Tag: PC

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Game Ramblings #226 – American Truck Simulator

More Info from SCS Software

  • Genre: Simulation
  • Platform: PC
  • Also Available On: PS5, Xbox Series

I’m not generally a fan of score-based reviews. I don’t think they really map the subjectivity of user preferences to the objectivity of a number. For me it comes down to two buckets – recommended or not. Sometimes there’s a third bucket for me – games that are perfect for me right now. Sometimes it’s games that are legitimately great like Super Mario World as a kid. More often than not it’s games that I just vibe with perfectly like Final Fantasy XII. American Truck Simulator for whatever reason is one of those.

On its surface this is a game with legitimate obvious problems for a simulation game involving long haul trucking. Visually it’s fine but not a stand out experience with most areas only vaguely looking like their namesake with a couple particular things to match the real world. Traffic density never really changes whether you’re in a city or in the middle of nowhere Nebraska. The game has a real loose understanding of how traffic works in the US with a distinct lack of things like blinking yellow left turns. Traffic laws are extremely exploitable with things like being able to blast through the shoulder at full speed or run cops off the road to avoid speeding tickets. But really, none of that mattered as soon as I started vibing with the game.

When you’re driving around the environment really does become enough to convince you you’re in reality because I can recognize things that I’ve driven through. The curve of I-5 through downtown San Diego isn’t really the right scale but it’s there. The stupid giant cross in Effingham, Illinois is just as bizarre as it was when I moved west. The drive south past the Tacoma Dome and down through the coast of Oregon is convincing enough. I-70 through the midwest and I-5 through the central valley of California are both horrendously boring. It’s all just so compressed that you see highlights that are close enough and lose all the things between there that you hit a really good pace of something interesting to see very frequently while otherwise trying to deliver goods all over the country. I suspect as things continue to push east into other areas of the country that I’ve lived in I’ll continue to have those hits of familiarity.

It does help that the simple act of driving in the game is a lot of fun. I play enough racing games that I’ve got my wheel setup ready for a game like this, and that’s definitely part of it. It’s just fun to sit behind the wheel of something as large as a big rig in a way that I can drive without the danger of….having to avoid crashing. I can sit there and try to row through 12 or 18 gears without really caring about wrecking a transmission with poor clutch usage. However, the simulation-enough aspect of driving also has interesting side effects where I can’t treat this like a racing game. I have to properly manage my gear selection to make sure that I have enough torque to make it up hills. I have to maintain my momentum through uphills to try and avoid scrubbing too much speed. I have to manage my speed through engine braking going downhill so I don’t just runaway and risk tipping over. It sits in a very narrow band somewhere between simulation and arcade that pushes into the fun side of things over the realistic side of things.

There’s then enough on the business side of trucking to give me enough outside of driving to be interesting. The money I’m making is going toward equipment and garage purchases and hiring of drivers. Over time my ability to make money is becoming less and less important as my drivers are taking on more and more of the percentage of revenue of my company as a whole. What I assume my path will end up being is that over time I will simply stop doing deliveries and just managing and driving. There’s a lot of side content around discovery of towns to offer more locations to find jobs at or picture locations to discover for landmarks or dealers to purchase trucks from, and that’s awkward to do when you’re on deliveries. Right now you can purchase a truck and drive around without a trailer attached to do that, but they are also planning on releasing a DLC around Ford pickups, and that feels incredibly intentional. The long term of the game from the business side is that you become a manager and not a driver, and it feels like it’ll be much more fun to do the discovery driving in a regular vehicle.

So then why is this a perfect game for me now? It’s incredibly drop-in friendly. I’m in the middle of a project completion pass and time is inconsistent. Sometimes I have 15 minutes to kill waiting on a build to finish to test, and I can complete a local delivery. Sometimes I’ve got to kill several hours because I’m waiting on things like a multiplatform shader cache update and I can do a long haul trip of several thousand miles. Sometimes I need to distract a 5 year old and I can sit him on my lap and drive around because he loves to see big trucks. It hits such a wide band of my current potential use cases while not really requiring me to think too deeply about what I’m doing. I simply jump in, pick a goal, and drive. For right now, it’s simply perfect.

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Game Ramblings #221 – Minishoot Adventures

  • Genre: Action/Adventure, Metroidvania
  • Platform: PC
  • Also Available On: PS5, Xbox Series, Switch, Switch 2

Frankly I just needed a break from Pokopia and the new Warcraft expansion and this one was the winner. I’d seen it popping up a lot on social media as something that may be a hidden game of the year with its console releases, so it seemed like I shoudl at least give it a shot. Social media was absolutely right here.

