Tag Archives: RPGs

Pig Papillomas Patrimony

I’m slightly too old to have been one of those Harry Potter kids, but I begrudgingly checked out the first movie when it was relatively new and already massively popular, and despite my skepticism, I actually enjoyed it. That led to me eventually watching them all, many times, including several in the theater, reading and/or listening to all the books, and having way more fun than any middle aged man should admit to with The Wizarding World of Harry Potter stuff at Universal Orlando. My partner, a bit younger than me and more in-line with the age to have been enraptured by it as a kid, is similarly afflicted. When Hogwarts Legacy came out and started getting a lot of acclaim, she ended up picking up a copy. I figured she’d love it because on top of loving Harry Potter, she’s played plenty of open world games, but while she didn’t bounce off it, the gameplay didn’t quite hook her either. After a few sessions she lost interest. I, on the other hand, liked what I saw and added it to my backlog. It had been a while since I’ve played a game of this sort, and feeling in the mood for one, one day I dusted it off and jumped in.

“There it is, Hogwarts Castle.”

First, I should say that the game looks (and sounds) quite beautiful. The developers did a bang-up job realizing the world. While I’ve not played even a single other Harry Potter related game so I can’t really compare it to previous efforts, I can say that a lot of love and care was put into crafting the world, particularly Hogwarts itself. It’s huge and absolutely brimming with secrets and insane details, so much so that not being able to find my way around eventually started to get a little old. Thank Ignatia Wildsmith for Floo Flames, eh? Seeing Hogsmeade at Christmas time was another highlight. Unless you’re simply not a Harry Potter fan, this all goes a long, long way all by itself. Overall, the game feels very competently made, and while I wasn’t really familiar with Avalanche Software before this, they’re now very much on my radar. I’m impressed!

As for the gameplay, after you get through the introduction which sets up the main story of the campaign, you’re finally plopped down in Hogwarts. From there on, the game consists of an open world where you can more or less do anything you want, with most quest triggered by approaching the relevant NPC and chatting with them. Of those quests, the main story related quests tend to be much more linear and focused, and of course, include quite a few cutscenes. The rest are a bit more of the variety you’d usually find in an open world game, with some being a bit more involved than others. There are also quests related to going to your classes, though these are usually more like cutscenes which usually lead to special assignments from your professors that result in the opportunity to learn new spells. All of the main story quests, classes, and some of the more notable side and relationship quests are grouped together so that you need to complete everything in the group to unlock the next main quest, and completing that will unlock the next group of quests. This actually works quite well in ensuring that you don’t skip anything too important to the overall story.

“Correct answer. Get fucked, Gryffindor!”

Combat is action RPG focused, mostly consisting of your spammable basic cast and more interesting spells which are on cooldown timers. There’s not really a mana system or anything like that; as long as a spell isn’t on its cooldown, you can use it, and the more spells you have, the less you need to use your basic cast while waiting around for other spells to become available again. It’s all pretty straightforward. One of the funnest and amusingly weird things about the game is how incredibly violent combat actually is. You have a huge selection of spells by the end, but even the most mundane ones you have at the beginning are pretty brutal. Levitate someone so they’re helplessly flapping around in the air, then shoot the shit out of them, then pull them closer to you, still keeping them floating, then push them away, violently slamming them into a wall. You can “juggle” them like that for quite a while too, although I prefer using some of the interesting spells you get later instead. I mean, why not burn them alive in the process as well? While I think the spells are represented accurately enough, seeing them actually used like this doesn’t quite fit the tone of Harry Potter. This might turn some off, but as I said, I find it darkly humorous.

You know, early on, I came to the realization that between the over the top, whimsical British vibes and this particular style of the open world action RPG gameplay, Hogwarts Legacy actually reminded me quite a lot of the Fable games, particularly Fable II. Of course, combat aside, a bit less over the top. I mean, there’s no farting to impress prostitutes in Hogwarts Legacy, but I guess we can’t have it all. (/s) Searching around a bit, I definitely don’t seem to be the only person who saw the similarities, and I’m quite curious about how much the upcoming Fable game is going to end up resembling Hogwarts Legacy when it’s released.

