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Review Dump #1

I need a place to throw out my thoughts about some games, so in a first for the blog I will be “reviewing” some games in this post. I’m just gonna call it “Review Dump” and I think this will be a recurring thing. Normally I’d just put out a Steam review but for these that’s not an option for obvious reasons or not where I own my copy of the game. In future RDs I’ll probably include Steam games as well but this one is specifically for some non-Steam games I’ve played lately.

Anyway let’s get into it.

First up is 12 Minutes. What an absolute disappointment this thing was. Listen, there are some interesting things about this game but the story is confusing, and the ending is just shock value nonsense. Mechanically the game can be a little frustrating with how repetitive it can be, and it makes some of the already slightly annoying puzzles that much more annoying. To understand what’s really wrong with the game you need to go in blind and just try it but I don’t recommend it. I think you’d be better off watching it on YouTube if you’re really curious. I’d give it a 5/10 maybe a 6/10 if I’m in a good mood. Like I said some cool stuff but it really just fumbles it by the end.

Next I’ll talk about Astro’s Playroom. That’s right, got myself a PS5. What an absolute joy this game was. Front to back just a good time, it’s not reinventing the 3D platformer and it’s not like it has this great story but it looks good, plays great, and is just a feel good game. It might be the best “launch title” ever, not in that it beats out a game like BotW, but in the way that it is a joyous celebration of the new console and its history. Roughly 1/4 of the way thru I decided I was going to platinum the game, and so I did. Obviously you need a PS5 to play it, but if and when you do don’t skip this. Especially if you have any love for PlayStation or its history. Solid like 9.5/10. I don’t think it’s doing enough to be considered a 10/10, and I actually wish there was a little more meat to it but otherwise I have no complaints.

Seeing as I got a PS5, you can probably guess that I’ll talk about a couple more PlayStation games. I decided to finally sit down and play The Last Guardian, which I had bought somewhat recently when it was on sale. I’m a huge fan of Shadow of the Colossus, but when TLG came out reception was mixed, to say the least. I like to form my own opinions on things, even if that opinion is dislike or even hatred, so I wanted to play this game eventually. And I now have. Man…TLG is one of those games that I think could have been an all time great, if it just worked better and if they just decided to be a little less, I don’t know, obtuse. I think it’s tragic in a way. There’s something about the game that pulls you in, and makes you want to keep going and going and see the next interesting little world detail or next revelation. In between those things is one of the clunkiest, messiest, self-indulgent slogs I’ve ever seen in a game. I’m not going to go into heavy detail with how this game fails mechanically but I’ll just say it doesn’t feel good to play. Movement is messy, camera is jank, button layout is wack. This is really tough but I have to give this game like a 6.5/10 MAYBE a 7/10. But it’s like, the best 6.5/10 game of all time. I recommend this to people who have a lot of patience and to people who like oddities. There’s no game like this and I doubt there will be many like it going forward. As a Video Game Enthusiast I think it’s worth seeing and playing for yourself. Watching on YouTube is an option but I think there’s something special about playing it that you can’t get out of just watching it.

Lastly I’ll briefly talk about Beyond: Two Souls. Might seem like a strange batch of games but I just play what I feel like when I feel it. I don’t have a huge paragraph for this game. It’s like playing a high budget, really long action flick that you’ll mostly forget all the details about. My biggest complaint about the game is that it’s really too long and just kinda wastes time doing random stuff. It’s generally speaking still somewhat interesting stuff but they could have cut hours off this game and lost relatively little. And I’ll also say the “branching paths” stuff seemed really shallow and cosmetic mostly. Maybe I’m wrong about that but I’m not gonna play through multiple times. Overall it’s fun, if you like this type of game you’ll like this one. If I had to give it a score maybe like a 7.5 or 8/10.

That’s all for this batch. I’ve been trying to Play More Games as of late so I’ll probably be posting some more soon. Happy gaming out there.

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Back on the Wagon

The last post I put up on this blog was years ago - and it was a somewhat generous look at what Google Stadia could be. Of course, we know now that Stadia is somewhat of an ongoing embarrassment for Google. I still think that game streaming is something to keep an eye on as far as industry trends go, but Stadia was not and is not the service that "figured it out". I haven't actually touched Stadia since its beta test all those years ago, so I don't know how the service performs these days but I do know that the pricing model is still quite bad. I digress, of course, because this post isn't about Stadia or game streaming.

