In an interview with Axios Gaming on September 17, the design director on the upcoming Diablo II remake explained that folks trying to decide if they should buy the game should “do what they feel is right.” Many players don’t want to support Activision Blizzard games after a recent lawsuit made public horrible stories and claims of abuse and harassment mostly targeting women at the company.
Diablo II Resurrected is the first major release from Blizzard since a damning lawsuit was filed on July 20 by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing after a years-long investigation turned up stories of multiple women suffering daily harassment and abuse while working at Activision Blizzard.
Diablo II Resurrected was announced back in February 2021, before the lawsuit, and is being developed by Vicarious Visions using the original source code and gameplay of the classic action RPG first released by Blizzard back in 2000. The studio was not specifically named in the suit and has in the past worked on non-Blizzard/Activision titles, but the lawsuit and the fallout that followed have affected the team at Vicarious Visions.
“It was definitely very troubling to hear these types of things,” design director Rob Gallerani explained, “And we really wanted to support our colleagues and our co-workers.”
The lawsuit included horrible stories of abuse and after the suit became public, Kotaku learned of a hotel suite that was reportedly a booze-filled meeting place where many would pose with an actual portrait of convicted rapist Bill Cosby while smiling.
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Since these stories and reports have surfaced, numerous former and current Blizzard higher-ups have apologized, with some leaving the company including Blizzard President J. Allen Brack. Games like World of Warcraftand Overwatch have also removed mentions and references to people named in the various claims and the lawsuit. And Activision itself seemed quick to hide its logo and company name during the announcement of the latest Call of Duty.
As a result of this and all the controversy, Gallerani told Axios that Vicarious Visions did a full scrub of Diablo II Resurrected to see if any references, names, or quests needed to be removed or changed. According to him, nothing was found.
After the lawsuit became public and stories of harassment and abuse continued to be shared online by women and men, many players have struggled with buying the companies’ games or boycotting them.
Gallerani’s comments to Axios seem to leave the decision up to players.
In August, Kotaku reached out to employees at Blizzard and Activision about if they supported fans boycotting upcoming games. Some didn’t respond. Others didn’t want their comments to draw attention away from the ABK Workers Alliance’s current demands.
Tales of Arise, the latest entry in Bandai Namco’s long-running series of games about spiky haired boys who scream “You bastard!!!” and then stab an evil dude, is a notable deviation from established formula. Rather than an action-oriented RPG, as you may expect by now, this one’s more of an RPG-oriented action game. Yeah. Big changes afoot.
But Tales of Arise is still thoroughly a Tales game, with all the weird costumes and cheesy jokes about food that implies. Here’s how to navigate this brave, new, different-but-only-kinda world.
In battles, try to fill up the boost gauge.
This might sound counterintuitive, but winning battles in Tales of Arise isn’t a matter of dealing as much damage as possible, as fast as possible. You’ll fare better by filling up a nameless gauge—indicated by a diamond-shaped icon hovering over the foe you’re currently targeting—by landing concurrent attacks in quick succession. Once the gauge is full, you can press any direction on the D-pad to have a party member perform what’s called a boost strike, which will take out any rank-and-file monster in one hit. Bonus: Boost strikes never stop looking totally kickass:
Gif: Bandai Namco / Kotaku
The boost gauge is easier to fill up as an enemy’s health dips. There’s no hard threshold, but if an enemy has less than half its health remaining, you can typically fill it up with one solid combo. Also, alternating Artes (Tales lingo for “special attacks”), as opposed to using the same one over and over, tends to expedite things.
Bank your boost attacks.
Tales of Arise features both boost attacks and boost strikes. It can get confusing. Boost attacks are a bit weaker; they won’t kill anyone in one hit, but they will impart unique effects. Alphen’s is pretty standard (it knocks an enemy over), but the other five have effects that can usually stop an enemy in its tracks.
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Use Rinwell’s when you see an enemy readying a spell, indicated by a circular gauge that slowly grows more and more purple.
Use Kisara’s when you see an enemy running toward you really fast.
Use Dohalim’s when a fast-moving enemy is standing still for a damn second. That’ll slow down their movement.
Use Law’s against people wearing armor.
Use Shionne’s against airborne enemies.
