Tag: ps5

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Shelved It #16 – Gran Turismo 7

More Info from Sony

  • Genre: Racing
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4

This one probably could have been titled Set Aside, because frankly that’s what I’m doing. I’m putting this one aside to return to it at some point. The driving experience is still far too good for me to not jump into this one periodically, much like past GT titles. However, everything around it is garbage – just flat out garbage, and it’s baffling that Gran Turismo continues to be like this, because a lot of the problems are not new.

Just on its own, the problems that came over from past games were enough for me to generally pull my very little remaining hair out. Gran Turismo has ultimately been well titled in the past as “The Ultimate Driving Simulator” because the racing experience has always been pretty bad, and it’s still bad here. In past entries, it was something I was largely able to ignore but we’ve continued to have Forza entries in intervening years that at the very least have fun racing, even if the driving experience hasn’t quite felt there. Unfortunately for GT, I’m kind of at the point where I would just rather be playing Forza.

The first obvious thing is that you’re never actually in what I’d call a race. You’re just in a chase. You start every race 20-30 seconds behind the leader, who’s a quarter lap or more ahead of you. You’re given a very limited set of laps to do your best to chase up to the front and try to get the “win”. However, all you’re doing is upgrading your vehicles to the class limits of the races so you can easily outclass the AI enough to get to the front. You’re never just starting an event from the line and going head to head against cars of equal measure. Again, it’s not racing. It’s chasing.

On its own, that sucks. And ya, I can do multiplayer if I want to race but frankly it isn’t why I play these games. However, the AI are also part of the overall problem. They simply aren’t trying to race. They’re just out driving. If you’re next to them and in their perceived line on a turn? Fuck you they’re running into you. If you’re ahead of them and their braking pattern doesn’t match what you want? Fuck you they’re running into you. They just stick to their preset racing line and don’t react to what’s going on around them……which might be fine, but they also rubberband. Their braking is clearly unnatural. Their acceleration is clearly unnatural. Their ability to do things in turns without losing traction is clearly unnatural. As a combination of things on top of the fact that you’re trying to rush to the front ASAP, it results in a frustrating mess of dodging unpredictable and unnatural cars at high rates of speed.

Which again, it sucks, but I expected it. This is Gran Turismo. It’s always fucking been like this. Just like past GTs, the menus also still suck. Things take far too many clicks to get through. There’s far too many layers deep to change simple things. Modifying your car’s setup is still in weird spots. Restarting a license event when you don’t quite hit gold is still slower than I want it to be. But again, these are all things I expected. I knew that all of this stuff was going to be the case going in, and I wanted to play it anyway because the driving experience part of the games is what always drew me in. So they went ahead and added more problems anyway.

Simply put, the game shipped with barebones content on the single player side. There just isn’t really the wide set of unique races that past games have had. Rather than being a wide array of manufacturer specific races, there’s a handful for a couple of companies like Porsche, then a handful of country specific events. The rest are largely class type races. You’re completely missing out on the wide array of lower power races like the old Mini Cooper or K-Car races. You’re missing out on some of the fun endurance events that encouraged tuning less exciting vehicles to go for as long as possible without needing refills or tire changes. It’s just missing the interesting random stuff that made expanding your garage fun.

Which doesn’t really matter, because the economy is completely busted. Get a duplicate car? Too bad, they removed selling it. Car prices? Now modeled after realistic car values rather than being set to some gamified practical price. Have fun with your $400k Skyline. Don’t like the changes to driving dynamics if you apply engine mods? Too bad, they’re permanent. Buy a new engine, often as expensive as the car was to start with. Want to put a set of racing tires on your car? Well about 75% of the races don’t give you enough money to do that through one try, so lmao start grinding. A lot of the public is pessimistically noting this as a consequence of microtransactions trying to be encouraged, and there’s probably some bean counting going on to prove that out, but frankly a lot of this just feels like bad design.

Ultimately, this was all capped by the game forcing an online connection, even in single player mode. The development team claims this was to prevent hacking in multiplayer, but that feels like a copout. People that want to play in multiplayer will accept some form of restrictions, be that an online-only profile, multiplayer being distinctly separate, etc. Make that distinction and keep it on its own. Don’t let it affect the single player. Frankly, the single player could be balanced much better without the online chain around its neck.

