How very Edge, Nintendo, how very Edge Magazine of you. Or maybe, when you could play Space Invaders on that one PS1 game's loading screens? Yeah that...
Nintendo, don't forget just how many gameplay mechanics you flat out stole in the early days. Balloon Pop is Joust. Devil World is Pac-Man. Heck you straight up copied Pong and changed the name to Color TV Game 15. You open this door, there will be problems Nintendo.
For those who don't know, Belgian studio Larian, the developers of the Divinity series, has been working on a D&D game called Baldur's Gate 3 for several years now. The game is now getting close to completion, it releases next month, so press have gone to see it. The press reaction is quite positive.
As for me, though, it's complicated. I'm sure it will do well and be popular, but I've been skeptical about my interest in it all along and still am for various reasons. On the one hand, I love Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 a lot, but... is this really Baldur's Gate? It sure doesn't seem like it. Is this game a real sequel (from a completely different team), or just some random D&D game using the BG name in order to get attention? I've always assumed the latter and see no reason to think otherwise. Yes, the game is set in the city of Baldur's Gate, but when it comes to computer games the name has certain expectations and I don't see much of a connection.
Also, I know Larian is well thought of, but I haven't played any of their games much. Also I've rarely loved European RPGs, they often feel even jankier than north american ones... Bethesda excepted of course but I don't like their games that much either. I know Larian may be the best european RPG developer though so the should be good as a standalone title... it has been in early access for like two years now. They have had a lot of time to get feedback and improve it. I hope it will be polished beginning to end, we'll see.
As for the gameplay, it looks like the game will feature a very faithful adaptation of the d&d rules, with turn-based combat using fifth edition D&D rules. The problem is, what made BG's engine so good was the pauseable real-time play. BG3 isn't pausable real-time, it's fully turn-based. This makes it more accurate to D&D, but a clearly very inaccurate Baldur's Gate / Infinity Engine game. That's not infinity engine combat! That was one of the first things I heard about the game and as soon as I heard that I basically stopped paying any attention to BG3. The Infinity Engine that was used in BG1 and 2, Icewind Dale 1 and 2, and Planescape Torment, is my favorite RPG game engine. This game has totally different gameplay. It looks like a good turnbased RPG, but it's clearly not Baldur's Gate. I get wanting accurate D&D rules, but ... call it something else.
Also, the first trailer was ... pretty messed up, wasn't it really gross? it was too much and turned me off from the game. ... Looking it up yeah it was a guy becoming a mindflayer. Why was that your announcement. I hated that trailer, it left me expecting the game to not be something I'd be interested in. The game looks better than that trailer, but it made a bad first impression. The story of this game has absolutely nothing to do with Baldur's Gates 1 or 2, it is entirely new. The first two tell a continuing story, this isn't an episodic series. The characters are also all new. This is not a sequel to Baldur's Gate, it's an entirely different game using its name.
So overall, I would say that I am interested in Baldur's Gate 3 because it's an apparently accurate D&D game, but not at all interested in it because they are using the name of some of the best RPGs ever; that's a drag against it, really. I imagine the name will get them more sales though so I get why they'd use it. Still, the game probably should be named something else. This game should NOT have been released (or about to be released) as Baldur's Gate 3, it should be a game with some other subtitle. Without the gameplay, characters, or story of Baldur's Gate, there's literally nothing connecting this game to the games it is not a sequel to but pretends to be a sequel to other than its name. How obnoxious.
Ah remember earth? I can see it now... like a lovely painting in exquisite detail.
Well, it's also a book trilogy I've been reading through and it's about to become a TV series. Funny thing is, in reading this very dark sci-fi trilogy, I'm reminded of A Link Between Worlds of all things.
There's a concept in this book series called the "Dark Forest". It's a solution to the fermi paradox that basically says that yes, there's aliens out there everywhere, and all of them are hiding, because if they reveal themselves, SOME civilization is going to destroy them at the speed of light. So, you know, on a galactic scale that's tens to hundreds to thousands of years. The reasoning is that while civilization expands, the number of resources in the universe remains the same. Further, survival trumps all other concerns, such as morality. Thirdly, there is no way to resolve the chain of suspicion in a timely manner when cut off by time scales that mean whoever you even made an alliance with is dead and whole new generations that may have wholly different values will almost certainly "change the agreement". So, in this dark forest, the moment you hear a sound whether from a rabbit or a lion, shoot immediately and hide always. No Federation can form in this universe.
There's also a weapon described through a fairy tale. A painter from a farwaway land can paint anyone they've seen, turning them into a lovely painting but the original is gone, now painted. This was meant to secretely convey a weapon called a two dimensional foil which pulls in spacetime around it at the speed of light forcibly compressing everything into two dimensions, a vast painting on the scale of a star system.
I ended up thinking of Link Between Worlds not just because of Yuga painting everyone into paintings in the same way as that fairy tale, (and that impossible to defend against weapon), but because Princess Hilda is absolutely treating Hyrule the way aliens treat the discovery of other civilizations, as a dark forest problem. Sneak in, take, save your realm at the expense of the other for survival is all.
Also, for some reason the cover of these books says "As recommended by BARACK OBAMA", as if I care about book recommendations from politicians.
So, last year Microsoft announced it was going to buy Activision-Blizzard-King for $65 billion. This set off a long process of getting the merger approved by regulators all over the world. Most ended up approving it, but two, the UK's CMA and the US's FTC, tried to stop it. The legal process in the US is for a court case to decide the result, and today the judge came back with her ruling: the FTC's request for an injunction to stop the merger is denied. The FTC's case was pretty poorly presented at the trial, which was mostly livestreamed and had some interesting stuff come up because of it, so this result is not surprising at all. The FTC focused its case on Call of Duty and how much Microsoft could get from getting ahold of that series, but Microsoft insisted that CoD would stay multiplatform for at least a decade, which I believe; they'll probably treat CoD like Minecraft. Other Activision and Blizzard stuff will probably go PC/Xbox-only, but not CoD for a long time.
(Meanwhile, MS also said that King's mobile games were actually probably the number one reason why they want to buy the company.)
Meanwhile, as for the UK regulator, the CMA, it seems that they are going back into negotiations with Microsoft, so maybe now that they know they're the only regulator trying to stop the deal and that their case was incredibly bad -- basically the CMA focused their rejection entirely on how it'd give Microsoft too much power in cloud gaming, even though there is no proof that cloud gaming is going anywhere -- maybe they'll back down now. I hope so, that's an absurd reason to block the deal over.
What do I think about the merger, though? As I have said before, Activision and Blizzard have a very poor track record of how they have treated their employees over the past two decades or so. Microsoft is certainly also flawed in that respect, but they're no Activision, so it should be good for Activision's workers if the merger goes through. Additionally this should get Bobby "I love Republicans and don't care about harassment at my workplace" Kotick out of the industry, which would be great. Kotick, who remember is the longest-termed CEO in the tech industry, did some good things back in the '90s when he saved Activision and led them to make a series of fantastic games, most notably MechWarrior II among others, but for several decades now every story about him has been bad. It's either about his support for Republican causes, giving jobs to awful people, not doing much about the bad work environment at his company for women and such, how he makes insanely huge salaries (like what was it $150 million a year?), etc, etc... if this gets him out, even with a golden parachute, I'm in favor.
On the other hand, having the very first third party videogame developer, and a company that is one of the largest third parties, get bought up by a first party really says a lot about how this industry is going. AAA development has gotten absurdly expensive, beyond the means of all but the largest companies. And so mergers continue as studios get larger and larger and fewer and fewer companies buy up as many of the major studios as they can. This is a bad trend, and Microsoft and Sony are both guilty of encouraging it, but considering how expensive development is now I understand why it's happening, unfortunately. There's probably not much that can be done so long as development costs stay high, and I can't see them going down unless there's a crash or something!
The result of mergers like this will be even longer dev times and even more expensive development for the increasingly small number of titles in the AAA(AA) space. But what can you do? People want the best graphics, the largest worlds, and such, and that costs a lot in money and time. I hope that it also results in more smaller games as well though, which it could -- ActiVision has basically done nothing with any of its back catalog in recent years, they only make CoD. I hope MS uses some of their many good older IPs for either new games or classic collections. An Atari 50-like collection of Activision classics would be a fantastic start, for instance...
Diablo IV Impressions (And How it Compares to Diablo II / DII Remastered)
Posted on July 9, 2023 by Brian
Introduction
Diablo IV, Blizzard’s latest title, released last month, and like a lot of people I bought it right after its release. As the title suggests, I am playing the game on Xbox Series X. Pre-release the game had two public tests, though, and I played both of those on PC, so I have tried the game on both PC and console. It runs great on my PC, but a lot of the game clearly was designed for a television more than a monitor and I decided I’d rather play on my big TV than one of my mid-sized computer monitors (and no, with my setup I cannot easily just output the computer to the TV), so I got the game for xbox. Plus, I like having physical media and this got me a physical copy of the game.
Diablo IV is an overhead-isometric action-RPG. As in previous Diablo games you cannot control the camera, it stays at a preset distance and angle. You run around, kill lots of enemies with your abilities, collect items by the score, do quests, follow the often-depressing story, and then kill more things. The game has an open world to explore, though you can ignore the open nature of the world if you want to just follow the primary quest path and play areas in order. Really, the only difference between this game and Diablo II, world design wise, is having connections between the areas instead of having each as a fully disconnected space. There are only a few connections between each area, so that isn’t as different as it may sound. I am quite fine with the results, they work. The primary goal is to find better items for your characters. I don’t care that much about collecting loot, though, so that isn’t much of a draw for me. I do like exploring the map and wiping out the numerous evil minions with by characters’ abilities, and that’s enough to keep me interested if the gameplay is good. This games’ gameplay is, spoilers, definitely good, so I keep coming back to this game and will continue to do so.
Right now, I am in the third act of the story. My character is a level 49 Sorceress, playing in World Tier II (that is, the second difficulty level of four). I’ve been taking my time exploring, so I am not finished with the story yet and am not in the postgame. I hear that the Sorcerer class is weak in the postgame, which is unfortunate, but where I am now I’m still strong. In fact, while the game seemed pretty hard early on, something changed around level 40 and the game got significantly easier. I went from dying a lot at lower levels to now pretty much not dying at all. Given everything I’ve heard I know this will not last, but it does make me question this games’ difficulty balance; shouldn’t a game get more difficult as you go along, instead of starting out harder then getting easy before finally getting harder again much later? That would make a lot more sense than what I’m finding in this game. Oh well. But anyway, I should talk about the game from the beginning.
Please note, most of my past experience with Diablo games comes from Diablo II, both in its original form — I got Diablo II when it was new — and in its much more recent Remastered release. I have played some of the third game and a little of the first one, but I’ll be comparing DIV to DII and DIIR in this article. I know many more recent series fans focus more on comparisons to Diablo III, but I didn’t like that game much at all so I won’t be doing that. Fortunately this game is dramatically better than the third one was.
Graphics and Performance
As I said, I haven’t bought Diablo IV for the PC. I did play both betas on PC though, so I have experience with that version. From the betas, the PC version runs great. My computer was pretty nice when built but is dated now — it’s an Intel 7700K CPU with a GeForce 960 GPU. I do have 32GB system RAM, still a pretty decent amount, but still, the graphics card particularly is dated. Despite this, Diablo IV runs great at medium graphical settings, it had no issues at all. At high settings it mostly ran fine, but struggled at times with large numbers of enemies on screen.
On Xbox Series X it looks as good as the high settings, runs at a higher resolution since I have a 4K TV but don’t have a 4K or higher resolution computer monitor, and runs with no issues, so I think getting it on console was the right choice. If you buy it on PC though, know that like usual Blizzard did a great job of making the game run well on lower-end hardware like my graphics card. Overwatch 2 similarly runs flawlessly. The only real issue with the game on PC is that some text and the item names are in a very bland, huge font which looks quite outsized when you’re sitting right in front of a monitor. They seem to have been sized for TV viewing, not monitor. Ah well.
Returning to the version I’m playing now, though, on the XSX, the game looks fantastic. Diablo IV has great graphics and art design with a dark fantasy look highly reminiscent of Diablo II but modernized. I love Diablo II’s graphical style so this is a great thing, I love that they got rid of Diablo III’s Warcraft-style art design. Sure, Warcraft’s cartoony style looks great, but the two series are different and should be different. This is a fantastic looking game and the visuals regularly impress me. Each area looks distinct and the enemies and characters all look as good as they can given the overhead camera. Environments vary, from snowy forests to deserts, cities to disturbing scenes from Hell, and it’s all done with great visual design and style.
