Steam Deck – losing its lustre?

Yesterday, Steam Deck reviews finally dropped from a range of outlets. I had been eagerly anticipating them; I’m very excited about the device, and managed to get my pre-order in within 20 minutes of going live. I was given a Q2 date, and I’ve been unreasonably excited about it since. I play on PC a fair bit, between a (fairly old) laptop and my 3700x/2070 Super-powered desktop, but an affordable handheld PC that I can carry around with me when and where I want feels like the dream.

Reviews landed about where I’d been expecting from the pre-release coverage – great hardware, but software coming in a bit hot. According to Linus Sebastian, of Linus Tech Tips fame, Valve were patching things in continuously throughout the review period, and even then, he ended up coming to the conclusion that the Deck is, at present ‘unfinished‘. He fully believes Valve will continue to build on it and get it where it needs to be, and I do too, honestly. But I do have some concerns. Some old, some new.

First, the old. I must admit, I’d been a bit concerned about the Steam Deck running on a version of Arch Linux and using Valve’s Proton compatibility layer to make games work. I’ll admit I know very little about Linux, but since the announcement I’ve spent some time rooting around ProtonDB – an online database that collates reports detailing game compatibility from users. Honestly, I think a lot of those ratings don’t do the database any favours; for instance, Cyberpunk 2077 has a gold rating. Gold sounds great, right? Well… dig into some of the reviews, and you’ll see some users reporting the game doesn’t even boot for them since its recent patch 1.5 update. Even prior to that, you’ll find reports of other issues which, to be fair, the community regularly does a great job at working around. But Valve are pitching the Deck as a console experience as much as it is a fully-fledged PC; many of us will be fine tinkering with things to get games running, but there will be some users out there who have never delved into PC gaming and saw this device as a low-stress way to get into the platform. Indeed, a console-only friend of mine pre-ordered one to play a lot of the older JRPGs that tend to hit Steam and skip over their preferred platform, Xbox. Users like them are going to get very frustrated, very fast.

The new concern? Well, fast forward to this Wednesday, and Valve launched a Steam webpage that checks compatibility against your library, and it’s getting updated pretty frequently. Initially, only 41 titles in my library had been tested by Valve, but in the few days since the page went live, 12 more have been tested and sorted into the following four categories. In Valve’s own words:

Deck Verified: Valve’s testing indicates these titles from your Steam Library are fully functional on Steam Deck, and work great with the built-in controls and display.

Deck Playable: Valve’s testing indicates these titles from your Steam Library are functional on Steam Deck, but might require extra effort to interact with or configure.

Unsupported: Valve’s testing indicates these games in your Steam Library currently don’t function on Steam Deck. Valve is continuing to add support for more games over time.

Untested: Valve’s testing team hasn’t yet gotten to the remaining games in your Steam Library, but we’re testing new games every day. Come back often to see more of your library get Verified.

There’s some good stuff in the ‘verified’ block so far. Big games like Horizon Zero Dawn, which I played on PS4 and have been looking forward to running through again on PC, hugely replayable favourites like Bayonetta and Metal Gear Rising, and more indie-level stuff that I haven’t gotten around to yet, and looked forward to playing on Deck, such as Paradise Killer. All of this is great, and I’ve seen enough footage of big, verified games like the aforementioned Horizon to know I’m going to have a great time with them.

It’s the unsupported list that really has me worried, though. I play a fair amount of older JRPGs on my laptop, because they’re pretty lightweight, and I am usually just sitting by my laptop, which means I can get a bit of time here and there throughout the day to put into whatever adventure I’m currently enjoying, and I was really hoping – expecting, honestly – to move all of these over to the Deck. For the last six months or so, I’ve been working my way through Falcom’s Ys series, in chronological order. So far, I’ve completed Ys Origin, Ys I + II Chronicles, Memories of Celceta, and The Oath in Felghana. Lucky really, given two of those – Origin and Celceta – are now on the unsupported list, and so can’t be played on the Deck. Next up in my story-order playthrough is Ys VIII, then onto VI, VII and, finally, Ys IX. So far, three of those are untested, and last year’s Ys IX is unsupported. So it’s not looking great for the venerable action RPG series on Deck.

With a wealth of Falcom RPGs announced for PC last year, including the long-awaited Crossbell duology and newer titles in the long-running Trails series, I was planning to do the same with Falcom’s other celebrated series this year; I’ve played Trails FC before on PSP, but all the rest of the titles are a mystery to me. “It’ll be amazing to be able to play those on the Deck,” I thought. Unfortunately, it seems like this will remain a thought in my head, as Trails SC was in the initial drop of unsupported titles on Wednesday, and today, Trails FC also got marked as unsupported (and basically inspired me to write this piece, because honestly, I’m pretty bummed about it). Clannad is another that was added to the unsupported list today, and makes me wary about whether any of the visual novels I have in my Steam backlog will be playable.

To be clear, I’m still massively excited about the Steam Deck, and I honestly can’t wait to get my hands on my unit. But the fact that some of the games I really, really wanted to play on it are not supported has certainly dulled a little bit of the shine for me. The pull of the Steam Deck has been to have a powerful handheld that plays my PC games, and obviously that was always going to come with some caveats, but I’ve long been of the opinion that, should SteamOS 3.0 not be able to do what I want it to, I could always just slap Windows on the thing. Not all of my PC games are in Steam, after all, and it’d be great to be able to access the Game Pass catalogue too. But I wasn’t expecting that many of the Steam games I want to play wouldn’t be available either. At the moment, there are apparently no Windows drivers for the hardware, but I’ll be eagerly watching the developments as I wait for my unit to arrive. Until then, I’ll be keeping a sharp eye on the compatibility lists.

Are Platinum Games angling for acquisition?

