What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?

Valheim

Since setting up the Tildes community server last week, I have been spending my time on it exclusively. We have a small village set up where we have made great progress putting a wall around the houses, setting up a dock, and getting started with portals. I have really enjoyed seeing the progress that has been made by others each time I log on. It has also been fun to stumble upon camps set up by users that I haven't met yet. With that said, if you have been playing on the community server, feel free to join us in the village! We can expand our boundaries to accommodate new people coming along. I've been pretty blown away by the amount of activity on the server. The most I have seen so far is 8(!) people online at one time while at a minimum there seems to always be one player online.

So far I have only faced one boss out of a possible 5(?). We should be ready to take on the second boss soon with enough people. My goals right now in the game are to continue to explore. I made my way pretty far away from the home base last night and had to set up a temporary camp at a base of a mountain, adjacent to a swamp biome. I would like to soon get the gear required to traverse the mountain biome without freezing. The other key exploration objective is to uncover more dungeons so we can get the materials needed to build more portals.

For the people I haven't met and spoken with in-game, my Valheim name is Jorrek.

I finished up Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order yesterday. It's one of the most interesting games I've played recently due to how it mashes so many things together. It's my favourite kind of video game: a 7/10 one. A game where what makes it so good isn't self-evident, one that tries to do a number of unique and interesting things but doesn't always succeed, and one that doesn't have universal appeal. It's a game that is within arms reach of greatness but is held back by other factors, but should those factors be cleared out of the way then it could usher in some changes to industry trends. Finally, it's a Star Wars video game so there's a truckload of baggage that comes chained to it, which always throws a wrench into the mix.

Primarily, this game has an excellent concept. A Metroidvania-style approach to Star Wars across multiple planets allows for non-linear environments in a franchise that has a lot of potential for creating new and unique worlds, without the large tradeoffs of open world games or the constriction of linear A to B hallways. It allows the player to taste and explore the world at their leisure, finding more each time, and learning how the different planets can be traversed. The idea that slowly re-learning Force abilities opens up new pathways adds to this quite a bit, as it gives some extra meaning to these abilities beyond more ways to attack an enemy. Shoring this up, they went with a Soulsborne style combat system where learning and responding to enemies is the key to combat, not learning the timing of your own moves and executing it no matter what enemy is in front of you. Previous Star Wars titles have had a traditional approach to lightsaber combat, which I never found translates well in terms of the skill and precision apparently required to wield them. By changing the conscious priorities of combat for the player, while allowing the enemies to keep the same rote combat style, it opens up that sentiment quite a lot.

With this concept, behind a team like Respawn, it's easy to say that it would end up decent at the very least. They've proven quite a few times they can build out interesting games with solid mechanics, with all that AAA polish one would hope for. Indeed the hardest part about this concept is the Souleborne combat (specifically, Sekiro's variant). That is not at all an easy combat system to take on, there are very, very few Soulsborne-type games that match the quality of the games. I'd even go so far as saying Dark Souls 2 doesn't either, and it's in that series. It's taken me close to a decade to wrap my head around that entire style of gameplay to figure out why it works so well in those games and not in many others, and even then it comes with the caveat that it's simply not for everyone. But Respawn really outdid themselves here, this is the best Soulsborne style game that isn't from Hideteki Miyazaki (note: I haven't tried Code Vein). It's not perfect at all, there's still something off about it, but they nail the overall satisfaction of the combat system.

And fear not, this is not a difficult game. Difficulty is not as inherent to what makes Dark Souls' combat system work, no matter what many claim. Jedi Fallen Order is probably the best entry into the joys of this combat system for most people. It takes a familiar property, something many people have playacted with their friends as children or still make mouth-noises to while swinging tubes around as an adult, and gives the system the weight and feel that the movies suggest. Parrying is a big part of the gameplay just as it is in the movies, and the game is very lenient with it. For example: parrying Stormtrooper blasters is a conscious act of pressing a button, performed as quickly as a reflex like the Jedi do in movies, with an extremely satisfying result that you, the player, have done. In most other SW games, you just hold block or your character does this automatically. Here, it's because you are the Jedi with great timing. Apply this to basically every single enemy and their various attacks and the game really does feel like you're a Jedi instead of someone playing as one. I experienced a lot more satisfaction with the combat of this game than The Force Unleashed or Jedi Academy, where lightsaber combat felt relatively weightless.

Unfortunately it's not all aces. I've said before that there's something off about it overall and I think I found what it was late into my playthrough: there's animation delays on everything. Nothing happens the moment you press the button, there's always a windup. Whether it's swinging, blocking, parrying, jumping, using Force powers, dodging, or rolling, every single action in this game comes with a perceptible and annoying delay where your character has to wind up and then execute. In Miyazaki's games, there may be windup on the attacks but there are not on any of the defensive actions. It seems like Respawn got the wrong message, and applied windup on everything. Many have reported that the game feels sluggish or laggy when I looked around to see if anyone flagged an issue, and I think it's this. I realized it during a platforming puzzle when I was wondering why I wasn't doing the double jump with every attempt—this delay is constant across all inputs. It's not a showstopping problem but it is a little annoying timing to get used to. Luckily the game is fairly lenient, even on the highest difficulties, so this is mitigated somewhat. If this was present in a Dark Souls game, it would be much more catastrophic.