I should note, this is a very M-rated game in terms of violent imagery. That is to be expected for a Diablo game, but even so some stuff like the hellscapes may disturb some people. On the other hand though there is no nudity and zero sexual content in this game. It may even be a bit less suggestive than the original version of Diablo II, in fact. The M rating is exclusively for violence. That’s about what you expect from an American game, heh. It’s more violent than that game was for sure though, largely due to the improved graphics. Compared to the most recent past release in the series, Diablo II Remastered, this game has slightly better graphics and more costume variety since there are more equipment slots now — you now have separate lower body and upper body armor. It also brings back a nice feature from, uh, I think World of Warcraft, called Transmog, which allows you to show any armor piece you want as the one that appears to be equipped, regardless of the one that actually is. This is pretty nice and adds to your ability to make your character look as you want.
On another note, much like Diablo II Remastered’s 3D mode, the screen rarely gets as dark as it does in the original Diablo II. Night in original DII is very dark, with a completely black screen outside of the fairly small visible circle. Both the Remastered 3d mode and DIV instead just dim the screen, so you can still pretty much see everything but it’s a little darker. This game is like the latter of those two options. That’s okay, but does perhaps reduce the scaryness sometimes. I kind of miss the very limited visibility at night or in the dark, but it is what it is. There is one enemy attack effect that mostly removes your vision, that’s kind of neat.
Controls
Control-wise, the gamepad controls are good. You move with the left stick and activate abilities with three of the case buttons and three of the shoulder buttons. The fourth face button uses an evade roll, and the fourth shoulder button uses a heal. You start with only one ability button open, and somewhat slowly unlock the other five as you play the early hours of the game. The controls work well once you get used to them. The keyboard and mouse controls are also fine, with the same number of abilities but mapped to mouse and keyboard buttons now, but as usual for Diablo games you have to click on the edge of the screen constantly to move, which I’ve always hated. With a gamepad you can just hold the stick to move, which is much easier. On PC, you can go back and forth between keyboard/mouse and gamepad, and the on-screen button labels will change on the fly depending on which control option you touch an input on. That’s a nice feature.
Diablo IV and Diablo II Remastered both allow you to equip six skills to buttons on the gamepad when using gamepad controls. With mouse and keyboard, two actions go on the mouse and the rest on keyboard hotkeys, unless you have a mouse with extra buttons of course. However, in some ways Diablo IV has worse controls than Diablo II Remastered, because while that game has a modifier key to give you a second set of skills to equip, doubling the number of skills you can use without having to change your bindings, Diablo IV has nothing of the sort. You can equip six skills at a time in this game and that’s it. Each class only has a few dozen skills, so you don’t NEED more than six, but it would be nice since the last game had it. Ah well. Another thing missing from Diablo IV is an alternate weapon equipment set. Diablo II lets you have two different equipment loadouts you can switch between with a button, but no such thing exists in this game, you have one equip and to change you’ll need to go into the menu and change weapons. That’s unfortunate.
Other than those relatively minor issues, though, on the whole there isn’t a lot to say about the controls because they work great. Control is responsive, and while once in a while I get hit for what seems like unfair reasons due to input lag or something, those occurrences are rare. Diablo IV feels great to play. I wish you could have more skills equipped at once, access to a second set of six mapping spots like DIIR has would be nice, but this works well enough.
Story
I’m covering story here because I want to save the best, the gameplay, for last. Story? This game has a story, and they tried to tell an interesting tale, but so far I agree with the consensus I’ve seen online that this games’ story is disappointing. One of the worst parts of the story is right at the beginning, as the first section of the game, which serves as a tutorial and introduction, has numerous overlong cutscenes with too little gameplay in between each one. Sure, as always from Blizard the fully CGI cutscenes look fantastic and the in-game engine cutscenes look pretty good too, but there isn’t anywhere near enough gameplay in between them to keep me interested in this part of the game. They had too much setup to cover at the beginning, I guess, but should have come up with a way of telling it that actually let you play the game more, instead of starting with a lot of overlong, tedious cutscenes.
Of course, if the story was great perhaps I would mind less, but as I said… it’s not. This game’s story, particularly in the first chapter, is a very post-World of Warcraft Blizzard story. They try to tell depressingly moving tales of characters in the games’ world of Sanctuary falling for demonic lies and destroying themselves and fellow humans of theirs, but most of the time it doesn’t really land. Some characters are pretty annoying, most of the writing is cliche and predictable, most of the characters do not act like people but instead like characters in a mediocre MMO… eh, it’s not great. I did like the story in Act II a lot more than that in Act I, though. It’s a more concise chapter without the bloat of the first one, and I like the characters more too. The chapter II boss was oddly quite easy — I beat it first try — but perhaps I’m over-leveled? There are huge amounts of side activiites to do in this game, do they expect you to just follow the main path first and leave the many sidequests and dungeons for later? I really don’t know. It’s hard to know what level you are supposed to be on for things because the game scales most enemies to be similar to your level.
Anyway, beyond the often-iffy writing and the not always interesting characters, my other complaint about the story in Diablo IV is about how hopelessly dark everything is. I mean, I know that all Diablo games are like this, but they really emphasize it here. The power of evil is everywhere, in the demon Lilith who is the main face of the evil forces in the game, to the innumerable lesser demons filling the world, to the other evil powers out there. While the humans try to cling to belief in good powers, where are they? A few angels exist in this series, but they rarely make an appearance and even when they do they’re not exactly friendly to humans. They are’t enemies either, just not exactly friendly. I should note, that while the Diablo games use the words angels and demons, this game is not set in a definitely monotheistic world; the setting, Sanctuary, is an original creation. If there is a single god in charge that god is never mentioned, only the hosts of angels and demons. That is both good and bad. The bad side of this is that it’s kind of a shame because most Western fantasy RPGs are set in polytheistic worlds, so a more actually medieval monotheistic one would be interesting since monotheistic Christianity’s very important role in society is one of the most important defining elements of the Middle Ages. On the good side, the backstory of this world is interesting and morally complex. This games’ plot goes into the backstory of Sanctuary in more detail than previous games so I can’t say much without spoilers, but the setting has a great war between angles and demons in other planes. This world, Sanctuary, was created by an angel and a demon together, so it’s kind of caught in the middle… supposedly. In effect mostly it’s just invaded by massive armies of demons over and over while the angels do little. It’s extremely imbalanced between the sides. For a game mostly about fighting demons I understand why this is, I do not also want to have to fight angels. But the game isn’t exactly about good versus evil, either, because the angelic forces of good are also quite morally flawed. Uh, or the like one angel in this game is, you don’t see any others. What the other angels think I have no idea.
Basically what I’m saying is that the story of this game is a good example of what storytelling in this time has become: the old stories of good and evil are no more. In their place are stories of grey and black morality, of deeply flawed characters on both sides. I’m not sure if ANY of the major characters here are actually good, other than maybe some of the human characters. Okay, people are flawed, so this makes sense. I am flawed, everyone is flawed. But there IS good out there, and even though most of the plot of this game works fine, of evil forces trying to control this world, I wish that there was an actual clear good force out there organizing the resistance against them. But instead it’s left to you to be that force. Given how poorly that turned out in previous Diablo games, I doubt very much that this is going to end all that well. The other humans take this as encuragement to either surrender to evil or focus on the good aspects of their nature and fight back on their own, which is what your character does, but that leads into another issue…
So, your character. Videogame characters are usually significantly stronger than everyone else, and this game is no exception. You start out weak, but eventually become an incredibly powerful figure. You can kill armies of demons with a wave of your fingertips, warp from place to place with magic in a way no other human in the game can do, and so much more… and the story doesn’t really ever acknowledge this. For example, the town portals and warps are there to save the player the tedium of walking everywhere, and for that they are great, but it is odd when you see NPCs in some small side town talking about how hard it is to get to the far away capital of their area when I’m thinking… like, just walk over to the warp circle over there and wrap to town, you’ll be there in ten seconds. But they can’t do that and the game doesn’t acknowledge it. This is normal for videogames, certainly, but the “everything is super hopeless” tone here emphasizes the issue more so than usual, I think. It’s similar with your character’s extreme power. How are the forces of evil actually so inevitably powerful when you can literally wipe them out by the dozen? I know, as soon as you go to the next area all enemies respawn in the previous zone, that’s how it works in videogames, but in a more realistic place someone this absurdly powerful would completely break that power balance, when one person can wipe out most of the demons on their own how are demons actually a serious threat? And again I know, there are plot excuses for this late in the game in every Diablo title, including your link to Lilith explained in the beginning of the game and that it is nearly impossible it is to actually kill Prime Evil demons for real and such, but I still think it’s worth mentioning. There is strong tonal dissonance here, more so than Diablo II. Regular enemies feel more threatening in that game and the story has a different, though certainly also very dark, tone. As I’d expect from pre-WoW Blizzard, DII has better writing. Also the warps don’t go between towns, just from the town to points in the wilderness and dungeons and such.
So, overall, Diablo IV has an uneven, mediocre story with subpar, post-World of Warcraft Blizzard writing and a setting too focused on showing the power of evil and the flaws of good. There are interesting elements to this story but most of them are ultimately not handled all that well. It’s too bad. Still, some parts of the story are interesting, so it’s not ALL bad. But if you want to skip all the cutscenes and just go around wiping out demons I don’t blame you, that’s the strength of this game, not the story.
Character Creation and Nomenclature
Diablo IV launched with five classes: Barbarian, Rogue, Sorcerer, Druid, and Necromancer. Unlike the first two Diablo games, this time you can fully create a character and choose a class, instead of choosing a pre-created character with a preset class as those games did. It’s nice that you have a lot more freedom in character creation this time, but beyond now being able to play as any class as either a male or female character, something not possible before, not much customization was added. You can change your characters’ skin and hair color, add tattoos to your characters’ body from a variety of patterns available, adjust facial hair — which for females only adjusts eyebrows, you cannot have a bearded woman — and … well, that’s about it. You cannot change your height, hair style, or anything like that. You can’t change your characters’ voice either, the male one has a male voice and the female one a female voice. Given the overhead perspective I understand not having a height change option since it won’t look all that different anyway, but some other options really should have been here, this is as minimal as a character creator can get. I like that there is some character creation options but Diablo IV left me wishing for more choices.
Diablo IV does make one change in its character creator that you’re seeing more and more often now, though: it removes the words “male” and “female”. You just click on the character you want, with no text saying which is which. The game’s story or NPCs will never refer to your character by their sex either. Nintendo did something similar in Splatoons 2 and 3, where instead of the “choose male or female” of the first game it says “choose your style” before picking the obviously male character or the obviously female one, with similarly limited customization to Diablo IV beyond that. I know that the politics of gender are quite fraught at right now, but is this really a change that is enough to satisfy everyone? I doubt that. I mean, I know that some on the right were somehow annoyed by Splatoon 2’s change, but still, it’s the most minimal change a company could do. After all, the games still have binary gender. That’s normal in games, where each character model needs to be hand-designed so having more than that would be significantly more work, but plenty of other games have a lot more customization than this game has. I’d think that things like that matter more than whether a game is using the words male and female or not… but whatever, removing the words is fine, I’m just interested that they did it.
To complain about something extremely common in games, though, the terms used for classes and costume pieces are all either neutral or masculine. For the class names, the one with an issue is Sorcerer, since the female form Sorceress is still commonly used. It is good to remove gendered terms from professions, but this is one which is gendered. If they wanted to keep the name and not find something more neutral, which refers to Diablo II’s Soreceress class, deciding “and we’ll use just the male form for either gender” is kind of annoying. A lot of fans, me included, call their female sorcerer sorceress. Similarly all armor pieces were probably named for the male version of the outfit. Most of the time this doesn’t matter, but sometimes it does; for instance a female sorcerer’s “heavy pants” is a skirt. I get it, having different names would be much harder, but it would be nice if terms that work equally could be found. This game does not do that.
