Hello everyone, Kelvoran Gaming here, and today I’m doing something different. I’m not discussing a game, although trust me, that’s coming, as I am planning to review Diablo: Immortal and do a fun piece about World of Warcraft: Shadowlands where I explain ‘how I’d have done it’ at some point in the future. Years ago before the concept of Kelvoran Gaming existed, I wrote something similar about the Warlords of Draenor expansion and I’d like the opportunity to stretch my creative brain muscles again, so that’s in the works.

But that’s not why I’m typing this. Today I’m typing a response to the most recent episode of Allcraft, which for the uninitiated, is a show where Asmongold and Rich Campbell talk about World of Warcraft related subjects as well as all things Blizzard Entertainment. Now I’ll be the first to admit, prior to this episode I never watched an episode of Allcraft, it was never on my radar, however an individual that I do follow and watch a lot of videos of, Josh Strife Hayes, was a guest on this particular episode of Allcraft, and as I had watched his videos about Diablo Immortal, and this Allcraft episode was about Diablo Immortal, I chose to tune in and listen to not only Josh, but also Asmongold, Rich and Quin discuss their experiences about Diablo Immortal.

So is this an aggressive rebuttal article where I slag off the Allcraft episode and rage about how awesome Diablo Immortal is or something of that nature? No, no it’s not. Because when it comes to Diablo Immortal, I actually agree with many of the points made. But I also disagree with some of the points made (and some of the speculation) and since it’s too much for a Twitter thread, I figured I’d compress it here into a blog article.

Now do I think Diablo Immortal is a good game? Well, from a gameplay perspective, the way the game plays, the music, the graphical style, the classes, the abilities, the combat etc yes, Diablo Immortal is a good game, it’s a fun game. But I’m not going to mince words the way their microtransaction system is designed is completely FUCKED and there is absolutely no defence of it. The Allcraft crew in this episode actually do a very good job explaining why it’s fucked, on top of the video that Josh created where he goes into detail and they’re spot on. No disagreements there.

So firstly I am going to disagree with both Quin and Rich where they state that Diablo Immortal ‘isn’t a game’. It is, and if you stripped away all the aggressive microtransactions and completely fucked up systems that are designed to empty the wallets and bank accounts of the people that play it, you actually have a very good game under the surface. When Chris Wilson of Grinding Gear Games said that they’re ‘not worried about Diablo Immortal releasing in a few weeks because that’s not a game’ I found that incredibly disrespectful. Be as critical as you like about the game, by all means, but completely rubbishing all the work that went into the game (which is 4 years of effort by the Immortal team) is not okay by any stretch. Diablo Immortal is a game, and it has the opportunity to be a great game, but that’s a point I’ll come back to later.

Rich goes on to say that Arclight Rumble may be the same way, this is another point I’ll disagree with him on, because I’m one of the many people able to test Arclight Rumble already. I’ve seen the microtransactions that are available and while I think one particular item is overpriced, at the moment at least the store is far better in respecting players time and money. Almost as if it is being made and developed by a different team, after the exposure of all the bullshit that Bobby Kotick was involved with at Activision Blizzard. This is another point I’ll come back to later however, so bear with me.

Now again I want to stress that the majority of this video I completely agree with. When Josh talks about how insidious and manipulative Diablo Immortal’s microtransaction system is? He’s 100% correct. It is insidious and manipulative, and someone designed it that way, specifically, to make sure this game bled as much money from its player base as possible. This is not something that should be tolerated, much less rewarded, and this is where I have to criticize Quin, because spending over $20,000 to finally get that 5 star gem has rewarded both parties at his expense and that, in my opinion, is something he shouldn’t have done, that sends the wrong message. But moving on and this is where I’ll start splitting the post to avoid losing people.

Who is behind Diablo Immortal’s monetization?

Rich brings up a point roughly 37 minutes into the show that this is something that the Diablo team and Blizzard have designed that is even more insidious because they’re banking on 20+ years of trust from the community. This is something I disagree with him on and I’ll explain. This trust that he mentions did exist many years ago, before 2014 and the launch of the Warlords of Draenor expansion for WoW. Before the release of Diablo 3 with its Real Money Auction House, before the release of Battle for Azeroth, Warcraft 3: Reforged, the incident in Hong Kong and the exposure of the sexual harassment lawsuit. Blizzard had player trust at that point. But that trust was gone long before Diablo Immortal launched or even went into beta. Which is why it was so important that Diablo Immortal be successful and fair to all players, and while it will definitely be successful, it is by no means fair. They needed to rebuild their reputation that was in tatters after several years of mistakes that sunk their once proud name, and sadly Diablo Immortal has done the complete opposite, it has harmed the good will that Blizzard was attempting to build, and in turn damaged current President Mike Ybarra’s reputation, since this game released under his watch, even though he was not in a leadership position at Blizzard in the years prior to its release.

This is why I do not believe that this microtransaction system was designed by Blizzard Entertainment. Because I feel that the developers at Blizzard know all of this, and know how serious the rebuilding of their reputation is, and I don’t believe they would go out of their way to hurt it as severely as Diablo Immortal is hurting it for short term profit gains, even if those gains are significant.

So who is behind it then? Well this loops back to something I mentioned earlier in the article. I said that when compared to Arclight Rumble, Diablo Immortal feels like it was made by a different team, and on the face of it, it was. The Arclight Rumble team is a different development team than the Diablo Immortal team. But what I mean by this statement isn’t related to the development team, but instead related to the people behind that development team, and by that I mean Activision Blizzard themselves.

Activision Blizzard, since the lawsuit was exposed to the general public, has been found to be doing extremely shady things. We know for example that when the allegations first came out that Fran Townsend wrote a company wide email denouncing the investigation. Only, whoops, that was actually Bobby Kotick using Fran Townsend’s email, and he threw Fran under the bus immediately after he wrote it, calling her (but really his) email ‘tone deaf’. We know from the words of staff on the Overwatch team that Bobby kept pulling the entire team aside to work on his little side projects, which he would then cancel, thus delaying the work that needed to be done on Overwatch 2 (this is why I believe Jeff Kaplan left Blizzard, due to Bobby Kotick’s constant interference with his team). They also employ monetization managers who’s job it is to oversee the monetization of games that their subsidiaries develop, as is the case with Call of Duty, who’s live service monetization is handled not by anyone at Raven, Sledgehammer or Infinity Ward, but by Max Teles who works directly for Activision Blizzard and reports directly to the executives above him.

