Lies of P (Demo)

Demo.

Hmm. Okay, I died three times before the first heavy encounter and the fourth time in the heavy fight. Keeping in mind that this is a demo and things will change in the final version, if they don't fix the load screen, there is going to be a problem. It's 2023 for goodness sake, load screens, really?

The game did not ask for a difficulty option so don't know what's happening there.

First death was with the guy with the gun. One shot and done. I did not even see him. There was some sort of "You can't see in the dark" message and I went to turn on the Cricket lantern and bang. He one shotted me under a fraction of a second. Second death was with the same guy but because I got stuck on the stairs leading to where the shooter was and could not sword him before he one shot me again.

Third death was upstairs because someone snuck up behind me and I had no way of knowing until getting whacked good and proper. The character (is it Pinocchio, will there be nose super powers?) only attacks in the direction it is facing. An attack from the back does not cause him/her (?) to turn towards the assailant. He/she calmly keeps facing the same direction until you manually turn.

There is no effective defense against the heavy enemy. I have a bad feeling this is going to be another button masher combat scene.

Now, I could have kept going despite the recurrent deaths but the game save/checkpoint system (in the demo at least) is ghastly. You just go back to the beginning of the level and every single enemy respawns. Unfortunately, health pickups do not. I had only one, er, med kit(?) and could get no more. So one death means repeating a lot of the same and ending up with the boss with the same inventory. That feels an awkward way to do things. You could drop and extra health or two pickup if you are going to respawn everything else. And put a checkpoint before boss fights.

The game has a special feel to it. I hope they fix the minor issues.

Assassin's Creed Unity (2014)

First, my personal history with the Assassin's Creed series.

I played the first game in 2009 and had immediate problems. At the start, there are these people with tall pots balanced on their heads. Navigating that was a major hurdle. Of course, considering the sheer volume of gamers that got through just fine, the fault must have been mine. Anyway, got through somehow. After a few missions there is one where you have pick someone's pocket. Oh, the agony of that one. Again, maybe I was not understanding what the game expected me to do but it was troublesome to say the least.

But I got through the game somehow. Some say it revolutionized something. Uh, maybe it did, but not for me.

Then, in 2012, I got hold of Assassin's Creed II. Ho hum, ho hum, carrying along, no bottle of rum. Arrival in Monteriggioni and Uncle Mario. This is where the gamer inside me fell in love with Assassin's Creed.

A persistent peeve of mine (to this day) is when combat turns into a button mash fest. There has to be a way to take out your opponent in one move instead of hitting the idiot 13 times over and over. After the training session with Uncle Mario, Ezio can now disarm opponents and best of all the Counter Kill.

For the rest of Assassin's Creed II, my first act on combat engagement was to be barehanded. No weapons. Disarm. Counter kill. That was so satisfying.

Brotherhood followed with a changed combat system that was more aggressive.

I have mentioned this before in earlier posts that when a game allows a stealth approach, that is always my choice. Open combat is only when the game leaves no other option. The stealth approach naturally involves a slower and sneakier style of play. Little by little Assassin's Creed was moving away from that going into flashier and complex combat moves.

Assassin's Creed III was the last game in the series I played until now. Ubisoft had some direction in mind and the player base seemed happy with it given the success of subsequent entries but not me. Starting with a wannabe RPG attitude, more and more the series was turning into a "farm for XP" style of gameplay.

Again and again, all thoughts go back to Assassin's Creed II and the incredible focus of the game that got blurred and blurred over as the series progressed. Don't want to collect all Codex pages? No problem. Don't want to collect the six Seals to unlock the Armor of Altair? No problem. Don't like button mashing combat? No problem. Don't want to upgrade the Villa? No problem. Don't want to collect all feathers? No problem. Resource gathering? What resource gathering? Crafting? What crafting? Trading? What trading? XP? Say what now?

Yes, the AI was relatively clunky back then and there were several problems that have been resolved today and yet that game still stands out for me as the Assassin's Creed game.

Too much history.

So I quit on the Assassin's Creed series. Black Flag, Rogue, Unity, Syndicate, Origins, Odyssey, Valhalla (ha ha). Never played any of those. But over the years I kept watching walkthrough videos just to see what was happening with it. And with Valhalla it was clear that a new low had been dug and found.

And here we come to Unity (2014). Through the constant internet cacophony one note kept repeating that the parkour in Unity was the best the series has achieved (with a few hiccups, apparently you just cannot have a game without a hiccup or two).

Off to Steam, put the would-be perisher on the wish list, and buy when within budget.

August 2023, finally playing Assassin's Creed Unity.

The game starts and the first thing to do is contact Ubisoft support with the damnedest stupidest question ever: How do I start a new game?

For a few days I even thought Steam had sold me a DLC and not the actual game.

Well, that was an interesting game interface to encounter. Anyway, the game starts.

So I start running around, enjoying myself, and yes the parkour is great with dedicated buttons for up and down making things absolutely smooth. Arno seems to not so much run as glide along at ridiculous inhuman speed. If you get it right then traversal is fun unto itself.

