Category: Video Games

I’ve been meaning to sit down and write this for at least a week or so now. The thing is, when I’m not at work or doing something else important like cooking or sleeping, I’m playing Marathon.

In an earlier post, I mentioned Arc Raiders as a game that I tried and kind of liked. I liked the environment; I liked the aesthetic; I liked the sounds. It just didn’t have the “juice”. Playing it didn’t get me excited or anything. A successful exfil didn’t make me look forward to jumping back in, and getting killed didn’t make me want to try harder next time.

But Marathon… I played during the Server Slam and it tickled all the right parts of my brain. The environments are cool. The aesthetic is incredibly stylish. Grabbing some loot just makes me want to go try to get more. Getting killed just makes me want to try again. (Ok, getting killed like five times in a row really blows, but I’m getting to where that doesn’t happen as much.)

The classes feel really different, but not wildly so. I started out playing Recon because I liked having a little spider drone that jumps on enemies, but that’s about it. You get informed when someone else pings you, but if you’re not good enough to do anything about that, well… Then I switched to Triage, and tossing healing drones at your teammates is great. You can help a squad a lot by just keeping everyone put together or getting them back in the fight. (Because it’s an extraction shooter, it’s not quite the same as, say, being a Medic in Battlefield, but there are similar vibes. There’s also a defibrillator that can EMP enemies!)

There aren’t a lot of maps right now, but the ones there are pretty varied. Perimeter feels like a typical sort of video game map. Some open spaces and buildings with some verticality to them. Dire Marsh has more wide open spaces. Outpost funnels everyone into close quarters. (I have no idea really about Cryo Archive; I didn’t run it last week – maybe this week.)

There’s a ranked mode, but… why? (I mean, I know why – because some people don’t just want to have the best loot; they want a little tag that says they’re the best so they can put “Top 5 Assassin” in the title of their Twitch stream or whatever.) You don’t need a rank to know when you’re doing well, though. If all your gear is blue and purple, you’re winning.

But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. Since it is an extraction shooter, you can lose stuff. Losing stuff sucks. The game mitigates it somewhat by both letting you go on runs without stuff (either by using free kits or playing as Rook, which is kind of like a Scav run in Tarkov) and by giving you some more stuff when you level up, which you can do without successfully exfiltrating sometimes.

And some players will just cause you problems because they can. “There are only 3 minutes left; there’s no way a squad is still camping that room. They have to get out, too.” Haha, no, those assholes are ABSOLUTELY camping that room, just to be dicks. Possibly just to be dicks to YOU. (Probably not, but who knows?) “Oh, that squad is exfiltrating; they won’t mind if I slip in there and get out with them.” Oh, they mind, and they will gangbang you and strip you clean.

Sometimes, you can’t accomplish anything at all. You just fill into bad squad after bad squad that isn’t communicating, or is basically just doing solo runs in the trios queue. But when you get a good squad (either just randomly or that you found via another community)… man does it feel good. Completing your mission; completing someone else’s mission; finding a big stack of the salvage you’re looking for – it really squeezes some dopamine into you. (Out of you? I don’t know how it works.)

The guns are varied, but sometimes I look at my vault full of guns and the one I really want to use is one I don’t have at the moment. It works, though; there are weapons for long range and close quarters and in between, and mods that can tweak them more to your liking. It’s a Bungie game; at this point, you know going in it’s going to feel good to play. Halo was good. Destiny was good. (Still is, at least at its core mechanics, or so I’m told.)

It’ll give you wonderful highs, and punishing lows, but they’re both satisfying. A lot of the time, just matching into a squad is trash, though, and finding people to run with when you’re behind on missions or lower-level is hard. It has all the baggage of extraction shooters, although so far it doesn’t quite have the toxicity of Tarkov. (It also absolutely does NOT have the cooperative vibes of Arc Raiders. Sometimes you might be able to find a Rook that’ll cooperate with another Rook, or maybe a squad is happy to find an ally, but if you run up expecting to not have a fight, you’re gonna have a bad time.)

I’ve had some great runs. I’ve had some terrible runs. I’ve had some sessions where I can’t even put together a run. The game’s only been out for three weeks, and I’ve played it for 28 hours, and I can’t wait for a chance to play more.

I guess it’s fine.

Several posts ago, I mentioned Arc Raiders as a game I might get into. I played their Server Slam (or whatever they called their demo weekend) and had a decent time, but then I never picked up the game. As I read more about it, it seemed fine, but people were progressing through it quickly, so jumping in later seemed like a bad time. Now it has (basically) dedicated PvP or PvE queues, which sounds nice, but also kind of boring. The world of the game was nice. It’s very distinct; everything really does feel cobbled together out of scraps. The enemies come in pretty distinct forms. It’s all-in-all a nice time. I just never felt “grabbed,” you know?

