Ubisoft’s Baysian juxtoposition of the Operator and the Science Man
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brave protagonist nomad is out here SURVIVING in the RUGGED WILDERNESS while these LIBERTARIAN EGGHEAD SCIENCE-PUSSIES are in their comfortable tech suburbs CRYING about GUNS and our TROOPS
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Please don’t make me want to play this pseudoMMO piece of garbage
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Is Breakpoint better than Wildlands? I liked that game’s realistic difficulty and the fact that it’s based on a real place. Breakpoint just looks super bland and jank.
Breakpoint is mechanically (and visually!) better in a lot of ways, but there’s just something about it that…I dunno. If anything, it inspires me to maybe go back to Wildlands and actually play the game, instead of use it as a Sniper Management Simulator 2017?
But, then again, Wildlands had that bullshit thing where you’d snipe a guy and a whole base would come down on your exact location immediately. So…I dunno, I’d probably rather play Breakpoint.
That said! The thing @iguferon mentioned about your character constantly stumbling down hills is maybe my favorite part of the game. It’s probably a better move than your character in Wildlands being able to run up and down a mountain (or ride a bike up/down an almost vertical incline) at like 100 mph, but it comes off as just…really really funny?
I’m not even running away from squads or drones or anything. I’ll slowly climb down a hill toward an abandoned outpost or something and just wind up tumbling my way down, managing to somehow pick up a bunch of bananas and herbs in my fall.
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The stealth AI alone almost makes it better to play than Wildlands because they can’t immediately figure out where you are from 400 meters away if they get alerted anymore and your co-op partners getting spotted doesn’t mean you’re spotted either. Wildlands’ real world setting is also one of the reasons it is a disgustingly racist piece of imperialist propaganda (Bolivia, a country that solved its drug violence problems without the DEA irl, getting taken over by a fucking Mexican drug cartel is one of the most offensive premises a Tom Clancy game has ever had) so at least you don’t have that here either, even if they’re shockingly unquestioning of where all the indigenous people went on this “uninhabited” island full of ancient ruins the libertarians turned into Galt’s Gulch.
Breakpoint really feels like they wanted to go further with the survival elements but someone higher up the chain at Ubisoft told them they couldn’t. I got a tooltip telling me to fucking craft bandages or some shit which is baffling because you get an infinite amount of them and can use them at any time. I guess they never wanted you to be in a situation where you are cripplingly injured and unable to heal yourself for a long period of time but there’s so many fucking camps dotted all over the map that you’ll only ever use for fast travel that it kind of doesn’t matter anyway. There’s a whole crafting system that isn’t really useful outside of making slightly better versions of your grenades and shit because you can buy everything from the store (also available at camp) for incredibly cheap anyway. You can craft rations that give you buffs like +10 reload speed for 30 minutes or do a preparation at camp that gives you a buff like +40% injury resistance (so you see the most tense part of the combat less lol) for 60 minutes but none of it ever feels necessary.
I think I’ve only ever had one firefight where it felt like we had properly fucked up and the AI was actually giving us a run for our money. We got caught between an alerted base, patrols on the roads, and several foot patrols on the woods so it felt like we were actually being flanked and hunted. We kept getting injured and unable to stop to do the long bandaging animation and it was actually caused a lot of tension when we kept taking hits and it seemed like the next hit would put us into a critical state where we couldn’t use our rifle anymore. It took us like 30 minutes to fight our way out of that situation and it was great! But that was in spite of the game as is. We were rolling down the cliffs around the outpost constantly because your operator is a master of slapstick comedy, enemies with shotguns were spawning next to us, the mortar position always knew where we are even if we weren’t visibly detected. It also would’ve been way less interesting if we knew the syringe healing item healed you to max and cured all injuries instantly. At least it’s a fucking limited consumable.
We ended up setting the difficulty to Advanced which is the second hardest just to make it more interesting…except this means the AI kills you so fast that you never actually get to deal with injuries, so it’s not necessarily an improvement either. It’s such a shame because there is a potentially interesting Ghost Recon game buried under every other little fucking thing from other Ubisoft games that they shoved in here and how much they undercut their own “military survival” premise. They patched Wildlands to make it a lot better so who knows, maybe they’ll magically turn this one into a game where every other mechanic isn’t in complete opposition to each other.
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Well yeah it’s racist but Bolivia is a pretty country.
It’s always a possibility that they can update into a better game over time. Asscreed Unity got all it’s bugs patched up eventually etc.
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The last update for Wildlands, the one that added the multiplayer test run of Breakpoint’s multiplayer, was the sunset for major support and development for Wildlands. I don’t see them doing anything like fundamentally overhauling the way the AI works there, especially as it might serve to draw folks away from the (even more) heavily monetized* Breakpoint.
*Not in a game breaking “Buy our shit to proceed” kind of way for the moment, so much as a “We looked at all the cosmetics and gear that were extremely popular in Wildlands and locked them up behind paywall, so please spend $40 for a set of official 5.11 tac gear cosmetics.”