In some ways I think I can be slow on the uptake - especially when it comes to my own thoughts and feelings. I say this because it took me years to realize something very simple. Listening to people talk about something when you have something to say is an extreme test of patience. I think I already knew this but it has never been so clear to me as it is today.

For a long time now, going back 10, maybe even 15 years I have been an on again-off again podcast (specifically video game related podcasts) listener. The height of that being the years of 2017-2020, when I was listening to podcasts nearly every weekday. Early in 2020, however, I pretty much just stopped listening to any podcasts.

There are some practical reasons that I stopped, but realistically my overall interest in video game "pundits" had pretty much plummeted. Somewhere along the way I think I just became frustrated. Not for anything that, say, Greg Miller or some other personality said, but for the fact that I can't really throw in my two cents. As someone that really cares and spends a lot of my personal time just thinking about this stuff, it just wears on you.

It's been over a year now and I'm finally realizing the simple solution. Bring back the blog. Broaden the topics, don't be concerned with format or length or profundity. Just talk about stuff, send it out into the void, and be satisfied that your thoughts are out there to see. And on that note, I'll see you in the next one.

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Google Stadia - The Future of Casual Gaming

Stadia is a major leap in tech. As someone who took part in last year's Project Stream, I can attest that it definitely works. But Stadia doesn't just "work". It redefines how we look at the gaming market place - but only when speaking about casual players.

If it ends up working as intended, Stadia will allow users with good enough internet connections to essentially instantly play any game available on the Stadia platform with a press of a button. This isn't the only thing that Stadia is setting out to do, but it's arguably its most important feature to the industry at large. It, for lack of a better explanation, is Netflix for gaming - something that I think even yesterday was thought to be impossible with our current infrastructure.

Although exciting, I have to wonder about some of the details. What kind of connection do you need? What is the pricing? Are you buying games separately, or are you subscribed to a service? Since we don't have these details, we have to speculate. Some of the wording used in today's keynote makes me believe that there will be a Stadia Store, which seems to point towards buying games separately. But that flies in the face of their "one-click access to games" messaging.

The big question about this service that needs to be asked is what games will be available on it and what exclusive experiences will be hosted there. They mention things about fully destructible environments and large player counts (like 1000 player battle royales). Can these games capture the interest of the hardcore market? Because without super compelling games and gameplay, hardcore players will continue to want to play games locally off their machine at home. I don't care how nice the picture looks or how cool the tech under the hood is - people will notice the input lag and bow out of the service, especially people who like mouse and keyboard controls.

I like what I've seen of Google Stadia, but I think it's too early to say this is the future of gaming. Even if all works as intended, I think this will be a major branch of gaming that hardcore players mostly ignore - much like the mobile space. I don't think it will take over the industry as a whole. Let's hope Google shows us a lot more before the launch of Stadia later this year.

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One Piece: World Seeker - One Small Step When We Needed One Big Leap

One Piece: World Seeker is a perfectly fine game. It's one of the most "7/10" games I've ever played. It feels stuck squarely in the range of quality we would see from a mid-generation Xbox 360 open world game. But on the outset, this game looked like it could have been the push forward licensed anime games need.

"Anime game" is somewhat of a derogatory term, as most games that could be described as such feel like budget versions of better games with your favorite anime characters slapped on it. Unfortunately, in a lot of ways, One Piece: World Seeker fits this mold. It is an open world action game with light RPG elements. I could point to a bunch of different games that it takes ideas from, such as God of War 2018 (combat/skill tree), Assassin's Creed Odyssey (open world/quest structure) and Batman (light stealth/overworld movement). It doesn't improve upon or even meet the quality of its inspirations, however. Its combat never feels as good as God of War, quests don't have the same level of freedom as AC Odyssey, and its stealth segments are arguably just bad.

There are positive things to say about the game though. The story is actually very good, as far as One Piece stories go. The new characters and the new island don't feel like throwaways. Besides a few questionably designed areas on the overworld, the map itself has memorable landmarks and is small enough that I can get to different locations on memory alone. Although the combat isn't as good as God of War's (few combat systems are), it is definitely serviceable. It's simplistic, but there is depth if you seek it out (even if the game doesn't ever need you to use that depth).