In a recent interview with VGC – the first English language interview since Atsushi Inaba and Hideki Kamiya became President/CEO and Vice-President respectively – Platinum Games’ leaders were asked about acquisitions and industry consolidation. With all the money flying around, VGC’s Andy Robinson suggested that Platinum must be fighting off offers themselves.

Microsoft’s recent blockbuster near-$70 billion deal for Activision Blizzard is still fresh in everyone’s minds, and Inaba is no exception. “The most important thing for us is to have the freedom to make the games that we want to make. What I hear about the recent acquisitions, I don’t think Microsoft is going to start micromanaging Activision to where they take away all their freedom… I don’t think it’s going to be a relationship like that,” he told Robinson. “I think there’s going to be a lot of mutual respect there and I think Activision will be able to continue doing what they do best. That’s also what’s most important to us at the end of the day, whatever form that takes for us and our company. So I would not turn anything down, as long as our freedom was still respected.”

That last line got everyone talking. Were they signalling an interest to join Xbox? Have they got Phil Spencer on speed dial? Forum speculation took off; maybe they’re already talking!

Obviously, Inaba outright said they would at least consider an offer, should their freedom – their creative freedom, specifically – be respected. And Microsoft has been forging ahead with its ‘limited integration’ strategy with recent acquisitions – a strategy that proved its worth with the Mojang purchase back in 2014. But would an Xbox-Platinum team-up work for both parties? Let’s take a deeper look.

The first thing that comes to mind when you think about any sort of combination of Xbox and Platinum is Scalebound, Hideki Kamiya’s dream game that was being developed as a high-profile Xbox exclusive, but was unfortunately cancelled in 2017. Forum narratives sprung up in the immediate aftermath that Microsoft had forced Platinum to alter the scope of the game, and were entirely to blame for the failure of the project and, in a sense, it’s not too difficult to see why. Scalebound was not the only casualty of this period, as Microsoft seemed to be slashing budgets left and right; closing studios, cancelling games, and pushing others out before they were ready – Xbox was in shambles. And Platinum, while coming off a string of licensed games that they’d taken on to keep the lights on, were still highly regarded for explosive action games like Bayonetta and Metal Gear Rising. Two months after the Scalebound cancellation, they released NieR Automata to massive critical acclaim. The audience was, broadly, with them.

Platinum’s higher-ups generally stayed quiet during this period (except for one now ex-member, JP Kellams, who would occasionally show up on social media to refute the narrative); maybe they were under NDA, maybe they didn’t want to say much for fear of damaging a business relationship. But over the last couple of years, Inaba and Kamiya specifically have opened up a bit more about the situation, expressing regret for the way the project ended, and suggested it was just too much for them to take on at the time.

“We were working in an environment we weren’t used to,” Kamiya said in a November 2021 interview with Cutscenes. “We were developing on the Unreal engine. We also lacked the necessary know-how to build a game based on online features. The hurdles we had to overcome were very big. We weren’t experienced enough and couldn’t get over that wall, leading to what happened in the end.”

He continued, “I’m sorry to the players who looked forward to it, and moreover I’m sorry to Microsoft who had placed their trust in us as a business partner. I want to apologise both as a creator and as a member of PlatinumGames.”

Kamiya has also recently stated a desire to work with Xbox again, and has, on occasion, expressed a strong desire to return to Scalebound and complete the game. He reiterated this desire in VGC’s interview, when Robinson questioned whether his previous comments were made in jest.
“I think it’s really strange because, to be honest, I’ve been in a lot of interviews since the project ended and I feel like I’ve said many times that I’d love to be able to bring it back. Having gotten somewhere with it, as a creator I’d like to see it to the end. And I hear fans saying they really want to play that game, which is too bad, and I want to give that to them when I hear that,” Kamiya told VGC.

“That’s something that I thought I’d been saying, or I’d been trying to say for years now. I’ve said it in interviews before and gotten no reaction, but now finally I got a big reaction, and I was glad to see that. But no, it’s not a joke: I’m totally serious about it, yeah.”

For his part, Phil Spencer commented, right after the cancellation of Scalebound, no less, that he’d love to work with Platinum again. So it’s fairly safe to say there’s no bad blood between the two parties, and they could certainly explore some kind of collaboration again in the future.

But an acquisition? Well… it does makes some sense, actually.

Phil Spencer has been clear about his desire to have more first party capability in Japan. With the addition of Zenimax Media and its studios, they do now have one first party Japanese studio in Tango Gameworks (and this is actually a pretty important point that we’ll return to shortly), but Xbox leadership have been clear about the need and desire for more. However, I think they’re going to struggle to convince many established Japanese teams to join Xbox, as this means effectively abandoning their home market. One way around this could be for Xbox to allow any Japanese studios they acquire to stay multiplatform in Japan, but be exclusive to Xbox in the rest of the world. This feels like a potentially very messy strategy, though.

Another idea, one which I’ve honestly been expecting to see for the last couple of years, is to incubate new studios under the Xbox umbrella, and maybe do so with creators they’ve collaborated with in the past. Tomonobu Itagaki has always been a strong supporter of the Xbox platform, and recently announced a new studio, and a desire to work with Microsoft again. As we’re seeing with teams like The Initiative though, setting up brand new studios takes time, and seeing results from them even longer. Perhaps instead Xbox could acquire smaller teams, such as Mistwalker or Grounding Inc – developers they already have a fair bit of history with – and scale them up to support larger games. Again, this takes time.

The counterpoint to all of this is that Platinum actually seem willing, and that’s a quality Microsoft are sure to find in short supply in the region. They’re also exactly the kind of Japanese studio that Xbox needs; they’re established, they have a good track record, and we know they can create great games. There’s also a bit of a parallel with some of the studios that Xbox picked up before they started going crazy and buying entire publishers. Studios like Double Fine, Ninja Theory and Obsidian, teams with proven talent that just need a bit of stability to do their best work.

