What Games Have You Completed? (2020 Edition)

Life is Strange season 2
The Outer Worlds
Far Cry: New Dawn
Goat Simulator
A Plague Tale: Innocence
Until Dawn
Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag
Assassin’s Creed 4: Freedom Cry DLC
Control
One Night Stand
The Division 2
Batman
Star Wars, Jedi: Fallen Order
Assassin's Creed II (Ezio Collection)
Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom
Batman: The Enemy Within
Battlefield V
MediEvil PS4 remake


Life is Strange: Before the Storm. Completed and platinumed. Why did this get so much hate? The first episode alone is better than the entirety of season 2. I initially avoided this having been salty over the ending of episode 5 in the first season… and also because it seemed like a shameless cashgrab. Pleasantly surprised.

No, it’s not as good as season 1 because it does not have the time travel that made the gameplay so great or the mystery that made sure every collectible was vital even when they weren’t, but Chloe is still an amazing, tragic character and the Life is Strange universe is still fun to exist in. It’s one of those worlds where you’ll wish the characters were real lol. I just love everything about Arcadia Bay even in this condensed, low budget form. Felt like coming home.

Only gripe is that it has one of those endings where most of the choices that matter are the ones made in the final episode rather than all the episodes prior to it. That being said it’s the journey that matters, as corny as that sounds.

The farewell episode features a 12 year old Max and Chloe reliving a fantasy dreamed up by their 5 year olds selves, and thus highlights that nostalgia has very little to do with genuinely missing the way things were but more to do with the fear of the future. Max’s time travel ability tied in beautifully with her Peter Pan syndrome. This is what Life is Strange season 2 was missing - an actual theme, not just torture porn and blunt political references. I would say you have to play Before the Storm if you loved season 1, or at least the farewell episode.

(Also, managed to platinum COD: Advance Warfare after finding a workaround an annoying bug. Rather anti climactic but a win is a win. :rolleyes:)

Life is Strange season 2
The Outer Worlds
Far Cry: New Dawn
Goat Simulator
A Plague Tale: Innocence
Until Dawn
Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag
Assassin’s Creed 4: Freedom Cry DLC
Control
One Night Stand
The Division 2
Batman
Star Wars, Jedi: Fallen Order
Assassin's Creed II (Ezio Collection)
Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom
Batman: The Enemy Within
Battlefield V
MediEvil PS4 remake
Life is Strange: Before the Storm

Fallout 76. Completed and platinumed. There is something relaxing about wandering the wasteland and making discoveries in the environment. When I grew tired of doing that I could dip into the Wastelanders DLC for more stimulating story content.

Without looking at trophies, it’s actually very difficult to know where vanilla 76 ends and Wastelanders begins because Bethesda did an excellent job of seamlessly integrating the DLC into the main game. It’s shocking to see how much they’ve added and it’s hard to imagine the game without it. With even more story DLC 76 will surely improve but, that said, even if Bethesda added 20 Wastelander-like DLCs it will never reach the quality levels of previous entries in the series because, at it’s core, Fallout 76 was not made to accommodate it.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the reputation system with the new factions. Rather than making your reputation have any meaningful consequences for the story it has, instead, a comically grindy rep meter that serves no purpose other than to push you into doing daily quests for ‘treasury notes' that you can exchange for gold which in turn you can exchange for better gear. When you hit max friendship with a faction you get a special reward. That’s it. And it is with the reputation system that really exposes Wastelanders as yet just another vehicle for the online loot elements, an excuse for more ‘endgame’ content, another reason to grind because this game is DESPERATE for your time and will do anything to keep you playing it, no matter what.

Side note: the creatures in Appalachia are lore breaking, not remotely believable, looking absolutely ridiculous and out of place. It was my understanding that non-human Fallout enemies were simply real world animals mutated by radiation. The new enemy types here border on fantasy. No amount of story DLC is going to validate their presence, try as it might.

There are other areas where the game being online directly compromises the potential of Wastelanders such as an inability to kill some NPCs, the fact that allied NPCs cannot run with you in free roam, being able to steal items from NPCs and wallop them around the head without any reaction etc

Then there's the fact that Fallout just does not work as an online game in general, and by being online all it does is expose the flaws. The shooting, for instance, has always been bad but VATS hid it. In real time, VATS percentages can flip on a dime so it’s pointless to use for anything other than a makeshift lock-on. Outside of it you realise that the enemy A.I. is too erratic for a shooter.

Worst of all, the sacrifices made to make it online were not worth it because the online elements are poor. You notice it less while main quest lines are active but the moment they end and you look to endgame content you realise there’s barely anything to do. The events and daily missions are boring, repetitive and reward very little XP or decent weapons. The daily missions in particular are also too short to make it worth doing in a group.