To be clear, this isn't a review of the game. If you like One Piece and don't mind the Assassin's Creed Odyssey style of open world gameplay, you'll probably enjoy your time with this game. Whether or not it's worth $60 is hard to really say.

The real point here is that this game, more than a lot of others, could have proven that licensed anime games don't have to be budget cash grabs and half baked arena fighters. Dragon Ball FighterZ proved that you can make a good licensed anime game on a smaller scale, but this could have proved that large scale, open world games are possible too. Although this game is a step in the right direction, there's a lot more room to cover. This is not the Batman: Arkham Asylum of licensed anime games, and I'm beginning to wonder if that game will ever come.

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PlayStation - 2019 and Beyond

As many who follow PlayStation (PS) are aware, PS skipped out on their yearly PSX event last December and also are skipping E3 this year. This brings into question what 2019 will look like for the PS4 platform. We know about of a lot of games in the pipeline, but we don't know a lot of release dates.

Right now, the only thing that we know is releasing in 2019 is Sony Bend's Days Gone, a zombie open world sandbox game. I think this game will sell modestly, but only because by the time it comes out PS4 diehards will be starving for a AAA first party title.

This games existence, and its release window (April) leaves us in a strange spot for The Last of Us Part II. PS probably wouldn't want to step on its own toes and release two zombie focused games even in the same year. Which means that TLOU2 may very well be a PS4 swan song in 2020, much like the first game was for the PS3.

That leaves Death Stranding, Ghost of Tsushima, and Dreams. Kojima's strange and exciting game starring Norman Reedus, Death Stranding is a complete mystery. Who knows what that game even is, let alone when it will come out. Ghost of Tsushima looks good, and is from InFamous developer Sucker Punch, but seeing as it was only announced last E3 and PS has elected to skip two major gaming events where they might announce a 2019 release date, it doesn't look good. For Dreams, Media Molecule's spiritual successor to LittleBigPlanet, I think it is destined to have a small but passionate userbase. It will most likely come out this year (we don't know for sure), but won't set the world on fire.

This potentially means that 2019 will be an extremely barren year for the PS4. Which is an interesting strategy considering that most likely, the PS5 will be announced and released before the end of 2020. So are they going to release a shotgun blast of great games on the PS4 right before launching the PS5? I doubt it.

This begs the question, will some of these come out this year despite how unlikely that is? Or are some of these going to become PS5 launch games? Only time will tell, but I think many PS fans will feel burned after waiting for so long for some of these games, only to be told they need the new console to play them, if they go that route. PlayStation has a huge lead in the console war this generation, and they could easily lose the lead in the transition to the next generation if they don't play their cards right, especially when it seems like Xbox is making all of the right moves.

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Ubisoft - What Are We Rewarding?

Ubisoft has had a bit of a comeback in recent years. Back when Assassin’s Creed Unity was released, things were looking bad. It seemed like every release was flawed at best and fundamentally broken at worst. But recently, it seems like they’re firing on all cylinders. Rainbow Six Siege has a very dedicated and slowly growing userbase. The Division still has some players, and there’s quite a bit of hype around The Division 2. The last two Assassin’s games have been very well received.

On the surface, this all seems kosher. However, when you look closer, you realize that Ubisoft simply adopted a new business model that suits them and the way they release games. Rainbow Six Siege, For Honor, and The Division all released in less than stellar condition. All of them were light on content, and oftentimes buggy and unreliable. Now that they can update games as “live service” games, though, they can simply fix it all in post.

Now don’t let me take away from the fact that this is still a lot of work, and for the people who work on the live team, it’s a very commendable effort. But what are we rewarding if we buy into this? Are we saying that releasing games in a piss-poor state is acceptable as long as you fix it later? There’s something to be said for “making things right” but I feel like maybe we should be demanding more out of games when they release. 

This isn’t just an Ubisoft problem, I know. Destiny 2 suffered from the same problems. Ubisoft has just adopted this model into almost every game in their library (even the ones that release in an acceptable state). Their business is now live service games. Even single player games like AC: Odyssey are updated like live service games.

All I’m suggesting is that we as video game enthusiasts have to decide what we think is acceptable. I don’t truly know the answer. On one hand, it’s great that they are making their games truly good - even if it is post launch. But on the other hand they sold us a disappointing product at the beginning. Clearly many people are okay with it, but there’s a risk that this is a slippery slope. Food for thought.

