Category: Multiplayer

Battlefield 6 is fine, but too expensive.

As we approach the end of the year, I’m pretty tired. I have a bunch of cool writeups I should finish up (Blue Prince! Omegathon!), and a few posts like my writeup of Horses that could go up, but I’m somewhat hesitant to actually post, because they’re both A) slightly soul scouring and B) I think Horses purely as a video game is pretty banal, and not some sort of incredible and transformative piece of interactive media. Wheels of Aurelia was more innovative in it’s mechanics and narrative.

So while scrounging around for something to talk about, I remembered that I’ve played 100+ hours of Battlefield 6. So lets talk about that real quick.

A quick confession.

I loved Call of Duty. However, just over four or so years ago, I stopped playing Activision-Blizzard games. If that wasn’t clear enough, when Diablo 4 came out, I made some statements that will probably prevent me from ever being invited to certain press events. Really, the kick-off for all of this was when Blizzard censored a Hearthstone player protesting for Hong Kong. I really don’t like it when companies kowtow to authoritarians of any stripes, so I stopped playing their games. No Overwatch. No Starcraft.

But I missed Call of Duty the most. I loved me my stupid gun shooty game, and I’d fire it up every day after work on my travel laptop. There’s some deep think-pieces on the the soft power image control of the military gun violence fantasy, or the jingoistic nature of the campaigns in these games.

I don’t think I’m qualified to write that piece and frankly, I’m not very interested in trying to write it. I didn’t even play the campaign in Battlefield 6, because I’ve never understood why you would play the campaign in one of these live service shooters. I’m just gonna talk about the game as it is for me, which is mostly Call of Duty methadone.

The General Overview

I was gonna joke that I could just copy my Battlebit review across for this part, but I actually can’t. My general take on Battlefield 6 is that once you’re in a game, the general experience is pretty good.

Guns work well. Movement feels good, and a lot of the weird secondary gadgets are quite useful. Maps are mostly even and pretty well designed.

There are definitely weak points. The map pool is a bit anemic, and pretty much every game mode reuses the same maps. I wish the engineer class had a second gadget that was actually useful modes without vehicles.

But once you’re in a game, it’s a good time. Everything that isn’t the game though?

It sucks.

The game is $70, with an in-game cash shop and battlepass. The battlepass has it’s own mini-battlepasses, with timed challenges for maximum FOMO. If there’s a way to make more then 3 loadouts for a given class, I haven’t found it in the labyrinthine menus. Getting the game to even launch for the first time is a pain, not a huge pain, but a pain.

Every update also seems to make the game slightly worse. The most annoying one for me is that helicopters seem to have some sort of animation culling turned on now when they’re far away from me, and given that helicopters are in the sky, they are usually far away from me. It makes it look like a Pokemon game.

Also, now it’s time for the longer set of complaints

Battlefield isn’t realistic, or super memorable.

If there’s anything I’ve learned from reading ACOUP, it’s that I don’t know anything about war. And if there’s anything else I’ve learned, it’s that games will almost always sacrifice fidelity for fun. By default this does not annoy me. When Battlefield 6 added the cash shop, I wasn’t pissed because someone could now play as their fursona, I was pissed because I had already paid $70 fucking dollars for this game.

That said, for a game about high troop number combat, you would think there would be literally any way to meaningfully communicate with the other 28 people on your team. I’m pretty sure modern war isn’t conducted by taking 32 dudes, giving them thousands of dollars in military hardware, and then pointing at a burnt out mall and saying “Go fuck em up!”.

But wait, you say. You say 32, then 28. Those are different numbers. Yes, they are, because you do have voice chat with your squad, but you only have text chat with the rest of your team. I have used the text chat maybe 4 times total. The only time it had any measurable impact was when one teammate was complaining that a challenge was too hard, that they could not overcome it, to which I suggested that “through jesus christ all things are possible”, which was followed by a series of “amens” from other team members.

They managed to complete their challenge.

