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Game Ramblings #114 – Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: Switch
  • Originally Available On: Wii, 3DS

So, this is admittedly the third time I’ve played this game. I knew I would enjoy it, I knew it would take a long time, and I knew what the experience would be like. However, it was interesting playing it after Xenoblade 2. It didn’t necessarily make the remake better or worse, but the big changes in combat for Xenoblade 2 are something that I think I now appreciate more having gone back to the older combat style. My ramblings here are generally going to reflect seeing the changes the series has gone through now that I’ve played the two book ends sort of back to back.

Combat in the remake is the same as it was in the original. Your artes are lined up in a row to be used. Some artes are attacks, some are buffs or debuffs, some are defensive maneuvers, etc. Some of them are based on positioning (ex: bonus damage if attacking from behind). Some are used in tandem to effect the enemy (ex: Break -> Topple -> Stun). The basics that are there are the same that have been in the Xenoblade series the whole time.

What surprised me going back now that I’ve played Xenoblade 2 is how much I wish they’d have applied that game’s combat system to the remake. Ignoring some of the features that are definitely tied to the Xeno 2 story, the core change to that combat is that instead of a bar of artes that you scroll through, each attack is tied to a hard button – either on the d-pad or on the face buttons. This would have made the combat in this remake so much more fluid. You’ve got 8 buttons that could be used, 8 artes that you can assign anyway, and then a center activation on each character that could easily be applied to one of the shoulder buttons. Instead, you’re stuck doing a scroll to get to the arte that you want to use, while at the same time trying to juggle movement.

It also caught me a bit off guard that I never hit a point where I really felt a need to grind. I’m not sure if this is just because I’m generally familiar with the game, or if they did a rebalance pass, but balance was almost always in line with my expectations. Bosses felt reasonably balanced for where I expected to be in the game. If I was hitting a point where I was feeling a bit pressured, there was generally enough side quests around to give me boosts. I was generally collecting enough general stuff to keep up with money needed to grab the relevant current set of gear. It was just kind of a nice level playing field for the bulk of the game. I admittedly dropped it down to easy at the end, but not because I was frustrated of the grind like 2 or X. I was simply at a point where I wanted to see the remastered finish and epilogue content, rather than go through a boss gauntlet I’d already been through before.

On the other hand, boy do I really not miss the complexity of the systems in place in Xenoblade 2. That’s not to say that this game was ever really that simple, but it still only has three real forms of progression – XP for levels, AP for leveling up artes, and SP for leveling up passive skills. This is a far simpler game than the Excel simulation that Xeno 2 ultimately became. If there’s anything that really is still a bit of a chore to manage, it’s the amount of side questing involved.

That said, the overall UX for this is much improved over the original game anyway. Getting to your quest list is super fast (d-pad down). The in-world indication of where quest items or quest kills are is significantly improved. Generally speaking, it’s a lot more obvious what I should be doing at any point, and far quicker for me to change my focus to a different side quest with a few clicks.

There’s also some bonus points for how easy it was for me to change the cosmetic look of the party in the remake. Buying a piece of gear once permanently allows you to equip its cosmetic look to the characters it applies to. This is a super nice change, since your party can very rapidly turn into a multicolor shit show with all the random gear you’ll end up finding. I set my party’s look pretty early on to be consistent with roughly where they started, with a few minor color variations that I preferred, and stuck with it. On the surface, this may seem like a small feature, but I was always more of a fan of the numbers behind gear in JRPGs, and typically less of a fan of the visual impact in games that supported it, so finding my look and sticking to it is one of those things I really appreciate.

However, the real reason I suspect most people will want to replay this is for the Future Connected epilogue. This one was interesting in that it’s substantial, but not nearly as substantial as the Torna expansion for 2. It provides some nice story closure specifically for Melia, but not much else for the rest of the gang. It adds an interesting mechanic with the Nopon Ponspector horde that replaces chain attacks, but also significantly scales back your party flexibility. I suppose ultimately, it was a nice way for me to wrap up my gameplay of the remake, but it left me wanting to see more of what happened to the rest of the party. There may be some potential for them to add more of these epilogues to the game if they need to stretch the schedule before whatever Xeno project comes next, but I’m not sure if I’d recommend playing through an entire long JRPG again unless you’re really as big a fan of the series as I am.

Remakes are always a tough one, but in cases like Xenoblade I’m pretty happy about it. Beyond exposing the game to a much different audience than the previous go arounds, it’s just nice to hop into a game I loved in a way that is significantly better looking. This has continued my sort of run of JRPG remakes that I’ve been doing lately, and this is probably the safest of my recent bunch, sticking to the original framework entirely – FF7R was a distinct explosion, and Trials of Mana was similar in gameplay, but much different in visual style. However, it being safer didn’t make it worse. The game largely still works great. Would I have liked to see them take some risks and make combat smoother with lessons learned from 2? Ya. Am I glad to see that they didn’t add heaps of new systems? Even larger ya. This game wasn’t accidentally a 92 metacritic its first go around, and that shows. This game has aged remarkably well, and with a fresh coat of paint it’s still going to be worth playing for newcomers, and returning players may just take it as an opportunity to revisit a game they loved.