A couple of weeks ago, I played the Marathon Server Slam. Visually, it’s incredible. The sounds in the game are immersive to the point of being almost a downside. (Was that lightning or some sort of energy weapon? Is that robot I hear a UESC guard, another runner, or my squadmate? (Or me?) Is that banging in the next room someone looting, someone shooting, or just a machine running?) Overall, it went ok. I had some good runs, and I had some terrible runs. However, each terrible run made me say “damn, wanna try one more?” Maybe it’s just because I found people to play with (some via online communities, and some just organically in the game), but even everything falling apart and losing a pile of gear doesn’t make me want to quit, like it kind of did with Arc. I’ve basically put my other games aside for the time, so my last week or so has been work, curling, watching wrestling, and playing Marathon. Time I would spend in the evening idly searching YouTube for things to watch is now doing terrible runs on Tau Ceti IV.

The rest of the player base is progressing much faster. The parts I want/need to do for missions, everyone is already past. That’s a little bit of a pain. Luckily, I think some new people are still joining the game, so there are still people early in the progression. Or maybe people are just not playing as frequently. I hope I don’t just end up hopelessly behind until the season resets. (And I hope whatever I miss due to not being ready for it before season reset isn’t just gone forever.)

Is Sony going to kill off Bungie because the game isn’t selling billions? I hope not! Is the game going to last as long as Escape From Tarkov? Probably not. (Although technically, Tarkov just released in November, despite being in alpha/beta/whatever early versions since like 2016.)

It’s frustrating. It’s exciting. It’s incomprehensible. It’s beautiful. It’s weird. It’s fun.

It’s fine.

After finishing Expedition 33, I started Cyberpunk 2077 (because it’s in the Game Catalog on PlayStation Plus) and it seems fine. I’ll get back to it eventually because cyberpunk (with a small c) is cool and this particular instance has some fun vibes. However, this post is about a bunch of games I was looking forward to all coming out around the same time. One of them, I purchased and am playing. The others, I played demos or betas and might purchase, depending on… I don’t know.

First, the one I actually bought and am playing is Borderlands 4. I’m maybe like a third of the way through it so far, and… [drum roll]
… it’s fine. So far, I would put it as better than 3 (most people seem to not have liked 3 all that much, but I enjoyed it), but not as good as 2. Some parts of it are incredibly annoying (like the various “carry quests” that require toting around an item that uses a hand, so you can’t aim down sights or grapple or various other movements you’re very used to, or, to me, things like waves of enemies spawning in pretty much every time you go anywhere, but I’m aware it’s a shooter game with weird guns so enemies popping up everywhere to kill with your weird guns is kind of the point) but most of it ranges from “kind of entertaining” to “pretty fun.”

The story is kind of dumb, but it’s Borderlands, and “kind of dumb” is basically what the franchise is all about. Because it’s doing the “open world” thing, the enemies and missions scale to your level, so you don’t really get to experience the “look how powerful you are now” bit because the enemies constantly get a little tankier or hit harder, which definitely takes away a lot of the allure, but also helps keep the random waves of fodder that pop up everywhere from being boring. It does keep them from being ignorable, too, though, which is a pain when you’re actually trying to go somewhere.

It’s enjoyable enough. I’ll finish it in time.

The next one to talk about is Battlefield 6. I have not purchased this one, but I did play an open beta, and I had a pretty good time. I’m part of an online community that used to play (among other things) a lot of Battlefield 4, and this pretty quickly brought back a lot of those vibes. I also have some “real-life friends” (wow, that’s weird to type) who play and they’re trying to get me into it, and… maybe. The game does have a single-player campaign, but I’m not terribly interested in it, and while the multiplayer isn’t bad and doesn’t really require any sort of grinding, I also don’t really see myself playing it all that much, and so I’m not sure that I want to spend 70 dollars on it. Maybe if it goes on sale or someone gives me a gift card or something. (Or my next trip to a casino is a win, but not a big enough win to do something like buy a new coat or furniture. Like maybe winning a hundred bucks on slots or something?)

And the third one is sort of a sleeper hit to me, and that it’s a game that I’m not “supposed to” like, but I played the most recent tech demo and had a pretty good time. That game is Arc Raiders – an “extraction shooter” (in quotes because there are gaming bloggers and vloggers commenting that it’s not really an extraction shooter) which is a… genre? game mode? style? whatever… that I don’t really like. Or at least, I don’t like the idea of. I’ve never played Tarkov (god it looks so sweaty and toxic) but I was kind of looking forward to Marathon before the whole art fiasco and Riloe on YouTube has me intrigued about the game Beautiful Light (which doesn’t release for another year), so I’m not entirely against the idea of a “get in, get thing, and get out” game.

