Journey for the Lords of the Battlefield Beta(?)

Hey, you try thinking of something when the games you're writing about are Lords of the Fallen, The Battlefield 1 Beta, and Journey. And honestly, I don't really have a ton to say about any of them individually, but altogether I can probably scrape something together. Unless you're just sick of my blogs, given that this is the third one in as many weeks. Don't worry about that, there's no other new games this month I want, and who knows if next month's PS+ will have anything worth writing about, so it might not be until Titanfall 2? And even then, I might pass on that, you never know!

Lords of the Fallen.

This is a bit of a weird one. I think, judged solely on its own merits, I enjoyed most of my time with the game, and I think it's pretty well made in most ways. Plenty of issues, to be sure, but still good. However, it's kind of impossible to play this game without thinking about where this game draws most of its inspiration, and in that context, it's hard not to be a lot more critical of this game.

What I mean is that, if you don't know what this game is (Vinny did a lengthy Quick Look of it a couple years ago if you haven't seen it!), it's basically Dark Souls. It's an action focused game where you lose your XP when you die and have to go run to where you died to recover it. The basic controls for combat are the same. Right weapon attacks are on the right shoulder buttons, and the left buttons are for the shield, or left weapon when duel wielding. Attacking, dodging, and sprinting all take stamina, which refills faster if your shield is down. There's differences, of course, but it's very similar. Certainly more than Nioh was to Dark Souls.

I'm not saying that's a bad thing, if anything I'd say the general feel of the combat is the best part. The problem is that none of the rest of the game is especially great on its own, and fairs even worse when compared to Dark Souls. I do think the game is often graphically nice to look at (even if the framerate isn't the best, but fairs better than most of the Souls games), and some of the enemy and other designs are neat. But the world, lore, story, writing, and characters are all forgettable at best, and kinda bad at worst. I'll go over some game play differences first.

The magic is one of the bigger differences. You pick a class of magic at the start of the game, and I don't think you can get spells from one of the others later, but I never actually tried, so I'm not sure. Each has four different spells, and each has higher faith requirements to unlock (you put points into skills to level up individually, much like Dark Souls). The first one for each is a "Prayer" spell that creates a big duplicate of your character, which distracts enemies and creates an aura that helps you. Which aura depends on the class of magic you chose. I went for the one that would heal me, which turned out to be very useful throughout the game. It's a very slow heal, and honestly fairly tedious if you want to try to use that as a main heal (which you shouldn't, that's what the potions are for), but I found it good for topping off between fights, especially after I upgraded it. There was also a rage spell that buffs damage and gives infinite stamina for a short time, but I didn't find the other spells in that class useful. I don't remember what they were for the other classes, but I think one of them was a rogue-type skill that lets you turn invisible? That would probably be useful.

The other side of the magic, which is a bit closer to Dark Souls, is the gauntlet. It has three different firing modes, a projectile (think a magic missile, or Dark Souls style Soul Arrow), a shotgun like blast (never used it against an enemy), and a lobbing grenade (okay). Some of the loading screen tips make it sound like the gauntlet is the thing to use if you want more ranged type combat, which is technically accurate, but the thing uses up so much of the magic meter that I could really only ever use it as an opening attacking. Maybe I just didn't put enough points into faith to make it more useful, that would at least extend the meter.

There's no durability on any of the weapons or armor, which is good. There's also no direct upgrading of any of them. Instead, you collect runes, which an NPC needs to unseal before you can use them. Runes can also be used to open certain chests, which I found to generally be more useful because most of the runes didn't provide huge bonuses. I did equip a fire rune into the gauntlet, which let me light enemies on fire, so that was cool. I guess you can also spend XP to get a better chance of getting better runes, but even the good runes didn't make that big of a difference.

And speaking of XP, there's another difference. The more enemies you kill without dying, a multiplier builds, which gives more XP per kill. For better or worse, it caps at 2X, so you can't go getting insane amounts of XP by fighting early game enemies with a 10X multiplier like I had hoped. Using checkpoints to refill potions resets the multiplier, unless you hold L3. Seems like a bit of a clunky way to let you still save (the game doesn't autosave all the time like Dark Souls) but not lose the multiplier (it also doesn't heal or refill potions if you hold L3), but at least that's in there.

