Video Games

LEGO Fortnite First Impressions

Fortnite is launching several new game modes with the advent of Chapter 5. The impression I’ve gotten is that these are supposed to be more or less permanent fixtures like Battle Royale and Save the World. The first of which to drop was LEGO Fortnite. This one kind of feels like the largest one because it includes LEGO Mini figure versions of many many skins and completely new gameplay in large worlds. Not all of the skins have LEGO versions, but they seem to plan to add them all over time. If you already own a particular skin, then you get the LEGO version of that skin, usable in the LEGO mode.

LEGO Fortnite isn’t just “Battle Royale with LEGO skins”. I’ve seen it described as being “Minecraft but it’s LEGO”. From what I’ve played, it seems more like a LEGO version of the popular Viking survival game Valheim. Honestly, aside from the occasional sound effects, nothing much about it even feels like Fortnite at all, which is kind of weird. Even the landscaping and trees, which use a non-LEGO style don’t really feel like Fortnite exactly. I would really love to know some of the juicy business details behind whatever made this happen because it really feels like LEGO could have just made a stand-alone game. I get why EPIC wanted this added, they are trying to make Fortnite into their Metaverse play, and much more than just “Battle Royale”.

So, I know there are quite a few of these “survival sandbox” sort of games, but most of my experience is with Minecraft and Valheim, so those are what I have to compare things to here. Like Minecraft, you can create a world that is either creative or survival. Like Minecraft, in Creative you get access to all the parts and just get to build as free as you want, in Survival, you have to forage for everything. The survival part feels a lot more like Valheim. The resources are much more limited than Minecraft, and it’s more about actual foraging than digging up every block on the map. Which is why it feels like Valheim, with its central village base that you explore out of, and it’s more realistic gathering methods.

Everything centers around upgrading your village, which lets you gather more and more villagers, which are just NPC LEGO versions of popular Fortnite characters. The whole gimmick is a little hazy. To get a villager to stay, they seem to require you give them a bed, which is simple enough, but also that your village be a certain level. They will show up and gather around your central square statue until you officially recruit them. Even when not recruited, they pretty much just act like every other NPC though, defending the village and hanging around the area not doing much.

You can give them jobs to gather resources, but that doesn’t seem to actually DO anything from what I can tell. I have no idea where the resources go, if anywhere, and when you “ask about their job”, they just answer that they just started and have not done anything yet. However, when you assign it, they say they will be done in one day cycle.

It’s also clear and not clear how to upgrade your base. There are clear-cut needs, like a certain number of stones or wood, but also a vague, “Improve your village”. Which I think it related to how much you have built within the little circle area around the central post.

Like many of these games, there is a day/night cycle. Mobs are not limited to only nighttime, but there are MORE mobs at night. And this kind of brings up my first gripe with this game mode. You are REDICULOUSLY WEAK. There does seem to be a way to craft more health, I have yet to unlock a way to craft armor or better weapons, if there even is one. You have three health hearts, which can tick away in quarter increments, but for things like Wolves, they hit very hard for almost half your health, and for the skeletons at night, it’s easy to rapidly become overwhelmed, as they move much faster than you do. The balance here just feels, way off.

The skeletons also have a pretty huge aggro range, which means they will start swarming your village regularly. Thankfully, they don’t seem to really damage anything and the NPCs seem to be indestructible so they can kill the skeletons easily. Also, when you die, you will just respawn in your village, so you can quickly recover your lost loot. I have tried spreading campfires all over to light the area, but it doesn’t seem to really help. Also, campfires seem to be the only real way to make light. You can toss down torches, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to place them like in Minecraft. I crafted some candles around but they don’t really seem to DO anything.

Since we are on Campfires, it’s probably worth mentioning the weird temperature mechanic of the game. I’m sure there is a way to become too hot, but when it rains, you can become cold, which is bad. The game tells you this, it’s basically, “Get to shelter.” Standing next to a campfire does not work. You would think it would, but it does not keep you warm in the rain. It also does not heal you like in Fortnite BR either, it just provides light. You also can’t build or interact with anything in the rain. This all is a bit annoying because the best solution is to build a giant roof over your entire village, which feels a bit, not very village-like.

Between the coldness and the mobs being overpowered, you will often spend many nights just standing around waiting. Which is boring. In theory, you could use that time crafting things, but the game is very resource-stingy. You could build, but that also requires resources. And going out to the dark edges of the village to build, means probably aggroing in 10 skeletons.

