Tag: fps

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Game Ramblings #217 – Metroid Prime 4: Beyond

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: FPS
  • Platform: Switch 2
  • Also Available On: Switch

This is a game searching for a core, and that seems to be something that was recognized by the team. It is often a really good first-person shooter with level and boss segments that rival any recent story-focused FPS campaign. It is just as often an excruciatingly boring experience driving across a barren desert. It is also frustratingly in opposition with what a Metroidvania wants to be to the point that I would argue this has no real Metroidvania elements. I wouldn’t go as far as to say this is a bad game, and I admittedly did generally find it to be fun, but it is obviously something that had troubled development.

There’s points where this game just works and still feels like Metroid Prime and it’s brilliant. The first pass through each region when you have the right tools is pretty universally fun and is universally capped by a really good boss fight at the end of the segment. It’s in these places where the game really feels like Prime. You’ve got a little puzzling, a little combat, a little platforming, and a fun upgrade somewhere along the way. All of this is backed by it running at 120 FPS on Switch 2 and a modern refresh of controls courtesy of the Prime remaster to really support a better overall game flow than on the Gamecube. The problem is that things beyond the core didn’t really work out well.

Some of these things are small. For example – mouse controls. This is something that should have been dead simple. Implement the mouse like a mouse that exists on PC and FPS fans understand and has 30 years of working examples. Except they didn’t do that. They virtualized the Wii pointer controls – which were good when you had a physical object you were pointing and called it a mouse. You don’t mouse to turn, you mouse to push the cursor to the screen edge to start turning. Within the screen boundaries you’re basically moving a cursor. It is not mouse controls and it does not work well like it does on a Wii Remote. This is something that any PC FPS developer would point at and go “this is not right” and fix immediately.

But then there’s larger problems like the fact that this doesn’t do the Metroidvania thing well. The only times that I bothered to backtrack were the couple of times that I physically could not get into a zone because of an upgrade blocker. Both times it happened were particularly annoying because the game started by saying something along the lines of I can do things “in the order I want” only for that to be immediately obvious bullshit. I would spend 5 minutes trudging across the desert only to hit a blocker where it then becomes obvious that I needed to trudge 5 minutes in a different direction to a zone that had the upgrade I actually needed, at which point I then needed to trudge 5 minutes the other way to base camp to get the upgrade since it was provided as a data card.

Beyond those kinds of “oops” incidents, I really didn’t do any re-traversal or backtracking. I kind of went through each of the 5 core zones once – except for a couple very particular quick trips back to the electric area for short segments. There just isn’t really any pull in the game for me to go back and collect all the upgrades because they just aren’t overly necessary, and there weren’t any core upgrades that really required you to do anything other than the linear first-pass through zones.

And then there’s the largest problem of the open world changes that just did not work out. There’s multiple things that went wrong with this whole segment of the game.

One of them is the collection mess, where the player is required to collect a bunch of green crystals scattered about to get to the final boss fight. You do eventually get a green crystal radar, but the point at which I got it was after I had already gotten to about 80% of crystals collected and finished the rest of the game and was literally trying to just wrap the one specific section. It’s boring, tedious, and too long to be something that blocks progression.

The other thing is that general gameplay in here is just not that compelling. There’s occasional combat, but it’s against the same three or four enemy types so they wear out their welcome rather quick. There’s some upgrades that you can find in little shrines but compared to other open world Nintendo experiences like the latest two Zelda games they don’t come close to the same quality bar. There’s some optional story bits with the NPCs that you see in the game, but you stumble upon them so they are purposefully disconnected from core plot and don’t have a real push behind them.

The final nail in the coffin is then just how big the desert is. The thing that made the original Prime trilogy work is that everything was interconnected and getting between zones was relatively fast, but also that you could find new stuff and new shortcuts with the upgrades you just found. The desert completely breaks that. It’s just open so there’s no real blockers to unblock, and because it’s open it’s not fast to get around. Any need to get across the desert is just slow garbage time. I finished the game in around 10 hours, but it was pretty clear that compressed down without the desert this was a much smaller game than the original trilogy. The fact that there was no fast travel option – at least to get back to the hub – was a pretty egregious omission that would have at least resolved some of the issue of needing to get around and encouraged me to hop quickly back to other zones to check for new things.

I guess at the end of the day this is a game with problems. It’s not an unplayable mess, and the core gameplay within zones really is a lot of fun, but it’s just surrounded by things that prevent the game from reaching the heights of previous Prime titles. The team mentioned that given the extended development they chased gameplay elements that both didn’t work out and had already soured in the wider gaming community, and it’s pretty clear that this was just finished to allow the team to move on to better things. I hope that Retro gets a chance at a Prime 5, because the combination of quality in Prime Remastered and the technology that they have in place for Prime 4 show that the team is probably now ready to stretch its legs on the series again after having to rebuild, but this is definitely an unfortunate stumbling block along the way.