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Destiny 2 - Bungie’s Newfound Freedom

Recently, Bungie severed its ties with Activision and walked away with ownership of the Destiny IP (intellectual property). This means that, going forward, Bungie will be making all the decisions when it comes to Destiny as a franchise. And this could potentially be the beginning of a new, better era for Destiny. It also could mean more of the same. 

The truth is that people who are hardcore Destiny players and even on-and-off again players like myself have been giving Bungie a pass, in some respects, because we assume that Activision has been forcing the issue on certain things that the community doesn’t like. Eververse being the most obvious example. And most likely this is the case. The tumultuous development of both Destiny and Destiny 2 is well documented, and it seems as though a lot of concessions are made to keep to Activion’s timetable and financial expectations. 

Now Bungie needs to prove to us that it was just Big Bad Activision causing all these problems. That they can still make great games. Many of the people who are responsible for the creation of Halo - and even the original concept for Destiny - are long gone. And honestly, even if they were there, it’s hard to have faith in them after many years of disappointing releases. It certainly hasn’t been all bad, but it has been a very expensive and very rocky road that Destiny enthusiasts have traveled. 

So what will the future hold? Certainly year 2 of Destiny 2 will go on as planned. The roadmap is laid out and schedules have been made. The big question is what happens in year 3? And beyond that? I speculate that Destiny 2 will live on for maybe even a 4th year as they develop a new Destiny (not called Destiny 3) that will take on more of a traditional MMO approach to financing and update structure. But that will require either extreme changes to their current engine or a completely new engine. 

The Destiny franchise’s future is now in Bungie’s hands, and their hands only. There’s no one to blame but themselves. Let’s see if they can handle the pressure.

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Anthem - EA’s Last Chance

Anthem is arguably the most important EA game ever. Obviously, it’s not out yet, so I don’t mean that it’s important because it’s really good. It might be, but I don’t know yet. The reason why it’s important is that it represents EA’s - and possibly BioWare’s - last chance to make good with the hardcore audience. 

After a few questionable years now, EA finds itself in a predicament where they could lose the hardcore market. I know there are a good number of people who have already written off the publisher. And now that Battlefield V has released with lukewarm reception, and another Star Wars single player game has been canceled, the situation is looking more and more dire.

They’ve been saying a lot of the right things. No loot boxes. No season pass. Matchmaking on all activities. Of course this is great, but the actual game itself is far more important. How good is the story going to be? How much end game content will there be? How often will post launch updates and content drops come out? 

And this is where BioWare’s part is. After the abysmal release of Mass Effect: Andromeda, they need to make good. If Anthem flops, BioWare is going down, no doubt in my mind. 

2019 is poised to be possibly a great comeback year for EA. If Anthem comes out and is just good - it doesn’t have to be great - they’ll be on the right track. Obviously you’ll have your sports games mainstays (Madden and FIFA), but beyond that there’s Respawn Entertainment’s Star Wars game, the possibility of Titanfall 3, and who knows what else. EA can create a lot of goodwill this year and start the new decade starting in 2020 at a great place with fans, they just have to not drop the ball. Which they are prone to do. 

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The Future of Gaming - Subscriptions and Streaming

The industry has been shifting towards a subscription business model for years. Ever since Microsoft introduced Xbox Live Gold, the other two major home console platforms have followed suit with PlayStation Plus and Nintendo Online. 

But in addition to that, we have seen more and more of a push towards subscription based game ownership. PlayStation Plus started giving out games monthly - but you can only play them as long as you’re subscribed. Games with Gold eventually followed suit, following the same formula. Nintendo Online has its NES Online feature, which allows you to play old (and sometimes improved) NES games both single player and online with friends, and again only for as long as you’re subscribed.

On top of all that you have PlayStation Now, a subscription service that allows you to play the entire PS Now catalog instantaneously via streaming. Xbox introduced Game Pass, which has an ever changing lineup of 100+ games, including brand new releases. Nintendo doesn’t have this yet but wait for it any day now. 

Outside of the major platforms you have Origin Access, which works very similarly to Game Pass but for EA games only. Things like OnLive pioneered in this space years ago, before the market was ready for it. Google is developing something called Project Stream - it’s an impressive bit of streaming technology for playing AAA games in your Chrome browser. Amazon has announced they are getting into the game streaming business, with the aim to get AAA game titles to play streaming on mobile devices. 