Platinum definitely fit this particular mould; aside from taking on a horde of licensed games for publishers like Activision in the recent past, they’ve also just been spreading themselves way too thin as they attempt to secure their independence and move away from searching out deals with other parties and towards self-publishing. This has seen their output dropping of late; since 2019’s well-received Astral Chain, they’ve put out a Wonderful 101 remaster, a mobile game, and a retro-styled shooter. They were dropped from Granblue Fantasy: Relink, as CyGames took it entirely in-house, and the upcoming Babylon’s Fall doesn’t seem to have ingratiated itself with gamers. Bayonetta 3, announced all the way back in 2017, is still slated for this year, but an apparently protracted development and a recent trailer have fans a little wary.

All of this is a shame, because Platinum have shown they can make phenomenal games when they’re not spreading themselves too thin and are just able to focus on the fun. An Xbox acquisition could help them get back to that, as they’d no longer have to shop themselves around to a myriad of publishers just to stay alive, and Phil Spencer, Matt Booty and the rest of the Xbox leadership team have shown a willingness to fund their teams and get out of the way of the creative process. It could be the best thing for both parties; Platinum receive security, stability and creative freedom alongside the ability to focus their team on larger, more ambitious projects (and the chance to tap into the now enormous Xbox development community for support when and where they need it), and Microsoft gets a highly-regarded, established Japanese first party developer with a proven track record, who are now empowered to do their best work. The fact they’ve worked together before and have an existing relationship makes this outcome more likely for me, rather than less.

There’s also the Tango connection that I mentioned before. I would honestly be amazed if Kamiya hadn’t been on the phone to Tango leader Shinji Mikami, to ask him how life’s going under the Xbox umbrella. The two have a lot of history together, going all the way back to the origins of the Resident Evil series under Capcom, and Mikami was also one of the initial founders of Platinum Games itself. As long as Mikami’s experience is a positive one, Tango could end up working as something of a Trojan Horse to get Platinum into the wider Xbox organisation.

But will this happen? Well, that’s the multi-million dollar question. Xbox have certainly been gobbling up plenty of development talent of late. If and when the Activision Blizzard deal closes, there will be more than thirty development studios under the Xbox wing – a far cry from the five internal studios they found themselves with in the aftermath of Scalebound’s cancellation. But Microsoft are also getting out ahead of concerns that the FTC will closely scrutinise the Activision Blizzard purchase, so they may be disinclined to rock the boat by acquiring another company, even if it’s a relatively small one like Platinum. They expect the deal to close no later than the end of their 2023 financial year in June next year, and with how quickly things are moving lately, the opportunity may have passed.

At time of writing, no one from Xbox or Microsoft has passed comment on Inaba’s comments, so we’ll just have to wait and see if anything happens. My guess, honestly, is that nothing will come of this, even if it seems to make a ton of sense to me. So in the event an Xbox-Platinum team up does not come to pass, let me take this opportunity to make an appeal to Xbox: give Kamiya the money to finish Scalebound, at least. It’s his dream game, and he still wants to work with you. Let him do it. Rescope it if need be, but throw some of that warchest money at Platinum and get a big first party Japanese game for your playerbase – something I think we can all agree we need more of.

So, it’s been a while. Time for an update…

Hooooo boy, it sure has been a while, huh? Bar one piece of writing last week, it’s been nearly four years since I last interacted with this blog. I’m trying to get back into the habit of writing more frequently, so I thought I’d start with a bit of an update.

Before going dark here, I’d started a Youtube channel with a couple of friends. One of them has since dropped out, but the channel is still going strong. We’re a bit over 1,000 subs now and, while we haven’t yet reached the threshold that would allow us to monetise our content, we’re still putting out regular videos, including a fortnightly podcast that we started last year. Here’s the latest episode:

In the past, we’ve focused quite heavily on let’s play content. However, it seems to be a bit of a dying art form; fewer and fewer channels are publishing these kinds of videos now, and we too saw our views on let’s plays dropping precipitously. Ours never did amazingly well, but the last few we did were getting views in the single digits, which, honestly, is pretty demoralising given the time and effort that went into them. Last year, we decided to stop doing them.

Personally though, I still really like the concept, so I’ve decided to try something a little bit different. In our past let’s plays, we basically just recorded gameplay and commentary in thirty minute blocks or so, and very lightly edited them, so as to capture as much of the original experience as possible. I’m starting a new series today that I plan to be a more heavily-edited, curated experience, aiming to capture the essence of the game, if not the entire reality of the experience. I’m aiming to cut out a lot of the downtime to keep videos a bit leaner, and I’m starting out with a series on Ready at Dawn’s VR classic, Lone Echo. Part one is now live (and please excuse the black bars at the bottom and right-hand side – OBS has a habit of sabotaging me in new and unexpected ways… I’ll get this fixed up the next time I record).

I’m excited to see how this series goes, and I really hope it does better than our last few LPs, as I honestly really love the format and would be sad to see it die entirely.

So… focusing more on Youtube is one reason this blog has lain rather fallow over the last few years. Another is that I also made some effort to branch out into creative writing. I’ve always written stories – a teacher in primary school was absolutely convinced I’d be a novelist one day – but I always end up jotting down ideas on random bits of paper and then losing them. These days, I jot them down in a notes app on my phone when an idea hits me in bed at three in the morning, so I’ve been a bit more able to get them out of my head and onto some form of page. A few years back, I actually posted one of my short stories on this blog, but moving forward, I’d like to have a proper home for them that is just for creative writing. To that end, I started a second blog for short stories. I’ve only got three up so far, but I have ideas for more. If you’re interested, you can find that creative writing blog here.

But now I’m back in the groove, I’m planning to be a bit more active here. I’ve already put up one new piece, looking at Sony’s recent acquisition of Bungie from the perspective of an ex-Bungie megafan, and I have another currently in drafts taking a critical look at Halo Infinite’s campaign. Hopefully that one will be published soon.