Side Note: I suspect that the Lord, if real, and in the habit of intervening in the mortal world, has better things to do with their time then help someone get three air vehicles kills in one match, but what do I know.

I also mention this because in 134 hours, it’s the only memorable moment I’ve actually had in game. There’s no building, so there’s no real opportunity for anything clever or tricky, just destruction. It’s a bit of a bummer.

The lack of communication would bother me less if the classes were less obviously synergistic. The assaults spawn beacon is the only reasonable way to make extended pushes across the map, but you can’t push with one person. The engineer is the only class that can reasonably deal with vehicles, but without extra rocket rounds refilled by the support, is going to do have a very hard time doing that. Recon can paint vehicles with it’s gadgets, enabling faster lock-on for the engineer, but without that engineer to followup, it’s pretty much useless. Support enables everyone to do their job better, with extra gadget and grenade usage, but can’t do any of those jobs particularly well on it’s own.

It’s just aggravating for a game where communication is key to have no communication. Now, if I remember correctly Battlebit did have local voice chat, and the result of that was every game started with a cacophony of racial slurs, Free Bird, and Fortunate Son, but at least it was possible shout “Rez me” at someone.

Overall

I personally enjoy Battlefield 6. I don’t really recommend it though. It’s a pain in the ass to get running, it costs too much too much money, it’s lacking quality of life features, and goes hog wild everything that’s bad about modern live service games.

I don’t even think it’s a bad game. I just think you can more better games for $70. For that sort of money, you can go buy Titanfall 2 and Blue Prince, and a lot more if you’re willing to wait for a sale.

Battlefield 6 is that one restaurant in town that’s just a bit too pricey, but no one in your friend group hates. It’s a good place to hang out, chat, catch up, but if anyone could really make a choice, you’d all go somewhere else.

Q-Up

Q-Up is a lot of different things. It’s a incremental game. It’s a competitive coin-flipping eSport. It’s a weird satire of live service games and tech startups. Oh, and it has a really cool grid based node engine building system, and slightly less interesting, but still compelling item system. Finally, it’s a game that I feel weirdly conflicted about.

Before I go any further, I want to note that I do recommend Q-Up. It’s a weird one, but if you like incremental games/engine building experiences, and enjoy strangeness, you’ll probably have a good time. And if you’re on the fence because of that “incremental game” element, Q-Up generally respects the player’s time. It took me about 6.5 hours to reach the “end” of the game, and I suspect it would have been closer to the expected 8-10 hours if I hadn’t played a lot of the demo to get familiar with mechanics beforehand.

If you’re the sort of person who really loves incremental games… well, there are some absolutely busted end-game builds, and semi-competitive ladders, and the folks on the game’s discord seem to be having a good time.

A lot of what I’m going to be talking about here, I already covered in my writeup on Q-Up’s demo. If you want a spoiler free discussion of the game, I suggest you go read that instead.

Q-Side

The premise of Q-Up is simple: it’s the hottest new competitive game on the market. Games are 4v4, and after queuing up, and getting placed in a match, you’ll either be put on Q-Side or Up-Side. A coin will be flipped. If it lands on Q, Q-Side team gets a point. If it lands on Up, Upside team gets a point. First team to 3 points wins.

And yes, this does mean that you as a player have zero agency over who wins or loses any given game of Q-Up. That’s the point. Something something comedy, something something frog.

But just because you can’t influence the outcome doesn’t mean you can’t change the results. After all, it’s not about winning or losing. It’s about getting as much stuff as possible.

Oh The Stuff You Can Get

Q-Up has four main resources: Q, experience, gold, and gems. Lets start with Q.

After each flip in match, you’ll gain or lose Q. Winning the flip starts you out with a positive amount of Q, losing with a negative amount. Q determines your rank, with higher ranks giving more Q, and lower ranks give less.

This amount, however, will be adjusted by your character’s skills and items, which is as good a place as any to talk about experience and gold.

