gamescasey

[gamescasey]

Maybe I Don’t Get Days Gone

On paper, Days Gone looks like a fresh take on the linear zombie gameplay of The Last of Us. An open and dangerous world, optional side quests and progression outside the main story line, and a variety of zombies that seemed to encourage a diversity of play styles created an optimistic sentiment in an era where every company was trying to replicate the success of The Last of Us and The Walking Dead. Although there were moments where I second guessed my opinion, Days Gone is a feeble attempt at capturing lightning in a bottle the same way The Last of Us did.

Days Gone first piqued my interest when it became a free game on PlayStation Plus, and I’m grateful to this day that I never had to pay for that game. I was thrown for a loop by the IGN review criticizing the story, gameplay, and characters, but I was more interested in the backlash received because of the criticism. Companies hated the game, but players absolutely loved it. I had to know which side of the fence I would land on.

Praise:

Days Gone is really close to being a good game. The opening hour depicts a hardened protagonist in Deacon St. John, who’s emotional complication should have been expanded on throughout the game. The introduction of the Rippers as a loose organization driven mad by the end of the world is super cool. My interest in the shady government organization NERO was high in its introduction. The upgrade systems seemed maybe a little too vast, but by no means a problem. My highest praise for the game comes when they are aware they’re in an emotional moment, specifically Boozer and Deacon’s desperate motorcycle ride to Lost Lake. The moment marinates in song for the occasion and doesn’t feel forced. I wish more of the game was as engaging and well-thought as those ten minutes. The foundation definitely exists for a well-rounded open world zombie game: the world feels alive a lot of the time, the wandering hordes are scary and tense when they appear, and a few of the characters are genuinely interesting. Sometimes the game is good, but the compliments stop there, unfortunately. 

Criticism:

Days Gone plays about as well as the other free PlayStation games. For combat, the options are shoot, bomb, and knife (I’m not including running over zombies, even though it was my favorite). When done stealthily it’s much more enjoyable than open combat. The gun play is very standard: there are a lot of different guns and sometimes ammo becomes an issue. The skill tree feels weird and out of place in a survival game, like they were trying to turn a story-driven open world game into an RPG. Not my cup of tea but there wasn’t really a problem with it. The non-combat gameplay was horrible. Cutscenes were abundant in the worst way, the stealth missions listening to NERO gave me the worst Assassin’s Creed flashbacks, and I had to turn down the motorcycle noises more than once when it was the only thing I was hearing for extended periods. Driving through open areas becomes tedious when you don’t see yourself being scoped down by a random-event sniper in a tree.

Enemy variety was simply a difference in health, which meant each combat mission can be done in the exact same way. The big zombies are annoying simply because I don’t want to expend every ounce of ammo in stock. Every animal fight only involves rolling out of one or two attacks, so even the bears (the “tough” animal) could be fought with the boot knife. Horde combat was close to a success, but the hordes can be cheesed to the point where there’s no reason to do it any other way. Why bother crafting a well-thought plan of attack when I can ride my bike in circles gradually picking off zombies as I go? Sure, it's not fast, but I turn my brain off and listen to the zombie and motorcycle noise as I ride in circles. The bugs that affected the hordes also took me out of the experience, even two years after the game’s release.

I’ve decided that I hate realism in games. I understand that in a real zombie apocalypse (oof) I would run out of gas, my weapons would degrade, and I’d have limited ammunition to work with, but there was nothing more tedious than collecting currency to repair and gas up my bike before every mission, and there was nothing sadder than forgetting to repair a good melee weapon and needing to use the boot knife. Fuck the boot knife. Running out of gas in the open world was one of the most miserable experiences in a game, and having my bike damaged beyond repair because I tried to run over too many zombies had me filled with rage. Why was I being punished for trying to do something fun? Running over zombies was one of the only things I enjoyed while riding to the next mission, so the fact that I would have to watch where I was going instead sucked the joy out of the travel experience.

My main gripe is the story of the game: the well-paced and interesting 30-minute setup is squandered with 10 hours of uninspired, tedious fetch quest missions that reward the player with dialogue. Unfortunately, the dialogue is brutally uninteresting, heavy with ten-second cutscenes, and hilariously voiced. Characters were so poorly voiced that I actively avoided characters when time was allowed for side quests. The ripper storyline was probably the best in the game, and it’s a shame there was a decision to bloat the game with so many more uninteresting plot points. The plot with Deacon’s wife was the most aggravating for me though. I can’t believe you go through so much of the game with the idea that Deacon is this broken man with nothing left to lose only to find out it was all bullshit. I’m so angry thinking about my last shred of empathy leaving my body as Deacon became even less likeable. The vengeance, the struggle, the emotion, all for nothing. The emotion I, as the player, feel when someone in the game talks trash about Sarah, all for nothing. The sentiment, the memorial, the tributes and all the grieving throughout the game, all for nothing.