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Game Ramblings #177 – Cyberpunk 2077

More Info from CD Projekt Red

  • Genre: FPS
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series, PC

I know. I’m spectacularly late on this one. In general I was weary of the original release since I tend to not really find long-form FPS games that appealing. The genre is something that I want to play for a few hours, destroy hordes of enemies, and be done with. However, three years and a big 2.0 patch later I figured it was time to get around to playing this one. What I found was a AAA experience that matches a lot of what I’ve seen in a lot of AAA games in the past decade or so. It does a spectacular amount of different things to a reasonably good standard, but I found myself really struggling to find something that it does to a great standard, and that was something I found across the board.

The city visuals themselves are done to a high level of polish and it’s honestly probably the standout feature of the game as a whole on PS5. The story is a bit of take it or leave it for me, but it was effective enough – at least until the end. Those things are typically not really something that get me to put down a game early, so they kind of hit enough of a mark to be strong for me. I suppose I’m ultimately a gameplay guy, so that’s where my real focus was. The gameplay is really the thing where I kept going “why isn’t there more polish here?”

The most obvious flaw to me playing on console is that it just felt like they didn’t consider the gamepad experience when they were putting it together. It’s not necessarily that the gamepad experience is difficult, but that the depth of assists is just not there. There’s a single setting to manipulate that to the best I could tell only affected an angle of aim correction, as well as typical ADS lock. It didn’t feel like there was any real aim adhesion – where the camera is pulled towards targets based on either the player’s or their movements. It didn’t feel like there was any aim friction – where the movement of the camera slows when panning across a target. For what I expect out of a AAA experience, there was just no depth to modify how the game felt to play on a gamepad.

I know some of you are screaming “just play it on PC” and I don’t necessarily disagree. However, I’ve made these systems for console shooters recently and it’s just not a difficult thing to implement. What it does give you is an ability to craft combat on a gamepad that isn’t spectacularly easy due to aim correction without making it impossible for the player to effectively aim. It also gives the player a much wider range of potential for tweaks to their experience to match their skill level. As implemented in CP2077, it just feels like they slapped aim correction in, said “screw consoles”, and went about their day. It’s a really weird thing to see in this level of budget when the reality is that the console market is a huge revenue driver.

Outside of the core shooting experience, the RPG aspects also had weird things to them that kind of made me question some decisions here. One of the things that really bugged me early on was that weapons were tied to specific parts of the skill tree. My preferred play style as I went through was to go full stealth, inevitably fuck it up about half way through a mission, then go full shotgun chaos. However, stealth and shotguns were in different skill trees. The weapons in the stealth tree weren’t my preferred play style, and the skills in the shotgun tree weren’t my preferred play style. I’d have generally preferred to keep them entirely separate.

However, about half way through I sort of realized that I was no longer actually using the skill tree and I had about 10 points unused. It dawned on me that they really didn’t feel like they were modifying my power curve at all. The only thing I ended up really using the points for was to directly pass skill check requirements to do specific things (ex: open doors with technical knowledge, overpower things with strength, etc). Maybe it’s something that is more relevant to higher difficulties, but on the normal difficulty it was a weird thing to be suddenly wrapping my head around. The power curve was entirely in finding whatever weapon had bigger numbers, and not in applying skills to craft your perfect character. They were irrelevant. For a game that is theoretically trying to be an RPG, having your main RPG system not feel powerful or useful is just weird. It makes me think that separating weapons and skills would have been useful, both to allow players to build in a more weapon-focused direction as well as to allow the skill trees to be made more singularly useful.

All of this is compounded by a bunch of really weird UX decisions that made navigating information really obnoxious. Why can I not get to the crafting screen from the inventory menu? I have to go out a menu, scroll to inventory, scroll down, then go to crafting. Why is the default sorting of the inventory some seemingly random horseshit? At least make it something immediately useful like type sorting. What relevance does the sorting in the journal have? Other than the immediate story mission being at the top, I could never figure out what order the rest is since there’s a mix of basic chores intermingling with stuff that could become story relevant later on. It’s just a bizarre set of menuing that I don’t see working with keyboard/mouse, let alone with the setup on a gamepad.

I guess that sounds like a lot of ragging on the game, and I guess I kind of am. I’ve sounded similarly negative about some other AAA titles that I’ve played in the past few years – Final Fantasy 16, Halo Infinite, Horizon: Forbidden West, or Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla are a few that come to mind. I think ultimately what my frustration is in a lot of these cases is that the games are doing so many things in them that they just don’t need to do, and in going wide on systems they’re losing depth and polish on important things. This game did not need so many skill trees. This game did not need the 8 or 10 categories of player mods. This game did not need as many categories of weapons. This game did not need pages and pages of writing for little journal entries you pick up everywhere. It all feels like things done for the sake of filling a budget that I can only ever dream of working with. However, in going so wide they never really got any system to a place where it was simply great.