In the lower-left hand corner of the screen, you’ll see a diamond-shaped icon for each of your party members. Those icons slowly fill up over time. When one starts glowing, you can activate that party member’s boost attack by tapping the D-pad in the corresponding direction.
Boost attack bonuses don’t work if any enemy glows blue.
The good news is that typically doesn’t happen unless it’s on the brink of death, though.
Also, shiny enemies have more health.
Watch out for that golden glow.Screenshot: Bandai Namco / Kotaku
If you see an enemy glowing gold, they’ll have more health than usual. Be wary.
Spam your Artes.
Tales of Arise blows up established formula in one huge way: Your Artes no longer require MP, a reserve that doesn’t automatically refill between battles. In fact, MP doesn’t even exist in Tales of Arise. Instead, your Artes—even the most powerful spell in your moveset—are dictated by AG, which restores in the middle of battle, usually within seconds. In other words, yes, you can use Demon Fang 117 times in one battle without any ramifications for the next one.
Read More:Tales Of Arise Is Even Better If You Remap The Buttons
Artes are better than standard attacks in just about every way. They fill up an enemy’s boost gauge faster. They deal more damage. And sometimes, they come with elemental effects that deal even more damage. Don’t have any reservations about spamming them to hell.
Inspect your enemies.
Holding down L1 pauses time and allows you to cycle through the enemies on the battlefield. In the upper-left hand corner, you can see how much health they have left and, crucially, what element they are, if any. There are six elements in Tales of Arise, matched off in pairings of mutually assured destruction, where each type deals double damage to its opposite. Fire beats water (and vice versa). Wind beats earth (and vice versa). Dark beats light (and vice versa).
Deactivate spells as needed.
Despite the simple elemental match-up, your party members are incapable of grasping the core concepts. Thankfully, it’s fairly easy to turn off any spells that an enemy would be resistant to. Just pause the battle, go to the Artes menu, scroll through the list of Rinwell’s Artes (it’s always Rinwell who fucks up), and press Square when you see spells listed with—if, for example, you’re fighting a bunch of birds—the green wind icon.
You likely won’t need to do this in standard battles, but it’s enormously helpful for boss fights.
Orange gels should be treasured, cherished, coddled as if they’re gifts from the gods.
If you’ve played a Tales game before, you may laugh at this, but orange gels are bar none the most valuable item in the game. Though combat Artes can be used with abandon, healing spells (like the extremely helpful Fairy Circle) and buffs (like Barrier, which temporarily raises an ally’s defensive stats) have finite use. Both of those will eat away at your cure points, a well that’s shared among your party.
Cure points don’t reup between battles. To restore your cure points, you can either rest at a camp, inn, or healing light (giant glowing circle on the ground). Or you can use an orange gel. And for the first 20 hours or so, you can’t buy orange gels in shops. Use sparingly.
Always go off the beaten path.
It’s rule number one of JRPGs: If the quest marker tells you to take a right at the fork, go left. Nine times out of ten, you’ll find an item that was worth the trek and intermittent battles. Perhaps even an orange gel!
The blue icon accompanied by question marks is where you need to go. The circular chamber due south is where treasure lives.Screenshot: Bandai Namco / Kotaku
On a similar note, while you’re exploring dungeons, you’ll come across obstacles—a boulder, a wall of ice, a green force field—blocking your path. You can expend some cure points to tear these down. Again, nine times out of ten, doing so will lead you to an item that’s well worth the cost. But if you’re on the fence, you could always just save before burning the cure points, knock down the wall, and reload the file if you don’t think the spoils were indeed worth it.
Unlock stats, not skills.
Tales of Arise’s skill tree is a bit different than your typical RPG skill tree. By completing certain actions—like cooking a specific meal or meeting 80 percent of the owls, a thing we’ll get to in just a sec—you’ll earn new titles for your characters. Every time a character earns a new title, they’ll get a new branch on their skill tree. Every branch has five skills associated with it. Unlocking all five (first one’s free) will give that character a permanent stat increase.
Once you unlock a tree’s second skill, see that tree through to completion. The stat boost is far more helpful than any singular skill is.
One caveat: Get KO Prevention ASAP.
