Tag: shelved

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Shelved It #16 – Gran Turismo 7

More Info from Sony

  • Genre: Racing
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4

This one probably could have been titled Set Aside, because frankly that’s what I’m doing. I’m putting this one aside to return to it at some point. The driving experience is still far too good for me to not jump into this one periodically, much like past GT titles. However, everything around it is garbage – just flat out garbage, and it’s baffling that Gran Turismo continues to be like this, because a lot of the problems are not new.

Just on its own, the problems that came over from past games were enough for me to generally pull my very little remaining hair out. Gran Turismo has ultimately been well titled in the past as “The Ultimate Driving Simulator” because the racing experience has always been pretty bad, and it’s still bad here. In past entries, it was something I was largely able to ignore but we’ve continued to have Forza entries in intervening years that at the very least have fun racing, even if the driving experience hasn’t quite felt there. Unfortunately for GT, I’m kind of at the point where I would just rather be playing Forza.

The first obvious thing is that you’re never actually in what I’d call a race. You’re just in a chase. You start every race 20-30 seconds behind the leader, who’s a quarter lap or more ahead of you. You’re given a very limited set of laps to do your best to chase up to the front and try to get the “win”. However, all you’re doing is upgrading your vehicles to the class limits of the races so you can easily outclass the AI enough to get to the front. You’re never just starting an event from the line and going head to head against cars of equal measure. Again, it’s not racing. It’s chasing.

On its own, that sucks. And ya, I can do multiplayer if I want to race but frankly it isn’t why I play these games. However, the AI are also part of the overall problem. They simply aren’t trying to race. They’re just out driving. If you’re next to them and in their perceived line on a turn? Fuck you they’re running into you. If you’re ahead of them and their braking pattern doesn’t match what you want? Fuck you they’re running into you. They just stick to their preset racing line and don’t react to what’s going on around them……which might be fine, but they also rubberband. Their braking is clearly unnatural. Their acceleration is clearly unnatural. Their ability to do things in turns without losing traction is clearly unnatural. As a combination of things on top of the fact that you’re trying to rush to the front ASAP, it results in a frustrating mess of dodging unpredictable and unnatural cars at high rates of speed.

Which again, it sucks, but I expected it. This is Gran Turismo. It’s always fucking been like this. Just like past GTs, the menus also still suck. Things take far too many clicks to get through. There’s far too many layers deep to change simple things. Modifying your car’s setup is still in weird spots. Restarting a license event when you don’t quite hit gold is still slower than I want it to be. But again, these are all things I expected. I knew that all of this stuff was going to be the case going in, and I wanted to play it anyway because the driving experience part of the games is what always drew me in. So they went ahead and added more problems anyway.

Simply put, the game shipped with barebones content on the single player side. There just isn’t really the wide set of unique races that past games have had. Rather than being a wide array of manufacturer specific races, there’s a handful for a couple of companies like Porsche, then a handful of country specific events. The rest are largely class type races. You’re completely missing out on the wide array of lower power races like the old Mini Cooper or K-Car races. You’re missing out on some of the fun endurance events that encouraged tuning less exciting vehicles to go for as long as possible without needing refills or tire changes. It’s just missing the interesting random stuff that made expanding your garage fun.

Which doesn’t really matter, because the economy is completely busted. Get a duplicate car? Too bad, they removed selling it. Car prices? Now modeled after realistic car values rather than being set to some gamified practical price. Have fun with your $400k Skyline. Don’t like the changes to driving dynamics if you apply engine mods? Too bad, they’re permanent. Buy a new engine, often as expensive as the car was to start with. Want to put a set of racing tires on your car? Well about 75% of the races don’t give you enough money to do that through one try, so lmao start grinding. A lot of the public is pessimistically noting this as a consequence of microtransactions trying to be encouraged, and there’s probably some bean counting going on to prove that out, but frankly a lot of this just feels like bad design.

Ultimately, this was all capped by the game forcing an online connection, even in single player mode. The development team claims this was to prevent hacking in multiplayer, but that feels like a copout. People that want to play in multiplayer will accept some form of restrictions, be that an online-only profile, multiplayer being distinctly separate, etc. Make that distinction and keep it on its own. Don’t let it affect the single player. Frankly, the single player could be balanced much better without the online chain around its neck.