“Torturing a Mountain Troll and not feeling too bad about it.”

One big difference between Hogwarts Legacy and the Fables games is that there’s no morality system in this game at all. You’re supposed to be a student at Hogwarts but by the time the campaign is over you’ll probably have brutally murdered hundreds of dark wizards, poachers, and beasts, trespassed everywhere, and stolen everything not nailed down and no one, absolutely no one, cares. Nowhere is this more clear when it comes to “unforgivable curses”. Yes, you can learn some of the infamous, highly illegal spells that only dark wizards use. You can agonizingly torture someone with Crucio right in front of other students and even teachers and no one bats an eye. You can even learn Avada Kedavra (the killing curse, which instantly kills a target) later too. Yep, met with a shrug by everyone around. It’s hilarious!

The main quests take you all over the map, from very familiar locations like Hogwarts itself, Hogsmeade, and the Forbidden Forest, to innumerable tiny hamlets, ruins, caves, dungeons, and other points of interest. In fact, this relates to my another complaint about the game. I wouldn’t say its absolutely massive, but I do think the world is too big for this game. It would have been better to tighten the map up to just the notable areas from the books and maybe a small number of hamlets and specific side quest locations. Instead, this game takes the opposite approach and fills a pretty large area with a number of random puzzles and collectibles. Like I said, it’s been a bit since I’ve played an open world game like this, so I went kind of OCD trying to do and collect everything. This was mostly pretty fun, but the game did start to feel a bit like a massive checklist outside of the quests.

“Flying a Hippogriff at night, Hogwarts Express below.”

At least you can fly around the map, and I have to say, I love the way flying a broom feels in this game. Some may complain about the lack of maneuverability, but to me it looks and feels exactly like it’s portrayed in the movies. My only real complaint is that they somehow neglected to include Quidditch. I suppose adding an entire sports game inside of the already content rich main game was just too heavy of a lift for Avalanche Software, but it does feel like a bit of an oversight, even if there is a flimsy in-game excuse for why the season was cancelled.

There are a lot of other diversions, from growing and gathering herbs and other spell ingredients to brew potions with, to decorating your own magical “room of requirement” space, and even capturing and breeding beasts. I put around 70 hours into the game and while I got pretty close, even with my compulsion to check all of those boxes, I still didn’t 100% the game. I wanted to, but there was just too damn much to do, even though I was still having fun with the game.

“Trying to make a Kneazle like me in my Care of Magical Creatures class.”

Overall, quite an enjoyable game, and yes, I will definitely be paying attention to the details on its sequel as more are revealed. Part of me is kind of surprised that it’s getting one, as after the initial hype died down, it seemed like everyone stopped talking about the game. Then again, it was the global best-selling video game of 2023. Who knew?!

Diabolic

While StarCraft: Remastered seems to be pretty well regarded, not all of Blizzard’s efforts to rejuvenate their older games have been so successful. With that in mind, I was highly skeptical of Diablo II: Resurrected. It was only after hearing great things about the title from some trusted podcasters that I decided to check it out, and even then it was kind of a random, impulsive install. Regardless, I found myself getting hooked by the gameplay and story despite having played through it so many times before.

“Playing a fire build was a good choice with this new lighting engine.”

In short, this remastered version looks, sounds, and plays exactly how you probably remember it from back in 2000 and 2001, but the ability to dynamically toggle the graphics between the old and the new really shows just how faulty our memories can be. Knowing that the game was remastered had me engaged, trying to spot little changes and differences, and likely mistaking a lot of things I’d simply long forgotten as enhancements. I got so hooked, I ended up buying it for my Xbox Series X as well to give playing with with a controller a spin, utilizing the cross-save feature to swap between platforms whenever my mood demanded it. I didn’t play much further than the first act, but I was very impressed by the craftsmanship put into this new version, and while most of the potential to modernize some of the more dated features was skipped in favor of staying faithful to the original game, it’s hard to fault that. I’ll return to Diablo II: Resurrected one of these days, but the main reason I bailed so early was because I knew more exciting things were on the horizon.