Now Blizzard Entertainment as well employs their own monetization managers. Johnathan Mann is one such individual who previously worked on the Diablo 4 team. But when I look Diablo Immortal, what I see is a really good game, that the developers on that team worked really hard on and tried to make it as good as possible and then I see this aggressive monetization system, which feels like it was created by someone else and, to use a metaphor that the Allcraft episode referred to, ‘stitched on’ to the game. It would not surprise me, at all, if this monetization scheme was designed by someone at Activision Blizzard years ago, who then forced the Diablo team to implement it. Since the lawsuit became public, since the firings and the cleanup (not to mention the Microsoft sale) Blizzard Entertainment has tried hard to rebuild their reputation, and this feels like a last gasp of some dying creature struggling to hold on to what it had.

And I see that represented further when I look at the decisions made by other teams at Blizzard. The Arclight Rumble monetization, despite being a mobile game as well, does not look nearly as bad as Diablo Immortal. The changes to how Overwatch 2 would be monetized as well show a massive shift in how Blizzard respects players time and money by ditching loot boxes, which are insanely profitable.

So no, I do not think that Blizzard Entertainment designed this system, and I don’t think we’ll see Blizzard exsanguinate their other IPs. I think Diablo Immortal is going to be the worst we’ll see it get, because it’s the last struggling attempt for Activision Blizzard’s executives to drag as much profit out of the games as they can before they’re left to rot as Microsoft takes all these developers and moves their focus to more player friendly business models.

Diablo Players do NOT like Pay to Win.

This is a point that Quin brings up roughly 50 minutes in and I 100% agree with it, even though Rich and Asmongold both disagree with him, and Quin is actually right on this. We even have evidence to prove it both now with the existence of Diablo Immortal (who’s PC crowd is full of livid people upset with the pay to win aspects of the monetization) and Diablo 3. Asmongold and Rich will of course be aware of this, but when Diablo 3 launched, it launched with a Real Money Auction House (and they do mention this later in the video), which allowed players to sell items that they obtained in game for real money. This of course led to mass outrage from the Diablo playerbase, who saw this system as pay to win, even though Diablo 3 did not have any competitive elements in it at the time. There was no PvP (that would come later) and at that time there were no leaderboards (which would also come later) but still the players revolted, and they left so much feedback that the development team on Diablo 3 revamped the entire game, scrapping the auction house system entirely (both for real money and gold), which was the first of many steps Diablo 3 would take to righting the ship.

So when Quin says Diablo 4 will not be pay to win, he’s right. It will be monetized as a live service game. We know this. This means battle passes, this means purchased cosmetics, pets, mounts etc. But will it have pay to win elements? No. Because the Diablo 4 team can look at what’s happening with Immortal right now, and what happened with Diablo 3 and they know that if they want their game to succeed, it can’t have those elements present in the game. It’s that simple.

The 80/20/5 Rule

So at this point you might have noticed in the article that I’m skipping quite liberally through the show and picking out certain points. One at 37 minutes in, another at 50 minutes in. I watched the entire show before I put a single word on this website and then I started re-watching it so I could zero in on the points I wanted to make. This is not a point by point breakdown, but is instead me picking out specific things that I want to respond to, agree or disagree.

Which brings me to my next point, the 80/20/5 rule, which is what Josh is actually referring to around the 1h 18m mark when he says there simply aren’t enough people who care about these issues like Diablo Immortal monetization or the Hong Kong incident that Blizzard was involved in. The 80/20/5 Rule is part of game development. It’s something that is mathematically proven to exist and it affects game development, especially in how games change based on feedback or lack thereof. If you’ve ever sat there playing your favourite game and asking yourself, why is this developer not listening to the feedback on the forums/twitter etc. Well, they are, but that’s where the 80/20/5 rule comes into play, because the majority of the players? They’re just fine with the systems that are represented or if they are giving feedback, they’re doing it in mediums such as, in the case of World of Warcraft specifically, the ‘submit suggestion’ tool.

The general idea is that the 80/20/5 rule breaks down a player base into three camps, with each having a different reaction to the game. 80% of a game’s player base will do nothing else but play the game. They are, as Josh says in this part of the show, the people who will walk into Game, or Gamestop and buy the latest FIFA, the latest Call of Duty. They buy, they play, they turn off the game and then they go and do whatever else they were going to do that day. Rinse and repeat until the next FIFA or the next Call of Duty comes out. 20% of a games player base are the types who will look up additional news about their games. They’re the types that go to websites like mmo-champion or wowhead. The 5% are the hardcore fans. These are the ones who go to conventions, who post on forums and other message boards, who will post about their game on Twitter etc. Now 5% seems like a small number, and in respect to the total player base of a game it is, but that can still represent a lot of voices. A game with a player base of 10 million will have a population posting on forums, reddit and other message boards of 500,000. That’s roughly 81,000 short of the entire population of the state of Wyoming, so it’s no small number. But from a game development perspective, from a feedback perspective, that 5% is often not enough to change something on its own. That feedback has to be supported by other feedback from elsewhere in the community, from the other 20 or 80% using the tools that are available to them.

If you want a greater breakdown of this, I recommend reading the article that was written by AskaGameDev, who writes blog posts on Tumblr about the nature of game design and he goes into the 80/20/5 rule, along with microtransactions while busting the myth of the ‘incomplete game’, I’ll provide a links to each article at the end of the post.

The Big Ship That Takes a Long Time to Turn

The next point I want to address is one that Rich brings up when he talks about indie developers and publishers, and he makes a very good point when he speaks about indie developers that are able to make, market and ship their game without relying on publishing deals and the like. And that works well in certain situations. We see this with Vampire Survivors, which is a game that they bring up in the show as well as Phasmophobia and Stardew Valley, all games that were made without the developer being tied to a major publisher.

He’s also right that publishers once had a very different purpose, but the key phrase is ‘once had’ at least for the PC market. Now with digital distribution being everywhere it is entirely possible for a developer on PC to create, market and publish a game on their own, while only giving a slice of their profits to the platform that they publish the game on, such as Steam. However, these are in many cases small scale productions, games created as a hobby, that do not cost a lot of money to develop or maintain. They are done by small teams or solo developers, not by large companies with hundreds of developers on each team or even more.