The KO Prevention skill is debatably the most helpful passive ability in the game. Once per battle, if an enemy attack would take out one of your party members, that character will survive with 1HP left, helping you preserve life bottles and cure points. (Revival spells cost more than plain healing spells.) Different party members will open up a pathway to KO Prevention at different points in the game. You should get it for everyone as soon as you can.
Some bullshit: Those who picked up the game’s more expensive non-standard editions can fast-track this process.
Find the owls.
Owl royalty.Screenshot: Bandai Namco / Kotaku
Rinwell, the requisite mage character, is constantly accompanied by an owl pal named Hootle, who has its own dramatic tale of woe. See, Hootle wants to find its missing owl friends, who are all lost around Tales of Arise’s world (and all wearing high-fashion flair to boot). Finding most of the owls will unlock a new skill tree for Rinwell, so it’s worth keeping an eye out. Some tips:
If Hootle pops over your shoulder right when you enter a new area, that doesn’t mean you’re in close proximity to an owl. It just means there’s one in that area.
If Hootle pops over your shoulder while you’re walking around, though, you’re probably near one.
Listen for the hoot-hoot-hoots.
Look up.
In the game’s second area, you’ll stumble upon the mythical “owl forest.” The owl king and queen, thankful for your services sending lost owls back to their rightful home, will gift you cosmetic options at various intervals. If Rinwell says something, like, “Maybe something’s going on in the forest,” that’s your cue to head over there.
Hold onto your forged weapons.
You can then resell them for a pretty penny, and you might be tempted to do so once those sweet, sweet orange gels are available for purchase. Don’t. You’ll need to keep those weapons on-hand to higher-powered versions down the line. The game won’t tell you these versions exist until, probably, you’ve already sold the base versions
But sell your armor.
There’s no armor crafting in Tales of Arise. Once you’re done with a particular suit of armor, feel free to burn it for cash.
Don’t fall off the waterfall.
Trust me. You’ll know it when you see it. The ladder isn’t quite as bad as that in Metal Gear Solid 3, but it’s still a looong way up.
Yes, you can skip cutscenes.
Tales of Arise is—and this isn’t an exaggeration—roughly 60 percent chitchat. If you, like me, are impatient and just wanna get right to the punching, know that you can skip scenes. Just hold down R1 (on PlayStation) and press X.
Pressing X by itself simply skips the current line of dialogue, which is a good way to advance quickly through the, um, less-interesting scenes. Note, however, that you can’t do so in plot-critical cutscenes.
With its thick, meaty impact and the satisfying smack of it returning after being thrown, the Leviathan Axe from 2018’s God of War is one of the most memorable weapons in all of gaming. This week, members of Sony’s Santa Monico Studio and gamers everywhere mourn the passing of George Mawle, a gameplay engineer who game director Cory Barlog calls “one of the fathers of the Leviathan feel.”
The news of Mawle’s passing September 2 passing came from God of War combat design lead Mihir Sheth, who sang the engineer’s praises in a lengthy Twitter thread over the weekend. During his tenure at Santa Monica Studio, which started in 2013 and lasted until his departure in January of this year, Mawle worked on God of War’s weaponry, navigation, RPG systems, combat behaviors, and more. Sheth in particular calls out Mawle’s work on the Leviathan Axe, as well as the whirling chains of the Blades of Chaos.
Prior to joining Santa Monica Studio, George Mawle worked as a programmer on several noteworthy games. From 2003 to 2010 he worked as a technical director at Radical Entertainment, programming games like Scarface: The World is Yours and Prototype 2. His programming credits also include 2003’s Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis for the GameCube and Xbox, one of the worst-reviewed games of all time.
But what George Mawle will be remembered for is his contributions to 2018’s God of War, one of the best-reviewed action games of all time. Game director and studio head Cory Barlog took to Twitter yesterday to remember the man and the Leviathan Axe he helped forge, saying “Without (George Mawle’s) curiosity and intellect those moments of pure joy recalling the axe would never have existed.”
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Rest in peace, George Mawle. I would suggest booting up God of War and giving the Leviathan Axe a throw or two in his honor this week, or just closing your eyes and remembering how damn good that weapon feels.
