This week's highs and lows in PC gaming by SYL team!

THE HIGHS 

I'm skeptical when a developer says that such-and-such feature is going to generate such-and-such  player interactions, as it so rarely works as intended, but Sea of Thieves' skeleton forts really do generate tense, fragile alliances as promised. Case in point: I was a complete asshole to a group of four players who offered to help Chris and I for a split of the treasure, trying to stealthily sink their ship on the assumption they'd betray us. They didn't at all! They even offered to double check and make sure we had a fair share of the loot. I figured they probably ought to keep more of the treasure on account of my betrayal (and still worried that they'd betray us) so I waved goodbye and booked it away feeling like an ass.

Samuel Roberts: System Shocked
Reading Wes's interview with Nightdive, the steps that the studio is taking to get its System Shock remake back on track sound sensible to me. I appreciate the idea of trying to contemporise a game so you're not just selling them the same thing, but ultimately that project is exciting because it'll be familiar to people. 2020 is a long way away, though.

The team cites 'feature creep' as a problem in developing the game. Ultimately, the Unity demo for the remake was really promising, and I still can't wait to see what the finished project looks like.

Ni No Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom finally released on Friday, but I've been digging into a review copy since last week and really enjoying my time with it. As someone that desperately wanted to love the first one but ultimately had to give up because it was just kinda bleh, Revenant Kingdom does a much better job of capturing the spirit of Studio Ghibli in a videogame. It's more Ponyo than it is Princess Mononoke, which is disappointing, but I'm still having a blast. Building the kingdom of Evermore is so much damn fun that it could almost be an entirely separate game. I love managing and recruiting new citizens, plotting new developments, and generally managing the affairs of state. It's a lovely surprise in what I thought was going to be another traditional JRPG.

This week I have been revisiting the flawed, broken, and occasionally brilliant Trespasser, a Jurassic Park spin-off game released in '98 that has become somewhat infamous over the years. Look out for a full retrospective on the site (and in the magazine) soon, but for now, I will say that it's one of the most fascinating games ever released on PC. I mean, it’s basically terrible, but there’s something compelling about how ambitious it is. And I always have time for scrappy games that try something new, even if they fail spectacularly.

Essentially a digital sequel to The Lost World, Spielberg's weirdly uninspired second Jurassic Park movie, the highlight for me is the presence of Richard Attenborough reprising his role as John Hammond. As you play the game you hear excerpts from his diary, and the late Attenborough's performance is fantastic. He really captures the tragedy of the character. If you want to hear them but can't stomach the game and its weird floppy arm physics, an enterprising Trespasser fan has collected them all here in a series of atmospheric videos.

We've covered Dark Souls' enemy placement mods in the past, but none have made my skin crawl more than horkrux's Bonewheels Everywhere. I mean, the thought of dropping the odd Royal Sentinel in Sen's Fortress' walkways is a scary one; as is facing off with a Giant Stone Knight on the Moonlight Butterfly fight bridge. But the idea of Bonewheels stalking your every turn? That's horrifying. Bonewheels in the Undead Burg. Bonewheels in Anor Londo. Bonewheels in The Depths, in New Londo Ruins and, bloody hell, Blighttown. I might rather turn hollow than suffer this nightmare. 

Horkrux's work proves gitting gud is all relative. Gud luck if you're taking this one on.

I looked at a few VR demos at GDC this week—I've already written about Creed: Rise to Glory and Mi Hiepa Sports, and there will be more to come—and something I noticed in many of the demos was that I had arms! Finally, I have arms!

 Typically, VR games render your hands in place of your controllers, but those hands are disembodied and floating. Which is weird. It's weird to have hands that aren't attached to anything. So, I was pleased to see several demos this week that gave me arms. And a legs. And a body. It felt much more natural, more immersive, more real—except for when you put a controller down and your virtual arm sort of weirdly and urgently points at it. Mostly, though, my virtual arms made me happy and I felt more connected to the world I was inhabiting.

Anyways now lets talk about the LOWS!