When you cross into that territory of creating a large scale game, that’s where a publisher on PC comes into play, because they’re going to have the money and resources that you need to make your game. That’s ultimately what they provide for most PC titles, the money and the resources, which many companies do not have on their own, especially when they’re starting out.

But where publishers do come into play, ultimately, is cross-platform games. Games like Diablo 3, Call of Duty, Fall Guys etc. Games that exist on consoles as well as PC, because unlike PC which has, for the most part, shifted over to a fully digital distribution system (collectors editions for PC games are still sold, but in limited numbers) the console market is still making physical discs and marketing materials that need to be shipped around the world and put into the hands of retailers so they can be sold. And a lot of games these days are cross-platform, there are few exclusives that are only on PC, and as long as there are cross-platform games on PC and Console, there will be a role for publishers beyond giving money and resources to these developers to create their multi-million dollar title. This is something I’m sure Rich himself knows, having worked for Blizzard Entertainment, but it’s still worth addressing here. Publishers will continue to serve a role as long as multi-million dollar games continue to be created.

The Fan Questions and my Responses

Will Diablo Immortal monetization affect World of Warcraft monetization?

So this is where I had the most thoughts that I wanted to get out, and I’m going to start with the first one, because this is something that Rich misses by a mile. The question that was asked was ‘Do you think Diablo Immortal’s monetization will affect World of Warcraft’s monetization’ and Rich pushes this idea that Blizzard will speed up expansions, and put as little content as they can in each one so that they can get the most money in the shortest amount of time.

I do not understand how someone who used to work for Blizzard can have this opinion, because quite frankly, they already tried that and they failed at it. Warlords of Draenor was their attempt to move up the timetable between expansion releases. They hired more employees with the end goal logic being more staff doing the work means that the work gets done faster, so expansions can be pumped out quicker.

And what was the result of that? Well we know what it was. Warlords of Draenor bombed, hard. A lot of promises that were made at Blizzcon for the expansion, including Karabor and Bladespire Citadel being capital cities for the Alliance and Horde, and the Garrison being a headquarters that you could put in any zone was scrapped entirely. Zones like Gorgrond, which had too many assets missing for their original incarnations, were completely redesigned to not have those complex systems. For those who actually played the alpha of Warlords of Draenor, they’d know that the entire expansion was supposed to feature the Grimrail Line, a form of fast travel that you could use to go from zone to zone very quickly. Additionally Gorgrond as a zone was supposed to be more industrial, with a heavier focus on the Blackrock Clan and Orgrim Doomhammer (who was supposed to have a much larger storyline). Sadly all of that was scrapped, with the Grimrail Line being condensed into a single dungeon and references in the Blackrock Foundry raid and Orgrim Doomhammer had 90% of his story removed. He was also given a poor model compared to other characters, and I’ve actually gone and called him ‘Discount Thrall’ because he is literally wearing the same armor and weapons that Thrall wore during Vanilla, despite the fact that both characters are canonically wearing the Doomplate and the Doomhammer, which Blizzard had created a high quality models for so that Thrall could wear them.

But back to the main point. They tried the 1 expansion every year idea back in 2014 and they failed. They even recognized that it was a failure, which is why they moved back to their previous model of one expansion every 2 years (sometimes 3, as will be the case with Dragonflight). So why would they attempt the same thing again now? The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome. It would be insane for Blizzard to try to push for 1 expansion every year again, which is why I firmly believe that they will not go down this route.

But to expand on this question further into something that the Allcraft show did not get into (which I thought was surprising). Diablo Immortal is a mobile game. This has been obvious from the get go, and as we know mobile games have an expectation to be heavily monetized. Why has that form of monetization only stayed in mobile games? Because it cannot survive in the markets outside of it. What you will notice if you look at the evolution of mobile gaming monetization and PC gaming monetization, is that many of the things that PC gaming does first, mobile gaming will adopt, but not the other way around. Loot boxes started in Japan and became popular in the west thanks to Team Fortress 2 (FIFA also had ultimate team card packs, but at that time FIFA ultimate team required you to buy into it, so it wasn’t as popular as it is today). Now you can find them in various mobile games. The Battle Pass, another monetization feature that appears in mobile games, was popularized on the PC market, first appearing in DOTA 2 back in 2013.

But where mobile games have created monetization ‘advancements’ the PC market doesn’t adopt them in turn, at least not to the scale that the mobile market does. For example, timegating that can be skipped with alternate currency. That is something you will see a LOT in mobile games, but not in PC games. Small tiny purchases that rope you in and get you spending more and more, is again something that you see in mobile games, but it doesn’t appear often on PC. Now there are exceptions. For example, Genshin Impact and Diablo Immortal, but these were designed as mobile games first (and thus have mobile monetization) which were then ported to PC. An opposing example, oddly enough is also from Blizzard Entertainment, and that’s Hearthstone. Hearthstone was designed as a PC game first, so its monetization is focused on what a PC player would find acceptable. The mobile version of Hearthstone uses the same monetization model as the PC version, there are no excessive predatory microtransactions there.

In short, mobile monetization will not affect PC monetization, because the two are like oil and water. The only similarity between the two is that they’re both liquid, and they don’t mix.

What could be done to salvage/redeem Diablo Immortal right now?

This is sadly another question I feel a few on the show miss the mark on, especially Asmongold and Quin who both think that it can’t be redeemed at all. It can be, and quite frankly, while it would take a lot of effort for Blizzard to make the changes, the amount of good will it would generate would be fantastic. Here are some ideas that I would suggest Blizzard do, and this is by no means an exhaustive list, and I think if they did this, it would drastically improve the game for everyone and bring even critics like Asmongold and Quin to a point where they could perhaps agree that what is there is acceptable.

Step 1. Scrap every predatory microtransaction system. Every single one. This is 100% doable. No one time troves in the store (make those actually be rewarded as one time chests that spawn in the dungeon when you complete the dungeon they’re attached to). No unique crests that allow for unbound gem sales, no reforge stones etc. Move all of these systems into the game proper without pushing them as microtransactions.