The Witcher: Ronin is a manga that sees monster-slayer Geralt of Rivia’s adventures recast in the world of Japanese folklore, and little-known RPG-maker CD Projekt Red wants your help to make it happen. The company launched a Kickstarter campaign for the project today aiming to raise just over $100,000 to deliver it into the hands of fans.
Announced at WitcherCon back in July, The Witcher: Ronin is written by longtime CDPR comic book editor Rafał Jaki and illustrated by Japanese artist Hataya, and features an “Elseworlds” take on the titular hero that sits outside the official Witcher canon. It sounds really cool and the 100-page hardcover version exclusive to the Kickstarter campaign seems worth the $40 asking price. But why is CDPR asking for fans to crowdfund the manga at all?
The Poland-based game developer and publisher is the largest in the country and valued at several billion dollars. And despite the hit it took from Cyberpunk 2077’s trainwreck of a launch, it continues to do alright for itself. Nevertheless, it’s asking fans to support The Witcher: Ronin like it were some indie imprint just getting off the ground. There’s even an early-bird bonus.
“Time is of the essence! Back within the first 24 hours of the campaign and you’ll receive an exclusive collectible miniature inspired by The Witcher: Ronin with your pledge!” CDPR writes in today’s announcement.
The company has already blown through its initial goal and is currently headed toward raising over $200,000 in the project’s first few hours. CDPR tried to head off potential criticism of its reliance on the crowdfunding platform back when Ronin was first announced, citing it as a means of creating a deluxe collector’s edition and also launching the manga globally. The company also said the collector’s edition could expand with additional support.
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“The more support for the comic, the more amazing new artists we can enlist to create stunning variant artwork — all showing off unique takes on this Japanese-inspired Witcher story,” CDPR wrote on Kickstarter.
The Kickstarter campaign no doubt also doubles as a good peg for extra publicity and an easy way to effectively take pre-orders. Ronin isn’t expected to ship until early 2022.
“Rewards aren’t guaranteed, but creators must regularly update backers,” reads the Kickstarter reminder in the middle of the page. I have no doubt CDPR will be able to deliver. It is, after all, several times the size of established comic book labels like Dark Horse.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is a popular game that millions of people are still playing a decade after it was first released. And thanks to mods and user-created content, some have dedicated years of their lives to playing this game. Bethesda’s insistence on re-releasing the iconic RPG likely isn’t helping anyone escape Skyrim’s vice grip, either. So one modder created a way out for those unable to stop playing. The mod, NoSkyrim, makes the Bethesda RPG unplayable once installed.
Made by ThatLittleCommie, that’s literally all the admittedly silly mod does. It doesn’t add extra characters, new weapons, or copyright infringing content like lightsabers or Thomas the Tank Engine. You install it and after that, you can no longer play Skyrim. It just crashes instead. Here’s how the mod’s creator describes the mod.
“Did you ever feel like the game which you spent your hard-earned money on, should be removed and be unplayable, well so did I. Now with NoSkyrim, instead of being able to start a new game like most Skyrim players, you just can’t.”
Read More:Vikings Have Been Taking Over Video Games In The Last Few Years
The mod was originally uploaded to popular modding site Nexus Mods. But it has since been removed for unclear — but probably easy to guess — reasons. I’d bet a mod that simply breaks Skyrim and makes it impossible to play isn’t something the folks running the site want on their mod depository. Kotaku has reached out to Nexus Mods about the removal and if NoSkyrim will ever return.
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Currently, if you want to download this silly mod you can find it over at LoversLab.com, which is a uh… more adult modding site. It seems the folks at LoversLab don’t care if a Skyrim mod breaks the game and renders it unplayable.
As spotted by PCGamer, the mod currently has a Change.org petition that folks can sign to support it being readded to Nexus Mods. As of this writing, it has nearly 350 signatures. Meanwhile, a subreddit dedicated to the mod and its return to the Nexus site has also popped up. It has just over 260 members. The top post is a smiling image of Todd Howard, Bethesda’s director, and executive producer. Other posts include people lamenting the mod’s removal as it was the only thing keeping them from playing the decade-old open-world RPG. (These posts are jokes, if you hadn’t figured it out yet.)
