Tag: ps5

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Shelved It #23 – Saros

More Info from Housemarque

  • Genre: Third-Person Shooter
  • Platform: PS5

This is a somewhat unusual shelved it in that this is a really well made game and I really have enjoyed my time in it. The…problem as it were? I just don’t enjoy roguelite loops. I can deal with it to a certain extent if the loops are quick but I usually hit a point where the growth of the experience has either stopped because it’s out of new mechanics or because it’s at a wall and I grew bored. I’m more at the first for this one at the 6th boss. However, for me it’s a bit of a miracle that I’ve played a roguelite for 11 hours and counting to begin with, and I can see this one slotting into the type of game that I occasionally return to and eventually just get through via time.

The thing I will absolutely call out here is how good the combat is and I think it comes down to one specific thing – despite being a “shooter” I’m not often doing a lot of aiming. Saros recognizes that it’s first and foremost a game about dodging projectiles, and not so much about creating projectiles. The entire experience is then built around that. You have a rapid dodge that allows you to go through some projectiles. You have a shield that allows you to absorb other projectiles to return as attacks. You have a parry that allows you to block other projectiles. Choosing the correct defensive maneuver is by far the most important part of combat with offense then being a secondary consideration.

This only works because the attacks that are coming at you are very clear and give you enough time to react. Blue can be absorbed, yellow can be dodged through, red should be parried (and additionally, red shields should be hit with a melee attack with the same button). You constantly move to stay at a range where you can still attack but have time to react and never stop being in some form of fast action. It’s fast and relentless but always feels fair. In the classic roguelite pattern it also feels like I’m constantly learning and using that to reinforce the upgrades I’m getting to move further every time.

The lack of aim is completely built into the weapon system. Most weapons have auto-hit with large aim correction built-in, with some specific weapons being instead built and balanced around auto-hit being off. Despite not really aiming though, the weapons still had important variety in letting me build the way that I felt comfortable. There’s things like shotguns and chakram discs that I totally disliked using because their damage felt so inconsistent around how much I was playing a run and gun style. On the other hand there were rifles and pistols that were reliable damage dealers if I needed an upgrade. When I got particularly lucky I was getting one of the crossbow types which were universally a ton of fun for my preferred style, putting out slower shots but much larger damage at a time.

This is then backed by the stat upgrades typical of the genre that have interesting modifications when in the eclipse state. This morphs upgrades from simple stat increases to things with drawbacks. Sure you might get some resilience, but now you take fall damage. You might get increased weapon power, but now you can’t stay still. You may bet better shields and absorption, but now you may have decreased damage at low health. It adds the type of fun decision making typical of the genre in a way built very well around the core gameplay of Saros. I knew I could always comfortably take the penalties standing still or the fall damage penalties because avoiding those things was crucial to my more run and gun play style and tailoring my build to that always felt incredibly effective.

However, the roguelite part of the game caught up to me at around the 10 hour mark near the 6th boss. Each biome introduced new mechanics but over time they were becoming less important because they were starting to become minor modifications to combat instead of large changes. I started seeing fewer new enemy types, and those that were new started to be some clear combinations of existing enemy types. It’s typical of the roguelite meta loop, but for me it doesn’t really work unless the loop is fast, and here it isn’t.

The death loops here are typically 25-30 minutes and that is just far too long for me. It works fine when I feel like I’m making progress, but I just zone out when I get some bad RNG and make no progress in a loop of that length. But that’s the genre expectation and it just doesn’t typically work for me. Getting the 11+ hours I got out of this one is highly unusual. Getting that far was only because the core combat in the game really was simply that good.

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Game Ramblings #223 – Dragon Quest VII: Reimagined

More Info from Square Enix

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Switch, Switch 2, Xbox Series, Windows

This is an easy ramblings for me to write. In a lot of ways it boils down to one question – do you like traditional JRPGs? If the answer is yes, then frankly you’ve probably already played this game. However, for as good as the original and 3DS releases of this game were, the game is just unnecessarily long. That’s something that is incredibly common for Dragon Quest games in general, though it’s been getting better in recent years. That is really what my mind was focused on coming out of this.

I had put off starting this one for a while because I didn’t really want to tackle an 80 hour JRPG. I just don’t really have that kind of time to play games anymore. I’d heard some people recommend it and noting that it was shorter. I then noticed that its How Long to Beat page was seeing 40-50 hours as a more common time to complete. That kind of time investment is a bit more doable. That drop in length by about half comes about in a few ways. However, it’s not unfair to say that it’s simply because the game just loads quicker. Getting into fights is quicker. Getting into zones is quicker. Getting through the time portals is quicker. It just compresses the experience through lack of loading.

However, the more beneficial part was how much quicker leveling can be, and that’s entirely up to the player. One of the things that recent Dragon Quest titles have been doing is giving players more control over difficulty. It started with things like an “easy” difficulty that ramped up player damage, ramped down damage taken, and ramped up XP gained. It then added a lot more over world automatic battles when you as the player have gotten strong enough. DQ7R is the most granular control that they’ve given, and it’s much to the game’s benefit.

The way that I chose to play this title was with the following settings:

  • Damage: Normal for given and received
  • XP Gained: Increased
  • Gold Gained: Increased
  • Job Points: Increased

What this essentially is is a settings group that is the game at intended difficulty, but with significantly less grinding. I was essentially choosing to just have less combat for the sake of making the experience faster while preserving difficulty. This gets combined with the fact that battles are no longer random in recent titles, so you can choose to simply skip combat entirely if you’re at an appropriate power level.

This simply makes the game faster and it’s much better as a result. The pattern I like in JRPGs is to figure out the enemy setups, fight them a few times, then move on. I don’t need to fight things dozens of times to get my value. At that point it’s just boring. In a case like this where XP gained is high, I can simply fight things to get my entertainment, then move on.

