Category Archives: archived features

I Finally ‘Get’ The Witcher 3

It felt like a perfect storm of external forces all converged on me at once, pushing me into trying a game I had bounced off of several times before. After Skyrim and Fallout 4 failed to satiate my RPG cravings, it was the buzz coming out of E3 around Cyberpunk 2077 that served as the catalyst for me diving once more into The Witcher 3. Nearly thirty hours later, I think I can safely say that I am really enjoying my time with it… mostly.

My memory of The Witcher 3 wasn’t exactly positive up until this point. I distinctly recall being turned off in my previous attempts by the first few hours of the game. So instead of starting from the beginning, against my better judgement, I just picked up a year old save and ran with it. Most surprising is the fact that it worked. It’s probably worth noting that I guess I had cheated and boosted my level pretty significantly at some point in this save, which has made the combat incredibly easy.

Gotta shoulder check em’ to keep them off their rhythm

But the combat was one of the reasons I bounced off of The Witcher 3 in the first place. Even when I was fulfilling the power fantasy of being a legendary witcher and just annihilating anything in my path, the combat still felt loose and unresponsive at times. But trivializing the combat was what I needed to do in order to better appreciate everything else that people loved about the game.

It was when I accidentally walked up to the door of a random building that everything clicked for me. The door swung open and revealed a beautiful and detailed home adorned with several shelves that were packed with books and various baubles. Paint cans and brushes strewn across a table with a blank canvas waiting to be propped up on an empty easel. Around the corner was a bed and a large empty basin with a water pump next to it. This didn’t feel like a place where an NPC just stood in, but more like an actual home with the amenities needed for a person to comfortably live in this space. Just to be sure that my admiration was justified, I walked into every house in this city block that I could and found they were all unique in their own ways.

I could listen to this jam all day

As I continued deeper into the city towards my waypoint, I could hear the distant sales pitches of merchants, citizens complaining about the inequalities in their lives, a band playing a really awesome song, and a rather suspicious amount of cats hissing at me. This city felt alive in the way a city that was quietly being overrun with the meanest cats in the universe would be. Suddenly I came to a stop, yielding to a cut-scene of two people getting burned at the stake for practicing witchcraft. It was just as uncomfortable as you’d think it would be.

It’s here that I’d like to mention my first grievance with The Witcher 3. I really don’t like Geralt as a character. I don’t know the history and lore of Geralt outside of what I’ve seen in this game, but he just kind of sucks. I gathered that the witchers are supposed to be emotionless and only do what’s necessary for a paycheck, which seems to be contrary to a lot of what you see in the game itself. I find it odd that an emotionless mercenary like Geralt has any relationship options at all, as well as having dialogue choices that usually grant him options to be a more caring and understanding person. This wouldn’t bother me so much if maybe he just stopped bringing up the fact that witchers went through mutations to feel no emotions. Maybe the past games and books explain this stuff, but for someone like me who is experiencing The Witcher 3 in a vacuum, it just doesn’t make a lot of sense.

“I was genetically altered to kick your ass. Please go home though.”

But none of that is enough to make me stop playing altogether. I’ve genuinely enjoyed some of the story beats of The Witcher 3, even if there are plenty of times I had no idea what was going on. There are a lot of names and places to keep track of and it can get very confusing very quickly. But I was always ready to just accept my fate and go talk to whoever had the waypoint over their head. More often than not, the people I’d talk to were good at clarifying why I was there, and why it was important. That or they just wanted to challenge me to a game of cards or to race horses. The latter being one of the worst parts about the entire game.

This game still looks absolutely stunning

The Witcher 3 has the courtesy to let you opt out of most horse races, which is convenient because your horse, Roach, might be the worst video-game horse in history. This fucker is the absolute worst. The amount of times Roach has decided to not gallop when I hit the gallop button, or better yet, just stop in the middle of a pack of wolves, is unbelievable. Maybe when I spawned him in, he appeared behind a short, hoof-high rock wall or near a small bush. Well fuck me, because getting him out of that mess is going to be a challenge. But my favorite annoyance happens when I have the audacity to use the feature where Roach will auto-run and follow the road. This feature is a lie, and does not actually exist. Roach will ride on the road until he decides he wants to go on his own horsey adventures with or without you. Thank goodness for fast travel, or else I’d just end up walking everywhere.

Fuck you

I’m far from finished with The Witcher 3 but I know that if nothing else, I will see the credits for this game. I’m too invested at this point to just walk away from it like i had previously. In spite of my lack of enthusiasm for fantasy settings, CD Projekt Red has crafted a phenomenal game that I’m glad I can finally appreciate, albeit a few years late.

