Splatoon 2 Global Testfire Impressions

Stage 1 - Denial

It's the morning of March 24th, approaching noon, and I've gotten my nice new Nintendo Switch out to play some Splatoon. Starting soon, the Global Testfire will start, and as a huge fan of the original Splatoon on the Wii U I'm looking forward to seeing how things have changed. The supers are all brand new, there's a new kind of weapon in the Splat Dualies (which allow for rolling, how fun!), and the maps are all new.

The hour rolls around, and I boot up the game. A tutorial lets me get the hang of the controls, which seem largely unchanged from the original game, and I'm quickly shown the weapon select. I select my old standby, the Splat Roller, and the test starts connecting me to the game. Or, it tries to, at least. After a little bit, a connection error message pops up, and I'm booted back to weapon select. I try again, and the same thing happens. Try again, same thing. I look up information online, certain this must be a widespread issue, but...no, most everyone else has gotten in, enjoying themselves.

I find a few scattered reports of issues, and I try their suggestions. I restart my Switch, no dice. I double- and triple-check my internet connection, and it's green across the board. There is, as far as I can tell, no reason that I should be unable to play the game. Yet, I still get booted out. I post a joke on Twitter, complaining that there's no Squid Jump to distract me like in the original game, all while continuing to try, fruitlessly.

The hour ends, and with it the test, but my hopes remain high. The server tests for the original Splatoon were rough at first as well, but by the next time I was able to connect no problem and start splatting. I look forward to the next test I'll be able to join in on.

Stage 2 - Anger

It's 4 AM, the following morning, March 25th. I got home a few hours ago from a pretty rough shift at work, my feet still hurt, and I'm still a bit annoyed at some stuff I won't go into. But that's all in the past, and now I'm about to jump into the Splatoon 2 Global Testfire, which is about to start another hour of testing. I hop in, pick my weapon, and...the same thing happens. Can't connect.

I go through all the same motions as last time, restart the console, check the internet, everything's good, everything's working, why the fuck can't I play this game? I start trying different weapons to see if somehow my choice of the roller is preventing it from working, no luck. I'm already tired and annoyed, and now I can't even play this goddamn video game. Great. I post into a group chat that I want someone to complain to about this, but it's four in the goddamn morning, nobody's around. I go to sit next to our router, get as good a connection as I can, but nothing works. Around this time, I notice that it's always around 2 measures of music, the same two measures of music, before I get booted around, but it's never the exact same amount of time, always ever so slightly off.

I go back to my computer and am quite surprised that someone has in fact joined voice chat. I take a moment to remember that it's not 4 AM everywhere, then hop in and start my complaints. They lend a compassionate ear at my understandable frustrations. They tell me what they thought of the game, which doesn't annoy me as much as I was afraid it would (though I still make a sarcastic comment). Apparently Rollers have some momentum now where they take a second to roll at full speed? That's weird, and feels super unnecessary, but so did making the Kraken super in the original Splatoon completely useless by the time they stopped updating it, so who knows.

We shoot the shit about the original Splatoon, and our likes and dislikes about it. We both agree that skills shouldn't be tied to equipment anymore, so we can just be stylish, and that Nintendo will likely keep that stuff linked to equipment anyway. The entire time I keep trying to connect to a match, but no luck the entire way through. Eventually, the hour ends, and I've still put absolutely no time into Splatoon 2. I thank my friend for lending me their ear, and go to bed, setting my alarm for before the next test starts. I end up sleeping through it anyway.

Stage 3 - Still Anger

It's 8 PM that night, and guess what, the same shit happens. Can't connect. Earlier today a friend of mine who lives on a rock with bad internet and doesn't own a Switch tweeted about how they were playing Splatoon 2, which definitely wasn't rubbing it in my face but also definitely felt like it a little bit.

I spoke to the same friend earlier and apparently Bill Trinen, Senior Product Marketing Manager and notable public face of Nintendo of America, noted issues related to Comcast, the same ISP which I am unfortunately bound to. I check, and he is able to connect just fine to the current one. He is now tweeting about college basketball, and I guess I hope the team he was rooting for did well.

My thoughts wander to the worst case scenario. What if this is just how the game is gonna be? I feel like I'm one of like 7 people on the planet who can't get in, what if I'm considered an acceptable loss and Nintendo just doesn't do anything because hey, most people aren't having an issue? Splatoon 2 was one of the reasons I spent 300 dollars on this, what if that's just not feasible? I tweet to the official Nintendo of America account asking what work is being done between sessions, but I might as well scream into the void. The void does not scream back.

