Pathfinder: Kingmaker 1 Hour Initial Impression

When it comes to Pathfinder, I am a novice. I know nothing about the world, the ruleset, nothing other than it's a fairly popular pen and paper rpg. When I saw the videos for Pathfinder: Kingmaker, it instantly reminded me of the older Baldur's Gate games or more recently the Pillars of Eternity and Tyranny games by Obsidian.

I am a big fan of computer rpg video games, and I have a special fondness for the isometric style made popular with the original Baldur's Gate. So naturally I was very intrigued by Pathfinder. So much so that I decided to take the plunge and purchase the game.

So what are my thoughts after just over an hour of playtime? Well I'm glad you asked. I like it so far. Pathfinder: Kingmaker is just familiar enough in look and feel of past isometric rpg games that fans of the past Pillar's or BG games should find enjoyment with Pathfinder.

The ruleset for the Pathfinder pen and paper which Kingmaker is based off of is very reminiscent of Dungeons & Dragons. For those like me that have never played the Pathfinder game but have played anything based on the D&D rules, I think, will be comfortable with Kingmaker which should keep the learning curve to a minimum. I remember the first time I played the first Neverwinter Nights and absolutely hating the game because it had feats and abilities, this stuff that wasn't in the first Baldur's Gate. That honestly ruined that game for me for the longest time. These days that kind of stuff is very common in rpg's so when I went back to play Neverwinter again I had a great time.

So what is bad about Pathfinder: Kingmaker? I'm still in the tutorial, but I would say that there is nothing bad about the game thus far, but there are some things I wish were different. Recent crpg's have spoiled me with some of their quality of life options. Things like movement speed toggle between slow, normal and fast, or a show interactive object toggle. A few things I don't like is the shared inventory weight, really just inventory weight in general as it slows character movement which is already slow to begin with. I also am not a fan of character movement during combat, your front line fighters take an awfully long time to walk up to the enemy.

One area I do need to spend more time learning about is spellcasting. According to the tutorial, spells that are cast cannot be used again until the spellcaster has rested. It's a mechanic found in the older infinity engine games, Baldur's Gate/Icewind Dale, something I've not been a fan of ever. I created a fighter for simplicity sake to learn the game, but very early on you will get a bard, sorcerer and cleric in your party, all of which can cast spells.

So far I am enjoying Pathfinder: Kingmaker. I have purchased very few PC games this year, but I love isometric crpg's so I was actually excited for this game because I know nothing about the Pathfinder IP and I thought this would be a great introduction to that world. I hope to share more thoughts about Kingmaker as I make my way through the game.

Ghost Recon Wildlands Open Beta Impressions

I will admit that I wasn't all that excited for a new Ghost Recon game, after both Advanced Warfighter 1 & 2 and Future Soldier I was pretty skeptical that Wildlands would be any good. You see, I really hate GRAW 1 & 2, and Future Soldier was enjoyable at times but quite frustrating most times. After spending the weekend in Wildlands I can safely say that it is a load of fun. Most times.

When I first saw GRW gameplay it instantly reminded me of The Division mixed with Far Cry. Turns out it's more akin to Future Soldier mixed with Far Cry but with the third person controls much like The Division. GRW plays so much better than the past few Recon games and is an awesome coop experience. Full disclosure: I played maybe ten minutes of the single-player so I cannot comment on that.

The game looks good, plays great and is a ton of fun when playing in a group with friends. The enemies are pretty relentless which keeps the game from becoming boring. We did run into a few bugs during our time over the weekend, the worst being unable to complete a story mission. Otherwise it was a blast.

I look forward to March 7th when the game is released and writing about my adventures in Bolivia!

What I Think of Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City.

Watch this video.

Who wouldn't want to play this game! I know after watching this trailer one day on Steam I sure did.

So what is RE: Operation Raccoon City? It's a third person action game that begins prior to the events of Resident Evil 2. You play as one of four members of a U.S.S., or Umbrella Security Service Delta Team sent to Raccoon City to retrieve the G-Virus. Of course things go terribly wrong because if not the game would be even shorter than it already is, and you find yourself going to various locations fighting infected and Spec Ops soldiers in the hopes of being extracted from the city.

ORC was built to be a four-player co-op game. Yes you can play a private campaign by yourself with three AI squad mates, but ORC's gameplay is balanced around having four human players. If you take a restrictive FOV, a cover system that requires you to stick to walls which for the most part is broken and useless, a complete lack of a dodge mechanic, enemies that are bullet sponges, and mix that together with a game that likes to throw as many enemies as possible at you in small areas, what you get is a rage induced coronary from a game that is way harder than is should be even on casual difficulty. It's ok to make a game challenging, but ORC falls within the realm of cheap rather than difficult.