Step 2. Remove the Boon of Plenty and add an optional subscription service for $5 a month that provides the same benefits, but with rewards that are retroactively granted to you if you miss a few days so that your money is not wasted. More importantly, so that players don’t feel like they have to pay to advance, allow anything that the subscription service gives you as a daily reward purchasable from a vendor for gold. You’ll just need to farm the gold to buy the items instead of having them granted to you.

Step 3. Scrap Platinum as a currency entirely or make it a form of currency that you earn as you get too much gold, similar to how you get a piece of gold in World of Warcraft for every 100 silver you earn. Allow Guilds and Gems to be bought with set amounts of gold/platinum and have those gems always be available as a form of bad luck protection. Make 5 star gems something that you want to aspire to, but if you can’t get them by running rifts, at least you have the opportunity to get them elsewhere without needing to rely on RNG.

Step 4. Merge the battle passes together and make it $15. Remove the ability to pay to advance the Battle Pass and instead implement items as the season gets closer to ending that automatically grant catch up levels similar to how Renown is handled in Shadowlands currently. Have these items purchased for gold.

Step 5. Drastically change the gem system so that it is not whale bait. Make gems easier to level, keep the awakened gem system but have that enabled for Nightmare and Hell modes only. So level 10 for a player who plays the game on normal mode only is the limit. Make sure that when it comes to PvP, players who have awakened gems cannot fight players who don’t, thus preserving the competitive edge and not creating this feeling where normal mode players feel they must progress into hell so they can stay competitive. This does not mean that players who own awakened gems can’t compete in PvP against players who don’t, but they must have normal ranked gems in their gear to do so so that the playing field is fair.

There are a ton of other changes that could and should be made, resulting in a final experience that gains money from the sale of cosmetic outfits (that should be account wide, not per character), battle passes and an optional subscription. Astral Orbs can remain as a currency as well, but only used to purchase other cosmetics. Pets, wings, unique looking banners etc, nothing that is giving players an advantage or power.

Every single social system should be engineered to not require any cash or orbs to progress. Every predatory MTX must be removed. That is how Diablo Immortal is redeemed.

The End of the Response and Links to AskAGameDev.

So this wraps up my response to this Allcraft episode. Now again, to be clear, I do not disagree with most of the points that Asmongold, Rich, Quin and Josh make during this episode. They are spot on 90% of the time and I support their views on Immortal. Personally I hope that Blizzard listens to them and fixes Diablo Immortal to make it less Pay to Win and earn the good will they lost from this release back.

They’ll still make money if they make these changes. They might chase away some of the whales, but they’ll secure the good will of the larger population of players, especially on PC.

Thank you very much for reading. I know this was a long read and I wish I could have shrunk it down a bit. The grammar is probably terrible, but this is what happens when you write something starting at 5 in the morning, which is when this all started. You’ll find the earlier mentioned links to AskAGameDev below. I would have linked them above, but as Tumblr previews can be lengthy on WordPress (where this blog is based), it would have created a massive break in the article. So the links are below:

https://www.tumblr.com/askagamedev/149466049419/80-20-5

https://www.tumblr.com/askagamedev/121854965721/why-do-massive-games-like-halo-5-that-know-for-a

https://www.tumblr.com/askagamedev/72269327402/game-developer-myths-the-complete-game

Well, folks, it’s been a while. My last review was for Warcraft III Reforged, and while there have been plenty of games that have released since then and a LOT of industry news to talk about. My own mental and physical health issues have just kept me from being able to write anything substantial for the few followers I have.

But here we are, it’s now December 15th (here in Australia) and I am writing up my review for Cyberpunk 2077. But first, before I really into this, the question needs to be asked. What is Cyberpunk 2077? Well I think most folks who know games already know this, but in case there are any uninitiated who read my blog here, I’ll cover the ‘detes’.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a first-person, open-world RPG set in the Cyberpunk universe, created by CD Projekt Red, the developers of the Witcher games, the third of which, Witcher III: Wild Hunt, won Game of the Year and is praised to this day for what it brought to the gaming sphere in terms of the amount of content and its overall quality. Understandably, given the quality of past games and the promotional material released for this game, many people had very high expectations for CP2077. The hype was very real, even as the game was hit with multiple controversies in the form of multiple delays and dishonesty about crunch being forced on employees at the studio. Outcries could also be heard from the Transgender community and their allies, many of whom felt that the company was not ‘on the level’ so to speak, and were objectifying transgender individuals without putting much thought into actual representation. These are all serious controversies and I will say it now, and say it clear, the team at CDPR needs to step up their game, work with the Transgender community in situations like these and make sure they keep to their word in regards to promises of no crunch (Which should not even be a thing in 2020!).

But my review isn’t really going to go into detail about these controversies, nor are they going to reflect on the score that I give the game (as per my review scores post, there is no category for ‘developer fusterclucks’). Instead, I’ll be focusing on the meat and potatoes, the graphics, the story, the gameplay etc, and as many of my readers are well aware of by now, my scores are based on my OWN experiences, not the experiences of everyone else. Now with all that stated, let’s get into the review proper.

So what is the basic premise of Cyberpunk 2077? To begin with, you play as V and after choosing whether or not you want to play a male or female V, we run into our first real hurdle. The character creation screen. This is… not the greatest character creation screen I’ve seen in a game. There are plenty of options, to be sure, including some that other games simply do not have, like the ability to change your character’s voice to either be masculine or feminine, independent of body type, but it falls very flat when it comes to skin colour, hair colour (especially eyebrows and facial hair) and eye colour. Rather than go with a colour wheel (which is what I would have done personally), the game sets you up with a limited number of options, meaning that if you want to play as an African-American V, you can’t really do that, as the darkest skin option you have looks like you spent far too much time in a tanning booth and turned your skin into the leather found on a couch rather than any naturally dark skin-tones. The absence of these tones honestly confused me, especially when you consider that within the game itself there are multiple dark-skinned characters that have natural skin tones, but none of those tones can be used by you to create V.

The same can be said for hair colour. If you want to create ‘punk V’ where she has bright pink or green hair, you’ve got options there, but more natural hair colours are completely missing, meaning if you wanted to create a straight-laced corpo character with a professional look, you’ve got only one or two hair colour options to choose from.

