Month: February 2020

When Owlcat Games released Pathfinder: Kingmaker in 2018 to mostly positive reception, its epic isometric RPG spanned an incomprehensible ocean of story, worldbuilding, character subplots, and lore, with an overarching kingdom-building macro layer that somehow neatly tied in your character choices in meaningful ways. It was an incredibly ambitious take, but at launch, it was also incredibly buggy and was prone to cascading difficulty spikes that easily destroyed your good work if you were careless.

But Owcat has spent the time since Kingmaker’s release refining its game with a near endless stream of post-launch updates, support, and downloadable content, to such a degree that Pathfinder: Kingmaker is now an excellent version of itself. And now that expertise is driving the studio’s next RPG.

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So we, as fans of isometric roleplaying games, should all be collectively excited at the prospect of Owlcat’s next venture, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous – a faithful adaptation of the tabletop roleplaying adventure storyline of the same name released by Paizo [the developer of the Pathfinder tabletop game] in 2013 and ‘14.

The Wrath of the Righteous

Owlcat’s video game adaptation won’t be due out until sometime in 2021, with the Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous Kickstarter campaign just kicking off today, but it’s already well into development. The Wrath story itself takes place several years after the events of Kingmaker, in another nation, so while some of the peoples and places you recognize from Kingmaker may be a reference, Wrath of the Righteous isn’t a sequel or really connected

“We’re taking the story and making a CRPG out of it: a lot of choices, a lot of consequences, a lot of topics like corruption and redemption,” said creative director Alexander Mushlin. “Will you be willing to sacrifice people to reach your goal?”

“We consider ourselves GMs [Game Masters] for this adventure: we’re adding some stuff, removing some stuff, adding more choices and consequences, adding more side stories, and stories about companions.

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“The biggest change we’re making to the source material is we’re allowing players of any alignment where the original adventure was strongly aligned toward good characters fighting the demons,” Mushlin said. This is important since Pathfinder has a wealth of character classes to pick from, some of which didn’t make it into Kingmaker but will be coming to Wrath of the Righteous.

Owlcat has announced it’s adding the Witch and Oracle classes to Wrath of the Righteous, with more classes to be announced as development continues. And that translates to a ridiculous amount of additional content with no intention of watering down the complexity if you’re looking for it.

[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=Owlcat%20is%20adding%20the%20Witch%20and%20Oracle%20classes%20to%20Wrath%20of%20the%20Righteous.”]“We really like how deep our character customization is, and our fans also like it. In terms of gameplay, we had about one thousand spells, feats, and abilities to build the characters [in Kingmaker], and for this game, you can expect that number to grow two times over,” Mushlin said.

Unfortunately, if you’re jumping into a CRPG as a novice there’s a bit of an uphill battle – one that’s well worth the climb, but it’s a climb all the same. Not only are you learning how to play the video game, but you’re also learning how to play the tabletop game at the same time. It can be daunting if you’re unfamiliar with either, let alone both. So Owlcat tried to figure out a way to keep the depth fans love and be inviting enough for new players, without being overly handhold-y.

“We’re not going to lose the depth of the game. We’re be building an unobtrusive, integrated, optional tutorial that not only teaches how to play our game but also the Pathfinder system itself,” Mushlin said.

For example, during character creation, if you want to play an archer and you want that archer to be really charismatic, Wrath will have little tools tips that say, “Hey, archers use dexterity as their primary attribute, so you might want to build into dexterity to have a really effective archer.” And you’re free to ignore it if you like, but it’s there.

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Another example is the crazy number of stats-modifications and how they interact with one another. If there’s a conflict between buff spells and items, or buffs and buffs, or items and items, Owlcat plans to spell those out. So if you’re wearing full plate mail with a high armor class and put on a ring of protection and wonder why your overall armor class isn’t getting better, the tooltip will tell you – armor class buffs from items don’t stack, so since your plate mail armor class is much higher of than the ring, we’re just counting the better of the two so that ring is useless on this character. That’s just an example but they’ll drill down as far as they need to go on these.

But compared to Kingmaker, Wrath of the Righteous will change in some ways – namely in technical improvements, development tools, and the grand strategy layer. But the most obvious will be tone. Wrath focuses on a demonic invasion and, well, demons are a little more intense than the pissed off fey creatures of Kingmaker.

