Tag Archives: Anthem

Gaming Round-Up: Diablo, BioWare, NextFest, and More

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Grab-bag time.

Diablo IV

My warlock is tormenting by a vision of Lilith in Diablo 4.This has really been the month of Diablo for me, with Diablo IV taking up almost all of my gaming time. I’ve poured my pretty extensive thoughts on the game into some Massively columns that should go up in the coming weeks, but I want to briefly cover it here as well.

As you’ll read over on MOP, I mained a warlock for my first run through the campaign, but now that that’s done, I’m letting my altoholism run wild. I deleted almost all the myriad characters I made during the various trials as I’d put no thought into customizing them and felt no attachment to them, so now I’m making a fresh round of characters. The one exception is a druid, whom I did put some effort into.

I initially skipped the side quests and optional objectives for most zones, so I’ve decided to assign a character to clearing out each remaining zone. I’ve assigned a sorcerer to Kehjistan, a paladin to Hawezar, a necromancer to Nahantu, and of course my druid will do Scosglen. Most likely I’ll save Skovos for when the amazon class releases. I also have a barbarian and a spiritborn I created for reasons I’ve already mostly forgotten, but I don’t plan to play them much, if at all. I will probably make a rogue at some point, too. I want to throw knives at people.

It is a bit crazy how much power disparity there is between classes, at least at low levels. We’re talking “coughing baby versus hydrogen bomb” levels of imbalance here. I’m playing on higher difficulties as is my wont, and my paladin is struggling to survive even basic fights on expert, while my necromancer is just obliterating everything on penitent. If I wanted to I could probably just stop pressing buttons entirely and let my minions deal with everything.

A cutscene featuring my new necromancer in Diablo 4.I maintain very conflicted feelings about Diablo IV, as you’ll see when my columns on it go live, but as I’ve always said, ARPGs are like pizza. Even when they’re bad, they’re still pretty good. There’s a lot of joy to be found in smashing hordes of demons, now as it was in the past.

BioWare’s end

This is of course the big news lately. I feel for the people who’ve lost their jobs, and I hope they find new work quickly, but otherwise I’m surprisingly empty of strong feelings on the closure of what has historically been a favourite studio.

As someone who stayed a cheerleader for BioWare much longer than most — I adored Andromeda, enjoyed Anthem, and didn’t hate Veilguard as much as some — it’s a bit odd to me to see everyone suddenly changing their tune. I’ve seen nothing but pessimism and hate towards BioWare for so long it’s hard not to feel like the current outrage over their closure is a bit hypocritical.

I didn’t have a lot of hope for their future prospects, either. I’m really only excited for more Mass Effect if it’s a continuation of Andromeda, but given the unjust hate towards it, that was never likely. I don’t see how you can continue the Milky Way story without it being a bit of a mess.

All good things, Shepard.Now that we’re getting leaks about what they were planning for the next game, a lot of it does sound promising, but it’s easy to say your game would have been great when it was just an idea in early development. Dragon Age: Dreadwolf sounded amazing too, and look how that turned out.

I certainly wouldn’t be unhappy if the crusade to save BioWare somehow found success, but I think my hope is better put towards other companies continuing their legacy by creating other games in a similar vein. That’s more exciting to me. I was never that attached to Mass Effect as a universe; I just like the way they tell stories. Please be good, Exodus.

SlopFest

I played a few demos in the latest Steam NextFest, or SlopFest as it has been crudely but accurately dubbed by the wider community. Between the wildly inaccurate tags on so many games and the flood of AI garbage, it was pretty painful trying to find anything worth playing.

The most noteworthy demo was that for ArcheAge Chronicles, but that’s going to be the subject of another Massively Overpowered piece, so you’ll have to wait to hear my thoughts on that.

A city devoted to Athena in the Theos: Cities of Myth demo.I also put a decent amount of time into Theos: Cities of Myth, a spiritual successor to the ancient Greece city-builder Zeus: Master of Olympus, which I loved when I was a kid. Theos has that same familiar gameplay loop with some nice quality of life improvements, like being able to set patrol paths yourself, but it did feel a bit low budget for my taste. The lack of voice acting was a big bummer, as the goofy voices were a lot of what made Zeus so charming. Still, I did end up playing the demo for longer than I expected. I put it on my wishlist, but I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to actually buying it.

Next was old school RPG Wyldheart. I wanted to like it, but it just felt too low budget and janky. I only played about twenty minutes of it before I decided it wasn’t for me.

Finally, there was Silberheim Evolving Card Game. Another one I really wanted to like as it has a strong emphasis on story and some lovely card art, but it’s also lacking voice acting, and more importantly it was just fiendishly overcomplicated. I love card games, and learning this one gave me a headache.

Eternal

Speaking of card games, I haven’t talked about Eternal in a while. While I never fully stopped playing, I did scale back drastically. I’ve been very burned out, and it’s a bit stale as the game is in semi-maintenance mode, with only the weekly story chapters for new content. Even as someone who loves video game story, these aren’t exactly riveting, and the new promo cards they offer are usually too niche to be exciting.

A very buffed Icaria the Liberator in Eternal Card Game.

Neuron activation.

I have been having a bit of a resurgence lately. I’ve been trying to build some new decks, though I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel for ideas. There’s more I’d like to try, but it’s so hard to earn legendary cards, and I’ve already got most of what I’d want at other rarities.

So far I haven’t had any big hits. The Clockroach deck is strong, but boring. I made a stealth deck that’s moderately fun and moderately effective. I just made an Elysian singleton-ish deck using Archmagister’s Portal and Sacred Tableau that seems kind of neat.