(How does my favorite online RPG, Guild Wars 1 (2005), fare at this? It uses the names of the genders (which I have no position on either way); character creation has minimal customization, though you do have a height slider so it’s got that on Diablo IV; it has class names that are mostly neutral except for one which kind of isn’t, Monk (though the term monk can be gender-neutral in certain cases, it usually isn’t in English); and for item names… it’s pretty similar to Diablo IV overall. Guild Wars has standardized item naming. The first half of an item name is its set name, and the second part is the piece. The lower body piece names vary from class to class but most classes use the somewhat generic term “leggings”, in a few cases “hose”, or, for monks, “pants”. Some end up awkwardly named, female elementalist (and other classes) skirts are leggings apparently and that one female monk skirt is dubbed pants, but at least the issue isn’t with that item name in specific since they have standardized names, it’s with the naming system. Overall I’d say that Guild Wars is probably a bit better than Diablo IV at gender-neutral naming, or at worst they’re even, despite it being a much older game.)
Gameplay – Skills and Builds
To return to one of the first things I said in this article, Diablo IV gameplay is all about running around and killing things with a variety of different combat abilities, weapons, and skills. How you kill things will vary depending on your class, but the results are the same, demons dead by the dozen. The game likes big numbers, and your damage numbers, stat point numbers, health numbers, and everything else get large quickly. Where at level 20 in Diablo II you’re probably doing like 10 damage per hit, or less, at a similar level in this game you get numbers many times larger and they just go up from there. When it comes to numbers like this bigger isn’t better, but people like large numbers so Blizz significantly increased the size of the numbers. Okay. I kind of miss D&D-inspired sane numbers in RPGs instead of everything doing hundreds of damage per hit, but that’s not how it is anymore clearly. A level 42 Diablo II character of mine’s main weapon is a spear that does … 25-116 damage. In Diablo IV numbers that would be a much lower level weapon than that.
Most of the time in Diablo IV, you will be fighting with the games’ skills. Each of the five classes has an entirely separate set of skills that you will unlock the ability to put points in and equip as you level up. In addition to that, the game has several universal abilities, such as the dodge-roll, which is on its own timer that starts refilling after you use a dodge, and the healing potion button. I will describe those other two functions later, this section focuses on the skills you choose. In short though, the healing system in this game is kind of strange as it uses non-refillable potions that drop in the world. They are not something you can buy . As for the dodge-roll, it’s a powerful and useful ability which makes combat much more dynamic. With it you can dodge powerful attacks, get out of the way, and more. The combat in the game is designed around its use, which is mostly good but has some downsides. Both of these abilities have both good and bad sides to them.
The equippable skills, however, are pretty much all good. Indeed, the skills in this game are a significant strength of Diablo IV. This game has a nicely large skill tree with a good number of skills, both active and passive, available to each of the five classes. There are many RPGs which simplify skill selection, by not having any kind of skill selection as lots of classic JRPGs do or by tying skills to equipment instead of fully letting the player put a build together freely, but Diablo IV doesn’t do that. You do not get stat points to distribute after each level as you do in Diablo II, but you still do get a skill point after every level up that you can distribute to skills on a series of hubs that form up the skill tree. Each hub is named for the kinds of skills you find on it, such as Basic, Core, Defense, and more. Each has several different active combat skills and passive abilities for each of your classes’ different ability types. The Basic skills cost no magic to use so they are your basic attacks. Everything above that does cast magic to use. Magic regenerates, but slowly enough that you need to use it judiciously. Additionally, as I said each class has three different categories of abilities you can put the points into, a classic Diablo staple. With the sorceress for example you have fire, ice, and lightning abilities, just like Diablo II, and can choose which skills you wish to get points in and use. After level 50 you unlock a second skill upgrade board that gives you stat bonuses, as well. It’s a great system that is mostly implemented well.
Re-speccing your stat points is much harder than it should be, but even so I love that this game has a full, user-customizable skill system with a lot of different abilities and upgrade points. There are plenty of balance problems in Diablo IV to be sure, as there are in most games with deep, user-customizable skill systems, and it’s unfortunate that apparently the sorcerer/ess gets the worst of it in the lategame level 70+ higher difficulty level play, but even so I’d take this every time over some game with limited customization. There is a lot more customization in this games’ skill system than Diablo III had, so I am very thankful that Blizzard backed down from that games’ console-style simplification and went back to a more complex, and dramatically more interesting, skill system here. The results are great.
To be clear though, Diablo IV is no Guild Wars; you have only dozens of skills per class, not hundreds. There is plenty of skill customization you can do here, but the games’ skill system is middle-grade in complexity. In that way it’s very much a Diablo game, since the Diablo series has always been simpler than some other RPGs, going for very well-polished but relatively simple design over the most complex systems. Diablo II had almost no side-quests, for example, unlike most action-RPGs of its day. So, in Diablo IV you will reach the bottom of the regular skill tree relatively early in the game, after which you only have the added bonuses of that second board to keep you interested. I kind of wish that there was a bit more to the skill tree, but with three different sets of abilities on the tree for each class you can always go back and try the other skills if you’ve focused on only one with your build. As you go to higher difficulties you will need to re-adjust your skill choices as well.
Overall, in Diablo IV you can equip six skills at a time, will have points in more skills than that, and will have more skills than that that you don’t have points in. Skill builds matter, both for where to put your skill points and which skills to equip, and different builds will have very different effectiveness. I could look up the best builds but have always preferred to just play a game with the skills I want to use even if it’s not the most effective unless something in-game forces me to go look up builds. So far in Diablo IV I haven’t had to do that much, it just works. Fantastic stuff. Sure, I hope they continue working on game balance — it could use some — but even so I love it.
Inventory, Death, and Healing in Diablo II
After the skill system, probably the next most important topic to cover is this games’ inventory system and its somewhat odd healing mechanic. It’s not something I have seen before. First, though, I would like to describe Diablo II’s inventory system, because inventory management is one of the core elements that makes Diablo games what they are so comparing these differences is important. In the first two Diablo games, you healed with potions. You had to spend a large amount of inventory space in your very, very limited-size inventories on healing potions. You did get increasingly large belts which can hold more and more potions, but even the final 16-item belt still doesn’t hold anywhere near as many health and mana potions as a player will need. Additionally, you needed to have two two-block books in your inventory for your town portal and identify books. Diablo I and II have very limited inventory size both because of how much space you must devote to potions and also because weapons take up large amounts of inventory space. Weapons can take up to eight tiles of inventory space, and that’s a lot. In Diablo II, your main inventory is 40 blocks. Remembering that many items are multiple blocks, after the various charms and potions are there you have very little space for item pickups. You also have a 4-tile Horadric Cube which has 12 spaces in it that I used as added inventory. Your storage chest in the original version of Diablo II is a single 8×6 space. And that’s all you got. There were no added storage panes, no easy way to transfer items from one character to another, nothing. Third party applications did exist to allow item transfer, so you could save some items to “mule” characters, but each one only added as much space as your first.
Diablo II Remastered makes the change of adding dramatically more storage space in the storage chest. Your character’s inventory space is the same, but the storage chest now has four panes of 10×10 tiles each. Three of the panes are shared between all characters you create, so transfer to other characters, either for them to use it or for storing extra stuff, is easy. One pane is exclusive to each character. It’s such a nice improvement, it makes playing the game a lot less frustrating since you don’t need to leave nearly as many interesting items behind! Even so, Diablo II is a game where you need to judge which equipment that you get while exploring is worth going back to town to store or keep. After all the potions and books and charms and such fill my inventory, in Diablo II I often only have space for a few item pickups. Grab a few things, use a town portal — and this uses up a scroll in that town portal book that you will need to buy a replacement for — go sell or store the stuff, and portal back to where you were to proceed. Often I found myself having to drop random stuff all over just in order to free up space for some valuable items I wanted to go back and sell.
Also, Diablo II, in either release, has you store money in your storage chest. The storage chest has separate money totals for money you are storing only your character and for shared money between your characters. Money in your storage chest is yours for good. Money on your character, however, is all lost upon death. Bank your money! In addition to that, when you die in Diablo II, you drop ALL equipped items where you died, lose some experience in higher difficulties, are sent back to the town of the current act, your equipment’s durability takes a hit you will need to repair later once you re-collect it, and need to get back to where you died to pick your stuff up again from the last warp portal. It’s quite a punishment.
Diablo III has a much larger inventory, and limits item size to only two tiles maximum now. It also has a larger storage chest. Diablos III and IV are pretty similar in inventory space though, that’s one of the few things Diablo III did well.
Gameplay – Death, Healing, and Inventory
Diablo IV so far has probably less storage space than III, but it has dramatically more than II original and a lot more than II Remastered. Because in Diablo IV, all inventory items take up only one space, and healing potions do not take up inventory space. Key quest items and crafting materials for the games’ simple upgrade and potion system also do not go into your inventory, they have separate storage. Gems do go in your inventory, but they can stack now, something not present in DII, up to 50 in a stack. The 33 spaces of character inventory that you get are plenty for lots of stuff… or they would be if some areas didn’t drop such ridiculous amounts of loot! Seriously, this game gives you so much stuff that items mostly lose any meaning. Why should I care about almost any of this stuff when I’m just going to get like twenty items dumped on me around the corner, anyway? The game does help players out by putting a single number on most items which tells you its overall item power, a common feature in loot games of the past decade or so, but you can’t look only at those numbers once you’ve gotten farther into the game. The many modifiers and stat boosts are very important and you’ll need to consider each item swap carefully. As much as I don’t really care about items, it is fun to consider the equipment and think about which ones I should equip and which not to depending on their different bonuses.
Even if you do get overwhelmed in items, though, you can freely warp back to the nearest major city with the press of a button at any time you aren’t in combat. Town portals are unlimited now. You don’t need to identify any items anymore either, unlike Diablo II, all items come automatically identified. In the cities you can sell the items, store the good ones in your storage chest, upgrade your items, add gems to items to add modifiers to them, and a lot more. The game has a lot of fairly powerful inventory systems to allow you to change and improve inventory item modifiers. It’s mostly well thought through stuff which adds a fair amount to the game. You can choose to destroy high end equipment if you want to take the special bonuses, called affects, out of that item and add that affect to a different item, for example. It’s good stuff. You can also try to get different modifiers on an items, add gem slots to items that don’t have them, and more. I’m sure people who spend a lot more time than me min-maxing their equipment will take issue with elements of the item modification systems, but to me they seem mostly good. My only criticism, other than that the game gives you way too much loot, is that some of the stuff you need for things such as adding a gem slot to an item are quite rare crafting materials. Ah well.
The healing system is also significantly changed, for better and worse. In Diablo IV, you do not need to buy healing or mana potions. In the abstract, this is great! I’ve always disliked the “do you have enough health and mana potions to survive?” school of game design, it feels like lazy limitations aimed at artificially creating difficulty that wouldn’t otherwise exist. Great games can use that design, but in the abstract I prefer a system where each encounter can be designed for the player at full strength, challenging you to play your best. This game is like that, but its implementation has its own serious issues. Now mana recharges somewhat quickly, but has a low maximum. Your basic skills use no mana, as explained earlier, so most players will use those as regular attacks and the higher level skills that do use mana more sparingly, once it recharges. This system works well, though it is odd to have magic spells that somehow don’t use any magic… DII isn’t like that, if you’re out of mana use a potion or start using your regular weapon. DIV’s system here is probably overall better. Even though free-magic spells is odd I like the quick recharge mana system, it makes combat more strategic and interesting.
However, when it comes to healing your health, I have some major issues with Diablo IV. Potions are mapped to a button, and you have a limited stock of them, at first four, though you will expand this number a bit as you play. Each time you use a potion one stock is used up. The potions cannot be bought and do not regenerate over time. You cannot pick them up if your stock is full. Instead, they are dropped by enemies, environmental objects you can break, or chests. These drops will eventually disappear, so if you trigger a potion at the wrong time it may be gone when you needed it in a fight in that area later. This is annoying design. Bosses, which as I will explain can be very overly long in this game since boss fights are a much stronger focus of this game than previous Diablo titles, have markers on their health bars which note at which points in the fight they will drop a healing potion or potions. You need to try to avoid taking more than one potions’ worth of damage until those points in the fight if you want to defeat the boss. This is an interesting challenge, but it can lead to extreme frustration when I was dying over and over and over to a boss that I just couldn’t quite defeat with the number of potions I was given. In the early parts of the game though most of the particularly challenging bosses are optional, the main-path stuff is not as hard.