I didn’t pay much attention to Diablo IV until relatively close to its release, when I started hearing positive things from those lucky enough to try the game during preview events. Blizzard had a couple of “server slam” stress test weekends a few months before release, and I managed to get into the very last one and try the game out for a few hours myself. I preordered the game shortly after that. That’s how much I enjoyed it.

“Fending off a horde of skeletons.”

Diablo IV feels, in many ways, like a love letter to Diablo II. Something of a “what if” scenario where Diablo III never happened, and the team that made Diablo II and Lord of Destruction immediately dove into developing a sequel, only after the entire studio was somehow transported 20 years into the future. This has positive and negative connotations. On the positive side, the game is an absolute return to the dark, moody tone of Diablo II. While maybe slightly less bleak, it pulls no punches in terms of showing the grim and gory world of a Sanctuary under the influence of evil: you’ll find far more corpses laying around randomly, piled in stacks, hanging from trees, and impaled on spikes than living NPCs, for example. This is also reflected in the graphical style, which resembles the 2D pixel art of Diablo II far more than the more stylized, simpler 3D models of Diablo III. The series’ sound design and particularly its music has always been consistent with what was established with the original Diablo, and Diablo IV feels continues this trend with a lot of direct throwbacks to those classic sound effects and compositions.

While I have seen the odd accusation of the game looking dated, I suspect that this is largely a side effect of trying to translate Diablo II’s look into 3D. I’m a fan. Besides the underwhelming character creator, my only nitpick is that I wish I could zoom the camera out just a tiny bit more, and we know it’s possible as many of the game’s cool in-engine cutscenes play with the camera, sometimes leaving it zoomed out further than normal. The prerendered cutscenes are absolutely amazing too, but we expect nothing less from Blizzard at this point. The aforementioned sound and especially music are masterfully executed as well. One of my telltale signs that a game has good music is when I actually notice it and stop to enjoy it, which I did more than once during my playthrough of Diablo IV’s campaign. So, that’s all good then, what about the story?

“I admit it, I kind of love Lilith.”

As a random wanderer, your character stumbles across a village that has been recently taken over by the influence of the demon Lilith. You soon meet up with some allies and the investigation of Lilith’s plot, with the eventual goal of stopping her entirely, guides the rest of your adventure. Lilith is very interesting antagonist in that, unlike your usual demonic invaders, while sure, there’s definitely an evil corruption at play, her charisma and the dogma she imparts seems to do just as much of the heavy lifting as she builds a following of humans rather than the usual shtick of simply wanting to wipe them out. In fact, she claims to want to save Sanctuary from further destruction by the machinations of and conflict between Heaven and Hell. Of course, that would mean her coming out on top, and who knows at what cost, so perhaps she’s actually just full of shit, but I like that she always comes across as a little sympathetic, and her true nature is always left at least a little ambiguous. I also loved the concept of the angel Inarius, banished to Sanctuary where a religion forms around him. In a twist to fans of the previous games, Inarius is not really an ally to your character in any real sense, and while he’s an important part of the story (particularly the backstory) he’s barely featured. Neat stuff, though the way it all wraps up comes about as close to begging for an expansion or at least a proper sequel as you can get without the story feeling unfinished.

Diablo IV also all but pretends that many of the revelations that came from Diablo III’s story didn’t happen. I don’t believe there was a single mention of Nephalem, for instance. In fact, the only real connections I picked up on (although, it has been quite a few years since playing Diablo III) were the now rather old Horadrim Lorath, and the fact that the Horadrim (and Sanctuary at large) feels particularly devastated, which makes sense after the events of Diablo III’s Reaper of Souls expansion. I could imagine this confusing if not disappointing a lot of Diablo III fans, though I for one prefer the much more serious tone of Diablo II and Diablo IV to the more fantastical, and at times flat out silly, writing of Diablo III.

“Lightning Sorcs can make quite a mess.”