The lack of resources also really adds to the tediousness of it all. I mean, sure, the idea is to get you out into the world, but then you run into another issue. Inventory management is absolutely atrocious. Your 24-slot backpack fills very quickly with things of dubious usefulness. Ok, sure, you can just dump stuff. Maybe you want to keep things, well, there are chests for this. Small chests with 8 slots in them. So you’re probably going to need a room full of chests. Chests themselves are kind of costly to build though, since resources are hard to get, making chests can feel costly. Also working against you, tools break very quickly, so you will be burning resources making fresh axes and picks and swords.

But it’s a survival game, those are more just complaints about the game having gameplay, so I can accept them. But managing all of this is even worse. items don’t automatically group and stack, for example. They stack to stacks of 30 or so. Say your chest has 4 of an item, you “deposit all” on a stack of 5. It now takes up two slots. You can manually stack them, but the entire point of quick keyboard shortcuts here is not to have to hassle with manual sorting. That 5 stack should drop into that 4 stack and make a 9 pile on its own. This feels nitpicky, but when you constantly have to do it, it gets old, very fast.

Exploring itself doesn’t feel very rewarding either. The main driver is gathering wood or rock, which is a constant need. But sometimes there are special encounters. you might find a ruined building or a small pack of bandits, or these little glowing butterflies that lead you to a chest. The rewards are almost never good though. Often just berries you can find anywhere.

I should probably mention the game servers/worlds themselves. Like most of these games, the map is procedurally generated. I have not explored out to the edges, but they may be infinite, I am not sure on that one yet. You can invite other players to join you as well, which is a popular aspect of these sorts of games. According to the game, you can hand out keys to a limited number of people to allow them to play without your presence, otherwise, the world ends when you leave. There also isn’t any additional cost to running a world/server, which is a bit surprising considering Minecraft has things like Realms that you can pay for, and even running a game outside of that means a host of some kind and a cost. Then again, they also host all of those creative mode maps as well. “Free Hosting” is kind of Fortnite’s gimmick I guess.

I feel like a lot of my complaints are about how this survival game expects me to survive. And to some extent they are, but the real underlying complaint is balance. The game world is all cutesy and LEGO, but also it’s hard and restrictive on what it gives you. The harsh survival part of these games is supposed to be at the higher-end areas, or when you explore out deep into the world, not, literally while you are in your own home base.

The game just sort of, feels at odds with itself. It’s stingy on resources to encourage exploring, but the enemies are very tough so you never feel confident enough to go on a long trip anywhere. There are bonuses and special chests around, but they never give worthwhile loot. I mentioned Valheim, this is all part of why I could never really get into Valheim, it all just felt so egregiously annoying for the sake of annoyingness.

Fortnite Big Bang Event

Dec 3rd, 2023

by Ramen Junkie.

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What a ridiculous letdown. Especially after all the build-up. Last season’s end with Fracture was lame but at least there was things to DO and some story stuff happened.

Let’s start with the build-up. As is standard, there was a special event at a specific time, in this case 1p, my time, CST (all times CST). I logged in a half hour early, which was the suggested lead time from Epic, and was greeted with a queue wait, of 90 minutes.

I let it go, thinking maybe it would jump ahead faster, but nope. 1 pm came and went. Eventually, I did get in. The news splash banner said there were additional runs, due to demand, at 4 pm and 10 pm. So I decided I could kill some time and wait for 4 pm. I did a Team Rumble match, then loaded up a Deathrun to try to get a couple more last-minute levels, to unlock the Golden Peely/Whip skin. I only needed like 2 levels.

Around 3 pm, and 2/3rds of the way through a 400-level Deathrun, I was randomly booted out of the game. When I reloaded, I was greeted by another queue. Another, 90 minute queue. You see the math problem here? I sat in that queue and walked away to do some other things, and well, I missed the 4pm event. I think a lot of people did, because around this time, the game went completely offline. It was offline, for hours. I pretty much decided not to bother with the 10 pm event, and it’s likely just being another 90-minute queue.

I was upstairs messing on my laptop, and decided to remote to my other PC, and, I was able to log in. This was, maybe 8 or 8:30pm. I loaded another deathrun that dropped a slow drip of XP, just to make my account look less idle, and decided to give the 10pm event a go. Around 9:30 I went back down to my PC. Unfortunately, as, I think, a side effect of the Remote Desktop, the interface and fame were sluggish. I killed the process and reloaded, again, hoping for no queues. Fortunately, there was none.

