That will actually become available once you get past the first Rite. I thought the same thing but it’s X on PS4 you just have to get a little farther in.
I wish I had a well thought out and considered reason for this sentiment but I don’t. It’s like some ingrained bias long held and mostly unshakable. I don’t really care for real world sports and I think that carries over into gaming. I don’t know why theming with combat is more satisfying then something with a ball.
I also don’t think I am alone. Frozen Cortex had an all-time peak of 298 players and most months the average player count was 2 or less. I contributed to decent sales since I was one that pre-ordered (mostly to support Mode 7) but couldn’t build up the enthusiasm and excitement to actually play it. While I had Frozen Synapse installed on my PC, my iPhone, and my iPad and played the hell out of it. I still have Frozen Synapse installed on my PC today.
Part of the problem is that there are so many games being released now and I have a huge backlog. Competition is fierce for my time. I recently fired up Warhammer: Vermintide and had a bad sound glitch. 5-7 years ago I would have scoured forums to find a fix and tinkered with my installation to get it working. Now I just uninstalled the game and moved on to the next one. So football in the Frozen Synapse world or basketball in a Banner Saga-like world aren’t that compelling to rise to the top of my to-be-played pile.
On paper, your argument that a good tactics game is a good tactics game regardless of theming seems perfectly reasonable. In reality the numbers often don’t support that. But Pyre seems to be doing well so that is a good thing.
Yup. Not into sports games of any kind. RPGs, action RPGs, first and third-person shooters, puzzle games, and adventure games. That’s what I enjoy. No sports, nothing resembling sports, no survival, no tower defense, no MOBAs, no strategy games.
Well, the game is out already, so any opinions?
I’ve only played maybe the first hour or so but I can already say I think I’m going to live this as much as I loved Bastion. Bastion still ranks up there as one of my all-timers but I could never get into Transistor.
While I obviously haven’t played enough to really evaluate the core mechanics of the Rites but even if it stayed as simple as it is right now I’d be fine. The art direction, the writing, the beautiful, haunting music, the interesting characters. This is a return to form as far as I’m concerned. I’ve read the Rites (admittedly the games one and only game mechanic) do get more difficult/complex with more variety in character and skill. Overall I’m already kind of in love with this game.
I finished the main campaign over the weekend, and enjoyed the journey quite a bit. The tricky part is figuring out how to discuss without telegraphing too many spoilers…
Since this is SuperGiant, the graphics, music, writing, lore and world building are top notch. There are lots of tiny little touches and flourishes - the in-game UI, relationships between characters, musical signatures, the mechanics of the dialog system, pronouns, even the pseudo-language character voice-overs are specific and vocabulary can be picked out. [As an aside the language is more like Robert Jordan’s languages or George R R Martin’s (pre-HBO) – some common terms and rules but not a true constructed language. This is not a knock, the technique serves the purposes of the game well - allowing voice-over that conveys emotion and tone while allowing for the large amount of dynamic text generation needed to support the number of variants and choices throughout the game] The overall story and campaign plot is serviceable, though not particularly groundbreaking. The game itself is very much about making choices, and the impacts those choices make.
Much of the game for me was spent reading text, exploring the world building and following character threads… there is a lot of reading. “Dear Reader”, indeed. This was a draw for me, but could be a detractor for someone who wants simply skip over text to get to the action-y bits. In fact, it was actually a bit of a let down for me when I hit the action-y game bits. To be fair, the sports-ball sequences are not too bad, and there does seem to be a wide range of tactics and builds possible in the system. By the end, I felt like I had a better grasp of how to play – the AI did introduce several interesting tricks and techniques along the way, which I promptly ignored. For the most part though, I simply stuck with a single strategy for the entire game.
In addition to the campaign mode, there is a Versus mode that allows building teams and running matches against AI as well as local (only) head-to-head modes. Watching two humans compete who actually know the systems could be very enlightening. It is probably telling, though, that I have no real desire to spend much time here.
As in Transistor and Bastion, there are special “challenge” matches available in the campaign that require different ways of playing to succeed - and there are similar ways to their earlier games of opting into higher difficulties. There is at least one surprising gap: no New Game++ (although, I suspect this will be added later, based on SuperGame’s other titles).
I will post later more spoiler-y thoughts after others have had time to play: the way win/loss is handled, the interaction of story and sportsball, the permutations of choice and dynamic narrative, and so forth.
So… 6/7 sols, would Pyre again.
Did this game pass under the radar? Seen it in a couple of year end lists but hardly any of my Steam friends have played the game yet. I’ve a couple of hours under my belt, and I have really fallen for it. Basically Banner Saga meets NBA Jam? :)
I never really clicked with Transistor but this is definitely pushing the right buttons for me. Certainly helps that the art and sound are stunning and the writing (as mentioned above by glimjack, there’s quite a bit of it) is much better than most games (not hard tbh but it really is high quality).
I just played through it. Not sure how I feel about it. The graphics and music are pretty amazing. The world-building was intriguing early on, but at a certain point the book became annoying to navigate and I stopped reading it. The writing is obviously good, and I definitely needed to see where that story and those characters went.
On the other hand, that gameplay… Everything about the overworld (e.g. the navigation or the stupid starchart) is just tedious busywork. The visual novel format is my least favorite way of storytelling in a game. And while the sports gameplay looked intriguing, I never really got comfortable with it. Especially efficient character switching is really hard.
Played it back when it came out on PS4 and really loved it. Dunking the ball was one of the year’s most satisfying gameplay moments. I understand why there wasn’t online play (mostly they’re a small studio and it would have made dev time and cost too high) but I definitely would have spent a lot of time doing PvP after the game was over.
Ah man yes, this is kinda terrible.
But on the other hand…
I picked this up for a few bucks on the PS4 because I thought it would be fun for my girlfriend and I to play through together. The Dissidents on Heightened difficulty were a particularly brutal scrap. Almost lost that one, whew.
While trying to find out what the characters are saying when they win a rite, I stumbled on a Steam discussion which talks about the language in some detail. Very interesting stuff. To me the voiced lines sound very much like Italian, and I guess I wasn’t that far off.
I freed my first exile tonight (long time away from the game). I chose Hedwyn…and now I kind of wish I’d kept him around for more dialogue.
Edit: I sort of marvel at the number of possible scenarios here. After liberating Hedwyn, I played my next rite against the Dissidents, during which we won Rukey free of his debt to Barker. That would never have happened if I’d sent him home first!