As for death, in Diablo IV, almost none of the death penalties from Diablo II return. You can’t even put money in storage this time, you have to carry all of it with you. I guess you can’t share it between characters then. Having few penalties for dying is to be expected, modern games usually punish you much less for dying than older ones like DII do. When you die you respawn at some point near where you died with absolutely no penalties other than a 10% decrease to the durability of all equipped items. If items run out of durability you will need to go back to a blacksmith to repair them. This is the only part of DII’s death penalty that returns in IV. The other penalty is that if you are in a boss fight, you will need to restart it once you return. I understand why the rest of those penalties were removed, but it does make dying trivial most of the time, which hurts the game a bit when compared to its predecessor… except in boss fights, where trying to stay alive is still quite important because of how long boss fights can take.
Gameplay – The Overworld, Dungeons, and Strongholds – Exploration and Difficulty
Diablo IV has a fairly strong difficulty disparity between the different elements of the game design. This game has an overworld which is interconnected, made up of towns, regular exploration areas, and some challenging stronghold zones, as well as small and large dungeons scattered around that world. The regular overworld is usually easy. Even in the early parts of the game when I was the weakest and died the most, I still was only very rarely dying in the regular overworld areas. Overworld foes aren’t very strong and you usually should be able to win in those encounters. You also can run into other human players randomly in the overworld, though this game has no in-game chat at all so you cannot interact with them in any way. I’m sure that makes keeping the community not horribly toxic much easier, but it raises as many problems as it solves, you can’t communicate with teammates in-game and finding other people to party with is quite difficult if you don’t know people outside of the game you want to play with. Very much unlike classic Diablos I and II, the overworld in this game is entirely pre-designed, it is not randomly generated. This means that even though this games’ world does not feel much larger than Diablo II’s, it is probably somewhat similar in size, perhaps slightly larger at most, this world is more interesting to explore since everything was laid out by hand. I love Diablo II, but the randomly generated maps usually end up being just giant boxes I’m running along the walls of. Overall I prefer this, though it will lead to reduced replay value since everything is going to be in the same place every time. You won’t have that ‘I know I’ve played the game before, but where will stuff be this time? It could be pretty different…’ element that Diablos I and II have. Diablo IV adds replay value through the promise of seasonal content that will change the world while those seasons run and through the much larger number of optional dungeons and sidequests this game has, though, and that’s a lot. I like how many sidequests this game has, DII always felt like it had far too few. I like the larger number of NPCs as well, and the various towns of different sizes scattered around the world. I like the variety of smaller towns and their differences, it adds to the game. Some areas even have NPCs in combat zones, which is interesting.
In contrast to the overworld, dungeons and strongholds are instanced for each player separately. As a result you will need to conquer them on your own, or with a party if you randomly group with others ingame or know people you want to play with. Diablo IV Dungeons probably do have a random generation element, they feel like they are put together from premade chunks. They could be hand-made from premade pieces, though, I’m not certain. There are a relatively small number of dungeon graphical tilesets that you will see reused over and over. Dungeons are completely separate areas from the main world. There are three kinds of dungeons: small, large, and story. Story dungeons are large dungeons that you go through as a part of the plot. Small dungeons are little cellars or small caves. They are marked with a small opening on the ground. Each contains a single room with an enemy challenge in it, with treasure rewards once you win. Full dungeons are marked by a large open door along a wall surface. They are long, usually challenging missions with multiple phases, culminating with an often-difficult bossfight. How hard dungeons are will vary greatly though, some are easier than others. Lastly story dungeons are similar to the other ones but will have plot-relevant cutscenes and, so far in the game at least, are easier than optional dungeons. Both the dungeons and their bosses do not reach the challenge level of the stronghold or optional dungeon bosses. Maybe they want you to go through the story first, then go back for dungeons? I’m not sure. In the postgame you unlock even harder versions of the dungeons called Nightmare Dungeons, though I haven’t gotten to those yet.
In both the overworld and dungeons, you will frequently see random event battles appear. In these encounters you fight waves of foes at a single location for a while because of some scenario that plays out, from defending merchants to activating a pillar. These draw from very limited pools of event types and give you item rewards once completed. Overworld events and dungeon events are different, but the idea is the same in both cases. I like the concept here, having random events happen at various spots in the world makes the game a bit more dynamic, but there are so few different event types that after not many hours at all you will see the game repeating events, and from then on it’s the same few types over… and over… and over. Sure, the enemies get harder as you gain levels, but there are only a few event types. I think that for this concept to work better the game really needed a greater variety of event types, it’s too repetitive.
Strongholds, on the other hand, are dungeon-style areas in the main world, and they are the same every time, apart from level-based scaling of course. They do not have random events, but instead each tells a story of how that area fell to evil. Each area of the world has three strongholds, and the stronghold quests are interesting and fun. The strongholds are pretty cool, though unfortunately you can only clear each one once with a character, as once completed they change into something different. Often, following your victory, humans retake the place from the monsters and move back in. Beating some even unlocks waypoints to warp to. However, they can be quite challenging at times. I found the Kor Dragan stronghold boss particularly hard, it took me dozens of tries and many level-ups before I finally beat that guy. The other two strongholds in the first area were much, MUCH easier for me.
I have discussed bosses a lot in this article, but that is because of how much focus Blizzard put on boss fights in Diablo IV. In Diablo II, most bosses are stronger regular enemies. They aren’t anything special, they’re just some regular foe with more health and abilities. Many are randomly generated. Dungeons don’t always have a traditional boss at the end, a room full of a bunch of enemies is more common. There are a few major boss fights, but they are rare. In this game, though, every dungeon and stronghold ends with a big, hand-designed, not randomized boss fight. These bosses get a large health bar put on screen with those markers I mentioned telling you when you get healing drops. Their difficulty varies from the easier bosses of most of the story to the harder ones of some optional dungeons, but either way pre-designed boss fights are a huge part of this game. I like the challenge that these unique foes bring, it’s certainly more varied than what DII had, but must emphasize dislike how obnoxiously long their health bars are, wearing them down can be tedious.
As I said, dungeons and strongholds are also generally much more challenging than the overworld around them, though how much harder they are seems quite uneven, and nothing in-game rates dungeons or strongholds by how hard they are. Difficulty ratings on the dungeons and strongholds would be really helpful, the game should have them. I need to repeat that I think that this games’ difficulty balance is not very good. And worse, often you won’t know how hard one is until you’ve gotten quite far into it, because bosses in this game can be a major ordeal. A boss could be really hard, or it could be a moderate challenge I beat first try, I rarely know until I get there. Bosses have long, LONG health bars that take an extensive amount of time to chip down. As mentioned, if you die you will need to start the fight over from the beginning. Of course, your character class and build will have an effect on how hard any one boss is so there may not be an absolute way to rank dungeon difficulty, but even so the game could have done something. Instead, with all level markers on zones basically identical since again everything in this game is scaled to your level, you won’t know until you try.
You frequently will face large numbers of enemies at a time, too. Diablo games have always had you facing large crowds of foes, and this game is no exception, but Blizzard took advantage of the increasing power of technology to have probably even more foes than before and to make combat more dynamic and action-focused. As I mentioned in short earlier the dodge-roll really changes the game from earlier Diablo titles, as it allows you to quickly move around the battlefield. Of course Diablo II had its teleport and such for some classes, and this game has that as well, but this is different. For insance, you will want to watch for when an enemy is about to shoot at you or do a strong attack so that you can dodge-roll out of the way of the attack. This is a gameplay element entirely absent from classic Diablo, but critical here.
With the games’ dodge-roll move the game feels like a bullet-hell game at times, particulerly in the harder bossfights. The game will mark areas on the floor which the enemy’s next attack is going to affect for some projectile attacks. Get out of those areas. The dodge roll has a timer, so you can only use it at first once before waiting for a fairly long timer until you can roll again. I often found myself needing to dodge attacks but I couldn’t, I’d used it several seconds ago, I didn’t have boots with multiple charges yet, and it has a 5 second recharge. Some boots will add additional dodges before you have to wait for their meter to refill, which is extremely useful. Your characters’ defensive skills from their skill tree are also important to your survival. You will need to dodge and weave skillfully to avoid the waves of bullet patterns enemy bosses shoot out. And yes, this game has actual bullet patterns, sometimes marked on the floor with “stay out of this area, attack commencing” warning area indicators. It can get overwhelming at times, particularly when facing these bosses when the game is hard, which, again, for me so far was in the earlier part of the game (and the later part by all accounts). Once you get more and more powerful abilities, going through the crowds of enemies and destroying them with your abilities is fun stuff, so long as you can stay alive. Manage your defensive skills, dodge rolls, and heals well.
Microtransactions
Yes, despite being a $70 retail title, this game has some microtransactions. While everything you buy from merchants in the main game are items you buy with in-game currency, which you should have more than enough of given how many items you get that you can sell and how few of the items shopkeepers sell are actually worth buying — I don’t think I’ve bought any items yet — there is also a real money shop in the pause menu. Here you can buy other items, which I believe are cosmetic only, for real money only. It’s a modern game and a modern Blizzard game, of course it has microtransactions. I’m just glad they aren’t much, much worse,as they are in Overwatch 2…
Each quarterly season will have a lot of free content, but each does also add a paid DLC Battle Pass you can buy for added stuff. The contents of the battle pass for the first season have not been announced yet so we don’t know exactly how it will work or how mandatory it’ll be. I very much hope that you do not need to buy it, I probably don’t want to. I don’t like the way battle passes work, they require you to play obnoxious amounts of a game to unlock the things you paid for in the pass, and you’ve got a time limit for how long you have to get the stuff too. It pushes both hours played and money to the developer to the detriment of player happiness, because who likes grinding for experience and such? Not me.
Conclusion
In conclusion, while I’m only playing it off and on — I got the game pretty much at release and am “only” at level 49, after all — when I do play Diablo IV I often get hooked for hours, and it’s kept me coming back in a way that most games do not. That is one of the highest marks of praise you can give a game. This game is far from perfect, most obviously its game balance is highly suspect, but despite that Diablo IV is a fantastic game and one of the best of its kind. Diablo IV is a fantastic experience with great graphics, near-perfect controls, mostly good game design, a fantastic sense of atmosphere, a good amount of variety, a great, highly customizable skill system, thousands of demons to kill, and a promise of lots of content to come from future seasons and expansion packs. I’m not the biggest fan of a game world that is fully scaled to your level, it removes some of the satisfaction of a game when earlier areas stay just as hard later on as they were the first time, but it does mean that you can return to earlier areas not not find them super easy so there is that benefit to this design. The game has issues with late-game content — apparently after level 70 content thins out badly in the release game — but I’d say that’s fine, that’s where season content and the full expansions that are in development can fill in after all. For a launch game this is in extremely good shape, with huge amounts of content to play through and no major bugs I’ve seen. The story is flawed and somewhat disappointing in ways that Blizzard games all have been for almost two decades now, and that is a real downside, but apart from that, unless you don’t want to play a game that focuses this strongly on evil demonic forces (and I would understand that), I highly recommend it. It’s great.
However, is it better than Diablo II (Remastered)? I know that nostalgia is a factor here but right now I would say no. First, DII has a better story and better music. In terms of art design both are fantastic. Diablo IV is great, and is better than II in some ways — you have dramatically more inventory space, more ways to modify your equipment with removing the affects and such, more dynamic combat with the dodge mechanic, significantly more unique and dramatic hand-designed boss fights, and a hand-designed world instead of random generated generic walls everywhere. Its magic system with quick refill is probably better than “drain those potions”, too. However, the healing system is weird in some not great ways with how limited healing potion drops can be in some fights. Those boss fights drag on way too long, for sure. Battles against regular enemies of your level are not as challenging as they are in Diablo II because the challenge focus is more on bosses, but I much prefer a game with more even difficulty between bosses and regular levels instead of “the levels are easy and the bosses hard”. Also, for a hand-designed overworld, they made some odd choices. Some of the waypoints are quite close together, and others far apart. I would think that it’d be more balanced in terms of how far you have to go from the towns to get to places, but it isn’t. The dungeons feel randomly generated too, whether or not they are, and they are a huge part of the game. And perhaps most importantly, the way combat focuses heavily on dodging attacks and not just using your skills to defeat the enemies isn’t always something I enjoy; I’m not a Dark Souls fan, after all. It’s mostly good but sometimes having to dodge constantly is annoying. Still, combat is fun in both games but for somewhat different reasons. In some ways this design is better than DII and in other ways it is worse, but if I had to choose I’d probably go with the classic style by a hair.