Until then, I’d just like to say it feels good to be back. Feel free to check out that recent piece, the Youtube content, or my creative writing blog, and if you do, I’d love to know what you think.

Opinion: On Sony’s acquisition of Bungie

On Monday 31st January, 2022, Playstation announced the acquisition of Destiny developer Bungie.

And my reaction was, “oh, okay.”

I didn’t really have any kind of emotional response; I felt like it made a lot of sense for both parties, for some reasons I’ll go into later, but I didn’t really feel anything.

And it took me a few hours to really recognise and examine that, and honestly, in some way, it’s kind of weird that I didn’t feel any kind of way about it. You see, I used to be obsessed with Bungie. Obsessed. For the entirety of the 2000s, and into the first few years of the 2010s, they were my favourite developer. I was (and remain) an enormous fan of their prior universe, Halo, and I would voraciously consume every tiny scrap of info that I could find about the studio and the people that worked there. I dreamed of actually working there myself one day.

Aside that, since the release of the original Xbox, Microsoft’s console platform has basically been my ecosystem of choice – largely because of Halo. I’ve always had other consoles, but Xbox has been my main for twenty years now. So to see headlines listing what was once Microsoft’s prestige development house as a Playstation studio… that should have elicited some kind of response. Right?

Well, not now. Not in 2022. For one, Bungie have – until very recently, of course – been independent for longer than they were under the Xbox banner. Halo has long since been handed off to 343 industries (who absolutely knocked it out of the park with 2021’s Infinite), and since then, Bungie have focused exclusively on Destiny. And Destiny… never really did it for me.

That is something that surprised me at the time. When word emerged that Bungie were building a brand new mythic sci-fi universe that sought to blend two of my favourite things in video games – the gameplay of Halo, the systemic and mechanical depth of RPGs – I was absurdly excited. I was convinced it was going to be the best game ever, and honestly, I was probably about as excited for Destiny as I had been for Halo 3 just a handful of years prior.

But when it came out, it just wasn’t what I had been expecting. Some of the blame certainly lies with me for creating some kind of ‘supergame’ in my head that reality could never live up to, but I just wasn’t into it. As far as I was concerned, large parts of the game were a complete mess – important parts, like story; I was one of those Halo fans that read every book, devoured every graphic novel and live action ad, and analysed every line in the game for some hidden meaning. I spent years discussing the grander mysteries of the Halo universe with likeminded fans. So when I finished Destiny’s initial campaign and found a disjointed, nonsensical narrative with plot holes wide enough to pilot High Charity through, I was crestfallen. On top of that, the game was an ADS-fest (Halo fans can and will wax lyrical about how much they hate ADS gunplay), enemy AI felt like a huge regression, and campaign missions never evolved beyond running through an admittedly very pretty sci-fi space and occasionally stopping to let your ghost companion scan a thing for a few seconds. Coming from a studio that gave us incredible campaign missions like The Silent Cartographer, Assault on the Control Room, and Halo 3’s The Covenant, it all felt incredibly lacklustre.

On top of all that, the studio I’d loved and followed for more than a decade was changing before my eyes. A lot of those faces that I’d gotten used to through all the Halo vidocs, interviews and behind the scenes clips were all leaving. Jaime Griesemer. Robt McLees. Marcus Lehto. Joseph Staten. Martin O’Donnell. All these people who, to my mind, were Bungie. All gone. It just compounded the feeling that they weren’t that studio I loved any more. So I drifted further and further away from what was once my favourite studio, to the point where, eventually, I just… didn’t really care about them any more.

Now, I don’t want to sound like I am completely down on Destiny. I do think it’s a good time. I put a good hundred hours each into Destiny and 2017’s Destiny 2 – a drop in the ocean compared to the game’s most devoted fans, to be sure, but plenty enough time to have an informed opinion. I completed all the raids in D1 (King’s Fall was legitimately a fantastic experience that I will always have fond memories of!), but I never managed to finish the launch D2 raid, and eventually I’d just get to the point where I was just turning up for new expansions to play the story content, and then checking out again. When Beyond Light dropped into Game Pass on day one, I played the opening mission and then… never went back to it.

Destiny is fine. Good, even. It’s just… not for me, and neither is Bungie any more. And that’s fine! Many, many people love the game, and while Bungie aren’t the studio I loved, making games that I got obsessed with, they are now a studio that other people love, and they make games that those other people get obsessed with. And that’s okay.

All of which brings me back to that original reaction. “Oh, okay.”
Because, honestly, I think it makes sense from both sides of the acquisition. Playstation want to get more involved with ongoing service games, games that have a highly-engaged audience that continues to generate ongoing income. Bungie are great at that, they’re among the best in the industry right now. There’s a meme that nobody hates Destiny as much as Destiny players, and there’s some truth to it, in a sense. The game’s biggest fans often get frustrated by some of Bungie’s decisions, but it’s because they’re invested in the game and want it to be the best it can be. Bungie has a large, captive audience with Destiny, an audience that will keep coming back, and Playstation have effectively just acquired that audience.

They’ve also acquired Bungie’s expertise in the GaaS model, expertise that can be brought to bear in future titles from the platform holder, who, just days after the acquisition, signalled their intent to launch more than ten such service games over the next four years, citing “close collaboration between Bungie and the Playstation Studios,” as a key driver for the initiative.

