II as a kid, but not very much, so I know how the games work but am certainly not a good perspective on how Hero’s Hour holds up to that series’ highlights (although I am given to understand that the last few games have been garbage). I don’t know how the balance of Hero’s Hour factions compares, or if the units are more or less noticeably distinct, or if the different heroes have more gameplay variety, or whatever. What I can say is that there’s enough overlap between different heroes and factions that none of them feel super distinct from each other after sinking a few hours into the game.

I can’t even properly remember how long a single HoMM II scenario took to complete or how far into it I got, so I have no idea if the name “Hero’s Hour” refers to how the game is usually over in just an hour (or two), i.e. it’s Heroes (of Might and Magic) in an hour, or if HoMM was always like that and “Hero’s Hour” was just a cool sounding name that gets the fantasy vibe across while helping to identify the game as a HoMM successor. But certainly it is cool that the games only last about an hour or two. You can’t quite squeeze it into a lunch break, but you can squeeze it into an afternoon. I suspect that Hero’s Hour is much faster than HoMM because it has realtime battles, which means they tend to be over in about 3 minutes, and even titanic clashes usually take no more than 5-10 minutes. Going turn-based, I can easily imagine HoMM battles lasting 30 minutes if both armies are large enough.

Unfortunately, there’s not any kind of campaign released yet, and they’ve already pumped out one DLC, so it seems like there isn’t one planned. There definitely was one planned at some point, because the level editor has campaign dialogue in it, but no actual playable campaign. There’s some worldbuilding if you dig through the game’s codex, and each faction has twelve different named heroes (six unique ability trees each of which has two heroes associated with it), with a very fun and satisfying diversity in fantasy creatures between them. Like, the theme of the Arcane faction is being all wizardly and most of their heroes are humans, but that doesn’t stop them from having a lion person. A campaign that explored who all these characters are and their relationships with each other (even if those relationships are relatively simple and one note – he is a lion man with unyielding courage! She is a cunning sorceress queen! Together, they fight crime!) would be a lot of fun, although doing it for all twelve would certainly be a challenge.

You would want each scenario to introduce an average of probably about two new characters each. You’d have some scenarios that introduce four new heroes at once, introducing two new characters in the protagonist faction and two new characters in the antagonist faction, but you’d have others that introduce just one or even zero, so I think two is a safe average. With twelve heroes each across twelve factions (not counting the DLC faction), that’s about 72 scenarios. That’s over three times as many scenarios as HoMM II, over twice as many scenarios as StarCraft or Age of Empires (Age of Empires II is probably a better comparison for that general era, but the eight billion expansion campaigns that game has received in its 2010s revival era has made it annoying to look up which campaigns were original – most wikis and guides sort them by continent, the way the Definitive Edition of the game does). The game does have a level editor, and I’d considered trying to make some campaign scenarios myself, but unfortunately I find the controls for setting up things like “the first time the player enters this area, display this text” to be pretty difficult and clunky to work with. I may circle back and try it at some point, but I don’t have any immediate plans to do so now I’ve worked with the game’s tools.