Overall, Diablo IV is a fantastic action-RPG well worth buying. It has some strengths and some weaknesses, but it’s one of the best games in its genre I have played. It does a great job at modernizing Diablo’s design while bringing back key elements of Diablo that were missing from the third game, such as build complexity and that distinctive Diablo visual style. It’s a must-play for any action-RPG fan. If you want you could wait a while before playing this game if you haven’t played it yet, though. After all, the game will be getting more content in the future. I am glad I got it at launch though, it’s great fun. This game is a definite game of the year contender.
Greetings, internet strangers.
I'm sorry for the clickbait-y title, but I'm at my wits' end with a semi-serious problem. On several recent occasions I have been told that I look young for my age (i.e., my nephew's friends thought I was a High School Senior, a receptionist also said I looked like a teenager... etc). It appears that I have a different view and perception from others. Suffice it to say, I've always had a fairly poor self image. And it seems somewhere along the way I may have also developed a bit of Dysmorphia, so I mostly just see flaws. Thank Jeebus for Covid masks. I'm also almost certain I have undiagnosed Avoidance Personality Disorder (APD), so I don't actually have anyone close that I might approach the subject without embarrassment.
It really doesn't help that I'm a tiny 5'3 and 112lbs, so finding adult clothes that I fit hasn't been an easy task. I've mostly been a T-shirt, jeans and a hoodie type of guy and never really had style or fashion sense, although I've been trying to opt for more dress shirts and the sort to look more age appropriate. It still kinda feels like cosplay though.
So my fellow anonymous and randoms on the internet, I'd like a honest and unbiased opinion. Do I just look like an old fart or did I miss my calling as a "To Catch A Predator" bait?
I'm just struggling to find a balance and don't want to be that Steve Buscemi Meme.
Soon after the success of Goldeneye, Rare's star team began work on it's successor, Perfect Dark. It's development had numerous delays brought on by inside challenges however. Midway through the new game's development, key members of the original Goldeneye team left to form Free Radical. Fortunately, they had completed a lot of the preliminary development work that the remaining members could build from. Numerous designs from other departments at Rare were brought together to form a new star team. They had a basic outline, but they opted for a "add whatever you think is cool to this game" approach at this point in development. Whole new gun modes, weird interactions, the plot growing even more bizarre, and plopping in numerous gameplay modes and graphical tweaks. They did all of this right up until the very last moment. As an example of the sort of madhouse environment at work here, the well praised reload animations were done by one programmer on a whim a few weeks before the game went gold.
This also resulted in one of the longest threads here at Tendo City. The anticipation for Perfect Dark was met with delay after delay, while all these troubles and oddities behind the scenes were hidden from public view. Fortunately, when the game finally came out (a year after the release of the Dreamcast and the start of the next generation of consoles beyond the N64), all those delays and additional work turned out to be worth it. However, the question that comes up is this. Should the game have been delayed into a Gamecube launch title, like both Star Fox Adventures and Eternal Darkness? Were the performance hits taken by pushing the N64 harder than it had been up until that point worth the, at the time, amazing visuals? The good news is, we have the best of both worlds now. The game has been ported to the XBox 360 since then, with smooth 60FPS gameplay and enhanced textures and models. I'll be focusing most of my review on the N64 original, but I'll have a section at the end regarding the 360 version afterwards. It's that second version that's delayed this review for so long, what with it's added "Award" challenges and new 201% completion rating challenge. With all that said, let's get started on what is often considered to be Goldeneye's superior and see if it lives up to that reputation.
--- Story ---
It's the year 2023. The world belongs to a consolidated collection of mega corporations who's inventions revolutionize both civilian and military activity. Global conflicts now focus on information. Megacorps are developing advanced AI who's morality is questionable. The gap between the wealthy and the poor is vast. The U.S. President appears to be a tool of the corporate class and even agents controlling the NSA seem to have heavy ties to them. Pollution, war, and the steady effects of climate change still run amok. In the midst of all of this, rumors of unidentified flying objects and even deeper secrets the governments seem to have witnessed have recently resurfaced thanks to odd videos.
Anyway, enough talking about the news, let's get onto the game's story. Why yes, I DID rush through both Goldeneye and Perfect Dark's modern ports in this specific year JUST to make that joke in this review, but it is stunning just how well this absolutely ridiculous game's initial story lines up with the actual year 2023. As to the rest, yes the story is ridiculous video gamey tropes. The original concept was inspired by a combination of James Bond, X-Files, and Cyberpunk. They had the idea to make the lead character a woman right from the start. They simply thought it was about time they had a female lead in one of their games and worked around that. "Wokeness" has always existed, and we're richer for it. There are conflicting reports on where the name came from. Originally some developers said Joanna Dark was supposed to sound like Joan of Arc, but a few years back another developer revealed that this was just a happy coincidence they later capitalized on. The name for the character stemmed from the game's name, and the game's name was simply mashing together a bunch of cool sounding words until they found something they all liked the sound of. In any event, what we get is a complicated setting involving two megacorps at war with each other, each secretly allied with one of two alien groups competing to reach a hidden ancient weapon on the sea floor. It's themes are largely incidental to the setting they wanted to play with. The whole thing is pretty self aware with Joanna's own reactions to how much stranger and stranger events get playing a bit of comic relief. Unlike Goldeneye, which had a movie to fall back on if players wanted some more backstory, Perfect Dark had to expand it's cut scenes to develop things a bit more. The cut scenes were fully voiced, but the developers still had to keep them short both to avoid losing player interest and to conserve limited ROM space. They opted to have almost every line of dialog simply push the plot forward. There's almost nothing to really latch onto for character exploration here, but fortunately there are a few interesting moments. For my part, I love the moment Cassandra reveals just what kind of person she is simply by revealing she is willing to sacrifice her own life to save one of her enemies if it means getting revenge on the group that betrayed her. For the rest, you get a selection of cliché characters with not all that much depth to them, but they play the roles well and they're fun enough. Elvis in particular is a rather adorable alien buddy that's generally enjoyable every time he's in a scene. By the end of all this, Joanna manages to single handedly slay the leader of an alien empire and allow her ally aliens to bombard the capital, saving the sector. Typical stuff. The game does do it's best to try and hide a lot of the story twists and turns, but the ad campaign more or less spoiled a lot of it before the game had even come out. Elvis' head is right there on the box and numerous promotional materials make it very clear this will eventually involve aliens. All in all, the story is the bare essentials, but I'd say it's more interesting to follow along than Goldeneye's if only for the creative mashup of genres. Like Goldeneye, it's enough to keep you following along to see where it goes next, and nothing more.
--- Visuals ---
A few years had passed since Goldeneye had introduced mocap to FPS games and the genre on PC had expanded by leaps and bounds since then. The likes of Unreal Tournament, Quake 3, and System Shock 2 had released the previous year. Further, a competitive to the "female lead secret spy shooter" space would release only a few months after Perfect Dark with No One Lives Forever, and Free Radical's own first Time Crisis came out around the same time as that, so Perfect Dark was racing against it's own subgenre, just barely beating those two to market. Visually, it couldn't compete in a lot of ways with any of those titles, limited by the N64 hardware as it was when the Dreamcast was already out and the PS2 was right around the corner. However, it still managed to introduce effects not yet seen in other shooters of the time. It managed to simulate real time lighting effects throughout levels based on destroying light sources by creating multiple light maps per level and using that to base what is and isn't lit up. Further, blood effects were expanded to stain surroundings, though in a limited way compared to what later games would do, and the game layered on numerous trippy visual effects in many of the special weapon modes, such as fisheye stretching when using a Slayer rocket or after images when punch-drunk by fists or a neutron bomb. It did all this while greatly expanding the size of various levels compared to what they were in Goldeneye. While Unreal was still champion of raw visual fidelity at this point, Perfect Dark still managed to do JUST enough to catch interest at the time.
However, this came at a cost. The N64 simply didn't have enough memory to handle all this AND all the large levels in the game at once. The game required the recently released "Expansion Pak", which plugged into a slot on the top of the console and doubled it's memory. This was advertised as making the system "run faster", but this isn't accurate. All it provided was additional memory but the system ran just as fast as it had before. Some games could use this extra memory to store higher resolution textures and thus perform at higher resolutions, but the clock speed was unchanged. In fact, running at that higher resolution would often slow games down more than they already were, and thus it was often recommended to either disable the high res mode or simply swap back to the jumper cart to force the game to play at the lower resolution in order to boost performance. In the case of Perfect Dark, Donkey Kong 64, and Majora's Mask, the memory requirements of the games' designs required more memory to run at all. Perfect Dark in particular did have a high resolution mode, but it's hit on performance is bad enough that turning it off is one of the recommended options to make the game "playable". Fortunately, Rare's developers seemed to realize this and so it is already off by default. Further, technically the game is "playable" without the expansion pack, but most of the game modes have been disabled, including single player, and limiting multiplayer to some smaller levels in two-player only.
This brings us to what it runs like in this ideal state, expansion pak inserted and low res enabled. Frankly, it isn't good. Goldeneye was bad, Perfect Dark is worse. Is it that far from Goldeneye? No, I'd say it's only a few frames difference. However, when the two games are running in the teens to begin with, a few frames can feel a lot more significant. At it's worst, the game dips below 10 FPS, and if you do something as foolish as to set up chain reaction remote mines and gaze into the explosive chain reaction, the game will crawl at handful of frames a second. Fortunately, that latter example is something someone would have to intentionally set up and it's the sort of thing that could be done in Goldeneye as well. (In fact, in the XBox 360 remaster, chain reaction explosions even cause that game to slow down. I suspect that explosions weren't coded particularly well in these games.) Here's the good news. Much like Goldeneye, the programmers were especially careful about how the game handled slowdown, so key frames are prioritized making sure that what does get animated are either the results of player action or the result of enemy action if at all possible. This makes the game feel far more responsive than it otherwise would without that optimization, even at the low frame rate, and thus brings it back into being playable and allowing for accurate movement, aim, and actions taking place without delay.
The art design leans further towards sci-fi and a slightly more stylized look than Goldeneye did. While faces still use photos skinned onto the models, they now use more bright and almost comic-book colors, and the characters are equally bright and bold with clear silhouettes. While the art still veers towards the realistic side thus preventing the visuals from aging very well even one generation on, they fair better than Goldeneye's strictly "movie realistic" aesthetic does. It was a needed change to allow the humans of this world to fit in better with the aliens and alien environments in the latter half of the game though. Otherwise, Elvis or Mr. Blonde would have stood out horribly. Along with that art are two very distinct visual styles for the two alien races in the game. Elvis comes from standard Grey aliens from American folklore, called the Maians in this setting. Their bodies are sleek smooth silver without visible mouths and their weapons are equally inscrutable, literally melting their ammunition into themselves to reload. The Skedar by contrast are tall imposing dinosaur-like monsters full of jagged angles and hard edges in green, only to ultimately be revealed to be pretending to that kind of strength and actually being tiny little snakelike entities that use bio-armor to wage war. Their weapons feel like a mix of high tech and barbarism, reloading in a more traditional way yet using everything from destructive energy to literal screaming explosives. Humans have the most recognizable weapons, but being set in a cyberpunk future and working for a secret organization, they have a distinct flavor. One is a laptop that transforms into a gun, another is a rather rectangular pistol that still manages to look sleep. The mines even have an odd glow to them. You know... future glow. Oh yes, and the shields. They resemble the blocky shields from David Lynch's Dune movie, only colorized to indicate how much charge remains.
Environments stay interesting enough to look distinct throughout. Every building seems to have it's own aesthetic. Area 51 has stretched out hexagonal tunnels that are medical-bay-white (and with pointless caution stripes all over the place instead of just at the point of danger, but that's a typical cliché that can be forgiven). The G5 building has numerous very tight corridors built into stone. Carrington's villa is an island paradise resort of sorts. The Cetan superweapon is a bioship that's alive with green living walls and biological turrets in the ceiling. The Skedar homeworld is a holy place yet the very capital already looks run down with broken pillars and malfunctioning doors, as though the Skedar themselves did far more damage to their world before you even discovered it. The downtown area is every cyberpunk dystopia, eternally raining and full of flying cars, dangerous security robots, and agents trying to keep everything in order. There's also a frozen expanse in Alaska, the inside of the plane Air Force One, the luxury office of dataDyne, and the clean professional Carrington Institute, to name a few more. This keeps the game feeling fresh and prevents the areas from getting too stale, save for when a level is reused, which happens more often here than in Goldeneye, but I'll get into that later.