“This time around, as most games these days, we’re going a bit more dark, a bit more epic, and a bit more realistic,” Mushlin said. “It comes with the territory because we’re fighting demons and demons tend to do bad things to people and you have to show that.

We’re making a little shift in that direction. We still want to have lighter parts to the story and we still want for you to have a spectrum of emotions, not just doom and gloom, and ‘everyone’s going to die eventually.’”

The Crusaders

Like Kingmaker, the Wrath of the Righteous story will kick off with your character thrust into the events – a demonic invasion of a major city – because they were in the right place at the wrong time. And like Kingmaker, you’ll still be splitting time between your character and the party’s exploration and that higher-level strategy element. In Kingmaker, it was wrestling the Stolen Lands into submission to build a kingdom from nothing, and navigating the pitfalls of diplomacy in a wilderness positively lousy with curses.

In Wrath of the Righteous, Owlcat is moving on from the comparatively pedestrian problems of would-be rulers, focusing instead on your goals as the upstart leader and architect of the Fifth Crusade. Demonic and devilish fiends are everywhere, and like the many crusades before you, you’ve got to gather an army, upgrade and outfit it, assign officers, and set goals for them and their troops as you collectively pierce the heart of the invasion and beat back the Demon Lords of the abyss.

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“We liked how the strategic layer allowed us to show the companions in a different perspective as a governing person rather than just one of your followers,” Mushlin said. “And we liked how it allowed us to show you a more strategic part of the nation-building and solving the crises to decide what kind of nation you’re going to build.

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But like differences between running a nation and managing a crusade, there are fundamental differences that Owlcat sees as opportunities to improve that strategic layer this time around. Namely, time. In Kingmaker, time was the greatest enemy. While exploring you constantly had to be wary of how long you’ve been away from the capital, lest things start going sour and your kingdom comes apart. That’s not going to be the case in Wrath of the Righteous.

“Time was a great tool to make you remember to go back to your kingdom and address problems,” Mushlin said. “There are consequences if you neglect your kingdom and it worked well because that’s what a king should do. Time was used to teach you how to manage your personal time between exploring the map and managing your nation.

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“In the crusade war effort, I wouldn’t say there’ll be no time quests at all, but the importance of time will be far less than Kingmaker. For me, time is a tool to tell a story. And for nation-building time is an essential tool, but for a crusade, an army is an essential tool and we’re using the army for this.

The grand strategy crusade element of Wrath of the Righteous is still in development so many of the details are still coming together or being fleshed out. But along the way, there will be tough decisions and you’ll be able to shape the fiber of the crusade as you navigate it both morally, strategically, and logistically. For example, Hell Knights – brutal anti-paladin types that are only concerned with the letter of the law, not the morality of it – will play a major part in the events of Wrath of the Righteous. They get the job done, but with demons and devils on one side, do you really want hell knights on the other? Your decision.

The Path of the Mythics

Much firmer are the developer’s plans to introduce the Mythic Paths – a separate advancement path not tied to your character’s main class or level – your main character class, that allows you to tap into incredibly potent otherworldly forces to harness powers that make up the fabric of the universe and impact the main story.

“Mythic paths are an additional layer of character development that was introduced by Paizo specifically for the Wrath of the Righteous tabletop adventure to allow your characters to become even stronger and fight the demon lords, demigods, and entities of similar power,” Mushlin said.

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“We’re taking the initial idea but we’re approaching it more thematically. So we’re allowing you to become a specific powerful being that affects both the story and strategical and tactical options. So when you select the Mythic path at the end of the second chapter you can merge the main story with this new progress path.”

The first of the four mythic paths that Owlcat is talking about now – with more to be announced later – is the Angel, the leader of celestial forces. He’s essentially the “good” archetype that can summon angels, heal, and protect. His story is entangled with the main storyline and if you select him you’ll be seeing some special choices that aren’t available to other mythic beings.

[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=As%20a%20lich%20you’ll%20be%20able%20to%20recruit%20enemies%20you’ve%20defeated%20as%20undead%20minions%20and%20party%20members.”]The second mythic path is the Lich. Liches are what happens when an incredibly powerful magic user pursues power and immortality above all else, performing profane rituals that turn it into an unbelievably potent undead creature.

