 So as I was working on the best games I played script I realized that looking back I didn't actually play that many games that really impressed me this year I played a lot of games and most of them were just pretty good But there were very few that were great and most of those great games actually weren't even made this year Though several of them are on my list because they got releases this year Thanks to switch ports or coming out of early access and I came to this unfortunate realization as I was playing the last new game I'll get to in 2018 studio a-44 is new. I don't uh I don't want to call it a souls like because it isn't souls like it's It's dark souls Anyway a-44 is a new low-budget indie dark souls game Ashen and before I go further this seems like the kind of game that a lot of people are gonna like and I don't like ripping on Indie studios because I understand but I Gotta say what I gotta say After the logo I Played Ashen all the way through I completed all its NPC quests. I explored its world I fully upgraded several weapons I finished the game and that right there means it was I guess worthwhile because as I get older and crankier I actually finished less and less games There was no AC Odyssey video this year because I just could not be fucking bothered to finish it seemingly endless Expanse of nebulous content. Was it bad? No AC Odyssey was fine. I guess but it wasn't really any better than fine. It was it was fine Anyway, I had a few videos running through my head as I played Ashen and as I got to the end I realized that this game perfectly fit into another video. I kind of been thinking about Before Ashen, I went back to play doom 2016 again Doom is one of the very few games that I have been continuously replaying over the last few years and as I did again I realized that it wasn't just a good game doom is Unbelievably good, but why why is doom great and why isn't Ashen great? It all boils down to the importance of excellence a Game that does lots of things Competently is usually less impressive than a game that does one or two things superlatively and this is kind of true in sports too players who are just sort of Average at a lot of things generally get paid less even though they're more valuable than players who do one thing Really really well. Okay, the very best games do many or most things with excellence, but Let's use destiny as an example Okay, destiny has a litany of problems always but the things that destiny does well it does Incredibly almost without peer well destiny looks and sounds Absolutely amazing its production values are nearly unparalleled and the feel of its FPS combat is as good as any other shooter ever made Its story is Hilariously bad its mission design ranges from groan inducing levels of shit to passable its progression and economy systems are just simply awful But the game is a success because the things it does well it does better than anybody else Doom 2016 is a nearly flawless game because the things it does well It does almost perfectly and the things it doesn't do well. It does at least adequately and more importantly Infrequently its story is only fine. And so it doesn't force hours of it upon you Its production values and art design are unbelievably good. It has Fantastic environmental storytelling it has music that is about as well implemented as any music in any game ever And it's not just that the music itself is amazing which it is It's how that amazing music is actually integrated into the gameplay and The gameplay of course is flawless honed to a razor edge of awesome with perfect combat in Perfect levels against perfect enemies the game knows what it does well and it leans heavily into that and I talk about doom because my main critique of ashen has a very natural and logical counter argument Okay, the argument is going to be like how can you say that ashen is too much like dark souls aren't all shooters the same But you like a bunch of different shooters. Well, we'll address that idea after we talk about why ashen actually falls flat Ashen's biggest problem is it's nearly shocking lack of ambition in its design as I've made clear I don't like the souls games I consider them nearly unparalleled works of gaming art that are amongst the very best ever made Aside from two which I hate From software souls games are now recognized as their own genre, but they weren't totally revolutionary The combat is clearly inspired by old third-person action games like ninja Gaiden or Zelda It's a third-person lock-on action combat system. That's the basis of the game The setting is a familiar one. It's fantasy The writing is fairly standard high fantasy stuff though really really good and perfectly voice-acted Souls is great because even though many of its parts are familiar it does almost everything very well Visual presentation is incredibly good Dark Souls 1 is still to this day an unbelievably beautiful game and Dark Souls 3 and Bloodborne are downright stunning most of the time Dark Souls story and more importantly its storytelling are interesting and powerful its level design is top of the line top shelf Fantastic its enemy variety monster design both of those things are just perfect And of course the combat system is second to none In fact, I like the souls combat system so much that I've played all of the notable souls likes as they've released from salt and sanctuary Lord's of the fallen Neo etc. I like souls combat in the same way I like FPS combat or the way I like Metroidvania games I enjoy that particular method of interacting with a game world I like detention and I like how the combat is kind of a fast-paced puzzle a sometimes frustrating and needlessly cruel puzzle But still so I'm not one to disparage the game simply because it uses a combat system that I enjoy I wish more games use the souls combat system But what makes a game a Dark Souls game isn't just the combat system It is the consistent commitment to excellence in the design the reason I didn't like Dark Souls 2 is because it felt sloppy to me animations were stiff and unconvincing Enemies felt like their poise and stamina was somehow off Leading to frustrating encounters where enemies simply wouldn't stagger or