I've been playing Genshin Impact for several hours yesterday, on release day. That went smoother than I thought, probably because I pre-downloaded and pre-registered. Some people reported downloading and registering today wasn't going so well, but once you were in, the game played very smoothly. Now first things first, Genshin Impact is a good game. It is fun to play, taking some of the best gameplay elements of Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and combining them with elements from more typical JRPG. I had a lot of fun, and I'll be playing this for a while.

On the downside, this is a gacha game. It is financed like a mobile gacha game, by players buying loot boxes that contain weapons and characters. I would not recommend this for completionists or people with a gambling addiction, as somebody calculated that it would take $20,000 to get all 18 characters and all 5-star weapons. Most of the content of the lootboxes is 3-star weapons, which you will accumulate pretty quickly if you start spending money. You basically need to do the 10 wish at a time method to get a guaranteed 4- or 5-star, and that gets expensive pretty quickly. Having said that, I spent $100 to get the introductory double currency offer, and I got one 5-star character (Venti) and a selection of good 4-star characters and weapons. And I was able to buy the resource pack of character and weapon xp, that allowed me to actually boost all those characters and make them playable. So the good news is that I have lots of options in party composition now. And as I am not interested in getting any specific character, I don't need to spend more money now. You can play Genshin Impact for free, especially with all the current bonuses you get for the 10 million pre-registration celebration, but it means having fewer options and being a bit weaker. This is clearly Pay2Win.

The main problem with mobile gacha games is that normally there isn't much gameplay involved other than collecting characters: Battles run in auto-mode, or are so boring that you *want* them to run in auto-mode, and the map is usually just linear. So the one thing one really needs to credit Genshin Impact for is to make a gacha game with full triple-A JRPG gameplay. Open world exploration, including climbing and para-gliding. Large maps full of interesting spots, with monster camps, resources, challenges and puzzles. The only other gacha game I currently play is Assassin's Creed Rebellion (because it has *some* gameplay), and Genshin Impact is clearly in a much higher league. I was also impressed on how good Genshin Impact runs on a iPad, with basically the same graphics, although I am not fond of the on-screen joystick for movement.

So even if you'd never spend money on a game like this, I would absolutely recommend trying Genshin Impact for free. Especially if you either loved Breath of the Wild, or you haven't got a Switch and always wondered why everybody was so crazy about Breath of the Wild. Getting this for free on a PC, PS4, or tablet is great!

On my first day, I played until Adventure Rank 13 (which is the real "level" of the game, and can't be bought). That was good, because at Adventure Rank 12 the daily commission system opens up. There is a reward for getting to Adventure Rank 20 before patch 1.1, in 4 weeks or so, but that seems relatively easy. I still have tons of places to explore, and lots of quests to do. The action-based combat is not overly complicated or difficult to execute, so I am doing okay with that. However there are optional hero trial challenges, which I can't seem to beat. I don't see me doing really difficult endgame boss content. But up to now, there is no need for that, and I am having a lot of fun.

- posted by Tobold @ 8:43 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild sold 18 million copies. At one early point in time, Nintendo had sold more copies of Breath of the Wild than it sold the Switch consoles you need to play it on. Saying that Breath of the Wild is popular is an understatement. And video games have very strange copyright rules: You can't copy the code, or the characters, but you *can* copy look and gameplay. So it isn't surprising that in a week we will get Genshin Impact, the game most famous for being such a blatant copy of Breath of the Wild that people were breaking their PS4 consoles in protest. While Breath of the Wild can only be played on the Switch, Genshin Impact runs on Switch, PS4, PC, iOS, and Android devices. So even if it is a clone, it makes the gameplay available to a lot of people who don't own a Switch and can't play the original. Sounds like a plan to me!

I will definitively have a look at this game. It might be huge, there are already nearly 4 million people pre-registered before the game even comes out on September 28. I love Breath of the Wild, and don't mind a clone, if it is well done (we will see whether it is). And I am curious how it could possibly play on my iPad, without a gamepad, and how cross-platform play will work.

Having said that, I can see the downside of the combination of cross-platform play and a highly anticipated release: I've been at too many MMORPG launches that crashed the servers to not consider that possibility. If 4 million people try to login at the same time, the effect is predictable.

- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments

Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild doesn't have experience points or levels. There is a progression aspect, where over the course of the game you gain stronger weapons and fight stronger monsters, and you gain more health and stamina by doing all the shrines. But you can (and I did) visit the end content Hyrule castle with a character just out of the tutorial, and with some clever sneaking collect some powerful weapons right of the bat. On the other hand, weapons break, so it isn't because you got those powerful weapons early that the rest of the game will be too easy. The whole thing plays pretty well, with a strong sense that you can go anywhere you want, at any time in the game.

