NEO Scavenger preview

I have recently had the pleasure of being able to play the indie game NEO Scavenger. Set in a post-apocalyptic earth where some sort of global disaster has plunged the world back into the dark ages, ruined cities litter the landscape, horrific monsters roam the surface and the remaining humans live as nomadic bandits or cling together in urban fortresses. The game has a permadeath system, meaning that if you die your saves get instantly deleted, and with the unrelenting difficulty of this survival simulator that's going to happen quite a lot.

First Impressions Count

"You wake up disoriented, slumped over the base of an empty cryosleep pod, still damp from cryo fluid. The thick dust from the floor clings to your skin, leaving a clean spot on the ground, where a large 05 is painted.

Across the room, there is an open door to the hallway, and a broken window leading outside.

Just as you gather your wits, an unearthly scream erupts from down the hall beyond the doorway. Something is coming. Fast"

The game then gives you a choice to make, based on the traits you select in character creation. Do I dive out of the window? Should I hide in the corner? Or is attempting to fight off whatever is approaching the best idea? This introduction to the game really reflects the choices given throughout the rest of that game, but more on that later.

The Big Wide World

The world in NEO Scavenger is what you would expect from a post apocalypse, ruined cities, destroyed towns and natural growths cover the landscape. The world map is handled in hexes much like civilization 5, and movement and actions are turn based. For every playthrough the world is randomly generated, assuring a fresh experience every time you die. which will be often. There are many locations that can be scavenged for items, of course items are not the only thing you could stumble across, you can choose to scavenge in a number of ways, for example using your strength, hiding skills or a crowbar, these choices affect your looting, safety, and stealth levels, meaning that if you decided to strength loot somewhere with a crowbar more than likely someone will hear you and attack.

Fisticuffs

This brings us neatly on to the combat segments of the game. Combat works very much like a roguelike, you pick an option from a number of choices, the game calculates what damage you did to where, and on the surface it seems very simple. In fact the combat manages to be very dynamic, there is a large number of combat options but not all of them are available at any one time and there is a numerical distance system, stealth system, and stance system worked in too. You can even threaten enemies with your weapon to scare them off! However like a lot of roguelikes battles can leave you with long lasting wounds, which means that every battle is a hard choice to make, is this guy worth the loot? or should I run away and hide in the woods? This game offers choice at every turn, and its stuff that actually matters gameplay wise. Just winning the fight isn't the end of it though.

Patch Me Up, Doc

NEO scavenger boasts a rather in depth wound system in comparison to most other games, limbs can be crippled, wounds must be bandaged and the amount of pain the character is in actually affects the actions they can take. If a wound is not treated properly infections can occur, which require you to find antibiotics and hope for the best, to avoid this a clean rag is required, which is hard to come by in the post apocalypse. Due to the long term ramifications of wounds, a lot of thought has to go into everything potentially risky in the game, even in scavenging a building floors can collapse and give you a nasty cut that could end up being the death of you. Your character also has needs that need to be tended to, a sleepy overburdened thirsty survivor is hardly going to last long out in the wilderness.

Items, A Survivors Best Friend

Naturally a game like this has a lot of items, and being in a beta state even more are to come. The inventory in NEO Scavenger is handled very realistically, with backpacks being used to contain a finite number of items arranged into a grid, items can be rotated to optimize space usage, similar to games like Resident Evil 4. Items of clothing have item slots in them too, like pockets in hoodies or jeans. small plastic bags can also be found which adds believably to the game world. There is also a crafting system which adds to the survival elements of the game, meaning that you don't always have to scavenge everything you need and can just instead make do with what you have

And Of Course, The Graphics

The graphics are a pretty standard affair for an indie game, high quality pixel art is the name of the game here. The pixel art for characters is what you wold expect, however occasionally events happen that have their own special pixelart, which is honestly astounding. From a distance these scenes can look like photographs, but on closer examination you can clearly see that a lot of work has gone into them, take this for example:

Its a very high quality rendering, and really helps drive the imagination of the player.

You can check out NEO scavenger for yourself at Hereand back the steam greenlight at Here. I would really recommend that you check this game out, its very good and from a clearly passionate developer.

Core Online - full HD browser based games?

Square Enix recently launched a new service named "Core Online" with the promise of full HD games in your web browser for free, seems too good to be true right? Suprisingly enough they managed to deliver, unlike the similar service Onlive the game itself is rendered on the local PC with all the required data being downloaded between levels, this means that if you can cope with a long load screen you don't need a super high speed connection like with Onlive, and that there will be no problems with input lag. This of course does have its drawbacks, because your PC is rendering it you have to have a fairly good PC to be able to run some games, which begs the question of who is this service intended for? Presumably for network optimization purposes all of the important graphics options are unavailable for tweaking which means that low end PCs will not be able to run the games very well if it all, and if you have a meaty PC more than likely you can just buy the games and download them, instead of in the browser for free.