would suddenly catch you into long combo depths that didn't feel fair There was a strange lack of weight to the combat with hits not feeling powerful and sound design that made everything feel much game Year levels outside of a few excellent ones and the pretty excellent DLC felt uninspired Monster design was just average It's kind of the perfect example of a bunch of little things dragging a whole experience down and making it only average or fine Now Neo was very souls like Lords of the Fallen was very souls like but Ashen is Shamelessly Dark Souls for instance Let me just remind everyone that the player character in Dark Souls 2 is called the Ashen one Let's just run down all those similarities before we get to why all of it adds up to something so much less the combat system and Ashen you'll go through areas fighting enemies and using a limited number of healing items called estus. I mean sap flasks Estus sap flasks You'll need to make it to the checkpoint to refill your sap flasks without dying If you die, you'll respawn at the bonfires which are called stones and all the monsters will respawn If you die you drop the currency of accumulated, which is called scoria You have to make it back and pick it up without dying again, or you'll lose it all The combat and checkpoint elements and there are others and I didn't even mention are exactly the same as Dark Souls And I mean exactly Light and heavy attacks are mapped to the same buttons Sprint and dodge and jump are mapped the same the healing is mapped to the same button It is exactly the Dark Souls combat and control system But that's to be expected, right? I mean all the games that have attempted to do the souls formula have used these basic concepts as the bedrock But the thing is most games have added something unique Neo which by the way didn't use the same controls game, which actually kind of was annoying But either way Neo slightly tweaked combat with key pulses and a more robust ranged combat system as well as a kind of super ability that worked with a rechargeable cool down Now I didn't like Neo all that much But I can freely admit that Neo added to the souls combat system with its own fresh take on it The surge did the same with its body parts targeting and upgrade system Both of those games took the souls combat and decided to differentiate with some unique and interesting mechanics Ashen takes the souls combat system and simplifies it by making all weapons have the same move set Eliminating magic only having two types of weapons outside of one or two special weapons like a halberd It eliminates parrying and backstabbing. It replaces bows with spears But they serve the exact same purpose of either using them to pull enemies or to cheese them Ashen doesn't have its own combat inspired by souls It has these souls combat but less robust souls combat shines for a bunch of reasons and Making this video for instance I went back to Dark Souls 3 to get some footage and the video is late because I played the whole damn game again And I've got nearly 400 hours in Dark Souls 3 I have a character on new game plus 6 and the game is so good that I ended up going all the way through again Even though I only needed like five or six minutes of video The combat never gets old because there is a pretty huge Assortment of weapons and shields and armor and magic and because there's a tremendous variety in the enemies that all feel different to fight Ashen's combat is competent It behaves basically like Dark Souls combat But it isn't excellent and it doesn't offer anything new at all It's Dark Souls combat for less diverse less interesting and it doesn't feel as good because the animations aren't as good And that's totally understandable of course Dark Souls animations are Ridiculously good some of the best animation work in gaming and it would be asking too much for an indie studio's first game to hit Those lofty heights right out the gate, but this lack of excellence in the combat isn't the game's only problem The combat is perfectly fine and occasionally fun and the lack of depth was the only problem in the game I would be making a different video, but it's not so let's move on to the rest story and world Ashen is about a world where light has faded and darkness is beginning to rule the world There is a curse that has spread. There is an ember of light that needed to keep the darkness at bay You'll meet NPCs along the way that have quests for you to complete for them You press a to engage in dialogue The bosses are all big versions of regular enemies with tragic backstories You've got a hub area where you collect NPCs who serve as vendors as you find them in the world You unlock the ability to fast travel between checkpoints about halfway through the game But before then you can use consumable items that you will find to warp back to that hub area Again, it's not souls like it is Dark Souls from the story to the hub area to the fast travel system and vendors It's just like Dark Souls, but a little bit worse Dark Souls is often panned for not having a coherent story But that's more a result of a minimalist style that isn't present in most mainstream art forms Dark Souls is a kind of impressionist game. It has a very straightforward story. So straightforward It's only like a paragraph long the gods kept the golden age alive with fire The fire is fading and requires someone with a powerful soul to be burned alive to keep it going in The games you hunt down powerful beings Kill them take their souls into your body and then burn yourself alive to keep the golden age going But the actual story is rich and the complex and open to interpretation Through item descriptions enemy and level design environmental storytelling Dark Souls narrative is told quite literally through every pixel in the design There isn't a huge amount of dialogue But what's there is rich and interesting and invariably impeccably written and acted Dark Souls story might be simple But its story telling is so layered and well done that it's able to be emotionally powerful with only a smattering of words Ashen story is Fine, but simple and the lack of depth means that the game can't lean on its story at all The dialogue is extremely