For whatever reason, the checkpoints only refill three potions before they have to recharge. Unless you die, then they all refill. I guess it's a game balance thing, to try to make it a bit more challenging, but the game is so easy in general that it didn't really work. Unlike the Souls games, enemies only respawn if you die, or load into a different area. You can go kill a single enemy, walk back to a checkpoint to heal, then go to the next enemy. That aspect is both probably the right thing for this game, but also maybe a bit too easy. There certainly are frustrating things about some of the encounters, like the second boss, which I was stuck on for over an hour.

That brings me to one of the couple of frustrating things about the combat in this game. Certain enemies (and a couple of the bosses, including that second one) have shields. If you hit an enemy with its shield up, your weapon clanks off the shield and you do a very small amount of damage. A shielded enemy's guard can be broken (wasn't able to do it with the bosses), but usually by the time I managed that, either I was out of stamina, so I couldn't press the attack, or the enemy was able to bring the shield back up before I could lug my big hammer back around to hit again. Getting back stabs on some of them helps a lot, but there's this one type of enemy that I couldn't ever get a back stab on, and of course they're the biggest and most heavily armored of them. By the end of the game I got to the point where I could deal with them relatively quickly, but that particular enemy type never got fun to fight.

And that second boss, specifically, not only has that shield, but he also occasionally summons smaller enemies whilst going into a state where you can't damage him. He has this one attack where he summons magic shields that fall from the sky and hit you. So far as I could tell, they fall pretty much randomly, and there's almost no way to tell where they are going to land and be able to get out of the way in time. I got lucky most of the time, but there was definitely at least one attempt where that dumb attack was my undoing. Oh, and during that attack, he becomes invincible for no apparent reason. That, or I was doing so little damage he might as well have been, I don't remember which.

While the game is generally more upfront about how things work than Dark Souls, it also weirdly isn't in others. There's several, useful mechanics that the game did not mention in the tutorial, so I didn't know about them until hours into the game when I saw something about them in loading screens. Specifically that timing successive attacks well will reduce the amount of stamina needed to attack, and that holding L1 whilst sprinting lets you shield bash. It's quite useful for stunning enemies, and also for breaking cracked walls (something I had to read online to find out about). Now, the thing that really bothers me about those walls is that the shield bash is the only way to break them. I tried hitting them with fully charged heavy attacks with a hammer, and that didn't work. That hammer does more damage to enemies than the shield bash, so that's kinda crappy.

A lot of the inventory stuff is not great. I know the Souls games are infamous for not great inventories (they got better over time), but I feel like this game is even worse. Well, it's fine if you only have a few of a specific thing (weapons, helmets, etc). But once you get a whole bunch, looking through them all is a hassle and takes forever. There's no way to get rid of any of them either. No merchants to sell them to, no storage to keep them in, and so far as I could tell, no way to discard them. You can favorite things, and then they get sorted to the top of the list when you sort by value (which the game does not tell you), but that only helps if you want to move between a couple of things.

Speaking of, I played this game with the alternate control scheme, because tapping to use a healing potion sounded better than holding (in the default tapping Square swaps the equipped item), but I maybe should have looked closer at the default controls. For whatever reason, that scheme has a button to swap between favorited weapons, but the alternate one does not. Also worth noting that the default scheme has multiple buttons (two on the d-pad) that do nothing, but the alternate has everything used. I feel like I should go look at them again, because writing about them now is making me feel crazy because it doesn't make sense? I mean, aside from not having a way to swap weapons without pausing the game, the alternate controls are totally fine. But that was still a bit of a hassle.