Mechanically, Diablo IV does very little to build off of the systems that appeared in Diablo III, feeling in some ways like a bit of a step backwards. Your character feels a bit weaker and the action tends to feel a bit slower than the utter murder fests that fights in Diablo III would turn into. Skill progression is similarly old school, as you pick a number of abilities, both active and passive, from a fairly large tree, versus Diablo III’s much more stripped down progression system where you’d pick from a small selection of active abilities and apply a single modifier to them. The endgame “paragon” system does make a return from Diablo III, but is similarly much more complex. Naturally, some people will prefer Diablo III after so many years of live iteration, and some will be taken aback by Diablo IV’s slightly regressive mechanics. Personally, thanks to giving us just enough quality of life enhancements and overall polish, I think it works well. My only real gripe is that progression tends to be a bit front loaded, and by the time you near level 50, you’ll mostly be spending all of your points on relatively boring passive abilities, and after that you’ll progress to the aforementioned similarly boring and definitely more than a little convoluted paragon system.

Gear progression is in a similar boat. Diablo IV’s legendary items have “aspects” which can often have a major impact on the behavior of core class abilities, but I find myself missing some of Diablo III’s wacky, sometimes overpowered legendary weapon effects. There are a thousand other differences, as well as some Diablo II mechanics that didn’t make it in (like runes and rune words, despite there being a gem socketing system) but I suspect there’s a good chance of many of them showing up in the inevitable expansion. Not being one of those hardcore players who has sunk thousands of hours into the endgames of previous Diablo games, I don’t think I want to go too much more in-depth about the mechanics. That is to say, there are definitely better qualified people than me to provide this kind of analysis.

“Welcome to the Burning Hells.”

Perhaps the biggest change a casual player will notice is that Diablo’s world map is now completely open, sprawling, and filled with side content. The size and openness of the world doesn’t actually impact things too much, as the campaign questline will inevitably lead you through various regions and some of their sub-zones in a similar, albeit less linear fashion as the previous games did, and traveling isn’t too much of a chore thanks to the all too familiar system of waypoints (and when you get a horse later on, even less so.) No, the biggest issue I have with the open-world is the huge amount of side quests, dungeons, and other distractions you’ll run into in your journey. On one hand, I appreciate the content, but on the other hand, trying to complete every quest you come across and clear every dungeon you see is going to seriously derail your campaign progress. I started playing the campaign at the same time as a few colleagues of mine, and even when our playtimes were similar, I noticed I was well behind them in the campaign. It was the damn side quests! Once I started totally ignoring them and focusing exclusively on campaign quests, the game stopped feeling like so much of a slog, and I was able to dig myself out of the burnout that was setting in.

I should make a quick mention of another major change while talking about Diablo IV’s more open-world nature. The game is now something of an MMO in that you’ll run across other players in the world while playing. If you’re asocial, you shouldn’t let this concern you, as I rarely ran across anyone outside of the major cities, and even when I did, we’d almost always ignore each other and go our separate ways. There are “events” across the map (more or less the “public quest” system introduced in Warhammer Online) which work best when tackled cooperatively, but these are the only times I really played with random players. Even still though, I personally enjoy seeing other players in the world, and the opportunity for casual co-op play, random chat, and the like is pretty cool, never mind being able to fairly seamlessly play with your actual friends when you want to. I just wish this was an optional feature for those who’d rather (or can’t) always play online.

“Lorath and I unloading.”

I’ve personally never been even a little enamored by Diablo’s endgame. In the original game, it was grinding for better items, sometimes with friends, and of course PKing and otherwise griefing other players. In Diablo II, it meant running through the campaign multiple times with increasing difficulty until focusing on that brutally repetitive Act V item grind, trying to find the best unique equipment, set items, and runes. Diablo III did a good job of trying to make this less of a repetitive grind by introducing “Adventure Mode” which would give players random quests to go slap a series of enemies, and rifts, which were randomly generated dungeons. Diablo IV leverages its open-world for its endgame. Since enemies are always scaled, all of that content you may have skimmed over while playing the campaign is available to grind through, as are the Tree of Whispers random quests, Helltide events, world bosses, and a number of other challenges and collect-a-thons. There’s a lot to do, although it’s a tiny bit of a bummer that so much less of the game is randomized now given that it was such a notable element of Diablo’s roguelike origins. Regardless, at the end of the day, all of these iterations come down to one thing: fairly pointless grinding. No offense to anyone who enjoys it, of course, but It’s amazing to me that Blizzard would focus so much on an endgame which is going to be so unappealing to most people. *shrug*

