Tag: xbox

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Game Ramblings #151 – Forza Horizon 5

More Info from Microsoft

  • Genre: Open World Racing
  • Platform: PC / Xbox Series X
  • Also Available On: Xbox One

Look, this is Forza Horizon. From a meta game perspective, there’s nothing new. You drive around in an open world, find races, find over the top stupid events, crush signs, get a ton of cars. That hasn’t changed. The location has changed. The specifics of the story have changed. None of that is really important though. If you’ve played these games, you know if you like this series by now. If you don’t know if you like it, give it a try. That stuff’s not really what I care to talk about.

What’s nice about 5 is that it’s a lot of the things that they felt like they learned from 4, but amped up and there from the start. Seasons and seasonal play lists are no longer the big new feature, but just part of the game. As a result they feel oddly more integrated to me. There’s more variety in the seasonal play lists. There’s a better push to get you to jump into multiplayer games just to try them out, without the stress of needing to win. There’s just more of a reason to do these things for the hell of it. Being rewarded with cool new cars is just a part of the fun.

The other big thing just there is the Eliminator. For 4, this was the battle royale that was added as a random patch a year after the game’s release. What nobody expected is that it was going to be a hell of a lot of fun. For 5, it’s there from the start and continues to be chaotic. Now that it’s just a part of the game, I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of dumb shouldn’t work but ends up being hilariously find ideas they come up with.

However, the big thing for me is related to screenshots in this one being in different aspect ratios. I was actually able to take advantage of cross platform play this time around, and boy does it work well. For FH3 and 4, my choices were PC or a base Xbox One, and let’s be realistic – that isn’t a choice. I was PC all the way. However, now I have my development PC or a Series X. They’re comparable hardware for me with comparable experiences – I can do 60 FPS in 21:9 1440p or I can do 60fps in performance mode dynamic res 4k. They’re both great experiences and I used them both.

The big thing for me is that the cross platform play just works. A lot of cloud save stuff in the game industry has tended to be sporadic. Nintendo’s cloud saves work well, but require a lot of manual handling that can be kind of a pain in the ass. Sony’s storage needs are so slim relative to the size of modern save files that I stopped taking advantage of it when I left the PS3 generation. On mobile, both Android and iOS have made me want to stab myself in the face when developing on those platform. Steam’s cloud saves work well though because they check when you launch a game for any newer data in the cloud. Microsoft takes this approach, and it works flawlessly. If I was already at my PC, I’d just play there. If I wanted to lay in my beanbag or didn’t want to turn my PC on, I just turned on the Xbox. In both cases I didn’t think about save data or whether I needed to sync things. I just went, it just worked, I just raced.

It should also be noted just how well it runs on any hardware you throw at it, but frankly Digital Foundry covered it better than I will ever be able to.

That was really the important thing for about playing through 5. I already knew I was going to come in and enjoy the game because I’ve literally been doing that now for this subseries for the past decade. What I didn’t expect was how easy it would be to just play where I wanted to play. This series has always been spectacularly fun, and it continues to be so. Now I just know that I can do so where I want, when I want, and I don’t have to worry about the platforms getting in my way.

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Shelved It #10 – Infinite Undiscovery

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: Xbox 360 via Series X compatibility

This is one that was sort of floating around in the ether for me for a long time. It’s a JRPG from a company (tri-Ace) that I’ve tended to like, but historically has had a lot of ups and downs. Critically, this one was definitely one of their down moments. It has decent combat, but the mechanics around it are often pretty questionable leading to a vague, if not frustrating experience that ends up feeling less like skill and more like trial and error grinding.

The core combat of this one typically would be fine for me to keep wanting to play. It’s action-based, but distinctly a JRPG in terms of stats, buffs, debuffs, etc. Where there’s simplicity in controls, there’s a lot of depth in their use. For example, different combos (A-B, A-A-B, etc) can have different results. Some are knockups, allowing you to juggle your enemy in the air. Some are knockdowns. Some are AoE attacks. Learning which to use at the right time is core to effective combat and has really good overall combat rhythm. You can also link with your active party members and use skills related to them. It can be a bit awkward in the 15+ year old game sense, but more often than not it works well.

Where the game really falls apart is in the specific mechanics often tied to a dungeon.

For example, the first dungeon in the game requires you to mind control two specific enemies to a door as sacrifices to unlock it. In isolation, that’s a really cool idea. However, it requires a few things – the knowledge that one of your party members has an ability that can mind control enemies, the knowledge that it can be used to do more than talk to NPC animals, and then the luck to have them actually hit the ability. There’s a bunch of things in that list of things that you just kind of have to accidentally stumble upon, because they don’t teach you.