I am currently playing Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, and that is an open world game with levels. Not only that, but the power gain per level is rather steep, and fighting elite opponents a few levels above you can be quite deadly. You definitively *can't* go anywhere you want, at any time in the game. However, there is a system in place which increases the level of the areas you have normally "outleveled". There is always at least a minimal danger everywhere, you are never fighting level 1 opponents with your level 30 character. Even quest of a certain level that you have in your quest log will increase in level when you do.

Frankly, I'm not a huge fan of the system. The linear and non-linear elements of the game just don't mix very well, and it becomes all a bit confusing. With random quests being generated all the time, you never feel as if you "finished" one region, because new quests of your level will pop up again. You always want to take all the quests you find, because some are simply long-term quests, which you might accidentally fulfill while doing something else, e.g. kill 10 Athenian archers, or clear 10 bandit camps. But as a result my quest log is very full, and it is very hard to distinguish between random quests that you do only for the xp, and side quests which unlock other content, e.g. cultist clues. If you go to YouTube and look for videos explaining how to find the cultists of a certain branch, you will frequently be told that you need to do this or that side quest first.

The problem the system causes with the flow of the game is the following: If you only follow the main story, and never do any random quests or side quests, you will get stuck. You will become blocked because your level is too low, or because you didn't do a prerequisite side quest. As you can't "overlevel", the best strategy is thus to do a lot of side quests and random quests, and exceed the level requirements of the main quest. However, that takes a lot of time, and as you can imagine, the random quests also feel very random. As I said in a previous post, sometimes you fight for Sparta against Athens, and sometimes the other way round, possibly switching back and forth several times per day. By the time you come back to the main quest, you have thoroughly lost all sense of purpose.

*Spoiler Alert* The sense of purpose in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey is further complicated by the game being open ended. There are different possible endings, depending how you behave towards the members of your family. You can end up with a happy family reunion, or you can end alone, up having killed half of your family. If you aren't aware of that from a spoiler, you might well end up with an ending you don't really like, just because you were goaded into a conflict.

Compared to Horizon Zero Dawn, Assassin's Creed: Odyssey does a bunch of things better. The ability to climb wherever you want is a huge plus in an open world game. While still far from perfect, the system of crafting and looting weapons in AC Odyssey makes a lot more sense than the one in Horizon Zero Dawn. But the story and sense of purpose in Horizon Zero Dawn is *far* better than in Odyssey. But in the end, I would prefer the level-less Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:56 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments

I have been subscribed to the Xbox Game Pass for PC for nearly a year now, at €4 per month, thus €48 in total. During this time I played Crusader Kings III, Shadow Tactics: Blade of the Shogun, Phoenix Point, Final Fantasy XV (very shortly), The Outer World, The Flame in the Flood, Gears of War 4, Gears Tactics, Surviving Mars, Fallout 76, and Valkyria Chronicles on this platform. In other words, I played 11 games for the price of one of them. That was a pretty sweet deal!

Now I got a mail that Xbox Game Pass for PC is leaving beta, and doubling the price of subscription. Annoyingly it expresses that only is $ terms, from $4.99 to $9.99, but I guess for me it goes up from €3.99 to €7.99, not €9.99. Based on my previous experience, I will keep subscribing, because even at the new price the subscription is cheaper than buying those games individually. And I still have a list of games I'd like to play on the service: Age of Wonders: Planetfall, Dishonored 2, Wasteland 3, Star Renegades, and Two Point Hospital. In fact, the service often adds games I want to play to that list faster than I can shorten the list by playing those games.

Not all the games I played or want to play are new, full-price, triple A games. And not all of them have great review scores. But somewhere I consider this one of the advantages of the Xbox Game Pass for PC: It lowers the barrier to entry into games that I might not have bought at full price. I enjoyed my week in Crusader Kings 3, for free, but would have regretted paying €50 for it on Steam. I didn't really like Fallout 76, but I am glad that I could try it for free. And so on. If I am bored one day, I can quickly download the Goat Simulator, laugh about it for an hour, and uninstall it again, no harm done. Not something I would want to spend money on.