Netflix has influenced the games industry in an irreversible way. I don’t know if it’ll be the PS5 and the Xbox One 2 that embrace this fully - there are rumors that Xbox might make an “online only” console, that only plays games streaming. I think it’s too soon for that, but as internet gets better across the country (and the world) and profit margins go way up for publishers, we’ll see this business model become the norm in the next 5 or so years. 

To me, there’s no way streaming will ever match the experience of playing a game on the hardware locally. And this will be the major hurdle that companies will face to capture the hardcore audience. But I also think that soon the value proposition of these subscription services will be too good to pass up. Only time will tell, and the day is approaching fast.

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Epic Games Store - Store Wars

PC as a gaming platform is unique in a multitude of ways, but I think it can all be summed up in a single word: options. You choose how much money you want to put in your build, you can choose your operating system, you can choose what resolution your games run at, so on and so forth. Soon, there might truly be an option of what storefront you want to use. At least, I hope Epic Games Store will be that.

Competition is healthy for any industry, and the gaming industry is no exception. Steam, for everything it does right, does a lot of things wrong. Or just poorly. Its communication/chat platform has never been good, and things like TeamSpeak and Discord have filled that need for the PC community. Epic Games Store can compete too, they just have to find the thing that they will do better. 

Epic came out of the gate swinging. Not only are they giving away critically acclaimed games for free every two weeks, but they also secured desirable exclusive games for their platform, like Ashen. Which is great for the consumer end. But on the developer end they appear to be doing even more good, offering an unheard of 88/12 revenue split to people who sell games on their store. This is in contrast to Steam’s 70/30 split, which has been the standard for years. This means that if you want to support game developers, Epic Games Store is the place to do it. Although, it should be noted that Discord has a similar revenue split, but will probably never have the pull and reach that Epic does. 

What I think is unfortunate is that there will probably be a lot of pushback from existing PC players. The convenience of having everything in one place (Steam) is too appealing to consider adding yet another launcher to their desktop. And honestly, there are too many launchers on PC. Besides inconvenient, it is actually difficult to keep track of every storefront and keep your games up to date across all of them.

Hopefully, at the very least, Epic Games Store makes enough of a splash that some of the great things they are doing will be adopted by Steam. Only time will tell.

Thanks for reading.

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Competitive Play - The Rejection of Fun

Without trying to be dramatic, I think competitive play is causing many games to be far less fun or enjoyable than they could be. Games have to be designed and balanced around their competitive play, forcing the entire audience - casuals included - down a very linear path of playing.

This, in my opinion, is a negative that parades around like a positive. People want high level play and they want balanced game mechanics. For some games it might even be the right call. They’re developed from the ground up to be taken seriously, to push esports players to extremes in order to prevail over their competitors. Games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Other games suffer because of what seems like arbitrary decisions to make the game more hardcore, more obtuse, and more restrictive.

In my opinion, the best competitive games grow naturally out of a love for a game that is first and foremost fun. Rocket League, for example, is a game that was fine tuned to be fun. Since it launched in 2015, it has grown a very dedicated and hardcore audience that plays the game at the highest level. But Rocket League wasn’t developed for the highest level of play, players themselves elevated the already existing game mechanics to new heights. Another example is Super Smash Bros. Melee, which has been played competitively since it came out on the GameCube over 17 years ago.

If you look at games like Halo, Destiny, and Uncharted, these are games that should have very light competitive features, if any. Halo is too sandboxy, Destiny has too much going on, Uncharted doesn’t have precise enough shooting. But in all these cases, the games have increasingly had new competitive features tacked onto their gameplay without much concern for whether or not they actually work together. All in service of the few thousand people who might play the game at the highest level. 

I guess what I’m saying is let players have fun, let them stretch the games balance to its limits. There is no need for every game to be an esport, and it’s exhausting trying to keep up with any one of them. The golden age of multiplayer gaming for me was somewhere smack dab in the middle of the PS3/360 generation, where most games were barely contained chaos online. Anything goes, weekly and monthly balance patches were unheard of so ridiculous gamebreaking bugs or weapon combinations sat on servers for months, or maybe even never got fixed. It might not have been “balanced” but it certainly was a lot of fun.

