Baud Attitude

Finished Assassin’s Creed: Mirage tonight, which is embarrassingly-enough the first “real game” I have completed all year.  I’ve spent entirely too many hours in soulless gacha waifu cash grabs, and I shall do penance appropriately.

I mean, after I do my dailies.

But, setting that aside: AC:M was quite good!  It utterly failed to stick the landing – seriously, if I need to do a web search of “meaning of ending of <game>” while the credits are still rolling, my thought is that the narrative needed some extra time in the oven – but it did give me 27-and-a-bit hours of running around Baghdad stabbing people that generally needed to be stabbed.

And, really, that’s the baseline you expect from an Assassin’s Creed game.  Well, that and occasionally making fun of guard AI that lets you lure a steady stream of hapless soldiers into standing next to the same, increasingly-full haystack.   And I was playing on the default difficulty!  The description for easy mode implies that the guard AI can be made even more brain-dead, if desired.

Look, if the guards were smart then the game wouldn’t be nearly as entertaining.

Playing through Luna also continued to generally be a good experience.  I did move over to playing it locally as I DO have a nice gaming PC and it DOES look much nicer when you can crank the graphics sliders to 11, but I could happily have gone either way.

I rarely sink to the depths of social commentary, but I did notice one omission in the game’s settings that I will mention without further comment: While you can happily sack monasteries in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, and I am told that you can 100% shank people in Shinto shrines in Assassin’s Creed: Shadows and then destroy the contents of the shrines, there was absolutely no stabbing of ANYONE in a mosque, or really any way to go into a mosque at all.

Well, maybe that was just left out.  It is a much smaller game than any of the massive open world RPG-style Assassin’s Creed games we’ve been getting since Origins came out, back in 2017.

…and typing that out makes me realize that it really HAS been nearly a decade since that came out.  Oh, dear.  I’ll just set a broom and dustpan next to my computer chair so my wife can more easily clean things up when I crumble into dust.

Anyway, that’s not a criticism!  I really appreciated the reduced scope and stuff like a simplified skill tree and gearing system.  Odyssey, in particular, had me spending far too much time in menus trying to decide whether 3% more of THIS skill was worth giving up 2% of THIS OTHER skill and so on.

The smaller map and more focused storyline also made me feel like I could do side content without it absolutely consuming my life, so I did most of the optional contracts and chest finding and collectables collecting.  Not all of it – I wasn’t trying for any trophies – but enough to feel like I’d fully engaged with the game and gotten my money’s worth.

Next up, I dunno.  I had a weird flashback to my misspent youth earlier today that has me wondering about the state of Apple II emulation.  Maybe I’ll find some 40-year-old game I never finished and bump it to the top of my stack instead of playing something more recent that I actually spent money on.

We’ll just have to see.

While I am a big fan of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, I’m usually at least a couple of years behind the curve when it comes to actually playing the latest entries.

So, just getting around to Assassin’s Creed: Mirage, two years after release, isn’t all that unusual for me.  What IS a little unusual is that, in the process of getting to this point, I had to admit defeat and give up on AC: Valhalla because it was sapping my will to live any desire I had to keep playing it.

That isn’t to say that I don’t like the RPG-formula entries in the series.  I loved both Origins and Odyssey.  Bayek is top three AC protagonists of all time and Kassandra is right up there as well, and both featured a huge hunk of more-or-less-historical scenery to climb all over and drop down upon unsuspecting guards from.  Also Atlantis, which is maybe less historical and more…well, you know, I wasn’t around back then, I can’t PROVE it didn’t exist.

Valhalla, well, there may eventually be cities and buildings to climb?  But I was like a dozen hours into it, and I had done a lot of dice gaming and Viking Rap Battles and sacking monasteries for resources to construct new huts in my outpost and… well, I hadn’t really done any assassinating yet.  A little?  Not much, anyway, and it didn’t seem like any was really imminent.  I’d done a lot of running up to people, screaming at them, and hitting them with an axe, and that wasn’t scratching the stealthy stabby itch.