The other options on the character select screen are mostly fine. There are even genital customization options for those that want to customize their character’s junk, although these options are fairly limited, with only 4 options to choose from, giving you the choice between no genitals (which simply hides them beneath your character’s underwear) a single vagina option and two penis options, circumcised and uncircumcised. As with your character’s voice, this is independent of your chosen gender, meaning that if you want your male V to have a vagina, you can choose that, and likewise, if you want your female V to have a penis, that is also an option.

Then you move on to attribute distribution. There are a total of 5 different attributes, which include Body, Reflexes, Technical Ability, Intelligence and Cool. When you get to this section, you have a few points to spend jacking up your attributes, but you can’t increase any single attribute past 6 for the moment, meaning you can ‘max out’ two attributes with your starting points if you want. Or you can max out just one, or none. These attributes give fairly standard improvements to your character, Body for example adds health and armour to your character for every point you spend in it. But there are other benefits as well. Increasing the body attribute will enable you to tear open doors that would otherwise be locked to you. Increasing Technical Ability allows you to unlock other doors, and Intelligence allows you to hack into certain terminals, either to collect cash and crafting materials or just access terminals without needing any access codes. Certain attributes will also give you unique dialogue options which makes your character seem more knowledgable about certain subjects, but otherwise doesn’t really play much of a role. There are also perks attached to each attribute, but you won’t be able to customize any of them yet, so more on that later.

Once you’ve created your V, you’re asked to choose which ‘path’ you want to start off on. You have three options, Nomad, Street Kid and Corpo, and these paths are mostly just for flavour. You’ll get a different prologue mission for each, and each mission will introduce you to certain NPCs, some of whom will remember you later (such as Padre, one of the Fixers in the game if you choose the Street Kid option). You’ll also get dialogue options in various conversations that can change up how the conversation plays out, either giving you different options to progress the quests that you’re involved in, or giving you more information to work with. One thing, however, is a constant regardless of your path, and that is that you’ll run into Jackie Welles, and your adventures in Night City start shortly after meeting him.

Then we get really into the meat and potatoes of the game. Once you’ve gotten through the introductory missions, you’re free to roam the world (at least to a point. Until you finish Act 1 you can’t leave the district you start in as all the roads are closed). There’s plenty to do in regards to side quests and the like, many of which have solid stories behind them, meaning that you should do them whenever possible. Explore, take in what’s on offer, earn experience and level up, then progress with the main story at your leisure.

Speaking of levelling up, the mechanics here are interesting. When you level up, you’re given an attribute point and a perk point. Attribute points increase one of the base attributes by one point (I went over those earlier in the review) while perk points allow you to get various bonuses from perk trees located in each attribute category. Each category has multiple perk trees in it (such as Athletics, Annihilation and Street Brawler for the Body attribute) and these perk trees will ‘level up’ as you spend more time engaging in that activity. For example, if you spend a lot of time brawling with your fists, your street brawler skill will increase. But the perk trees cannot increase any higher than your attribute level. So if your Body attribute is 3, it doesn’t matter how much time you spend brawling, your street brawler skill will never increase past 3. This doesn’t really matter all that much though, as the available perks in each tree are not determined by the level of your skill tree, but rather is determined by the attribute level tied to each tree. Meaning you can have a 1 in street brawling, but still have access to the rank 9 perks in that tree as long as your body attribute is ranked up to 9.

With the way that character creation is set up, you’d think the game would want you to split your attribute points as you level between multiple attributes, and you can absolutely do that and have a fairly well-balanced gameplay experience, but there’s no real downside to maxing out one attribute in particular and doing so will change the way you play the game, for better or worse depending on your preferences. A character with a maxed body skill and no points spent anywhere else may not be able to unlock doors or hack computers, but they’ll be a tank on two legs, able to shrug off a lot of damage as they crush anyone or anything that gets in their way. Likewise, a character who maximizes intelligence may not be able to take a lot of damage, but they’ll be able to use quick hacks to shut down entire networks and kill enemies before they get a chance to fire their weapons. Ultimately, there are a lot of options here to choose from, so even though your starting experience can’t vary all that much, once you get into Night City proper, you can drastically change how you approach the game in each playthrough in a similar way to how you could change things up in say, Fallout 4.

Speaking of Night City though, how does it look? What are the graphics like?

I will say, at least for me, that the graphics quality in Cyberpunk 2077 is solid. I played the game on PC, and my rig isn’t filled with the best tech on the market, but it was still able to run the game on high settings with ray-tracing enabled. This means the game is honestly quite beautiful and highly detailed, even in the areas that are supposed to look ugly. For all the flaws this game has at launch (and it has its fair share) the art team did a fantastic job on both the environments and the characters and I’m honestly quite impressed by what I’ve seen, even though some of what is visible isn’t supposed to give off that feeling (such as the various advertisements that are visible on various screens throughout the city). Throughout my entire experience playing the game (and I’ve sunk multiple days into the game by the time of writing) the graphics were stable, and I only really experienced serious frame drops twice, both in small compact areas with quite a few characters and NPCs in close proximity. Now obviously your mileage may vary depending on your own rig specs and what platform you choose to play on. I’d be remiss to not mention the severe graphical quality issues that are plaguing the PS4 and XB1 versions of the game, although this will not factor into my scoring, because as I said above, my scores are based on my personal experiences with the game and I did not play CP2077 on either console.

What about the audio? What did Night City sound like?

The audio quality for the game is fairly solid, although admittedly, I did not use the radio all that much while in any of the cars, so I can’t comment there (I prefer to hear the sound of the engine and the ambient noise of the city itself). What I can say is that the city felt alive while I was moving through it, listening to various NPCs having conversations, hearing the advertisements (some of which made me really glad I play games with a headset instead of speakers), even the various firearms and sounds of conflict were well done. So I’ve got no real complaints here. Expect audio to be given a high score at the end of the review.

The gameplay though, that’s the kicker, how does the game actually play? Are there any bugs?