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Game Ramblings #113 – The Outer Worlds

More Info from Obsidian Entertainment

  • Genre: FPS / ARPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Xbox One, Windows, Switch

I’m not a huge fan of the recent Fallout games, so it may seem weird that I decided to play the spiritual followup to New Vegas. However, it was never the world or story I had a problem with. It was entirely the shooting mechanics. The Outer Worlds from the outside seemed like it was at least attempting to play more like a typical shooter that has RPG mechanics, rather than an RPG that uses guns. This definitely leans closer to a game I can enjoy, but it’s not without its mechanical issues that knock it down a few notches.

The first-person Fallout games never really made sense to play without using the VATS system. The straight shooting mechanics were pretty garbage, and leaned heavily on stats in ways not typical of FPS games, while the VATS system provided a much more accurate way of figuring out your chance of hitting things without having to deal with aiming. The Outer Worlds on the other hand is very distinctly an FPS with RPG wrapping. Shooting is much more of the core experience, with only a bit of an ability to slow down time for limited periods to help with aiming. In that regard, this is definitely a much smoother shooting experience.

However, that’s not to say that I found it to be a mechanically good FPS, especially with respect to playing it on console. At a base level the weapons generally feel kind of lifeless in a lot of respects, with pretty weak recoil and camera shake. As an example, the difference between high damage pistols and rifles or mid damage automatics is pretty irrelevant, so I tended to just go for highest single-shot damage and spam fire since I wasn’t going to deal with a typical single-shot high damage doom recoil.

On a gamepad, the feature set there was even more disappointing. They have the typical trappings of a gamepad shooter with some amount of aim acceleration, target adhesion, etc. However, it pretty uniformly felt like the activation range of gamepad aim assist features was significantly below the functional range of the weapons I was choosing, and also well closer to enemies than I wanted to play in the style I chose. The result of this was that it felt more like playing a pre-Halo console FPS, where I was just tapping the camera stick to get close enough to use strafing to finalize my aim and guarantee hits. Compared to the high-end of console FPS, it just felt like the features were a secondary thing that hadn’t been put through much testing.

This all kind of came to a head in the general player UX. It was more often than not that I didn’t really realize I was dying or nearly dead until it was too late. I’d be trying to effectively aim at things beyond the assist range while depending on my team to prevent flanking. They would occasionally get killed, allowing enemies to flank and kill me. The big issue throughout all of that is that it was never that obvious that either my team or myself were dead or dying. The UI elements for health are small and packed in the corner, so they’re out of focus. Damage indicators at least to me weren’t in your face, up until the point where I was at very low health, which typically was too late. The aiming issues combined with that were the leading cause of death for me, and it was generally a frustration point because it felt entirely preventable on both accounts.

That said, the rest of the game was generally of the style that I really wanted it to be.

The core progression of the game is a series of quests that take you around to small hub worlds. Each world has its own set of side quests to do, factions to help or hurt, and secrets to find. Blowing straight through the storyline would have been a quick affair, but there’s so much to miss just doing that. The side quest lines that you get involved in all have fun storylines to run through, with their own entertaining set of people to meet. In a lot of ways, this felt more similar to Mass Effect than to Fallout to me, where the main story would get me to a planet, but then I’d get lost in the local story for a while until I later got back on track. Generally speaking, if a game has me playing the side quests for the sake of them being fun rather than for needing the rewards, then I’m pretty happy with the end result.

This is all helped by a visual style that is distinctly not Fallout. This is a supremely colorful game, which is both a blessing and a curse. You’ll never mistake this for a brown post-apocalypse setting. While this is a lot of fun to look at in isolation, it’s also exceedingly busy. While this isn’t usually a problem, I did lose enemies in the visuals from time to time, especially on the smaller end of things. That said, I much prefer visual brightness and loudness to the drab wasteland of the Fallout series, so I’ll take losing some silhouettes from time to time as the downside.

The rest of the RPG trappings are also a lot of fun. There’s a ton of variety to build out with regard to your stats and inventory. Of note for me was my ability to build out what ended up becoming basically a lockpick master. I leaned heavily into increasing stats in 3 main areas – long guns for offense, lockpicking for crates, and hacking for electronics. In doing so, I was able to break into almost anything that was locked. This allowed me to make up for my deficiency on the defensive side of things by having a much larger ammunition and weapon upgrade pool to choose from than I’d otherwise have typically had. It’s this kind of customization that brings me to play more western-style RPGs, where mechanically they’re often otherwise kind of slow and clunky. The customization on top of being more action-leaning did a lot to keep me playing this one until the end.

This one is curious, and definitely shows some growth for Obsidian now that they’re disconnected from the Fallout IP. Ya their shooting mechanics aren’t the best, but they’re distinctly a step in the right direction. The rest of what’s there feels like what made New Vegas work to begin with. Good writing, good RPG underpinnings, fun characters, and an entertaining world. With the budget of Microsoft behind them and some time bringing their FPS mechanics towards industry-leading this could be a special series.

