Tag Archives: Mass Effect

Thoughts on Upcoming Games

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Between the Gamescom announcements, other recent teases, and some upcoming releases, there’s an unusually large number of games on the horizon I’m keeping an eye on. I thought I’d do a rundown on everything I’m looking forward to, or at least willing to hear more about. Maybe some will be future favourites. Maybe some I’ll never mention again. Place your bets now!

Aion 2

A promotional wallpaper for Aion 2.Obviously this is the big one right now. I was pretty excited when it was first announced and have gone back and forth over how hyped I am since then. Right now I’m expecting it will probably be like Lost Ark: Not something I end up sticking with longterm, but something that will give me a hundred hours or so of good entertainment all the same. I hope for more than that, but I don’t expect it. It’s always good to have managed expectations.

Right now my major concerns are that the endgame seems extremely sweaty, the community seems quite toxic (both problems Lost Ark had as well), and the class design seems a bit uninspired, with little room for meaningful customization. I’m hoping we get the Brawler class with the Western launch; it seems a bit more mechanically engaging than the others from what I can see. Then again, I do like the DPS/healer hybrid role of the Chanter as well.

One thing’s for sure: I’m maining Asmodian. Azphelumbra!

Exodus

Probably the game I’m most looking forward to right now, though a bit farther off than Aion 2. It’s been a long wait for this Mass Effect spiritual successor, but we now know it’s coming April of next year. Some of the early previews looked a bit janky, but the recent Gamescom trailer focused on the intelligent octopus known as Salt was very good.

Again, I try to manage expectations. I’m not expecting a perfect game — the Mass Effect games never were either — but I am hungry for a BioWare style narrative-focused RPG right now, and the world-building looks incredibly fresh.

Warlock

A promotional image for Dungeons and Dragons: Warlock.Another thing we got a peak at during Gamescom. This D&D based action RPG looks a little campy, and the trailer seemed very over-produced to the point I question how representative of actual gameplay it is, but the general concept of combining magic and physical skills is appealing, I’m always up for more of Tricia Helfer in anything, and the fact it’s set in Ravenloft is a big plus (even if they picked what I’d consider to be one of the least interesting Domains of Dread — at least it’s not Barovia again).

Path of Exile 2

Having finished the original and declared it to be one of the games of all time, I’m a little lukewarm on PoE2. I’ve been waiting for it to launch and go free to play to give it a shot, but now the time for that is only a couple months away.

I’ve heard it’s going for a slower, more deliberate approach to combat with more actual rotations as opposed to spamming a single nuke, which is very appealing to me, but I’ve also heard it’s been trending away from that and more towards PoE1 combat, which is not. I like the changes to skill gems not being tied to gear, but the passive wheel still seems an exercise in quantity over quality.

I was looking at potential builds the other night, and I was thinking of going either druid or huntress with a mix of shapeshifting, companion, and necromancy skills (going for the “cycle of life and death” vibes), only to discover that the skill nodes for those three things are all in completely different parts of the wheel and thus difficult if not impossible to combine. That was pretty demoralizing. Again, PoE seems to be the champion for the illusion of choice rather than genuine choice.

It’s also a bit of a bad look that PoE2 seems unlikely to launch with all of its promised classes. Makes it hard to want to jump on board when I don’t even have the full roster to choose from.

Wolcen 2

A shot from the Wolcen 2 trailer.Now here’s something unexpected. After the disastrous collapse of Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem, I didn’t really expect its developer to have much of a future at all, let alone produce a sequel.

I have conflicted feelings. Wolcen was in many ways the best ARPG I’ve ever played. Its combat and build system were second to none (here’s the real depth of choice PoE only pretends to). Now whenever I play similar games there’s this nagging voice in the back of my mind saying, “Why doesn’t this feel as good as Wolcen?” But its post launch support was one of the most mismanaged disasters I’ve ever seen.

If they can produce a game that’s as good as Wolcen but actually has a finished storyline in a reasonable timeframe and doesn’t light itself on fire after launch, that’s a game I’d love to play.

If.

Road 96… 2?

The folks at Digixart recently released a brief teaser for what appears to be Road 96 2. Again, not really sure how to feel here. Road 96 was one of my favourite games of the decade, but it didn’t really demand a sequel. Its prequel, Mile 0, already felt a tad unnecessary.

I’m not even sure how you do a sequel to Road 96. The endings are different enough it seems like they’d have to pick one to be the canon ending, which is likely to piss a bunch of people off.

The bright sun of Petria in Road 96.I’d love to revisit Petria in a way that captures the magic of the original, but I just don’t know how likely that is.