--- Sound ---
The game's sound design is excellent, as it was with Goldeneye but enhanced even further. Unique sounds for running on various surfaces, panting, random bits of often hilarious commentary from enemies, solid punchy weapon sound effects, reload sounds ranging from simply satisfying to outright surreal, and all the numerous ambiance layered throughout each level. It all comes through as rich as the visuals do, and unlike said visuals, the sounds still hold up. When the music is "calm", take a listen. City streets are bustling with the sounds of distant events going on in roads just out of sight. Buildings have running ventilation and computers beeping in the background. Alien ships and worlds have strange unrecognizable yet consistent sounds throughout. Even Carrington's Villa has a sea breeze and the occasional sound of waves when outside. The music is a microcosm of the game's own development. Grant Kirkhope returned to take over composing duties after Graeme Norgate left for Free Radical, yet both had worked together on Goldeneye's soundtrack. Other artists also contributed, but these two, while not exactly working as collaboratively as they had on Goldeneye, still managed an absolutely stunning and addictive soundtrack. Aside from some obvious inspiration from Bond that had to stay a lot further away from that franchise this time around, they implemented numerous more "surreal" instrumentation inspired by the theme of the X-Files, and also implemented heavy "synth" inspired by movies like Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell. The mixture of all these flavors came together to make a soundtrack that's a joy to listen to even without playing the game, like many Rare soundtracks. Much like Goldeneye, the game used queues to switch up songs midlevel to emphasize the situation. Sneaking uses much more subdued calmer music with that nervous edge. Combat switched to much more action packed music. Full alert emergencies ramp it up to a panic. Multiplayer also makes use of a lot of this music, and further allows players to select which music they want to play and even create a playlist. If you don't like a song, it can be stricken off entirely, though generally I simply stick with "random" myself.
I suppose it would be enough to summarize this as "Rare did Rare quality work" here. The sounds pop, the music's catchy and sets the right mood.
--- Controls ---
The game's controls are taken straight from Goldeneye, and like Goldeneye the ideal control setup is 1.2, which is more or less a "southpaw" version of the standard modern twin stick controls, replacing the right stick with the four C buttons. The game now has a number of interesting tweaks on top of this. Firstly, "head wobble" can now be disabled. This makes aiming far easier especially when running or sniping. My first time through the game I insisted on playing with this turned "on", but frankly I was making things harder on myself for no good reason. All it does is implement a random wobble players must contend with, so disabling it leaves it purely up to player skill. Plus, for those who really want to go for speed running, they'll want this off to better their chances. The game now has a cursor outside of "precise aiming" mode, so even while moving one can see exactly where they're going to shoot without resorting to putting sticky tack on the screen. The cursor itself is also much more subtle. It's smaller, semitransparent, and has a bit of a "range finding" aspect along the sides to really give a good impression of where the shot's coming from and where it's going, in case the player has a bad case of cotton eye. Corner leaning works just as it did before, and now ducking has a bit more nuance. In Goldeneye, being able to run while crouching was more of an accidental blessing that required very particular timing to pull off. In Perfect Dark, they took that and made it intentional design. Not only can players now move while crouched, there are now two levels of crouching, allowing a range of movement/profile tradeoffs. Using that particularly well timed button combination from Goldeneye now quick-ducks from fully standing to fully crouched, to save time.
Then there's the "quick menu". This feature is becoming standard in games these days, but Perfect Dark was the pioneer. By holding down the weapon switch button, a circular "quick menu" comes up. Point the analog stick in the direction of the item one wants to use and the game will switch right to it. This is much faster than manually switching most of the time, and also keeps players "in the action" better than pausing and manually selecting equipment (though the latter is still possible and very important for speed runs). If player inventory passes a certain point, pressing the trigger while in this menu switches to a second, and a third. Commands to A.I. allies take up the last "page" of this quick menu.
Once again, the fastest way to move involves diagonal running at JUST the right angle, which is easily done using the c-buttons in the 1.2 control scheme. I've noticed that the most popular shooters to speed run are the ones that involve skillful running tricks. There's something satisfying about utilizing some hidden method to get the best speed. Doom has wall-running. Quake has bunny hopping. GE/PD has diagonal running. All of them require a certain level of skill to utilize properly and mitigate movement commitments. In Goldeneye, the diagonal run was an unintended glitch, but in Perfect Dark they've specially calibrated the par times around the expectation of it's use. They didn't bother to fix the glitch and instead seem to fully endorse it now. It's such a wonderful thing when developers embrace techniques that add to the replayability of a game rather than clamp down on them.
All in all, the controls have been tightened and expanded but the general physics still feel very much like Goldeneye. For those who played the former, they'll feel right at home and then some here.
--- Game Design ---
Here's the crux of it! First, let me recap what I said in my Goldeneye review. That game created a new subgenre of FPS that emphasized exploration through numerous paths to discover solutions to unique objectives for each mission, very often allowing unique solutions so long as the core objective flag was triggered. It also heavily emphasized sneaking, though not to the extent of true "tactical espionage action" games like Metal Gear or Thief, which had already come out by this point. Further, with games like System Shock 2 out, there were now games that competed and even surpassed in terms of world interactivity while still providing solid shooting mechanics. However, Perfect Dark wasn't ready to just rest on what made Goldeneye's level design work so well. It expanded. Now the game wouldn't just add new objectives on higher difficulties. It would alter them entirely or shift locations of key items or enemies around based on the difficulty. Where Goldeneye made things more interesting and deeper with each new playthrough on a higher difficulty, Perfect Dark made each difficulty feel like a different path through the game. It wasn't incredibly rich or deep. Only some levels even did that, but the ones that did really stuck out. Further, numerous choices made in previous levels would affect later levels down the line. It becomes a good strategy at times to replay a level and pick a different option to make a later level's status shift a little. This sort of thing truly made player agency matter in a way Goldeneye didn't quite have. As examples, in Carrington's Villa, on lower difficulty, you are tasked with saving a negotiator as a sniper secretly inserted on a nearby hill. On the highest difficulty, you ARE the "negotiator", and you have to fight your way out of the situation yourself. In Area 51, during the escape, depending on the difficulty you may find Jo's brother Jonathan early on, or have to search deeper into the base to locate him. In that same level, near the end, Jonathan says he'll open the gates to allow you and Elvis to escape while he escapes on a jetbike. If you intercept him instead and stand in front of him, Jo will say she'll do that and Jonathan will escape instead. If you do this, later on Jonathan will still be alive to aid you when the institute gets invaded. The most significant change based purely on difficulty is the Cetan ship itself. The level consists of reaching numerous sections via teleporters, and depending on difficulty, the "middle" section is a completely different layout in each difficulty. Numerous little changes, and consequences to choices, are littered here and there throughout the game and it all adds up to make the game a richer experience that's a lot more interesting to play multiple times.
The levels themselves are still filled with numerous interactable objects, only this time with a wider range of effects which does make sense considering the sci-fi setting. There's computers that can be found that open hidden compartments or paths through levels (revealing secret weapons or just a shortcut to take certain enemies by surprise), windows that can be opened, and oh so very many pretty shiny buttons. The spy tools are the same kind of eclectic bunch to be found in Goldeneye, with the added bonus that more of them are optional this time around. For example, there is a level where you need to hack a taxi to create a distraction by remotely crashing it into a security bot. Except.. you don't need to do that. There's a remote drone hidden somewhere in the level and it can be fit with a bomb and asploded to create a distraction another way. In this same level, guards can be lured out to open certain locked shutters to give you more hiding places, including an entrance to a um... gentleman's club underground. As for the level's layouts, just like Goldeneye they're often filled with numerous paths and often useless side areas simply to give the area a more "lived in" feel, as though it's a real place. This also adds to routing options or simply hiding places over time. Certain level "equivalents" may be noted by Goldeneye players. The Alaskan wilderness "crash site" is much like the "Surface" levels, save that there's a whole underground section and mountains cut the aboveground region into sections. However, one thing can't be compared. Goldeneye had lots of "remnants" of it's early design as an on-rails shooter, where Perfect Dark was never intended for that. So, there are far fewer sections that look like they came out of Time Crisis here, and nothing like the "Train" level. One other thing worth noting is the player can "fall off" far more places than in Goldeneye. While some invisible fences still exist, for the most part the player is free to jump from higher levels to lower if there's no visible obstruction.
I should mention the cheese! During development, one of the designers commented to the map creator that something he'd made looked like a wedge of cheese. He decided to turn this into a running gag and put an intentional piece of cheese into every map in the game. Finding them all is yet another secret to explore, although there's no in-game tracking for it so it's just for your own satisfaction.
There is one downside to these levels with all their richness, and that's how many get reused. I'm not going to count cases like how the external of Area 51 and the internal are technically all one big map, because in practice you can't actually get to one section when playing the other so they effectively play out as two very distinct levels. I AM going to count that the "inside" section is done twice, once going in the other going out. The same goes for the main building section of dataDyne, and in fact the bonus levels unlocked at higher difficulties are also all reused levels. Not counting the bonus levels, the game only reuses as many as Goldeneye did, but counting those? Not a single bonus level is a unique location. There's four of them, but one's basically a mini-game that can be disregarded for this, leaving three. The game is one level shy of Goldeneye's count after that, and again, the bonus levels are reused. Don't misunderstand. They are reused in clever ways that make for unique strategy, but it's still lacking in comparison. All in all though, having replayed the Goldeneye and Perfect Dark levels so many times these past few months, I love them all, but Perfect Dark's level design (mostly) edges out what came before.
One last point to mention. Unlike Goldeneye, this game has a hub level called the Carrington Institute. This is a place to "relax" and calm down between tense missions. All the NPCs have some cute things to say. There's computers that add in details on current progress in the story, character bios, equipment information, and a few training facilities on top of that. The um.... "simulation room" (that looks like a holodeck straight from The Next Generation) creates holograms simulating things like navigating security lasers or locating switches. The gadget room has a hidden training hall teaching you how to use the gadgets. The massive storage rooms have hovering crates and a hoverbike you can play around with. (Here's a hint. Yes you can actually ride the hover bike. You have to press the interact button twice to get on or off. I didn't know this for an embarrassingly long time because it isn't actually documented anywhere in or out of the game in the manual.) Oh and yes, here's one you'll spend the most time with. The armory has a shooting range and you unlock more challenges in it by unlocking more weapons throughout the game (by finding and picking it up at least once in a level then finishing it, both in the campaign or in combat challenges). They range from bronze to gold and are all tailor made specifically for each weapon. Some can be very challenging, especially the ones that involve tossing explosives, but they can be rewarding when you find the unique tricks for tackling each of them. For the most part, these help you learn the full ins and outs of each weapon, but some of the training levels are a little "weak" in this regard. All in all, the institute is a wonderful addition, and if you think it's vast design is a bit overkill for what's actually there... well you're not wrong. Wait for it. No level design goes wasted in Perfect Dark.
Unfortunately, unlike the later Time Splitters series, there is no map editor. While Time Splitters would eventually have map editors so powerful they allowed for fully functional campaign levels with objectives to be set up, Perfect Dark is limited to the levels included. Recently, modders have set about fixing this with new map editing available to the retro game, but this was not available at the time of the game's release. This sets it, and Goldeneye, behind the likes of Quake and Doom which had custom level design built in right from the start.
Now we come to the enemy design. Let's get this out of the way. You can't shoot hats off guards any more. Apparently this was a result of changes that allowed different head sizes among guards, including alien heads of course, which made the hats no longer sit "right" on different heads, so they just baked the hats right into different head models. Maybe an extra week of development could have resolved that, but they decided to focus on other things. What did they focus on? Everything else. Now you can shoot guns out of a guard's hands, or even just walk up and disarm them. They may surrender if they are alone or hurt or otherwise weighted towards their "fear" factor, or they may decide to run away, or fight back. If they fight back, being close to them is a bad idea. They can melee you too, including knocking your weapons out of your hand, or they could reach down and pick a gun up off the ground, or they may have a gun or two or twenty stashed away in their clothes. All around, AI has been improved dramatically since the last game. In fact, while pathfinding has never been their strong suit, their general behaviors for handling what you may throw at them are beyond what's put in a lot of today's tube-quest cinematic shooters. Trying to lure an enemy chasing you around a corner so you can blow them away the moment they pass through the door? They may just hold back and try to lure you out instead. They may know you're a floor above and chuck an n-bomb at you to hit with the AOE. They may run and group up with more to rush back to you. They may... be able to see you over railings and fire back over them! You can no longer rely on rushing at a guard and ducking to karate chop their knees to death. Their new melee options allow them to handle that. Other than this, familiar weaknesses remain. Enemies pulling out their weapon have little room to adjust their aim if you decide to dash behind them before firing, leaving them wide open. Their animations usually need to fully complete as well. Of course, the "slowly walking forward while holding down the trigger on an automatic" animation remains, and it's as deadly as ever if you can't get behind them before it starts, so find cover instead. Of course, it's worth mentioning the aliens and their AI. The maians are basically a race of oddjobs with big heads, so their AI has all the same strengths and weaknesses. By comparison, we have the Skedar. Their AI is... much more simplistic, and since the last few levels feature them almost exclusively, it leads to them being a bit of a disappointment. They either rush straight at you or plant their feet and just fire away. No clever flanking or strategies of any kind, because they're built to be brutal almost like wild animals. They're still dangerous though at least, just not as well... interesting as the earlier human enemies.