That’s worth mentioning, because it seems that certain types of games are judged largely by a hardcore, vocal minority of endgame players, and yet I can really like a World of Warcraft expansion, for example, based solely on its campaign and the gameplay changes I experienced therein, regardless of the raiding community thinking it’s the worst expansion to date. Diablo IV’s endgame is just one of the many popular topics that commonly pops up in criticisms of the game. It’s bizarre to me how divisive of a title Diablo IV is. Some of it, like the ridiculous cosmetics store, ham-fisted nerfs around the season 1 patch, and how slow Blizzard has been to address certain things, is legitimate, but pop into any comment or discussion thread about the game, and you’ll see a lot of people spouting absolutely ludicrous, objectively untrue nonsense about it. I guess there are tons of people always primed and ready to hate on anything Blizzard produces these days. Shame that, because while I certainly don’t believe it succeeds in taking Diablo II’s crown, I really did enjoy my time with it and will definitely be dusting it off again in the future.

Bastioneer

I’ve had a few of the more well-known survival games in my backlog for a while now. No Man’s Sky has had my eye since it was first released, well before it was patched into a reportedly vastly improved experience, I’ve heard nothing but amazing things about Subnautica, and can’t wait to dig into that one, but it was Astroneer I decided to go with this time. Between the three, Astroneer looked like a much more casual experience, and I didn’t want to dedicate myself to some massive galaxy spanning adventure or spending several tense hours cowering from giant alien shark-beasts in some underwater cave. Not yet, at least.

“Caverns of fun!”

As luck would have it, it turns out that Astroneer actually scratches an itch that I don’t believe either of those games would have. That would be the same very basic mining and caving gameplay loop that Minecraft’s survival mode employs. While plenty of other games have implemented much deeper and/or more interesting survival modes since Minecraft first blew up, that particular aspect of it has always been left by the wayside. Whenever I’ve gone back to Minecraft, that always seems to be the most compelling component for me. Playing cooperatively with my girlfriend, she’d often be the one crafting and building, while I’d spend almost all of my time digging out elaborate mines and exploring the game’s massive, randomly generated cave systems when I’d encounter them. When it comes to those aspects, Astroneer absolutely delivers.

The basic premise of the game is that you’re some sort of an astronaut dropped onto a planet and, well, it’s not readily apparent what the fictional reason for your mission actually is, something vaguely related to gathering research, I guess? From a gameplay perspective you’re immediately thrown into a classic loop of gathering material to build upgrades, to gather better materials, to build better upgrades, and so on that just about every survival game incorporates to some degree. The difference is that Astroneer focuses entirely on that loop – there’s no additional survival elements related to eating food or water, staying warm, etc. nor are there enemies or many other direct threats to your character. Your only survival concerns are oxygen and the occasional dangerous variety of plantlife, which are usually easy to avoid once you’re aware of them.

“I spent countless hours trekking around the surface too.”

So, that pretty much leaves you with mining, exploring and scavenging, and upgrading your base and equipment. Eventually this has you even leaving your starting planet to head to another one of the other 6 planets and moons in the solar system for a change of scenery and access to some new resources to mine or otherwise gather. It’s a relatively simple and fairly open-ended game, with little in the way over any sort of overarching goals that you don’t set yourself, which, when combined with the game’s beautifully clean, stylized visuals and excellent, minimalist soundtrack, make for an extremely relaxing experience, whether played alone or cooperatively. I spent way too many nights unaware of how much time had been flying by while I was deep into a grinding session.