That amount of stuff ultimately does mean that as a whole the game is good enough to be fun to play and even recommend, but it also means that the game will never really be at a point where it’s anything other than a footnote as something I’ve played through. I’m not going to remember the writing like I will a game like Spiritfarer, where the journey of death is so crucial and specific that it becomes the core focus of the entire game. It isn’t going to be something like Tears of the Kingdom where they built an entire game around one core idea of sticking things together and letting that one feature breathe. It isn’t going to be like a Ratchet and Clank where they are so focused on making sure their weaponry is fun to use that anything outside of that is basically unnecessary.

I just don’t think these sort of do everything open world scale games are generally that necessary, and I’m hoping we’re starting to turn a corner on it. Ubisoft just released a shorter Assassin’s Creed game that is no longer open world. Some of the common complaints about this year’s big title in Starfield is that it’s effectively unnecessarily too big. I expect that we’ll keep seeing a lot of large open games (hell, Spider-Man 2 is about to come out), but I also hope that companies will start crafting tighter experiences that focus on making a small set of features spectacularly good, rather than making every feature under the sun simply good enough.

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Shelved It #18 – Halo Infinite

More Info from Microsoft

  • Genre: FPS
  • Platform: Xbox Series X
  • Also Available On: Windows, Xbox One

This feels like a game that was searching for an identity that it never found. It’s very clearly Halo, but it tried to push too far into the Ubisoft open world formula, and it doesn’t really feel like it made it there. While the shooter part of it works really well, it felt dragged down by the rest of the metagame in the half dozen or so hours I put into it to the point where I just didn’t feel like picking it back up.

The core mechanics of this game are still as good as ever. Ya I get if a console shooter isn’t your cup of tea, but for what it’s aiming for it’s still incredibly fun in moment to moment combat. The guns have really clear archetypes and you kind of fade into the ones that you like to play with the most. Aim assist is just present enough to reduce the frustration of aiming on a gamepad. Running enemies over in vehicles is still fun. The Ghost being as small as it is meant that I could pretty much bring it anywhere, including into encounters it didn’t belong. However, it’s the enemies that still work the best.

Halo enemies always had really clear purposes, and that still works here. Grunts are still your fodder and effectively die in one hit, but they fit the role of distracting you well. Jackals still have the pain in the ass shield, which encourages you to get into melee range or use explosives to clear them out. Larger enemies like Brutes encourage precision in order to kill them faster via headshots. New enemies like the Skimmer add a level of verticality to throw you off just scanning at ground level. In general, the encounters are built well around sprinkling a few different types of enemies to make you approach them in varied ways based on the environment. In a vacuum it works well, and in past games it’s been able to be balanced against slow growth due to the linearity of the experience. That is all gone here.

The open world nature of this entry just feels like a mistake. Rather than having crafted encounters along a relatively linear path, you’ve got random encounters that constantly pop up going between points. Rather than the core gameplay being progression through a story, you’ve got a lot of miscellaneous stuff scattered about. The problem is that there’s only so much you can do with this kind of gameplay. It’s Assassin’s Creed or Ghost of Tsushima without the variety. You don’t really have the ability to do large scale traversal puzzles like that series. You don’t really have the choice to do stealth-focused gameplay or action-heavy sequences as a distinct choice. You just have guns blazing.

Where this ends up dragging is that every encounter feels the same. As you’re going from story point to story point you’ll inevitably see a bunch of encounters. However, it all bleeds together. You’ll see your half dozen grunts, a couple jackals, and a couple brutes/hunters/elites. Rinse and repeat. Between story spots you might see a half dozen of these. You’ll also see typically a handful of side quests – rescue a squad, destroy a base, kill a target – that also just have the same combat. Because the open world just has so much ambient combat, you quickly reach a point where it becomes a chore to traverse, rather than fun to traverse.

Within a pretty short time I basically just started hijacking the first Ghost I could find and running around guns blazing. From a practical standpoint, it made encounters much easier to skip because I could just zoom right on past. When I got to an encounter I did need to engage in, it also meant that I was in a moving resource with infinite ammunition and pretty predictably high power. From a min/max standpoint it was just far more effective. However, whenever I didn’t have a Ghost the game instead just felt like a chore. At that point I knew this one wasn’t working out for me.

It also ultimately didn’t help that there’s no co-op. I’ve played almost every entry in the series exclusively in co-op, so not having that is a huge drag. I could see this style of metagame working well in co-op because I could log in with the same group of people, run around for a while doing whatever as we shoot the shit, and over time we could progress through the game. Doing repetitive things over time wouldn’t matter as much because that’s kind of not the point of just having fun playing games in that group setting. Not having co-op at launch – although it’s apparently coming soon™ – is a baffling decision for a series built on co-op stories and multiplayer gameplay.

Infinite just kind of feels open world for the sake of being open world, and it feels to me like an anchor around the game’s neck. The core shooting mechanics are still fantastic, but when you are doing repetitive ambient encounters instead of crafted linear segments, there just doesn’t feel like any sense of progression or growth. Every encounter gets kind of samey, and over time I just felt like avoiding them entirely. For a game built around combat, not engaging is a weird thing. In all likelihood I’ll revisit this when co-op finally launches, but for now this one feels like a swerve that isn’t working for me.