In the Souls games you create a character, who is the blankest of slates. Here, you play as Harkyn, who is about as generic of a white guy protagonist as you can get. He's big, burly, bald, bearded, and has a mysterious past only alluded to vaguely outside of his being imprisoned for "unspeakable crimes." I do think the lore of tattooing a prisoner's crimes onto his face is interesting (probably done somewhere else first, if not in real life), but it's all in (I presume) made up symbols/ancient runes, so it's not like you can look at his face and know what he did. Unless it was in an audio log that I missed, the game never goes into what his crimes were, so that's a piece of back story that goes absolutely nowhere, and serves no purpose other than to make NPCs angry with him.

Anyway, I don't mind when games have set protagonists. Honestly, in most cases, I prefer it, because the less defined the player character is, the less focused the narrative can be about that character. It can lead to things like no one ever says Shepard's first name in the Mass Effect games because you choose it. Or it can be something like Fallout 4, where the narrative was clearly written with the dude in mind, and then they slapped some stuff together for the lady. Either way, it hurts the experience in some way if it's not done right. That said, if you're going to have a defined, singular main character, that character should be likable, and interesting. Harkyn is neither. Given the absurd depth of the character creators in the Souls games, I'm kind of surprised this game didn't even attempt it. Maybe it was outside the range of their budget or resources?

On a related note to characters, this game only has one woman character. I don't mean one named woman, or one woman important to the plot (she doesn't seem important to the plot), I mean one woman in the whole game. The game doesn't have many NPCs, but it has that vibe of, "this game was made by dudes and no one gave it a single thought." I dunno, it doesn't really impact the "game," but I felt like it was worth mentioning. At least she's not a damsel in distress, even if Harkyn does most of the hard work around her side quest.

The story itself is a lot more straightforward than Dark Souls, but it's not nearly as worthwhile. There's an old, fallen god, his lords, and some weird demon army from an alternate dimension. The game tries to say something about the nature of good and evil (I think), but the whole ending feels so rushed and slapdash that the game kinda feels like the first act of something bigger. I mean, it's long enough on its own (took me over twenty hours), but doesn't really feel complete.

Also, the way the game determines which ending you get... I'll put it in SPOILERS just in case, but if you haven't played this game, don't worry about it. It won't ruin the game for you, but you know. Spoilers.

So, Harkyn finally gets to the fallen god in the other dimension, and the god starts talking about all the lords that Harkyn killed along the way. This bit is kinda neat, because it shows some stats about the bosses. How many attempts they took, how much time was spent, and what was used to kill them. It'd be more interesting if the game was harder, but still a neat bit.

Anyway, then the god says that the human guy in charge is bad because he takes the evil out of people, and that threw the universe out of balance. So he gives you a special rune and tells you to go kill this other guy to restore balance. Then this third guy (who Harkyn started the game with) shows up as a magic hologram and says that you should restore balance, then he peaces out. After that, the game warps you to this other area and you fight an Ornstein and Smough rip off (two bosses at once, and the second one gets the ability of the first one you kill). When I went to go finally equip the rune, the rune equipping NPC made a big deal out of it, so I went to a wiki to see what the best way to use the rune was.

Which is when I learned that the ending of the game depends on what you do with the rune. I do not mean that you kill the boss and are then given a choice of what to do with the rune. I mean that the ending of the game will change if you have equipped the rune into a weapon, or your armor. Because obviously defeating the final boss with the rune in your weapon means that you sided with the fallen god and then will lead the demons from the other dimension to victory over the humans. But, having read about this bizarre ending choice set up, I put the rune in my armor so I could get the ending where the humans win because that seemed like the reasonable one (and my weapon didn't have a rune slot to begin with).

According to the voice over during the ending slideshow (which I assume is there because they didn't have the time/resources to do a full/actual ending) made it sound like the fallen god told me to put the rune into a weapon to show support for him, but I don't remember that. I dunno if that's a case of inconsistent writing in the game, or my not paying attention. Either way, the game didn't remind me of that when I was equipping those runes.