Sure, there can be some stress, like when you accidentally fall into a cavern, breaking your connection to your oxygen tether network, or end up getting lost for hours while exploring (damn you, shitty beacon system!) but overall Astroneer really nails owning this particular corner of the survival genre like nothing else I’ve played. I do have some other complaints, like the lack of split screen coop on the console version, and some fairly serious performance issues that seem to relate to the number of objects in the world (and likely those two things are directly related) but nothing close to a deal breaker.

“…and when you get bored of that stuff, you can GTFO!”

That said, I’ve had my fill for now. While I wouldn’t say I “completed” the game, I accomplished enough to feel like I had more or less mastered most of the systems before it all started feeling too repetitive. I got most of my tech to tier 2 (of 3) and beyond, visited every planet, unlocked some cores, and just basically got a healthy taste of almost everything on offer. The biggest compliment I can give the game is that I absolutely think I’ll be back to Astroneer instead of Minecraft the next time I’m feeling a strange, primal urge to go delving into deep in pursuit of rare materials.

For a bit of a palate cleanser, I followed that up with a quick dip into Supergiant’s now something of a classic action RPG, Bastion.

“In a stroke of innovation, NPCs with quests have exclamation marks over their heads!”

Bastion was one of the darlings of the wave of new, sexy indie games hitting Xbox Live Arcade back in the Xbox 360’s heyday, and it seemed like everyone was playing it for a time, the ever-present and extremely divisive narrator being a hot topic on every podcast I listened to. Having always enjoyed narration and frankly surprised it hasn’t been done in more modern games (cue flashbacks to Dungeons and Dragons Online) I was quite looking forward to it myself. A huge Diablo fan, I was far more skeptical about playing a colorful, consolefied take on the ARPG genre, which was honestly probably the main reason I hadn’t got around to playing it until now.

Immediately upon jumping in you’re treated to the game’s sublime visuals. A painted, colorful floating world filled with squat, cartoony characters that evoke isometric Japanese tactical RPGs from the 90s more than Diablo and its ilk is assembled around as you walk through it to cool effect. Then the narrator comes in and… well, that wasn’t what I was expecting at all! Instead of a narrator chiming in here and there, and feeling fairly removed from the game world like an overwatching dungeon master or the hilarious narrator from a Sierra adventure game, the narrator in Bastion is actually another character in the world with his own personality, and he really is ever-present, chiming in about every other little thing your character does. It’s not that it wasn’t cool, it just wasn’t what I had in my head for all these years.

“Even Bastion’s junk yards are beautiful.”

Then I got into the action and, eh… it was fine. Nothing too particular to complain about, but something about it just didn’t click with me. I knew it was a short game, so I figured I’d keep playing it and at worst, have to write a fairly negative review. Then, maybe my third session in with the game, out of nowhere I found myself having a ton of fun. I think a big part of my enjoyment came from the extremely smooth pacing. Having such bite-sized levels was genius, making it feel effortless to dive in and out, which ends up being vitally important as you start unlocking new weapons, weapon upgrades, spirits, and secret skills to play with.

I’m the type of person who typically settles on one good loadout in a game like this and won’t deviate from it all too often outside of a cursory test of any new items and abilities I pick up, but Bastion absolutely nails its upgrade and loadout systems. Soon I found myself experimenting wildly to find the best ways to best each of the weapon challenge areas and the “Who Knows Where” wave attack arenas. I was actually having some of the most fun I’d had with a game like this in recent memory.

“When in doubt, use a shotgun.”

Once I was hooked on the combat and the progression, the intrigue of the story, the aforementioned beautiful art style, the amazing soundtrack, and really, just an overall highly tuned experience from front to back, brought me the rest of the way to the end of the game. I ended up enjoying it so much that I went from barely interested to now committed to trying some of Supergiant’s other games, like their 2014 follow-up, Transistor. Hell, I even briefly considered giving the new game+ a go, something I almost never do. In the end I settled on being happy with as close to 100 percenting the game as you can get in a single playthrough, and calling it a day. Still, that was a pleasant surprise!

Screenshots are from the PC versions of these games, stolen from random users on the Steam Community pages for these games.