I’m unironically disappointed. I’d take any new direction at the moment, I’ve already been pushed past the point where it wouldn’t make a meaningful difference to me if it got worse. Even a change with a low chance of getting better is worth it over a guarantee of remaining shit.
Yeah, I think he was one of the most unambiguously heroic characters I’ve played. He was always willing to sacrifice for what he thought was right and just, and constantly put in situations where that put him at odds with the lawful side of the good equation. The DM loved to throw us into challenging ethical situations and I always had so much to bite into having such a well defined and nuanced morality for the character.
For some reason when I write overtly heroic characters like that they don’t seem to be that compelling, but then in actual play they really hit.
I played a sort of gutter punk druid once. He’d grown up in a sort of nature commune that had been wiped out by a magical disaster, and had lived penniless and transient on the streets of cities for years afterwards. There was a deep, empathetic anger at the injustices of how the world was structured I really enjoyed playing. Rather than just some reactionary defense of nature as something separate from people, he knew a better world was possible for the people who lived in it too by finding harmony with nature.
If you start playing as a player in a homebrew world that I built. How little information would you feel needed to be able read before you can build a character in it?
I mean, nothing. I’ll just assume standard fantasy tropes exist somewhere, keep my pitch brief and anywhere I need proper names you’ll get <INSERT NAME OF SLUMS IN CITY> or whatever.
It’s not ideal but I’ve done it plenty of times.
Not to mention would you as a player like reference to other mediums so you could quickly know what to expect or would you rather have a in game view of it?
Comparisons with other media can be a powerful shorthand, but reference the wrong things and it can be extremely off-putting. Over the years I’ve learned that DMs referencing some media, even things I like, can be a massive red flag. Nothing triggers my flight instinct from a game quicker than seeing the advert reference anime.
I thought after playing Star Trek: Resurgence, which I adored, that I’d follow up with The Expanse: A Telltale Series. I’m a fan of both series and The Expanse seems just as well suited to the format, I’ve enjoyed the other Telltale games I’ve played and I really like Camina Drummer. Recipe for a slam dunk.
Off the bat, The Expanse has a lot of advantages over Resurgence. It’s far better on a technical level - it never crashed, I didn’t have any visual bugs, I didn’t have any performance problems and there were no input issues. All things Resurgence was rife with.
But here’s where the problems start. The Expanse, in a technical sense, is better graphically. It doesn’t look better though. It’s just creatively kind of dull. This is going to be a running theme with the game - it suffers any time an artistic choice had to be made.
There’s only a brief moment in the first episode - of five - where we escape the uninspired industrial corridors. You might point out those industrial corridors are part of the show’s aesthetic, but they don’t convey the same details about how these machines work and how the people live in them. They miss details like how the decks are laid out in relation to the direction of thrust, and are weirdly wide rather than that utilitarian claustrophobia. The show also had no problem finding spectacular space vistas that are largely absent here.
But visuals are not why we are here. It’s the story, right? But for the first time in any Expanse media - from the books, novellas, show, etc - I was incredibly bored. None of these characters are remotely interesting. The Camina I know is intense, driven and decisive. This Camina is unsure, anxious and just all around unimpressive. The politics are gone - not that the faction don’t get a lot of lip service, but everything said is incredibly surface level and dull.
The game is blatantly obvious in how it forces outcomes regardless of choice. I was particularly frustrated when I shot a mutinous crew member multiple times, saw him floating limp in space, only for him to teleport mere moments later and have a gun pointed at another crew member again. I had these whiplash moments pretty often, where it felt like there needed to be an intermediary set up scene but instead we just awkwardly jump to something.
More important than decisions in story outcomes is stuff you find while exploring. People live or die based on these. Except you have no idea whether clicking something or walking somewhere is going to trigger a cutscene that’ll push you past a threshold where you can’t return to find something. Locations of items rely on moon logic - you don’t find meds in any of the med bays you go through, you them on a random crate floating in space. The result is an anxiety over whether you’ll miss something, and butchered pacing as you aimlessly walk around trying to find these things that could be anywhere.
The voice acting is sadly sub par. I really liked Camina’s actress in the show, but she sounds like she is phoning it in here. The others aren’t any better. The belter accents were particularly awkward.
It feels weird to talk about game play in this genre, but with dialogue choices this weak I couldn’t help but notice how much worse The Expanse’s were. There is a lot of tedious filler walking, jarring video game-y avoiding patrolling “drones” with comical red laser beam search lights and holding a button until a thing is collected. Resurgence had plenty of issues in this regard but, to it’s credit, it mostly just cut to the next scene (at least in the first half).
The one puzzle I remember was moon logic. You need to work out a password, which is connecting a series of shapes, and are encouraged to look around the environment for shapes that might have been important to the previous inhabitants. Is it any of the pseudo-religious iconography? Anything of sentimental importance? No, it’s the path of the silly connect the power lines chore you did earlier.
Ugh, I could go on. This is already way longer than anyone should read. The TL;DR is The Expanse gets a 3/10 for me, compared to Resurgence at a 9/10. It should have been an easy passing grade given my investment in the series and it’s suitability for this format but it’s just so creatively bankrupt.