Category: Multiplayer

Last Epoch

A few weeks ago after I finished eviscerating Grim Dawn, and bemoaning my lost $12/12 hours, I continued on the quest that brought me to it in the first place. That quest was to find a good ARPG that wasn’t Diablo 4. I won’t be playing that game for reasons I’ve touched on before.

Note: That said, just because I’m not playing Diablo 4, it hasn’t stopped my friends. And I’ll be honest, after the honeymoon phrase wore off, none of them seemed to find it super compelling.

Then I found Last Epoch. And fortunately for me, Last Epoch is exactly what I wanted. A smooth, enjoyable ARPG with the ability to make a fun necromancer good build diversity, solid skills, and meaningful end game.

ARPG’s in Brief

For those who might not know, ARPG stands for “Action Role-Playing Game.” ARPG’s are defined by having virtually no roleplaying elements, and the action parts dominated by spamming your abilities every second you have the mana/rage/potato points to do so.

Here’s a less cynical definition: ARPG’s are traditionally top-down or isometric real time action games defined by extensive skill trees and character customization. Combat generally has two modes, fighting against trash mobs, which are pinatas for stacks of loot, and fighting against bosses, which are also pinatas, except this time they have the baseball bat.

Last Epoch doesn’t make any innovations that were obvious to me in the moment to moment gameplay. Skills are fun and enjoyable to use, attacks are generally well telegraphed, and have interesting variety. Bosses and enemies have a variety of interesting designs, instead of just being 20 different dudes in armor.

Skills and Skilltrees

But that’s not to say Last Epoch doesn’t innovate. The two main places where it makes changes are in its leveling and skill system.

Last Epoch has two parallel skill systems that compliment each other without overlapping. The first is a traditional passive skill tree that unlocks further abilities as pointed are allocated, with some abilities being gated behind specific earlier unlocks. Each class has a base skill tree available, along with several masteries. Investing points into the base and masteries unlock further active skills for use.

The second set of skill trees are the active skill skill trees. Each skill in Last Epoch has a full secondary skill tree that can fairly radically change how the skill works. Skills level independently of the player, and how they’re leveled can change the impact of the skill.

As an example of this, one of the bread and butter skills of my build was Summon Skeletons. Based on how it was leveled, I would have been able to turn it into a skill that summoned vast hordes, or a much smaller but stronger pool of skeletons. It could also built out in such a way that it summoned melee brawlers, flame arrow launching archers, or poison applying rogues.

Last Epoch does limit the player to 5 equipped skills. Initially I expected to hate this, but I found after a bit that instead it just forced me to focus on picking which skills I wanted to use.

Endgame

I think my favorite thing about Last Epoch, though, might be the endgame’s monolith system. Monoliths will feel familiar to anyone whose played Path of Exile, as its somewhat parallel to that game’s map system. They’re sets of random maps that are linked together on a world map. They generate semi-randomly, remixing tiles and mobs from the main game, with a temporary challenge to clear them.

Clearing them generates stability, and clearing them without dying also gives a chest of extra loot, and some specific rewards based on the nodes, allow for a certain level of target farming.

Stability in a given monolith unlocks sets of bespoke mini-missions, with specific boss fights items that aren’t available in the general pool, or main campaign. My personal favorite was a fight against a gigantic icy necromancer dragon.

There are also a bunch of other missions and modes that are unlocked by collecting and spending keys. I’ll be honest, I’ve tried some of these modes several times, and I’ve been flattened each time.

Life pro-top: Don’t try to take the screenshot of the early endgame boss during the fight.

Crafting and Items

A brief note: For most of this post, I’ve been trying to explain things in a way that would make sense to someone who isn’t familiar with the genre. This section isn’t going to do that. If you’re not a nut-job for ARPG’s feel free to skip this bit, as I’m going to be using a bunch of jargon that won’t make sense if you’re not familiar with the genre.

There are several categories of items in Last Epoch. These include normal items that roll affixes within tiers as is commonly done in the genre. They also include unique items, items that can drop with variation in their rolls, but generally offer some sort of weird build around benefit that can change up a build. Finally, it has set items, similar to unique in having specific names and rolls, but offering a benefit for equipping a certain number of items in the set.

There are also legendary items, created in a system that involves fusing unique and exalted items, but I haven’t actually made any of these yet. Point is, there’s a lot of depth here.

Last Epoch doesn’t currently allow trading between players. Instead, it makes up for it with a fairly robust crafting system, and providing a pretty ample amount of resources to do so with.

Unlike other games that only allow you to reroll the affixes and tiers of an item, items in Last Epoch drop with a value called forging potential. This is loosely a resource that defines how many changes can be made to the item before it stays locked in forever.

The crafting system is simple: spend items called shards to either upgrade or add prefixes/suffixes to an existing item. Doing this spends forging potential. However, items can only have their tiers upgraded to a particular level, with items having a tier above that are only available in drops.

In case none of this made any sense, here’s the end result:

Last Epoch has a strong crafting system that allows upgrading existing and weaker gear to be tuned for the current content, and also easily allows shoring up missing stats such as resistances. At the same time, it still puts the highest tier of gear locked behind drops, thus making it so that there’s still incentive to farm for end game gear.

Maybe I should have just written that instead.

Closing Comments

Last Epoch is still in Early Access. While there’s some content missing, including several sets of skills and masteries for various characters, and the full complete story campaign, I never really felt their absence. The only real problem I have with the game in it’s current state is with the multiplayer. Multiplayer suffers from some small lag and loading issues, with multiplayer and online games having much longer load times than offline.

However, these look like issues that will eventually be addressed. And I still recommend the game in it’s current state.

Last Epoch also has a bunch of other small features I really appreciate but don’t quite have time to cover in this writeup, including a powerful but understandable item filter, auto-sort, the ability for crafting items to be sent to storage at any point in time instead of eating inventory space, and a reasonable skill respecing system.

Last Epoch is $35 on Steam.

BattleBit Remastered

I’m not sure I have anything new to say about BattleBit Remastered. On one hand, I’ve played close to 60 hours of it, bought copies for friends, and generally had a really good time with it. On the other hand, the game already has thousands of positive reviews, and hundreds of thousands of players. So my writeup feels like tossing a single match into a volcano.

BattleBit Remastered is falls into the genre of the “Massive” FPS. That is to say, the smallest maps and game sizes available are 32 players vs. 32 players. The largest games are 127 vs. 127.

BattleBit doesn’t have any features that feel outwardly revolutionary or genre defining. The thing is, this doesn’t really matter because it does everything correctly. Perhaps the biggest thing for me is that the game is incredibly well performing even at the highest player counts and game modes.

A Quick Story

Because of the high player count, it’s easy to assume that BattleBit is a game where a single player or group of players can’t have any impact. I don’t think that’s true.

One of my favorite moments was when I was playing on a winter map with only a single set of roads. Working with my friends, we managed to sneak around back, and seize control of a small outpost area. We then built a spawn point near the area, and set of barricades blocking only road to the other 75% of the map. This meant that vehicles couldn’t get past, and led to at least a dozen enemy vehicles including APC’s and tanks just slamming full stop into the hastily erected barriers, and letting us shred them with rockets.

It’s moments like this that make BattleBit feel great for me. Working with other folks to flank or block areas can feel really fun and meaningful!

Just Very Good

It’s hard to figure out the best way to praise a game for just doing almost everything very well. Maps are interesting and balanced, offering spots for both sniping and close range combat. The guns feel pretty good, with comparable stats and time to kill. No single class feels overpowered.

The game also has an effective party and squad system that just works really well. Players can just create a party when they log into the game, and then invite friends later. There’s no having to back out, no MMR, and the high player count means I’ve never run into the “Oops, we already have a full party” issue.

That’s not to say that I consider BattleBit to be perfect. There are some small things that are frustrating around loadouts and stats. It’s not possible to have more than one loadout saved for any class, which means that swapping weapons based on the map is a bit aggravating. I also find the body armor/helmet/backpack system incredibly confusing, as cosmetic variations of various items are intermingled with the stat changing ones.

But none of these issues actually impact the core gameplay: running, gunning, and getting shot by a sniper halfway across the map.

In Conclusion

BattleBit is also blessedly free of all the other bullshit I usually feel obligated to point out or excuse. There is no battlepass, no microtransactions, no in-game cosmetic store. The game is $20. You can buy it once and then play it with your friends for as long as you want.

If you like first-person shooters like Call of Duty or Battlefield, you can buy this game right now safe in the knowledge you’ll get your money’s worth.

Avant Carde

A few months ago I mentioned in my Granite Games Summit writeup that one of my favorite prototypes at the event was a deck builder with a working title of “Cubism.” I also noted that I didn’t really want to write about it while it was still in the prototype stage.

It’s been a while since then, but I’m happy to note that this week I can finally talk about that prototype. Mostly because it’s no longer a prototype, and it has a new final name: Avant Carde.

Avant Carde is a deck builder where players take on the role of collectors organizing shows of their artwork to score awards.

If you’ve played a traditional deck builder, you’re likely familiar with a lot of the base components of the genre. Players are given a (weak) starting deck that they make more powerful over time by using it to generate resources, and purchase additional cards to be added to the deck.

Where Avant Carde innovates, though, is in how it handles playing cards during a players turn, and also its scoring and buying system.

In something like Dominion or Clank, any card can be played in any order, though there might be advantages to doing things a certain way. Avant Carde is different.

Avant Carde has a something more akin to an Uno style chaining system. Once a player plays a card for their turn, the next card they play has to match the previous card in either color or number to continue the chain. At the end, they count up the number of cards in the chain, and any other abilities those cards might have, and that number is the amount of money they have to buy with.

This chain, for example, would generate 5 money for the player.

This leads to a really interesting balance where the more expensive and powerful cards can end up being a bit riskier to play if they aren’t in a color that you’re collecting.

Avant Card also has some interesting changes in how it handles the buying area. Unlike Ascension, where a limited pool of cards are available at any point in time, or Dominion, where everything is always available, Avant Carde splits the difference in a pretty fascinating way.

Another neat thing: The abilities in Avant Carde aren’t on the cards in your deck. Instead they’re on the cards you lay out above the buy row! This means you can change all of the cards’ abilities by just swapping out 6 cards.

You’re collecting cards numbered 2-7. Every number is always available, but the stack of cards for each number only ever has the top card flipped up and visible. And since the numbers come in different colors, even if you have the money to buy a high-cost card, it may not make sense to actually buy it if it’s completely off color, and would be hard to include in your future chain.

As tempting as that 5 might be, splashing into blue to play it could be difficult.

I’ve really enjoyed Avant Carde. It’s one of the few prototypes that I wanted to play every time I saw it over the last few months. I’m even more excited to see the final game. It’s a fascinating deck builder with some really neat mechanical innovations in the genre.

If any of this sounds cool, Resonym is currently running a Kickstarter for the game that you can check out.

Disclaimer: I am friends with the designers at Resonym, which is how I ended up playtesting it, but it’s honestly the best Resonym game I’ve played

Grim Dawn

Grim Dawn is an ARPG that is probably intended to be in the vein of Diablo 2. I honestly don’t know. I never played Diablo 2.

What I do know is that after 11 hours, 17 deaths, and one kill on the final boss, I do not recommend it. In fact, I actively loathe Grim Dawn. I have a lot of problems with the game, but upon reflection, I think they break down to two large gripes.

The Good Bits

Before I devote a large amount of time to eviscerating every other aspect of this game, I’d like to take a moment to say some nice things about Grim Dawn. Don’t worry, it won’t be long, because there aren’t very many.

I like how the game can run without an internet connection. If the apocalypse happens and I happen to have Grim Dawn installed, I’d have a reason to kidnap people to run in a giant hamster wheel and charge my computer.

I like that the game has auto-pickup for certain types of loot, like currency and certain crafting items. Not having to click every time I want to grab something is nice.

Fundamental Problems

Grim Dawn has two fundamental problems as an ARPG. Every other issue I have with the game is either the result of these problems, or caused by them, and they are as follows:

  1. Movement is slow.
  2. Skills are fundamentally uninteresting.

Movement speed in Grim Dawn is really slow. Like, incredibly slow. One of the few really interesting items I found in my 11 hours was a pair of boots that gave 17% movement speed. They also had the downside that if you got hit, you lost 20% movement speed. I ended the game with a pair of drawback free 11% movement speed boots, and 6% buff. The end result is that the game feels incredibly slow.

This matters because of all the problems that spiral out of it. Every quest is a fetch or kill quest that requires you to go out, find something, and then teleport back home to turn it in, so you’re going to spend a lot of time walking around.

Also, in terms of finding things, the maps are large, confusing, and generally janky messes. Sometimes if you click somewhere, you will be autopathed to where you need to go! Sometimes, you will not.

A fully zoomed out view of Blood Groves.

Maps cannot be overlaid on top of the game screen unlike in many other ARPG’s, adding to the difficultly of exploration. Instead, you’ll have to constantly open the map and check your location, or leave it open the middle of screen.

Finally, the GUI isn’t modifiable. Meaning that if you play on an Ultrawide, some HUD elements like pet health will be the in VERY far corner of the screen, but the map can’t be moved around and will always sit dead center.

None of this would be as big a problem, though, if you could move faster than molasses.

There’s also one other thing that prevents fast movement. Unlike Path of Exile or Diablo 3, there are no skills that offer mobility or movement in the base game.

This brings us to the other big thing that Grim Dawn doesn’t have: fun skills.

I wanted to try to make a summoner build, as I usually play Necromancers in ARPG’s. I do this so I can live out my deepest, darkest fantasy: being in upper management. I come up with high level strategic objectives (murder people for loot) and delegate responsibilities to my HMZ (highly mobile zombies) to fulfill them.

So how did that work in Grim Dawn? Pretty unimpressively.

I got through Grim Dawn on Veteran Normal difficulty using a total of 7 skills. Skills 1-3 summoned pets, but only one pet each, so I would just cast them each time my other pets died. Skill 4 was an aura, so I would toggle it on and forget about it. Skill 5 was a temporary buff, that I would just activate every 30 seconds or so, and skill 6 was a small orb that did poison in an AOE. Skill 7 was a swarming dot/right click skill.

But for those who are counting, there are only 2 skills I would use actively: the poison orb, and the buff. And only one of those had to be aimed.

By the end of the game, my character was less entertaining and satisfying to play than pretty much any Dota 2 hero or any build I’ve done in PoE. The skills just felt bad.

This led to a bunch of my other problems. Trying to find specific key locations or waypoints when you have to slog through tons of bad combat is annoying. Every boss fight being the same “poke, walk away, poke” for 3 minutes is annoying and boring. Speaking of which: what’s up with every boss fight (except 2) just being a dude in armor?

Also, this is the first ARPG I’ve ever played where I was enviously looking at the NPC’s and going “Wow, that skill seems fun, or at least more useful. Wish I could use that!”

Some Other Nitpicks

These are all minor, and frankly, they’re all the sorts of things that I would overlook if I had fun with the game. But I didn’t, so let’s complain!

Nobody has ever enjoyed back tracking to turn in quests. Lost Ark solved this for ARPG’s, and the solution very simple. I pickup the quest in Area A, Go to Area B, and when I finish, I turn in at Area C, the area I’m going to next. Stop making me backtrack.

Also, the quests!

These were all the quests I had unfinished by the end of the game.

I think that Grim Dawn is trying to do a thing where you have to really read the dialogue of each quest, and then carefully do it. This would be interesting if quests were ever anything more than “Kill the Dude” or “Find The Obtusely Hidden Thing.” But it means that if you don’t remember exactly what that quest giver said, good luck. Also the rewards are pretty shit, and you can’t hide individual quests on the UI.

By the final 75% of the game, I just stopped picking them up all together, mostly because I didn’t care about these people or the story.

Which brings us to the story. I think the story of Grim Dawn is trying to be all spooky and grimdark. It mostly fails. There’s only so many times a poor survivor can be all “Please, find my family/pet/Jays” and then you get there and they’re killed/eaten/creased before I stop caring.

Also, there’s some sort of “Actions have consequences” system, but I want to stress something: I don’t know who gives a shit about actions/morality in an ARPG. Presumably the same person who thought I’d read all that quest text. Most ARPG players I know would kill every NPC in the starting zone for a 5% item quantity boost. 5% exp boost? You bet your ass I’m decking Deckard Cain.

The story is also unsatisfying! You start out fighting monster group A, and then it turns out that monster group B is also here, and you have to stop their evil plans. And then you fail, and have to kill their resurrected god instead. So you do, but then the world is still shit. PoE didn’t have the greatest story in the world, but at least after you completed the story mode, there was a single map where everyone throws a great big party. (Also, Kitava’s head goes in the middle of table like a gorey centerpiece, which I’ve always enjoyed.)

Also, the enemies are boring. There are like 5 of them, and most of the bosses are just dude in armor, or a tentacle thing. There’s a whole section near the end of the game where you find a bunch of ruined pre-industrial tank things that have been tipped over and destroyed. For a moment you’ll be like “Oh, are we gonna have to fight one of those? Are we gonna ride one of those?” No, no we’re not. They’re just there to build ambiance.

In Conclusion

Back when I played PoE, sometimes after grinding for several hours, or trying to power through the game’s campaign to get to the rest of the game, I would reach a sort of fugue state. I would get tired, drained, lose interest, and feel like my brain was melting out of my ears.

Grim Dawn managed to make feel like this before the first boss.

There were moments of amusement, or interest, but they were few and far between. And they were massively outweighed by the thoughts of “I could be playing PoE/D3/Don’t Die, Collect Loot instead of this.”

I am $12 poorer, and have 12 hours less life, but you dear reader need not make my mistake.

Grim Dawn is 50% off on Steam at time of writing, but you can save even more money by not buying it.

PS: It’s possible that some of the DLC solves the issues I have with this game. To which I say, if it makes the game not garbage, maybe just include it in the actual game.

Friend Vs Friends

I enjoy playing Friends Vs Friends. I don’t enjoy its progression structure for unlocks, and I will complain about that in a bit. One person I played with called it “Play-To-Win” which is very funny way of putting it, and also felt kind of accurate. But let’s start with the good stuff.

Genre1v1/2v2 FPS
Recommend? Y/NYes.
Price$10. Deluxe Ed $18. No IAP.
PlatformPC
Short VersionBest as a party game with friends. Progression systems are a bit annoying, but not a deal breaker.

Friends Vs Friends is a 1v1 and 2v2 first person shooter with a pleasant low-poly vibe. The goal is simple: kill the other player before they kill you to win a round. Win 3 rounds before they do to win the match.

So now it’s time for the twist.

Before a game, you build a deck of cards. Using a card can give you a weapon or other equipment, buff you, debuff an opponent, or other wild and weird things.

Perhaps most importantly for the purpose of strategy, unused cards carry over between rounds, and it’s possible to see which cards the opponent uses. So if they pop a powerful weapon, give me a big head, and slow on me on me at the start of the round, I might decide it’s not even worth committing resources to try to win that round. Instead I might pool up cards, then try to push through on a future one.

The end result is a really fun blend of moment to moment resource management, and FPS skill. Time to kill is fairly high overall, with most weapons requiring a large number of hits. This is important because it gives you the time you need to decide what cards to use.

The most fun I’ve had with Friends Vs Friends is playing it as a sort of party game with 3-4 friends who I talked into getting it. It’s relatively easy to set up a private game, invite folks, and then just jump into it. Running around, yelling at each other, trash talking, and calling every single round winning clutch is great.

But some parts are not as great. So let’s talk about them.

Progression and other complaints

Deckbuilding in Friends Vs Friends is reliant on collecting cards. You buy card packs with a in-game earned currency. There are two types of card packs: basic and rare. Rare packs cost twice as much as the basic ones, and it feels like you earn currency pretty slowly.

The frustrating thing about the cards is that they use what I’ve come to think of as the “Clash of Clans” model. That’s the one where duplicates don’t give you more copies of the card to work with, they just upgrade the existing card’s power level. Which is not very fun, because it means duplicates of a rare card (instead of feeling special and improving your deck a lot) just give you a like 3% boost.

But that’s not the real problem. The real problem is quests.

There are daily and weekly quests, because of course there are, and they give much larger amounts of EXP than just playing games. This would be fine, except for one thing.

You can’t complete these quests in games withfriends, or anything that isn’t random online matchmaking.

And the random online matchmaking, suffers from two really big issues. First of all, it’s very easy to just drop out of a match after a loss. So you can expect to see a lot of canceled rematches. This in turn means a fair amount of time spent waiting for the next match.

To be fair, I would also probably quit after losing a match to someone at progression level 100.

Secondly, it just isn’t quite as fun. The game is a lot more enjoyable with a group of friends shouting at each other over voice chat, and with the ability to make a fair set of 2v2’s by balancing teams.

But grinding online is the best way to unlock more cards and money to play with, and also the only way to unlock the in-game cosmetics.

So the weird end result is that the best way to play a game called Friends Vs Friends is, in fact, to not play it against your friends.

Overall

I like Friends Vs Friends. The gunplay is fun, and it feels fantastic as a group game. Unfortunately for my group of folks, it sort of got its lunch eaten by BattleBit in the FPS department. But we were having a good time with it before that.

It probably would have been better if the quests/progressions/unlocks didn’t work the way they did, or there was more capacity to really deckbuild. As it is, it’s fun, but the deckbuilding is never about building cool combos. Ultimately deckbuilding is just a “Stuff as much good stuff as you can” sort of vibe.

Overall thought, it’s good! I just wish there was a bit more to it, and some tweaks to a few systems because it could have been great.