As the lich, you’ll be able to recruit some of the enemies that you’ve defeated to become your undead minions and eventually your complete party can be comprised of these minions that serve under you. For example, when you kill a boss and choose to bring it back from the dead, it becomes part of your collection.

The third path is Aeon, the cosmic judge of balance. He’s here to fix balance when things are out of sorts and he usually finds the guilty side and destroys it. He’s not good, he’s not evil, he’s lawful. As Aeon, when traveling through the city he’s seeing who’s guilty of destroying the balance and he can try to go up to that person and talk to them to understand what’s happening, then he decides if he wants to fix it, or kill this person, or something else entirely.

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The last mythic path Owlcat has revealed so far is the chaotic Trickster. He’s in here to have some fun, pull some pranks – he’s kind of a Loki type. One of the more meta and interesting Trickster traits is that he understands that beyond this world his fate is governed by dice rolls – kind of a tap on the fourth wall.

Since he’s aware of that, he can manipulate those dice rolls. Every time the system rolls a d20 for him he can change it into a 20 and you’ll be able to see that in the logs and everywhere else.

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It’s still early in production but The Wrath of the Righteous is already shaping up to be a worthy successor to Kingmaker with a welcome flair for the dramatic in its darker subject matter. For more on Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous you can stop by its Kickstarter campaign to follow along.

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Brandin Tyrrel is a Senior Editor at IGN. You can find him on Unlocked, or chat over on Twitter at @BrandinTyrrel.

Bethesda has revealed a new trailer for Wastelanders, the next major content expansion for Fallout 76. Wastelanders is scheduled to launch on April 7 for all platforms, finally bringing fully-voiced NPCs to the multiplayer-focused RPG.

Wastelanders takes place in the Appalachian mountains and includes a brand-new main mission campaign quest to take on, either on your own or with other players. Like several previous Fallout games, Wastelanders also sees you meet and interact with competing factions, and your choices will determine who ultimately ends up on top.

This new expansion won’t cost you anything to play–Wastelanders comes included with Fallout 76 without the need for an additional purchase. Wastelanders will make adjustments to the original Fallout 76 campaign as well, revamping the story with the inclusion of NPCs.

Fallout 76 launched to a pretty rocky start, and Bethesda has been implementing several large content updates since the game’s release in order to address player concerns. Prior to Wastelanders, Fallout 76 saw new quests added in Wild Appalachia, a battle royale mode in Nuclear Winter, and challenging team-based raids.

In GameSpot’s Fallout 76 review, Edmond Tran wrote, “Bethesda has stated it intends to continue supporting the game for a long time, but at launch, Fallout 76 is a poor experience. There are echoes of the series’ admirable qualities, but look past that facade, past the cute Vault Boy animations, past the familiar radio tracks, and you’ll find no heart–just an inconsequential wasteland doomed to be nuked over and over again.”

Spoiler Note: The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics follows the same plot as its Netflix TV series counterpart. While this review is spoiler-free and the gameplay and screenshots shown were picked to avoid giving anything away, keep that in mind if you haven’t seen the show and want to go in completely fresh.

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It’s 2020, but Netflix is still banging the drum for licensed tie-in games. Like Stranger Things 3: The Game before it, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics morphs the streaming network’s 2019 prequel TV series to Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal into game form – this time as a tactical RPG akin to Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics. It twists Age of Resistance into a linear, combat-heavy experience, but ends up feeling like little more than a hollow puppet of an RPG used to capitalize on a beloved franchise. It’s passable enough to trigger some Pavlovian response from both my love of tactics games and The Dark Crystal series, but left me wanting in both regards once I really saw what it had to offer.

In the interest of avoiding spoilers, I’ll say that The Dark Crystal Tactics covers the same general plot arc as the Age of Resistance show. Like Stranger Things 3: The Game, many missions are pulled right from sequences in the show, and new, well-drawn comic-strip cutscenes retell key scenes with some flair. Despite this, the story told here pales in comparison to the TV version. These moments, both interactive and hand-drawn, are truncated in ways that seem tailored to elicit memories of when you watched the show, rather than actually tell its story. In between the very clear nods to Age of Resistance, the plot moves far too quickly through strings of dialogue shown on the world map between missions. I found it difficult to follow, even after watching the first few episodes just before I started playing.