Bungie, for their part, seem to have secured some incredibly generous terms from Sony. In an FAQ on Bungie.net, the developer stated beyond a shadow of a doubt that, not only will Destiny 2 remain a multiplatform game, but there wouldn’t be any platform-exclusive benefits for Playstation going forward – something that plagued Xbox, and latterly, PC fans of the sci-fi shooter for years; it’s going to be the same experience for everyone. But that’s just the beginning. Bungie have stated that, though they will be owned by Playstation, they retain full creative control, including the power to decide what platforms future games will release on. To quote Bungie:

“We remain in charge of our destiny. We will continue to independently publish and creatively develop our games. We will continue to drive one, unified Bungie community. Our games will continue to be where our community is, wherever they choose to play.​“

That’s… incredible, right? They’ll be owned by Playstation, but they’ll continue to control everything they do in-house, including strategy around future games and the platforms they launch on. It’s unprecedented, but it’s not entirely surprising, in a way; Bungie have always been fiercely independent, including when they were owned by Xbox, so it’s not a shocker that they would have sought to hold onto as much freedom as they possibly could in any potential acquisition scenario. What’s crazy here is that Sony paid $3.6 billion dollars, and agreed to such terms. I guess the play is that they get to own all the revenue that Bungie’s games bring in, while availing themselves of all that GaaS expertise to power their own entry into the service games market. On top of that, if viewed as something of a retaliatory move against Microsoft’s recent Activision-Blizzard acquisition, which will undoubtedly lead to many – though maybe not all – of those games becoming exclusive, it could also lead to some clever ‘good guy sony’ PR in the months to come. Seemingly nothing is going to change for Bungie fans on other platforms, so it’s hard for anyone to feel upset about the deal. Indeed, given their stated aim to accelerate recruitment as a priority post-acquisition, it may end up leading to better experiences for everyone.

Still though. Three point six billion dollars. It’s a hell of a lot of money for one studio with one owned IP. This is a play for the future though, and if it pays off for Sony, it’ll have been more than worth the outlay.

FFXIV: Looking Heavensward

Oops! I was supposed to come back and post an update on my progress on Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, wasn’t I? Last time I posted, I was just two back-to-back dungeons from the end, and hoped to finish the 2.0 campaign that week. Though I didn’t post, I did finish the game!

So what have I managed in the last two months? Well, I’m coming up on the end of the 2.x content patches that lead into the first expansion, Heavensward. I’m just at the start of patch 2.5, having just (literally just – as in, about two hours ago) defeated the ice primal Shiva. I’ve also finished my Augmented Ironworks gear set, but have since glamoured it to look like the Daystar set, as I really wanted a new look after months with the Ironworks gear. You can see how my character currently looks below.

I’ve also been working through the Hildibrand questline, which is genuinely quite funny. It’s made me laugh a good few times so far, as I follow around the bumbling inspector Hildibrand and his ever-faithful assistant Nashu. The last thing I did was fight, err… Greg on a… conspicuously large bridge. Ahem. It’s been a lot of fun.

I’ve also recently got a new tattoo. More on that to come.

So now I’m on the cusp of level 59 and just have patches 2.5 and 2.55 standing between me and my first expansion. My Free Company pals are still miles ahead of me – two of them have now finished Stormblood, the second expansion, while a third is partway through it – but they’re still hanging around to help me out. My plan is to finish Stormblood before the third expansion drops, which should be sometime around June next year. I really want to be able to look forward to new content releases, rather than seeing them as some far-off thing I’ll get to a year or two later. I’ve a long way to go, but I’ve picked up the pace a bit recently. So here’s to getting myself through Heavensward (and also being able to unlock some new skills, something I haven’t been able to do since hitting level 50!).

Eorzea: At Journey’s end. Almost.

Back in July of last year, I wrote about my return to Final Fantasy XIV‘s realm of Eorzea, after some time away. I thought it was about time to update where I am with the game, but first: a short recap.

I first played FFXIV when it was in beta phase 3, which is when Square Enix let in PlayStation 3 players for the first time. I’d never played an MMO before, though I had been tempted, but being a big Final Fantasy fan, I decided this was the one to break my duck. It also helped that a friend also wanted to play, and though he didn’t get into the beta, we both picked up the game at launch, and I rolled a male elezen archer called Khroma Midgard.

Before long, I’d joined a Eurogamer forum-based Free Company and got through a handful of dungeons, but my friend drifted away from the game as he wasn’t a fan of the ongoing subscription. My other guildies had also rushed ahead of me, and though I’m sure they’d have been willing, I didn’t want to ask for help, as I felt I’d be holding them back. Though I managed to advance him to Bard, I abandoned poor Khroma Midgard at Haukke Manor, never to return, never to run that dungeon.

Though I’d managed to put over a hundred hours into my first ever MMO, it always bothered me that I hadn’t finished the Main Scenario. And I sure as heck missed that world; I’d drop in from time to time – one such time being when I bought a PS4 and received a free upgrade to that version of the game – but I found that everyone else had moved on to other Free Companies or servers. At that point, I basically dropped the game entirely, occasionally casting glances at content patches and update news, but not meaning to return.

So what changed? I returned to the game partly because of Noclip’s excellent documentary series into the game’s turnaround, helmed by Naoki Yoshida, but mainly because a member of the Destiny group I joined last year, who had also played FFXIV in the past, expressed an interest in returning. An interest in starting again. It was the perfect opportunity for me to do the same, only this time on PC. So I re-subbed. And then I created a new avatar, one that would represent a new beginning, while also calling back to my original adventurer in Eorzea. I made a female Miqo’te healer, and as she was a Keeper of the Moon, I named her Khroma Moonsong.

So, after nine months back, what have I achieved? Well, I joined a new Free Company right from the off this time – indeed, I think I was the fourth player to join – I’ve become a White Mage, and I’ve long since passed my previous roadblock of Haukke Manor. I’m now less afraid to ask for help from my fellow Free Company members, most likely because they’re made up mostly of members of the Eurogamer Discord community, so I find myself interacting with them daily outside of the game. I’m still far behind everyone else – I’m just slow at games, okay? – but I know I can always ask for help when I reach a dungeon or trial.