For now, it seems NoSkyrim will not return to Nexus Mods. It’s a sad day for folks unable to uninstall a video game or who have no self-control. Meanwhile, Bethesda is still announcing ports of Skyrim in 2021. I wonder if the latest port will work (or cease to work) with the NoSkyrim mod?
This is probably the second least graphic of the game’s endings, which should tell you something.Screenshot: Annapurna Interactive
Twelve Minutes is, or at least should be, a game about trauma. It is, but it isn’t.
It is but it isn’t? What does that even mean? Start the story over.
Twelve Minutes is a game about a man stuck in a time loop. That time loop gives him the opportunity and impetus to do terrible things to his wife. There are moments where it made me feel sick.
Getting there, but not enough context for a real thesis. Try again.
Twelve Minutes released one week after Boyfriend Dungeon, a queer action RPG/dating sim hybrid, which was met with immediate controversy over what some claimed to be inadequate content warnings. Twelve Minutes asks you to drug your wife upwards of a dozen times as you puzzle your way through torturing a man into giving up plot-critical information. The same discourse has not repeated itself, despite a complete lack of content warnings.
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Closer, but wordy.
Twelve Minutes is a game about hurting everyone around you as an excuse to process your own trauma. It is, in its most hopeful and generous reading, a game about a bad man trying to be better. I do not think it deserves that reading. It does, however, deserve the quiet storm brewing over its true ending.
Good enough, for now.
The setup for Twelve Minutes is simple: a cop is coming to kill you and your wife, and you will be stuck in a 12-minute time loop until you stop him. To break said loop, you will adventure-game your way through a series of puzzles, uncovering more information about character motivations and relationships each time. The game’s animations are stiff, and its puzzles are obtuse. The star-studded voice cast isn’t given much to work with, and fails to contribute to the experience in any meaningful way. Its ending is terrible. This is the most I can say without spoiling the entire game. Consider yourself warned.
Twelve Minutes has three major twists. First, that your wife killed her father. To learn this, you have to watch her get murdered from the closet. Second, that she failed to kill her father and it was actually you, the protagonist, who killed him. Oh, and you’re her brother. To learn this, you have to drug her and torture a man. And third, that all of this was part of your psychosexual mind palace and the only thing that really happened was the incest. That part was real. The rest has been a fantasy.
And what a gross fantasy it is.
Twelve Minutes makes you watch as your pregnant sister/wife (this was tough to type) is kicked in the stomach, shot in the head, and strangled. Drugging your sister/wife is plot critical, and must be repeated multiple times. To get enough information from the cop, you must zip tie him on the ground and shoot his limbs until he talks. Also, there’s a really graphic animation for stabbing your wife to death in the game for…some reason? No one’s quite sure.
All of this shit sucks, which is compounded by how poorly delivered it is. It’s as if Twelve Minutes was supporting its entire body weight on its nose, and that nose is breaking.
The cop who keeps killing you and your wife is actually the psychosexual representation of your own (shared) father. You can tell because they have the same voice actor, and in the game’s true ending, your father uses the cop’s most oft-repeated line to get you to stop fucking your sister: “Thank you for understanding why it needs to be this way.” He also reminds you that “you can’t just try again,” cementing the game’s time loop narrative as a failed attempt to envision a world where you happily get to continue your relationship with your sister/wife.
The cop’s daughter, who is dying from cancer, then becomes a stand-in for how he sees your sister/wife. See, in the mind palace, the cop is coming to kill your wife for revenge and to steal your father’s pocket watch in order to sell it for his daughter’s cancer treatment. Killing you, your wife, and stealing the pocket watch, thus becomes the metaphorical representation of ending your relationship. To save his daughter, he has to get you to give up on the idea that you two can be together.
All of this Psych 101 writing could be fine if it were delivered with grace, or tact, or care. But it isn’t. It feels pretentious and exhausting, like trauma porn for the sake of itself.
There is a more generous reading to this game. That its depiction of your fucked-up mind palace is a way of centering the fact that the power dynamics inherent in a secret incestuous relationship will always lead to its demise, and to the people therein getting hurt. That the only way to maintain this lie is to be an abusive, violent shitheel. That leaving someone you love will always be hard, regardless of the context. And that good choices rooted in a care for other people are always possible, even for someone preoccupied with violent ideations. The game could earn this reading if it weren’t trying so fucking hard to be smart, from its psychosexual mind palace to its convoluted puzzle design that at one point asks you to show a baby shirt to the man you’re torturing.