I’m Just Not Good Enough for Absolver

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I suppose the most direct analogue to Absolver would be the Dark Souls series. I haven’t played enough of either games to make that connection myself, but at a cursory glance they seem to share a lot of the same mechanics. This is troubling for me because I’ve never been a fan of the Dark Souls games, mostly because I’m not up to their challenge. Also because I’m not a sadist.

Before I dive into why these kinds of games never worked for me, I should explain what Absolver is. Absolver is a martial arts based, action-rpg that is built around the idea of stance-based combat and customizing your combos. It all sounds really exciting from a distance, but the thing I wasn’t prepared for was the level of difficulty within.

I’ve got a million ways to kick your ass, just try me.

I’m sure for a seasoned Dark Souls fan Absolver presents a unique, yet surmountable challenge. But from the early stages I found myself bashing my head against encounters until the enemy randomization and placement became a little more forgiving.

A typical scenario would be me breezing through 3 or 4 enemies only to come up against Bruce Lee wearing a mask. No matter how many times I’d counter or dodge, Bruce would counter my counters and dodge my dodges and ultimately kick me into oblivion. Then I’d reload, only to find Bruce Lee had trained his buddies at the entrance of the level, and get obliterated again. A few more times of this and finally Bruce and his disciples had left, leaving me in the clear and able to stroll through the level.

That’s where my biggest qualm with Absolver is. I never felt like I was actually learning anything or getting any better. Every time I cleared an encounter or beat a boss, it felt less like I had used an arsenal of skills and more like I had gotten lucky.

Don’t knock my style

But this isn’t an Absolver or Dark Souls issue, this is a “me” issue. I’m not good at these games and as I get older I have less and less patience for them. I’m powering through Absolver as much as I can, but I know I’m going to hit a wall and eventually stop. I want to like this game so much, but I can’t. If I could feel a little more like a badass and less like I hit big at a casino this would be a different conversation.

This also feeds into the lack of difficulty consistency in Absolver. There’s nothing rewarding about handily defeating a boss, only to be dissolved by the nameless enemy waiting around the corner.

But then again, I only speak for myself. The fact that Dark Souls is a successful franchise that spawned it’s own genre is a testament to the fact that people want these kinds of games. Players have mastered them in ways that seem superhuman to me, and I know there will be people who dominate Absolver in a similar fashion.

Behold, the world is yours to punch your way through.

This isn’t to say Absolver is a perfect game that I just suck. The game has a lot of rough edges in terms of optimization and especially control issues. I’ve been using an Xbox One controller, and I can’t help but think that the right analog stick has far too many functions attached to it. For instance, we have basic camera control when out of combat, but once you tap the right bumper, you’re locked on to an enemy thus changing the function entirely. Once locked on, the right stick is your dodge or parry depending on what class you pick. But wait, there’s another enemy, hold the right bumper and move the right stick to target them. Oh no, you’re in the wrong stance, hold the right trigger and move the stick to change it, all the while dodging attacks and making sure you don’t fall into a pit or a pool of water.

It’s a lot to deal with all at once. Maybe I’m nitpicking, but these things all compound and make a game that requires a ton of precision feel less precise. That combined with the difficulty inconsistencies make me enjoy Absolver less and less. It’s a damn shame too, because it presents itself so well in terms of world design and art style.

I’ll probably fall from up there at some point.

But ultimately, this isn’t an indictment of the game, but of myself. Games like this just aren’t for me and have become increasingly more impenetrable as I’ve gotten older. Maybe my patience has worn out, maybe I just don’t have the time to practice, but I know that I’ll never “git good,” and I’m totally fine with that.

I’m a Soccer Master Thanks to Behold The Kickmen

The Problem With #ContentCreation

The Wasted Potential and Disappointing Realities of No Man’s Sky

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It’s hard not to have a greater discussion about managing expectations when talking about No Man’s Sky, and for good reason too. No Man’s Sky is the fifth game from indie developer, Hello Games, but the first of theirs that doesn’t involve motorcycles and stunts.

To boil it down, you’re traveling to procedurally generated planets in a procedurally generated galaxy with all kind of procedurally generated creatures and plants for you to analyze and collect. At face value that sounds like a pretty compelling concept. Who wouldn’t want to be the Lewis and Clark of space? The problem is that No Man’s Sky feels more like a tech demo and less like a fleshed out game.

The “carrot on a stick” is the center of the universe, where some grand mystery allegedly lies. To get there however is a true test of patience. You collect the resources you need to power your hyper-drive which allows you to get to the next planet which has resources to power your hyper-drive, so on and so forth. That core loop isn’t inherently bad though. What is bad is how dreadfully dull each of these planets feel. They all contain the same series of core resources, landmarks, and outposts. The most diverse part about these planets is the flora and fauna you’ll find scattered around. Sure, it was cool to see a giant mushroom that hops around, but I’ve already seen a few variants of that already on other planets.