And it CERTAINLY wasn’t scratching the scaling massive structures itch or the parkour-style chases over rooftops itch.

That’s a lot of words to justify dropping it and moving on to Mirage, but it was absolutely the right choice.  In less than 90 minutes from “Press A to start”, I had gotten the “join the assassin’s guild! we’ll make a man out of you!” introduction out of the way, gotten my own hidden blade, received instructions to go to Baghdad and stab Bad People For Good Reasons, and ridden a camel there to get on with the stabbing.

This is how an Assassin’s Creed game SHOULD start.

I’ve put another eleven hours into it since arriving in Baghdad, the main storyline is somewhere over <gestures vaguely> there somewhere, and I am choosing to ignore it in favor of doing all kinds of side missions where I sneak into places I am not supposed to be and fill bushes and haystacks with the bodies of hapless guards whose last words are almost always been some variant of “hey, what are you doing here?” before they catch a bad case of Knife-In-Throat Disease.

This is also how I feel an Assassin’s Creed game should be played.  It’s a sort of very familiar gaming comfort food.

On the other hand, I’m going well outside my comfort zone in HOW I’m playing it, which is to say that I’m actually taking advantage of the fact that you can use your Ubisoft library through Amazon’s Luna Cloud Gaming service, which works… pretty well, actually!   I’m not sure I’d use it for something that demanded quick reactions, but Assassin’s Creed games are typically pretty forgiving in that respect.

The last time I tried a cloud gaming service was because Google had sent me a free Stadia kit.  That worked pretty well also, though it was a bit blurrier than Luna and considerably more prone to little visual glitches. I’m not sure how much of the improvement I’m seeing with Luna might just be attributable to having a better WiFi setup now, to be perfectly fair.

Even with the better WiFi, the graphics experience is not comparable to a high end PC or modern console.  I’d say you’re getting roughly the PS4 experience, or at least what I remember the PS4 to have played like.  It’s possible I have some overly-optimistic memories of that console.  It’s perfectly playable, at any rate.

There are two big points in Luna’s favor.  Maybe three.  I’ll just start putting down some positives and we can count together at the end.

First, assuming you have Amazon Prime and link it to your Ubisoft account, you can play the majority of the games you own through Luna without an additional subscription.  Obvious omissions are older Assassin’s Creed titles – anything before Unity seems to be missing, and while I do have access to Liberation HD I can’t see Assassin’s Creed III HD.  I don’t own any older Far Cry games, but Far Cry 5, New Dawn, and 6 are all available.

Likewise, you can link in your GoG account.  This is much more hit and miss when it comes to title availability, and I don’t own nearly as many games there, but some showed up.  I don’t remember buying most of these on GoG.  Is there something where Steam games you own link over to GoG?

The big plus here is that you don’t have to buy games on Luna and pray that the service stays around.  You can buy Windows games on other services, play them through Luna when you want, and keep access to them when and if Luna follows Stadia into the afterlife.

Oddly enough, this does NOT link in games I own via Amazon Gaming.  I’ve never actually paid for anything from that service, though, and I typically forget it even exists except on the rare occasions I claim free titles on it.  And it certainly does not connect to Steam or to games you own via the Microsoft store.  There’s a connector to the Epic Games store but that seems mostly there for Fortnite.  None of the games I own via Epic Games show up in Luna.

Second, the real justification for cloud gaming, it’s platform independent and you don’t need a desktop PC or a gaming laptop.  Assassin’s Creed: Mirage is a reasonably demanding game, it’s not going to perform well on an older GPU – especially not an older laptop GPU.  Something like Luna means that you don’t need to upgrade your computer as often.

That segues neatly into pointing out that it also gives access to Windows-only games to Mac users.  Since my daily driver laptop is an M2 MacBook Pro, that’s a big advantage.

I did need to install Microsoft Edge, which felt weird.  Not gonna lie there.  Felt icky.  Luna needs Safari support.