Whatever. I've already said more about the story than this game deserves. You know, usually when I write these things, and spend a large portion of it criticizing the game, I end up saying that despite the flaws, I still really enjoyed it and recommend it. But here, I the more I actually wrote out my issues with the game, the less I liked it as a whole. I still think the minute to minute combat is mostly fun (shielded enemies aside), but as a whole it's mediocre at best. If you've got PS+, it's still free for the rest of the month. For free, it's enjoyable. I'd still recommend any of the actual Souls games (I include Bloodborne in there (because Bloodborne is the best one)) over this, by a whole lot. But if you've played all of those to death, and don't want to wait until February for Nioh to give you your Souls fix, this game is fine.

Battlefield 1 Beta.

This beta reminded me a lot of Battlefield 4. Like 4, I think the it's at its best when it's a chaotic, vehicular mess. The driving is just wild enough to be dumb fun, and the explosions are really good. The map (I think it was just one map in the beta?) is also so big that getting around without a vehicle seemed very tedious and impractical.

But, also like Battlefield 4, it all falls apart for me as soon as I start getting sniped. Which didn't take very long once I got out of the tanks. I get why long range sniper weapons are in games like this, especially when the maps are so big, but getting sniped isn't fun. It's never been fun, and it'll never be fun. I know that the idea is you're supposed to play better and avoid places where you can be sniped, but getting sniped like that just kills most of my interest in playing the game. I know Battlefield doesn't have a monopoly on snipers, but at least in most other games the maps are small enough that it isn't an issue.

Actually, I feel like I was getting sniped more in this beta than I did on average in 4. Maybe that's because there were fewer giant open spaces in those maps? I dunno, it's been a while since I played 4, and I didn't play a ton of that game. I bought it on sale a good while after it came out (which was probably for the best given how broken it apparently was at launch).

On top of all that, I think the game's representation of World War 1 is bad. It certainly looks like that era of vehicles and weaponry (though none of that bleeds over into the UI, which just looks modern and boring), but it could just as easily be a reskin of Battlefield 4. Honestly, I think that if they weren't going to even try to make it more like actual World War 1, they shouldn't have done that. Maybe the campaign will be closer to the war, or more respectful, but I think there's a very low chance that is the case.

But who knows! I went into the beta with low expectations, and did manage to have some fun. I'll be passing on the game, though. Even if the campaign is amazing (I doubt it), I could probably just borrow it from one of the very few people I know in real life. Sounds like at least one of them will probably get the game.

Get back to me in a few years when they're putting out Battlefield 2, which is set in World War II. I'm telling you, that's what they'll do, whether they position it as a remake of the original Battlefield 2 or not.

In lieu of a screenshot, here's a short clip I saved of my favorite moment with the Beta.

Journey.

Yep, I finally got around to playing Journey. All it took was waiting four years for it (well, the PS4 version) to be made free on PS+. I don't have anything new or especially interesting to say about Journey, but I did like it a lot. It's beautiful and heartwarming. The scarf gets comically long by the end, which was not something that I was expecting.

Part of me does wish I had played the game years ago, before I had large swathes of it spoiled for me just through internet osmosis, but what's done is done. It was nice to see other people playing it too. It's definitely an interesting experience in co-op. Figuring out what to do to progress, and trying to coordinate via chirping was a fun twist I wasn't really expecting. I mean, I knew there was co-op, but I was playing at kind of a weird time of day, and wasn't expecting there to be enough people on to run into anyone. I guess I wasn't the only one playing it for the first time!

I'm going to relate some stuff that happened regarding the co-op, but put it in SPOILERS.

Late in the game there's a big snowy mountain, and whilst climbing it, there was someone with me in the game. Now, this mountain is really cold and windy, to the point where when the wind blows, you have to hide behind something to not get blown away. You know, video game stuff. But it's also so cold that your scarf starts to freeze, and I think that prevents you from jumping.

This co-op partner and I were figuring this all out as we went, and we were doing things like chirping when we were ready to move ahead, and also doing it to try to thaw out each other. There was this one moment when we were huddled together behind something from the wind, chirping for warmth, and I just wanted to hug this person, whether the real life person, or the one in game, I don't know. But it was just a really heartwarming moment where I was interacting with someone just by standing there trying to share body heat. It felt like a moment out of one of those Molydeux (the joke account) fake games, you know?

