Screenshot Monday: Relaxing in Ebonscale Reach

 By the time this post goes live I am likely many, many miles in the middle of nowhere on a off grid canoe trip.  So here is a picture of me relaxing in my Ebonscale Reach home in New World (as well organized as my real life one).

 

I miss my monster truck in Just Cause 2

 I miss my monster truck from Just Cause 2.  Such a fun game!  Here are some screenshots to remember it by.

Crrruuuunnnnchhhh

Vroooooom

What goes up must come down

 

Do you remember Global Agenda?

 Do you remember Global Agenda?  I don't particularly myself, but I had a few posts on the game back in 2011 so spent some time with it.  Browsing through screenshots to share recently I came across this one from the game.

Screenshot: Why are you in my bed?

 Months later and I still don't know why this guy is in the bed on my ship in Starfield.

Who are you!?

I'll be in my canoe

Northern Tier

 I am off to Northern Tier with my son's Boy Scout Troop.  We'll be spending a week on the water canoeing the boundary waters between Minnesota and Canada.  I've scheduled some simple posts to go out on the blog while I am away so enjoy!

Fishing Russian Style

 As I dabble around games and completely avoid my Steam backlog I decided to give Russian Fishing 4 a try.  What I found was a deep and complex fishing game.

 First, I will admit the fish species and baits are foreign to me as an angler who fishes in the USA.  That does not, however, change the feeling of seeing a fishing pole bend over when a fish is hooked or the relief when the fish lands in your hands.

 My other most recent fishing game experience was with Call of the Wild: the Angler which is much more on the arcade end of the fishing simulation.  In comparison Russian Fishing 4 is much more on the realistic simulation side.

 This more realistic approach is evident from the moment I stepped into the tutorial.  I started with a "cane pole" (fishing line attached to a pole; no reel) and did some float fishing.  The game offers no strike or other indication of a fish.  I was required to watch the float and set the hook when the fish ran off with the bait pulling the float with it.

 The tutorial also goes through fishing with a spinning reel which works without indicator aside from poles pending and fishing line moving.  This is about as realistic as a video game could get aside from having a rumble feature of some sort to give haptic feedback to me as a player.

 I liked this approach more than I do the arcade model of CotW:Angler.  There is also many other "real fishing" features that I liked about my first couple of hours in Russian Fishing 4.  I can place my fishing rods on the ground so I can have one out with bait and use the other for active casting with lures.  Its quite fun to juggle putting down one reel to scramble and get the other one.  Funny as well when you wander a bit far and forget about the rod you set down entirely.

 Underneath the fishing is also a deep and complex progression system.  There are skills for everything from creating your own baits to all the aspects of fishing (cast distance, cast accuracy, retrieval, etc).  I barely scratched the surface so far but it hits that part of your brain where you are always saying "one more cast... one more fish" before realizing its 2 AM and you need to go to sleep.

 The game is free to play but has some form of pass you can buy which looks to expedite progression, but I've not felt compelled so far to buy in.  The free experience scratches that realistic fishing sim itch pretty good.  I'd love a version of this that is more USA focused and it's possible later maps I can get onto have USA waters and fish species, but at the end of the day a fish is a fish is a fish and they are fun to catch anywhere in the world.

 Screenshots:

Decent enough looking water and maps

Fish on!

One rod float fishing (left) and active fishing right next to it.  A cool mechanic many other fishing games don't offer!

Once Human's Seasonal Resets

 One aspect of Once Human that intrigues me is their plan for seasonal resets.  Every six weeks the world will rest and a new chapter of the story will be revealed.  Along with it characters will start fresh for that new season.  I think this is an interesting model so wanted to share some more thoughts on it.

 First, a summary of what a season is in Once Human 

 In Once Human, seasons will introduce fresh gameplay experiences within a fixed timeframe, featuring new stories, events, and mechanics. Each season is divided into stages with unique challenges and objectives. Players start anew at the beginning of every season, but can carry over certain progress and items to the next season.

 The best comparison I can make is to Crowfall where campaigns came and went and players extracted materials from the campaign to use with their "crow" (character) in the next campaign.  Crowfall also had Eternal Kingdoms that were persistent hubs for players to build up as a more permanent hold.  Once Human is planning a similar feature with Eternaland.

Eternaland serves as a personal "bubble world" for each player that persists between seasons, allowing them to build and keep structures across resets

 This model looks to keep things fresh for players and help avoid power creep in the long run as players are brought back to level playing field regularly.  However it is at the cost of persistence so Eternaland makes sense.  To note; as far as I could tell Eternaland was not available in the demo and its not clear we have any players that can share hands on experience with it.