There’s additional little gameplay things that are added like save/heal points that appear frequently right before bosses to act as safety and time savers for the player. There’s a weird side effect that comes out of this – I use MP-based skills far more often. Because I don’t need to fight as much, I can dump my resources for the sake of fun. Because I know I’ll heal before a boss I’m not preserving my resources for the boss. If I’ve used everything and don’t want to spend items, I can simply avoid fighting. The combination of these things further enhances the speed of playing the game because I can simply be aggressive on offense, which is something that a lot of older JRPGs didn’t really allow.

I’ve said similar things about recent JRPGs that have pushed into streamlining the experience for the player. A recent example includes Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter. I just don’t buy arguments about JRPGs needing length to be of value. To me empty grinding is just fluff and I’d rather have a shorter experience. The DQ1-3 HD2D remakes and now this DQ7 remake show that Square is taking the idea of a cleaner experience seriously for the players. This is everything about the story and metagame that made the original great, now combined with modern sensibilities around not wasting the player’s time. It’s a far better game for it.

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Shelved It #22 – Spirit of the North 2

More Info from Infuse Studio

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Steam, Xbox Series

I so badly wanted to like this game more than I did. The first game is a perfect example to me of a sit and chill game. It had some puzzles along the way, but it was largely just a relaxing walking simulator that looked fantastic. This one made some major leaps in its iterative choices – it’s open world, it’s got a lot more lore to discover, a much longer length, and it even has some combat. The problem for me was that by and large the iteration just did not hit.

The first obvious change is the move to an open world. For the most part this didn’t really change how I approached the game that much since linearly wandering and completing puzzles doesn’t feel that different to me than aimlessly wandering and completing puzzles. However, there’s a few things that snuck in to compensate this design that really dragged the experience down for me, both of which are tied to needing to find things in the environment.

One of these was the collecting of soul wisps. These are dotted around the environment or purchaseable via shops and are used for other things. In some cases, it’s things like ancient trees for skill points or for unlocking gates to get into other puzzles. The problem I had with them is that they are not marked at all on maps like the puzzle areas are, so finding them is either luck of walking past them or a need to wander in a very precise manner to cover the whole area. This is compounded by your ability to carry a fairly limited stock of them (I was up to 7 by the time I shelved) so you could easily cap them out and not really be in a position to remember where new ones are to pick up later when you need them. It ends up being an incredibly tedious system where to really be smart with it, it made sense to immediately just go wander around dumping them into things when you cap out instead of taking the game at your own pace.

There’s also a number of situations where you have to carry things to specific places, and that almost always feels like a drag. Sometimes it’s a need to find a torch to light a thing to let you into a puzzle area. This requires you to a) find a torch, b) light the torch, then c) walk to the spot to use it. Sometimes this is crucial story items at the end of puzzles that you then have to carry to some temple and place down. Until you do that (often a pretty significant walk) you also can’t really pick up other things without the risk of losing the key item, so you can’t even always complete other puzzles along the way. In these cases it just feels like the game is dragging you down to slow the pace in a negative way. This is compounded by the lack of fast travel potential. The handful of portals and the ability to fast travel to your last den are not really sufficient given the scale of the environment.

What this really results in is that the game feels open world for the sake of open world with a lot of the design decisions compounding negative feedback for the player experience walking around completing puzzles. Compared against what was essentially really enjoyable linear wandering in the first game, it feels like a big step backwards.

The new boss combat also feels like an unintentional misstep. Where boss fights feel like a good idea on the surface to get a bit more of an action tie-in to the story, these fights end up feeling slow and unforgiving.

The screenshot above is an encounter where you have to avoid attacks while tethered to the center of the arena for 30-45 seconds before spirit walking to the pillars in the background to activate them. This fight had a few problems. One was practical – some attack tells were simply below the visuals of the arena making it impossible to see them. Another was balance – I could avoid getting hit for most of a phase, but then get hit once (see previous problem…) and I could easily be juggled from 100-0 health being bounced between attacks without an ability to get out of them. It never felt fun and finishing the fight was a relief instead of a triumph.

The last boss fight I did before shelving this was a set of two wolves. Each had their own attacks, but it was basically a very slow progression of them choosing a bite attack that I had to dodge, then a secondary attack that was a bit more randomized. Finally, they would move to a phase where they shot out rings of fire after which I could attack them. This was a case where I was able to again get through the fight completely unphased at full health, but a mistake in the last hit of the last phase of the fight meant that one of the wolves got its bite attack (which locked me in place) while the second wolf activated a fire beam (which I couldn’t avoid) and got knocked from 100-0 health without a chance to do anything.

As a developer this feels like a classic case of the team not compensating for their own skill at playing the game. Once you do a fight 5…10…100 times in development the fights become second nature to the point where it’s easy to forget what the experience will be like for a player getting to it for the first time. These are all cases of that for me. Stun locks are not fun. Being juggled without invulnerability after being hit is not fun. Randomized attacks that can flood the entire arena and sometimes just not allow dodging are not fun. However, these are things that are easy to miss when the fights are muscle memory, and that’s what it feels like happened here.

At its core this game didn’t really lose what made the first game enjoyable. The wandering and puzzle solving and beautiful visuals are all there. The problem I ultimately had was that that new things never felt like they stood up to the original game, so the experience kept feeling dragged down by them. The new things to support open world gameplay weren’t fun. The scale of wandering between things with nothing to do wasn’t fun. The boss combat, despite being well tied into the story, was not fun. It kind of just feels like a step to far for the series, where maybe a third title could have ultimately ended up here with a bit more of an iterative step in between.