And here’s where we get to the biggest issue with CP2077 in my opinion. The gameplay. Now overall the gameplay itself is fine. The dialogue system works well, and there’s plenty of options there. There’s a large number of weapon and armour options, some of which can make your character look downright ridiculous, although thankfully you’ll rarely see said character’s look unless you’re riding a motorbike or looking at the inventory screen and the various perks and abilities you get access to via your cybernetics and cyberdeck is amazing. There’s more than one way to hit each area of the game, whether it’s using stealth, using quick hacks or going in with guns blazing. The gunplay itself feels pretty good, and depending on personal preferences, you’re quickly going to find favourites among the guns you get which will mean you’ll always grab a particular weapon, even if that weapon deals slightly less damage than the other stuff you have access to. Sadly, this really is where the good parts of the gameplay end, so let’s talk about the bad. We’ll start with the melee combat. To me, this is one of the weakest parts of the game. Yes, you’ve got plenty of options for melee fighting. There are plenty of weapons (both lethal and non-lethal) and you can definitely run in swinging and get your murder on with a katana or the mantis blades if you want to, but that being said, with almost every enemy in the game packing heat (or iron as its called in CP2077) you’ll find that unless you’ve built your character the right way, that melee will see you chugging health items as you desperately try to kill enemies before they manage to tear you to pieces with their high-powered automatic weapons. Which is not to say it’s not doable. It is, and you can have a lot of fun with it. But if you expect that you can run in and go crazy with a katana right from the beginning, you’re going to have a bad time.

Next, we have to talk about the bugs. Oooh boy, the bugs. Now, I’m used to playing games with a few bugs. You can’t play a single video game that releases on the market these days without running into one or two. So I rarely get upset at a developer for missing one or two bugs here and there. But CP2077 has a LOT of bugs and it definitely is not a good experience. In my time playing the game I experienced multiple NPCs t-posing, I crashed into vehicles and ran over pedestrians that popped in right in front of me (nothing like getting a wanted bounty for killing civilians I couldn’t see until the last second), I saw NPCs standing inside my car, stuck because they walked through space where I parked it (and they did not like when I hopped back into the car). I saw NPCs driving their cars into barriers, heavily damaging their own cars in the process, and I even experienced the glitch which caused Male V’s junk to pop through his pants. Hell, during one mission after I respawned, I spawned -inside- another NPC and had to sit inside this NPC until we got to the point where I got ejected from the car to start fighting.

Now some folks might be able to shake all these off and say “Well, as long as it’s not preventing your progress, you can ignore it right?” and to be fair, they’re not wrong. Even though I experienced all of these bugs, I was able to let it go and keep playing, because none of these bugs was impacting the story and preventing my progress. That was until last night though, because last night I encountered a bug with the quest ‘Lose Your Mind’ where I could not enter the car at the end of the mission, because another car was blocking the door. Regardless of the option I picked at the end of the mission, I still had to sit in the car, and no matter how much ammo I unloaded into the car that was blocking the quest objective, I couldn’t destroy it (although I did get a wanted level, which caused the cops to pop into the completely locked off quest area and murder me) and on top of it all, I couldn’t even leave the quest area, because all the doors exiting the area were locked. My only option to leave was to get into the car I couldn’t get into.

So now I cannot progress further into the game until CDPR fixes the bug, or I start again, which admittedly, is something I am not thrilled about doing. While I am planning multiple playthroughs to see what I can get up to with different builds and story choices, I’d rather do that because I finished the game and am starting again, not because I hit a progress stalling bug that has locked me in a garage run by an AI taxi service.

And that’s not really going into all the other bugs that have been reported across multiple platforms. This game is extremely buggy, and while CDPR has put out a statement saying that they will be addressing these bugs (which I am thankful for), in my honest opinion it should not have released in this state, not after so many delays.

So now I’ve discussed all the major points. What is my final score? Well, as folks who read my blog already know, I don’t give one score, instead, I give out multiple scores, one for each category, so let’s get started:

Graphics: 10/10 – Night City and the entire world of CP2077 looks amazing and the art team did a fantastic job. I couldn’t crank all the settings to the max because my hardware won’t support that, but I am looking forward to being able to do that one day. Well done CDPR.

Audio: 8/10 – I did not like the radio music in a lot of cases and chose to turn off the radio whenever I was in a car. That said, the ambient sounds of the city and the various NPC conversations were well done. So what would have been a 10/10 was knocked down 2 points because of my thoughts about the radio.

Gameplay: 8/10 – The gameplay is solid and fun. With so many ways to customize your version of V, there’s a lot of replayability, which I expect will only increase further when DLC is added, along with the stand-alone multiplayer mode. Gunplay is fun and meaty and you’ve got all sorts of options on how to approach each situation. Sadly, I do have to dock 2 points due to how I feel about the melee system at this time. I just don’t feel like it’s up to snuff and it really could be better,

Performance: 4/10 – I hate giving CP2077 this score for performance, I really do. Overall the game runs fine and I only experienced a few areas where there were frame drops, but that being said the raw number of bugs that exist in the game in its current state completely tanks this score. I won’t sugar coat it, it’s bad, and it makes games released by Bethesda look like absolute gems by comparison. I expected more from CDPR in this respect.

Story: 10/10 – While I still haven’t progressed far in the main story for CP2077, I have absolutely enjoyed every part of the experience thus far and I’ve really jumped into the side quests and loved the experiences there. One thing CDPR knows how to do well is craft a good story, and CP2077 is no exception.

So there we go folks, my CP2077 review. I know it’s probably not the greatest review out there, but it is what it is. I do hope to see CDPR right the ship, so to speak and fix a lot of the bugs that are present in the game so it is in a playable state, especially on PS4 and XB1. I also want to see the company keep to their word on crunch and eventually phase it out entirely so that it never happens again. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I want to see CDPR sit down and talk with the LGBT+ community. Not only to address the serious flaws in their own company, but also to make sure that representation of the LGBT+ community is handled properly, and not just thrown in there for a quick inclusion credit.

Hopefully, we’ll see that happen moving forward.

Until next time folks!

Folks knew this was coming right?

Okay so, let’s get this out of the way real quick because this review is going to be a long one, with quite a bit of text dedicated to history leading up to Reforged launch, so I’ll give you all a quick TLDR at the start to sum up my opinion before expanding on my thoughts down the line. Here we go:

Warcraft III Reforged is a remaster of a legendary RTS, but despite improving the game in many places, it brings with it its’ own flaws which take away from the complete experience.

There we go, review done, 10/10 well done Kelvoran…

Hah, not even close. Okay, let’s get into detail and I’ll start with some history leading up to this point just to give those who read this a good idea of where I stand in regards to the Warcraft series and the RTS genre.