All of these little things are basically making me put the game down. Sure, the driving experience is still as fun as ever. Doing hot laps for shits and giggles in a Miata is great. It’s as close as I’m generally going to get to taking the ND in my garage out to these tracks, and I love it. However, everything around feel like the game is actively trying to get me to put it down. It has old Gran Turismo problems that have been ignored at this point for literal decades and adds new problems that just make the game insufferable to play, so this one is going back on the shelf until it starts to see some patches roll through.

Perhaps by then I’ll be playing Forza 8 anyway.

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Shelved It #15 – Horizon: Forbidden West

More Info from Sony

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4

I don’t typically shelve games that I enjoy, let alone sequels to games I enjoyed. There’s often enough of something there to keep me moving. For Horizon, that’s very nearly the universe they’ve created, which is still just as gorgeous and interesting of a sci-fi experience as any game out there. However, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was just playing the first game again. Not a sequel with iterations, not something with fresh ideas. Literally the original game. I put it down for a few days to give it some fresh air while I played a bit of Gran Turismo, but I’m finding myself at a point where I don’t have a drive to pick it back up, so at that point I might as well shelve it.

I could literally post my ramblings about the original as well as my ramblings about The Frozen Wilds and you could basically figure out what my pros and cons list for this game would be, and frankly that was always in the back of my mind as I got further into Forbidden West. Obviously the core gameplay was there, but problems started slowly creeping in.

The most immediate sorta issue you run into is with climbing. I played the original game immediately after Breath of the Wild and the inability to climb on any surface was already a bit of a detriment at the time. 5 years later it’s now a glaring problem. You can basically climb almost anywhere in this game, but you hit enough small points where you inexplicably can’t climb for it to be annoying that they didn’t just implement BOTW climbing. It being glaring is not helped by the fact that the cliffs literally now glow with climbing markup.

I’m not exaggerating about that. As a developer, I get why they probably chose to keep the systems similar between the original and sequel. However, as a developer I also understand that they had 5 years and a AAA budget – something I’ve rarely had access to – to implement better climbing, and their answer is a UX nightmare. It’s weird.

However, as the game went on I came to be generally bothered by the pace of combat slowing to a crawl. This game has the same general curve as the original. You start off able to stealth kill almost everything, then a couple of bigger things need a stealth swing + maybe a bow shot. As you get a bit further, you start seeing more larger mobs that require a bit more melee to take down. You then get into higher level variants of small machines that can’t be stealth killed and require more attacks. You get into larger mobs that can’t really be stunned by melee, so it loses its effectiveness. At a certain point, you’re just fighting level 30+ groups where you have to range everything and combat falls apart.

In general, there’s still a distinct lack of feel to the power curve of melee. There’s a few general skill tree upgrades, but with melee it’s kind of WYSIWYG. You don’t get to purchase cool versions of the melee weapon like you do ranged. You don’t get to do workbench upgrades like you do ranged weapons. You don’t really get much in terms of stealth damage upgrades once you hit the couple of skill tree points early in the game. It doesn’t feel like you really have a choice to do a melee or stealth-focused track, because you just kind of a hit an effectiveness wall with them, regardless of your upgrade path.

The thing about melee is that is it also generally puts you in a hugely disadvantageous position. It’s surprisingly easy for things to blow past you and out of camera range. Sometimes it’s because you did a big melee attack and went too far. Sometimes it’s because you dodged to the side and the machine blew past you. The problem for me is that it never felt like I had the tools to then really keep track of what was going on off-screen. There’s not any sort of system to let the camera lock or quick pivot to nearby targets. There’s not really an effective way to mark targets and have them be obvious in location off screen during heavy combat. What it ended up meaning again is that for fights of multiple enemies, melee wasn’t worth the danger or hassle and I was better off going to long range and keeping the entire group in front of me in view.

Ranged at least alleviates the problems somewhat and is pretty obviously still the more focused development track. There’s still a large array of ranged weapon types from bows of different effectiveness distances to trap launches to boomerangy type things. The elemental attack system is still also a lot of fun, with different machines having different weaknesses and benefits to the player. The big problem in the end is that ranged also hits an effectiveness wall that grinds combat to a half. When you’re doing hundreds of points of damage with an arrow and seeing a health bar barely blip down despite hitting weak points perfectly, it’s kind of grating. It’s one thing in a Souls-like when you’re basically hopping from boss to boss, but in a game where that starts to happen with general overworld trash it really slows progress to an unfun level.