This attempt to present itself as smart, and serious, and worthy of intellectual rigor, has seeped into Twelve Minutes’ every pore, including its marketing rollout. Of course it opens with an orchestra tuning, that’s how you know it’s smart. Of course they secured major actors for its voice cast, that’s how you know it’s serious. Of course terrible things happen over and over and over again, how else would you know it is worthy of intellectual rigour? I have heard people call the game’s twist edgy, and I think they’re wrong. Twelve Minutes isn’t edgy, it is desperate.
It seems to have emerged from a previous era. One where the medium had yet to prove itself as art to a wider world, and so instead tried to spin itself into being a shadow of film. It is a David Cage game in miniature, all the way down to its star-studded voice cast, and I wish it had the confidence or capacity to be more.
It’s perfect timing for a game like The Ascent. Not much else is coming out right now, so there’s more incentive to break through its slow opening to get at some of the chunkier gameplay in the back-half of the game. It’s also on Game Pass for PC and Xbox, so you can get in, give it a try, and bounce back off it with minimal upfront investment. There’s just one problem: the cyberpunk action-RPG is a headache to play on console.
Yes, the game is a bit janky. No, the top-down twin-stick shooting does not feel great. But the real issue is that the game is a visual mess to navigate on a conventional TV screen with loads of borderline impossible to read text. None of these are new issues exactly. I and others have beencomplaining about tiny fontsfor years now. And it’s clear that, while console manufacturers have tried to make porting games from PC easier than ever, especially on the Xbox side, the games themselves are seldom optimized for anyone not playing with a keyboard and mouse while sitting two feet from a giant-ass computer monitor.
The Ascent has been a big part of Microsoft’s Xbox Series X/S marketing push, though. The company listed it as one of its “biggest exclusive games lineup ever” and clearly thought it was worth locking down as a day-one Game Pass title as well. And, look, three hours in and I am still lowkey enjoying myself and morbidly fascinated by the oppressive detail and density of Neon Giant’s take on cyberpunk. At the same time, I have almost no clue what’s going on or how its progression systems work because I can’t read a damn thing on the screen:
Image: Neon Giant / Kotaku
Image: Neon Giant / Kotaku
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While The Ascent does have a display option in the settings menu to boost the front size, it only seems to work for cutscene subtitles. Ambient conversations throughout the rest of the world and a cascade of RPG-lite menus remain incomprehensible. A few times, I walked over and stood directly in front of my 50” TV to read some flavor text or compare stats on new armor in the shop. Mostly, I’ve just been ignoring the story altogether and dumping skill points into random stats. Several people tell me this is a perfectly feasible way to play and beat the game. It is also, frankly, a bummer way to play.
There are other shortcomings with the console version. Multiplayer has been a bit of a mess. There’s no ray-tracing or DLSS (deep learning super sampling) visual features at the moment either, though they’re getting added soon. I can accept these trade-offs for the option to play a grimey sci-fi Diablo-like from the comfort of my couch, however. Maybe someday that’ll be a real option. For now, you can find me surfing The Ascent wikis to get an idea of what’s actually going on outside of all the augmented looting and shooting.
The dream: Four players playing the same game at the same time.Screenshot: Neon Giant
The Ascent, a cyberpunk-themed twin stick shooter released last week for Xbox and PC, has long been billed as a single- and multiplayer game by developer Neon Giant. Thing is, for some players, the various multiplayer modes aren’t exactly working.
First announced during a May 2020 Xbox showcase, The Ascent was planned as a launch title for last fall’s Xbox Series X/S. It was then delayed indefinitely, before eventually getting a July 29 release date, where it’d launch as part of the Xbox Game Pass library. Initial reception has largely leaned positive so far: By most accounts, The Ascent is a rock-solid twin-stick shooter, offering crunchy shooting, satisfying RPG mechanics, and a deliciously realized techno-chic setting.
Read More:The Ascent Makes Good On Cyberpunk 2077’s Promise
But the promise of multiplayer hasn’t exactly borne out. Since the game launched late last week, players have taken to social media en masse to report issues with hosting new games, joining new games, stalled connections in crossplay, invites that kick players back to the title screen, recognizing keyboard inputs for only one party member, andmore.