For me, Warcraft is a BIG chunk of my history, not going to lie. The first time I played a Warcraft game is when I played Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness on my friends’ laptop while I was still in school. I thought it was an amazing game and I wanted to get my hands on it and play it for myself, which I did. I saved up what money I had, bought Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (and later the expansion, Beyond the Dark Portal) and I played that game as often as I could. I never really touched multiplayer, as I didn’t have an internet connection at the time but I loved the single-player and I would often challenge myself to beat missions within a certain time or with only a certain type of unit.

Then Warcraft III launched and I snapped it up immediately. I played the hell out of Reign of Chaos and The Frozen Throne, even going so far as to jump into the multiplayer and have a crack at the ladder, although I never really got far. Not only because I wasn’t really that good at beating other players, but also because I was connecting to the game on a dial-up connection, and my house only had one phone line, so the moment a call came through, I lost my connection and lost whatever game I was playing.

I love the Warcraft series, and while I eventually stopped playing Warcraft III, I never really stopped playing Warcraft games, as I’ve spent the past 15 years playing World of Warcraft, something which I don’t regret at all, even if some expansions were less than stellar…

-cough- Warlords of Draenor -cough-

So when Blizzard announced at Blizzcon in 2018 that they would be releasing Warcraft III: Reforged, a remaster of the RTS that I loved back in the day, I was very excited. The visual upgrades alone were enough to sell the game to me. Seeing the model comparisons just made my jaw drop, and a few weeks after Blizzcon, as soon as my finances allowed me to, I pre-purchased the Spoils of War Edition, because not only did I want the game, but I play two Forsaken characters in WoW who now own a sweet looking Meatwagon mount…

What?? Don’t judge me…

So I waited patiently for news about the game. I eyeballed sites like Wowhead which discussed all the news surrounding Reforged updates, I shared information with my friends and guildmates in various discord servers. I was looking forward to the revamped campaign, the changed maps, the altered cutscenes.

And then I watched Blizzcon 2019. I bought a virtual ticket because I heard that there were going to be some high profile announcements at the con and I didn’t want to miss out on all the juicy details, and boy I wasn’t disappointed. Diablo IV, Overwatch 2, World of Warcraft: Shadowlands, all of those games boosted my excitement, but more importantly, I wanted to hear more about Warcraft III: Reforged. So I tuned in to the Deep Dive panel to listen to the developers talk about the game, where it was in development and what I should expect going forward.

And I was disappointed…

Because it was at Blizzcon 2019 where I learned that they had changed course on many of the things they highlighted at Blizzcon 2018. The revamped campaign with new story arcs? That was gone. The changed maps? Some would be changed, but most would stay the same. The altered cutscenes? They were returning to a more vanilla Warcraft 3 style, although there would be alterations here and there. I also learned that features like Clans and the Ladder would not be available at launch, but would be implemented in a future patch and that the cinematics would be upscaled and improved in places, but not completely redone in the same way that the launch cinematic was.

So all I would be getting would be a remastered version of Warcraft III, with updated visuals…

And it took me some time, I questioned myself, asked if I wanted to get a refund. Ultimately I decided to keep my purchase (I may have been influenced by the Meatwagon) and wait until the game launched, then I’d see if the game lived up to my expectations. If it didn’t? Then I’d get a refund. The game launched, after a delay on the 28th of January and I downloaded it and jumped right in…

Fast forward to today, and I’ve put well over 20 hours into Reforged and gone through most of the campaigns (I’m working through the Undead Campaign for The Frozen Throne at the moment) so here are my thoughts about the game.

It’s good. Great even, but it has issues.

So let’s go over the details here. The game itself launched with all the campaigns from Reign of Chaos and The Frozen Throne in one complete package, all of them updated with the Reforged visuals, and they all use the balance systems of the Frozen Throne expansion (which is great in my opinion) although the Reign of Chaos campaigns do not use units or buildings from the Frozen Throne expansion. Visually the units and buildings look stunning, and in my opinion, it’s almost as if I was looking at a World of Warcraft cinematic, but as a playable game.

Sadly the same cannot be said for most of the environment details, the trees, grass, water and other areas of the environment have been updated, and drastically improved in some areas, such as the Quel’thalas maps where the trees look similar to those found in those same zones in World of Warcraft, but they’re not as detailed compared to the units themselves. It’s not so bad as to be jarring, but it could have been much better.

Gameplay remains identical to how the game played in Warcraft III, so if you’re a veteran to the series, the game will instantly feel familiar with respects to how units behave and how the game itself plays. Nothing new gets added here, but, thankfully the starting missions of each campaign introduce folks in slowly enough so that those who have not played the game will be able to pick up the method to the madness behind each playable race.

The story? It remains, for the most part, unchanged, and many of the missions still play out the same way that they did with Reign of Chaos and The Frozen Throne, although there are three missions which have received drastic alterations. The three missions I’m referring to specifically are the Culling of Stratholme, The Fall of Silvermoon and the Siege of Dalaran. Each of these missions has been completely redesigned, with new maps and new scenes playing out in each of them, and they’re all fantastic missions to play through.

But now for the elephant in the room. The cutscenes…

Many of you will remember if you’re familiar with Reforged promotional material, how awesome the new cutscenes looked in that footage. There was an expectation levelled against the Reforged team that all the cutscenes in the game would receive that treatment, which they did not. This was revealed to all of us during Blizzcon 2019, and as I watched the panel, I was prepared for the disappointment, but others who did not watch the panel were not, and so this is one of the aspects of the game that has been criticized heavily and for good reason.

Finally, as I wrap up, I want to discuss five other aspects of the game. Overall performance, bugs, missing features, the forced update and the EULA change.

Starting with overall performance. For me? The game runs smoothly. My rig is not the greatest, I’m using a GTX-1060 and an AMD FX-8320 processor, both quite far behind the current technologies being used in computers (especially the CPU) and I can run the game smoothly on high settings. There are however times when I’ve noticed some slowdowns. The menus do not seem to be as responsive as the games themselves, and during one mission I did notice a severe drop in frames, although that was likely because I alt-tabbed during loading and caused the game to blow a gasket. The issue was fixed by a simple restart. Overall performance ‘for me’ was good. This does not mean that the performance, however, is flawless. Multiple players have reported performance issues which Blizzard will need to address, but, that being said, this review is a personal opinion based on my own experiences, so I won’t be factoring in other people’s performance issues in my score (which is a change from past reviews and something I’ll be sticking to from now on).

