Ukraine still stands strong against Russia, and the whole Israel-Hamas thing hasn't turned into an open regional war yet. Take the wins where you can get them!
The Shattered Space DLC for Starfield is an odd duck. Given the name, and the nature of the base game, you would be forgiven for expecting it to have something to do with, well, space. Outside of stumbling across a space station in a random star system to start the DLC's main quest, though, it's strictly a planet-bound affair. That planet happens to be the homeworld of House Va'ruun, the xenophobic political/religious sect that once sought to convert all of humanity by the sword, before declaring peace and withdrawing from all contact. It's a bold choice by Bethesda, using this as a backdrop for their first DLC, pity it didn't really bear fruit for them.
To give a spolier-light overview of the main quest... you arrive, are treated with suspicion by the xenophobes, then circumstances conspire to mark you as a chosen one, arrived to help with a large, self-inflicted problem. Since you're an outsider, you have to first go through a ritual to join their religion before they'll let you help, a ritual that has effects that imply there might be more involved than mere mumbo-jumbo. After that, you meet with a group of councilors that represent the three largest houses (couldn't they have said "clans" or something like that) of the combined houses that form House Va'ruun, and have to do a task for each to set up for getting to fix their problem, interrupted once by the lady who ran your induction ceremony sending you off on a side-quest based on a vision she had. Finally, you enter their holiest-of-holies, fix their problem, fix the source of their problem (their leader), then, apparently, go back to the council, help them work out what they're doing from now on, and... that's about it.
I said "apparently" there because I couldn't force myself to finish the final "boss fight" of the DLC. See, in an RPG like Bethesda has made to date, I treat it like a world with rules that are only broken rarely, and then in service to improving the story. One of the big rules that these sorts of games rely on is "I make you dead, you stay dead, unless necromancy is a thing, and even then there's limits". Now, that's not the only rule they break here - the whole DLC is littered with teleporting enemies - but at least in that case, they have a decent thematic reason for including those. Late in the lead-up quests, you run into a couple of "improved" enemies that combine that with a form of rebirth after death, but it's a light-touch thing and, again, fairly thematically justified. The final fight, though, consists of nothing but infinitely respawning enemies in an enclosed area, where you are expected to trigger some switches and shoot some targets, but some additional respawns are triggered by approaching those switches, including increasingly difficult enemy types. Honestly, it feels like a desperate attempt to artificially pad out an under-resourced, contractually-obligated DLC, especially compared to the sorts of DLC Bethesda was able to put out for Skyrim (well, setting aside the Hearthfire DLC, which, if memory serves, was the contractually-obligated DLC of its day). My last save is at the opening of that boss fight, and I don't think I'll be starting that back up until/unless I hear of something amazing (and amazingly well reviewed) coming to Starfield in years to come.
So, doom and gloom aside, while I was waiting for Shattered Space to come out (and not playing any number of games because I didn't want to have to set them aside when it launched), Against the Storm went on sale. I had my doubts - almost anything approaching real-time strategy just isn't my bag - but it turned out to be a lovely mix of RTS resource-gathering with a city-builder sort of thing, all in a world where your group of humans, beaver-folk, and lizard-folk are trying to help your Scorched Queen expand her influence and reclaim the world from chaos. My initial play, I expected to run a tutorial mission or two, maybe about an hour or so. I finished the entire tutorial and, against my better judgement, started in on the game proper, and found 4-5 hours slipping by in the seeming blink of an eye. Sadly, this is another game that desperately wants to be Your Only Game for an extended period of time, so I'm shelving it for now, but it's high up on the list to come back to, should life permit.
No comments:
Post a Comment