Sulphur on 15/3/2015 at 12:10

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(Or, how the internet and a paraplegic cat taught me how to wait.)

Within the last two months, I have made two day-one purchases. The first one is Homeworld: Remastered. The second is Ori and the Blind Forest. Both of them have one thing in common: they are, without a doubt, the most beautiful games I've ever set my eyes upon. Homeworld/HW2 were my benchmarks for game visuals back in the day, and now they're my benchmarks again. Let's do some screenies.

http://cloud-4.steamusercontent.com/ugc/540769214245274972/514917D8654385D3BF5FA6B65DB6AEA2A7AB6C4E/
http://cloud-4.steamusercontent.com/ugc/540769214245336489/9BE8C7702EAEE4264F3CDD78022338DCDE1919C2/

http://cloud-4.steamusercontent.com/ugc/540769214245287733/E82F0B5587C6C4DBF8D9C33AE89B6EB5269C463C/
http://cloud-4.steamusercontent.com/ugc/540769214245289339/F6F98C5DC5888D2D251FF494211B1A4206C5FBB4/
http://cloud-4.steamusercontent.com/ugc/540769214236962715/8D0DC6F98C19A19BCB02F3367DC9E7366485494C/

Ori, meanwhile, is what the future of gaming looked like to us back when we were kids playing the first Rayman on our PCs. You know how we like to talk about 'moving paintings', and 'painstakingly handpainted visuals', and all that jazz? Well, here's your benchmark. This is it. There is none better. Every pixel of this game seems to have been daubed onto your screen with love. Every parallax layer animates. Every patch of grass, every emerald bough, even the tiny mushrooms in the background move with gentle life as Ori pushes past them. It is a masterpiece. It is also fully capable of breaking your heart within a playable five minute prologue that features no dialogue.

It is a crying shame, then, that two hours later, I can't play it any more. Not because it's too much - though I dare say it is, it can be a cruel, sadistic bitch of a game when it wants to - but because Ori has now learned to swim, but at the same time, forgotten how to jump. She (he?) makes a yelp of complaint every time I press the jump button to get her onto land, almost as if she resents being put in this situation. Well, Ori, you're not the only one.

I left Ori treading water near the Ginso tree, dark shapes circling below. We're both waiting for divine intervention here. Something that'll lift her up in glowing streamers of light, maybe, and then pulse against her in a wave of cleansing purity, before floating her back to the water with the use of her legs regained, a cripple no more.

Or a patch would be good.

Meanwhile, Homeworld Remastered set out to treat the franchise with respect. They redid the music, the audio, the graphics. It's all better than before; it resembles my memories of the game now, which were all rendered in ultra real high definition in my teenage self's mind and locked in a safe labelled 'Best. Game. Ever.'

So you might imagine the perplexed look on my face when I loaded up the game and the music swelled, and the neon trails of spaceships all fit into place pleasingly, but when the camera panned to show me the mothership, the view was... incandescent.

Incandescent like god had placed a sun next to the thing for a million years that had bleached the paint right off. Also fluorescent - like a ceiling light flickering on and off.

'Ookay,' I said, and decided to look at the rest of the game. It worked fine; brilliantly, actually - it was just that stuff near the mothership tended to go into whitewashed incandescence. But that was okay, because I was maneuvering the camera around and issuing orders around just like I did back in 2001. The right-click menu was gone though. No biggy, I remembered the shortcuts. So I set my fleet of interceptors into my favourite claw formation, and pointed them at an enemy. Well -- you know where this is going.

So Homeworld Remastered basically shoves HW1 into HW2's engine, and the problem with that is that the AI and design were almost completely redone between the two games. Formations and tactics in HW1 work very differently in HW2. In HW1, when you assign a formation and target to a fleet, they head to it and concentrate their fire intelligently on it.

In HW2... well, let's use an analogy. Imagine you have a pool filled with minnows and they're all super well-trained and swim about in tight little v-shapes, because you're an obsessive compulsive douche who whips fish into military formations just because, but also forgets to feed them from time to time. Then, one day, someone throws a catfish in. That bubbling and frothing before the entire pool darkens with blood and bobbing corpses is what happens in HW2. In HW2, what you end up looking at when a melee breaks out, is a big ball of what the fuck.

So, after getting over why my fleets were acting so weird in HW1, I decided to push on to the next stage. It loaded, there was the warm beep of the sensor manager, and then the game politely showed me my desktop. Feeling slightly peeved, I tried again. No joy. Turned out, I needed to push the texture usage down to 2048 MB and reload, then finish the level cinematic and save before I could push it back to the maximum and reload.

Well, I wasn't going to have any of it. I went and drank some tea and ate some biscuits as grimly as I could, then proceeded to pull all the hair off my cat.

http://cloud-4.steamusercontent.com/ugc/540769214245267704/CC3482B58C1C7947326926479B9A660E0F6388F7/

It's been a couple of weeks and change since HW:R was released, and the two patches since have not dealt with any of this so far. This is, entirely, my fault for trusting Gearbox. I'm culpable in this. But it also shows that good faith is sometimes not a good idea. (Or, let alone that, pre-ordering. Which is still an amazingly, stupefyingly dumb thing to do, unless you 100% trust the devs to push out something extraordinary... and the only AAA company I can say that about right now is Arkane.)

It's been a couple of days since Ori was released. There hasn't been a patch yet. This is, entirely, my fault for buying a game day-one. I'm culpable in this. But since Moon Studios are a new outfit, I'm hoping they have their act together and will push that act of divine intervention out for us sooner, rather than later, and fix what needs to be fixed. And I'm hoping they'll be able to provide this post with some semblance of a point, because come on. I could just buy everything I want in a Steam sale in a couple of months' time post release. Bugs would have been fixed, and I'd be paying 50-75% less for the privilege. Increasingly, people seem to be going that route. But what about devs that you'd like to support by buying their games day-one? Because you'd like for them to do well? Because you want to support the idea of what they're doing?

I don't really care about fish all that much (and I have the original HW to play); but I don't want to have my heart shattered by a gorgeous platformer whose story ended because it decided to break the legs of its little protagonist forever.

I mean, how tragic would that be?

PigLick on 15/3/2015 at 15:14

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Yeh I got Grown Home thinking this looks really cool and interesting, then after about half an hour I gave up and havent played it since. Great looking game, boring as hell.

totally relying on stilt fella to bring home the bacon

WingedKagouti on 15/3/2015 at 17:19

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Question:

Is it truly a Day One Purchase if you've played a representative demo/beta (not a pirated copy) before paying for it on release day?

Yakoob on 16/3/2015 at 01:55

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I can't remember the last time I bought a game on day-one, I think I only may want to make an exception for Witcher 3. But it really doesn't make sense to buy games on launch anymore, not in the age of "50-75% discout next holiday season (aka 2 months from now)".

faetal on 16/3/2015 at 09:31

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Due to backlogs, I don't touch day 1 any more. It's still tempting, but I can get that new game smell simply by installing something on Steam which I bought ages ago and haven't played yet. I'm still annoyed that I paid full price for Assassin's Creed 3 (back when I was playing AC2 and loved it so much, I immediately bought Brotherhood, Revelations and pre-ordered 3 thinking I'd play straight through and then burned out on Brotherhood and didn't pick it back up for 2 years) and have only just started playing it when I could have bought the edition with all of the DLC for less than 10€ during several sales.

Now if I really want something, I just add it to my wishlist and wait for a price I can't ignore.