Thanks for reading.

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God of War - PlayStation’s Commitment to the Art

Video games are a business. This is a fact that we have to live with, and one that drives many of the decisions made in today’s video game landscape. Things like season passes and microtransactions are not only a reality but the norm. This is just how the industry functions now. It’s not all bad, but there is certainly a spectrum. On one end you have a game like Fortnite, which, in my opinion, does this business model the best way possible. It’s a free game, and as far as actual gameplay goes, there’s no real reason to spend money. Heck, there’s not even loot boxes. On the other hand, you have a game like Star Wars Battlefront 2, specifically how it launched. Not only did it cost 60 dollars, but it also had egregious microtransactions that completely revolved around loot boxes that contained game-altering equipment and modifiers that gave advantages to the highest spenders. We all know how that went. 

God of War doesn’t fall anywhere on the spectrum. In fact, it rejects it. After 4 years in development, it dropped with no microtransactions and no plans for any DLC. But this is just one piece of a large puzzle that, when put together, shows PlayStation’s true commitment to the art of video games.

God of War is a passion project. A singular vision from a singular man (Cory Barlog, director of God of War) - funded by a worldwide entertainment monolith. With the focused purpose of an indie film and the budget of a Marvel movie, God of War came out and took almost everyone by surprise. 

It’s hard to understate the risk that PlayStation took here. This game is almost unrecognizable as a God of War game, looking at the rest of the franchise. Existing fans could have very easily been alienated, and for the people who didn’t care about God of War before, there might not have been much reason for them to care now. But they gave Sony Santa Monica the time and the money they needed, and the end result was better than anyone could have expected.

What it seems like to me, is that PlayStation realized long ago that there’s money in supporting the art of making video games. People crave games that elevate the medium. People want to spend time in games that don’t waste their time. People want quality over quantity. 

God of War is an example of what gaming could be. Probably even what it should be. And as long as PlayStation continues to support artists making art, and not focusing on padding their profit margins, other publishers might try it out too. Otherwise we’ll end up in a world where all the brilliant minds in gaming are making sequels to Call of Duty and Battlefield. And if you think I’m being dramatic, look at Glen Schofield. The creator and executive producer of Dead Space now spends his days developing Call of Duty games at Sledgehammer. Let’s not let that happen to Cory.

Thanks for reading.

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Persona - The Pain of Finishing Games That You Love

Persona 3 has the honor of being one of my all-time favorite games, period. It’s also a game that took me years to finish. Beyond the fact that I had actually gotten stuck at a boss (the hanged man, who you fight on a bridge for those familiar with the game), due to being woefully unprepared after avoiding Tartarus for too many nights, I found myself very comfortable with the idea that there was more Persona 3 to play anytime I wanted. I hadn’t hit the end yet, but I knew it had to be somewhat close. However, I didn’t truly know how much more was left in the game. And that was comforting, for me. 

It might seem silly to look at it this way, but honestly I was full on obsessed with Persona 3. At the time I was in school, and all I could do all day was think about Persona 3. When I got home all I did was play Persona 3. When I went to bed I dreamed about Persona 3. When I woke up I couldn’t wait to get back to playing Persona 3. 

Anyway, when I got stuck on that boss, I stepped away from the game for years. It’s not like I didn’t think about it. But I felt so complacent in where I was with it. I didn’t need to finish it. I didn’t need to see the end because the beauty of it was that I could step back into those worn shoes at any time. That felt so good to know.

These days, I live in a world where I have finished Persona 3. It’s not so bad here, I guess. But the truth is that I miss the days when I still had more Persona 3 to experience for the first time. 

I experienced this again with the somewhat recent release of Persona 5. I don’t have as much love for Persona 5 as I do Persona 3, but it is still easily one of my favorite games of all time. When it came out in 2017, I quickly racked up 70-80 hours, playing all the way up to the second to last palace. This time I didn’t even have the excuse of being stuck. I could just feel the story threads start to tie into a nice knot. I could see that this thing was on its way out. And so one day I just stopped. My friends who were once way behind me eventually caught up and passed me, even finishing the game. It took me until this past December (of 2018) to finally chip away at that last 20 or so hours. 

I’m now left feeling very similarly to how I did after finishing Persona 3. There’s no more for me to play. Yes, I could do a new game plus, but that’s not the same. I now live in a world where there is no Persona 5 story content for me to experience now, and that sucks. 