After the prison escape and initiation into the Creed, the game proper begins and that is where my peeves all stand up together and start collecting broken bricks to throw at something.

Combat is a button mash fest. There is a parry but even a perfect parry is just that, a perfect parry. There is no quick way to dispatch an opponent. You slog through pushing the same buttons and combos, rinse repeat. I tried mightily to go about being sneaky and take out as many as possible from the perimeter inwards but it doesn't always work. Once you are spotted, they all come running and surround you. And since more than one can attack when you are still stuck in your stunned animation cycle, you just wish you could drop a bomb, climb the nearest Sync point, and to hell with everyone.

As mentioned (many times) in other posts, I don't do side missions or collectibles or what-have-yous. Just the main campaign clocked in at over 36 hours because I tried desperately to avoid prolonged combat scenarios. At a rough estimate, eight to ten hours of gameplay would have been cut down if the combat could resolve quickly but no. Slog, slog, slog.

It was like you finish today's homework, get ready to go play, and are told you have to do the next three months homework in advance. Sheesh. Have a heart, someone.

Another weird thing happened. Imagine you are playing a game and you, through your own action, get teleported to something that is not part of the main game. And before you know where you are, after six hours of gameplay, you are going about following objective markers, all the time wondering where are the main characters, where are the familiar streets, why is the map so different, why are all the AI opponents behaving so differently?

Then, you pay attention and read something remarkable. You are in Sequence 13. Er, what? 13? After 4, I went to 13?

This has become a recurring thing with me now. I have to keep going to the internet just to figure out where the dickens I am in a game and how to get back to where I want to go. Gosh.

The mistake? Following the exclamation point (or sword or whatever) on the map and not reading what mission you are going to agree to. Why Sequence 13 even highlights on the map before previous sequences are complete, the developers alone know, bless their convoluted sense of progression.

It has been almost a decade since the game released. When you go to forums and realize that these problems have been around for an equal length of time, what are you supposed to think about the developer? Starting a new game, re-starting a game from zero, getting back to the main campaign after getting shuffled into Sequence 13. These are unanswered questions floating about the internet with no clear solutions. I mean, come on. There are solutions but they are not obvious. It is basically bad user interface design. What confounds me is that how did all this get past beta testing.

Anyway, the sheer amount of time the main single player campaign takes to complete thanks to avoidable but not avoided gameplay mechanics, renders the game boring. The only time the game induces a sense of enjoyment is when you are running wildly across the map, close to the ground, the sides of buildings, or across rooftops. The moment you enter into "complete objective" mode, it just goes bad.

Unfortunately, this is not a unique issue with Unity. All AC games now are following this same pattern. Combat is now a chore to be completed.

Nine years of waiting to go back to AC and, oh dear, the disappointment.

Please bring back disarm and counter kill. One button press per opponent. Or include better stealth mechanics to clear out the field without getting surrounded by rotters that take 15 hits before they go down.

This could just be the whine of someone who simply has no patience with prolonged combat. Maybe the majority of the gaming community likes assaulting virtual people and flogging them like, as the expression is, a dead horse. There is no sense of accomplishment in that behavior. It is not like you solved a medium difficulty puzzle or something. All you are doing is hitting the same button ad nauseam. If that inflates your sense of accomplishment, maybe it's time to go and work in the garden or something. Get a dog for heaven's sake or a squirrel.

The peak of AC Unity's offense. There is an enemy that dodges your attacks. This enemy type is so nimble, they can dodge bullets, all the bullets. Even if you drop a smoke bomb and shoot them, they dodge the bloody bullets. Did these guys escape from The Matrix or something? WTH?

The Easy Anti-Cheat Debacle

The story begins vaguely around October 2022 (hey, I don't keep track of time like that) when I started thinking of buying a new GPU. With the price crisis and everything else, the purchase was made in February 2023. Around the same timeframe, Gears 5 went on sale on Steam. Bought, installed, benchmarked Gears 5, gushed all over it.

Then set it aside till July 2023 because of waiting for Gears 4. I am a stickler for proper sequencing in sequels.

Gears 4 is not available on Steam and it finally went on sale on the Microsoft Store (Game Pass is uneconomical if you only want to play two games available there). Bought Gears 4, installed, played, gushed all over it.

A few things happened. The only one I was aware of is that the Steam Client got updated. Nothing to do with the games itself. The other thing I became aware of only after reinstalling Gears 5 was something called Easy Anti Cheat. This was not there in February 2023 (at least I remember no such splash screen).

That is when the debacle proper began. Gears 5 would not start because EAC was, uh, incompatible or something. Still don't know what the actual problem is.

The Hunt For A Solution On The Internet followed as is to be expected. A lot of posts with people facing the same issue. A lot of posts repeating the same three odd solutions. Nothing worked.

Off to official support website and The Great E-mail Exchange over four plus days with Xbox support. Try this, try that, blah, blah, nothing worked.