I decided on a skin, and decided to go with Arianna Grande since the event had this Eminem theme promoting it. Plus I think Arianna was the star of a previous end-of-season event (before I started playing). It seemed like a good fit. Finally, I was in a lobby, which meant hanging around the empty map with some other players for a bit, centered around the rocket at the center of the map. Everyone was mostly just running around building random things and emoting. There wasn’t a ton to do since you couldn’t break anything or gather mats. I even tried running to the edges of the map. Even trying to destroy gas pumps, they would just, flame up and not explode. Jumping off the map just saw you instantly teleported back to the center to glide down again.

Eventually, the countdown completed and the rocket was launched. You couldn’t actually interact with the rocket at all, in fact, once it launched, you couldn’t interact with much of anything. Your character is launched way into the sky and just hovers for a bit, while, something(??? I don’t know what) attacks the meteor and then the rocket comes back and basically, the island explodes… again…

This leads to an on rails tour of a Fortnite LEGO world, which was kind of leaked and known about. Which leads to a short race in Rocket Racing, which was leaked and known about and I’m not sure how much actual control there was from the player actually happening. Next up was the most interactive bit, when the players drop onto a stage and Eminem appears, as Lose Yourself starts up. Finally, some good stuff!

But there wasn’t really much, good stuff. You play a bit of Lose Yourself in a little mini rhythm game, and then the stage is destroyed by a giant Kaiju sized Eminem. He goes walks circles around you on a small floating stage raping some song I didn’t recognize, while occasionally destroying buildings.

And… that was it.

I went in expecting an Eminem Soundwave Series level. Instead it was a ten minute advertisement for the new modes coming soon. It literally could have been a YouTube video. All that waiting and hype for something incredibly lame.

Sky: CotL – Without a Cape aka “Hard Mode”

Nov 20th, 2023

by Ramen Junkie.

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I have been setting up a couple of secondary accounts on Sly, to send Hearts to myself, because you need a zillion hearts and there isn’t any reliable way to accumulate them with any speed. Even having alts, it’s slow as heck.

With the Steam version of the game, this is a lot easier to do, especially since I have several machines capable of running the game. Ideally, I might automate this task, but for now, I am fine with doing it manually. I probably won’t do it consistently either since sending hearts takes 3 candles, which are easy to get, but it does require some actual playing.

For my latest alt, I decided to try something different. When you first enter the world of Sky, you have no cape. Which means you can’t fly or glide, you can only walk and run and sort of hop around. A minute or two into the game, you are prompted to collect your first Winged Light, which unlocks the cape and most of the game’s mechanics.

A thought occurred to me.

What if I just… Didn’t?

I landed on the Idle of Dawn, a fresh unwinged moth. You can’t swim around the first mountain, there is wind blocking the way. So I proceeded through the story cave and came out, prompted to collect my cape. The game strongly encouraged this because the Winged Light (WL) is in a little cratered area, you have to be able to fly to get out.

Or do you?

You can’t swim off the main area here, I tried that. So it was back to the edge of the mountain. To my surprise, you can simply cop up the edge of the crater, and escape, no WL needed.

There was another obstacle though, the desert area that follows is also surrounded by a tall rock wall, too tall to even fly over with one WL. The proper path is to collect your first Spirit, then unlock a Spirit Gate, and climb up a rock cliff, where you jump into the clouds and fly to the next area.

Fortunately, there is a cloud wall along the right side edge of the desert. And fortunately, you still bounce up in the clouds, even without a cape. So I was able to scale the wall. But then I also glitched out and fell into an out-of-bounds (OOB) area just under the terrain.

After exploring a bit, I headed towards the glitched area under where you are supposed to leap off the rock face. Fortunately, the geometry of the world worked out, and I was able to ride clouds from here, out of the OOB area, and up to the temple at the end of the zone. First major hurdle passed!

The second zone, the Daylight Prairie was pretty easy to pass through. All of the needed activities can be passed without flying. You can burn the bells from the ground and ride the mantas up to the temple. The main thing I needed to keep track of was not to collect any of the WL along the path. Fortunately, you have to actively press a button to collect them.

My other concern was in the temple. To pass to the next area, you do a deep call and ride some butterflies up. My worry was that the butterflies would not carry me without a cape. Fortunately, they did.

The Hidden Forrest presented the first real challenge. Shortly after entering, it starts to rain. The rain constantly drains your energy. Now, for those who don’t know how energy works in Sky: CotL, its your cape. The more WL you have, the longer you last before you burn out and once you burn out, you can rapidly perish.