Experience points are… experience points. You get enough of them, you level up. When you level up, you unlock skills and skill points to use on the skill grid.

This is the engine building part of Q-Up. The skill grid is a set of interconnected trigger-able nodes. Nodes can trigger when you win, lose, or always. They can do a variety of things, including triggering other nodes. Nodes also have activation stock: a maximum number of times that they can be triggered during a given flip.

It will start out reasonable, and it will rapidly turn into something that is very much not that.

It’s a very fun and unique system, with each of the game’s eight characters having their own nodes and builds. Some want high numbers of combos, others generate Q by spending gold, or clone items.

Which brings us to gold and items. There’s a shop, you buy items in it. Then you equip those items.

They’re mechanically impactful, and very functional, but there’s nothing here that makes it different from any other item shop.

Which means it’s time to talk about gems! You get gems by ranking up, and recycling unwanted items. They’re used to unlock meta-progression-y style stuff, like the ability to stop shop items from rotating out, and extra item slots, and other things.

And this is the core loop of Q-Up. Play a match, get resources. Spend those resources to improve your build. Rinse, repeat. Often, in the middle to late portions of the game, that’ll involve reworking your build to generate a specific resource you might want, such as gems or experience points, or tweaking to maximize getting as much Q as possible.

So I’ve talked about the mechanics. I’ve talked about the theme. Which leaves the narrative.

Narrative

From here on out we’re talking spoilers. If you want to play Q-Up, this is a good time to leave.

Q-Up trades in a lot of different fields/themes. Fortunately for me, I think I recognize most of them, as they’re related to my job and interests.

This narrative starts out as one poking fun at what I’d generally group as “Live Service Games”, perhaps more specifically the “single match” live service game. League of Legends, Dota 2, Valorant, CS:GO, that sort of thing. This is where the game stays mechanically, but narratively, it’s going to become Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride real fast.

The writing is very good. I wish there was more of it.

I can’t think of a better way to dissect the narrative and the struggles I had with it, without laying the full structure, so here we go.

After you start playing Q-Up, at some point you’ll either get a 3-0 loss, or 0-3 win. This introduces you to Alice and Bob. Alice is the head of a quantum computing company and Bob is the head of the company running Q-Up. Alice and Bob are at least somewhat fighting over the company Bob is running.

This opens the second part of narrative, which is mostly about conflict between Alice and Bob. Notably, it’s also not told in any straightforward way, and most of the information you get given is filtered through the lens of “You just joined this project, and everyone is using terms you don’t understand, and acronyms no one’s explained” sort of energy.

Fortunately, I work in a tech company. I have LIVED this exact experience. Multiple times. So again, I was pretty in my element for this bit.

This is the sort of thing I think you can only write if you actually have worked at one of these tech companies.

Anyway, this culminates with Alice attempting a hostile takeover, and Bob using you, the player, to stop it by proving that Q-Up is a game of skill, and not a game of gambling. You enter the Q-Up championships, and attempt to win your way to novice rank.

Then things get odd.

I have a hard time summarizing what exactly happens next, because I’m pretty sure this is where the game starts playing around in the space of Information Theory. I don’t know anything about Information Theory.

Anyway, after you get banned from Q-Up by Alice, a sentient artificial intelligence intervenes in order to get you unbanned, and also to use you to free itself. At the same time, the server room for running Q-Up seems to start to collapse, because… again. I think something Information Theory related.

This leads to the finale of the game, where a pair of cosmic intelligences attempt to restart the universe.

It’s this last tenth or so of the game where Q-Up completely lost me. Not because it was bad, but more so because I was just incredibly confused. The sentient AI part is mostly fine, and foreshadowed pretty hard, but it’s also not really paid off to the extent I would like. The same is true of the cosmic intelligences. To me, they just come out of absolutely nowhere, but I suspect that the writers may be trading in themes or ideas that I’m simply not familiar with.

