Re: purpose?

"Tell me why, tell me who, tell me you don't know what to do"

Caravan Palace - Russian

 

Continuing my run through Weird West, I'm somewhat impressed by its many interesting mechanics, and very very unimpressed by their shallow implementation. I've tossed exactly one electric grenade in combat, to open a fight with a couple of cave terrors by slowing their movement. And why cook food when you get infinite free healing from water sources? Or why bother farming low drop rate animal hides when you get free level-appropriate gear for each character or can easily buy better gear with the gigantic pile of useless cash you rack up? Which in turn brings into question why you'd bother hunting bounties. Even the few useful gimmcks clash. Real-time combat renders complicated combos useless for their extended setup, your posse block your own shots more than enemies' and being tracked down by surviving mooks with a vendetta would be a great twist... if they didn't pop up and start a fight when you're trying to stealth around an enemy camp, promping nothing except an instant reload. But the real noodle scratcher's that in a cRPG so focused on wild west gunfights, you spend most of your time sapping victims unconscious a la Thief.

Did you forget what game you were making halfway through?

Well, it's not an uncommon occurrence.

 

If I'm not personally defending it, the Northern Empire's lost it.

I decided a few years in Calradia might be good for my health, but while Bannerlord understandably pushes its big selling point of large-scale warfare, it does so to the exclusion of the adventuring party lifestyle around which M&B was originally based, or even homesteading your fiefs. The AI is programmed to force constant warfare, no matter in which direction, and moreover seems to constantly lose territory wherever I'm not personally conquering towns for others to rule. It was great for the first few dozen sieges, but I'm beginning to sorely miss my caravan escorting and bandit hunting days, or being able to do anything other than rush to the next siege.

 

Or take Rimworld as another example. Two of its expansions, Biotech and Ideology, add a great deal of both practical and aesthetic customization to your colony. But the other two? Princesses with psychic powers and "cabin in the woods" horror with dungeon delving? How the hell do those build on the game's core Robinsonesque base-building conceit?

My recent jaunt through Fallout 3 reminded me expanding on anything with a story-based campaign in fact has always been a bit iffy. Back when it was made, companies tended to market DLCs as paid cheats, mimicking microtransaction pay-to-win schemes from multiplayer. The "content" you were buying often amounted to little more than a reskinned suit of armor with overpowered stats. But even if that trend has diminished (albeit not disappeared) you're still left with the problem of appending more content to what should have been a full campaign to begin with. Otherwise what the hell did you originally charge customers for? The spate of blatantly unfinished games marketed at full price over the past decade soured many on the concept of buying anything at release. Rare is the company like Larian which will refuse to further milk a cash cow like Baldur's Gate. (My hat's off to them on that point.) But even ignoring those issues, tacking on more content to a finished campaign so frequently smacks of pointless, gratuitous filler, like Kingmaker's endless randomized dungeon crawl minigame.

 

Or, conversely and comically, pared-down DLCs can expose needless fluff in the main campaign. We Happy Few's three add-on standalone adventures lack the main three's open world or RPG leveling elements yet play just as well or better, confirming the suspicions of everyone who pointed out the pointlessness of scrounging and crafting mountains of redundant loot. They'd obviously conceived their opus as adventure game sleuthing, and failed pretty badly at lugging that precept onto the Skyrim bandwagon.

 

It's honestly hard to discern whether more pointless bloat and feature creep stems from developers desperate to play a strength and stand out in a particular niche, or the reverse: overcooked fads and industry standards. Either way, have you noticed all the gameplay you've paid for yet neither played nor gamed?