This weekend, I'll redownload Star Wars Battlefront 2 and find out if there's still time for the overhauled progression system to rejuvenate the game. I'm not terribly optimistic, mostly because the wait for this new system has taken so long, and I haven't played the game since January, when I enjoyed the Star Wars-y spectacle above all else (much as with the first game). 

If nothing else, I'm excited at seeing what that new Bespin map looks like on my monitor. The loot crate system was ill-advised in Star Wars Battlefront 2, but I can't argue with the idea of giving away new maps for free. 

It's a lot better now, but it was a huge pain in the ass getting into Sea of Thieves earlier this week, with the servers going down or barring new players multiple times. There were also issues with earned gold and reputation progress taking ages to show up, and bugs, such as when my brand new ship sank for no reason. I'm starting to wonder if it's even possible for big multiplayer games to launch in a working state, no matter how many stress tests are done.

I had to give up on Final Fantasy XV. A few weeks ago I wrote that I was enjoying my road trip with Noctis and chums, but I’ve since uninstalled it completely. The moment that broke it for me was when, shortly after a devastating event that completely changed the life of the main character, I found myself delivering a tomato to someone. A single tomato, to some random guy in a diner I'd met once before. I think the disappointment of this truly banal sidequest was heightened by the fact that I had just finished The Witcher 3. In that game, even a random encounter with the most unimportant NPC can lead to something amazing.

But in XV, every sidequest I've gone on so far (there may be exceptions) has either involved killing X amount of monsters, or delivering X to X. Plenty of games are guilty of this, but if you're going to have the character be a prince, maybe make the tasks given to him at least a little relevant? I could just ignore the sidequests, but why should I have to? It's on the developers to make them interesting if they want to hold my attention. I'll probably return to XV again in a few months and give it another shot, but for now I'm playing the much more enjoyable Ni No Kuni 2, which is an absolute delight in comparison, if maddeningly twee.

"I'm going to use the slow-ish start to 2018 to catch up on all the games I've missed recently", is something I definitely said in December of last year. Fast forward three months and I've spent most of my time dicking around in GTA 5and its Online counterpart. Two months from now marks the arrival of Dark Souls Remastered, and while I absolutely don't have time to revisit Lordran, I almost certainly will.

I was sort of pleased, then, when then latest images to surface for the PS4 version looked a bit pants. Granted, PC mods have raised the original game to the point where I'm unsure how, or even if, the remaster can better what we have already—but I did expect more from its console variation, even if it's but a glimpse at this point. And so it's a double-edged greatsword for me: if the remaster looks spectacular, I'll throw myself into it. If it's not, I'll grumble about its shortcomings from the Undead Asylum to the Kiln of the First Flame. 

 Earlier this month, Path of Exile launched its latest league called Bestiary. It's all about capturing monsters and using them to craft powerful gear. To get you up to speed, these temporary leagues introduce wild new systems but require that everyone start from scratch. Normally, it's a lot of fun as it almost feels like a race against everyone else who is playing but with crazy new gameplay elements to contend with along the way (the last league had fissures that would randomly spill out demons and valuable treasure). It's also a great chance to try out new characters and playstyles.

But this league is just not that fun. When I previewed it before launch, I loved the idea but in execution it often feels more like a tiresome distraction that doesn't gel well with the core loop of killing and looting. It's tedious managing my monster inventory and the crafting recipes just aren't that lucrative. I've mostly given up even paying attention to it. I love that Grinding Gear Games loves to take risks, and the way they've built Path of Exile's temporary leagues means that the stakes are never so high that they can't weather a bad flop, but Bestiary has me wishing there was a fast-forward button on life so I could skip to whatever GGG has planned for the summer.

Some pretty disheartening information out of GDC, as Mike Rose, publisher of Descenders, got real about indie games on Steam. With the rise of Steam Direct, and the veritable flood of games pouring onto Steam every week, it's just harder and harder for any one game to get noticed before it's swept away with all the rest. It's not hopeless, of course—some games do make it and sell well or at least have a modest amount of success. But the vast majority of developers—93%, by Rose's reckoning—don't and won't make enough money to get by, even when their game is on Steam.