So I guess what I’m saying is, for Persona 6, let’s put an endgame loop on that bad boy. 

Thanks for reading.

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Red Dead Redemption 2 - What Makes a Game Good?

There are no spoilers in this post.

I recently sent this message to a friend on Discord, venting about my time with Red Dead Redemption 2:

RDR2 is an upsetting and miserable game made for people who hate fun and want to be sad. But the story is so good...I'm getting close but I haven't hit end credits yet. You're gonna want to suffer through it before you inevitably get spoiled

This ultimately covers my thoughts on the game, even after rolling credits. If you read nothing else, you’ve at least gotten that message. 

But more to the point: for all its polish and and pretty graphics and great storytelling, RDR2 can’t manage a single moment of fun gameplay. It is, for my money, the most boring, unfun AAA game to come out in a long time. And I’m not alone in this opinion. Many people across the games industry have driven the point home - the game isn’t fun. If you don’t want to hear about my particular gripes with the game, skip three paragraphs and continue on. 

There is no incentive to do anything in the game outside the main questline. Anything you could do (specifically for money and supplying camp) - hunting, fishing, poker, whatever - does not feed back into the game in a meaningful way. And even though those things can earn you money, the need for those extra dollars is completely mitigated by the very first bank heist that you do in the game, which gives you enough money to pretty much completely upgrade your camp and supply it fully. Anything else you might do (say, stranger encounters, or just random open world nonsense) has to come from your own interest in experiencing it. There is no significant benefit to doing those things outside of maybe stranger questline stories, of which only a handful don’t feel like a waste of time. 

The “survival” mechanics are laughable and poorly implemented. The cores are pointless and easily manageable, they end up just being a nuisance. The food you need to keep on hand takes up slots in the weapon wheel and make the radial menus a chore to tab through. Speaking of the menus, they’re bad. All of them. I have to relearn the menus every time I need to find something, and nothing is where you immediately thought it might be.

The gunplay itself is boring, and at times (like being on horseback) actually bad. The mission design is awful. If you’re not fighting enemies in between some rocks or in a canyon, you’re walking slowly next to an NPC for 10 minutes. Occasionally there’s a hint of fun in some of the stealthier segments, but even that is tainted by the game’s sluggish controls and awkward movement. I could probably go on and on.

Despite all of this, and all my harsh words, I wanted to - needed to - finish this game. As a fan of the first Red Dead Redemption, I needed to see how we got to where we were at the beginning of that game. But even without that, RDR2 has enough gripping stories, dialogue, and character development that you have to see it to the end. So I suffered - and I do mean that - through hours and hours of walking around, talking to people, auto-aiming, walking, talking, auto-aiming, rinse and repeat. And at the end of it I didn’t regret a moment of it. I was bored out of my mind playing through the vast majority of this game and at the end of it all I didn’t regret anything. The story was so good, the characters so well acted, the dialogue so well written. 

So what makes a game good? Because by all accounts RDR2 is, in my opinion, a bad game (strictly speaking about the play experience). It’s not fun. It’s barely even a game at all, if you ask me. But I played it to completion and at the end of the day enjoyed what I got out of it. Does that make it a good game anyway? Are all my complaints moot if I enjoyed the story as much as I did? You might dismiss this question by saying it’s subjective. And, yes, of course it is. But I feel there should be a baseline for what we consider a good game. If something was better suited to be a TV show or a miniseries can we really nominate it for game of the year? I understand that the game’s story slightly changes based on your actions and “honor” level. Is that enough? It can’t be a TV show anymore? Does that stuff really change the game’s story in a significant way? I don’t think so. It has to end the way it does because Red Dead Redemption begins the way that it does.

At the end of the day maybe I’m just confused. Conflicted. Gun to my head I’d say that RDR2 is not a good game. Ask me next week and I might say that ultimately it is a good game. Either way, you should play God of War. What a fantastic game. 

Thanks for reading. See you tomorrow. 

[virtual-dump]

An Introduction:

I’m here to talk about games. I have a lot of passion for games and nowhere to put it all, so here I am. Maybe one day this blog will get me somewhere I can talk about games professionally. Until then I’ll be here, trying to write something daily. I play pretty much everything and I have interest in almost all aspects of the industry. Strap in folks.