similar to Dark Souls but lacks any of the nuance or quality and The voice acting isn't just bad. It is ridiculously annoying I have never heard voice actors speak so slowly and the fact that every MPC speaks like this means it wasn't the actors who are responsible, but the director and I can't Overstate this man. So I'm just gonna play some clips. I felt like my eyes were bleeding listening to this shit watch Now that I am free I can use these pathways and I can help you do the same But first I need an artifact The cunning pestle the pestle was stolen away by a pair of cowards during your battle with Amaren Twin Divi you'll find their crumbling stronghold above Now heart is silent While the human heart beats on We must carry both hearts down a path only the bravest may travel Geffen awaits us in the gnar a place of great power and great danger Pass through those doors to the portal beyond. I have watched you This mediocre storytelling extends out into the very world design itself There are only two significant tweaks to the Dark Souls formula on offer in Ashen and one of them is the existence of an Open world that doesn't feel like individual levels many of the areas are wide open and kind of empty and at first This felt like something that had a potential to be a really interesting take on the genre But it doesn't take long to realize that this simply doesn't work in this kind of game or at least not here Giving the player freedom to wander open vistas runs very counter to what makes a souls like game really sing The meticulous and careful design of the player experience when you enter a level in Dark Souls Everything feels like it was placed carefully Central yarnum Bloodborne's opening level is constantly telling the player what happened The enemies you encounter actually tell the story as well as acts as gameplay There are citizens wandering their ruined city on the hunt They're all almost totally transformed into beasts themselves, but they attack and call you the beast you Interrupt them burning a huge werewolf in a town square in Dark Souls 3 the high wall Immediately shows the player a ruined world the soldiers here are still wandering as hollows in their armor There are bodies of hundreds of dead knights strewn about the level from some final Cataclysmic revolt and the few remaining knights that are living are totally hollow But still robotically making their rounds forever trapped in their duty Unable to do anything else now that they've lost their humanity Even the citizens seem to have gone hollow and sit passively praying or wailing it is creepy man The next level the undead settlement begins with you walking up to a gate as the residents release Hounds to kill the completely non-hostile hollows who've congregated outside of their former town The game Relentlessly drives home the story and the experience by carefully curating What you see when you see it and how you'll interact with it enemies are very rarely Simply waiting statically for you They seem to exist outside their roles an obstacle for the player and this world building seeps into nearly every moment of the game And drives the player forward with a feeling they want to explore because Ashen's world is far more open It means that players can approach it from many different directions and that means that developers can't carefully Curate it like they can in Dark Souls So what you end up with is something that feels less like a real place and more like a themed Playground for the player there are very few enemy types And they seem to be simply waiting for the player in random locations and this feeling of randomness does add to the Difficulty but greatly detracts from the logic of the world They feel like they were simply Sprinkled about to achieve a necessary combat density. I don't know who these enemies are I don't know what they were or what they want They all look the same almost all of them attack in the exact same way and the world itself though very beautiful Feels very fake and lifeless as a result The game does its best work in the dungeons where the careful design of the soul series is on display But most of the game is spent out in the open world the clever level design that drives player exploration in a souls game Simply isn't here and the other thing that drives player exploration in the souls game is also missing While there is a large amount of loot on skeletons throughout Ashen's world It becomes quickly clear that 95 percent of it is totally pointless with so few weapons Very few consumable items and only a handful literally a handful of armor sets The vast majority of items you loot are one of three upgrade materials or one of three consumable materials with a very Very rare weapon tossed in and those weapons themselves don't matter because they all share the same move sets Even complex Platforming of which there is an annoying amount almost always rewards the equivalent of Dark Souls's Homeward bone or Titanite shard by the third or fourth hour you'll realize that almost nothing you loot is necessary But for players like me who are Constitutionally incapable of seeing an item and not going to get it You'll be forced into wasting your time going to get a 100th useless item from a corpse It's this game that has made me realize just how well Dark Souls does loot Almost every item in souls is either interesting to use has a purpose for a particular play style or is attached to a really Interesting bit of story, but Ashen's Relentlessly simplified game mechanics means it just isn't enough stuff to support the exploration the game expects of you It's almost as if they put all the loot drops out in the world in really cool places But ran out of time before they could finish making the actual loot and just went back and put upgrade materials or spearheads everywhere This lack of interesting items hurts the gameplay and makes most vendors pointless because you will never need to buy anything We're getting long now. So let's kind of drill down on that enemy design again enemy design is Crucially important to a game like this because even if enemies are similar mechanically Design and attack animations give the gameplay variety and add context and depth