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Game Ramblings #112 – SnowRunner

More Info from Saber Interactive

  • Genre: Simulation
  • Platform: PC
  • Also Available On: Xbox One, PS4

This is sort of a ramblings in-progress, but in general it felt like a good point to do this. This is a lot like Forza Horizon, not so much in game style, but in the fact that it feels like the kind of game I’m going to repeatedly pick up to fill gaps here and there. There’s a lot of stuff to do in the game, and it always felt fresh doing a new task. It was never really that the tasks were new, or necessarily in areas I hadn’t seen. However, I was getting a constant drip feed of upgrades, new vehicles, and more that always opened up new ways to achieve things. Despite some pretty rough UI/UX spots, this is still one of the bigger surprises of the year.

This is basically a Euro Truck-style simulation, but it’s so much more than that. It’s a challenging and detailed experience that doesn’t leave you room to be lazy. Stop paying attention going downhill with a truck load? You’re probably gonna end up going to fast and running off the road. Being too aggressive with turning while climbing a hill? Be prepared to roll over. However, it absolutely breeds a certain type of patience in how it forces you to treat the driving experience, and it’s that patience that really drives the gameplay forward. You’ll screw things up in ways that in hindsight are blindingly obvious, add that to your mental checklist, and now be a much better driver for it.

It’s extremely gratifying hitting your end goal, whether it’s finding that perfect view on top of a peak while scouting out a new area or after convincing a huge trailer of goods to make it through a snowy pass or meticulously pulling a truck that’s stuck in the middle of a mud pit. All of these actions require some amount of careful planning, as well as a nice amount of skill on execution. You’re always going to want to bring the right truck (Need to pull a trailer? Bring something with power!), the right upgrades (Lifting crates out of a river? Bring a crane!), or even the right route to your goal (Doing a long drive? Plan a route with gas stations along the way!) The combination of planning and skill is at a point that feels rare, even in the simulation space.

The variety at play here is also a lot of fun. There’s a ton of different sizes of trucks that are better or worse at different things. If you want to go and see a new area, take a small SUV like the International Scout. If you’re looking to pull a bunch of goods, you’ve got all scales of different trucks to choose from depending on whether you want speed or brute strength. If you’re really looking to get through some bogged down muddy areas, go straight at something like a Caterpillar even if it means taking it really slow. That variety also works out well in the environment. You start out in Michigan, full of mud and water. You end up moving to Alaska and Russia where deep snow banks and icy roads become the king.

All of this is wrapped into a core loop that encourages you to kind of do what you want. There’s a number of spots in each area that require you to do repairs to improve your overall driving flow. This runs the gamut from taking care of downed power lines and rock slides to building new bridges to provide ways across rivers and canyons. Feel like just going out and exploring a bit? There’s some tasks to send you off on big exploration climbs in the woods. There’s also vehicles and upgrades to find scattered all over, improving your overall capabilities. Feel like just making some money? There’s all sorts of delivery tasks to do to just get yourself some hard funds. Each piece of this provides something directly beneficial to you, so even if you’re just screwing around, you aren’t wasting time.

However, like a lot of simulation games this one definitely has its pretty rough edges in the UI/UX space.

One of the first oddities that will hit you is in how they offer up tasks and missions. There’s a big ol list of them in your pause menu, and you can see the exact specific things that need to be done. However, you have to go to some specific spot to start the task, THEN you can deliver things. In cases where this is just deliverable products? Who cares, bring them on your way to the task, accept it, and immediately deliver it. But for tasks that require you to deliver some specific piece of equipment? Sorry, you can’t grab that until you accept the task. However, some of the tasks are gated behind progress anyway. It feels like once a task is unlocked, you should be able to just do the damn thing instead of having to drive around to hit yes on starting it.

There’s similar oddities in the general placement of things. Of the zones I played, there were two things that I really noticed – the garages where you go to upgrade and purchase vehicles are basically in a corner of the zone and gas stations tend to not be equally distributed. These two things aren’t really deal breakers, but it results in awkward flow issues. There’s sections of the game where you’ve got reliable access to fuel or easy access to the garage to modify your configuration. However, there’s as many times where you’re driving 15-20 minutes, realize you need to make a change to your vehicle and have to redo the entire trek again. Even worse is times when you simply are out of gas at the end of a multi-part task because you were on the one side of the zone with no gas stations. It may be a very “gamey” type thing, but centralizing the garage and making sure that gas stations are at least distributed better would go a long way to improving the overall flow of just being out and about completing things. Ultimately these things are easy to solve thanks to the fast travel button to take you back to your garage, so it feels weird that there’s a layer of friction in place to begin with.

At the end of all this though, this is a surprise hit. It’s a surprise hit in much the way that Euro Truck Simulator was a surprise hit to me. It’s something that should be a wildly niche product, and while it’s crafted with love it has a lot of rough edges from being in that sort of AA quality space. However despite it all I just couldn’t put it down for days. I would constantly be finding that new upgrade or grinding out a bit of money to pay for that new truck or taking my SUV out and climbing just one more peak, and loving the experience the entire way. It’s just one of those games that I can’t really explain why I enjoyed it so much, but can just recommend, and I’ll continue to look forward to jumping in to fill some time, even if for just one more delivery.