Perfect Dark's legacy certainly can't ignore it's unique weaponry. In keeping with Perfect Dark's "throw everything at the wall" development hurricane, the weapons are a huge collection of very unique concepts with no regard paid towards balance, and I like it that way. This game uses a "secondary fire" concept that many games use today, but in this case the secondary fire modes are usually very different from primary modes. They range from incredible to practically useless to ways to make up for controller limitations. Punching has a secondary disarm mode, which is one of the most useful capabilities in the game. Pistols have a secondary smack mode, which is probably the least useful save for being able to quickly knock out someone you're holding up with a gun. I'll go ahead and mention all the faves everyone does as well. The laptop gun converts into a throwable automated turret. The Cyclone allows firing an entire clip in the space of two seconds. The CMP-150 has a "Fifth Element" secondary where you can pass the cursor over up to five enemies, and the weapon auto-aims towards them each in turn until they are dead. The Callisto NTG switches to a slower firing high impact mode that goes through doors, thin walls, and rows of enemies. The Slayer fires a screaming explosion that can be remote controlled. The wrist mounted laser switches between Moonraker and "cutting beam", combining the two items from Goldeneye. The Dragon allows you to throw the weapon down as a proximity mine, which is especially cruel a trick in multiplayer. The sniper rifle's secondary is... crouching. Yes, you can crouch in the game anyway, but the way the controls are set up, the zoom function of the sniper rifle is mapped to the same buttons as crouching, so they had to just use the secondary for that. It's a shame.
All in all though, these secondary features result in many new approaches to levels and their challenges. Many can be treated as additional gadgets allowing playthroughs to become far more varied. The laptop gun can be tossed in a heavily guarded room to clear it out, or simply to defend you while you hack a console. The Remote control rocket can be used to take out a distant important target from safety, or simply to speed up progress through the level. It's these that truly make playing with all these unique levels fun. While the weapons are NOT balanced taken as a whole, their deployment in each level is. Like Goldeneye, you can't carry weaponry from one level to the next and start with fixed loadouts, dependent on POS (Procure on Site) to better equip yourself in each stage. This can feel a little silly at times when a stage literally takes place right on the other side of a door you finish the last level going through, but it means that the challenges can be tailored very specifically to the tasks at hand. Multiplayer likewise uses specially configured loadouts that are roughly balanced in power, but it does allow you to completely ignore this and make custom weapon loadouts instead. Both of these things are critical, because there exists the Farsight. This is generally considered the most overpowered weapon in gaming for a reason. It's an alien railgun with an X-Ray scope and AI target finding. You can sit in some secluded corner of a level and just snipe everything through any number of walls, and the hit is an instant kill on contact. Well, if the target has shields the first shot destroys the shields, and the second is an instant kill. It also fires very slowly, and aiming through the scope means you have no situational awareness. These are the very few advantages opponents have when facing this gun. Limiting it to a very small number of levels prevents it from utterly breaking the game, but oh how much fun it is when you finally do get it.
Classic Goldeneye weapons do exist in the game, but only as cheat codes and they can't be used in multiplayer unfortunately. Instead, they're only for later playthrough. These weapons are unlocked by completing shooting range challenges back at the Institute, as mentioned earlier.
--- Multiplayer ---
In Goldeneye, the multiplayer mode was a last minute addition by one developer that turned into the game's most popular mode. It's no wonder then that Perfect Dark would put a big focus on greatly expanding and focusing on the multiplayer right from the start. Fortunately, this didn't come at the expense of the single player campaign. Instead, it enhanced it.
Co-op mode was added, thanks to the popularity of this mode in Doom and Quake. This addition involved certain tweaks to the level design to keep the game challenging with the extra character joining. In this case, that extra character is (usually) Velvet Dark, a sort of "Luigi" style sibling to Joanna which the story fails to acknowledge. In fact, the co-op character can even be bot controlled complete with some basic player-input commands. Co-op drastically improves the appeal of the single player campaign, so long as those playing it are willing to handle the rapid "quit and restarts" that failing objectives in a game like this brings. Co-op also has it's own saved progression, so a full completion requires doing this mode as well. In a few cases, the AI will actually get in the way (such as Mr. Blonde's Revenge) so it's probably more ideal in those cases to have a human player or even just to select a human ally and then just leave player 2's controller alone. Some levels change enemy spawn locations, numbers, or health/shield levels. Others shift a few objective locations slightly, others make the two players spawn far apart, and some even alter how certain cut scene triggers work. (The escape from dataDyne has a section where you automatically walk through a gate, but in co-op this automated walk is disabled so that whatever player didn't go through isn't locked in place when it happens.) A lot of care was put into it, and it's appreciated even if they didn't bother adding par times for cheats to this mode. It should be noted that as for playing with an AI controlled companion, a few alternate companions with their own AI can be unlocked. However, they are treated as "cheats" and thus can't be used to gain progression.
Counter-op is a brand new concept involving having player 1 play through a stage solo, while player 2 hops from body to body like a Matrix Agent, using their death (including by using a suicide pill) to springboard into a random other NPC's body. The counter agent's objective is to cause a failed mission for player 1. This can include pushing things in front of doors, setting up traps if they have the right weapon for it, or simply helping to alert guards. However, the counter agent can't destroy mission critical objects. In practice, the mode is weighted very heavily in favor of the main player. Not only does the counter agent have very low health and are unable to carry inventory with them, they will often be forced to spawn in a body very far from the player. Killing themselves or other enemies in order to get ammo or spawn closer is also very counter productive as it can make even Perfect Agent difficulty a cakewalk. It's a creative mode, but unfortunately it ends up not being all that fun to be a counter agent chasing and failing to make even a dent in an experienced player's progress. This mode doesn't track progress in the N64 original and isn't counted towards completion. This makes sense, since it's pretty easy to "suicide cheat" your way through every mission at every difficulty.
Combat Simulator is the real star of the show. This is the multiplayer competitive component from Goldeneye, vastly amped up. This mode includes new scenarios, many new maps, much more customization, and the new "Challenges", inspired by Quake 3 Arena's substitute for a true single player campaign. On top of all of this, it provides a progression system for the player, keeping track of all kinds of data recording what the player's file has done. These player files (and custom game settings) can be saved independently of the main save file and stored on a N64 memory card to make it easy to take progress over to a friend's house.
The scenarios available include standard combat, where players compete for the highest kill count. This, and all other modes, can be configured either as a free for all or team based modes (with up to eight teams). There's also Capture the Case, a capture the flag stand-in that's straightforward enough just spy themed. The case is a little harder to spot though. The player holding the case can't be spotted with it and thus has to be picked out on the mini-map indicator, if it's enabled. Hold the Briefcase is a variation of this. Whoever is holding the briefcase gains points the longer they hold it. Unlike similar modes in other games, you are free to fire back at enemies while holding the case. Pop-A-Cap, aside from having a very cringeworthy 90's "white guys trying to sound street tough" name, is essentially a twist on the previous mode. Instead of holding a case, the game randomly selects someone to be "it", and all other players have to kill whoever's "it". Whoever is "it" simply has to stay alive to gain points, and whoever kills them becomes the new target. Hacker Central is... well it depends on how many players are on each team. When played with teams of 1, the game is a slog. One player has to first collect a hacking tool, then stand in front of a hacking terminal, unable to defend themselves, until the hacking tool completes. With just one player per team, this is dull and only ends when everyone gives up on just being killed and no one getting any points. However, the game becomes a lot more interesting with team sizes of two or more, where players can actually form some sort of strategy to defend the hacker. Lastly, there's King of the Hill. Unlike many implementations, instead of putting a circle down of a fixed size marking the hill location, Perfect Dark instead alters the wall texture color to indicate a whole sector or room as "the hill". This means it can be an incredibly large area such as the bottom floor of an open arena, or as small as a tiny square a team has to pack into that's at the corner of two hallways and visible through windows in another. A rule can be set on whether the hill moves after every point, or stays at a fixed location.
Most weapons, save for gadgets, the Goldeneye weapons, and the psychosis gun in particular, are available in multiplayer. These include more balanced preset lists, or a full level of customization so the player can make their own stage loadouts. There are a whole selection of brand new arenas, and three fan favorite levels from Goldeneye, with some tweaks and enhancements. There has been much speculation as to just why Facility was renamed Felicity, but as it turns out it was simply an in-joke with the level designer, much like the cheese (the nature of this in-joke has yet to be publicly revealed). It had nothing to do with copyright issues. One thing worth noting is the shift in focus when it comes to the new level designs. While the previous levels had as much of a focus on espionage and sneaking around as the game levels they're based on, this time around most of the levels are designed as direct combat arenas first and foremost. For those who liked the sneaking, traps, and subtlety Goldeneye combat focused on, this made the newer levels feel like a step down. I think in some ways I agree, but there are a couple levels I love in the new set. First is Grid, based roughly on the "ground floor" scene in The Matrix and with enough twists and turns and unique locations to keep people guessing. The second is Fortress, which is perfectly arranged for 4 team capture the case or king of the hill. Beyond that, the Skedar level has too much unreliability with the doors to be all that fun (an issue that also plagues speedrunning the single player version), and the car park is simply far too vast, with every floor being utterly cut off from every other. So, some new levels do have some issues outside of the shift in focus, but all in all since the most popular Goldeneye levels have been brought in, it still feels like overall the mutliplayer selections have all improved.
Simulants (bots) are another new addition, based on similar popular AI controlled entities in other shooters like Quake 3 Arena at the time. These however had a lot more player accessible customization than average, and they're surprisingly capable. They can be assigned to teams the same way any player can. In total, the N64 game allows for four human players and eight simulants at once. However, playing with these numbers in large levels combined with explosive weapon loadouts can cause the game to slow to an unplayable crawl. It's better to manage the numbers a little better to maintain playability. Simulants have a number of "personalities" that can be assigned, such as "cowardsims" who only attack when their algorithm detects an advantage, or "vengesims", who seek out whoever last killed them to the exclusion of all else. The difficulty of their AI can be set from "meat", which are more or less walking targets, to "Perfect". At that level, they can turn and aim as fast as if they were using mouse controls, always run as fast as a diagonal run, and switch their objectives instantly the moment players change the situation on the map. "Dark" is a level further beyond that. At that level, if Perfect felt like the enemy was cheating, Dark removes all doubt. Dark sims can pull off perfect aim with wildly inaccurate "crowd clearing" weapons like the reaper, instantly whip around for those headshots while running perfectly fast in reverse, and often simply manifest objects into their hands when you aren't looking. So long as the mini-map is enabled, their wave function stays collapsed but if you disable it, these quantum monsters now will teleport to whatever location their AI deems appropriate so long as a player doesn't see them do it. In the setting, the combat simulator is a holographic training facility and "Dark Sims" are modelled off of advanced robots that are faster and stronger than humans, explaining some of this cheating. All in all, it's very fun to play on a team with three friends and form a defensive base against an army of perfect or dark sims just to see how long you can hold out. This has shades of modern "horde" modes when done this way.