to the world They appear in Dark Souls feels like exploring a world because there are dozens and dozens of unique enemies all tied in Appearance and lore to the areas they appear in and this goes double for bosses But Ashen features like literally seven enemies and that is not an exaggeration There's dudes dudes with spears big dudes big charging dudes Dogs ghost ladies and then like one or two other ones that appear in the dungeons the few bosses in the games are Really extremely forgettable visually and very standard and boring mechanically Dark Souls 3 has dozens and dozens of unique weapons with unique move sets and then adds weapon arts Magic pyromancy Miracles shields as well as the ability to one or two hand weapons You then use that huge array of tools and mechanics against an equally large variety of enemies with distinct attack patterns that require Different tactics spacing dodging pacing it means that the combat never gets old because the game is expertly paced So as soon as you've basically mastered all the enemies in an area You're on to a new area with new enemies to master right until the end of the game But because Ashen has so few enemies and literally only a few different weapons The only way the game can add variety is through adding larger and larger groups of enemies or having them spawn in unfair ways or Agro all at once and even as this becomes the norm in the second half the combat is never more than competent It feels pretty good But it gets very very boring because it always feels the same fighting the big guy with the club Feels the same an hour one as fighting the big guy with the club does an hour 15 as opposed to Dark Souls where fighting hollows on the high wall is Nothing like fighting the jailers and aerothel dungeon or Lothric Knights in the castle The game's one really good twist is the use of darkness in its dungeons requiring you carry a lantern But this mechanic is rarely used and way underutilized It doesn't change the gameplay beyond making you go slower, which is welcome, but isn't enough to carry it I'm not a game designer But it seems to me that this is an interesting piece of the engine that could have been used to really give the game its own Flavor mechanically in fact it was this that had me anticipating the game way back when I was first announced and before I knew It was a souls like let's wrap up and get to the title of the essay. How important is excellence? Games are much more iterative than any other art form because they rely on technology and because the medium is Inextricably tied to science and the values inherent in that discipline the book masters of doom Repeatedly addresses John Carmack's refusal to patent any of id's Revolutionary technology. He believed that patent law directly contradicted both the hacker ethos and the very nature of science That relies on standing upon the work of those who came before that means that Inevitably games will be similar to each other as exciting new technologies come online and are copied Wolfenstein and then especially doom didn't remain the only shooters for long Other developers tried to improve upon the genre at first most were simply doom clones But as time passed other developers added on to the formula in interesting or exciting ways and even some of the doom clones Succeeded because they managed to do the formula spectacularly well Even if it was derivative Duke Nukem looking back what at its core separates doom 2016 and destiny from the myriad other FPS games that have popped up since 2014 What makes those games so successful doing a formula that is almost 30 years old both of those games zero in on at least one Thing and do it as well or better than anybody else Ashen doesn't have any obvious flaws outside the shockingly bad voice acting Which I can forgive because I was able to insta skip everyone once I realized how fucking bad it was man is fucking bad It runs perfectly. It is a very nice looking game. The sound design is fine. Combat is fine World design is fine But it's also nothing that Ashen does well and Certainly nothing it does very well and more importantly There's not one thing that Ashen does better than dark souls itself or even the other souls likes So if Ashen isn't going to change anything if it's going to be the most souls like of any of the souls likes And it doesn't do anything particularly well and certainly nothing better than souls itself Why does it need to exist its only reason for existence is as a decent product a game to pass the time and make some money for a new Studio and I guess that's fine But if you're gonna ape a game style you should ape one with less replay value than souls There are three Amazing souls games that any player would be better off simply going back to again a lot of talent and effort went into making This game clearly and I can only wonder why why bother making a game so true to the souls formula But so transparently inferior in every single way Why not take time to bring something that sets this game apart from dark souls even the lantern which had the Possibility of being a really cool change is actually more of a proper Implementation of dark souls 2's abandoned lighting system than its own thing and because there's nothing excellent about the game It started to wear on my patience The further I got into it the more obvious it became that there was nothing here I couldn't get exactly in a dark souls game And then I started to realize that I was actually wasting my time because I could simply be playing the better Version of this game if you can't do a game as polished and perfect as what you're riffing on You've got to make certain there's at least one area of total excellence That's different if you're gonna remake a genre with almost no Changes you have to make sure you do it so well. That's something about it stacks up favorably to the original Otherwise all you've got is the budget off label brands if you've got Xbox game past You may as well play ashen for a bit I guess but I cannot for the life of me think of a reason why you should play it if you already own a dark souls game All right, I'll be having a best of the year video coming up. See you next time. Thanks. Bye