Currently the only games it has are "Hitman: blood Money" and "Mini Ninjas" with more to come in the future. They manage to keep these free by having the player watch adverts to "earn" game time the game time earned is based on the length of the advert, with roughly one minute advert time being 20 minutes gaming time or you can purchase the game or levels and remove ads. The ratio seems intentionally non intrusive which I quite like, I'm not sure how this kind of approach could potentially affect the future of gaming, in its current state its a harmless alternative to purchasing games, but its definitely one to watch out for.

Check it out at http://beta.coreonline.com/ .Personally i'll just stick to the old fashioned way

Max Payne 3 - Game balance and DLC

At the time of writing this article Max Payne 3 has 1135 players currently using the online matchmaking service, which considering halo 3 currently has 18133, is somewhat pathetic for a multiplayer game wants to push its paid DLC upon consumers, especially with Halo 3’s age.

I personally think that the reason behind this abysmal player count is that absolutely horrendous multiplayer balancing, they completely buggered up in multiple aspects of the balance that combine together to make this even less balanced than MW2 on launch, a feat that is by no means easy.

First up is the peculiar take on the class system they took, not only on levelling up do you unlock new guns, gear, and bursts but you also occasionally unlock a higher carrying capacity for these things, changing how much you can carry before being classified into light, medium and heavy. These groupings determine your health and stamina regeneration, meaning that higher ranked people can carry the exact same as a lower ranker but be able to run faster, and survive longer, or in a lot of cases it means that they can just straight up carry more firepower without any sort detrimental effect to them, which completely screws the balance in itself, but that’s not all that’s broken.

Copyright Rockstar Games

The guns themselves. The guns unlock for purchase at level milestones like 10, 20 and 40 where a load of guns become available for purchase, meaning that between these levels apart from weapon attachments you will receive no significant firepower increase, unlike other games where you unlock things gradually, this lack of firepower means that someone at level 19 will be significantly less powerful than somebody at level 20, this is not helped at all by the complete lack of the weapon balance between these landmark levels. The weapons in the next unlockable tier are practically direct upgrades of the previous ones, and not small upgrades like other games, the upgrades are huge, especially in the gap between 10 and 20. You could argue that they are not upgrades because they weigh more, but the weight system completely destroys any potential balance here.

This coupled with the weight imbalance means that scenarios can and will arise where an extremely powerful semi-automatic sniper can one hit kill low levelled players because they simply cannot wear armour as well as carry semi decent weaponry and retain a bearable running speed and health regen rate, causing many one sided stomps to occur.

This then causes new players to leave the multiplayer aspect of the game to stagnate while they play better balanced games instead, with this kind of small playerbase making DLC that costs real money is pointless, the amount of users that would be interested in purchasing it is low enough as it is, and many of them may have noticed that the userbase is dying, and that the DLC would be a waste of money for them, it appears that rockstar are aware of this problem by changing the upcoming DLC from paid to free to coax players back in to the game, but sadly the balance is screwed so badly that it’s pretty much unsalvageable without a complete rework of the system which just isn’t feasible. Rockstar should quit after these planned DLC packs and reassign the employees to something not so pointless, I would say they should just quit now but that’s the problem they get into when they offer a “Season Pass” style offer.

Map Packs are cancerous anyway

Dark Souls - Why the storytelling is a step forward

Dark Souls,  a game which in my opinion is possibly one of the best games In recent years and one that me and no doubt many other people have spent far too many hours playing. One thing that stood out in particular to me though was the storytelling techniques that From Software decided to employ.

Instead of being fed the story in the form of cutscenes or excessively long explanatory dialogue like most modern titles Dark Souls instead keeps this to a minimum. In total a single playthrough of dark souls has two cutscenes that contribute to the story, one at the beginning and one at the end, this of course doesn’t include the cutscenes that don’t contribute in any way to the storytelling, like for example at the beginning of a boss battle, or transitioning between areas. Instead the story is told mainly through minimalistic dialogue, the environment, and item descriptions. This results in the player having to go out of their way to investigate and fully experience the story, resulting in immersion and making the storytelling elements far more interactive than any other game around right now.

The environment could even be compared to some classic movies (albeit a longer and significantly harder movie) where a lot of important information is contained within the subtext, never stated nor denied, forcing the player to observe the surroundings and speculate themselves about the implications of what they are seeing, this is why there is still discussion about the subtext of classic movies, and also why there is a lot of debate and discussion online about the dark souls story

This non-intrusive method also does wonders for the replay value of the game, one of my main gripes with Max Payne 3 and many other games is that the practically unskippable cutscenes make replaying the game a complete pain in the ass and only serves to distract from the gameplay.

However this approach to storytelling does cause some problems, modern gamers are so used to stories being spoonfed to them that a radical approach like this can leave some people with the impression that there isn’t a story and that the game sucks because of it, which is simply not the case.

Overall I think that this way of doing things has a lot of potential and just needs a little tweaking and experimentation to be fully accepted by gaming as a whole.

Welcome to EntryNode

Welcome to EntryNode, my intention with this blog is to write reviews, insights, and comments about gaming and the culture it has spawned. I want them to be as thought out and well written as possible, but criticism is always welcomed.

After all if I refuse to improve I'll be just as bad as Kotaku or IGN