Stage 4 - Acceptance, And Definitely Not Anger Or A Different Kind Of Denial

It's 4 AM on Sunday, March 26th, and there's another hour of testing, the last hour of this group, but who cares honestly. Splatoon wasn't that great anyway, I guess on a floundering system like the Wii U it was alright, but it was overrated in retrospect. Who cares about the sequel to it? Even if you did, it all looks the same, they haven't changed anything, so you might as well just play the one that actually fucking works instead of this new piece of garbage.

You know what game is better than Splatoon 2, probably? Nier: Automata. This game is rad, and I'm starting my second playthrough, and it's already pretty crazy. I'm still trying to connect to the Splatoon 2 servers, but not because I wanna play it, I just feel like I have to, if I want to be able to speak with any sort of authority on video games I should play all the games I can, even if I don't care about them even a little bit. 

You know what else is definitely better than Splatoon 2, which I know because Splatoon 2 is dumb? Persona 5. That's coming out in like, a week or something crazy like that, and I still need to beat Nier: Automata like 4 more times or something before it comes out so I can see all the endings, which are apparently all pretty amazing. Who has time to play some dumb multiplayer paint game, that I just checked again and nope still no connection shit, when I have to beat a game that many more times in a week? Not me.

Definitely not me.

The Static Story of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

The following post contains spoilers for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a game about what came before. It is about the fight against Calamity Ganon 10,000 years ago, where people built machines to fight off evil and triumphed handily. It is about 100 years ago, when Calamity Ganon returned, pitted those machines against their creators, and defeated the heroes who would oppose him without a second thought. It is also, to a lesser extent, the story of the entire line of Zelda titles, and their (occasionally shoehorned in) story of a hero through the ages, destined to defeat Ganon and save the world. But as the characters chafed against their destiny, and thinking on their failures 100 years ago, I found myself disappointed that a distinct possibility was never even considered: What if Princess Zelda and Link aren't the 'chosen ones' at all?

Throughout the story, or rather the story from 100 years ago, Zelda visibly hated her role in this prophecy. She wanted to contribute by working with the giant mechanical Guardians which patrol the kingdom, and garner a greater understanding of the society that built them 10,000 years ago. When ordered to go on a pilgrimage to gain the power necessary to defeat Ganon by the king, she barely withheld her anger, clenching her fist as she quietly acquiesced to the request. Even then, the power didn't come to her; all the prayer in the world didn't unlock the ability to defeat Ganon which was supposed to come so naturally to her.

There isn't much solidly connecting Link to his destiny either. In the flashbacks, he carries the Master Sword, which has apparently chosen him as its wielder, proving that Link is the warrior of legend. But there's no such choice when you recover the Master Sword in the present. It does not speak and claim you are the reincarnated hero, it does not look at your deeds and make a decision. The sword will cause damage to you as you try to pull it out, and if you cannot withstand the damage, you do not get the sword. It seems to imply you don't get the Master Sword because of some destiny; you get it because you have the physical fortitude required, the strength required to fight Calamity Ganon.

At first, I was rather happy with my little headcanon, as all the pieces were fitting firmly into place. Link had the sword, but it didn't seem as though it was any real destiny that got it into his hands. Zelda was not only unhappy with her lot in life, but actively unable to fulfill it. The final piece of the puzzle is obvious not an hour into the game: These heroes, these destined individuals, fought Ganon as foretold.

And they lost. Hard. In fact, it's implied they never really stood a chance. That doesn't happen with heroes of legend, the ones destined to win.

Yet, the game decided that this would not do. Late in the game, in the final optional memory you can unlock, you see Zelda did in fact use the power of the goddess to fight against Ganon and speak to the Master Sword. It's a silly thing to be disappointed about, but I was still a little bummed. Here was this great Zelda game, the first in the series I can say I love out of anything other than nostalgia (even that only applies to Link to the Past), and in so many ways the game broke the series mold: The guided story structure was replaced with the most freeform progression in recent memory. The combat was expanded with multiple weapon movesets and elemental types. Even Links traditional outfit, the one true standard of the series from the beginning, is nowhere to be seen in the game unless you complete every single one of the 120 shrines in the game.

Is it so weird to hope the "destiny" and "prophecy" story would be played with? The game is a story of what came before,- but that's just as much why we change what worked before as why we follow it. Breath of the Wild makes huge changes to some of the fundamental aspects of the Legend of Zelda series as a whole. Why make a story that is, besides framing and some minor details, the same "destined heroes" story we've seen a ton of times in this series before? Why not make the story about heroes who aren't chosen but made by the hardships they experience, the bonds they form, and the battles they fight? Breath of the Wild is so different, and so amazing, I can't see Nintendo do anything but use this as the template moving forward. With everything else on the table, I just hope the story can be given that same critical treatment.

Impressions from a 1 week Switch owner

Note: Apparently I forgot to post this last week. This post was intended to be up on March 11. I apologize for the error, and will post two articles some week in the future to keep up my once per week schedule.