Fable

I did play the original Fable a long time ago, and I remember mostly liking it, but it was never a franchise I had much attachment to. Still, the reboot looks very pretty, and a classless RPG with lots of choices to make is always an appealing prospect.

Can’t see myself buying it at full price, though.

Blood of the Dawnwalker

I’m not a big vampire fan, but this looks like it has the potential to be a good “choices matter” RPG. Another one I’m definitely not going to pay full price for, though.

Cinder City

After how The First Descendant turned out, it’s hard to have much optimism for another Korean looter shooter, but the Gamescom trailer did make it seem intriguing. Will keep an eye on it.

1001 Threads of Mizan

A promotional image for 1001 Threads of Mizan.The Gamescom trailer for this really impressed me, but the more I read about it, the more I got the vibe it may not be for me. The massive boss battles seems like it will be echoing the Soulslike formula I dislike, and while they say it’s possible to play solo, it sounds like it will be inadvisable to do so.

Still, maybe one day. The magitech Arabic mythology flavour is super cool.

Tarae: The Unbound

Not much information about this so far, but a Diablo-like ARPG based on Eastern mythology seems like an appealing prospect in theory. Worth keeping an eye on.

Marvel’s Wolverine

I just want to say I was really looking forward to this, and I resent Sony for not doing a PC port. Bold strategy, Cotton, we’ll see if it pays off for them.

Silver Palace

This was a trailer that caught my eye during the Gamescom reveals. I’m not big on anime-style stuff as a rule, but the Victorian noir vibe was intriguing, and some of the fight moves looked very cool (though I’m not sure if that’s representative of gameplay or just trailer fakery).

A shot from a Silver Palace trailer.

Is it just me, or does a lot of the promotional material for this game feel very sapphic coded?

I’m not really sure what it is, though? It looks like a Genshin style gacha game. The official website is frustratingly unclear, but this site seems to confirm it’s a free to play gacha title. I’ve avoided gacha games until now. Partly because they don’t seem super appealing (bhagpuss’ gushing over Neverness to Everness notwithstanding), but mainly because they all seem to be Chinese, and I’m trying to avoid supporting Chinese games on ethical grounds. Silver Palace’s developer, though, is Singaporean, which I have no objection to.

Miracle

I don’t have anything new to say about this. I just wanted to mention it again because it’s so exciting.

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Guild Wars 3

This one’s still aways off, and I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t get delayed. Not really sure how I feel about it. Guild Wars 2 is a great game in many ways, but it’s just never been able to hold my attention for that long, and one of the biggest factors in that — its poor story writing — is one of the things least likely to change in a sequel.

Overall it’s too early to form any strong opinions. I am hyped for playable Kodan, though. Bearfolk is an underrated archetype. Bears are cool.

Vindictus: Defying Fate

Fiona in the Vindictus: Defying Fate alpha.I don’t have anything to say about this I haven’t already said over on Massively, but no list of upcoming games I’m looking forward to would be complete without it. I really like what I’ve played so far, despite being pretty bad at it, and I hope we get a release date soon.

Life Is Strange: Reunion

This is actually already out, but I’m waiting for a discount. I never played Double Exposure and was kind of writing off the franchise for dead until they said they were bringing back Chloe.

Here’s the thing: This is shameless, cynical fan service. But it’s shameless, cynical fan service aimed directly at me and my interests.

It’s a kick in the teeth they didn’t get Ashly Burch back to play her, though. Her performance was absolutely iconic.

And more

I’ve already written about my thoughts on the next round of Age of Empires DLC. I’m eager for AoE4’s Raiders of the North to finally arrive so I can delve into the Crucible. I’m a bit concerned about its replay factor if it’s going to continue to be just wave defence scenarios, but AoE4’s bones are so good hopefully that won’t be an issue. AoE2’s Viking Sagas is, as I’ve said, something I want to play but probably not at full price.

A cutscene from Godsworn.There’s also Godsworn. Still no date for it to finally leave early access, but I believe they’re targeting early next year. I can’t be mad at the developers — there’s only two of them working on the game full-time — but I am impatient to finally sit down and play through the completed campaign.

Then there’s BlizzCon. We don’t know what will be announced for sure, but all signs point to a StarCraft shooter. My money is on “Destiny 2 with a StarCraft skin,” with smaller odds on “Warframe with a StarCraft skin” or “Helldivers 2 with a StarCraft skin.”

As I’ve written elsewhere, I think a StarCraft shooter could be good, but probably won’t be, so I’m not super enthusiastic. StarCraft II was such a near-perfect game I kind of wish they’d just let the franchise lie. There’s nowhere to go but down.

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…