I think it should also work on a tablet or phone, though I haven’t tested it.  I definitely have doubts about how performant the streaming would be over LTE, though.  Maybe it’s fine and I’m just being a boomer.

Not needing to play the games using local hardware also means that the computer in your house is NOT sucking down a ton of electricity, while the computer in some Amazon data somewhere IS.  You’re (at least partially) outsourcing your electric bill to one J. Bezos, and I think he can cover it.

Lastly, if you have a capable gaming PC at home but also want to occasionally play games on the road – or in your living room – both Ubisoft and GoG claim that your save data and achievements will sync back to a locally-run copy of the game.  This has worked for me, in my limited testing, though Ubisoft Connect on Windows regularly complains that it wasn’t able to sync my save and makes me slam the “Retry Now” button a few times.

tl;dr version: Assassin’s Creed: Mirage is the best Assassin’s Creed I’ve played in a while and cloud gaming seems like it has maybe kinda almost sorta reached the “it just works” stage.

Continuing from the last post, here’s my impressions of Genshin’s Sumeru Archon quest from my second time playing through it.

My first pass through Sumeru was enough to drive me away from the game for a while, mostly because I thought I’d figured out how the game was structured by that point and assumed that the “World of Aranara” world quest series was going to be mandatory for the Archon quest.

For the uninitiated, the World of Aranara is a 15-to-20-hour quest chain where you mostly run around a forest with entirely too much verticality while you obey the commands of small radish-like creatures that talk funny.  Some people love it, and I’m happy that it brings those people joy.

For the record, it does not bring me joy.  And it was with great pleasure that I discovered that it could be completely ignored for the purposes of completing the Sumeru storyline, though it does become mandatory if you want to run around the jungle solving puzzles and collecting chests.  There are also a number of crafted weapons locked behind it, which is particularly important if you want to craft a good 4-star sword for Bennett.

The other pain point in Sumeru is, of course, the phase of the Archon quest where you are locked into a sort of an Endless Eight/Groundhog Day-style loop.  This was really the only point in my entire second playthrough where I found myself wishing that Hoyoverse would implement a “skip dialogue” button, but knowing that it was coming and – more importantly – knowing that it would eventually end made it more tolerable.

Also, quests in Sumeru felt much longer than previous regions.  This is mostly a problem because quests give rewards at the end.  So, while Inazuma or Liyue had a bunch of small quests that kept giving you twenty or thirty thousand mora and some material at the end, Sumeru has fewer and longer quests with, yes, slightly better rewards.  I don’t have any strict data to back this up so this is strictly from vibes, but it felt like I was suddenly in a new region, with new characters to build and new teams to try out, and not getting enough resources from quests to do so.

Presumably, this was not an issue if you were a veteran player who came into Sumeru at max level after playing through all of the earlier areas, with an inventory overflowing with spare resources.

I am being a little harsh on Sumeru, here.  While it does feel like it was designed to maximize player “engagement hours”, it does introduce some really fun characters – Candace is an all-time favorite, and Nahida is just the ultimate in oh-she’s-so-tiny-and-adorable followed by “wait, never ever get on her bad side”.  And, though it took me a while to understand how Dendro works, I have had a considerable amount of fun with Hyperbloom teams.

Another positive to mention is that the villains are pretty top tier.  It would be really boring if every new region was just “oh look, the Abyss / the Fatui are getting up to no good again”.

I mean, there are Fatui in the region.  And they ARE up to no good.  But they really aren’t the focus of the plot, most of the time.

Lastly, some of the biggest pain points were addressed with QoL updates.  We’re talking stuff like interior maps and fast gadget swapping.  No more going into your inventory every time you need to bust out a musical instrument, or getting hopelessly lost in one of the underground mazes.

I mean, I can still get lost even with a map.  I’m special that way.

Anyway.  While I could still say some things about the desert area, my opinion of the region went way up, this time around.

Then it was off to Fontaine!  More about that later, unless I forget again.

Continuing my thoughts on the Genshin storyline and areas, from my second playthrough.

