[VGz] Turn each of the water jars into wine. 1/3 (2024)

I don't know exactly why it piqued my interest, but I think it was mostly about the fact that the developers had it in them to release an offline mode for the game, effectively after their studio had already shut down. It formed a sort of tragi-heroic, Sorkinesque narrative in my mind, and I wanted to see what the game was like because of it.

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The first hurdle was the log-in process. The game wants to connect to Bethesda.net, and the connection pop-up blocks the other pop-up to accept the TOS. The game wouldn't/couldn't connect to Bethesda.net for me - and I don't know if that's a me-problem or if the game's servers are already on-the-outs.

What I ended up doing was disabling my internet so that the connection attempt would fail, and then it would give me the option to Play Offline, and then I could play. It's a bit hacky and inconvenient and shows that they still weren't able to completely disconnect the game from its online features, but it technically does work as far as letting you play the game without an internet connection, and likely long after the servers are shut down.

In contrast, when survival-builder game Nightingale released its own offline mode in response to strong audience demand, they do so with a pop-up at the very start of the game, before literally anything else, with an option to always start under one mode or the other. Last Epoch even does this from the Steam launcher, and both approaches guarantee that there's no potential failure-state in getting the game to start. It's possible they didn't run into this because the game is unlikely to ask you for a TOS if you were someone who already bought the game by the time they released the final patch, but "people who have never played the game before and will buy it after the servers go poof" is literally going to be the only remaining audience moving forward, and they may well run into the same issue I did, but without my persistence.

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The next thing I noticed was the graphical glitches. In terms of fidelity and aesthetic, the game looks nice enough, but the way the shadows interplay with the foliage gives them a glitchy, vibrating look - like the image straight-up isn't stable even when looking at it standing still. And since this is supposed to be New England, there's a lot of foliage.

The other issue is that the glow that certain items get that distinguish them as interactable also misbehaves in that they pop up from way too far, and look cloudy and blocky whenever they do. It sort of helps in a way because you can spot such objects from across the room, but if the camera angle catches them at just the wrong angle, it looks unsightly.

That said, the game looks as a modern realistic shooter should, with all of the requisite bells and whistles and level-of-fidelity.

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The gameplay loop is fairly straightforward: the prologue has you setting up a base-of-operations, and from that base you go out and accept both main-story as well as side-quest missions, which sends you out into the open-world where you have to travel to a site, grab a thing or kill a target or operate a doohickey, and then return (usually via fast travel).

The enemies consist of both humanoid thralls of the vampire antagonists, as well as the vampires themselves, which have teleportation, move preternaturally fast, and need to be staked through the heart to be disposed of.

Out in the open world you can grab ammo, health packs, and various items that fall into the broad category of "things that would be useful in a survival/post-apoc scenario", with the third thing being converted directly into the game's currency that you use to buy ammo and better guns and upgrades for your character.

Killing enemies and completing missions earns you XP, and you level up to earn upgrades for your character that way as well. Eventually you'll complete enough missions that an entire region of the island of Redfall becomes free of vampire influence, at which point the narrative moves forward into a new region, with a new base-of-operations, and a new set of vampires and cultists to dispatch.

There's an overarching narrative to the whole thing, and another of the big changes in the final patch was the introduction of a "Story" mode that dials the difficulty way down if you want to "just" go through this narrative without wanting to be weighed down too much by the need to engage with the combat or the number-go-up mechanics.

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Despite the rough start, I've found that I've rather enjoyed my time so far with Redfall. The gunplay is tight, and the weapons are varied enough to force you to make some tough decisions about which three guns specifically to carry around. The ammo is (at least for now) scarce enough that being accurate is actually valued. The vampires are different enough from the regular mooks that it can throw a wrench into what might otherwise be a Tom-Clancy-esque "snipe em all from afar and pick off the rest" operation that I did a lot during my time with Ghost Recon.

And speaking of Tom Clancy, I think that's the biggest juxtaposition I'll make: I really liked the feel and look and general design of The Division, but I fell out of love with the constantly-online nature of it, where I needed to be able to have anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour to myself, uninterrupted, to be able to complete these long story missions. With Redfall, I can hit escape, and the game will pause, and I can come back to it. I had to take a 10 minute break to walk my cats in the middle of infiltrating a brownstone to turn on the power to the basem*nt to create a safehouse halfway across town, and the game was still there when I came back.

I guess it sounds weird to evaluate a game on the merits of "can you feasibly take a poop in the middle of playing this?", but that's genuinely where I am at this point of my gaming life.

The big question is whether there's going to be gacha or grinding mechanics in the game that will catch up to me eventually. What little research I've done suggests there shouldn't be, at least in terms of completing the game's story, but we shall see.