Hey so remember back in January when I said I wasn't going to get a Switch "anytime soon" because of how thin the launch line-up was? Yeah, oops, I own a Switch now. Last Saturday, one day after the Switches release while everyone was scrambling to find one, while spending time with a friend, he mentioned that a local Amazon Books had a lot of Switch's in stock. I called them, and apparently they still had "about two or three hours worth" of Switch's left, which struck me as an odd way to quantify it. We headed over, and when we got there we saw...this:

That picture depicts, by my estimate, several dozen Nintendo Switch consoles, and probably well over 100 copies of the main attraction, so to speak: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

So I got one. Strike while the iron is hot, as they say. After about a week of it, I can at least say that I don't regret the decision.

Pillars of Eternity, and the Possibility of Crowdsourced Lore

I've been spending a little bit of time lately playing 2015's Pillars of Eternity, Obsidian Entertainment's old-style RPG in the mold of Baldur's Gate or Neverwinter Nights. I kind of suck at the genre, but I've been enjoying it a great deal. The gameplay does "classic" without feeling outdated, and the story of trying to discover the reason behind a slew of soulless childbirths and your own newly-activated ability to converse with souls both living and dead keeps me going even as the opening stays fairly vague and mysterious.

Your ability to converse with souls most commonly comes to the fore via "soul stories," stories you can read from certain non-player characters depicting events from their lives or past lives. I was a bit surprised to learn, after doing some research, that all of the soul stories and the NPC's they're connected to were by backers of the games Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign, which raised nearly 4 million dollars in 2012. Anyone who donated a whopping $1000 or more was able to design an NPC who would appear in the game, with a soul story written by the backer. These small pieces of backstory on their characters (and, despite the game making it clear the souls held stories from past lives as well, every backer seems to have written stories from their NPC's point of view) led me to thinking: Could a game have NPC's written by their fans? Could you take those small, personal pieces of lore, and put their creation in the hands of the crowd?

Very Itch-eresting, Vol. 1

Valve, the gaming corporation behind the PC gaming platform Steam, recently announced that Steam Greenlight, the current method for non-traditionally published games to make their way onto Steam, will soon be phased out in favor of a new system, called Steam Direct. Rather than the complicated and obtuse method of combining votes, money gathered via crowdfunding, apparent quality, and a host of other reasons which Valve somehow used to determine what did or did not make it onto Steam, they will instead simply charge a fee. If you pay, you get on. The actual amount of the fee has yet to be determined, but Valve says they are asking developers for their thoughts and have received recommendations ranging from 200 dollars, twice as much as it took to put your game onto Steam Greenlight, to 5000 dollars.

5000 dollars, it should go without saying, is a lot of money, and would most likely prevent many smaller developing studios, and especially solo developers, from being able to get onto Steam. Some don't see this as a problem, however: if the game is worthy of being on Steam, the largest and most visible PC gaming platform, then 5000 dollars should be easy to recoup. If they don't happen to have a spare 5000 dollars just lying around, well there are other places to sell their games, such as perennial weird-game favorite, Itch.io.

A Lament for Persona 5, Which I Should Be Playing Right Now

Ah, Persona. How I've missed you these many years. Like most, I first cut my teeth on Persona 3, a fantastic JRPG that was just as much social simulator as dungeon crawler. The story, about students fighting the Shadow monsters which appear during a secret 25th hour, The Dark Hour, hooked me easily when I first played it my freshmen year of high school. It's sequel, Persona 4, remains a favorite of mine, containing my favorite cast of characters in any game and having many quality-of-life improvements over it's predecessor. It's been over 8 years since we were last graced with a game in the franchise, but at long last we've arrived at the release of Persona 5!

Waiting For The Fun

I've been spending a fair bit of my free time (or at least, small slivers of free time between other activities) playing Nintendo's latest mobile offering, Fire Emblem: Heroes. It's a perfectly serviceable title, offering bite-sized tactics gameplay in a simplified package. I've been thinking two things in my time with the game: One, I should probably try to finally beat Fire Emblem: Awakening. Two, free-to-play games sure rely on waiting a lot, huh?

The game has your typical F2P mechanic of a stamina meter. Instead of allowing you to play for as long as you'd like, every fight you undertake will cost a variable amount of stamina from your stamina meter. Capping out at 50 points, your stamina meter will refill at a rate of 1 point every 5 minutes, or a little over 4 hours to go from empty to full. Needless to say, this puts a hamper on prolonged play sessions, but the game isn't too hampered by this. The battles in the game are incredibly quick, swapping out the occasionally over half-hour long battles with huge maps and armies in typical titles and replacing them with 4 on (typically) 4 short-form skirmishes. It's been incredibly easy to simply hop in during a short bit of down time, play a quick fight, then put the game away for a bit while you do something else. In all my time playing over the last couple of days I've only been unable to continue due to lack of stamina once. Where I can see it becoming a problem is with trying to train up new units, preventing you from playing multiple fights to get experience. It's annoying, but hardly gamebreaking.