I know that the genres up there and the screenshot don’t make any sense together. Just go with it. This is Link to the Past if Zelda was a twin stick shooter. It jumps back and forth between overworld and dungeon segments like that. Where it gets the Metroidvania aspect is that the upgrades are generally more tuned toward things that aid in traversal that allow you to go back through areas you’ve visited prior for more content in a way that feels more involved than was typical of 2D Zelda.

As an example, early on it becomes pretty obvious that you’re limited by things like gaps and water, both of which are blockers for the player traversal. The first few dungeons give you upgrades straight in this progression. First you get a basic boost to move faster, which you can use to clear gaps with ramps. You then earn a jumpy/teleporty/dodgy maneuver to clear gaps on your own. You then get an upgrade to allow you to hover on water. These are all things that are earned by completing dungeons, but unlike Zelda these aren’t things that you use to complete a dungeon. Frankly, the bosses are all generally able to be defeated without them – although dodging through bullets or using speed boost to get to weak points quicker is certainly recommended. However, the upgrades have their biggest impact in the overworld. Even the biggest direct offense upgrade – a charge-based overpowered set of bullets – is used more to break down walls than really push combat. It’s that use of upgrades as overworld capabilities that makes this feel more directly Metroid than I was expecting.

But none of that would matter if the combat wasn’t fun and that does keeps me drawn in. The combat is constantly fun to engage with. Overworld combat is quick and aggressive with enemies coming from all over as you’re running through the world between dungeons and small little reward areas. Stuff will pop in and come in from off screen, making you stay on your toes. Dungeons have much more controlled room-based segments where waves with specific patterns come in. Some force you to move around in ways to avoid bullet waves, some to avoid enemies charging you, some to force you to kill things fast or be overwhelmed. Bosses then lean full in to the bullet hell where it often becomes less important to quickly kill the boss, and more important to avoid damage as first priority. I could disconnect the Zelda/Metroidvania metagame aspects and this game would still be good and still be engaging to run through as just a straight boss sequence (…which they let you do in the post game!).

However, it all felt fair. I usually enjoy bullet hell style games in pretty small bursts because they are usually exhausting. I finished this one in two seatings. I died a few times here and there, but checkpoints were common so I wasn’t necessarily losing a bunch of progress. Health during fights helps give some padding when I simply couldn’t avoid everything, and health drops were common enough (and could be upgraded to be more common!) to allow dungeon wave fights to feel pretty isolated from each other in a way that allowed them to individually be harder, knowing I would come out the other side with enough drops to be near full again. This is perhaps where the game felt the most Zelda to me in a way where difficulty came out of individual challenges, and not in stringing together a long sequence of simply avoiding damage.

I suppose pleasant surprise is the best way to describe this for me, but frankly it was the breath of fresh air I needed. Pokopia is a ton of fun, but it’s specific and detailed and slow in a way that I kind of jump in and out of it. World of Warcraft is fresh from a new expansion pack but is a game I’ve been playing for near 20 years and something I need to disengage from after a couple hours of play. This fit right in the gap for me. It was fast and exciting and interesting and fair and low friction while still being challenging. It was the break I needed.

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Game Ramblings #193 – World of Warcraft: The War Within – First Couple Weeks

More Info from Blizzard

  • Genre: MMORPG
  • Platform: PC

I’ve been playing mostly the same main since Wrath of the Lich King – a hunter. I’ve played all three specs at various points, including a run for a while raiding as melee survival. For the past couple of expansions though I’ve settled back into playing Beast Mastery. The War Within in a lot of ways feels like a continued push for Blizzard to allow me to play the game in a way that best suits my current capabilities – limited time because of work and kids and really a lack of time to dedicate to high end playing. However, that has come with some early oddities in terms of playing as a hunter.

From a surface level, this expansion really pushes you to play in a way that best fits your lifestyle. The main story line is segregated from other quests in a very obvious way, so you can simply run that. Dungeons are still there so you can simply run those. Follower dungeons where you run normal difficulty dungeons with AI allow you to get the dungeon experience in a less public and more digestable format. The new Delves system brings back a system similar to the Pandaria Scenarios with difficulty scaling that looks like it’s going to continue throughout the expansion. Basically, there’s a lot of options in how you want to play that support any sort of play style.

Delves are probably the thing I was most excited about because they gave me something tied to a dungeon-like experience, but without the need to queue and deal with PUGs in what will ultimately be limited hours to play the expansion. Early runs through all of them show a tremendous amount of promise as there’s a nice mix of objective-based gameplay and normal pack killing, combined with the Brann Bronzebeard AI helper to provide healing for me. Some of the delves slot into the overall story arc of the expansion similar to how dungeons have always kind of existed near the end of story beats. Some of them simply exist to thematically exist within areas. They all feel like they are meant to be there as smaller dungeon experiences, rather than simply replacing existing planned dungeons. However, as difficulty increased and as I hit level 80 some scaling and class-specific issues started to really show up.