Having no cap, I had no energy.

I managed to skirt around for cover and recharging well enough. I got stuck though at the end of the zone. You have to hop between some flying jellyfish to get to the temple. Maybe, MAYBE on mobile, I could have done it, the momentum is funny and weird on PC, and after many failed tries, I could not make the jumps, at all. So I had to cheese it a bit by bringing my main account on and handhold flying my alt up to the temple.

The butterflies also carry you off at the end of the Forest zone, which was good.

The Valley of Triumph was also very simple to run through. The trickiest part was avoiding the WL on the downhill slide areas. Unlike every other WL, these are automatically collected on contact. And I did NOT want to collect any.

After the Valley was the Golden Wasteland. I was worried this one would be impossible, because of how much can damage you. There are several points where you have to trudge through sludge that drains you. While I took long routes to find short paths across the sludge, a few times I came close to completely draining.

Then there was the Krill. The huge dragons that patrol around. Apparently, I have gotten good enough to just, know their paths, because they were no problem.

The Vault zone afterward was pretty straightforward as well. I was worried it may have been tricky because some of its puzzles are easier with flight. Easier, but its not required. There are little jump pads you can light and use in most cases. Or you can wait for someone else to do them.

Upon reaching the final summit, I was greeted with another barrier. You need to have unlocked 20 Spirits to enter the final zone. I had done zero, intentionally. I logged in on my phone again and pulled the alt past the barrier.

I am happy to say, I have gotten very good at Eden as well. I had almost no trouble passing through the entire area. This means, taking no damage as well. When I go through Eden on my main with a mighty 11 wing flaps unlocked, I can usually take like 2 hits before it becomes a problem. With zero, any damage would basically one-shot me down to injured and near death.

I made it almost all the way and picked up some accompaniment along the way. I imagine they were intrigued by my lack of a cape. Then, right at the very end, things got messy. I took a hit, and while crawling to the safety of light, the Krill that patrols right before the exit spotted me. Somehow, I managed to crawl to cover before it struck.

But then my new friends showed up. And it spotted them, and they would get to cover, but then they would get hit by a rock and lose WL, and trigger the Krill again.

And despite my better judgment, my instincts said, “Help them, help collect their lost WL, they were helping you.”. Which just made things worse possibly.

The Krill never did strike and finally left, but it was a slightly comical moment of people losing WL to rocks and me getting dropped to slow crawling all while we scrambled for cover.

But we all made it to the final cave and the final zone.

I was wondering what would happen in the final zone, given that I had, zero WL. Well, as soon as I entered, I died. Before the opening cut scene bit ended.

My friends cried over me, it was nice.

I watched them complete the end scenario, but then y game wigged out and I had to quit and resume things, so I lost them. Which was sad, because I wanted to chat with them at the bench in Orbit.

Then the normal ending moments happened, and I made it to Orbit.

No spirits greeted me there. No ascended candles were given. I just, walked to the exit to be reborn.

And when I was…. The game had given me the default 1 WL cape. Which was irritating.

What I’ve Been Playing – Light-Based Lore Edition

Oct 17th, 2023

by Ramen Junkie.

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I kind of want to do these weekly, but I don’t really know if I rotate my game interests enough these days to do them weekly. I just wish I could get more consistent, though I have no one to blame by myself. Though part of the desire to do these sorts of posts was to maybe, encourage more variety in my gaming habits. I think part of the reason I don’t have much variety lately is that, anymore, I play games to fill time more than for enjoyment these days. It’s certainly not for lack of options of things to play.

Hyperlight Drifter

This game kind of reminds me of Zelda a bit in play, it’s top-down, and you go around swording and shooting things. It’s essentially an adventure game like Zelda, though visually it’s all stylized pixel art. In that department it makes me think of Dead Cells. The sort of, core mechanic, is that you can sort of hyperlight speed dodge a short distance. This comes up a lot in combat as the standard strategy tends to be, dodge then hit.

I was enjoying it though it’s a bit brutally difficult in places, it also doesn’t punish you much since dying just means starting the current screen over again. So you can get a feel for actually improving one’s skill.

But I also basically stopped playing. I’ll probably go back, but I got to the first boss. A first boss? I’m not sure the zones have any real order. I just, couldn’t beat it. Not for trying, and trying, and trying, and trying some more. The strategy is fairly clear, get the boss to kill the adds before they spawn in, then dodge and hit the boss. It’s all just a bit too annoyingly knife’s edge for difficulty for me I think.