 Personally what I enjoyed most about the Once Human demo was the core loop of clearing enemy camps, gathering stuff, and coming back to build up the base.  The story helps as it drove me to explore more of the world and thus find more camps to clear/loot. 

 That sort of gameplay loop would eventually run out of steam if the base and my character and base persisted forever.  The season resetting and having me start fresh will keep me in that loop longer.  Now it is yet to be seen if that will be enjoyable to start over as the fine details of what carries over or does not carry over is to be seen, but I like the idea.

 I can also liken the experience to my experiences in New World; specifically server merge days.  While it wasn't cool to think less players over all were playing the game (hence server merges) it was actually a neat experience those first few days after server merge.  The somewhat stale cycle of your server was turned over and new faces/enemies/friends/etc came available.  Everything felt good for a couple weeks before thing settled in again.  

 I don't think it's wrong to think Once Human's resets will create that same sort of "server merge day" feeling.  Six weeks also feels long enough to be useful for progression but not long enough to feel like you've lost everything because of a reset.  It will likely feel weird for players that start playing right around a season ending but there is always a feeling of "I need to catch up" when you join a game past its launch.

 I will hold my final verdict until I get to move through a reset, but I think its a neat way to keep the game fresh.  I am also interested in Eternaland and what it will offer for players to have a sense of persistent progression outside of the seasons.

Not Pax Dei's Day

 Pax Dei launched into early access with a whimper.  Reviews are mixed and the Steam charts are mediocre compared to other meteoric early access releases this year.  Content creator reactions are tepid.  Jay Oddity summed it up best in his first impressions video when he commented that the game is like a sandbox without any toys.

Not bad.  Not good.  Pax Dei hitting 11,531 peak concurrent players in a year where we've seen multiple games in the survival/crafting genre hit 100,000+.

 

 This wasn't too unexpected.  My own feedback after the last alpha test was that there wasn't much to the game other than long crafting grinds and combat so bad you may as well not call it a combat system.  In more recent comments on Blue Sky I mentioned the game had at most a week of content (maybe more since they stuck with the time gated crafting progression from the last alpha).

 I don't want the game to fail.  I want an MMO at some point that does the things that Pax Dei says it will do.  I am also a supporter of games coming to early access as I'd rather play a game and see it evolve than to not be playing.  However, you have to have more than an barren sandbox as Pax Dei does currently.

 For what it's worth; I have no intent to play Pax Dei at this point.

Throne & Liberty Global Release!

 I picked up on the news for Throne & Liberty's global release plan via Mr O on Youtube.  The announcement comes with a new trailer.  The game launches on September 17th with a beta in July.

 I am looking forward to giving the game a try as it looks to have a complex and in depth end game system that has lots of different PvP options.  Also based on updates to the Korean version it sounds like they are working to make the game more friendly to solo / small group players vs the original version in Korea which has been dominated by large guilds.

Where I'm At With New World

 After reading Massively OPs article, Massively Overthinking: The New World Aeternum debacle, I wrote a long comment I wanted to capture on my blog as well.  It really captures where I am at with the whole situation and I'd prefer to spend no more energy on the topic for now.

As one of the louder New World fanboys who was devastated by this turn of events I have come around to this take on the situation: they screwed up communication but this is actually the right step for the game.

Out of all the MMORPGs I’ve played (which is practically all of them in the last 30 years) New World is one of the few that I feel makes sense on console. It’s action combat system fits consoles and that action combat extends to the rest of the game where you spend a lot of time involved with the game world and not a bunch of time with UIs like many MMOs.

So I think console was the right direction and having cross play and shared servers between PC and console was the right move. Also since AGS has shown a higher-than-normal focus towards MMORPGs (regardless of this recent genre twisting) and is working on other MMOs then I want them improving the base line tech for future games.

I also think there is some good content coming. The lawless PvP zone, raid, cross server arenas (my key item), sharding (assumed larger server sizes), and gear score increase to 725. All things the community has been begging for. Did they hit everything the community wanted? No, but that is still a fair shake of items.

The only issue with it is the wait time and AGS needs to improve their speed of delivery. I am hoping with the console transition done they go full bore on content delivery. I really think the game has a second wind coming and we’ll be talking about it at it’s 10 year mark similar to how we’ve seen GW2 and ESO both ascend post initial declines.

With that said they absolutely cannot f-up communication like this again. I was a huge “trust but verify” player before this and now I’m “zero trust”.