Conclusion:

Days Gone was bad for me. I don’t think the game is unplayable, and there are a couple things the game does really well, but there is too much about this game that just makes me want to play a better game. If you’re in it for the story, I’d say pick something else.

[gamescasey]

The Sad Story of Overwatch 2

Long ago (2016), there was a massive online battle arena called Overwatch. This game was filled to the brim with character, excitement, lore, and love. With simple, objective-based combat and easy-enough to pick up characters, Overwatch quickly found a place in the heart of many, myself included. The opposite, however, can be said about the sequel, aptly named “Overwatch 2″. The expectations set by the first installment were high, sure, but the release and post-release of Overwatch 2 left such a sour taste in my mouth that I haven’t picked the game up again in months.

When Overwatch dropped, everyone and their brother picked it up. The simple fun of being able to play any character without worry of a composition or tactics is still one of the purest forms of fun I’ve experienced. Grab the controller, pick a cool character, go crazy. An Australian who lobs bombs, a ninja who lost his body, a teenage girl shouting cringe lines from her mech-suit, the list goes on and on. The head of Overwatch, Jeff Kaplan, stated in an interview that if there was a mechanic he thought “wasn’t fun” it wasn’t included in the game. Unlimited ammo, the ability to choose a different hero at any point in the game, and a hero pool that favored skillful play but allowed for players to be unskilled are all great examples of the emphasis on fun. Cosmetics were constantly flowing into the inventory, there was no ranked system in place yet, and cinematics streaming out to YouTube emphasized each character’s personality. The world was being built, and the expectations were being set for future iterations of the game.

The buildup to and post-release of Overwatch was a masterclass: cinematics that had me falling in love with Winston before I even picked up the controller, and an intense, “who is Sombra” mystery with hacked websites and teasers. Each new hero introduced was an expansion of the lore of the game, and I felt like a kid again waiting in anticipation for new content to be released for my favorite game. Overwatch handily won game of the year in 2016, and after winning “best ongoing game” in 2017, it seemed like Blizzard couldn’t be stopped. The reveal of Overwatch 2 in 2019 had me excited, even if the game wouldn’t be released for another three years.

The years following Overwatch’s release were not good to Blizzard. A surfaced lawsuit detailing the frat culture of the company, Jeff stepping down as head and face of Overwatch, and rumors (with eventual confirmation) that Microsoft would be buying out the studio kept the company busy. I’m not trying to give Blizzard an excuse, since it’s actually really easy to respect women and keep high-talent employees like Jeff. However, these are contributing factors to the downfall of the Overwatch franchise.

With no fun-first lead on the game, Overwatch 2 quickly announced some particularly anti-fun “features” that would be present in the next game. A battle pass that doesn’t refund it’s cost on completion (every other battle pass does this), a removal of cosmetic content flowing, and a delay on the co-op story mode created a perfect storm for the series. Overwatch ended updates in 2019 to free up bandwidth to work on the sequel, so the general assumption was that there would be several new maps, several new characters, and several new game modes. They had the base game finished, so all they needed to do was improve. 

The tragedy of Overwatch 2 began with the loading screen. On the day of release, the menu, games, and characters were all horribly buggy. Two hours into the login queue I decided to call it a day. We got three new characters after the three years of work: one tank, one support, and one DPS. After the game’s release, it quickly became clear that little to no time was spent balancing these characters, as they were over-tuned right out of the gate. Bastion was removed from the game for a few weeks as well, showing the lack of commitment to a large update. The “new” maps were primarily nighttime versions of legacy maps, with only a handful of legitimately new maps to compliment. The new Push game mode wasn’t fun. Full stop. If there are any fans of push out there I’m really sorry, but I can’t stand this game mode. This switch to free-to-play-but-with-a-battle-pass was frustrating for me. The point of the original release was that there would be no payments necessary to have fun, but now each new character is locked behind a paywall. 

Overwatch 2 stinks. It’s really sad, but it stinks. I was hoping for a push against the free to play culture that gaming is entrenched in, but in stead we got a game that goes with that flow and stays in line. I feel betrayed by my favorite game, and I wish I could return to 2016, when there was no concern with competition, composition, or balance. I just want my fun multiplayer game back.