This is old news at this point, but my proudest achievement so far is making a good Elven tribal deck. You might think that would have been one of the first things I tried to do, and you’d be right, but it took a long time and many attempts to make one that’s actually good. There’s a lot of Elf cards in Eternal, but they were never designed with any overarching mechanical identity, so it’s hard to build an all-Elf deck that’s any good.

What I finally settled on was a Shadow/Primal/Time deck that uses relics to buff flyers and unblockables. On paper it seems like the sort of thing that would be way too convoluted to work, but it’s actually proven to be probably my most consistent Gauntlet grinder. Trust in the shadow.

ZeroSpace

Try as I might, I’m struggling to maintain my interest in this. I’m glad they added Xol to co-op, but like everything else about the game, they’re so incredibly unfinished. Posted a bunch of feedback on their reddit if you’re interested.

The Xol commander Anrubic in ZeroSpace.ZeroSpace has good ideas, but their complete inability to prioritize which ideas to focus on will be the death of them. They’ve spread themselves so desperately thin that nothing is even close to finished, let alone polished. What I wouldn’t give for a well-funded, competently managed Blizzard style RTS.

The future

For now I’m still happy grinding away in Diablo IV, but I’m not sure how long that will last or what I’ll do after. I want to play some more New World while I still can. I still play Overwatch Stadium here and there, though that increasingly feels like more a source of frustration than fun. I’m still on the fence on if I’ll buy Age of Empires IV’s Raiders of the North at launch or wait for a sale. Will be back to WoW at some point, but I’m not in a rush for that.

I keep seeing posts about Deadlock popping up on social media, and I’ve seen it often compared to Stadium. It’s starting to intrigue me. It’s got that some magic Overwatch has where every other character I see from it feels like the coolest character I’ve ever seen. Does seem overwhelmingly complicated, though, and I’m not fond of MOBAs (Heroes of the Storm is the exception that proves the rule).

I think I’d like to give Deadlock a try, but I should probably let it cook a bit more first. I’m hoping its rumoured PvE mode comes to pass; that would definitely have my attention.

Gaming’s Culture of Outrage has Rendered Word of Mouth Worthless

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I’ve been keeping one eye on the vampire-hunting shooter Redfall for a while. The colourful art style and vague whiff of The Secret World-style surrealism are intriguing.

A promotional image for the co-op shooter game Redfall.Of course, if you’ve been paying any attention, you know that Redfall has had an overwhelmingly negative reception. The problem is that in the current climate that doesn’t really tell me much.

Clearly the game has flaws. I don’t think the complaints came from nowhere. But there’s no way for me to tell if those flaws are minor hiccups, or if the game is genuinely a dumpster fire. These days, the gaming community seems to see both those things as one and the same.

Nowadays any time a game stumbles even a little, the brigades charge in to rage and foam at the mouth. Anything less than flawless execution is dubbed an unforgivable disaster.

Some of my favourite games from the last few years were considered to be disasters. Anthem and Mass Effect: Andromeda both come to mind. Both had issues, but those issues were relatively minor in the grand scheme of things, yet word of mouth would have you believe they were utterly irredeemable. The Secret World is perhaps the best game I’ve ever played, despite its rough edges, but mainstream opinion is that it was an unplayable mess.

Nothing’s perfect, and as I’ve often said, the mark of true greatness isn’t a lack of flaws, but excelling in a way that allows you to forgive the flaws. But according to the modern gaming community, no flaw can ever be forgiven.

Cora Harper and Scott Ryder in Mass Effect: Andromeda.Maybe Redfall really is completely terrible. There are definitely still games out there that just plain suck. But we now find ourselves in a living parody of the boy who cried wolf. When everything is called a dumpster fire, there’s no way of knowing which games are actually dumpster fires.

We’ve all seen the supercuts of bugs and bad AI behaviour from Redfall, but are those representative of an average session, or just cherry-picked to harvest clicks? When this all first blew up, one of the top posts on the subject I saw on reddit was a screenshot of someone who’d crawled up onto a roof, looked down a chimney, and found that the chimney had the roof texture at the bottom.

What an incredibly petty, trivial thing to complain about. Maybe the game really is bad, but throwing hissy fits over over meaningless things like this make it really difficult to take any of the other criticisms seriously.

(As some wiser minds on reddit point out, purely decorative chimneys like this are a real thing that some houses have, which makes the whole furor even more absurd.)

Social media and the toxicity of the gaming community itself are huge drivers of this culture of outrage, but the media isn’t helping, either. Outrage sells, and flamboyant headlines about disastrous launches and dead games bring in the clicks.

My second character's ranger javelin in Anthem.As a minor member of the gaming media myself, I’m not immune to this. I genuinely do make an effort to not be overly negative in my writing on Massively Overpowered, but honestly I’d forgive you if you never noticed. It’s human nature to focus on the negative, and it’s just much easier to write about what’s going wrong than what’s going right.

But that doesn’t mean all this is inevitable. It’s always going to be easier to talk about the bad than the good, and we should call out games when they stumble, but the culture we have now is beyond counter-productive. It’s all noise and no signal. Word of mouth, unless perhaps from a trusted friend, is less than worthless.

For my part, I’m probably going to hold off on getting Redfall at least for now, but not because of the bad reviews. I’m just hesitant to spend triple-A prices on any new game unless there’s a demo or it’s a franchise I’m familiar with.

Now, developers neglecting to offer demos, that’s something worth getting angry over…