The whole thing has made me think of how waiting gets used in other titles. For example, I've also been playing a lot of the MMORPG, Final Fantasy XIV. If you encounter interactive spots during quests, activating them will cause a short bar to appear, which needs to fill before you can continue. I'm not entirely certain why these appear (I assume they are either to allow time for the game to communicate with the servers or to ensure you're not being attacked by monsters), but the short little waits can add up to a bit of annoyance if you're in a rush. On the longer side, you need to wait for a party to be formed every time you join the Duty Finder, the "Looking For Group" feature in FFXIV which matches you with other players for dungeons, boss fights, and raids. The game leans heavily on the typical MMO class trinity of DPS (damage-dealer), Tank (damage-taker), and Healer, and parties found through the Duty Finder must have a particular makeup of classes. If you’re playing a Tank, a type of class which tend to be less common, the wait for a party to be formed is often instantaneous. If you play the more common DPS class...well, I typically sit around for 5-10 minutes before getting into a dungeon if I play when a lot of people are online, and I’ve sat around for as long as 30 minutes.

I try not to hold this against the developer. The shorter waits are typically only around a second long, even if I'm not entirely certain of their purpose. The longer waits are a necessary evil, given how FFXIV is structured and the nature of the classes: Everyone's playing DPS, so it's harder to find a group that needs one. But if you're catching up on old content, or just happen to be playing the game a lot, those short 1-second long add up to a pretty big annoyance. Meanwhile, those longer waits are a drag in any case, but they're especially bad if you're trying to run through dungeons multiple times in a row for special currencies or items.

These waits, difficult to avoid as they may be, end up dragging down what is otherwise a fun and relatively fast-paced MMO. But I've seen long waits like this work in other games. In fact, I'd argue it's one of the few things that worked in last year's No Man's Sky.

No Man's Sky is a space exploration and survival game, tasking players with making their way to the center of a massive galaxy. The game takes great pride in it's realistically sized planets and galaxies, even taking into account how long travel between planets would be. Depending on how far you need to go, it was often a couple of minutes from one planet to the next. A couple of minutes of nothing but a cockpit view of space, hurtling towards a planet that will probably have very little of note on it.

I remember when the game first came out, I played it on livestream so my friends could watch. One of them was absolutely astonished that so much nothing could be in the game. They were adamant that a game with this much time 'wasted' was no good. They were right about the game being no good, but in my opinion this time spent waiting was actually pretty cool. The developers, Hello Games, were going for a realistic view of space travel, and "a lot of nothing for a long time" is probably pretty accurate to what it would be like to actually travel throughout the galaxy and over entire planets. It made me feel more like I was really sitting there in my spaceship, hopping from planet to planet hoping to find what I needed to keep heading towards the center.

My most vivid memory of the game was when I spent a long while, something like 2 or 3 hours, on a single shitty planet with nothing on it. The whole thing was hotter than hell, around 80 or 90 degrees Celsius, hot enough to make prolonged time out of my ship dangerous. Worse, it had frequent dust storms that would cause massive heat spikes, upwards of 300 degrees Celsius. At times like this, my only respite was to hop into my ship, which I guess had the universe’s greatest air conditioning, and wait it out.

It was boring, and time consuming, but I felt immersed in those moments. Me sitting on my couch, turning on a podcast to pass the time, was not all that dissimilar to my character in the game, feet up on the dashboard, listening to something to pass the time while a storm rages outside. It was waiting, sure; I was doing nothing in this game I paid 60 dollars for, yeah; and considering the inexplicably long amount of time I was on this shithole of a planet I didn't end up with much to show but a couple of inventory slots and a new ship, both of which I could have gotten on any other planet. I honestly, truly don't have a good explanation for why I stuck around. But it felt really cool, y'know? Like I was a real explorer, dealing with the bullshit of a terrible place that I had to put up with for a bit. That little shitty planet made me feel more like a proper space adventurer than anything else I've played before. It was the only time playing No Man's Sky where I felt like the game had achieved anything close to its lofty goals.

When it’s done like this, I can defend waiting for the “real game” to continue. When a game isn’t forcing me to wait to try and encourage more purchases, or because there aren’t enough people running a dungeon, it’s possible for waiting to be hugely beneficial. I won’t deny it takes a certain frame of mind: if I wasn’t still on the game-just-came-out high with No Man’s Sky, I might not have had the patience. But those moments of peace, of taking in the view while I waited out a storm or flew across the galaxy, were my favorite part of the game. Not every game will benefit from forced waiting. But for putting you in a space, and taking in the sights, there’s easily potential for it to be well worth the wait.