Good news everyone: someone actually watched my new Kenshi series! And as hoped, people also watched my Yellow Turban series. Whether it really capitalised on the game's general hype is unclear, but I'm sure it did at least a bit. So there you go, I did a professional youtube thing! The main thing to celebrate is that I got Three Kingdoms for free. I even got to play it early - although this was a little wasted on me, as I didn't even know when it was due to release. Yeah, I pretty much didn't pay attention to it as it came up, but once I actually had my hands on it, I thought it was quite good!
Might as well just write a little review of it right here: it's Shogun 2 tier! Similar to shogun 2, it's technically got less content than the previous games, and is generally simpler, however the better presentation quality and consistency makes it feel like a more complete game. I've been interested in the time period since time immemorial thanks to good old Dynasty Warriors, but I think even if you have no idea what Three Kingdoms is, the fact that we at last have a NEW MAP, makes this title rather standout. It also benefits from much more effort being put into the UI, although it does remain messy; too much information is squeezed into too small a space for no particular reason, and it inherits Warhammer's reliance on critical information being relegated to the tooltips on small icons (although they are a big bigger than the 5x5 pixel nightmares of warhammer).
In previous total wars I critised how the UI seemed adverse to full-screen menus. In Warhammer, they began a transition away from this, and it continues in 3K. Lots of things are nice and big, and easy to read. But then the building menu is stuck on a bar at the bottom, forcing all kinds of information to be shoved in there, and as mentioned, be locked behind tooltips or clickable icons to save space. Just make it bigger, for the love of Kongming!
The building system itself is undoubtedly a step back, perhaps to the worst of the series. I almost couldn't believe how the majority of settlements contain a grand total of 1 building, COUNT EM, ONE, especially after there seemed to be some recognition that 4 was too few in Attila/Warhammer 1, with Warhammer 2 giving extra slots here and there. People will say 'but it lets you build everything everywhere'. And to that I say: so what? That's a matter of balancing. Just make it hard to be completely self sufficient in your little corner, but I still think it should be possible, so that it adds a layer of nation building and economy management to the game. Whether it's 'strategic' depends entirely on what the downside to building is, time taken, and generally what you could have done instead.
Yes I'm proposing that 'Total War' have some non-war based gameplay. I mean, it worked in the original Rome Total War. I just like the idea that with enough money you can develop your little kingdom internally. There's no space for the full 5 hour rant on this, but yeah, the building system is now teetering on being removed from the TW formula altogether, and I think that sucks. I will fight the building-hard-cap-crew to the death, until the building-soft-cap-revolution is in power. 'Upgradable roads' shall be our battle cry!
Aaanyway, yeah... Err... So the animations suck don't they? I've seen a lot of comment to that effect. But here's my PLASMA TAKE on that: it doesn't matter. You see, Total War games are stuck inside a gigantic design contradiction as it stands. There's the Yin: TW's unique selling point is 'epic' cinematic looking battles. And the Yang: playing the game REQUIRES that you DO NOT LOOK AT THEM. By that I mean that the camera needs to be very far above the action in order to control your units and see what you need to do.
For Yin and Yang to combine, and harmony to be restored, there are two rough paths: 1) decrease the speed of battles, or 2) decrease the visual quality to put more money into gameplay / have a large profit margin. As I understand it, they TRIED to achieve 1) in the warhammer era, but it proved too difficult on account of the balancing being reliant on units killing each other very quickly (based on chats with devs back then). They are aware of the problem there. 3K is as fast, if not faster, than previous titles, so the solution remains far away.
Therefore, we have path 2). Players, generally, won't see their units fighting. So, why waste money, development time, and indeed CPU power, having the fights look good (or having them visibly fight at all)? Anecdotally, I remember one dev saying something to the effect that removing the 'matched animations' (the style used in Shogun 2 -> Attila) was the main optimization that made Warhammer run so well. From their perspective, how could they go back? More expensive, more effort, narrows your game's theoretical market due to hardware concerns, and would anyone really care? Some people would, but the reviews are in, and broadly speaking this potentially major flaw is not at the forefront. People are there for the game, and not the cinematic experience.