That's not to say everything is bad in ORC. The audio and visuals are quite good and the story is serviceable and doesn't get in the way. My favorite aspect of ORC, and the only reason why I played so much, is the gunplay. If you've played a modern military shooter within the past say five years then you know what to expect with ORC. There are a number of weapons to unlock and pick up in the game, each with its own characteristics such as accuracy, damage and ammo capacity. Standing still gives you the best accuracy but at the risk of being hit by enemies. Move around and you suffer in accuracy as you increase a weapon's bullet spread while eating through precious ammo. The gunplay is not revolutionary, but I found it to be very enjoyable.

Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City is a competent, but generic third person shooter. It breaks tradition by forgoing the puzzle aspect which is a halmark of the franchise and instead focuses on the action. While I found enjoyment in the gunplay, I find ORC's focus on co-op with a difficulty exacerbated by bad gameplay decisions such as a lack of a dodge mechanic, bad FOV, a broken cover system and bullet sponge enemies to be less enjoyable.

What I Think of Spec Ops: The Line

 

Been working on this post for awhile now, let's see if I can get this done! THIS IS A SPOILER FREE POST! At least I will try as hard as possible to not give any sort of spoilers. Also, I played the PC version with a wired Xbox controller.

I am going to assume that by now most people already know what Spec Ops: The Line is - a third-person cover based military shooter that features a story based on the movie Apocalypse Now and the novella The Heart Of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Some may say the gameplay is just average at best which I think is a tad shortsighted and I believe there's a bit of hyperbole surrounding the story with these intense moral decisions.

Without going into spoiler territory let's begin with the story.

Six months before the start of the game Dubai is engulfed by a massive sandstorm burying most of the city under sand. Lieutenant Colonel John Conrad, commander of the 33rd Battalion which was in the process of returning home from Afghanistan has volunteered his unit to go in the Dubai and attempt to rescue those stranded in the city from the sand storm.

In the mean time Dubai has become surrounded with what is called the sand wall making flights in and out of the city impossible along with any sort of communications. Four weeks later a mysterious and slightly broken message penetrates the sand wall from Conrad and the missing 33rd. Players take on the role of Captain Martin Walker as he leads a three man recon team tasked with investigating the source of the transmission and to see if there are indeed any survivors before pulling back to the sand wall for extraction.

This information is pretty much revealed during the opening cutscene while the credits are rolling, anything further would be in that spoiler territory. Now initially there is a tutorial where you learn how to aim and shoot, run and use cover and interact with objects, from that point forward though the game goes into what I like to call the Heart of Darkness weirdness. Well actually, that kind of starts before the opening cutscene.

What I can say about the story is that I loved it the first time I played through Spec Ops. I only knew of Heart of Darkness from the many references made on various podcasts when talking about the game and I had very little knowledge of the movie Apocalypse Now because I've never seen the movie. Not knowing what happens in the movie or novella and how they influenced the story in Spec Ops was for me perfect. By the end of the game I was blown away by the story, found it interesting from start to finish.

Unfortunately after that first play through I spent some time looking for information on both the novella and the movie to see just how close in story all three were. All that time learning about how Spec Ops compares to the novella and the movie and what exactly it took from them, reading about the clues from the author and then playing through the game two more times to see if I could see the twists coming caused me to lose some of that initial love and admiration for the story that I had.

In the end the way I experienced Spec Ops the line with no prior knowledge of the source material I believe was the best way to play the game. However, if you are familiar with the novella and/or the movie I still think you will appreciate what Spec Ops does.

So what about the gameplay you ask? Well there's really not much to say honestly; you can aim, you can shoot and throw grenades, you can sprint, take cover, sprint in and out of cover, pick up all sorts of weapons and blow enemies heads off. It may sound generic or average, but it is a whole heck of a lot of fun. The gameplay was part of the reason why I played through the game three times in two and a half days.

There was a half-baked squad command system in the game which isn't a real detriment to the game, but on the harder difficulties it can be annoying when you have to repeatedly redo sections because your squad dies or you die from trying to revive them. Speaking of difficult, Spec Ops is not easy. It's easier on normal but it can still be pretty tough at times.

Spec Ops isn't revolutionary, it doesn't introduce any sort of new gameplay mechanics. It's not like when Gears of War was released and suddenly every third person game had to have cover mechanics. It's not like that at all, but what it does do gameplay wise is done I think very well. The camera never interfered with my enjoyment of the game, the cover system works great and the weapons had a hint of realism with bullet spread and kick when fired.