My goal for last year was to finally finish the A Realm Reborn 2.0 Main Scenario, which I didn’t quite manage. But I’m almost there now; the last thing I did in-game is defeat Rhitahtyn sas Arvina, one of the main antagonist’s most ardent followers. What stands between me and the end of the game I started more than four-and-a-half years ago is two eight-player dungeons. I’m nearly there! I hope to finally finish this very soon, and will update when I do. After that, I have more quests to do before tackling both expansions. Can I get Stormblood finished before the next expansion comes? Maybe that should be my next goal!

As for our Free Company, Eorzean Gaolers (EG, for Eurogamer, geddit?), we’ve grown a bit since I first joined. We’re now up to 19 members (though a few of those are lapsed), and it’s been really enjoyable for me to help newcomers to the game learn the ropes and get through dungeons; there are plenty of great guides out there, but what I feel a lot of higher-level players forget is that sometimes us newbies don’t really get MMOs. Often it can help to discuss early-game stuff with players who have walked that same path, and it’s really rewarding to help people see how much fun they could be having in Eorzea. Especially as the game now has an incredibly generous trial period, meaning new players are always joining in.

We’ve also since bought our own Company Estate in the Goblet, and after a lot of grinding for Grand Company seals (and having to suffer through the Aurum Vale with a random tank and DPS, ooh lordy never again), I finally managed to get my own room in the house a little over a week ago.

Now I just need to spend tens of thousands of gil decorating it. So far, I’ve changed the floor and walls (as a Conjurer of Stillglade Fane, I needed to bring a bit of Gridania with me to the Goblet, so went with a bit of greenery), and added a Glade Fringed Rug, a few Hingan benches, and a bed. It’s a bit spartan at the moment, but I want to add to it over time, rather than throw a load of stuff in there and then decide I don’t like half of it in a couple of months. Anyway, there’s no rush as I still have tonnes of content to play through, and right now, there’s an in-game event to celebrate Hinamatsuri that awards a Far Eastern doll display. I guess I’ll put that in there when I get it.

Out in the real world, I now have the FFXIV lorebook Encyclopaedia Eorzea, as well as all of the excellent art books, including the latest Stormblood book. I’ve glanced through that and the two Heavensward books (while trying to avoid spoilers!) and I’d say they’re an absolute must for fans of the game, filled with beautiful art and concept pieces from across four years of Final Fantasy XIV. It’s safe to say I’m in deep now, and this time I don’t intend to get drawn away from Eorzea again. (Also, I really want this)

I’ll most likely post another update when I finally finish the 2.0 questline (hopefully this week or next!), but for now, here’s one more shot of Khroma, lazing in her room, with her ever-faithful Relm minion close at hand.

Soma review

Two years after it first debuted on PC and PS4, Frictional’s latest slice of terror finally arrives on Xbox One. Rather than the interdimensional gothic horror of Amnesia, however, Soma opts for a near-future science fiction setting, and looks to ask questions about what it means to be human.

You awake in a Toronto apartment in 2015, in the body of Simon Jarrett, a poor sod who’s recently suffered a traumatic accident. As a result, he’s off to have a brain scan as part of an experimental trial; a pair of scientists have come up with a way to model the brain, allowing them to test out different treatments in a virtual setting before applying a working therapy plan on a living patient. Simon travels to the lab, takes a seat to begin the scan, and a helmet is lowered over his face before his vision fades to white.

He wakes up a hundred years later.

Clearly things didn’t go to plan. Simon awakens to find himself in a dilapidated, decaying industrial area, seemingly devoid of life, with no explanation for this sudden shift. Exploring our surroundings, we discover Simon has somehow been transported to an undersea research complex in a post-apocalyptic earth; after a comet struck the surface, the members of the PATHOS-II facility became the last remnants of mankind, and set about a plan to preserve humanity. And yet, at least to begin with, we can’t seem to find any people here, just murderous robots that seem intent on stalking poor Simon through darkened corridors at the bottom of the sea. On top of that, there’s some strange growth infecting everything in the station and its surrounding environs, apparently reanimating and controlling organisms for its own ends. Soma‘s vision of our near-future is a reassuringly chunky, almost retro-futuristic one, which makes its setting, and by extension its fiction, broadly believable, and at this point you’d be forgiven for being reminded as much of Creative Assembly’s Alien Isolation as anything from Frictional’s back catalogue.

Nothing good happened here.

While you’ll spend a fair amount of your time in SOMA creeping around creepy abandoned facilities by yourself, Simon isn’t alone during his journey through the thermal plants, factories and research labs that make up the PATHOS-II Initiative’s clutch of facilities. Fairly early on, you’ll meet Catherine Chun, a former member of the team that guides you toward your objectives and engages in frequent debates on the nature of the self. You see, while Soma can be a terrifyingly visceral experience at times, especially when being chased by the awful victims of the aforementioned infection, its true horror is more existential in nature. I really don’t want to spoil the story – which is interesting, thought-provoking, and genuinely gripping, and should definitely be experienced first-hand – but much of the thrust of Soma rests in exploring what makes us human, and where our sense of self – our very consciousness – resides. There are some genuinely chilling and unsettling moments in Soma that have nothing to do with creepy monsters or jump scares (though there’s plenty of those, too), and it’s all the more effective for its undersea setting, the pressure of the unfathomable depths pressing down on you and reminding you you’re almost alone in the world, often with nothing but your own thoughts for company.

Crucial to the horror experience is pacing, and Soma is excellent in this regard, too. You’re never in one place doing one thing for too long, and as soon as you start to think you might be getting a little too comfortable in any one location, you’ll be whisked off to another part of the North Atlantic shelf to do something else. Like Frictional’s other games, and increasingly common to the genre, you’ll spend a lot of your time simply exploring the environment and hiding from ungodly terrors (you’ve no means to defend yourself, of course), while also solving a decent amount of puzzles. These won’t tax your grey matter too hard, but you will at least need to engage your brain for a minute or two, and most are enjoyable.