The one thing I will not do is subscribe to several game subscription services at once. In the end it is my time that limits how many games I can play, not the number of games on offer. Two subscriptions would just cost me twice, and I'd end up playing the same number of games. I might at some point switch to another service, but for me the Xbox Game Pass for PC even at double price seems to be a better offer than UPlay+, EA Play, or Google Stadia right now. Ubisoft and EA mostly offer their own games, and have a lot of older games in their list, while Google Stadia has very few games that you can play without an additional purchase. And I doubt that Steam is ever going to offer a subscription service with access to all of their 30,000 games. :)

- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments

As this blog is mostly about games, I rarely mention my day job. But I do have a full-time job, and thus in an average week I spend more hours working than I spend playing games. Furthermore, on weekdays, I can only play in the evenings, after a full day at work. Which means that sometimes I am quite tired, and don't really have the energy to play something extremely complex or demanding.

Crusader Kings III was released earlier this month by Paradox. It has a 91% score on Metacritic, so I assume that it is a very good game. However, Paradox games in general scare me. I tried some of the earlier ones, and frequently ended up completely lost. A million different options and possibilities, and me scratching my head and having no clue what I was supposed to be doing. As a consequence I own only a few Paradox games, and I either played them very shortly and gave up, or didn't even dare to start. Basically, due to my day job, games that take a huge amount of effort to even understand the basics of don't really fit my life. I need mostly games that I can play as a tourist, having a bit of fun without a whole lot of investment. And usually Paradox doesn't make games like that.

Now the inaccessibility of Paradox tends to be reflected in the review scores. Thus the 91% score of Crusader Kings III suggests to me, that it is a bit more accessible than let's say Europa Universalis III (which I own on Steam and never started playing) with its 83% score. Furthermore over the last decade or so, learning how to play a game has become somewhat easier in general, because of YouTube. Complex games attract a lot of content creators making how-to video guides, which often are a big help compared to trying to figure a game out by yourself.

So now I am wondering whether I should take the plunge and try to play Crusader Kings 3. Is it even possible to play this "as a tourist", in some sort of "easy mode", without quickly becoming totally overwhelmed? If you have an insight into this, I would love to hear your recommendation.

- posted by Tobold @ 11:00 AM Permanent Link  (7) comments

There are a lot of things to like about Assassin's Creed Odyssey. Compared to the previous open world game I was playing, I especially enjoy the ability to climb walls or mountains freely, without having to follow a specific parcours painted in yellow. I think that "I see a mountain over there, and I can climb to its top" is a great feature in open world games. I still prefer the added dimension of Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild, where I am pretty certain that there will something interesting to interact on whatever mountain top I climb. But still, AC Odyssey is pretty good in my book.

However, Aloy, the hero of Horizon Zero Dawn, has a much greater clarity of purpose than Kassandra / Alexios in AC Odyssey. And how AC Odyssey treats the Peloponnesian War is at the source of that. AC Odyssey has a quite interesting system in which you, playing a single character, can have a great influence on a war. You can come to a province that is completely in the hands of one faction, and go and weaken that faction to the point where you can then help the other faction taking over that province. And then the game completely wastes this great opportunity to give your character purpose and influence by having a system of random quests that encourage you to constantly switch sides based on random chance.

Yesterday I gained two levels at once, which is quite a lot, by winning two battles for Sparta. I had previously accumulated a bunch of quests, two of which were identical and asked me to win two battles for Sparta, plus some others about killing Athenians. Weirdly enough the easiest way to win a battle for Sparta is to find a province controlled by Sparta, attack the various military installations in it to weaken Sparta until it is declared vulnerable, and then defend Sparta in the conquest battle. And once you go and complete your pro-Sparta quests, you visit the quest boards and pick up new quests, which might well tell you to now fight for Athens and against Sparta.

Yes, technically you are playing a "mercenary". But this mercenary is *very* mercenary, often changing allegiance several times over the course of a day. I find that neither very sympathetic, nor very believable. Add to that the questionable bounty system, which encourages you to from time to time just kill some civilians to get a bounty on your head, because killing the bounty hunters that then are sent after you is a great way to get gear. In a D&D alignment system I would characterize my hero, who is just following the reward system of the game, as "evil". That doesn't especially endear him to me.

Being "open world", you'd expect to have some choice here, select a faction and fight for it. But if you follow the main story, the main quest line also forces you to sometimes fight for Sparta and sometimes fight for Athens. And if you refuse to do the random quests for one side, those quests accumulate and at some point are all that is left. And even if you constantly fight for one side and try to make every province be controlled by your favorite faction, that control just reverts randomly from time to time, and you can never win the war. Peloponnesian War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing!