I’m not sure if it’s accurate to call Inazuma Genshin’s first big expansion, since it came after the patch that added Dragonspine, but Dragonspine is a completely optional area and I’m going to discount it as such.

It stands out a bit even today as being very isolated.  Every other region of the game can be reached on foot after getting a very short way into the story, and the game even opens up some teleport spots for you so you don’t need to run to the later regions, but Inazuma can only be reached by ship, and only after finishing the Archon quests that take you through Mondstat and Liyue.  Which can be quite annoying if you get a character from the gacha that requires upgrade materials from Inazuma, as an aside.

It’s also a complete vibe shift from those earlier zones.  While your experience with the elemental archons up to this point has been generally quite positive, Inazuma’s Electro Archon is not a very nice person and you wind up in direct conflict with her quite early in the story.

I mean, she has reasons.  And she gets better.  But she does kinda try to murder you at least once.

The vibe shift extends to the zones themselves.  On my “main” account, I had long since gone through all of the long quest lines that kept me from being, say, repeatedly struck by lightning while trying to fish.  On this play through, I was constantly reminded how many of the various islands that make up Inazuma are passively trying to kill you.  And you can get a little tired of purple after a while, though the scenery is genuinely gorgeous at times.

FORTUNATELY, the islands that want to kill you are not part of the main quest line, and it will not take much time to get through Inazuma if you want to just get to Sumeru as fast as possible.  I wound up spending some time on them because I had a couple of characters that needed character leveling materials, but even with that this was a very short stop on the road to the current content.

Looking at it from the perspective of what it must have been like when it was current content, however, you can really see all the places where Hoyo was trying to slow players down.  There are a lot of important quest lines that are regularly interrupted by the need to wait until the next daily reset to continue, for example.  It also introduced a mechanic where you needed to open chests to collect sigils to get upgrades that let your characters pass through progressively-stronger Electro barriers, which do lock you out of  some exploration.

It’s also a little aggressive with the way it tries to sell you on some of the game’s limited 5-stars.  It isn’t as pointed about it as the “Rebuilding the Jade Chamber” archon quest, which is a pretty forceful advertisement for Shenhe, but the interlude in the main quest where you have to stop doing what you’re doing in order to go hang out with Ayaka and Yoimiya is pretty obvious.

It’s not the only time the game tells you to stop doing main story stuff and go off to do some character story quests, but I think this is the first time those story quests aren’t for 4-star characters.

It’s not precisely filler, because “filler” implies a lack of quality.  But it does point out that the main story is very short, and I think it would have been a point of annoyance if I’d been playing at the time this was current content and needing to wait 6 weeks between story drops.

To fill that tie, Inazuma delivers on giving you a ton of entirely-optional content to have fun with.  I don’t think I’d recommend putting the main story on hold while you grind it out, but I could see “pick an island and roll with that island’s quest line” as something to do between content patches, for sure.

Anyway.  Inazuma.  Decidedly less friendly than areas seen before – or after – and I suspect it’s one of those areas that people either love or hate.  I’m still on the love train at this point, but unfortunately Sumeru is next.

Following up from yesterday’s post, where I described how I’d decided that playing through Genshin Impact, one of the biggest open-world games available, FOR A SECOND TIME, would be an excellent use of my limited hours on this planet.

On the other hand, I’m not working right now and my wife and cat are generally happy so what else do I have to spend my time on?  Woodworking?  I’d lose a finger.  And I like my fingers.

Well the right pinky is a bit of a bitch and I suspect it is plotting against me.  But I don’t think you typically lose those in any woodworking accidents.

Anyway, back to Genshin.  I wanted to mostly talk about the two regions that were available when the game launched – Mondstat and Liyue – and just what the experience is like once you finish those and are wondering what to do.

It’s pretty clear that the designers did not want you to rush through these areas.  Every quest in the main story has a required “adventure rank”, which is a sort of meta level that applies to your entire account – and, while main story quests DO give you adventure rank, they don’t give you enough.  You will be doing side quests and running around solving puzzles and opening chests for quite a lot of the time in these regions, which to be fair is REALLY fun.  Like, it is a never-ending stream of tiny dopamine hits as you make bars fill.