You’ll also spend a significant amount of time out on the sea floor, often trudging between stations. At first, being surrounded by vast, fathomless nothing feels oppressive, with your vision and hearing severely curtailed by the deep, dark depths. This feeling never really goes away, but after a while you’ll start to appreciate the relative freedom, and there’s a sense of (again, relative) serenity to these sections, especially as you come to realise you’re rarely in any mortal danger when out in the water. Of course, there’s still that sense of foreboding, that crushing dread that the game has been instilling right from the start, when Simon awoke in his apartment in 2015 and you had a sense that things weren’t quite right, and it’s to the game’s credit that it manages to keep that tone throughout. It’s never less than unsettling, and the fact that Soma manages to offer an ending that can leave you both horrified and elated is quite something indeed.

See, now isn’t this much nicer?

There’s also dozens of documents to read and audio recordings to find that will flesh out the lives and experiences of the now-absent PATHOS-II team if you care to explore. Aiding that is a new gameplay experience called Safe Mode, which allows you to play through the game immune to its various monsters. Before playing, this sounded like an odd addition for a horror game, but having now experienced Soma – and again, I’d like to stress that its horror is more rooted in existential dread than monster closets – it makes perfect sense. This is a world you will want to explore, and sometimes you just can’t – if a monster’s patrolling an area, you will have to sneak past, or maybe even try running and see where that gets you. My natural inclination in narrative-heavy games is to explore every inch of the world, and I couldn’t quite do that in Soma. I’m seriously considering another playthrough to experience Safe Mode for myself.

It’s a world you should experience for yourself, too. If a mix of Amnesia, Alien Isolation and System Shock sounds like sweet, terrifying manna from heaven (hell?), well, why haven’t you played it already?

A week with the Xbox One X

As you may know, last Tuesday saw the release of the Xbox One X, Microsoft’s second bite at the current generation cherry which aims to redress the power balance seen between the base PlayStation 4 and Xbox One since they released back in November 2013. As the Xbox One has been my primary platform this gen, I decided to pick one up, and you can check out our unboxing of the ‘Project Scorpio’ edition console over on A Game with Chums.

Having bought a 4K television in the middle of last year, I’ve been waiting for this console to push some ultra high definition content to it; I have previously borrowed an Xbox One S for a few days, and found myself wowed by Warcraft: The Beginning in 4K/HDR, but I was really looking forward to seeing how games fared on the new system, especially favourites like Halo 5: Guardians, which uses dynamic scaling on original hardware, sometimes reaching as low as 1152×810. Even unpatched, the game should run at a full 1920×1080 at all times, plus receive forced 16x anisotropic filtering, cleaning up textures at oblique angles and making the game just look better all around.

Fortunately though, Halo 5 was one of the (many!) games slated to be updated for the One X, with many patches dropping before the new console even went on sale. In the week running up to release, I had a good handful of my games updated and ready to go on my external hard drive; I just needed to plug it into my new console and get going.

Obviously, being a massive Halo fan, Halo 5 was the first game I wanted to try when my system arrived, and the results were immediately obvious. The game just looks so clean now. It still uses dynamic scaling, but now both the upper and lower bounds are far, far higher. Texture filtering has also been improved, and though the core assets are untouched, the fact that resolution and filtering are so much better just means you can see far more detail than you ever could before – even down to tiny incidental text on weapon models. Halo 5: Guardians was always a pretty game, if a bit blurry. On Xbox One X, it looks spectacular, and I can’t wait to see what 343 can do with Halo 6 on the new machine.

The next game I wanted to check out was Gears of War 4. Honestly, I thought this game looked absolutely ridiculous on the base Xbox One, so I was intrigued to see how The Coalition would update it for the new machine. The answer, apart from a much higher rendering resolution of course, is higher resolution textures. The game already offered HDR if you had an Xbox One S (and I did try it out on that console when I borrowed it – it looked great), but the higher fidelity textures are the real standout here. With the game looking so crisp and clean at 4K, the upgraded texture work really shines, and the game looks absolutely phenomenal. Every time I load the game up, it drops my jaw.

Gears 4 already looked fantastic though, and the game that has impressed me the most so far, offering the biggest leap from base hardware to One X, has to be Dishonoured 2. Just look at the image at the top of this piece, a screenshot I took of the Dreadful Wale’s engine room – it could pass for a bullshot! The textures and materials look spectacular, and there’s not even a hint of aliasing.

Dishonoured 2 is another title that has received upgraded textures, and the difference is immediately apparent. Everything seems to have been improved, from geometry to textures to skin shaders; just take a look at our video below, where you can immediately see the upgrade in texture work on the door behind Captain Mayhew. Then pay attention to the Captain herself, who looks far more detailed than she ever did before. Where her face seemed a little flat on the Xbox One, you can now make out creases, scars and freckles in her skin.

It’s a massive upgrade. When Arkane announced Dishonoured 2, I was extremely excited for it, and watched all the footage the Lyon-based studio put out. I thought it looked wonderful. But when my Xbox One copy turned up, I was a little underwhelmed by it, visually. The excellent art design shone through of course, but it didn’t look great on the console. One Xbox One X it looks like the same game on a different generation of hardware, the leap is that big. In fact, it looks so good that, after recording the above video, I decided to shelve my One X-enhanced Gears of War 4 playthrough to play this instead, finally getting around to my high chaos Corvo run (I previously did a zero kill Emily playthrough).

It’s safe to say that I’m incredibly happy with my purchase, especially as I already had the TV for it. Now I can play console games in the highest fidelity and watch some more UHD blu rays. And that’s without even mentioning how small and quiet the machine is, or what it can do for backwards compatible Xbox 360 games. This thing is an absolute monster, and I can’t wait to see what developers can do with it going forward.