Then, a little later on, we got to a part with those big stone sky serpent things. We were moving from stone structure to stone structure as cover, again chirping to signify when we were ready to move on. But, we got a little off from each other, and separated, and the next thing I saw, the camera turned to show one of the serpents snatching the other person up. And it was really sad because I figured they were probably a goner. So, I just kept going because I didn't think there was anything I could do, and didn't want our little Journey together to have been in vain because we both got eaten. A short while later I saw that person again, and we reunited. I guess the serpent didn't eat them? Maybe it just ate the scarf, I'm not sure.

It could also be that it was a different person, but I think that'd be weird. To match up with someone else at the end of a sequence like that. I did encounter four other people (and saved a screenshot of their decidedly not Journey-like names), but I feel like for at least that segment, it was the same person.

Or at least it was in my heart.

Anyway, if you haven't played Journey, you probably should. It's worth two-ish hours of your time. I should probably play it again. If only for that Trophy for playing it after waiting a week.

Anything else?

I did play some of that Badland: Game of the Year Edition. It's fun, but slight. I actually had to reinstall the game at one point because it was completely broken. Just kept repeating the same couple second loop of animation in the very first level, and never let me do anything. Well, I could back out to the menu, but loading back in didn't help. Closing and relaunching didn't help. Even deleting my save didn't. Reinstalling fixed that issue, but then I ran into another issue where the game would frequently restart checkpoints on its own. This time I went to Google for an answer, and apparently the problem is that I had not fully shutdown my PS4 in some time, and had instead been using Rest Mode. Seems like a weird thing to cause that issue, and like something that should have been fixed. Either way, restarting the PS4 fixed it. I don't really have anything to say about the game, but wanted to mention this if anyone else was having technical issues.

Speaking of the PS4, the firmware updated yesterday (as of when I posted this, anyway). At first I was drunk with power at the ability to finally create folders (only two years and ten months after launch), but quickly realized I was only making things worse. Sure, a joke folder called "Tactical Espionage" with only Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain was funny. But would I really ever need that? No, especially when I'd still need to put in the disc for TPP anyway, and then it'll pop right up to the front of the menu. So, I whittled it down to just one folder, for local multiplayer games. I know I don't have people over that often to play games, but when it does happen, at least I can get at that stuff more easily now.

I have a couple complaints, though. For whatever reason, "Media apps" like Netflix can't be put into custom folders, meaning I still have to use the pre-made one, and button past the Amazon app I don't use every time I want to use Netflix. I mean, I know what the reason is, it's because those companies made deals with Sony, and that's just the way it is. Related, before when I held the PS button whilst something was running, it defaulted to "Close Application," so I could close apps very efficiently. Now, it stays on whatever it was on last, which for me, tends to be the power option. For games, the easy solution is to just tap the PS button, then use Options to close it that way, but you can't do that with media apps, so I need to button past that Amazon app every time.

Or, you know, just press up a few times on the d-pad. It's not a big issue.

I guess I could write something about the PS4 Pro while I'm on the subject of the PS4? That was last week, after I wrote my previous blog, I think. I dunno. We'll have to wait and see how much better games with Pro modes for 1080P actually look and run, given that I don't have a 4K TV, and won't any time soon. $400 is probably still outside what I can afford, but if enough games do see a big enough jump in visuals, or frame rate, I could see getting one. At least as long as I definitely can't afford a gaming PC. My only fear is that my PS4 will just stop working, but long enough away from the launch of the Pro that I won't be able to wait. I can't go a month and a half with only my Wii U and PS3 for games! I don't really think there's anything wrong with my PS4, other than the jet engine of a fan, but what I see online makes it sound like everyone's PS4 sounds like that these days, so I'm not worried.

Not that worried, anyway.

And what's on the horizon? Dunno! Thanks for reading! See you next time, probably over a month from now.