Randomly Mine: October 5th, 2018

Dirt Rally

We’re all suckers for Nostalgia. Yes, it’s easy to belittle those soaking their jeans by a company simply resurrecting the past, but then the spotlight will sometimes come to your favorite brand, game, or feature, and suddenly you’re emptying the wallet.

That’s kind of what I feel like with Dirt Rally, minus the wallet part.

When Dirt Rally was released, I didn’t have the money, nor the space to play it within my ideal conditions, ones that I grew up with since childhood.

A comfortable chair, a big screen, and a steering wheel.

So I had to ignore Dirt Rally’s launch despite its acclaim from fans who had just as much of an attachment to Codemasters’ old Colin McCrae games as I did, and eventually the game came in a Humble Bundle Monthly pack, just taunting me to rush out the door and spend every last cent getting something put my old G25 wheel on.

Thankfully, after moving into this new home and getting things setup, I got a comfortable computer chair, my relatively big monitor, and the steering wheel to finally play this timegate to when it was 2000, and the PS2 was cutting edge.

I presumed having played nearly all of Codemasters games at that point, that this would be a walk in the park.

Holy crap did I blow balls.

Not only could I not match the speed and times of those classics, I couldn’t even finish a course without wrecking my vehicle beyond repair.

But you know what…

This just made the game that much more nostalgic.

There's wisdom that says you can only experience something for the first time once, but Dirt Rally became an exception.

It didn’t simply bring back the exact code used on Sony’s earliest consoles that I was familiar with. It used modern simulation, sophistication, and fidelity, to put me in my place. A place I was when I first tried Colin McCrae Rally, having come off of Gran Turimso 2 and never playing a dedicated all-terrain racer in my life, crushed by the variety of environments, jumps, and surfaces.

Just as I had nearly twenty years ago, I flipped through every vehicle and country available in Dirt Rally trying to find something that gave me an easy thrill and success.

I couldn’t find it.

Yet just like those early days, I stuck with it.

I dealt with the sand, snow, and dirt, the thin brakes and lack of traction on older vehicles, the terrifying sense of speed when blasting through a corner relying only on the navigator’s word.

And fell in love again.

Is Dirt Rally an accessible, mass-market racer? No. Definitely not, and that’s honestly what’s great about it.

That might seem really elitist but hopefully the following will appear less so.

There already exists an accessible, feature rich, mass-market racer, in Dirt 1, 2, 3, and 4. Each have managed to retain the excitement and thrill of the game’s its clearly based off of, but doesn’t have the grounded focus of them.

There’s a small passionate section of the playerbase that enjoyed Colin McCrae rally which lacked all of the production value, and had its racing alone be the main attraction.

I think most people have a series where they preferred those simpler times, and Codemasters found the way to involve those people and deliver an experience for them without sacrificing their main series.

And I really wish for this to be come the norm in established franchises. I wish more companies were willing to embrace the middle-market and use it to their advantage as Codemasters have done.

Because when you’re making a nostalgic product, one that caters to those who want something lost in the past, it’s very likely that even by the standards of this middle-market, it’ll be far ahead of anything that came out in the 90’s or 2000’s.

This gives the developer a freedom to not focus so heavily on what Raph Koster – Star Wars Galaxies Designer – describes as the display of the model, but the model itself.

Ring of Elysium

I’ve been playing Dragon Age: Inquisition in order to gain some perspective for the eventual Mass Effect: Andromeda Years Later project. However, I stayed up last night playing Ring of Elysium instead.

Tencent’s very obvious PUBG clone with identical controls, structure, gameplay, and even weapons.

And yet…

It hooked me.

I’m not even a huge PUBG fan. I’ve enjoyed my time with that game in the past but only ever played it as the casual fun I believed it was rather than becoming the world’s game until Fortnite by virtue of PR and polish.

But at least from my first impressions, I think Ring of Elysium is an example of how just a few minor alterations can add up to a more enjoyable experience.

Health isn’t arbitrarily restricted to 75 with bandages. Weapons automatically use attachments you’ve picked up, while also giving you the ability to customize and refine. You can switch scopes in the middle of aiming. You can use hang-gliders to fly, snowboards to travel, and ice picks to climb – though granted the last one is kinda weak right now – effective weapons are plentiful, and all of the animations and controls are a solid 10% faster and lighter.

Something I’ve really come to appreciate over the years being a fan of games made from duct-tape like Siege, is polish, and just how much it can improve the user experience. When there’s nothing to obstruct the player from the game itself, it’s far more likely that game has the chance to capture their interest.

I don’t know why…

But I’m typing fast enough to make my keyboard sound like a machine gun. Hopefully this doesn’t come across as rapid fire.

Age of Dragons

And while hopefully not spoiling a future video too much, there’s something I’ve already picked up on in Dragon Age: Inquisition within the first few hours of my latest playthrough, relating to polish.

This game consistently crumbles.

Every combat encounter, an animation is cut off, a companion teleports, or your camera bugs out from a certain angle. It’s only when walking through environments without a single enemy does the game truly feel like what the developers intended visually.

All this hard work is put into textures, lighting, weather effects, and the game can look downright gorgeous at times four years after its release, which is very impressive.

However, I’m honestly feeling like the game is less visually engaging to me than Mass Effect 2 with texture mods.

Enhancing ME2 brought ought the superb quality of that game's atmosphere which was already established in 2010, just not to the extent of today.

Inquisition meanwhile aims for a future it can’t reach, and as a result, will be forever trapped in the past at least through presentation. There’s not a mod in the world – even if they had proper tools – to carry Inquisition through the generations without fault.

And I fear that there might be a day where its textures, lighting, and environments aren’t impressive anymore, and the game’s visual appeal will have nothing to fall back on.

I’ve already talked about new engines not always bringing improvements, and I think it’s a mantle of responsibility. The new engine with all of its technology requires even more detail and talent from people that far too often are already overworked, and if the game’s structure and design doesn’t make the most of that technology, then it’s probably for the best to just leave it behind, and use something else that while less technically impressive in a still, will engage players far more in a motion.