Remnant: From the Ashes

 I think I'm nearing my fatigue point with Remnant: From the Ashes. The experience has been about what I expected - decently entertaining for a while, but not really compelling to me in repetition. Fine for a discounted purchase.

It can be described as a Soulsborne game with guns, but that's a very superficial classification and I find a lot more differences than similarities in the details. While it's a third-person action game set in a dark, post-apocalyptic world that relies more on unspoken lore than active story, so much of the design feels not-Dark-Souls to me.

The game is designed a bit more like Diablo, with procedural semi-random bosses and encounter zones strung together. There are a couple story-centric encounters, but most of the time you get one of two 'dungeon' zones at each particular step in one run. So a run through the campaign will not show you all the bosses and similar encounters - that'll take at least two runs, maybe more. Perhaps due to that randomized construction of areas, there is little verticality and not nearly the same level of interconnectedness you get in a Dark Souls environment. For those who enjoy rerunning content over and over, this is good design. I'm not particularly one of those. I knew that going in, though, so I'm not disappointed by it.

The scaling systems are similarly designed more with replay in mind - where zones/bosses seem to be created based on your current gear level when doing so. That means leveling up weapons as you go doesn't feel all that rewarding as it pushes up the level of your opponents as well. And newly-unlocked weapons need to be leveled up to compete (an aspect that bugged me a lot in Warframe). I'd almost say it'd be better to not level any gear, but some encounters have a minimum as well, so that's not really a viable option.

But the moment-to-moment shooting and running around does feel pretty good. I can see how it would also work well in multiplayer. So it's been an okay ride through the main campaign. I may or may not finish out the DLC story - I'm interested, but the game has pretty long stretched between breadcrumbs of story and they're feeling a little sloggish.

I'm not sure what to play next. AC: Valhalla is soon, but not yet, and that series is usually solid to play for a while. Watchdogs Legion focuses so hard on emergent gameplay that I'd probably feel bad paying full price for that. And Cyberpunk 2077 keeps getting delayed...