Arc Raiders is very stylish. The sound and environments are very nice, and while it has the “stakes” of an extraction shooter (if you get killed, you lose whatever you were carrying), you can get a free loadout to jump in whenever, and unless you’re really going hard, most of the “loot” you get is gonna be junk like batteries and other scrap. Your best gear is going to be stuff you assemble in your base, and if you lose it, you’ll probably be able to build more. From what I’ve seen so far, the community is pretty chill, too, and yelling “hey, friendly!” on proximity chat seems to mostly get people to chill. The enemies (the PvE enemies, that is, not the other players) are really neat, too. They’re mostly things like aerial drones with realistic physics and stuff so you can send them careening off or crashing by disabling one rotor on a quadcopter. I’m thinking I’m going to buy this one, but mainly because it’s only $40, and I think I can get at least that much entertainment out of it.

And that’s just shooter games. Europa Universalis V just released, and I kind of want to play that a bunch, too. I like(d) Stellaris and Victoria 3 is/was pretty interesting, too. I might just be getting hooked by YouTubers who are able to be entertaining while playing it.

And that’s not even including the huge games that I’m not interested in, like Silksong, or… I don’t know, whatever else people are playing right now. (I was going to say Call of Duty, but I checked and the newest one isn’t out yet.)

So yeah, find your self a game or two. It’ll be fine.

Ok, here’s the post about E33. I finished (at least, the story and rolled credits) this last weekend, so here’s the deal.

First of all, if I had to sum it up in one word, that word would probably be “beautiful.” The environments are varied and gorgeous, the characters are wonderfully depicted, and the music is absolutely perfect. (Although I’m told that if you know French, the soundtrack spoils the rest of the game while you play it. I can’t confirm that, because I don’t know French.)

The story is wonderfully told (although I won’t spoil any of it here, because you either won’t get it, are still planning to play the game and don’t want to know yet, or already know) and every beat perfectly pulls you along to the next segment. I had been mildly spoiled on parts of it, but they still hit because of the way certain segments are delivered.

HOWEVER

As your characters level up, they gain stats, but the vast majority of their stats come from their equipped “Pictos”, various trinkets you find that boost one or two stats and give the character an extra ability to go with it. Then, after having a Picto equipped for four battles, you earn the “Lumina” that lets you have the ability even without the Picto equipped. You pay for “Lumina” with “Colors of Lumina” (actually, you pay with “Lumina Points” that you earn by spending Colors of Lumina, but I’m condensing somewhat) and each character gets their own pool of Lumina.

You also find new weapons for your characters, and you find higher level weapons as you go, but you can also use “Chroma Catalysts” to increase the levels of weapons. The higher you’re trying to make the level, the more catalysts you need, and above certain level cutoffs, you need not just more, but an entirely different kind. (There are Chroma Catalysts (that only work up to level 3), then Polished Chroma Catalysts (that work up to level 9), Resplendent Chroma Catalysts (that work up to level 19), and Grandiose Chroma Catalysts (that work up to level 32). There are also Perfect Chroma Catalysts that you use specifically to go from 32 to 33, but you (I guess) only encounter those in the like post-post-game (or maybe in New Game+), since I got my weapons up to like level 23 (which is separate from the character levels which were just under 70) and that was plenty.)

Then there are skill points! To be fair, any game with any sort of character progression has skill points and skill trees, so that’s whatever, but it’s not just like you spend your points and then you have skills. I mean, you can and do, but then you can only have 6 skills equipped, so you end up switching skills around as you unlock more, and then switching Pictos around because each character can only equip 3 at a time, all trying to make sure to synergize your weapon with your skills and Pictos and the enemies’ weaknesses… sometimes, it’s a bit much.

And the combat is turn-based. That’s not really a knock against it, because JRPGs have turn-based combat and everyone loves those. (I mean, I don’t, but maybe I do? I really liked Super Mario RPG, but I never played any Final Fantasy games or Chrono Trigger.) I do know one person that doesn’t want to play E33 because of turn-based combat. I think that person should just get over it, but I get it. There’s only so much time to play games, so you gotta stick to the ones you think are fun.

And this one was fun. It was gorgeous and transcendently scored. You really do feel powerful as you progress, and I legitimately felt emotions during some of the cutscenes. Trying to decide how to spec your characters is a bit of a chore, but eventually, it just becomes a big pile of options you don’t want/need and then a handful that speak to you. It’s kind of a pain, but it also means you can play however you want. There’s an incredibly high difficulty ceiling, but everything on the main path is pretty manageable.

It’s beautiful, enthralling, emotional, tedious, aggravating, challenging, fun… It’s fine…

…and it’s probably game of the year.