Screenshots From The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics

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As a result, even the centerpiece moments like boss fights with the most prominent Skeksis from the show, feel hollow. All the key characters – Gelfling, Skeksis, and otherwise – get a chance to stand in the spotlight, but there’s next to no time spent on character development. If you aren’t excited by the sight of them alone, controlling or fighting them isn’t going to add much to the equation. Even allowing for the liberties you have to take when condensing a full season of plot into a roughly 15-to-20-hour combat-focused video game, this version of the story feels like a hurried summary you’d get from a friend – it hits the crucial details and can be enticing at times, but never captures the emotion of any important moments.

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Setting aside its capacity for Dark Crystal fan service, The Dark Crystal Tactics also evoked a bit of my nostalgia for tactical RPGs, particularly original PlayStation-era games like Final Fantasy Tactics and Vandal Hearts. Though its art style is not retro by any means – it’s got a muddy, overly rendered look that’s more functional than stylish – its turn-based combat laden with RPG-style abilities and tiled maps full of environmental hazards and gimmicks definitely is. The Dark Crystal Tactics gets the basics of that experience right, with a strong emphasis on using skills to get the upper hand over enemies that will likely beat you if you just trade blows until someone dies.

More than many other strategy RPGs, The Dark Crystal Tactics also emphasizes turn order and timing as a means of controlling a battle. A long bar at the top of the screen shows the next 10 character turns, helping you to predict your enemies’ movements and plan ahead. There are also a decent number of skills that allow you to move an ally’s next turn up or push an enemy’s back, giving you the ability to not only take stock of turn order, but manipulate it to your advantage. Any character can also refrain from attacking or using an ability to speed up their next turn, which cleverly incentivizes careful play over taking wild swings. Predicting enemy behavior is a cornerstone of all tactics and strategy games, but The Dark Crystal Tactics puts it front and center.

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But while the combat can offer some interesting decisions, even at its best it’s dragged down by poorly designed menus that take far longer to navigate than they should. You cannot, for example, cycle through characters in the jobs or equipment menus, but instead must select each character, then choose what aspect of their loadout to alter one by one. In combat, you have to select “move” from a radial menu to move, rather than just clicking on a character as it works in nearly any other game from the genre. These inefficiencies, combined with fairly long load times on Switch, make navigating menus both in and out of battle tedious to the point where I sometimes avoided tinkering with my party’s skills just to save myself the slog.

The Dark Crystal Tactics’ greatest strength is its progression, which is clearly a smaller-scale riff on the job system from Final Fantasy Tactics. In addition to level, each of your Gelfling and Podling fighters gains stats and abilities by choosing and leveling up their class or “job.” Though the job tree is small – there are 12 classes, most of which adhere to broad roles like Mender (healer) and Paladin (offense-focused melee fighter) – there’s a lot of room for customization. Each person in your squad can only choose a finite number of skills: three from their current, primary job, and two more from a secondary job. By the time a character hits job level 10, the threshold for advancing, they’ll have learned way more than three skills, so it’s on you to choose skills that fit a role on your team.

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Moreover, the classes are all complementary and feature very little overlap, so there’s always a strong incentive to stay in a lower class rather than absent-mindedly advancing up the ladder. Since you only bring four or five people into each fight, it’s impossible to create a flawless team, so you need to assemble your character loadouts with an eye towards specific sets of skills and an overall gameplan for how those skills combine.

However, the system works better in theory than it does in practice. With such strict loadout limitations, some of the skills become infinitely better than others, limiting character rotation greatly. For example, many of the most powerful attack abilities for Soldiers, like “Double Strike,” require you to mark enemies first. Mark is a basic Scout ability, so I was compelled to keep the Scout job as a primary or secondary for one or two characters at all times. While I found myself wishing I had access to other abilities, particularly passive and movement-related skills, they’re never as essential as the few I grew to rely on.

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Over time, new battle conditions will force you to mix things up, but even that causes frustration. You’ll run into bosses that are immune to the status effects you usually inflict; Poison swamps demand skills that cure debuffs; Beach maps with rising tides require extra speed. There are also plenty of missions that require you to focus on an objective other than combat, like getting your team to an exit or freeing Gelfling prisoners from cages, which push you to balance engaging an enemy and achieving your goals. None of these twists are very interesting or creative, but I appreciated the commitment to environmental mechanics and theme missions to keep things fresh. On the other hand, that commitment sometimes lead to boring situations where I’d have to spend a dozen extra turns slowly moving to an objective even after defeating all the enemies.