It left an unpleasant taste in my mouth, because the rest of the game is actually fairly interesting. I was much more invested in Alice and Bob of all things than I was in any of the “wacky hijinks” at the end. And in the last moments of the game, that story got pushed to the wayside for cosmic strangeness.

It also doesn’t help that this last section of the game feels very short and sudden. Things are escalating, escalating, getting exciting… and then it’s all over.

Putting on the introspective critic hat for a moment

Given that Q-Up is already trading in a bunch of specific themes in its aesthetic and narrative, I think that what is actually happening here is that I am just out of the loop for the joke. This last portion of the game probably isn’t “random wacky hijinks,” but is instead Who’s On First for quantum computing or information theory, or perhaps some third thing I’m completely unaware of.

Maximum insider baseball that I am no longer an insider for.

But it was incredibly jarring, because I had been an insider for the rest of it, and the result was that a narrative I cared about, that I was curious and excited about, suddenly felt like it pulled a Fish Guys.

It just left me feeling really weird about a game that I had, until that point, really enjoyed.

Hat is off, back to final thoughts

I like 90% of Q-Up. I like its mechanics, I love the theming and UI, and I love most of the story.

It’s the suddenness with which the story ends that really bummed me out more than the weirdness, if I’m being honest. Everything felt like it wrapped up too quickly. Q-Up is not a very long game narrative. The majority of the game takes place across 70 or so emails, and the finale across another 30. And that’s probably overcounting a bit.

Q-Up was $9. I think I got my money’s worth. But I wish I felt different about the ending.

I wish I could call the game a masterpiece, instead of just very good.

P.S. This is not my finest write-up. If it feels stitched together, that’s because, well, it is. I wrote 3-4 different versions of this, and none of them were exactly what I wanted. So instead, you get this mess. Sorry about that.

Have some gems.

Also.

TowerFall

Do you remember the Ouya? The Kickstarted Android console that cost $100 ($140 adjusted for inflation) and was never a commercial success? The one that released 12 years ago?

No? You don’t? Oh. Okay. Well, it was sort of a thing. Not a “thing” thing, but boy did people like talking shit about it, and writing articles about how it was a doomed to fail.

Anyway, when it released, one of its exclusives was TowerFall, a 2d multiplayer platform fighter. It became the Ouya’s best selling title, at just around 7000 copies.

TowerFall ended up being ported to all the other consoles, including Switch, and it was on Switch that I ended up playing it recently at a friend’s birthday party.

And this is how TowerFall should be played. A full six players. A giant screen. Preferably a crowd of onlookers. In this sense it resembles one of my favorite discontinued games, Killer Queen Black.

Unlike Killer Queen Black, though, TowerFall is every person for themself. Everyone starts with three arrows. Getting shot with an arrow or goomba-stomped kills you. After only one player is standing, the next map is loaded, and the next round starts. Victory points are awarded for kills, and the first person to reach 10 points wins.

Of course, there are a few more meaningful mechanics. There’s a dash that allows the player to grab arrows out of the air, and the screen wraps both directions, so falling into a pit to go up is an entirely viable strategy. There are also a few subtle catch up mechanics, as players who fall significantly behind get a shield that blocks one hit.

Perhaps your friends don’t want to turn each other into pincushions. That’s okay! There’re also a few co-op campaigns: a 1-4 player one, and a 1-2 player one. It’s hard to find much to say about these. They’re fine, and mildly interesting, but in most cases I’d rather be playing the versus mode.

As a fairly mild point of criticism here, I will say that I generally dislike how the ideal strategy for some of the co-op modes was memorizing when/where certain enemies would spawn, and setting up to kill them immediately upon spawn.

It’s hard to think of much else to say about TowerFall. It’s fun. It’s fine. I think it’s best as a party game or in person couch co-op, and it’s one of very few games that works on one console at six players.

I’m going to get back to worrying about the collapse of society now. See you folks next week.

Interestingly, the designer Maddy Thorson would later go on to make Celeste, which sold a million copies in under a year. Slightly more than TowerFall’s 7000 on the Ouya.

