Category: Xbox One

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Shelved It #8 – Ori and the Will of the Wisps

More Info from Moon Studios

  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Platform: Xbox One
  • Also Available On: Windows

I really liked Ori and the Blind Forest. It’s still as good of an example of a modern Metroidvania as I’ve played in the last ten years. The gameplay of Will of the Wisps is just as good, and when it’s smooth this is an absolutely wonderful game. However, it just isn’t smooth very consistently, and it has periods where it outright freezes for 5-10 seconds at a time, including in the middle of boss fights. Simply put – this game should not have shipped.

This is 100% a game that I expected to love, and for the most part it did what I expected. It’s still a really mechanically tight Metroidvania with a ton of great traversal. Wall jumps, air dashes, slingshots, water dashes – it’s all there and it all feels really good. Combat is similarly tight, with a nice set of melee attacks and ranged helpers to give you great capabilities to fight a wide range of enemies.

In a vacuum, this would have been an easy recommendation, but the performance of the game just could not hold up.

From a general game performance standpoint, things aren’t typically all that great. I get it – I’m playing on a base Xbox One and that’s not going to be the optimal experience. However, I’ve also shipped games on the base Xbox One, so I’m at least familiar with the machine’s capabilities, and Wisps is not doing a good job of keeping up. There’s a lot of sections of the game that run at a stable framerate, but I’d wager that probably 20% of what I played isn’t hitting 30 FPS. If it was close, that wouldn’t be a problem, but it was noticeably not 30 fps. I wouldn’t be all that surprised if some of the sections were more around 15-20 fps. In normal traversal this was just annoying, but it was especially bad happening during the game’s signature escape sequences. In those you absolutely need performance, and having to redo sections because a framerate drop caused me to miss a jump were infuriating.

However, the worse problem was the flat out freezing that happened every few minutes. I’m not talking about hitches – I’m talking straight up 5-10 second freezes. Looking around at the Steam forums, it looks like this is similarly bad on PC if you aren’t installed on an SSD. Given that, and given the laptop drives in all models of the Xbox, I’m assuming they’re getting slammed trying to load content. It’s bad enough when it happens in just running through a level or playing a cutscene, where it’s simply annoying. However, I had it happen multiple times during a boss, where it can often guarantee a death and reset.

This was capped by a handful of crashes that were periodically setting me back, which just kinda burned any patience I had left with the game in its current state.

Being quite frank, I’m surprised the game shipped in the state it did. It would be one thing to have some spots where a patch could smooth out some lower framerate spots. It’s even more unfortunate, because the gameplay is great when it works. However, having obvious long period freezes that happen every few minutes is unforgivable. Stuff like that is what certification is supposed to suss out and prevent games from shipping with. This being a first-party Microsoft title, I’m tempted to put some of the blame on them for it. However, the developers have as much responsibility as anyone to make sure they’ve got their shit locked up. And ya, I’ve been there – sometimes you just need to get something to cert and start working on a day 0 – but things like this should also be in your day 0.

More often than not, I shelf games because I simply am not finding something in the gameplay worth moving forward on. This one is the complete opposite. The gameplay is fantastic, but the performance and stability absolutely killed my patience with this game. If they sort it out in a patch, maybe I’ll come back to this, but for now it’s just kind of a disappointment.

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Game Ramblings #22 – Forza Horizon 3

More Info from Turn 10

So, I like Forza.  Of the now 11 games I have for the Xbox One, 4 of them are Forzas.  It goes without saying that I was looking forward to this one.  This was also a bit of an experiment for me, as it’s the first of the new Xbox Play Anywhere titles I’ve gotten, so it was going to set the tone in how I considered those purchases going forward.

Let’s get this out of the way.  The PC port was rock solid.  Visually it didn’t look that incredibly different than the Xbox One version, but that was already a fairly solid looking title on its own.  What it did get right are the details.  It has really solid 21:9 aspect ratio support, which a lot of PC games still don’t get right.  It has both really solid quick configure video settings for more casual users (including a really solid dynamic visuals system to keep framerate steady), as well as highly configurable settings for your higher end users.  Even on ultra, getting 60 fps was not a problem.  Also of note, they added a bunch of wheel support with promises to continue adding more.  Having played some with the Logitech G27, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, but it was definitely worth a laugh.  So, that out of the way, the question then is how good is the actual game?

The racing itself is about what is expected of a Horizon title.  The cars still have a pretty solid feel to them, with the actual steering, breaking, etc still feeling relatively realistic, even if it tilts more towards the arcadey side of things when it comes to drifting.  Different classes of cars are very obviously in different performance tiers, and it’s obvious to tell the difference between the handling and acceleration dynamics of various vehicles.  To some extent the amount of damage that vehicles can take, even with simulation damage on, is somewhat outlandish, but given the gameplay it feels pretty appropriate without being completely over the top.  That said, AI drivatars are still somewhat rubberbandy, and definitely exist purely to provide a mark of in-race progression, because they generally have a tendency to run their line to a fault, even if you are already in the middle of the race line.  Overall though, the speed of races, and continued hilarity of the cross country events provides an experience that stays fresh as you proceed through each event.

The progression system of Horizon 3’s meta game has definitely seen some improvements over 2.  Whereas 2 had you going through a fairly linear path of championships back to back, 3 really pushes the open world to the forefront.  The name of the game is gaining fans, and gaining more fans allows festival locations to be upgraded, unlocking events, PR stunts, and ultimately the Horizon showcases.  Because everything you do inherently gains fans, you are much less locked into a core path.  One minute you may be doing a race, then hopping to a Bucket List, or looking for speed traps and jumps.  You also aren’t locked to vehicles for non-championship events, so I was changing vehicles at a much higher frequency than in 2.  Overall the game provided a much better play as you want it experience than past games, despite the fact that the first 2 titles were already fairly open in their progression.

I guess if I were to end it with anything, it’s that this is probably a good game to jump into if you’re at all a racing game fan.  If you’re purely a PC gamer and haven’t played a Forza game, this would fall in line with recent Need for Speed games, or the older Burnout Paradise as comparable games that have made it to PC.  If you’re a console gamer the list is pretty similar.  Really, if the idea of plowing through a field doing 180 in a Ferrari, all while mowing down bushes and jumping off a cliff into a river sounds at all appealing, you’d probably dig this one.  Yes, that happens.  Regularly.