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I like Overwatch as a shooter, I hate it as a moba
Zen’s healing is only secondary to his character, most of my time is spent setting and forgetting, with clicking on enemies being his main focus
Pharah sort of fills my Quake live itch
D.Va is one of two satisfying hitscan characters
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then boy do I have good news for you
which is?
Breakpoint makes such a big deal about THE WOLVES and how they’re a super deadly elite team of ex-Ghosts that will hunt you down and murder you and bring you back to life and murder you again.
Anyway I just sniped like four of the bozos who kept running to hide between the same tree that a pile of corpses was already at.
It’s probably worth mentioning that Rock Paper Shotgun has a pretty good video on how to sorta juice as much XP as you can early on, which makes the game arguably better? At least in that you get more stuff to mess with faster.
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played a couple hours of Noita, that simulation-heavy roguelikelike that was in development for years. “every pixel is simulated”, they say. you’re a wizard who can float and shoot stuff out of wands. you have to…go down? they give you a shootwand and a bombwand to start with and i am convinced that you can bomb through to the other side of the hill with the entrance to the dungeon in it bc you can see land out there. one day. i also found an egg by climbing very high and then got chased by a lot of monsters. its hard and chaotic but i’m excited to see where it ends up with more updates.
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it’s very good, my main complaint is that later levels are currently just, like, projectile spam with punishingly high numbers. it’s too easy to get yourself in a situation and a mindset where you need to just blast everyone to survive rather than creating interesting situations
yeah, the furthest i’ve gotten is to the ice caves and its very easy to get in a situation thats completely out of control, so i can imagine it only getting More That further down. i like it though, the customisation stuff and perks are really interesting so far.
had been planning to write a roguelikes post for a while (Wizard of Legend, Cogmind, Nowhere Prophet, STS’s new Watcher, demos of One Step From Eden and MiSTOVER), waffled for a long while trying to get into the right headspace for some experienced analytical ghostprose. of course, the past while included a lot of disheartening indie exposés + my complete collapse from all life plans, so I never got around to the usual posting-letters-to-the-abyss.
in the past month I streamed a couple of adventure games with my girlfriend, which resonated a lot harder than any degree of cleansed procgen dynamics has lately, and brought some inspiration back into my life. I can’t really bring justice into talking about the unsubtle righteous fury in The Sea Will Claim Everything (2012)- as storybook fantasy directly discussing political philosophy with the Greek debt crisis. Still, it’s easy to appreciate infinite whimsical world-details and helping creatures also pointing against institution and towards revolution; the constant meta-conceit of the game being a window into another world is strangely suiting accompaniment to how it holds up a simple, yet stern mirror. It’s quite the painful snapshot, too, as the years split & industrialized the indiesphere and as fascist doublespeak infiltrated Gamer communities. The Sea makes me want to seek out more anchored games (…besides queer experiences) from the past while.
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Wandersong (2018) is in a strange position relative to other gamer-mindset satires and other pacifist power-fantasies in that it emphasizes redemption comes with willing change or death. The Hero as apocalyptic status quo gets in a lot of great narrative-breaking (her intermission forces itself in between chapters + is the only time one can attack almost anything at all; the game’s achievements are solely from her activities, not the player’s; she’s offered cooperation and refuses it, and so she might be the only one not saved in the end), and works well entirely separated from the protagonist. Unlike the spent introspection of games that criticize complicity by playing them at all, or splits of arbitrary cruel and non-cruel routes, Wandersong’s singular journey lets the player fulfill a pacifist counter-thesis in knitting the world back together against the Hero’s efforts, and that makes the point work a lot better than emphasizing the horror of “but what if we let / made you kill”.
(…not that it’s perfect here- the cosmological forces themselves don’t get much deliverance. still.)
Playing as that protagonist bard does have some unique appeals, of course. While my unskilled ears falter in idle singing, such as a verb is still explored well in communing with the world and protecting people on a constant basis. That they can do many dances 90% of the time without interrupting other actions is far more personally alluring; non-mechanical expression in non-creation works has felt sorely lacking, sometimes. They’re also just a loveable innocent dork that gets to process masking / depression and imposter syndrome, lighting up the heart of a disgruntled and focused witch dealing with diaspora and the duo’s struggles to fix things. There’s a lot of emotional catharsis in discussing ambient hopelessness and such personal strife half way through the game, and such snuck into a puzzle-platformer helps make the game’s hopeful intent to stitch the world back together work with more than just magic to solve everything.
(also, the postgame dev commentary about how many qualities of later plot were written on the fly and in subtle response to many other games, and I only played this a year after release included fixes for physics bugs. it feels and was barely held together, but my playthrough gave me hope that writing and trickery can make up for the infinite different specialties small game dev needs to function at all.)
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Having an owl named Sophia drop deep knowledge is intensely, incredibly Greek
my cat is named sophie and she just screams at me to look at her asshole