I can’t imagine how you'd play quests in a group - nobody is going to wait for you to read terminal logs unless you, perhaps, read it out loud. That is, if your teammates are even interested in hearing it. That’s the thing - everyone has different playstyles. I like to explore every nook and cranny in a building whereas another player may just like to do only what is essential to the mission. On top of that, the levelling is so unequal that a level 9 player can encounter a room full of level 68s during a quest if a higher-level player just so happened to be in the area first. The only way to fix this is to server hop. Bad.

This is also definitely the hardest Fallout and that’s not a problem in itself but the difficulty ties directly into it being an online co-op adventure. Enemies are scaled for a group regardless of whether you play solo or not so they are spongey. It’s still fun to make powerful builds but you have to significantly outscale lower level enemies to one shot them now.

The XP accumulation is stingy too, once again, in order to keep you playing forever (the level 100 trophy is literally called ‘Fallout Forever’). The double XP events feel like the way the XP system should be and if it weren’t for the most recent double XP weekend I would have never got the platinum. No way was I going to grind for 100 with the crappy online stuff alone.

Obviously checkpoints are more frequent now so you can sprint into an area, grab the item, get killed and then respawn at the same location with the item you need and be on your merry way. On the other hand there’s no take backsies for failure or bad choices, you’ll have to roll with the punches. I actually kind of liked that you only get one shot at making the right choice but other players might think that’s not fair.

Speaking of other players, Bethesda has fostered a really lovely community that is inclined to help others. People are friendly and supportive in events and willing to trade and drop items for others. Often I was relieved to see other players in free roam, as they were proof of signs of life in this otherwise empty world. Being able to sell weapons is incredibly rewarding, especially when players thank you (via emotes) for supplying them with a great weapon.

So yeah, as an online game it (mostly) sucks but other players make it somewhat redeemable in that area and you can largely bypass the events and daily quests anyway. What is not really forgivable though are the survival systems which take what would be an otherwise solid 7.5/10 and drags it right down to 6/10:

They’ve brought back weapon degradation, pretty much the worst thing about Fallout 3, for no good reason! On top of that, they’ve introduced disease, hunger and thirst meters. Who asked for this? Seriously, who? WHO?! You have to take so much time out to babysit your character, making sure he or she is well fed and weapons are repaired that it’s exhausting. Oh, and there’s a bottle cap fee for fast travel now so you could be stranded while your objective is all the way on the other side of the map, forcing you to explore the surrounding areas. And I don't recall weight limit being as intrusive as it is here. Even with my 'strength' maxed out I was constantly overburdened because they added weight to everything.

However, I have to put some asterisks here because my frustration with these survival systems may have more to do with me not understanding, initially, what this game was going for. This NOT an online RPG, it’s a survival shooter. That means, it’s not really about how much damage you do versus how much you take or how different choices affect how you play the game. It’s more about whether you have what you need to make it through by the skin of your teeth.

I’m on my second character which I’m enjoying way more than the first because the perks I have equipped directly tie into survival, e.g. controlling my thirst and hunger meter, how quickly things in my inventory spoil or break, how likely I am to find chems and food. I’m less focused now on my “build” and more about doing whatever it takes to survive and consequently I haven’t died once on my new playthrough. When you play the game like that you can kind of see what Bethesda was going for.

But then… they go and ruin the best thing about Fallout 4 - which was the base building - by requiring plans to construct every. piece. of. furniture. Even plans for items like a couch are rare, you have to farm for them lol. To be clear, base building is NOT cosmetic. As well as providing you with crafting stations to keep your character in peak condition, your stash is in there and you have turrets that can protect you. These are gameplay elements and your camp, especially late game, matters.

The base building plans exist purely to push the atomic shop which is sickening, even down to the quirky little 1940s swing music that gleefully plays whenever you enter it. You need atoms to purchase items in the store which, you guessed it includes, items for the camp. You can earn atoms via in-game challenges but the amount you get versus the cost of the shop is deliberately unbalanced in order to frustrate you into spending real cash – which I never did and never will.

Anyway, this post is already too long so let me just wrap it up before I get mad: the best quest line IMO begins in vanilla 76 called ‘Overseer’s Mission’ because the payoff added in the Wastelanders DLC is touching. It was the one and only time where the game felt like Fallout just because of what a character said to me – and what I said back - that made me reflect on my journey so far which, again, directly ties into the survival aspects of the game. It proved that it wasn’t for nothing; I had accomplished something in my time with 76.

So yeah, it’s a fairly enjoyable solo experience but a really bad online one.