On top of this, the player skill progression is pretty uninspired, and not well balanced. Most unlockable abilities require the Force to use, including the basic heavy attack for some reason, and you never quite receive enough force to make good use of many of these in a single battle, until perhaps very late into the game. Even then, Force replenishment isn't much so you actually feel disincentivized to use your Force abilities in many points in the game. The Force abilities you do unlock throughout the game wind up being extremely basic: Slow, Push, and Pull. All of these are basically standard things in most other Star Wars games where you play as Jedi, but here it's the entire point of the journey to collect these basic abilities. It makes sense within the context of the game but it winds up being a pretty unsatisfying journey of personal growth you've already experienced much more interesting Force powers over the last 25 years of Star Wars video games.

If a sequel were to be made and these two things addressed, I think we would have a truly great game on our hands. Taking the bones of what Respawn made and then iterating on top of it to balance combat out a bit, while exploring new and exciting Force abilities beyond the very, very basic ones could create a proper Jedi experience.

Outside of combat, the big draw to the game is exploring a handful of planets of the Star Wars universe. There's much more vertical exploration than I anticipated and it makes for some fascinating new portrayals of places like Dathomir and Kashyyk's more natural areas. It does start to come apart a bit when it also takes this same approach to structures, like Imperial bases on Kahsyyk and Zeffo, because it just seems unlikely that the Imperials would build places like this, but it's not a big deal. You still see quite a lot, and the blend of Imperial basis and natural planet environments is welcome and spectacular. You're rewarded for exploration with plenty of cosmetic lightsaber and outfit customizations that you unlock in crates, or "memories" that your character and connect with to basically fill out your Databank (this game's trivia book). They're usually well hidden, and I like the way they're presented. You hear an audio clip of what happened to leave that memory, and then you can go read about further detail if you like. It's a nice change in pace from audio logs, and the worlds are handcrafted well to never make any of them seem like a chore and a half to reach.

Since it's a Metroidvania-style design, you can revisit planets and open up new areas by getting new Force powers and a couple of other abilities (like being able to use zip-lines backwards). The game handles this well, usually introducing you to a planet with a good chunk of content, then having you go past there and into the new areas once you have the ability to traverse further. Helping this out are many, many shortcuts that you can open up throughout the planets, that help you get around more easily. It's a good concept, one I haven't seen executed quite like this since the first Dark Souls, but I'm not sure why they skipped implementing Fast Travel. The problem comes when you want to go back to visit some planets and collect things you missed. Despite the many shortcuts, many of the paths through levels aren't exactly short. Kashyyk is especially bad about this, as it's designed kind of like a consecutive series of loops and trying to get to the last one still means running through the rest of the level. I figure they though the shortcuts were frequent enough that players could cut through levels quickly... but they can't. In fact, there's one sequence that plays an entire cutscene every time you want to go from part of of a level to another on Kashyyk. A Fast Travel system, even if unlocked at the very end of the game, is sorely missed here. Even the Souls games had fast travel, it's just not that much fun to run from one end of a map to the other unless there are multiple ways that the player can choose from.

Lastly, the plot is fine. That's about it. It's a Star Wars story, and it's strictly controlled to the point of just being fine. It's a shame because there's so much room for these characters but the pacing is all off and there is barely any time for growth. It feels like Greez, your surly ship pilot, goes from gruff to jerk-with-a-heart-of-gold within three conversations. Cere is the character who gets the most growth but only because of her tie to the main villain of this game, who is immensely boring. I get that Star Wars started as a children's story with very clear good guys and bad guys, and a storyline about the Force, balance, and emotional control lest one fall... but it's so boring and trite now. The bad guy here is a standard Star Wars bad guy: they were a Jedi, then they got upset, now they're EVIL. Your main character has doubts, but then learns that being a responsible, level-headed person is a good thing, and is now a wise sage. Blegh.

Star Wars plots often make me feel like they're trying to paint on a six-inch canvas with a 12" brush because there's just no room for subtlety or nuance except with the most skilled artists. We get flashes of truly good stuff with the little asides characters have during the remarkably clever loading screens between planets, but anything to do with the main plot is simply dull, regular Star Wars plot. It's a shame because this game has many spectacular scripted moments, and one of the coolest ending sequences to end a Star Wars game, but I honestly can't say I care a whit about anyone in it ultimately.

It's a good game, and a great step forward in many ways. I just hope there's a bigger and better sequel coming down the line because it could truly step into greatness.