Category: Platform

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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.

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Game Ramblings #111 – Trials of Mana (Remake)

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Switch (original in Collection of Mana and remake), Windows
  • Originally On: Super Famicom

Where Final Fantasy VII Remake took a classic and completely reinvented it, this is more of a careful remake. Ya it does some things different than the original. Ya it’s in 3D. However, it follows a pretty safe path in modernizing the original instead of reinventing it. At the same time it’s a lot of fun on its own, so I didn’t particularly mind the areas where it still felt stuck in the 90s. If it wasn’t for AI difficulties, I would have no problem pushing this one more, but the AI really ran into problems that I’ll get into.

Where Secret of Mana’s remake felt odd because it stuck to its design, Trials feels good for the same reasons. Trials in general was always a more modern approach to the ARPG formula, having things like distinct combat areas, combo-based attacks instead of stamina, easy access to magic and skills, etc. It all worked pretty well on the SNES. In 3D it still works just as well thanks to some pretty solid implementation of hard lock targetting and target switching on the right analog stick. In its current form, it feels pretty reminiscent of the Tales of series, which caught me pretty off guard. The fights have a pretty good flow to them in normal trash fights, and for the most part the bosses played a balance that I really enjoy – not punishingly difficult, but longer in form and with multiple distinct phases, forcing you to keep focused and learn on the fly.

However, the boss fights are really where the AI struggles. As the game progresses, there’s more frequent segments where some high priority targets spawn with a timer. At the end of the timer is usually some punishing mechanic – maybe the boss gains 15% health back, maybe there’s large AoE damage, maybe there’s more adds, maybe it’s a guaranteed party wipe. By and large these are things that MUST be killed, and fast. However, the AI has extreme problems targeting them, and if you even get lucky, the AI typically won’t hit them more than once or twice before going on cooldown. Of the probably 6 or 7 times I party wiped in the game, I think only one of those was because of something other than a timed segment where the AI simply didn’t attack.

On the other hand, the game is extraordinarily clear about how the enemy is going to target you with special and magical attacks. Targeters are large and red, and very precise to the area that will be hit. They also fill in various ways to indicate when attacks will take place. Circle AoE fills from the center out. Sweep cones will go from the inside to outside of their sweep. What I like about all of this is that dodging attacks is never about small tells or dramatic animations. It’s 100% about paying attention to where you are, what the targeter is doing, and having an idea of how long you can stay in place attacking before dodging the hell out of the way. It’s both incredibly clear in execution, and allows for attacks to be incredibly punishing when they hit you, which ends up being a very fun and very fair combination.

The rest of the game kind of is what it is. The story is a straight pull from the 90s, and is a plot we’ve seen 1000 times before. It’s got a pretty cliche fantasy take on some other dimension dude taking over someone’s body and sending its minions in to sow chaos and take over the world. On the other hand, they’ve added a ton of voice acting across the board, so the story that is there is much more alive than in the past. Towns still feel like 90s JRPG standards. Ya there’s a bunch of people, but they nearly all throw irrelevant one liners in conversation. As a result, towns still work as the usual standard three stop affair – weapon shop, armor shop, inn to sleep and save. However, it’s still as fun as ever to walk into a town and buy out the entire upgrade stock, leaving the town as a more powerful badass version of your party. This release also has the same class tree as the original, which is effective but nothing new. Each branch of the tree has a bit of a specialization, and you can definitely tailor it to your preferred style, but it’s not doing anything that isn’t standard to the genre.

As safe as this release was though, it is still fun. Ya the AI problems on boss fights suck, but you get through them. Because the battle style focuses more on skill than numbers, I didn’t really need to putz around grinding. However, the game also gave out a fair amount of XP to balance that so it wasn’t like I was surviving purely on grit and determination. Trash fights have a really nice flow to them, so that never got boring. Ignoring the AI problems, the boss fights were also mechanically fun and long enough to feel like a real accomplishment. Is this as impressive a remake as Final Fantasy VII Remake? Absolutely not. However, it doesn’t feel like it was trying to be, and where it ended up feels like where it belonged.