Scaling is definitely one of the biggest issues that I’m running into this expansion. I would say from about level 70 to 78 the game was easy easy. Part of that was coming in with gear that I didn’t really replace until about level 75, but part of it was just that it was easy. I could easily kill mobs in a couple of hits, so I was never really getting into any sort of rotation. Elite mobs generally didn’t require me to even heal my pets, let alone do anything other than face roll. Around level 79 things started to feel suddenly appropriate. At 80, it’s like a flip was switched. Delves that I was previously clearing without issue were suddenly rapidly killing me. Non-elite world mobs in level 80 areas were in some cases near unkillable if I got more than two or three leashed to me. It all really caught me off guard.

What it feels like to me is that the automatic scaling system was not given enough testing at lower levels and potentially given too much testing at level 80 with instance gear. For someone that is going to exist on the fringes of gear quality, it does not encourage me to go into the current systems at max level. World quests in these high level areas are fine now with a lot of people playing, but I can imagine they will become frustrating as server populations naturally drop past early expansion stages. Delves giving me trouble now will not be something I want to continue doing when higher level difficulties open up in a few weeks.

Some of this comes down to just weird scaling, but part of it also feels like class issues for soloing content. There’s really two main issues for me – pet threat and lack of AoE – that are really hampering the level cap experience. Ultimately I guess pet threat is the big issue here, in so much as my pets just cannot hold NPC focus which ends up being a huge issue for high end delves. One of the theories I’ve seen floated around is that the Stomp talent is actually redirecting threat to the hunter instead of the pets, and it wouldn’t surprise me very much. It seems like no matter what I do my pets will not keep focus in packs of enemies, so I spend a lot of time in the current tier 3 delves not doing DPS and instead feigning death or running around to save Brann from pulling the pack. This is somewhat exacerbated by Misdirection now being a talent that is tough to justify speccing into over other options on BM hunters. This is even more exacerbated by the lack of AoE damage – and in particular AoE damage that triggers threat generation by the pets. It all leads to a situation where the class mechanic decisions that have been made for this expansion really just reduce the ability to solo content as a BM hunter that should be soloable.

All that being said, the leveling experience and story quest line experience was a lot of fun. Each zone has a very distinct feel to it. The starting area Isle of Dorn is a normal wide open WoW zone to get you situated with the new Earthen race. The second area – The Ringing Deeps – is a huge underground mine that features some of the more fun use of sky riding for me with height being such a constraint in a lot of situations. Hallowfall is a huge human zone that would feel right at home in Classic Alliance areas – even if it comes with some really confusing Arathi civilization timeline stuff. Azj-Kahet then finishes up the base story with a zone that feels like a fulfilled promise of what the Wrath Nerubian areas started to tease. Each area feels like some WoW zone that’s come before, but done to a degree of iterated polish that hasn’t been seen before. I suppose after 20 years that isn’t a huge surprise, as there’s not going to be a whole ton of completely unexplored area left. However, the promise of the expansion is that we’re going to be interacting with the very soul of Azeroth, so I suspect we’re simply waiting on the really weird stuff.

The difficulties with scaling and class balance that I’ve run into so far feel like the typical start of expansion woes. I am disappointed that the scaling is so wonky right now, and I am disappointed by how the BM Hunter currently feels, but this isn’t my first rodeo and I do think that things will be fixed. In the case of hunters, they haven’t really mechanically changed so it isn’t like they are going through a failed fundamental rework. However, they really do need a solution for solo threat generation on pets and that is not a new problem. On the core balance side, a mix of natural gear progression and ongoing balance patches will almost certainly smooth things out, and even at my current ilvl in the mid 570s it’s slowly improving. However, finding a natural balance point for things like Delves is not something I really think they are going to be able to pull off. Ultimately some classes are just going to be more suited to the high end of that content without some significant reworks to Brann as your AI helper.

Overall it’s not a bad first week though. The game works, the main quest line was fun, the solo content shows a ton of promise, and I’m enjoying the lore so far. This is a brave new World of Warcraft where factions for maybe the first time really don’t exist as a core idea of the expansion, and to this point it’s feeling like a compelling situation where both Horde and Alliance will be working together for something bigger than the last 30 years of Warcraft fighting, and I’m hoping that Blizzard ends up delivering on that promise.