Saturday Morning Gaming: Marvel’s Midnight Suns

Jaybird

Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com

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5 Responses

  1. Marchmaine
    Ignored
    says:

    Last Epoch just launched, if you can call ‘launching’ a game that was in (paid) Beta for so long I was able to amass 125 hrs played in between Path of Exile leagues.

    It’s (another) ARPG that is informed by both Diablo (booo) and Path of Exile (yaaay) and I’d like to say that it learns all the right lessons, but we’ll have to be happy that it learned about 66%-75% of the right lessons.

    Good:
    Build’s center around a single skill with a second (maaaybe a third) button push (POE).
    No Diablo/WoW ‘skill rotations’ gated by timers and lots of meaningless button pushing (thank goodness)
    Skills: Many interesting and fun to play damage skills … enough to make you covet a new class.
    Loot: Game breaking mechanics baked into loot (POE)
    Loot: You can influence RNG towards the gamebreakers needed for your build (New)
    Loot: Endgame allows you to target the types of outcomes you’d like to weight.
    Endgame: (still discovering) ‘Maps’ are a combo between POE and Diablo which strike me as better than both
    Endgame: You can ‘drive’ your way through Loot outcomes — selecting rewards.
    Endgame: ‘Dungeons’ are a thing… sort of like juiced maps with progressive waves and a boss.
    Endgame: Loot.

    Basically, ARP’s are Loot Economy sims and getting this right and satisfying for early, mid, late and Endgame is the sine qua non of ARP’s … all of the skills, builds, and gameplay are informed by enhancements to skills, builds and gameplay that comes from loot. Done well it’s a virtuous circle, done poorly? Well, see Diablo 3. **

    Bad:
    Early-game itemization (Loot) is simultaneously boring and meaningless.
    Mid-game itemization is *really* generic and repetitive.
    Late-game where to go, what to do, how does this new gameplay work is not clear at all; once you figure out that a paradigm shift has happened and how it works… it’s satisfying, but I — a very experienced ARPG player – was completely lost by this change. Fixable with more $$ and .dot releases.
    Loot: some skills/affixes are very obliquely itemized … here I’m thinking Throwing Skills and weapons.
    Tool Tips: Some really nice enhancements in Character page… but doesn’t go to Skill level granularity we need (maybe I’m missing something?)
    Bosses: Stupidly over-tuned and way too dependent upon WoW-like cheesy mechanics. Settle down Devs.

    TBD:
    How long will End-game keep your interest?
    Assuming we eventually ‘play your stash’ are there enough early-/mid-game twink items to make leveling better/faster?
    How much advancement is account based vs. character based — which leads to:
    Once we complete the game, can we skip the campaign a’la Diablo (the best thing about Diablo)?
    Will the game have Seasonal replayability like POE (phenomenal) or Diablo (cringe)

    On the whole, my initial impression is a B/B+/A- depending on how some of these End-game aspects play out — I’m ‘only’ level 70 atm. But so far, I’d rate the main ARPGs thus: POE, Last Epoch, Grim Dawn, Diablo IV, all the others (I’m curious about Undecember, but atm moment it’s cumbersome and boring, but maybe fixable?)

    ** For true nerds there’s this very interesting 2019 GDC talk given by GGG’s Chris Wilson about the importance of getting the economy right.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmuy9fyNUjYReport

  2. Marchmaine
    Ignored
    says:

    I didn’t play Hades… my understanding is that Hades is more a Rogue-like/lite? This isn’t really like Hades (from what I’ve read), it’s more like Diablo, if that’s your main frame of reference.

    Less complex than POE, but better pure ARP than Diablo which veers into MMO-ARP zone.Report

  3. Reformed Republican
    Ignored
    says:

    I have been playing Psychonauts 2. It doesn’t stray too far from the original, though it adds a few new powers. I am happy with that. They got rid of the annoying diving rod thing from the first game. I’m not even half-way through, but hopefully the final level isn’t a repeat of the meat circus.

    I have also dipped back in to Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate. I tend to play for a while, then get stuck and annoyed, and move on to something else until the bug bites me again. I’m still trying to get through G-Rank as a solo player. I started to do some hunts to get some better gear. Will I make more progress than the last time I played? I sure hope so.Report

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