Clearly the cinematic USP remains, as the game's promotional screenshots and videos highlight how it looks, with the proud 'in-engine' label on their footage. Then they use the ancient trick of cutting extremely quickly between painstakingly sought after shots so that the limited animations don't stand out. This probably sounds like a snark, but from their perspective it's the best thing to do. To bring things back around, my point is that I, personally, don't care that the animation suck, because I don't mind ignoring them. I am forced to look at them for my videos, and yes, they do suck. But while playing, I'm never thinking about that. That sums it up, really.
Basically, it's a well made total war game, with the cracks visible but forgivable. Veterans won't like as much as new players, for it lacks many features of older games, but this really isn't intended to be a game for veterans. It has the most basic battles the series has seen in a long time, cheap and cheerful yet very consistent, stable, and polished. The economy is out the window, but this is supposedly made up for by advances in diplomacy options and AI. I should add here that after 17 hours, I have not encountered any cases of these new diplomatic options, since my faction, the Yellow Turbans, has to unlock them.
Oh, okay, let me just say, in case people think that I'm being too forgiving, that the Yellow Turban DLC is a straight up scam. Yellow Turbans are just 'normal factions but worse'. They seem to play the same as normal factions, but you have almost all options taken away from you. No lore-friendly special considerations to make, e.g. can't make enemy peasant troops defect in battles, can't do anything with communes to have a special economy, nothing happens if you kill the emperor despite the UI indicating otherwise...
It would all be fine, but the fact this content costs money is outrageous for how little there is here. So yes, I think the fact I played as Yellow Turbans, and on the relatively feature-barren records mode, has given me a bad impression. FINAL SCORE: 7/10, can easily be an 8 with mods, can easily drop to 6 if the annoying things about it keep being annoying (like the recruitment/replenishment system, ugh I just wanted to quit when I found out how it actually works, see my upcoming videos for more...). Note this is on a 5 = satisfactory scale, not the journalistic 7 = satisfactory, so it's a better endorsement than it sounds. Personally I'm done with the game now, but of course I can expect a few hundred hours more filming videos in it!
NOW is there anything else to blog about? Gonna make a narrative in 3K once Frostpunk is done. Planning on playing as Liu Bei, but taking him in a direction contrary to the novels (and closer to history). And I'll make more Kenshi episodes of course. Got like 50 hours of gameplay recorded, so there's a whole load of those to make. It will have the big problem of being hard to finish, like Recs Romanum but worse. Got a rough idea for how to do it, but there could be 100 episodes of just exploring the map if I covered it in detail. Going to increase the pace going forwards.
I'll talk about channel stuff next time. Oh, let me quickly tell you...
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What I played this month!
I played Bloodborne, on PS4. It has the same major issues as Dark Souls, ranted about previously somewhere in this blog. I finished it, then the internet told me I'd missed major sections of the game without ever noticing it. I missed literally EVERY sidequest, and never realised there even were any. This design makes playing it a second time more fun, which I am now doing, but I can't say I endorse it. Not knowing what you're 'meant' to do at any given time isn't very nice, and similar to dark souls, if you look up the intended route through the game you learn its full of 'intended' exploits, and 'intended' knowledge of certain things can that can only be found through trial and error. The idea is that you're meant to talk to other players, and read their messages to find things out. But I don't have Playstation Plus, so I'm on my own!
Despite all that, it's still good, just because of the lore, environments, simple but high-risk and satisfying combat, and the fact that once you know which enemies you're 'supposed' to ignore, what the 'fun' order to do the bosses in is, what the 'correct' way to level up is, and so on, it plays 100x times better. It's too much to explain if this makes no sense, and I'm outta here... SCORE: 8/10, I see what you did there, but I had some real 3/10 times along the way man.
And that's what I played this month!
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Well, this wasn't really a blog, and I do actually have stuff to blog about, but I'll get into all that next time. Thanks for reading, citizens.