Note: I usually try to take my own screenshots, but this week I’m just using images from the Steam store page, and I usually prefer to call it out when I’m doing that. Anyway. Hope your week is going better than mine.

Deadlock Preview

This isn’t a review.

Deadlock isn’t out yet. You can’t even play it without a closed beta invite.

They’re not hard to get, but still.

By the time Deadlock is out, it’s likely that it will have morphed into something completely different from what it currently is.

That said, even in its current state, I’ve already played 80 hours. So I do want to talk about why, and why you might enjoy this game enough to try to play it now.

Why You Might Like Deadlock

Deadlock is Valve’s most current semi-public project. It’s a MOBA/FPS hybrid, taking elements from both genres, and adding a few new elements of its own.

And that’s the first reason to try it. Most of the folks I’ve been playing with are Dota 2 and League players. If you really enjoy those games, and generally like FPS games, Deadlock might be for you.

The other big reason is if you have an appetite for novelty. There hasn’t been a game like this in a long time. Monday Night Combat and Super Monday Night Combat servers went down ages ago, and Deadlock offers a much greater depth from its MOBA elements than those games ever did. There’s also tons of weird interactions to discover, tricks to find, and just general space to play and explore the game’s systems.

This is a game where (at least at my skill level) it’s possible to win a fight with expert positioning and the ability to click heads. It’s equally possible to just have a good enough sense of the map to farm everything out, and show up to the fight with flush with items and wipe everyone out with abilities while being unable to shoot anything.

These are the things that make me love it. But they might not work for you.

…and Why You Might Want to Wait

Deadlock is unfinished. It is probably not quite balanced yet. And it can be kind of buggy. And has a bit of a learning curve.

Most of these (outside of the bugs) are positives for me. But if you’re the sort of person who gets really annoyed when someone on the enemy team shows up and kills you in two seconds, you may have a bad time. If you’re the sort of person who gets annoyed when a creep wave bugs, and doesn’t push properly, you are going to suffer.

And there is a big learning curve. Just like Dota, this game has dozens of items to learn, many of which have activated abilities. It also has one of the densest maps I’ve seen in a MOBA, and even after the 80 hours I’ve played, I only have a general sense of where everything is.

Also, the art, while quite good, is not up to the Valve standard just yet.

Overall, Though

Deadlock is likely to be my most played new game of the year. It’s entirely possible it actually replaces Dota 2 as my “lifestyle” game, a slot that Dota 2 has occupied for almost 10 years.

There’s no reason to rush to play Deadlock just yet. It’s likely that it will be a much more complete game by the time it reaches a full release. But while there isn’t any reason to rush in, I really cannot overstate just how fun I’ve found Deadlock to be.

Stalcraft

Ed Note: Most of this writeup was written earlier in the year, around Christmas, as was my time in the game. Some of this info may be out of date. Still, Stalcraft is weird enough for me to want to talk about, even if I don’t plan on playing anymore in the near future.

Stalcraft is strange. If you want to know why and don’t care about context, you can skip ahead to the section titled “The Weird Bit.” If not, let’s lay some groundwork, and do a normal review before everything goes off the rails.

Stalcraft is a F2P pseudo-extraction shooter that takes place in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. It’s inspired by the short story “A Roadside Picnic,” using much of the book’s language and terminology. The game’s title is a portmanteau, that thing where you combine two different words into one word. The words in question here are “Stalker” and “Craft”.

If you’re going “Wait, isn’t there another game that does this?” don’t worry. We’ll come back to that.

In the game, you’ve suffered a hallucination, and woken up in the Zone—the game’s shorthand for the Chernobyl exclusion zone. You pick one of two starter factions, then you slowly work your way up through the ranks of various bases, completing quests, and traveling across the map deeper and deeper to try to understand what caused you to end up in the Zone.

