Video Games

This looks worth keeping an eye on...

https://youtu.be/_HG3si5zKv0

I notice it's about 3 weeks till "Still Wakes the Deep" drops. When I say "notice", I mean I've been couting down to it since they announced the date.

Just in case you'd forgotten.

I finally finished AC: Valhalla after what feels like a lifetime. It was fine but my need to collect everything and finish all the story lines just made it drag by the end.

Looking forward to playing lots of stuff now as there's been quite a lot included on Game Pass since I started AC.

First up is Chants of Sennaar which from the ~45 minutes I played at lunch I think I'm going to enjoy.

Been playing this morning!

It's brilliant to look at and very atmospheric, but it's also quite linear - I've not made a single unguided choice yet in the first 1.5 hours. Not sure if that'll put me off eventually (although I've also not yet caught a glimpse of whatever it is that's making the noises...)

Looks derivative, folksey, and shonkey.

But it's British shonk.

Chants of Sennaar

I've really enjoyed this, got a few little bits to polish off before the end but nice puzzling.

The few reviews I've glanced at so far seem pretty mixed, but I'm willing to take a punt based on the atmosphere and art direction.

Should wait until dark before playing tho.

First up is Chants of Sennaar which from the ~45 minutes I played at lunch I think I'm going to enjoy.

I thought that was a lovely wee game, very intelligently done. Have fun.

AC:Valhalla wasn't a terrible game but they made it a lot worse than it could have been by making a huge amount of what should have been side content compulsory. The most frequent complaint from reviewers was "Every so often I'm reintroduced to people who are supposed to be important and I have no memory of who they are". The most common post on the Reddit subs was "When does the story start?", sometimes after dozens of hours of play. Also the worst and trashiest historical reconstruction of any game in the series, because they went for the audience of The Vikings TV show. The difference between that game and the next, Mirage, is on an astronomical scale; OG Creed players mostly enjoyed Mirage but those who came in with the previous three mammoth RPGs had no idea what was going on and mostly hated it.

Looks like Bioshock and Everyone's gone to the Rapture had a baby. With Far Cry.

AC:Valhalla wasn't a terrible game

I played it right after AC Odyssey (the ancient Greece one), which I really enjoyed. It was such a similar game to play and I expected to enjoy it. I never got going on it - I think because it all just looked a bit dreary compared to the palette of Odyssey. It was all mud and cold compared to sun and bright mountains.

Yeah really enjoying it all so far. Very satisfying.

That's what I'd felt with AC, kept forgetting who was who and what importance they had. Also read that they'd actively made more effort to make stealth elements more of a thing again but it just felt like I was going into a camp, fighting everyone there and then picking up whatever was needed, especially with the raid feature where you have no choice but to do that in certain places, didn't realise that the first time so did sneak around and stealth it all only to be greeted by a chest that needed an ally to help open it. From what I've seen Mirage looks like it should be more up my street so I'll look forward to that coming to Game Pass in future or see if it gets cheaper in CeX. For me the Origins trilogy haven't been great within the series as a whole so hopefully Mirage will take stuff back to the older games.

so hopefully Mirage will take stuff back to the older games.

In atmosphere, absolutely. In mechanics, well, stealth is probably the best in the series (stop laughing, MGS fans) and the missions are designed to reward stealth and severely punish "charge in and kill everybody". Parkour purists weren't so happy - there's a limit to how much a small studio could change the Valhalla codebase - but the city design is the best since Unity's Paris, which makes up for that. And you're an assassin again, with many shout outs to AC 1 and a few to other games in the series.

The OG fans who were most disappointed were the ones who actually loved the way that old-style AC combat was so trival that you could slaughter whole armies with a few button presses as they lined up to be killed one by one. You die quickly and often if you try that in Mirage. Combat is possible but most survivable if you use stealth and traps/bombs to mix things up and to isolate and confuse the soldiers.

Another way it'sdifferent from Valhalla is that you can speed run it in under 15 hours, if that's your thing. I finished it in just under 40, mixing in all the side missions and most of the collectables just to explore Baghdad as much as I could. Might have spend half an hour or so paying street musicians so I could listen to them play.