All of these little things are basically making me put the game down. Sure, the driving experience is still as fun as ever. Doing hot laps for shits and giggles in a Miata is great. It’s as close as I’m generally going to get to taking the ND in my garage out to these tracks, and I love it. However, everything around feel like the game is actively trying to get me to put it down. It has old Gran Turismo problems that have been ignored at this point for literal decades and adds new problems that just make the game insufferable to play, so this one is going back on the shelf until it starts to see some patches roll through.

Perhaps by then I’ll be playing Forza 8 anyway.

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Shelved It #15 – Horizon: Forbidden West

More Info from Sony

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4

I don’t typically shelve games that I enjoy, let alone sequels to games I enjoyed. There’s often enough of something there to keep me moving. For Horizon, that’s very nearly the universe they’ve created, which is still just as gorgeous and interesting of a sci-fi experience as any game out there. However, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was just playing the first game again. Not a sequel with iterations, not something with fresh ideas. Literally the original game. I put it down for a few days to give it some fresh air while I played a bit of Gran Turismo, but I’m finding myself at a point where I don’t have a drive to pick it back up, so at that point I might as well shelve it.

I could literally post my ramblings about the original as well as my ramblings about The Frozen Wilds and you could basically figure out what my pros and cons list for this game would be, and frankly that was always in the back of my mind as I got further into Forbidden West. Obviously the core gameplay was there, but problems started slowly creeping in.

The most immediate sorta issue you run into is with climbing. I played the original game immediately after Breath of the Wild and the inability to climb on any surface was already a bit of a detriment at the time. 5 years later it’s now a glaring problem. You can basically climb almost anywhere in this game, but you hit enough small points where you inexplicably can’t climb for it to be annoying that they didn’t just implement BOTW climbing. It being glaring is not helped by the fact that the cliffs literally now glow with climbing markup.

I’m not exaggerating about that. As a developer, I get why they probably chose to keep the systems similar between the original and sequel. However, as a developer I also understand that they had 5 years and a AAA budget – something I’ve rarely had access to – to implement better climbing, and their answer is a UX nightmare. It’s weird.

However, as the game went on I came to be generally bothered by the pace of combat slowing to a crawl. This game has the same general curve as the original. You start off able to stealth kill almost everything, then a couple of bigger things need a stealth swing + maybe a bow shot. As you get a bit further, you start seeing more larger mobs that require a bit more melee to take down. You then get into higher level variants of small machines that can’t be stealth killed and require more attacks. You get into larger mobs that can’t really be stunned by melee, so it loses its effectiveness. At a certain point, you’re just fighting level 30+ groups where you have to range everything and combat falls apart.

In general, there’s still a distinct lack of feel to the power curve of melee. There’s a few general skill tree upgrades, but with melee it’s kind of WYSIWYG. You don’t get to purchase cool versions of the melee weapon like you do ranged. You don’t get to do workbench upgrades like you do ranged weapons. You don’t really get much in terms of stealth damage upgrades once you hit the couple of skill tree points early in the game. It doesn’t feel like you really have a choice to do a melee or stealth-focused track, because you just kind of a hit an effectiveness wall with them, regardless of your upgrade path.

The thing about melee is that is it also generally puts you in a hugely disadvantageous position. It’s surprisingly easy for things to blow past you and out of camera range. Sometimes it’s because you did a big melee attack and went too far. Sometimes it’s because you dodged to the side and the machine blew past you. The problem for me is that it never felt like I had the tools to then really keep track of what was going on off-screen. There’s not any sort of system to let the camera lock or quick pivot to nearby targets. There’s not really an effective way to mark targets and have them be obvious in location off screen during heavy combat. What it ended up meaning again is that for fights of multiple enemies, melee wasn’t worth the danger or hassle and I was better off going to long range and keeping the entire group in front of me in view.

Ranged at least alleviates the problems somewhat and is pretty obviously still the more focused development track. There’s still a large array of ranged weapon types from bows of different effectiveness distances to trap launches to boomerangy type things. The elemental attack system is still also a lot of fun, with different machines having different weaknesses and benefits to the player. The big problem in the end is that ranged also hits an effectiveness wall that grinds combat to a half. When you’re doing hundreds of points of damage with an arrow and seeing a health bar barely blip down despite hitting weak points perfectly, it’s kind of grating. It’s one thing in a Souls-like when you’re basically hopping from boss to boss, but in a game where that starts to happen with general overworld trash it really slows progress to an unfun level.