Gameplay Loop

After creating a character with one of the game’s two starting factions and being given a brief tutorial, you’re dropped into the Zone with a location for the main story quest, a base to return to, and about 5 bullets.

Most of Stalcraft’s gameplay loop takes place across the game’s various zones. Zones are permanently PVP-enabled between factions, and full of enemies

There are two primary parts to Stalcraft’s gameplay loop. Both parts have the player adventuring out into the zone. One is quests, and the other is just general looting and gathering.

A Hunting We Shall Go

Looting and gathering in Stalcraft is fairly simple. Load up your inventory full of bullets, go into the world, travel to various areas, and shoot everything that moves. Since this is an extraction shooter, if you die, you will drop your stuff. Well, not all of it. Some items, like your weapons and armor stay, as do a few quest items. But ammo, snacks, and med-packs are goners.

Stalcraft equipment follows a pretty standard F2P game sort of model, with each piece of being upgraded from older equipment. Doing so requires gathering various zone based resources. For PVP protection, when you’re killed the resources drop, but other players can’t use them.

Instead, they drop in a backpack, a container that can only be opened by the person who gathered the resources in the first place. The result is that it’s not really possible to progress your gear by PKing, but it is possible to PK for a profit by killing other players. Then ransoming their items back to them.

It’s a very slick piece of design. It forces players to engage with the primary system/loop, while still rewarding player killing, and preventing it from becoming a primary method of progression.

A Noble Quest

Quests, on the other hand, involve the same general “running around trying not to die,” but with a more story directed focus. And for every quest that asks you to kill 10 boars, you’ll get one that’s a bit stranger.

Crawl into a dog kennel, and solve a jumping puzzle.

Solve a mildly frustrating riddle.

Deliver these items.
Into an active volcanic area.

They’re some of the strangest and often incredibly hard things I’ve ever had to do in a video game. Sometimes that’s because they’re janky, and sometimes that’s because… well, you have to cross an entire map of enemy players to get to the place to actually do the damn thing.

The Weird Bit

If you’ve been paying attention, or looking at the screenshots, you might have started to put something together. Or maybe you also play a lot of games.

See, while Stalcraft now is a fully standalone game, that’s not what it started as.

You ready?

Stalcraft is/was a mod/private server for Minecraft, with the majority of the game, setting and world taken from the open world game STALKER, and its sequels.

The end result is that Stalcraft is a sort of weird chimera of design. Why are there so many (awful) jumping puzzles and riddles? Because those are comparatively easy to design and implement in Minecraft. Why do all the characters look the way they do? Same thing. Why are the characters and story so weirdly detailed and thought out? Because the whole thing was almost just ported over from another entire game.

To be clear: at no point did StalCraft team, as far as I’m aware, give a penny to anyone above. They just kind of… built someone else’s game inside their own game, and turned it into a generally fun, if aggravating extraction shooter.

It’s incredibly novel, and I’ve just never seen anyone do something quite like this.

That’s all very nice, but should you actually play it?

I played about 70 hours of Stalcraft before I burned out. Ultimately, this is a F2P game, with F2p monetization. Unless you have a huge amount of time or money to burn, you’re not getting to endgame.

That said, it’s an incredibly unique experience in the F2P genre. It can be tense, funny, and aggravating. I got killed and had my corpse camped, only to run back and die over and over again.

There was also a time I killed someone in an enemy faction sort of out of panic, looked at them, realized I didn’t really care if I killed them, rezed them, and then we just looked at each other and ran off.

I think what makes Stalcraft worth playing is how different, weird and janky it is. It’s not the same as something being good, but compared to so many other games, it’s interesting.

In many ways, the general experience reminds me a lot of Sea of Thieves, though slightly more dangerous. You’re dropped into a playground, full of glass, bits of irradiated metal, and told to go play with the other kids, some of whom will beat you up. And sure, the whole thing is cobbled together: those monkey bars are rusting, and some car somewhere is blasting Russian Christmas carols.

But god, if it isn’t fascinating.