When provided a list of questions regarding the state of cooperative play in The Ascent, representatives for Neon Giant told Kotaku that “the items you’ve mentioned are on our list of known issues and we’re actively working on fixes. We’re not able to provide a timeline at this stage but we are fully committed to fixing and improving all these items and we will aim to let you know once we have more details.”
I can attest to some of this personally. The Ascent has been on my radar since the second it was confirmed as a game that supports local multiplayer. I’m a huge sucker for good couch co-op and am more than willing to overlook a game’s flaws if it’s, y’know, fun. Make no mistake: The Ascent’s local co-op is an absolute blast, but I’ve run into near-nonstop problems getting it to work—a flaw that’s pretty hard to overlook.
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First, two of my roommates and I tried to get a local co-op game going on launch dayThursday. We were able to load single-player games individually without issue, buthen we tried to start a local co-op lobby—in various permutations of party makeup—The Ascent would close. After uninstalling and reinstalling the game, we were able to get it working. We played for about two hours, and I can confidently say that it clicked, hard. On a fundamental level, as Alex Walker put it for Kotaku, “it’s staggering how good The Ascent really is.”
So, last night, we tried to get our game going again. Though all three of us could pop into the lobby without issue, only the host’s character appeared to save any progress. And here’s the weird part: When we cycled through who hosted the game and who joined, the host would have their leveled-up, customized character show up. Anyone else had to start a new one from scratch. But when pivoting to have that player host, their primary character would show up. So all of the data was clearly there—it apparently just couldn’t mesh in the same lobby.
We’re by no means the only three-member party that’s struggled to reliably get a session off the ground. As one player detailed on Reddit yesterday, the poster and their friend could get a two-player game up and running without resistance. When trying to add a third player, The Ascent would reportedly stall on the “joining” screen. The group eventually came across that age-old “uninstall and reinstall” trick my friends and I tried. Still: No dice.
One of the most recent posts on The Ascent’s subreddit is indeed about the game’s multiplayer, simply asking if it’s “working yet?” As of this writing, no one has responded.
I wanted to like Tribes of Midgard. It has great style, with wonderful visuals that feel ripped out of an ancient painting. The combat is fun and responsive. But it also incorporates some of the worst parts of roguelikes and survival games and quickly becomes repetitive, with little payoff or progression.
Published by Gearbox Publishing and developed by Norsfell Games, Tribes of Midgard is a top-down roguelike action-survival RPG. In it, you take on the role of a—give me a second here—Einherjar, a viking who has died and gone on to Valhalla. But, when some evil forces rise up to destroy—one sec, googling again—Yggdrasil, the old Norse gods send you to protect the life tree’s seeds from armies of monsters and giants.
Each night waves of enemies arrive to destroy the seed, and you must hold off the grunts while also hunting down massive, powerful giants who have very bad intentions toward your seed. As epic as that potentially sounds, most of your time in Tribes of Midgard is going to be spent chopping down trees, picking up rocks, and “heroically” beating packs of wolves to death.
Do you like running around breaking down trees, mining rocks, and farming enemies for resources? No? Well, how about losing all your progress when you die, with nothing to show for it? Unfortunately, Tribes of Midgard tries to combine survival-game trappings with a roguelike foundation, but ends up grabbing the worst and most annoying parts of both.
Screenshot: Norsefell Games / Kotaku
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You’ll need to gather a lot of resources to upgrade your small village, the merchants who live there, and the gear you need to survive. But even when you have enough, building is mostly a frustrating waste of your time. Building things is finicky, rarely useful, and sometimes just doesn’t work. I would often try to construct a ramp to reach a higher part of the map, only for the ledge to block my viking from progressing. But you probably won’t even build anything because resources are so scarce that you’ll never have enough.
You can play Midgard solo or with up to nine other players. Of the 12 or so hours I played, a lot of it was by myself, and some with random online players pulled in via matchmaking. I can confidently say that Midgard wasn’t built for soloing. It’s technically doable, but not very fun. As the game grows more difficult, you’ll need astronomical amounts of resources to keep progressing. The amounts of rare resources demanded by sword and armor upgrades shocked me. Farming for this stuff is time-consuming, and as a solo player, it’s a hassle. Every night you have to race back to your village to protect it from the monsters, lest they destroy your seed and end your game.