For me Spec Ops: The Line had the whole package - it looked good, the audio was fantastic with the voice overs, sound effects and music, the controls were tight, the gameplay was great, the pacing was perfect and the story was amazing. I picked up the game on sale for five bucks and it was money well spent. I would say Spec Ops is easily worth twenty or thirty bucks, if not for the gameplay then at least for a story that you don't normally get in game like this.

A few small tidbits - I did try one game of the multiplayer and if you've played Call of Duty or Battlefield then you know what to expect. A coop mode was added in later but I did not get a chance to try it out.

What I Think of Chivalry: Medieval Warfare

Have you ever been given a gift that you wish you hadn't received, but you're thankful anyways and try to enjoy the gift only to get super frustrated and now you want to somehow smack the gift giver? Well a kind hearted friend wanted to share the fun he was having with Chivalry and decided to gift me a copy, and believe me there are times I wish he hadn't.

Chivalry is a multiplayer first person melee combat game built on the Unreal engine so it's pretty and quite unique. It is also broken, flawed and at times seems highly unbalanced, yet it has its moments that make the game incredible. Unfortunately for me those times do not happen very much.

There are four classes - Archer, Man-At-Arms, Vanguard and Knight. There are a small number of maps and includes your standard multiplayer game types - FFA, TDM, Team Objective, King of the Hill and Last Man Standing.

Each class must choose a primary, secondary and special weapon. Everyone starts with three primary and secondary weapons they can choose and from what I can tell there are six of each that can be unlocked by accruing a set number of kills with each.

Before I delve into the bad of Chivalry, I must confess that there is still information that I do not know. There appears to be no sort of manual for this game so some of what I might say could be answered by having one, something to keep in mind.

So what is broken and flawed about Chivalry you may ask? I think this a great time for some bullet points!

• Key bindings - a small patch supposedly fixed key bindings, but all it seemed to do was change some of them without changing the on screen prompts. Example: Use changed to I, still says E on screen. All commands must be bound to something and can't be left blank and you can accidentally have two commands bound to the same key. Example: Wanted to bind crouch to C since normal games do that which meant that war cry would be unbound, instead the game put both commands as C.
• Level system - yep, just like every other multiplayer game Chivalry has a level system. With other games gaining levels gives the player something for earning those levels. Not Chivalry. Seems the only thing levels represent is that a player has spent far too much time playing this game, cause they do nothing else.
• Weapon stats - each weapon has three stats: damage, speed and reach listed as percentages. There's even a detailed info screen that gives the percentages of primary, secondary and special. So what are the percentages based on? Is there some sort of rock, paper, scissors thing going on? The lack of information makes the percentages kind of arbitrary.
• Team Objective - It's the mode I tend to play most with any online game. In those other games each side will rotate who is for example the attacker and the defender. In Chivalry each map has a predetermined attacker and defender. With so few maps it would have been nice to have each side to attack and defend. There's also a timer to complete objectives, what that amount is I have no idea.
• Combat - My biggest gripe and I think the games best feature is the combat. It's unique, it's fast and brutal, and it's the most frustrating thing to experience. There are three attacks: stab, slash and overhand smash. These attacks can be blocked and parried by keeping the center of your screen on the tip of the enemies weapon. It's a neat mechanic. Unfortunately one can just circle strafe around while spamming left mouse button, or they aim high and spam over hand or aim low and spam stab. There is a finesse and skill to the combat that is extraordinary if played right, when on a server with 30 other players however, it just turns into a chaotic mess of LMB spam.
• Combat part II - Balance is fubar. Man-At-Arms have weapons with the shortest reach, lowest armor but are the fastest. Vanguard has moderate armor and speed with primary weapons that have long reach and secondary weapons with a short reach and no shield. The Knight is the slowest with the most armor, primary weapons with long reach and can use a shield with their secondary weapons. What this all means is that the long weapons are king of the battlefield and Knights are the uber sauce on that field. I like playing the MAA for the speed and shield, but I tend to get one shot quite often.

So if this game is broken and flawed how can it be so fun? It's unique and different from other multiplayer games which tend to be of the shooter variety. It's a gorgeous game that one minute can be controller throwing frustrating and in an instant become the most awesome thing you've seen. Weapon movement is slow, but character movement is very twitchy and timing is everything in Chivalry. On occasion I get it right and it is glorious! I just hope the devs continue to support Chivalry and patch up some of the brokenness with the game.