Ultimately what really did me in is that the game worked great for about 20 hours, then it just felt like I was slogging through it. It’s interesting to have a side quest about defending a town from raiders and machines for the first couple of times, but then it becomes uninteresting. It’s fun taking down a camp for the first half dozen times, but then it becomes uninteresting. It’s fun hitting the weakpoints on a Thunderjaw the first few times, but then it’s just the same. Since Forbidden West didn’t really separate itself from the original, this is a game that would have severely benefited from being a more condensed experience. Frozen Wilds was fun because it was a shorter experience separated by time from the original, so it was still fresh and fun when I finished it. As a sequel, this just didn’t work out the same way.

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Shelved It #14 – Earth’s Dawn

More Info from oneoreight

  • Genre: Action
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Windows, Xbox One

I spent most of my time playing this in a state where I wanted to enjoy it and generally was enjoying it, and then I’d hit a boss battle and no longer be enjoying it. It wasn’t that the bosses were hard, but they just weren’t fun. I puzzled on it a bit, but when it hit me what was really feeling off to me, I knew it was time to shelve the game.

I really wanted this to fit into that sort of Odin Sphere / Muramasa slot in my brain, and for a while it did. Its combat is pretty similar in core focus. You’ve got a main melee chain, the ability to rapidly dodge, and a way to set enemies into temporary stun states. For the first couple of hours, that was more than enough to be fun. I was going around getting comfortable with chains, getting comfortable with some of the basic enemy types, getting comfortable with the overall flow of the game.

Outside of combat, the game has both solid gearing and skill setup that I was enjoying a lot. Gearing is purely crafting-based, but had a solid number of archetypes to choose from. Guns could range from shotguns to rifles to uzis. Swords could be different lengths and weights. Overall it allowed me to craft in a direction that fit my favored play style. The skill setup was the more interesting part. Skills are basically two parts, earning it and the ability to equip it. Equipping is purely having enough available resources to do so, but the resources to do so came purely out of killing enemies in the world. The skill earning itself came from completing missions quickly. Those two in conjunction led to a place where you would identify the missions that currently had the skills you wanted to get combining into then completing them with full exploration to maximize your resource gain. The overall flow that came out of that reminded me a lot of something that honestly would have worked well on the Switch. You can play this game for minutes or hours, and in both cases you can complete some number of that core game loop to at least make valuable forward progress no matter the case.

So at this point you may be wondering why I shelved it. Over time I was noticing that on occasion I was getting into places where my dodges were missing when I was surrounded by enemies. For a while I chalked it up to multiple enemies causing me to get into stun states or something to that effect, and figured I just needed to be more careful. I then started noticing it happening on bosses, so I began to experiment a bit. What I ended up figuring out is that it was doing such aggressive button caching that I would be able to queue up multiple attacks in my chain ahead, and then not be able to interrupt that to dodge. When a dodge may only give you fractions of a second to execute it, having that all backed up behind attacks was deadly and it completely changed how I was approaching the game.

When I can’t cancel out of an attack into an immediate dodge, I go straight into Souls mode, and frankly I don’t like that kind of gameplay. Rather than aggressively attacking, I sit back and wait. I look for tells, then do my dodge in isolation, then get a few safe quick attacks in and back off. It’s slow. It’s frustrating. It’s boring. But, it’s safe. When playing aggressively results in death and significant time loss, it’s not a decision. You just play safe. Sure, I could grind away in side missions and power my way through, but that’s also not particularly fun. When I shelve games it’s usually a single cause – a small mechanic, something dumb that just gets under my skin. This was it. If I was going to be playing slow just to not die, why am I playing the game?

Like most games I shelve, I’m not really shelving the game because it was bad. It’s ultimately because the developers made a decision I didn’t like, so that’s kind of the way it is. On the other hand, I wonder how much more I’d be enjoying those moments given a dodge that guaranteed immediate fire and interrupted whatever I was queued up to do. That small of a change is often the difference between me liking a game or not, and in this case it went the wrong way.