With other players, Midgard becomes more chaotic, a bit easier, and more enjoyable. Watching almost a dozen vikings run around a large, procedurally generated map is a hoot, and even without voice or text chat, I often found having more players around made it easier to upgrade the village and multitask. I did encounter some combat lag online; usually tight and responsive, fighting became a bit more floaty and annoying with 10 people playing together. But I made so much more progress as part of a tribe than on my own the trade-off was worth it.
The ultimate reason I’ll probably stop playing Tribes ofMidgard is what happens after you lose.
Many of my runs would take over an hour to reach an endpoint. A few hit closer to three. Midgard’s a hard game, and often ends when a giant rushes into your village and destroys the seed before you can intervene. Being a roguelike, death is an expected part of the cycle.
Screenshot: Norsefell Games / Kotaku
However, Tribes of Midgard, unlike so many recent roguelike hits, doesn’t offer any real meta-progression or permanent unlocks or upgrades for all your hard work. A battle pass for the current season lets you unlock some starter kits, but most of these are only useful in the first 20 minutes or so of a run. For example, one starter kit gives you low-quality weapons you’ll quickly outgrow each time you begin anew. The rest of the battle pass consists of cosmetics and coins to unlock more cosmetics and other not-very-useful rewards.
Considering how long games can take, how much repetitive farming for resources you do in just one of these runs, and how hard the going can get after a few nights, be prepared to spend hours and hours losing. I’d be more into that if I still made some progress, but you get nothing but memories for all this trouble. There’s no narrative that moves forward with each loss, or abilities you can boost between runs to help you skip the early bullshit and move forward more quickly. It feels like a weirdly old way to do a roguelike that also ignores the great innovations games like Hades and Rogue Legacy have brought to the gen over the last decade.
All of the pain points add up and make it hard to feel like I’m some epic viking-demi-god-warrior saving the world. Instead, I often feel like an overworked, underpaid mercenary being asked to spin more plates while also finding more plates to spin. Then some big bully knocks all my plates down, steals my hard-earned gear, and tells me to start over. That’s not much fun and it’s shame, because while Tribes of Midgard looks great, it’s mostly a frustrating mess.
Earlier this month a Mother fan pounced on a Japanese auction listing that was selling a Nintendo corporate CD-ROM from 1998, solely because that disc included footage of the cancelled EarthBound 64 for the Nintendo 64.
With bids beginning at just $18, the CD-ROM was eventually sold for $357, all just so Zen could do the world a favour and get their hands on a copy of the EarthBound 64 trailer from Nintendo’s fabled Spaceworld 1997 exhibit.
Previously, the main way people had been able to see footage of the game in action had been via this ancient IGN footage:
Or this quick glimpse from the showroom of Spaceworld 1996:
Here, meanwhile, is the footage that was included on Nintendo’s CD-ROM, and which Zen has been able to upload. It’s not our first look at gameplay from the cancelled sequel, but a lot of it is new footage!
Sure, it’s only 25 seconds, and there isn’t any sound, but this game was cancelled over 20 years ago, it’s amazing we’re getting to see anything new at all.
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And what we do get to see, like all the other footage, looks incredible, especially when you remember this was an N64 game. But then, maybe that was the problem; EarthBound 64’s scale and ambition proved one of the key reasons the game was never released in the first place.
While there’s some new footage to agonise over, one unreleased holy grail remains for Mother fans: getting their hands on the playable build of EarthBound 64, which made it to a few trade shows (like the 1996 Spaceworld video above) but which has never been seen by the public since.
Earthbound 64 was originally supposed to be Mother 3, a sequel to the weird and beloved RPG series from Nintendo. While it was cancelled in 2000, Mother 3 would eventually be developed for the Game Boy instead, which is the Mother 3 we all know today, and are still asking Nintendo to please officially bring to the West.
In the meantime, Zen was also kind enough to upload the rest of the contents of the CD-ROM, which also include trailers for games like Ocarina of Time and some lovely hi-res Pikachu art, which you can check out here.
