June 28, 2024
Hello! Welcome back to our regular column where we write a little about some of the games we’ve played over the past few days. This week we dive into a new fantasy MMO that is a kind of social experiment; we’re revisiting an old favorite via a Director’s Cut of sorts; and we tackle the obscure categories first.
What did you play?
If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We’ve Been Playing, here’s our archive.
Pax Dei, PC
I have been fascinated by Pax Dei since it was announced. It’s a medieval MMO and what’s unique about it is that everything in the world is created by players. There are no pre-built towns or settlements; it was all built by you. The same goes for all the equipment in the world. What’s even more interesting is that it’s a kind of social experiment. Ultimately, the goal of the game is to have players organize feudal societies. It wants them to work together to form baronies, appoint knights and go on crusades. Take a look at some of the player-driven stories that have come out of the spaceship MMO Eve Online – developer Mainframe Industries wants that. That is a targeted comparison by the way; Pax Dei’s creative director Reynir Hardarson was one of the co-founders of Eve maker CCP.
Up until now, the excitement was all based on promises and some popular playtests. But on June 18th, Pax Dei launched. It only launched in early access, however, and it’s far from a finished game. There’s a basic implementation here. The focus is on building houses, and there are a lot of detailed and working systems based around it. In broad terms, it’s very similar to other crafting games: chopping trees, mining rocks, gathering stuff, and then refining it on various machines to create what you need. What’s slightly different is how open-ended the house building is, and that there’s some sort of building integrity system at its core. Roofs and walls will fall down if they’re not properly supported.
This approach means that houses look different in the game, and it’s fun to just walk around and see what people have made (and steal ideas for what to build as you go). Because Pax Dei is an MMO, there are also lots of people playing in the world, so there are lots of houses to look at. And it helps that the game world looks beautiful – like a mountain dream in the South of France – and that it’s realised in a peaceful way on a summer’s evening. I built high up on a mountain to look out over the valley below, and when the sun sets or rises, it’s breathtaking.
But it is very difficult – the raw material costs for individual parts of houses and for armor are high – and there is not much to do except make a house. You can equip yourself with nice armor, but I don’t know what else there is to fight other than boars. That’s because large parts of the game – and of this grand vision – are still missing. Mainframe is open about this; It’s been said to me and to the community that the adventure systems and civilization systems are the next big things it will be working on. But that doesn’t change the fact that it feels a bit like a tech demo – a very pleasant tech demo – as it is.
-Bertie
Beyond Good & Evil: 20th Anniversary Edition, Xbox Series
There is a universe where Beyond Good & Evil sold millions of copies. It was what Ubisoft had hoped for: its own Zelda that would explode and become a major new franchise for the company. Instead, this unconventional adventure earned itself a different kind of success, as an endearing cult classic.
I doubt we would have gotten the 20th Anniversary Edition of Beyond Good & Evil in the same way had it been a billion-dollar seller. In addition to the original game – now revamped with updated textures and a re-recorded score – the package includes a surprisingly detailed and candid behind-the-scenes archive, full of documents and commentary from the original development.
There’s an honesty here that I like, especially when talking about how the game struggled to explain itself to a wider audience. Photos from May 2002 – when Ubisoft took a demo to E3 to show it off for the first time – noted that “‘Project BG&E’ is struggling to keep up with the company’s other monster franchises”. A review of press clippings stated that media coverage was “thin, but positive: journalists really seem to like the demo.” It is a shame that the reporting did not lead to more sales.
But it’s a credit to Ubisoft for continuing with a series that many still hold dear two decades later, and that – despite the memes about its endless development – Beyond Good & Evil 2 is still on the cards. Like the story of a brave hero fighting against seemingly insurmountable odds, Beyond Good & Evil still goes on.
-Tom
Connections, iOS
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I’m not a huge fan of Connections, but I play it with my wife some nights, both of us trying to start at the same time, and both screaming when we lose a life or gain a category. It’s one of those games that’s most interesting when it’s obscure, or cheap, or just plain broken, when the categories are only categories if you’re actually willing to go along with a few false arguments.
But this actually led to a bit of fun. Connections shouldn’t be about getting all the categories as quickly as possible. It should be about getting the obscure categories first, from the deeply silly and improbable back to the things that are reasonable to the point of obvious.
Playing this way has kept the game alive a little longer for me. I still begrudge his hold on me, but I don’t begrudge it as much as I used to.
-Chris Donlan