However, the fight that ultimately did me in was one that I thought was obvious, but just downright frustrating – and as it turned out, was not obvious. I was fighting a boss that could go in and out of visibility on a timer that could lead to my failure. Of note, this was only the second time I was fighting one of these types of battles. The main character has a flute that could bring the boss out of the invis state, allowing the party to attack….except the main character could not attack him. I figured this was intended, and was just frustrated at my AI characters inconsistently attacking. Due to AI issues, I ran out of time and hit a game over, losing me a bunch of time of backtracking in the process. Looking online afterwards, it turns out that my main character had gained a skill that allowed him to attack these shifting enemies, and I had gained it almost 20 levels earlier. Didn’t know it had that secret power, sure as hell never saw it in the description or had any reason to care about it when I earned it 5+ hours ago. Now that I knew about the mechanic? Trivial fight.

It’s that level of inconsistency that follows with other tri-Ace releases. Games like the previous Star Ocean, which had really fun combat but was mechanically inconsistent surrounding it. Games like Resonance of Fate, that had interesting weapon mechanics, but pretty rough story and visuals. This one shows its bad side in those forced mechanics. They don’t make the game more fun or interesting or better. They don’t bring a level of inherent skill to the fights. They simply provide a guessing game of which thing you have in your possession that you never quite read the description of, or never quite saw the meaning of, or got hours ago and forgot existed. Once you figure out the mechanic, it’s easy, but until then it’s a wild guess, and honestly just not worth playing.

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Game Ramblings #128 – Minecraft Dungeons

More Info from Microsoft

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: Xbox Series X
  • Also Available On: Xbox One, Windows, PS4, Switch

This was one that I was really hoping to like more than I did. The promise of this extension of the IP is to blend what makes Diablo 3 fun with some of the unique nature of Minecraft. However, it never really ended up doing that. While what is there is mechanically sound, it ended up being a disappointing mix of two styles that never lived up to either end.

If this was simply a good Diablo clone, I’d have probably been fine with it on its own. However, this doesn’t really hit the variety that comes with that series.

While there’s a bunch of different weapons to equip, the differences in attack style between them never feel that impactful. A fast dagger and slow axe have obviously different speeds, but it ends up not really mattering much. What I was ultimately doing was going for the highest damage because one shotting an entire group with cleave damage was far more valuable than having an attack style that fit how I wanted to play. Ranged weapons were largely the same problem. Big damage was more useful than fast damage just in terms of ability to clear things out.

On the skill side, there’s just not much there. You can equip skills to three slots, and they can have different power levels, but I largely didn’t find them that useful. They ranged in use from skill buffs to pets to AoE damage. About the only one I found useful was an AoE blast that uses the souls of the things you kill to do large area damage, and given its low rate of charge I mostly just used it as a way to power through bosses super fast. Beyond that the skills were just kind of there, and didn’t do enough to justify paying much attention to.

In what is both a blessing and a curse, there’s also no classes. This is great in that you can equip any item to any character, and don’t have to worry about restrictions. However, it means everything feels kind of samey, rather than being uniquely tuned towards the character and how it plays in isolation. In the end, the Diablo side was just disappointing. Mechanically, what was there was super tight, but it just wasn’t that fun.

However, the Minecraft side was even more baffling to me. I get that they didn’t want to turn this into a full Minecraft experience, but thematically speaking, having so little of it feels out of place. Having a Creeper come at you should be scary – not just because of the damage, but because it exploding could mean that it opens a huge chunk in the land that could leave you stranged. Tossing a bomb should absolutely remove chunks of the environment, and it doing nothing of the sort feels out of place.

It leaves the game in an awkward spot where it’s visually Minecraft, but it just doesn’t use the license for anything useful. The game could have been reskinned to any other IP and played just the same, and probably have been better for it without the expectations that come with the license. When there’s such an iconic gameplay element missing – in this case the ability to destroy blocks in the environment – it just ends up making the game feel worse, even if the mechanics around it are fine.

This was unfortunately just a mix of styles that didn’t work. There’s really two paths that end up making this one work better. Make the Diablo style ARPG gameplay better, or make this feel more like Minecraft from a gameplay perspective. By mixing an average ARPG set of mechanics with a complete lack of ability to deform the terrain, you elevate the problems and just make the game worse for it.