The game’s fun though, and tells an interesting story despite no actual dialogue.

Omno

In a much different pace than Hyperlight Drifter, I played all the way through Omno. It’s a 3rd person platform puzzle title, and there isn’t really any way to actually die, so well, that makes it considerably easier than Hyperlight Drifter. It also takes maybe 4 hours to 100%.

I like this sort of relaxing play style these days. Interestingly, the game kind of reminded me of Sky: CotL in it’s story, though not really in it’s play style. Especially with the occasional light up hieroglyphics and light collecting game play.

Sky: Children of the Light

Speaking of Sky, I’ve jumped back on that bandwagon a bit again. It’s an enjoyable and relaxing title but it gets really repetitious after a while. I think the main thing is to stop grinding candles. Just stick to daily quests and events. Grinding candles is incredibly time-consuming and makes the repetition worse.

There was also a demo for the PC version. I’m looking forward to the PC release if only because it means I can set up a couple of extra accounts and send myself hearts. Hearts are the most pain in the ass currency to get in-game, You can get a slow drip of partial hearts from friends daily, assuming you fight people who light your candle, or a friend can gift you a whole heart for 3 candles. That’s not a lot of candles, but it adds up rapidly if you were doing it for several friends. The way the system works, the absolute maximum you can farm in a day if you get literally every piece of wax, is around 20-21 candles. This takes HOURS, even when you are super efficient. And candles are the main currency for other things, so you often want to save them up. Not a problem for a second account that’s just feeding hearts to a main account, 3 candles are fairly easy to farm out.

Anyway, on to the Steam Demo/Beta. I ended up doing two paths here, not really intentionally. When I first logged in on my laptop, my account wasn’t linking properly, so I ended up doing a fresh new run with a “local save”. I ended up running through the entire game, including Eden, and eventually, linked it to a secondary Steam Account. When I loaded it up on my Desktop, everything linked fine. I did some runs and collected Winged Lights on my main account, as I had recently run Eden again and needed to regather them all, and I recorded some gameplay of the Trials and posted it to YouTube.

The game plays pretty well on PC, it’s neat seeing the world in nice huge glory after playing so long on my phone. There are a few issues I came across. Both may be related to some core issue with controls. First, in some tight areas, when flying, it was super easy to end up caught in the clouds and bouncing around. This happened most often in “entry corridor” zones, like at the start of Daylight Prairie and Hidden Forrest, but also during the final ascension sequence at the end of the game. I think what’s happening is the PC controls don’t handle, I’m not sure the proper name, “Pressure based movement”. On the phone touch controls, you push forward a bit, your character walks slowly. Push it all the way, they run. On the PC, with WASD, the movement seems to always be the same speed. This actually makes things feel incredibly sluggish at times. I had trouble during the Trial of Fire at times because my character just felt sluggish and wasn’t quite able to make it to light the next candle or avoid a squiggly slug monster.

I’m not entirely sure how to fix this with KB controls aside from adding a “sprint” button.

Fortnite

I’ve ended up playing Fortnite this season more than expected. I mentioned before the pass was super lame and I wasn’t really interested, but I did manage to accumulate the free tier V-Bucks in order to have enough to buy the pass. This was worthwhile since spending 950 V-Bucks unlocked the paid tier V-Bucks, giving a return of 1200 V-Bucks total. Also, while the pass is really mediocre, I really like the heist elements of the map. There are three large compounds you can infiltrate for good loot. It’s fun infiltrating these places.

Fortnite Desperately Needs More Preset Slots

Oct 7th, 2023

by Ramen Junkie.

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There are currently 100 slots available. Given the sheer number of items available there really needs to be a larger limit. Each battle pass has 7-8 new skins added, each with different styles and colors, which can drastically change the skin enough that it’s basically two skins. One could easily want several pre sets for the same skin. This doesn’t even get into buying skins from the shop.

I like to change skins a lot and I have a lot of pretty alright set-ups. I really wish I could have more though. It’s easy enough to change skins, but then there is selecting a good back bling, and pickaxe, and contrails, and a glider, etc etc. There’s like 4 or 5 options to set up when doing it manually, easily.

They also really need a better way to sort and organize them. As it is, you have to load the preset, then save it to a new slot, overwriting something else. It’s a pain. Something something drag and drop here people.

It gets even worse because the thumbnail is always just the basic style, so it’s not easy to tell which preset has a different style applied. A good example below is the Spiderman skins, which all look the same, but are all different.

Anyway, here’s my hundred at the moment.