Where they go from here is hard to say. After 8 years of nothing but huge (and popular) ARPGs, they now have a fragmented player base with widely different (and mostly incompatible) expectations.

Looks like shadows is doing both stealth and head smashing, just depending on the character you choose for each mission. Seems like a pretty good compromise to me!

Open question at the moment, though, if it'll be a mandatory 60 hours or more slugfest (maximising the temptation for microtransactions) or more flexible. Hopefully they learned something from Valhalla. That said, Ubisoft is having more trouble with the "Ubisoft is woke" gamergate-style fans, masking their racism behind supposed defense of "the Asian male". Were they this upset when Ezio was in the Ottoman empire? No, but then Ezio was white. The assassin from the duo is Japanese but female, so doesn't count as far as they're concerned. Meanwhile, actual Japanese players seem much less bothered and more concerned about how accurate or not the cultural representation will be. Ghost of Tsushima set a high bar.

That sounds good to me then. I do enjoy the older press a button to counter an enemy and then press another button to take out the next enemy mechanic of the earlier games just because it was so ridiculous but perfectly happy for that to not exist for a return of good stealth. Also much more interested in a shorter game. As I say Valhalla started to drag and so did RDR2 when I played that over winter, just want something with a bit of character but is also succinct.

I do enjoy the older press a button to counter an enemy and then press another button to take out the next enemy mechanic of the earlier games just because it was so ridiculous but perfectly happy for that to not exist

They did bring back something like that, but it requires more skill. If you time a parry properly, then, on the easier difficulty levels, you get a one shot-kill riposte (again, if timed well). On the hard level, you have to wear your opponent down more (two perfect parries in a short space would do it) and the timing is stricter.

The stealth really is a big improvement. The environment and missions are designed to reward it, and you can break up a group of guards by becoming briefly visible to just one of them (if your timing and position are good), enough to make them curious and come over to investigate. Enemy AI isn't much improved, though.

just want something with a bit of character but is also succinct.

A lot of AC fans found Horizon Zero Dawn and Forbidden West to be good AC substitutes during the long ARPG years. Stealth, sneak attacks, religions based on ancient tech, messages from the past... you can even hang from a ledge and pull an enemy to their death.

I have seen horizon zero dawn around and expected it to be similar to the rpg side of AC so left it but might be worth looking at then.

It's an ARPG, but not a behemoth like Odyssey, let alone Valhalla. There are a lot of similarities with both old school and more recent AC, thematically and mechanics-wise. On the whole, I'd say Guerilla Games are a bit better at story-telling than Ubisoft, even if the plots aren't as ambitious in terms of multi-level narrative. It's closer to Origins than the Ezio series; stealth is very much encouraged, combat is much more weighted to archery and traps than melee, but there are skill trees, enemies with weak spots and so on. You can sneak through most of it, but there are a couple of boss fights.

Another comparison would be with Talos Principle. Not the puzzle solving, but the achingly sad messages from a time when humanity was facing apocalypse.

Who's in for Elden Ring DLC then

I bought the game when it came out then only played a few hours before life got in the way. Would love to get properly stuck in when there's so much to do it becomes weirdly overhwhelming...

Man I've got to finish off ff7 rebirth, armoured core 6, horizon frozen west, train Tekken 8 for the next tournament and now I'm an idiot so I've started a new elden ring character for the dlc

Loves me some Dark Souls, but Elden Ring was too much for me.
TBF I only have rookie hours in it (50?) so really need to get stuck into it.

Fallout 4 still has most of my gaming hours, with the ps5 update I rolled a new build and am trying to 100% the trophy list. (edit: 77 hours since the update)

Finished off Chants of Sennaar this morning. Enjoyed it throughout. Think there was one puzzle that I got stuck on for a bit that was down to me overthinking it and believing there was more stuff to do to solve it than actually was needed.

Downloading Jedi Survivor now to start on this evening.

Lol this is basically me too. Need to finish Rebirth, TotK, wanna train on Tekken 8, but one of my teens has been playing Sekiro and now wants to Start Elden Ring, which has tempted me. Need to finish both!

Game is to stop selling.... games.

RIP

(they've denied it but apparently it's happening slowly on the D/L)