Impressions: Red Dead Redemption Multiplayer

Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption has been a huge success thus far, I for one believe it to be the second best game released this year. There is no doubt in my mind that RDR is a strong single-player game, but what about the multiplayer aspect, can it be just as satisfying?

To answer that question I decided to take a break from the single-player and see just what RDR has to offer those looking for some multiplayer action.

There are two ways to get online in RDR; from the main menu when you start the game or from the pause menu while in a game. The main menu option will automatically thrust players into a public match with other players. But what some may not realize is that you can create a private match where players can invite their friends, this can be done from the pause menu while in a single of multiplayer game. I would highly recommend that all new players start a private match first so that you can edit your avatar and check out the world hassle free from other players.

The best part about RDR's online play is the Free Roam mode. Free Roam brings the open-world that players have experienced in the single-player to the multiplayer. In Free Roam you can join a posse with other players, tackle gang hideouts or try some of the competitive modes that are scattered through out the map. In my little play time online, it seems that gang hideouts the popular choice with players.

Multiplayer also features challenges like in the single-player; there are the personal hunter, survivalist and sharpshooter challenges, along with some multiplayer specific challenges as well. The reason players would want to do the various challenges, clear out gang hideouts or participate in some competitive modes is to gain experience. It's very similar to what you would see in Modern Warfare 2 or in Battlefield; as players increase in levels, they gain access to new weapons, avatars, titles and even mounts.

Oh, did I forget to mention that online is open PvP, every man for himself just like the wild west? Well it is, and for me that's where the fun really is to be had. Now that I've gotten the details out of the way, let me tell you a tale of a man who has come to New Austin in search of fame and fortune - or how I stayed up way past my bed time having the most fun online in a long while.

Here's how the story begins; I loaded into the public match in the city of Blackwater. So naturally I begin shooting up the town, killing everything that moves. You have to understand, in the single-player story I am trying to be as good a guy as I can, so I need to let my inner cowboy out.

So after doing that for awhile, I decide maybe it's time to see what other players are doing. At this time there was just one other player, and he was out trying to clear a gang hideout. Being the curious type that I am, I go and ride out to the gang hideout to see what is going on. It's easy to spot another player when they are close because they will have this big colored circle with their name next to it above their heads.

So this guy is up on the ridge looking down at me, I know he's there but he must be using cover so I can't see him. Next thing I know this guys starts taking shots at me. So like a good cowboy I run my ass off to get out of there. At that point I have one thing on my mind, IT'S ON!!

I decided do the noble thing and wait till he's engaged in combat with some npc's before I make my rush on  him. Things go back and forth for a short time; I take him out, he snipes me with his better weapons. Eventually I decide that I might try something else and ride out to McFarland's Ranch. It's a short ride away, but once there I open my map to see what there is to do and I notice his teal circle moving. A few seconds later I realize that this guy is coming after me!

Realizing that my slow moving donkey mount is not going to get me away fast enough, I decide to hijack a real horse from some poor fool and ride as fast as humanly possible out of there. At this point I can't tell where this guy is, how fast he's going and if I am even going to get away. I was litterally on the edge of my chair sweating with my heart pounding when I realize that I am not going to be able to get away and decide to make my way to Armadillo to make my last stand.

I was familiar with the town because of playing the single-player and figured that my best chance was to run and hide in the saloon. I make my way up the stairs, using the railing as cover so that I have a good view of the upstairs and down stair entrances. At this point it's a waiting game, I know he's coming just by checking the map. My heart is pounding, I'm sweating way more than I should be, I'm on the edge of my seat just waiting with a smile on my face.

BLAME!!! Not realizing that I was right upstairs he came running through the front door, one headshot later he knows exactly where I am now. What happened for the next 20 minutes was a gigglefest of me blasting him everytime he tries to come inside the saloon. Eventually in frustration I imagine he tosses a stick of dynamite at the building and it kills me. Pretty cheesy, but it worked.

For the next couple of hours I had this guy chasing me all over New Austin and Mexico. Occasionally I would stop and ambush him then ride away while I had the chance, but eventually he did corner me in a small town in Mexico. Just to be clear, this guy owned me most of the night. Yes I had some success in Armadillo and with a few ambushes, but this guy was higher level with a better mount and weapons, and he wasn't afraid to use them.

Once I realized how late it was I made my way out of dodge and he went on with his gang hideout busting ways. But for that three and a half hour span I haven't had such a heart racing, pulse pounding, palm sweating gigglefest of a good time like that in a long quite awhile.

I have yet to try out the new coop DLC that was released, but what I have played so far has been a real blast. The online gameplay is a nice compliment to the already strong single-player, and I think thats what makes RDR such a great game.