Finally got informed that this is not a game issue but an operating system issue. Redirect to Microsoft Support. Online chat. Remote control of PC by tech support. A few hours and zero solutions later downloaded an ISO of the latest Windows 11 install with instruction to update my copy of Windows.

All this because EAC refuses to start on Windows 11.

And now a word about EAC. A search results in this: "Easy™ Anti-Cheat is the industry-leading anti-cheat service, countering hacking and cheating in multiplayer PC games through the use of hybrid anti-cheat ..."

And now the gripe. I don't play multiplayer games and have never understood the appeal of multiplayer games.

Here is an idea. When you launch a game, ask the gamer if they want the offline single player campaign or multiplayer, then pass the gamer through that door. Disable multiplayer protocols for single player campaign. All this anti-cheat bull, let the multiplayer community deal with it. If there are gamers who cannot participate in multiplayer without cheating that should not mean single player offline campaign gamers should suffer the consequences.

It is a good thing that I am writing this almost seven weeks after it all happened because at the time I was so furious with the EAC implementation that anything I wrote would have broken down into incoherency amidst the barrage of a jillion F bombs.

Isolate offline single player campaigns from EAC (or whatever replaces it in the future). Prevent heartburn, hypertension, febrile illness, tremors, excessive sweating and other medical and psychiatric problems for a better single player future.

There was another reason that fueled the rage.

There are a bunch of years in my past that were spent as a programmer. Really in the past. Around dBase III and Clipper time. One thing every programmer learns to know as a personal friend to get programs to behave is the if-then-else-end in whatever form it may exist in any language used.

The EAC implementation is just lazy programming. Just ask one simple question and go from there. What is it with the global enforcement regardless of gamer situation?

Update 30 March 2024: So last week I formatted C:\ and reinstalled Windows 11. All fresh, not from the cleaners but from the manufacturer. A week later the happy thought occurred to try again. It worked! So I guess there was some other app that was interfering with EAC. Odd thing though, I installed the same apps again and nothing interfered this time. Hmm.

Tomb Raider (2013, 2015, 2018)

Ah, 1996. Software rendering. Unaffordable 3dfx cards (funny how that holds true for GPUs even today). And then there was Tomb Raider that raced to the top of the 3rd person action adventure mountain. Only to follow a gradual decline the other side.

I played the new trilogy in 2023, a decade after the Tomb Raider 2013 release and it was a rather enjoyable play through. There were some sections where hope and guesswork more than gameplay mechanics did the job (the parachute sequence, don't know how I got past that because there were no visual cues) but it was a solid Tomb Raider game.

Game over, start Rise of the Tomb Raider. Same format with minor changes here and there. Thankfully, a lot less annoying QTEs.

Lastly, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the least fun of the three. There seems to be some cosmic scale with a tendency to go downhill in every trilogy regardless of the medium.

This could be, and very probably is, entirely subjective but why does the scope of the first one always seem so big, the world so much richer, the characters far more interesting, the mechanics so engaging.

Tomb Raider 2013 takes place on one island. You go nowhere else. But it feels huge. I am not the type of player who goes for 100% in every game. In fact, I actively avoid it. Side missions, collectibles, what have you, just don't care. I stick to the main campaign and when that's done it's done. Game uninstall, move to the next.

TR 2013 (except for the QTEs) held me the way any good game should. It is not easy to get a gamer into a state of curiosity, not suspense, that is a different thing, just simple curiosity. Why is all this happening? That feeling carried me through the game, even the frustrating bits. Above all the story needs to make you believe that the villain's motivations come out of conviction and not just bullying meanness.

That was the biggest letdown from TR 2015 and 2018. The bad guy motivation was "just because." Maybe your expectations differ but when I am experiencing a story I have this need to know the reason why the bad guy is the bad guy. Just having a character do bad stuff, say bad stuff, act bad stuff. Not enough.

The brother-sister dynamic in TR 2015 was basically: If they don't care why should I? And they really did not seem all that invested in it. Always Trinity this or Trinity that. Just pretend it is all Trinity and ignore the rest. Makes no difference. And all those Daddy sequences. Put a Skip option on backstories for goodness sake.

TR 2018 was the most confined experience of the three. I spent some time thinking about how to describe it but there are no words. It felt small. Worse, it was mostly boring. The bad guys and the allies are equally uninteresting. One quirk simply has to be mentioned. The outfits come equipped with attributes like enhanced stealth. Now, if a game gives the choice, I always go for stealth and avoid open combat. You reach Paititi and you cannot choose outfits. Uh, what? For some reason, the Paititi outfit made me want to not see it the more I saw it but nothing to be done. If there is logic in giving a player a choice and then denying that choice throughout most of the game, I missed it. This time around there are no QTEs but long "rail" sections with enough freedom of movement to make sure you die repeatedly. Why are these sections Frankenstein-ed into the main game flow only the developers know.

Those are the main er issues I had with the new trilogy but otherwise it was a good gaming experience.