Ultimately what really did me in is that the game worked great for about 20 hours, then it just felt like I was slogging through it. It’s interesting to have a side quest about defending a town from raiders and machines for the first couple of times, but then it becomes uninteresting. It’s fun taking down a camp for the first half dozen times, but then it becomes uninteresting. It’s fun hitting the weakpoints on a Thunderjaw the first few times, but then it’s just the same. Since Forbidden West didn’t really separate itself from the original, this is a game that would have severely benefited from being a more condensed experience. Frozen Wilds was fun because it was a shorter experience separated by time from the original, so it was still fresh and fun when I finished it. As a sequel, this just didn’t work out the same way.

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Game Ramblings #156 – Riders Republic

More Info from Ubisoft

  • Genre: Sports
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Windows, PS4, Luna, Stadia, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S

This is one of those games that just hits the right parts of my brain. It’s a lot like Forza Horizon in that respect. I can jump into it at any point, just go towards the nearest random icon, and have a fun time. I can play the normal “serious” racing events and get some good action. I can play the fun events and be barreling down a mountain in an ice cream delivery bike. Either way, I know that I’ll be enjoying the ride.

It’s kind of incredible how much mileage Ubisoft has gotten out of its open world formula, and this one isn’t any different. You have a big open world map, sections of it unveil as you go into them, new icons pop up as a result of that, the things you complete open up more things, etc. You know that getting to an icon will at least unlock something fun. Sometimes it’s a race, sometimes it’s a trick event, sometimes it’s cool loot. It’s pure Ubisoft, just as an action sports game. Everything that makes that style of game work still works here.

The important thing is that all of the event types work. Right now you’ve basically got three groups of things – snow, bike, and air – broken into some sub events. They all play a bit different, but the core is always the same – get through checkpoints, do stupid tricks, get rewards. The important part though is they all work well. In all cases the controls hit a perfect arcade mix of tight control vs floaty fun. Your jumps are absurdly large because gravity doesn’t really apply that much, letting you do 1080s and double flips with ease. However, you can also turn nearly on a dime with some power slide capabilities. You might be going 160mph in a jet-powered wing suit, then slam on the brakes to hit a tight corner going through some canyons. You might jump off a hundreds of foot high cliff and land without any damage. It’s all kind of outlandish and all kind of a lot of fun.

That said, the variety is also a big part of the draw for me. Bikes and snow events may appear similar on paper, but both the control of your avatar and environments allows for them to counteract as good breathers for each other. From what I’ve played so far, bikes in particular have a large number of lap-based events that are purely not downhill and snow has a larger number of purely arena-based trick events that really feed the difference between the two. If I was really feeling burned out on that, I’d do air events. Those in particular have a huge variety. The wingsuit events are pure adrenaline where you’re trying to build up points by getting as close to the ground as you can without crashing. The rocket suits on the other hand are pure racing fun, especially when you start to dive into canyons.

Even when I wasn’t really feeling like competing, there’s plenty of other things to do. My favorite side activity was easily the stunt challenges. These were spread around the environment and generally involved doing something extraordinarily stupid like riding a bike along a steel beam over a canyon or trying to use your wingsuit to fly underneath bridges covering a river. This is where your skills in staying on tricky lines was really tested in a fun way. On the other hand, it’s also extremely fun to simply exist in this world. SSX 3 has always kind of been my high point in terms of how good it felt to start at the top of a mountain and ride down it for the sake of it. Riders Republic really nails the same vibe. You can start at the top of any number of mountains and simply ride doing stupid tricks all the way down. You can jump off the top of huge cliffs just for the hell of it, nailing your wingsuit before you hit the bottom. It’s fun just for the sake of it, and it works spectacularly.

Normally, this is then where’d I’d be going hell ya play this game….but I can’t outright say that. This game is purely online only. Right now that works extremely well. Seeing everyone in the world map just doing their own thing is cool as hell. Screaming down a populated slope with dozens of other people is cool as hell. However, it also means this game has a shelf life. It’s not that I necessarily think Ubisoft is going to shut the servers off soon, but it’s going to happen eventually, and the game will be mostly gone. You can still free roam offline, which gets part of what I enjoy about the game, but none of the event stuff is playable offline at all. Once the servers are gone, the game is basically gone. As someone who’s worked on games that simply no longer exist, that sucks.

However, if that doesn’t bother you this is an extremely fun game. It hits a place that very few games really get to – fun for the sake of it. While this game is live and while it has a ton of players it’s definitely a sight to behold. The content that’s there just works really well across the board. The only thing to really cross my fingers about is that one day we see a patch allowing full offline play, because the game has everything already there to support it.