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In a perfect world, your entire 14-character roster would be leveled up and properly equipped at all times to allow you to swap out different fighters to match each situation. However, since your characters only level up in combat, bringing in someone with a skill you unexpectedly need requires a lot of grinding optional battles to whip those backups into shape. It rarely feels worth the significant effort required, and I instead found myself trying to rejigger my default five or six squad members to the best of my ability whenever a level had a hard counter for my usual gameplan.

Though it wasn’t an insurmountable issue, every setback in The Dark Crystal Tactics feels like a disproportionately big inconvenience. Outside of the laborious menus, The Dark Crystal Tactics also somehow relies exclusively on an auto-save system and does not provide a way to quick-save in the middle of a battle. On Switch, you can always pause by putting the console to sleep, but your save reverts to the last time you were on the world map if you quit. Retrying a mission after a death (or when you quit out, since there’s no easy option to restart) requires you to sit through multiple loads, which can lead to a lot of downtime if you get stuck.

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For another Netflix show tie-in game, watch our review of Stranger Things 3: The Game above.

It’s also worth pointing out that the pre-launch Switch version of The Dark Crystal Tactics used for this review suffered from consistent bugs. Chief among them, backing out to the Switch home menu and returning without quitting would cause hitching and, in some cases, force it to crash entirely. Certain late-game cutscenes sped through dialogue and had faulty audio. There’s also a story map late in the campaign where highlighting certain panels would discolor a large portion of the screen. As with any game these days, it’s entirely possible that these issues will be patched out, but they were notably more consistent and impactful than the pre-release hiccups I’m used to seeing.

Total sell in for the PlayStation 4 has reached 108.9 million units as of December 31st 2019.
The console shipped 6.1 million units in the final quarter of 2019, down from 8.1 million units last year. Now approaching end of lifecycle. pic.twitter.com/DlkBj8PuHU

— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) February 4, 2020

As Sony previously confirmed, there are now 38.8 million PS+ subscribers.
This means that approximately 37% of total PS4 owners have a subscription to PS+.
PS+ value additions such as free games is a reason for people to stay with PS ecosystem next gen. pic.twitter.com/3pNNAiU7hc

— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) February 4, 2020

Note. Sony forecasts PS4 hardware sell in of 13.5m units for the 12 month period ending March 31st 2020.

In the first 9 months it has sold 12.1m units, meaning they only expect 1.4m this quarter. That would be notably down compared to 2.6m in the same period last year. https://t.co/N47NhonfeV

— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) February 4, 2020

For the first time ever, Google’s parent company Alphabet has publicly shared YouTube advertising revenue results. The information was included in earning reports for the 2019 financial year. Alphabet revealed that YouTube earned just over $15 billion dollars in ad revenue in 2019.

Reported by Variety, YouTube’s yearly revenue has nearly doubled since 2017 and increased 36% from 2018. Alphabet reported that YouTube earned $11.6 billion in 2018 and $8.15 billion in 2017.

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Further, YouTube’s 2019 financial report revealed that the video service earned $4.72 billion in Q4 2019, a 31% increase from the prior year.

Alphabet also shared financial reports for Google Search and Google Cloud, which earned $27.19 billion and $2.61 billion respectively in Q4 2019. Overall revenue for all Alphabet companies in Q4 2019 came in at an impressive $46.08 billion, falling short of Wall Street’s expected $46.9 billion.

“I’m really pleased with our continued progress in Search and in building two of our newer growth areas,” said Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. “YouTube, already at $15 billion in annual ad revenue, and Cloud, which is now on a $10 billion revenue run rate.”

YouTube’s tremendous growth is likely due, in part, to the recent popularity of streaming and esports. In late January, Activision Blizzard announced that all of its esports broadcasts would air exclusively on YouTube. This means that some of the biggest competitive matchups for games, like Overwatch and Call of Duty, can only be streamed on YouTube.

Are you surprised YouTube earned so much in 2019? Let us know in the comments below.

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Andrew Smith is a freelance contributor with IGN. Follow him on Twitter @_andrewtsmith.