Celebrate thirty years of Final Fantasy with A Game with Chums

Now that Hallowe’en is over, and with it our month-long Month of Horror, we’ve started a new series over on A Game with Chums. If you’re a fan of Final Fantasy, as we are, you’ll know that 2017 marks the thirtieth anniversary of Square’s storied RPG franchise, and we couldn’t let the year go by without celebrating that in some way.

We’ve raided our game shelves to make a collection of videos showcasing the first hour of every mainline entry in the series, all the way up to last year’s Final Fantasy XV, and we’ll be putting them up on Wednesdays and Fridays, starting today with the original Final Fantasy (well, kind of the original; we played the Origins version). You can watch it below, and please leave us a comment if you enjoyed it.

We’ll be back with Final Fantasy II this Friday, and we hope you’ll come with us on this journey. If all goes to plan and the technical gremlins leave us alone for a bit, we expect the final video to go up on December 20th, which is just two days after the original Final Fantasy was released in Japan back in 1987. It’s almost like we planned it.

Review – Yomawari: Midnight Shadows

You know a game takes its scares seriously when the first thing it asks you to do is turn off all the lights and refrain from tearing your gaze from the screen. Yomawari: Midnight Shadows even implores you to promise not to break these rules. You might wish you did.

Much like last year’s Yomawari: Night Alone, Midnight Shadows begins with a little girl and her dog. While we, unfortunately, had to witness the demise of the former protagonist’s cute little pup Poro, here we’re introduced to Yui, who has headed up into the mountains near her quiet little town to bury her beloved pet. I think Nippon Ichi might have something against dogs.

If you’re new to the Yomawari games, you might find yourself somewhat mollified by the cutesy chibi character designs and beautiful hand-drawn art. Do not be fooled. This is a bleak world where bad things happen. Much like the first game, that charming art gives way to an oppressive atmosphere, exaggerated by some incredibly minimalist audio – which frequently uses nothing but natural sounds like the rush of a river or the wind through the boughs of a tree – and some severe vignetting that darkens the periphery of your vision, forcing your focus to the centre of the screen, and hiding the terrors of the night in deep shadow. This is not a relaxing game to play. Even before you’ve seen anything out of the ordinary it’s put you on edge.

Of course, you’ll discover very early on that things are not normal in this town. The opening of Yomawari: Midnight Shadows – which I don’t want to spoil – might be the bleakest thing I’ve seen in a video game, and I honestly still don’t quite know how to feel about it. Dressing this segment up as the opening tutorial amplifies its effect substantially; “Ok,” you think, “the game’s teaching me how to play. I just hold X to pick this up. I push this over there. There were go. Aaaand… Oh. Oh God.” You’re lulled into a false sense of security, because you’re just being taught the controls, right? Nothing bad can happen in a tutorial. Yet with a few simple button presses, Yomawari: Midnight Shadows makes you complicit in a genuinely shocking act. And you’re only ten minutes in.

Returning players will note many similarities beyond just a little girl and her dog. Indeed, Midnight Shadows both looks and plays almost identically to the 2015 original, and that’s not a bad thing. What we have here is kind of an isometric 2D Silent Hill, where you’re tasked to explore an apparently-normal town where things have somehow gone very wrong. After the opening segment, we’re re-introduced to Yui, who has come to the mountain overlooking town with her friend Haru to watch a fireworks display. It turns out Haru is moving away and the girls are saddened that they will soon be separated. Haru, of course, doesn’t want to leave her friend, and declares that she’s not going anywhere. She’s going to stay with Yui forever.

As darkness falls and the girls head home through the woods, they begin to hear strange noises. Eerie apparitions flitter in the corners of their vision, and finally they hear a voice. Armed with a torch, Yui volunteers to go and take a look, and instructs Haru to hide in the bushes. Heading through the woods alone, she comes across something lying in the middle of the path. Bending to pick it up, she realises it’s the red leash she had used to walk her dog. We’re instructed to jump into the inventory to view it, so we do just that, reading the little text description and OH GOD WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?!

Christ. You’re not even safe in the menus.

We cut back to Haru, who emerges from the bush to find Yui gone, her discarded torch lying on the ground nearby. She sets off through the night to find her friend.

As you make your way around town, investigating points of interest for useful clues, you’ll note the cues Yomawari: Midnight Shadows takes from the earlier Silent Hill games. The inspiration is apparent too in that bleak, oppressive atmosphere, and there’s the roaming monsters and spirits that appear to block your path and chase you down. In Yomawari however, you feel more vulnerable than in, well, the vast majority of games, to be honest. It’s not just because you’re a little kid that can’t fight back, seemingly abandoned and alone in a town with no friends, no adults, no signs of normal life. Yomawari uses the children’s innocence to underscore just how miserable all this is; there are no adults around, strange spirits are roaming the streets, and yet for all that, the town looks normal, and Haru doesn’t even question it, doesn’t wonder where her parents are. She just wants to find Yui again.

The foreboding mood is fostered by that crushing sense of creeping dread that the best of Japanese horror cinema does so well, where even mundane, every day things will set your teeth to chattering, like the rustling of litter or the buzzing of a sodium streetlight. And of course there’s the scares. The majority tend to consist of jump scares, and I’m usually pretty immune to those, but there’s something about this game, something that makes me jump out of my skin whenever some multi-limbed grinning horror bursts from a seemingly-innocent little alleyway and chases me down a dark street when all I want to do is get back to the safety of home.

Luckily, Haru can hide in some of the scenery around town. If you see a bush or an A-board, you can duck behind it to escape the night, and you’ll see your chosen hiding place illuminated in the centre of a black background, the roving terrors that are following you picked out in red as they near your hiding place. You’ll hear Haru’s heartbeat pounding in your ears as they get closer, and even though you’re sure they can’t pull you from safety, your already-frayed nerves will be at breaking point until they start to move away, and you think it might be safe to emerge and continue your journey.

When you do, you’re just back out in the night, with the monsters, the dark, and the rushing of the wind.