pew pew pew badow badow badow

I have finally started playing Metro Quester, a game I had linked to Dungeon Encounters in mind. Aside from minimalist visuals, this turned out to be an absurd association to have.

Metro Quester has a sort of maximalist combat design with action points, a three command limit per turn per character, action order controlled strictly by the speed score of individual actions, and party-wide shared resources. Most of your party will be doing three things every turn, and hopefully those things will be relying on or triggering their passive abilities, too. Thankfully, your selected actions are saved and you can modify actions on a per-character basis before pressing a single button to execute the turn, so you're not making fifteen selections per turn. Once you have a general-purpose plan of action, many fights are resolved with a single button press. After combat, your HP and resources get refilled at fuel costs that remain low so long as no one hit zero HP. Knowing you get to take every fight in your best possible condition also opens up strategies and party compositions that would be impractical in a different game.

While I'm working on the final strata and the superbosses, I have already rolled credits on Dungeon Encounters.

I think the game needed to be 50 floors, not 99. The fun part of the game is roughly floors 20~40, and then the period of time where you've completely shattered the progresion structure to grab very powerful gear from the late game, followed by a kind of boring period where you're actually filling out floors 41~89 where absolutely nothing can hope to stop you. Then the game gets interesting again for floors 91~99.

Please disregard the mess on my floors, there was a recent... incident. In the future I will be nailing more things down to the surfaces they are on.

This isn't exactly a novel setup, but I've set up a Potato / Sugarcane farm inside the signal room in Voices Of The Void via the magic of:

The Wall Builder to create a dirt floor,

a faucet tapped into the Emergency Shower,

a garden hose connected to the faucet,

and a Sprinkler, connected to the other end of the garden hose.

This is gonna give me a reliable source of food and money, all in the (relative) safety of my base! Potatoes can be cut into fourths, and each fourth of the potato can grow one to two additional potatoes. The sugarcane is the money maker; it can be crafted into Paper Scrap at a decent return, which can be sold for reasonable but steady profits. Like most money-making strategies, it has been nerfed but not eliminated. Plus, filled garbage bags sell for 2 Points and only cost 1 Point, so even the dirt is helping me get paid.

Here's an unrelated, mildly spoiler-y post-nap surprise:

Voices Of The Void is hard to describe. It's like a summer job you have to do in isolation. And sometimes it's scary. But like, there's not a shift from "do your tasks" to "it's a horror game now". Sometimes you get up from your computer and have an experience, then you wake up 12 hours later on the floor. And that sucks because you've definitely missed some of your daily tasks because of it. You still need to eat and do your job regardless of what you may have seen, which was almost certainly a hallucination due to low sleep. Probably.

It's a slow burn paranoia simulator where it's hard to tell where the line between "paranoia" and "potentially legitimate concern" is blurry. The horror is the slow attrition of no one coming to help you because this is what the job is. You are where you are supposed to be. Nothing has gone wrong. Well, sometimes you get so hungry that you start hallucinating hamburgers like you're in a cartoon. No really, I tried in vain to eat a mystery hamburger for a while before I sheepishly realized it wasn't really there and I wasn't experiencing a glitch.

The one downside to the game is that it models a very wide number of things you might need to do while living in isolation, like farming, ATV repair, and a very meticulous, technical core set of tasks you're there to do. A lot of that stuff is not super intuitive. There is a justifiably mandatory tutorial and a very in-depth help menu, but it does feel like the game struggles under the weight of all the inputs. The first time your flashlight runs out of battery, you will struggle to figure out how to put a new battery in it, and it's honestly one of the easier routine tasks you will do.

What an extremely rude spot for a survey point.

Continuing my check-in with Synduality: Echo Of Ada. I feel like they've improved the hit registration, most of the weapons are performing better than I remember. I'm also getting more mileage out of Magus types other than Support. I mean, mostly just Anti-Cradle, but still. Marathon's taught me a lot about how to reset fights so I don't need the healing bubble as much.

They made Parasite Enders way less resistant to damage, and it's been a *huge* improvement in terms of gamefeel. Now non-weakness shots deal like 40% damage. That doesn't sound like a lot, but it used to be like 10% damage. It effectively made using a sniper rifle against them or smoke bombing + melee spam as the only viable strategies. Parasite Enders with shotguns felt like fighting Fungus Mecha Jason Vorhees. Now they feel easier to deal with than Bandits thanks to their deliberately worse AI.

I'm checking back in on Synduality: Echo of Ada. My fiance and I have been watching some Gundam (F91 and War In The Pocket), and it's got me in a mecha mood. Since I last played, Synduality has added Storm Hunt mode. In Storm Hunt, you fight monsters and mine crystals to get points. The more points you have, the more visible you are to other players. Taking damage or dropping to 0 HP causes you to drop points that nearby players can collect instead. If you do drop to 0 HP, your mecha isn't destroyed, you lose all your points and you're forced into a retreat. Your gear is slightly damaged, but you respawn elsewhere and you keep all your stuff.

This kind of mode with a lighter penalty for death was really what I was hoping for out of a PvP-lite mode for Marathon. Sure, Marathon doesn't have gear durability, but it does have UESC Trace, which is functionally very similar.

If I were Sony and I wanted to recapture the Destiny audience, I'd put every Destiny 2 dev that is slated to be laid off to work on PvE or campaign content for Marathon. Obviously, that's not going to happen, and I'm not sure that Sony even wants that.