[gamescasey]

SuperMassive Makes the Best Co-Op Games (Until Dawn and The Quarry).

Long ago, in the Spring of 2016, I returned home on break from college. I was beaten down by my first year, ready to see my old friends again. When we congregated at my mom’s one of my best friends pulled out a game case I’d never seen before: Until Dawn. He said it was a scary game but we could probably beat it in a day if we tried. 

This singular idea has kept us meeting up and beating game since then. 

The setup is simple: we pick out a relatively short and narratively focused game (Heavy Rain, Firewatch, and Life is Strange for example) and we would play the game start to finish in a single day, passing off the controller every hour or so. This structure keeps everyone involved and invested, allowing for everyone to say they beat the game when finished. Along the way, especially with the horror games, we would pause to discuss the various choices presented and try to save as many lives as possible. Phones and hints were off limits of course, and anyone who’d looked up content on the game was expected to keep quiet unless the decision-making process was stalling out.

I cannot recommend this style of gaming enough.

We started Until Dawn around 2 PM and finished it around 11, taking breaks for pizza along the way. The game itself, being campy horror, provided a good setting to hang out while some of the setup of the game played out, still paying attention to the relationships each of the characters had with one another. It also guaranteed that, as the game got more tense, everyone was paying attention and was invested in the characters we were half-listening to as they went up to the cabin in the woods. The memes and inside jokes that sprouted from this first game are still referenced today: Corey being the serial killer (he made one bad choice so we blew it out of proportion), Owen being the master of quick-time events, and coining the title “Master Detective” for myself. Playing games together isn’t what kept us all together after all these years, but it’s hard to think it hasn’t been a contributing factor.

After playing The Quarry this past weekend, I can firmly say that the dynamic hasn’t changed even if our situation had. The 10-or-so of us live in three different states, so we couldn’t pass the controller like usual. We all hopped in the Discord, I played and streamed the game, and we discussed every decision and prediction that came up along the way. We had a great time with it, and we even saved most of the characters. This isn’t really a review of The Quarry or Until Dawn, but more of a suggestion on how to play it if not a fan of horror, like many of us are.

[gamescasey]

What Stray Could Have Been

When I first saw the trailer for Stray in summer 2020, “That’s definitely a Casey game” was the general sentiment. I was stoked: Journey, Flower, and Abzu were among my favorite games, and this moody cyberpunk atmosphere that a cat could slink its way around seemed destined to be another of my all-time favorites.

But then it wasn’t.

Stray is a game where you play as a cat separated from its pack and thrust into an underground city devoid of humans. The simple cat-things that can happen (knocking things over, navigating obstacles and tight spaces with ease, and scratching for example) creates a unique perspective that drew massive amounts of hype leading up to the game’s release, but I was surprised to find how quickly the developers show their hand, even for a six-hour game.

Don’t get me wrong, Stray isn’t a bad game. I enjoyed it enough to start and finish the main story on release and go back a couple weeks later to finish the platinum. The upbeat music, gloomy but hopeful atmosphere, and mystery of the game and its world kept me playing. What took me out of the game all too often was the slog of dialogue boxes spoon-feeding me the lore and story. I felt myself rolling my eyes every time a random robot explained something inferred by the world itself. I almost felt disrespected as a player when the game decided the mystery of humanity’s downfall didn’t need to exist, and that dialogue was the best course of action.

My immediate comparison is Flower. Similar in runtime, Flower allows the music, atmosphere, and gameplay itself to convey the story of a changing environment and human impact. Stray toes the line between visual and not with significant sections conducted without dialogue. This is where the game shines the brightest. The impact several scenes and interactions could have been much greater without the tiny pest circling the feline protagonist. Doc’s library, where the dead robot sits hunched and covered in books, Zbaltazar’s character and the micro-story of what happens when the persuit of knowledge and preservation overcomes one’s humanity, and so much of Midtown that works as a comparison to coping with loss. There are so many small things that would have meant so much more if the player was allowed to just experience the game visually like Flower, and not be directly told of it’s metaphor. I wonder if the developers were so excited about their work in world building they thought they just NEEDED to explain it all, leaving no room for the player’s imagination to take what was given and run.

It was frustrating for me to play through this game knowing it could have been so much better. I wanted this game to be one of my favorites. But I couldn’t do it; Stray draws near perfection with it’s attention to detail in atmosphere, sound design, and playability, but the experience of the game is lost in the stream of annoying text boxes that, to me, indicate a lack of trust between developer and player.