- posted by Tobold @ 8:43 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments

I am still regularly playing Dungeons & Dragons on Roll20, both as a DM and as a player. One thing that I noticed right at the release of 5th edition D&D is that some of the instant damage dealing spells at low levels dealt quite a lot of damage compared to what hit points characters have. The basic magic missile spell, that used to deal 1d4+1 damage now deals 3 times that. Even a cleric has a level 1 spell that deals 4d6 damage, Guiding Bolt. So my initial impression of 5E was that spellcasters had been boosted compared to previous editions. However, over time, I noticed how much of a nerf spellcasters had received in the form of the concentration rules. The large majority of spells that don't have instant effects are concentration-based. Meaning that you can't have two of those effects running, and if you are hit, you need to make a concentration check or the spell effect disappears.

These rules affect different classes and different types of players differently. I know a player who loves to play mages, and pretty much exclusively uses instant damage spells. So 5E gives him a lot of power. On the other end of the spectrum a class like the warlock is very disadvantaged by the fact that they are built around the Hex spell, and that this one is concentration based. If you don't get hit, your Eldritch Blast spells or your hexblade attacks deal good damage, but once you lose concentration you end up being a lot weaker.

As a DM my main problem with concentration is that players tend to concentrate fire on enemy spellcasters anyway. In 4th edition it was a lot easier to set up interesting tactical encounters that involved a specific non-instant spell of an enemy spellcaster. In all previous editions, a spell like Cloudkill cast by an NPC mage was feared, in 5E it is kind of a joke. So while setting up an encounter for my next session, I was thinking about how to make these non-instant spells from NPCs more threatening and thus interesting, and that without changing the rules.

One thing that came to mind is using the interaction of non-instant spells with the rules on vision and cover. A Cloudkill spell not only deals damage, but also makes the spell area heavily obscured by green fog. So an enemy mage casting Cloudkill would usually be able to cast it in a way that once the cloud appears, the group can't see the mage anymore. A lot of spells can't be cast at all at a target you can't see, while most ranged attacks fired at a target you can't see would have disadvantage. An even simpler method is a mage stepping out from behind a wall, casting an area spell, and then moving back behind that wall. While the mage has to see the area of effect when he casts his spell, he doesn't need to see it while keeping concentration on it. Of course that is also true for player character spellcasters, but "I cower behind the wall and concentrate on the spell I cast previously" isn't really much fun to play.

Speaking of fun to play, one issue with the scenario of a corridor in which the enemy mage cast a Cloudkill between him and the group is the boring option of the group retreating out of spell range for 1 minute. Fortunately there usually is at least one player who can't wait for 10 turns for the spell to end. So I think I will be able to set up some situations in my game in which enemy mages use non-instant spells to good effect for a more interesting tactical combat.

Labels: Dungeons & Dragons

- posted by Tobold @ 9:03 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 Ni No Kuni one and two are on sale on Steam with a hefty 70% - 75% discount. Back in 2013 I played the first Ni No Kuni on my PS3, and quite liked it. So I should be jumping at the opportunity to buy Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom for just €15, right? Not so fast! Because we first need to consider a difficult question: What exactly is a sequel?

As I wrote in 2013, I wasn't particularly fond of the story of the first Ni No Kuni, which I found both a bit simplistic and too linear. What I liked the game for was the tactical combat system. Guess what the sequel kept from the predecessor, and what it changed completely! Right, we still have a child-friendly story, but the turn-based tactical combat system has been completely ripped out and replaced by an action-RPG combat system in which you need to time your button presses. Urgh!

As I don't like action-RPG combat, I can't tell you whether the Ni No Kuni II system is any good or not. I just can tell you that for me, this is not a sequel. Combat is such an important part of role-playing games that a complete change of combat system turns a game into something completely different. Just look at 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons, which (while I personally liked it), was too different in combat from the previous and future editions of D&D, and thus didn't succeed.

Much of marketing works with the concept of brands. We have so many sequels and remasters in video gaming because people are inclined to buy games whose brands they recognize. You don't always have the time to thoroughly research a game's reviews, especially if you buy it in a shop and not online. So you take a shortcut: "Oh, I loved the predecessor, let's buy the sequel". The brand built up a trust, and the buying decision is based on that trust. If that trust gets broken, there is a problem.

Maybe Ni No Kuni II is a good game for people who like action combat, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like it. As I am pretty sure that I wouldn't like the very deceptively named "Final Fantasy VII Remake", which is neither a remake nor a sequel in my eyes. A sequel number or "remake" in the name suggests a much stronger similarity to the original than what is delivered. I always said that 4th edition D&D would have been okay if they had named it "D&D Tactics" instead of 4th edition. If you change the direction of a game series, make that somewhat more visible in the title of the game! "Ni No Kuni Action" would have been fine, "Ni No Kuni II" is not.

- posted by Tobold @ 8:12 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments