A rant about Elden Ring, and the bits I don’t like very much.
I haven’t actually finished Elden Ring yet. When I do, I’ll probably do another writeup on the game. Right now, I’ve played about 70~ hours across various characters, and also a bit of the Seemless Co-Op Mod. My furthest character has about 44 hours on them, just around level 80.
I’m mentioning all of this to give a bit of context. Usually I don’t do writeups until one of three things happens: 1. I finish the game. 2. I quit the game with no intention to return. 3. The game doesn’t have an end/win condition, and is multiplayer, and I feel like I’ve played enough to give an opinion.
None of these situations are true for Elden Ring. I fully intend to complete the game, and despite bits feeling like bullshit, I haven’t quit. In addition, as the game is a single player RPG, it has an end. So why am I writing about it now?
Well, it’s mostly to get my thoughts into writing, and also provide a different opinion on the game than I see most places. The usual take seems to be that Elden Ring is a perfect masterpiece. I don’t think Elden Ring is bad, but I do think that the game feels uneven in tone, and while some parts of it are incredible, others… simply are not.
Bugs, frame drops, and crashes, oh my!
Let’s start with the easiest one to quantify. Performance, bugs, and crashes. On release, Elden Ring was plagued with a massive number of issues. After several performance patches, it is now only plagued with a large number of problems. Playing offline, the game still crashes a ridiculous amount. I was streaming my playthrough for a while. Quite a few of those streams ended when the game crashed, and I couldn’t be bothered to restart it.
If you’re wondering “How bad can it be?” here’s a horror story from a friend. He had beaten most of the game, and gotten to the gate instead of the final boss. He also recently had a kid, and decided to be a responsible parent, and do the last fight later. He went to bed, woke up the next, and found that whenever he tried to load his 60 hour save file, the game would instantly crash.
A patch did eventually fix this, but still.
Content Re-Use
When From Software makes games, they re-use assets from their previous games. This can include enemies, weapons, textures, what have you. And it’s fine, and not what I’m about to complain about here.
What I’m complaining about here is specifically the parts of the game that re-use the EXACT same boss fights. While I’ve generally tried to avoid spoilers, a large portion of the game focuses around reaching and taking down 5 larger enemies. Of these 5, four are incredible experiences, with incredible design and weight to them.
The 5th is a reskin/remix of an earlier boss in the game. It’s an incredible build-up for a massive let down.
And it’s not the only area guilty of this. There’s one mini-boss I’ve seen 3 times so far, and while the area you fight it in changes, it still feels fairly dull to reach the pinnacle of a brand new area, and see something you’ve found before. In general, I’d say the mid game area feels much weaker in this respect.
A Winding Circular Pattern
The last thing I want to quickly cover, because I’m not sure I’ll get to it in my actual Elden Ring writeup, is the general flow of the game. Having Elden Ring be open world is an interesting choice. On the one hand, it means that if you find yourself smashing your head into a wall, it’s possible to explore and find other objectives, or do something else.
On the other hand, it makes it much easier to get lost, or fail to find a particular location. The in-game map is beautiful and clever, but also not always the easiest to read. And when you do get stuck, it’s hard to tell if you need to Git Gud, or Git Going somewhere else.
The end result that my Elden Ring playthrough has a pattern to it:
Get to a new area.
Run into a hard boss, or be unclear on how to progress.
Explore more, trying to find a way to go forward.
Find more roadblocks.
Thrash around with multiple deaths to either hard boss, or roadblocks.
Get frustrated, and stop having fun.
Start trying random garbage, or run to random places.
Finally figure out a way forward, or a way to beat a boss.
Go back and clear areas/places from step 4.
Get to a new area.
This has happened to me about 4 times so far. But perhaps more importantly, Step 6 in this process can be a few hours long, and it’s incredibly non-enjoyable.
In Conclusion
Elden Ring is good. But I don’t like how the game seems to get near universal acclaim when there a quite a few spots that could be heavily improved. I’m willing to cut From Software some slack on things like their open world design, as it is their first open world game. But the incredibly poor technical performance, and boss-reuse? Not so much. This isn’t an inexperienced indie studio. Elden Ring is a synthesis of years of design and planning, and a literal synthesis in some cases of old ideas, and cut content from their previous games. It’s good, it’s worth playing, but it could be better.
I was going to title this post the “Good Stuff” post. It was going to be a nice big list of everything from the show that I liked, but hadn’t listed out yet.
Then I ran into a slight problem. See, that list was a grand total of one item long. I already covered most of the games from the show that I liked in the “Games From PAX With Demos you can play at home” post.
So instead, you get a super short post about Dome Keeper, the single remaining entry on that list. So I say to Dome Keeper: congrats! And please don’t disappoint me when you actually release.
Published by Raw Fury! Who also published Atomicrops, which I loved.
So what is Dome Keeper? Well, two things, sorta. It plays like a combo of Motherload, and Space Invaders. You are a small space person, living in your tiny little dome. You can leave the dome to dig down, and gather various minerals and ores, which you then drag back to your base and deposit. Different ores are used for different types of upgrades, which range from increasing the speed at which you move, your carrying capacity, and how quickly you dig. They can also be used to upgrade your dome. And you’re going to want to do that, because there’s a timer, and when it ticks down, your dome gets a attacked by a wave of monsters.
Of course, even if you clear that wave, the next wave will be stronger. So back into the mines you go to search for more minerals. Rinse, repeat.
The demo itself was a ton of fun, and the game is supposed to release later this year. The Steam page has it listed as a roguelike, so I’m curious to see how that gets implemented, and what other features the game has.
But like I said, the demo was fun. And really, that’s the most important thing. So cross your fingers with me, and let’s hope it’s good.
Dungeon Defenders going rogue is undercooked and unfinished, don’t buy it.
Let me save you some time and money. Don’t buy Dungeon Defenders: Going Rogue. If you want to close this article now, or perhaps just read about a better Roguelike, or a better Tower Defense game, that’s fine.
I’m writing the rest of this article because posting a writeup that’s just one paragraph long is rude. Also, spite, because I spent $15 on this junk.
Dungeon Defenders: Going Rogue wants to be a combo tower defense game and roguelike. It’s also technically an entry in the Dungeon Defenders series. (More on the franchise’s weird history later.) If you’ve never played a Dungeon Defenders game, they were 3D tower defense games with action combat, and fairly heavy leveling/progression systems.
Dungeon Defenders: Going Rogue, is not quite that. Here’s how the traditional loop of a Dungeon Defenders game worked: you’d pick a map to run, and a difficulty for that map. A map consists of a series of waves of enemies to fight, and potentially some form of boss at the end. Killing enemies drops mana, and you use mana to build and upgrade towers. Enemies can also drop loot, items you can equip, and whatnot. If you get to the end of the map, you unlock more maps and challenges, and if you fail, you keep the loot you had so far, but you have to start over.
All this is combined with having a permanent character, from one of the game’s classes, who you level up and such, also with mana.
Dungeon Defenders: Going Rogue tries to take that formula, and turn it into a roguelike, but it just doesn’t do that very well.
Let’s quickly get mechanics out of the way. Like standard Dungeon Defenders, you have a hero, and you have the same sort of abilities. These abilities vary from class to class, but generally have a pattern. Each class has a basic attack, a secondary attack, a nuke, an activatable overcharge, and two tower slots. Unlike towers in normal Dungeon Defenders, these towers have time to live, and die once the the timer empties. But the cooldown to place a tower is far higher than the time a tower actually stays alive, so in practice, you can only ever have two towers up for a short amount of time. In an ostensible tower defense game, this is a bit strange.
The biggest issue I have with Going Rogue is that as a roguelike, it’s incredibly boring. A good roguelike offers a high skill ceiling for mechanical mastery (Dead Cells, Enter the Gungeon, Nuclear Throne), informational mastery (Slay the Spire, Inscryption), or preferably a combination of both (Binding of Issac, Spelunky). If your game is going to be based around playing effectively the same thing over and over, playing needs to feel rewarding, and runs need to feel different. A weaker player should have good runs where they can feel like they’re succeeding even if they don’t know everything, and a strong player should be able to salvage even bad runs.
But even if you disagree with my definition of what makes a roguelike good, I think you’ll agree that being boring is exceptionally bad in a roguelike. Every run cannot just feel the same. And that’s the issue with Going Rogue.
The way the game handles abilities and power growth is underwhelming. After you clear a level, you open a treasure chest, and the chest has a few random items in it. One of these are the game’s runes, which seem to be intended to function as value pickups. Ultimately, I find them mostly worthless, because there’s virtually never a reason to not pick them up, and they give uninteresting stat buffs, such as 5% health, or 10% movement speed. They’re numerically boring stat sticks. And most of the time you don’t even get to choose which ones you’re getting.
At end of 3 waves, when you clear a map, you get a slightly bigger chest with a special rune drop that lets you choose between 3 different runes. The problem is that the very generic runes mentioned before are still in the pool, and it’s entirely possible to roll the same one twice as one of your choices.
The weapons, trinkets, and towers suffer from a similar but slightly different issue. As a run progresses, better towers/weapons/trinkets drop from the end of level chest. And because they’re almost always net better, there’s virtually never a situation where you’d choose to keep your current item, even if it has interesting stats, over an item with more damage. Get a cool tower early on? Too bad, by the time you’re in the 3rd zone, it’ll have 1/5th of the DPS of any random trash that pops out from your end of level chest.
The end result is a system where you can’t construct a build. You can only pick up bigger numbers, and hope they’re big enough.
Perhaps this could all be ignored if combat felt good, but it doesn’t. It’s a weightless affair, where you swipe at enemies until their health bar empties, and they fall over and die. Particle effects and animations are unimpressive, and feel like greybox assets. There’s not an ounce of mechanical mastery required, and the fact that abilities have virtually no synergy does the game no favors either.
But that’s all subjective. Maybe I have bad taste. But regardless of my taste, the game is buggy. In five hours of playing, here are a few highlights of what I encountered:
Random disconnection from multiplayer for no reason, killing the run.
Items dropping with a description of “ITEM TEXT GOES HERE”, no stats, and a sell value of 9999.
Items all dropping with the exact same stats, instead of having random rolls.
So that’s Dungeon Defenders: Going Rogue. A unpolished, unfinished mess. A brawler with poor combat, a tower defense game with no towers, and a roguelike with no power progression. If you took your money, and set it on fire, you’d get more value. This is because while the money would be gone, at least you wouldn’t have wasted any time playing the game.
Ed Note. So, Dungeon Defenders as a series has a bit of weird history. There was Dungeon Defenders, then a shit ton of DLC, then Dungeon Defenders 2, and presumably even more DLC. At some point, the company making it sorta shut down, then someone else bought the rights/reformed the company? I’m not 100% clear. In any case, the folks who bought the rights again wanted to make a new Dungeon Defenders game. They didn’t have any money though, so they made Dungeon Defenders Awakened. It was mediocre. Then they made Dungeon Defenders Eternity which… no longer exists. And now they’ve made Dungeon Defenders: Going Rogue, which isn’t worth playing.
Ed Note 2: If for some reason you want to see actual gameplay, why not watch me play it with a friend here?
A while back, I wrote a post on Satisfactory. However, I don’t think it was particularly satisfactory, haha, I’m so clever, wordplay. Okay, that’s out of my system. Anyway. I’m not super happy with how it came out. So I’m gonna give this a second shot, because Satisfactory deserves a more focused review.
What type of game is Satisfactory?
One of the things I’m the most unhappy with in the last article I did on this game is how I actually described Satisfactory, because I really didn’t. I think at least part of this is because Satisfactory doesn’t quite fit into any video game genres particularly well. While you could call a Automation game, or maybe a sim, it’s not really a sim of anything, and most of the elements in the game aren’t particularly… sim-esque. (For who does think Satisfactory is a Sim, please go run 3000 MW through 3 inches of cabling, over several miles, and let me know how well that experience matches up with doing the same in Satisfactory.)
Instead, I think Satisfactory might be closer to a genre of board game, the engine builder. Engine builders as a genre are mostly about building sets of systems to take actions and produce resources, all of which ultimately get turned into victory points. Most board games with this system have some sort of win-lose condition, but this isn’t present in Satisfactory.
But Satisfactory does have a lot of what I’d consider to be the hallmarks of engine builders. There are a variety of resources, and you turn them into other resources. As you progress, you get access to both new types of equipment, and more powerful/faster versions of the equipment you already had. This access is gated by having your current setup produce certain thresholds of resources.
Why is it good?
Regardless of what genre you want to put the game in, Satisfactory can be really good. The animations and models are incredibly polished*, the gameplay is smooth and satisfying*, watching conveyer belts spin up is enjoyable*, and I really like the semi-parallel tech trees.
*If you’re wondering what that asterisk is for: Don’t worry, we’ll get to that in a bit.
Lets talk about those tech trees for a moment, because unlocking them serves as both a combination of progression and tutorial. We’re mostly going to focus on the Tier progression tree here. There are several other systems in place that also unlock building items and craftable items, but they’re mostly sidegrades/semi-optional. Except for the ladder. I have no idea why the ladder is in the coupon machine.
Here’s how tier progression works. There are 8 tiers of research, and within those tiers, there are research goals. Once you unlock a tier, you usually unlock a few new structure types, the ability to see what unlocking the next tier will require, and the list of research goals.
As an example: I can work on unlocking improved logistics, or a jetpack, but neither of those will progress me to Tier 7-8.
At any given point in time, making progress on a tech tree is your general goal, usually requiring you to craft somewhere between 50-1000 of various different parts.
But the main gameplay of Satisfactory is building. And everything around the building is mostly designed to make it easy. For example, if you disassemble a structure, you get all the resources it took to build back.
It’s also fairly easy to switch between what you’re building, and you can look almost everything up in the in-game Codex. That’s right. No longer do you have to have a fandom Wikipedia page that consists of 95% advertisements and 5% the recipe for wood logs.
At the same time, the buildings themselves are fairly flexible in how they can be placed. You can run conveyer belts through each other, and also across things that you maybe shouldn’t be able to.
Look, the highest praise I can give Satisfactory is that each time I try to think of nice things to say about, I go boot the game up, play for 6+ hours straight, then go do something else because I’ve completely lost my train of thought. There’s a constant feeling of success and progress, even if you mess things up a bit.
Okay, nice things over. Lets talk about the somewhat… unpolished parts of Satisfactory.
The elephant in the room.
If I had been forced to guess how long Satisfactory had been out, prior to actually knowing the numbers, I would have gone somewhere between half a years, to maybe just sneaking up on two years. There are two reasons for this, the first being the combat, and the second being the multiplayer performance, and bugs. Let’s talk about the combat first.
If the combat in your game makes me LONG for Minecraft’s combat system, you’ve done something horribly wrong. Satisfactory has a combat system, but I’m honestly not sure why. From what I can tell, there are three or so types of enemies, all of which have larger more “Dangerous” versions of themselves. The dangerous is in quotes because every single enemy in the game can be dealt with in loosely the same way: Kite it behind something, and then hit it until it dies. Assuming you’ve unlocked one of the games two ranged weapons, you have the alternate option of “Stand far away and shoot it until it dies”. Lets actually talk about those weapons for a moment, because they’re awful. The entire weaponry array of Satisfactory consists of the pokey stick, the pokey stick that does more damage, a modified nail gun (which is the only one that comes anywhere close to fun to use) and the worlds most unsatisfying rifle.
Special shoutout to the rifle here as being the most joyless gun, both across real life and games that I have ever encountered. It both eats through ammo, which is a massive pain in the ass to make, has a laughably small clip size of 10 shots, and has absolutely no feedback/tracers/anything to make it clear if you’re actually hitting your target, or if shots are flying freely though the wind, and for all of that effort, it doesn’t seem to even kill things very well.
I can’t tell what the goal is here to be honest. If combat is supposed to be anemic to make us focus on building and other mechanics, why does every single resource node past a certain point have several of the higher tier enemies, who despite being dumb as bricks, also hit like a stack of them, and will force you to salty runback to where you dropped all of your stuff. If the combat and unlocks related to it are supposed to be meaningful, why do they all suck so much? It’s clear the devs already understand how to create gated zones with things like the hazmat suit and gas mask. That sort of thing is much more similar to the sort of game Satisfactory feels like it is, with the unlocks of various tools and equipment and options to make building more efficient and easier.
The thing is though, as much as I loathe the combat, it is vestigial. An annoyance when it shows up and rears it’s ugly head, but it can be ignored a good 95% of the time. The next big problem I have with the game can’t be.
Satisfactory, much like Minecraft, isn’t a game I would ever really play single player. This is because both games are about making things, and the purpose of making things, at least for me, is to show them to other people, and to see the things other people make. It also massively cuts down the labor needed, because while you’re working on optimizing iron production, your friend can be setting up a full oil refinery. I personally find exploring the world tedious, but some of the folks I was playing with enjoy it. Where there are required tasks that one person might enjoy, others like them.
All of which would be cool if multiplayer wasn’t quite as shit as it is.
“Bugginess/Stability” is kind of a weird metric. For me, the impact a bug has on my experience comes down to pretty much two factors (1) How often does the bug occur? and (2) What happens when it does? Something like Skyrim has a lot of bugs, but from what I’ve seen, they’re usually more immersion breaking then they are save file shredding. In my playthrough of Elden Ring, bugs themselves are fairly rare, but when they do occur, the game fucking crashes, and in a game where closing the game without saving is death, and death means losing all your experience points/currency if you aren’t able to get to where you dropped it, this is substantially more aggravating. I had one friend whose entire save file was corrupted and effectively died outside the door to the final boss, after 63 hours. A patch fixed that issue, and he was able to complete the game, but that’s the sort of thing that leads to an uninstall.
There are two bugs I’d like to talk about with Satisfactory multiplayer. The first is incredibly specific and straightforward: When you log into a multiplayer game, if you’re not the host, or if you’re playing on a Dedicated Server, there’s a pretty good chance you will show up with exactly nothing in your inventory. As a result, you’ll have to spend a fair amount of time running around and trying to resupply/reequip potentially each time you log in. Disconnecting and reconnecting won’t solve it, and there’s no easy fix. When I looked up this bug, I found bug reports and discussions to it that date back several yearsago.
The second set of bugs are a set of bugs I’m just going to refer to as “Desync” bugs.
While I’m not a game developer, I do have a technical background, and enough knowledge to make a guess as to what I think is likely occurring to cause these bugs, and why I’m specifically calling them desync bugs. First, a brief and somewhat inaccurate crash course in one way multiplayer games work. You have a server. The server is the sole source of truth for information about the games state. Then you have clients. Clients send information about what the player is doing to the server, and the server sends world state information back to the player. Because moving things, even across the internet can only go so fast, many game clients use various tricks to make things look instantaneous, or have the game client attempt to predict what will happen in order to give a smoother experience. When the client and server can’t talk to each other fast enough, for any number of reasons, you get latency, AKA lag, AKA the server is delayed in processing client inputs and sending the client information. I’m pretty sure these bugs aren’t lag, because they happened to me almost non-stop even while running the game on the same machine I was running my dedicated server one.
Instead, there’s a second type of problem that can occur. Usually, the game server tries to send only information that the client actually needs. If the system is well designed, this will be information that is relevant to the player. If the system is not well designed, it might not do that quite as fast, or it might not refresh certain information at the rate that might be desirable. For example, loading in that the player has walked directly into a cloud of poison gas.
And because the server is the sole source of truth, the client can send instructions that directs the player into situations where they take damage on the server, before the client receives that information. To the player, it seems like they died to nothing, because the state that the server was in did not match the state of their client. This is desync.
And it is fucking everywhere in Satisfactory. Sometimes its just annoying, such as with how every single conveyer belt in the game displays what it’s moving inaccurately, and how trying to grab things off them is a complete crapshoot.
And sometimes it will just fucking kill you, because you walked into the aforementioned poison gas. Or alien bees. Or radiation. Or a pack of angry spiders. You can see where I’m going with this.
Bugs are not inherently a reason to rip on a game. They can be a reason to avoid the game until it patches, like I’d currently suggest with Elden Ring, they can be a amusing nuisance like with Skyrim. But in the case Satisfactory multiplayer, they are a massive pain in the ass that actively interferes with the games gameplay loops and feel, and many of these issues have remained unfixed for years at this point. One friend who I had played with was shocked at how little had changed since the last time he’d played the game, about 3 years ago.
Early Access isn’t an excuse to ignore multiplayer performance, and frankly, there’s zero evidence that server performance will ever be fixed. They’ve had 5 years to do it, and they haven’t. I don’t see why I should believe they’ll do it in the next 5.
TLDR/Wrap-up
As a single player game, it’s an incredibly satisfying engine building/factory construction game of optimization and improvement, with a vestigial combat system, and some unimplemented features. As a multiplayer game, it’s all that, but with some exceedingly aggravating bugs that offset much of the games polish and design, in exchange for being able to untouched wilderness into a something resembling if MC Escher was tapped to design an Amazon warehouse with your friends, and the fun you’ll have is directly proportional to how long you can all go as a group before one of you snaps and quits to go back to a game that doesn’t wipe your inventory every time you try to log in. If this interests you, it’s out for PC on both Steam and the Epic Store at $30 a pop.
I mentioned in another post-PAX writeup how I’m hesitant to recommend boomer shooters based off demos. This is because boomer shooters almost always demo well, even if the final product is subpar.
Well, this week, we’re talking about another genre that almost always demos/plays well at a convention: The party game!
Combine the excitement of being at a con with anything competitive, and a large number of people to play with, and just about everything can be fun for a bit. So here are the party games I saw at PAX East.
Starting with…
This image does not do a good job of capturing gameplay mechanics.
From what I played, Orbitals felt like a Smash Bros style 2d party brawler. The game had two mechanical twists though. The first is that the whole thing takes place in a gravity free area. You have to move from area to area Super Mario Galaxy style. The second is that after each round, you get points to spend to upgrade your character.
When I played, I found the gameplay a bit floaty. I couldn’t tell if that was just because it was my first time playing. The gameplay seems interesting, and Orbitals is on my watch list because of that. If you want to find out more about the game, click here.
Next up:
I guess this one does slightly more?
Match Point by Jolly Crouton is effectively multiplayer super Pong. It supports up to 4 players. Unlike Pong, you have a few other abilities then just bumping into the ball. By pressing certain triggers, you can magnetize yourself to pull the ball in, or do harder shots. Also, the goal requires you to hit it twice in semi-quick succession to score.
After reading my notes, I have written down that I thought it was “Fine” and “Not really my thing”. Also “Good Party Game???”. I think those notes are pretty accurate. It’s well made, but it’s still mostly Pong. I think it might be fun with the right crowd. But if it seems like your thing, you can learn more about it here.
Which brings us to our last entrant…
Finally, someone made a header image where the image is from the game!
Squish is fairly straight forward. It’s a survival versus game for up to 4 players. You play as a small blob skeleton, and try to be the last one standing while blocks constantly fall down onto the field. You can push this around, but if you get crushed by one, you die. Get killed, and you’re given one last chance to control a falling block. Take out another player with that block and you’re back into the game.
Squish feels like a extended release of a Mario Party minigame if I’m being honest. I don’t dislike it, but it wasn’t amazing. The full game does promise more modes, which might change things up a bit. If you want to find out more, you can click here. It actually has a scheduled release date of May 31st, so pretty soon!
And those were all the party games I played at PAX East. Like I mentioned before, it’s a genre that does well at conventions, and always makes me pause for a bit. My personal favorite was Orbitals, for both having the most potential and being the most interesting.
In either case, join us next week as I attempt to keep writing these summaries because I played a ton of stuff! Not sure what the theme will be then, but I’ll figure it out.