These things are mostly forgivable though. Some people will absolutely enjoy roaming these vast landscapes, which in all fairness are impressive in scope. My main umbrage with No Man’s Sky is that it doesn’t go far enough in it’s gameplay mechanics. It tries to be a survival game and an exploration game, and fails to deliver on both accounts. Sure, you’ll need to maintain your life support systems, gather fuel and manage your inventory, but these things quickly feel more like a nuisance and less like meaningful mechanics.

In a more hardcore survival version of No Man’s Sky, not only would you be hunting for resources for your ship and suit, but you’d also need to scavenge for food and assemble shelter. With the nigh infinite kinds of animals and vegetation in the game, it could be interesting to have to establish what plants are edible and not toxic, or what animal you can make the best steaks out of. Strand me on planets, challenge me with surviving in an unfamiliar and perhaps unforgiving place, cause as of now I have no incentive to not just buy every resource I need and fly to the center of the universe.

Alternatively, No Man’s Sky could have gone in the complete opposite direction and have been more exploration focused. Drop the resource and inventory management and give me a procedurally generated version of Pokemon Snap. In lieu of resources on the planet, give me more intricate and interesting plant and animal life for me to document and inspect. I’d love to see which of these groups of animals is the predator and which is the prey, or how the raise their young, or even interact with the world itself. As of now these animals just exist on a planet and move from one side of the landscape to the other.

But as it is, No Man’s Sky is a completely underwhelming experience that doesn’t scratch either itch for a survival or an exploration game. It sits somewhere in the middle of these two experiences and doesn’t add anything aside from making you feel isolated and alone in a gigantic universe. If you stop to think about your size and impact on the galaxy, you realize how very small and insignificant you really are. You’re just one person exploring a gigantic universe on your own, charting your discoveries along the way.

Except no you fucking aren’t, because on every planet you’ll find some aliens willing to sell you stuff, ships flying through the sky and occasionally trying to murder you, space stations in every star system and space cops on every planet just waiting for you to fuck up and try to cut a tree down. The whole wonder of exploring and naming things is all ripped from you when you realize there’s just some alien sitting in his office asking you for carbon or plutonium in exchange for a better mining gun or more inventory space.

Suddenly No Man’s Sky goes from being about exploring the unknown, to walking into someones house and renaming their kids to “Butt” and “Fart” because you can. You turn into this wandering vagrant who lands on already named planets, and renames them and it’s inhabitants to whatever insane things you feel like.

I never feel like I’m actually doing anything in No Man’s Sky. I never feel like I’m making any meaningful progress or discovering anything interesting or even discovering anything at all. I’m just Christopher Columbus, going around “discovering” things that were already found and pretending like I’m the most important being in the universe. Maybe that’s the secret meaning of No Man’s Sky, or maybe I’m giving the game too much credit. Either way, I’m not having fun with it anymore and it’s because worst of all, No Man’s Sky doesn’t value my time as a player. It’s a grind to do anything and the grind isn’t ever fun.

It’s all such a shame because there are some truly interesting ideas in this game that are easy to overlook. The dialogue and language systems in particular are some of the coolest concepts in No Man’s Sky, but just like everything else they don’t go far enough. As it stands, you go up to a terminal or find a strange monument in the wild, hold the “interact” button and learn a new word in an alien language. When you start talking to an alien vendor, you might have some words translated for you, thus making it easier to understand what this alien needs. Sometimes when you’re right, you get a new ship or a new gun. But if you answer inappropriately, you risk taking some damage or losing some money, which may as well be no punishment at all.

A system like that in the next Mass Effect or Elder Scrolls game could be fantastic and add a whole new layer to dialogue in games. In No Man’s Sky however, the system just feels wasted. “Oh no, I didn’t get a cool ship from you, I’ll just fly a minute east and try the next guy who lives in isolation on this planet”.

All things considered, despite my ranting and anger, it’s not impossible for someone to fall in love with this game. It has a calming tone to it both in visuals and soundtrack, and is an easy way to lose a few hours of your night. No Man’s Sky might be a fun experience for you, but for me it’s been a disappointing and repetitive game that I doubt I’ll touch again until it’s next major feature update.

Combo Broken

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Sometimes my mind wanders and I think about what the high school version of myself would say about where my life has ended up. If I could go back in time I’d hope the younger me would heed my warnings, pick a direction and stick with it. Then I remember that I was a little shithead who never took anything seriously and just talk about how cool it would be if weed were legal and eat some Cheez-Its.

I was a tremendous asshole back then and while a lot has changed, a lot stayed the same. I still am a jerk from time to time, I still have an unhealthy obsession with video games, and somehow, I kept a lot of my old friends. At least for a while I did.