Once you get past Liyue and over to Inazuma, the main quest line gives you plenty of adventure rank XP and roaming all over the map like some sort of hyperactive treasure-chest-fixated squirrel is no longer necessary.  I assume they figure by that point in the game you have embraced your squirrel nature.

But, that conversation is for another day.

The first time you run into an adventure rank checkpoint, it can be a little jarring.  You’ve stepped into this huge beautiful world, met an annoying flying …fairy THING, gotten to meet a couple of quality waifus/husbandos, done a few simple puzzle dungeons that mostly teach you how to interact with elemental puzzles and fly around, and then you’re slapped with a “look, go do some other stuff and come back to the story, it will be waiting for you”.

This is also the only time in the game where you’ll walk into different parts of the map and get big red “stuff here will kill you” warnings on the screen, which gave me a great sense of satisfaction once my characters were strong enough that those warnings stopped popping up.

I think they’re all gone once your characters reach level 40 or so?  This is not a high bar to step over.

Once you DO pass this point, the open world is very forgiving.  There are definitely still ways to die, but running away and coming back when you’re stronger almost always works. Even the first time I played through this game, not knowing anything of what I was doing, the majority of my deaths were due to misadventures involving gravity or drowning.  Even when you’re yanked out of the safe haven of the open world and stuck in a small arena trying to survive against a boss, you get an easy version.

Note: if you go back to fight the bosses again, for loot, you do not get the same version.

Basically, this opening bit is a tutorial level.  It’s just a very, very, VERY long tutorial level, and it does that very well.  It also doesn’t try to sell you too many gacha characters because there simply weren’t very many to sell at the time.  This is a good thing!  When you hit later regions, and the waifu/husbando count increases, it can get a little egregious.

So now I’ll stop the cheerleading, because Liyue and Mondstat were the regions in the game at launch (1.0) and the next region (Inazuma) was released with 2.0 and there were a whole mess of patches in there and honestly this is where things are really messy and they could use with some cleanup and handholding.

Like, the game will suddenly try to send you to Dragonspine, which is a VERY unforgiving area that was added in a post-launch patch, and trust me you are not ready for Dragonspine when it tries to send you there, or it will try to send you to The Chasm, which is a massive and really rewarding sort of open world dungeon area where you are, again, probably not ready, and you’ll get a pop-up suggesting that you start a big story quest that serves as a direct sequel to the events of 1.0…. even though it was added in patch 2.4 so you really should not be doing it.

When I originally got past Liyue, I did not realize that I was being sent in so many directions and to so many places I shouldn’t be going.  Knowing the “correct” path to take made the transition to the next area so very much smoother.

It also struck me, once I finished these opening areas for a second time, that the developers definitely have a bias towards Liyue.  It’s much bigger, much prettier, and the story gets a lot better than “oh woe is us there is a dragon terrorizing our city won’t some brave adventurer do something”.

I mean, Liyue is the in-universe stand-in for China and it’s reasonable that there’s a bit of self love, but it took me a while to come up with a reason why you don’t just start there.  My theory, after minimal reasoning, is that they wanted their game to sell to a global audience and having a sort of vaguely-medieval Germany be the face of the game would be much more palatable for westerners and – especially – other Asian nations.

Oh, one final rough bit about this opening area.  The game is …fairly generous with currency for the gacha system, and you’ll probably get to pull for new characters a few times a play session.  You’re not limited to only getting launch characters, though, so it’s very easy to have the virtual slot machine kick you out a new character that can’t be leveled past a certain point because it requires items that can only be found in later regions.  Fortunately very little of the world is actually gated off, so you CAN run to the later regions and get the stuff you need in most cases, but having done so on this playthrough it does take you through many of those areas I mentioned where you get the big red “stuff here will kill you” text on the screen.

Anyway.  After clearing a tutorial area that’s larger than most full games, it’s off to Inazuma! That’s for another day.  Probably.