The AI really has it's chance to shine, and frustrate, in the combat challenges. Thirty in all, completion is kept independently for 1-4 players, so full completion means going through this four times, with differing numbers of players each. Frankly, that's a bit much to ask someone to put together with their friends, so fortunately there's a glitch that can be abused to just "complete" the challenges on the higher player count without actually playing them all. Of course, I'd recommend at least playing the one player versions the intended way. These all consist of specially baked scenarios with preset enemies, allies, weapons, and objectives with occasional interesting little twists too. The difficulty is fairly low key early on, and only really starts to become challenging in the 20's upward. The last few challenges, involving numerous perfect and dark sims, border on outright unfair. A lot of luck and exploitation of AI weaknesses will be required to handle these challenges. I think at that point the challenge goes a bit too far in the unfair direction. When that much luck is required, it's not really fun. However, one key note. These challenges unlock multiplayer features from maps to weapons to scenarios to customized options. Fortunately, the very hardest ones are past that point of unlocking things, which is a small mercy. All in all, it adds yet more replay value to the game for subsequent playthroughs without stretching the game out too long.
For customization, aside from the nuanced control of rules and weapon loadouts, players can also fully adjust which music they want to play and create a custom playlist on top of that. They can also select not just a character but an outfit from any available in the game, plus a few additional bodies that didn't quite make it into the campaign. This includes mixing and matching human and alien heads and bodies. While Oddjob was notoriously short and hard to hit in Goldeneye, Maians made up for this with massive heads that made headshots far easier. However, by combining a human head with a maian body, something even harder to hit than Oddjob is born. Sadly, Skedar are not a playable option. Their animations and behavior are just too different from the stock human bodies to have worked well without a lot of custom work. The closest option to that is playing as Mr. Blonde. Incidentally, this is also what happens in Counter-op when respawning puts the counter agent into a skedar body. They simply becomes another Mr. Blonde. Oh yes, it should be noted any custom game scenarios players cook up can be saved to the memory card and brought with them as well.
With all of these features, multiplayer has been enhanced to such a degree it's hard to go back to Goldeneye. About the only thing missing would be the rest of Goldeneye's levels brought over, or a map editor, but short of that this is one of the most complete multiplayer experiences available.
--- Cheats and other bonuses ---
It's a Rare tradition! Provide plenty of cheats and make players earn them! There's a massive number available this time around, one for almost every stage! Well, that's the thing. Unlike Goldeneye, there are no par times for the bonus levels. It's a shame since there's a few cheats missing that were in Goldeneye as well. There's no fast and slow animations (but there's a universal "slo mo" cheat now), and no "enemy rockets". There's also no "turbo speed" cheat, but there is a "fast motion" option for multiplayer that no longer counts as a cheat. A few other former cheats were graduated to full options though. Paintball mode is now simply an option that can be enabled without being considered cheating, and turning off the radar is simply a multiplayer option. The Goldeneye style aiming reticle however IS considered a cheat. There's also a number of additional cheats like "Hurricane punches", for when you want to just destroy an enemy, and infinite laptop gun ammo, or even infinite ammo without reloads. What's a shame is there's room for more cheats if only so many weren't just subsets of other better cheats. There's a "perfect darkness" cheat that casts the whole world in a black filter, but doesn't actually blind the enemy. Also, the "cloaking device" cheat is essentially a weaker version of the invisibility cheat from Goldeneye.
All in all, while some of the new cheats are unique and fun additions, like the psychosis gun for turning enemies to allies, others are downgrades, and the missing par times for bonus levels means less challenges to overcome in those cases as well. The cheats are of course welcome, but it all comes down as a bit of a wash between the two. No clear winner here.
The statistics gained in multiplayer however lead to something interesting. Each statistic has hidden "milestones", and reaching a certain preset number of these milestones across all statistics causes a rank up. After a long period of grinding, the coveted rank of "Perfect: 1" is attained, along with a revealed username and password. Originally, these were meant to be used with Perfect Dark's "augmented reality" ad campaign web sites, but those sites went down earlier than expected and the codes never did get properly used. Still, it was a unique idea, even if getting to that rank involved far more grinding than it should have. (Literal days of leaving a controller with buttons or a stick taped down to run in long circles.)
-- And in the end ---
What we finally received from Rare was their last great hit. Conker's Bad Fur Day would be another great game released a year later to end out their run of N64 games (a game Nintendo refused to publish forcing Rare to do so themselves), but this was the last million seller they'd produce that made such a name for itself. It was a game that truly improved on just about everything Goldeneye offered, and while it falls short of being "perfect", it's certainly one of the greatest games of it's generation, PC or console. If only it had a good framerate and perhaps a higher resolution....
Enter the XBox 360 version. This version was commissioned and done by 4J studios using the original code provided by Rare as the base, where the unreleased Goldeneye remaster was done directly by Rare themselves. I'll get into the numerous changes made to this edition. Note that this is for a fully patched version of the game. The patch fixed issues involving the timing of explosions and the laptop gun as well as adding extra control options. Of course, the game now mostly runs at a smooth 60FPS. Oddly, explosions still cause the game to stutter a bit, and massive chains of them can still make the frame rate crawl, but not nearly to the extent of the original. Beyond that, the gameplay is identical to the N64 original. Even most of the glitches and exploits for speedrunning are still intact. The only one of note that I honestly think shouldn't have been "fixed" is that now the devastator can no longer be used to blow up Carrington's files "before" Carrington orders you to do so, making that particular time trial much less flexible than before. Controls, with a little prodding, are also mostly improved and now work just like most modern duel stick FPS controls. Sadly this makes diagonal running MUCH trickier. I wish they'd allowed the d-pad (bad as the 360 dpad is) to be used for movement, but alas that's not the case. Instead, you must find JUST the right angle to get that diagonal run boost, and it's not even doable on every 360 pad. Of all the pads I own myself, only one actually is calibrated JUST right to allow for it, and unfortunately 360 gamepads can't be manually calibrated in any way. The game does allow for some minor buttons reassignment, to make buttons for reloading and the like match one of three popular franchises. I picked the "Duty Calls" one myself. Crouching is now assigned to it's own independent button! This is great in many ways, but there's no longer any "quick" way to go from fully standing to fully crouched. This also means the "secondary" mode for the sniper rifle was simply removed. There was simply no point in it even being there when zooming and crouching no longer overlap.
Textures and models have been updated across the board. They don't make the game look like Halo Reach or anything, but they make the game look sharper, like what it MIGHT have looked like as an early Gamecube title. Whether this is an improvement is a matter of opinion. Maians now look like wrinkly old naked people instead of silvery smooth cute buddies, and so I'd say that was a notable downgrade. Other changes are also hit or miss. Sometimes the "interpretations" change enough details that an object will look entirely different, and other times it'll look simply like an enhanced version as intended. Their interpretation of Maian tech shifts from "liquid metal" to "aquatic lifeform" for example. Of note is that many of the heads based on old employees from both Rare and Nintendo have been replaced with the then current staff of Rare, 4J, and Microsoft. While it's a shame that Miyamoto is no longer guarding the Pelagic II in a Fire Mario suit (because he's got real firepower, see), at the very least now we have Peter Molyneux as the new elevator guard at dataDyne. Yes that's right. MS's most fabled liar can now be punched and kicked repeatedly in the opening and closing cinematics between levels! They've also added an additional character for multiplayer, the "Agent" from Crackdown 2. That's... well it's whatever but at least they made the model intentionally undetailed to more closely resemble the N64ish look of the rest of the game. The four cheats that previously had an alternative unlock if you plugged in the Gameboy Color Perfect Dark with a transfer pack now unlock if the game detects a save from Perfect Dark Zero on your console.
Audio has also been enhanced in many ways, and this one is a more objective enhancement. Voice and sound effects generally play at a higher bitrate based on the original samples, and music was remastered using the original instrument samples as well. Some of the songs, however, sound rather different in their recomposition, and thus are open to interpretation.
There's been a few tweaks as well. Times now display to greater precision showing the milliseconds as well, but the Perfect Dark speed running community never really "took" to this version. Still, it's an appreciated detail. Further, the Goldeneye weapons are now fully selectable in multiplayer, and in fact all multiplayer options are selectable right from the start instead of requiring unlocking through challenges. Difference species heads can no longer be mixed together in this version without a special cheat. Hold down "RB" while switching from head to body and now they can be mixed, but the reason this was normally prevented reveals itself. The new models don't "mesh" right and now gaps show between head and body when the species don't match.
The two big gameplay changes this time around are in online modes and the new "Awards" system. Mutliplayer is as fully featured as 360 games were expected to be at the time. Full support for "parties", leaderboards, matchmaking, access to your friend's list, and so on. That's where "Awards" come in. These are similar to the game's achievements, but they go a step beyond. The list of achievements is mostly just an incomplete list of things you do to get 100% completion in the game anyway, plus minor stuff like killing an enemy with each weapon and just destroying Carrington's entire wine collection. However, one is locked behind getting all the awards, and that's only doable so long as 360 online support remains operational.
While achievements are progress stored both locally and online, "Awards" are stored solely online and saved to an ongoing profile for player's Perfect Dark progress. It's an extension of the game's leaderboard system, in fact, though it was almost never used after MS introduced it. In one way, this is frustrating. Once MS's 360 services go dark, there will be no way to attain progress in these rewards. I'd rather they have been part of the typical achievement system. Secondly, there is no clear indication of what the award even wants you to do. You're given an icon and a silly little quip and the rest is up to you to just guess at. The community has come through here, breaking the code and figuring out the objectives (with a little uncertainty on some specifics here and there) for each of these rewards. Their implementation may have been left wanting, but what they add is a whole new collection of unique challenges throughout the game. There's some multiplayer focused ones, the hardest of which is gaining every "medal" possible. Like Goldeneye, Perfect Dark awards silly little medals based on playstyle after a game. Things like "most shielded" or "most cowardly". Getting all of them nets you this reward. The majority of awards are additional challenges for the game proper. Each one must be done on a particular difficulty level for a particular level. One involves completing Carringon's Villa while getting scopeless headshots on 8 enemies, for example. Of these awards, three were particularly challenging, and not just to do but to figure out. Three must be done in co-op. That's not to say all three actually require a friend's help to accomplish, but that all three must literally be done while in the co-op mode or even if you do meet the objective, it won't count. No, not even with an AI buddy. It must be done with a second player, full stop. Of these three, technically two don't actually need someone to help you. One can be done completely solo (beating the G5 Streets level in under 35 seconds), and the other can be done with you switching back and forth between two controllers (on Air Force One, accomplish objective 2 BEFORE objective 1 and then finish the level all within a certain time, which can be done by having player 2 just stand in the right spot until a cutscene starts, immediately tossing a timed mine, then switching back to player one and skedaddling right the heck outta there. The last of these is the only one that truly can't be done without another person at the controls, and that's completing the first and second objectives in under a minute at the Carrington Institute, then finishing the rest of the level in whatever time but without using the RCP-120's cloaking feature once. If you want to know why this review took so much longer after my Goldeneye one, THIS is the reason. I had to convince a friend to take the time to grind out this particular accomplishment. In all fairness, once I did, it was actually pretty enjoyable. Neither of us got frustrated because we went in knowing it would involve many restarts, and unlike me this friend hadn't played Perfect Dark in a good long while so at first there was a lot of relearning involved, but eventually we got it done. It's just that the stars had to align to make this something this friend actually wanted to do. That, and the game takes longer to 100% than Goldeneye does, since there's so much more to do. Once this and all the other awards were finally attained, I sat on top of a 201% completion rating according to the leaderboard and could finally weigh in on all this. Let me just get this out of the way. I don't think there should be multiplayer dependent awards, in the same way I don't think co-op should have par times for cheats exclusive to it. It makes it all the harder for anyone to ever actually complete the game, and not in a fun way, save having someone else who actually cares about a 23 year old game enough to play a 13 year old remaster of it with you. All in all though, it did add a lot of new experiences and challenges to the old game, and that much I do appreciate. The awards? No new cheats I'm afraid, just a few "gamer icons", some avatar accessories, and a new theme.
All in all, the 360 release comes out as the ideal way to experience the game, for now. It's just a shame there's no "quick button" to revert back to the visuals and sound of the N64 release like Halo or Monkey Island's remakes did, and again the diagonal running aspect is far too tricky to pull off. Just a few changes, which at this point are unlikely to ever happen, would make this one truly perfect. Also, still no map editor outside of the modding community. But, it's easy enough to get this version on even the newest XBox consoles and for cheap.
Yep, that's basically what this is. Super Mario Bros. already had a pretty clear Alice in Wonderland inspiration, but this game really leans DIRECTLY into that until the background falls open and all the little backstage critters holding up the blocks and clouds freak out and run away.
This... is an absolute must play. I haven't seen such an "inspired" 2D Mario game since... Yoshi's Island. They also seem to realize just how creative they're being here, because they've dropped the "New Super Mario Bros. X" titling entirely.