Four or five years ago I started following the world of online video production very closely. The idea of content creation and being my own boss was incredibly appealing. It was a very “pie in the sky” moment for me. The market hadn’t become over saturated with gaming content and coverage, (at least in the YouTube space) and it was pretty clear to see the way people would consume information was changing. I wanted to get in on the fun, but just like in high school, I was lazy. I wasted a lot of time and didn’t actually start anything until mid-2013.

Around April of 2013, I reached out to one of my best friends I had known since high school. After purchasing a capture device and a microphone of questionable quality, I asked if he wanted to try this whole ‘let’s play’ thing with me. I explained to him the premise, showed him some examples of existing channels and he seemed to really be into it. We brainstormed some names we should use, and somehow ended up going by “The Combo Breakers”. This was a name I would ultimately come to hate.

Everything seemed great at first. My best friend and I were hanging out more than ever, playing video games and just talking like we normally did. The only difference was that from here on out, there was a microphone in front of us. We would record once or twice a week and then I’d edit and upload the finished products. I’d then blast them out on social media and various Reddit boards. I was having fun, some of the most fun I’d had in a long time.

“No one ever starts off doing it right.” That was a lesson I learned very quickly while pursuing this new hobby. We had a ton of audio and editing issues considering this was my first time doing anything like this. But after a few months I had a system going, I knew my shit and started to demand more of myself… and my friend. I was able to discern very quickly what was working and what wasn’t. I canned plenty of garbage we’d created because I refused to put my name to it. My friend wasn’t blind to this either, it’s what made him a valuable partner. As TCB (The Combo Breakers) started to gain traction and get some fans that weren’t people we knew, we started feeling pretty good about ourselves. We were producing great content on a regular schedule. Then the realities of real life started to set in.

Our schedules didn’t line up all the time, and we were out of content. This led to me inviting another friend to be apart of the channel.. The three of us would then become the core of the channel and continue to churn out great content. I was especially proud cause I felt a sense of ownership. Maybe it was buying the components, or being the editor or plugging our stuff on the internet, but I held TCB very close to me. So close that I started to treat my friends more like employees and less like people I’d made great memories with.

For months, I would push my friends to come over and make more videos. We barely interacted outside the channel anymore. I was possessed and my friends saw it. We’d fight about it, they’d call me out for being a slave driver, I’d fire back at them for not helping me on the back end of the channel. It was the nerdiest version of a bad marriage ever.

All the time this was happening, we were getting tons of praise from other small content creators which only served to justify my actions and behaviors. I wanted this to be successful, I wanted us to be able to do this forever and be comfortable. However, my ambitions overshadowed the reality of the situation. I was ruining a friendship over a channel that had 100 subscribers. It’s all so dumb when I think about it now.

This tension built up around us and listening back to some videos from that time, I can hear us getting more aggressive with each other. Eventually though, it got the better of us, and I shut down the channel in anger. I hated what it did to me, and what it did to us. The worst part about it all was I damaged my friendships, all for basically nothing.

I went on and created a new channel with some other friends of mine. It only lasted for a few months, but I greatly improved every aspect of what TCB was. New microphones, new software, new artwork. Everything was polished in a way that TCB wasn’t. Ultimately I ended that channel because I reconciled with my old co-hosts, and we brought The Combo Breakers back in a massive way with some new members on board.

Every bit of polish was put into TCB, and the content was better for it. Everything before then was now shit, and I hated it. We were growing twice as fast as we had before, and things seemed okay between us personally. Although, we still didn’t really interact outside of the channel. Maybe that was us acknowledging that our friendship worked in high school, it worked in college, but couldn’t withstand this makeshift employment.

We kept it going for another year and got more popular than any of us ever thought we would. We finally decided to call it quits again, and this time for good. We got new jobs, one of us even got engaged and moved in with his fiancé which made distance and travel a factor. Scheduling started to not line up anymore, and content was drying up. I knew what was coming, and I was okay with it this time. I talked to them about it, and while they weren’t enthused about the situation, I think they understood.

I put a bullet in the channel and wrote a nice goodbye note and made a video about it. I thanked everyone who ever helped me make that channel great, but made a point to thank the first friend I brought aboard the most. I felt like I sacrificed the most with him. The Combo Breakers effectively ended my friendship with him and I wish I could say I regretted it more than I do. I may have lost a friend or two, but because of The Combo Breakers I went back to school to get a degree in media production. This tiny, insignificant channel changed my life in some huge ways.

I think we were on this trajectory well before the channel even started. We got out of high school and desperately clung to something that worked then. We grew apart and that’s fine. We don’t hate each other by any means, but I think we all knew it could never be like the old days. We still occasionally talk and catch up and I think that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

I’ll still look back at The Combo Breakers and think “I could get the band back together.” Then I remember all of this. I’ll always appreciate the hell out of what we accomplished but I can’t do it again. It’s time to just move forward and leave some things in the past… Like a stupidly named channel. God damn do I hate the name ‘The Combo Breakers’. Good riddance.