Bugs? To be honest, I only ran into three. The first was the ‘instant defeat’ bug, which has only happened to me twice and was easily fixed by restarting the mission that I was trying to load into, and the second involved me getting booted back to the main menu when I tried to load a saved game, again, something that was fixed by reloading the mission, and the third is a bug with fire sprites which causes them to appear in the fog of war and flash rapidly in and out, with the flashing only stopping once you reveal the area with a unit or building. I didn’t consider any of these to be game-breaking bugs, and I haven’t experienced anything that could be considered ‘game-breaking’ either. Obviously, as with performance, multiple players have also reported bugs that have caused issues with their games.

Missing features? For this section, I want to specifically I want to talk about Clans, the Ladder, Automated Tournaments and Custom Campaigns. The first two are currently not available but will be available later. As with the cutscenes announcement, this change was announced at Blizzcon 2019, but it wasn’t talked about outside of the con, which meant that for players like myself, we knew this was coming, but for many others, they didn’t. Rest assured, those features will return to the game in a later patch. As for Automated Tournaments, these were removed from the game before Warcraft III: Reforged launched, and as per a post by Kaviax on the Warcraft III forums, they won’t be returning. Finally, Custom Campaigns. These were available in Reign of Chaos and the Frozen Throne, and their absence has been noted by players of the game and Blizzard themselves. There is no timetable on when or if that feature will return, but I hope that it will.

The forced update? This is a bit of an issue. A lot of folks who did not purchase Reforged have been forced to update their standard Warcraft III client to the Reforged one, which has impacted their ability to play the game. For some, the missing features and bugs that they’ve encountered are giving them a negative experience, for others, they lack the drive space or the hardware power to use the Reforged client, which means they can’t play the game they’ve owned for years. These are all significant issues, but ones that sadly, Blizzard can’t really ‘fix’. The forced update was going to happen, since the original Warcraft III, like many other games, has performance issues on current operating systems. As operating systems continue to evolve and update, the original game would begin to become unplayable by many, so this update brings the game forward and ensures that it will be compatible with modern operating systems for at least the next decade, if not longer. That has come with some negatives, and I feel for those affected but if I’m being honest, this type of updating happens all the time as game companies end support for outdated operating systems, it is simply a reality of living in an ever-updating technological world.

And finally the EULA change, or rather the lack of one. Many folks are being critical of the fact that the Warcraft III update changed the EULA and so now Blizzard owns your maps for Warcraft III. The truth of the matter is, however, that the EULA was updated on June 1st 2018, and the clause which gives Blizzard control of User Generated Content has been there since then, possibly earlier, however, there are no cached versions of the EULA that go back further.

And now we’ve reached the end of my review, let’s discuss scores. As you know, I don’t do a simple 1/10 score for my reviews, instead of scoring all aspects of the game individually. So here are the scores based on my own experiences with Warcraft III: Reforged:

Graphics: 8/10 – Environments could be improved further, but the unit models and buildings are fantastic to look at.

Audio: 7/10 – The sound is just as good as I remember it, even better in some places, however, there seems to be a delay between when units spawn and when the spawning sound plays, not a critical issue, but I do need to deduct a point for it.

Gameplay: 9/10 – It’s Warcraft III. In terms of gameplay, it’s the same game that most folks remember playing from 2002/2003. If you’re new to the series it’s a good way to discover the roots of Warcraft as a franchise.

Performance: 8/10 – My performance was relatively bug-free and the game ran very well on my system, so I am going to give this a high rating. The menus themselves could be smoother, but that doesn’t detract from the game for me.

Story: 10/10 – The story hasn’t significantly changed since it launched in 2002/2003, which is a bit of a shame because I did initially want Blizzard to revise the story and bring things more into line with how the world is set up in World of Warcraft. That being said, I respect Blizzard’s decision to not go down that route, and what few changes there are in the game have not reduced quality of it whatsoever.

So there we go high ratings across the board. Probably not what folks were expecting. I’m sure quite a few folks out there who read this would have preferred I act like a Metacritic Troll and give the game a 0 but that’s simply not my style.

Until next time folks.

Hey folks, Kelvoran here and today I’m doing something a bit different. Today I’m discussing a movie, specifically Rise of Skywalker, the latest Star Wars film, but more specifically I’m going to be talking about a video that was put on YouTube by another content creator that goes by the name Angry Joe. Recently he released a video titled ‘Top 40 plotholes in Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker’ and after watching that, I felt like I needed to address some of these ‘plotholes’ and attempt to correct the record on at least some of them, which Joe actually encouraged people to do, so there you go.

But before I do that, I just want to say something real quick. I am NOT saying that AngryJoe, OtherJoe or Alex’s opinions are invalid. They are more than entitled not like the film and I am by no means attempting to ‘school’ them on the Star Wars universe with this to force them to suddenly like the movie. This is simply my take on some of their plotholes, some explanations of things they may have overlooked, and how I was personally able to rationalize what happened in the film. I’ll go through the list as they do in their YouTube video (located here if you haven’t seen it), although for some of the plotholes they weren’t wrong, and I’ll point that out clearly when I get to them.

Oh and before we really get into things, if it wasn’t obvious already…

SPOILERS AHEAD, IF YOU DO NOT LIKE SPOILERS THEN DON’T READ THIS!!  

That out of the way? Okay, let’s get into it.

1. How did Palpatine survive the Death Star’s destruction?

He didn’t, at least, not his original body. That body perished when the Death Star exploded. What we see in Rise of Skywalker, while unconfirmed, is likely a clone of Palpatine inhabited by the spirit of the former Emperor.

Within the canon of Star Wars, the spirit of a powerful Sith surviving death is not beyond the realm of possibility. We have two confirmed sources that cover this, as there are two Sith who managed to stave off true death and return, although not as force ghosts. These two Sith are known as ‘The Presence’ who inhabited a Sith Holocron at Malachor (Star Wars Rebels) and Lord Momin, who managed to preserve some of his consciousness in a mask until it was destroyed by Darth Vader (Darth Vader: Dark Lord of the Sith). 

Perhaps more importantly, the use of cloning and dark science is how the Emperor managed to return in what is now Star Wars Legends. While this is no longer canon, I feel like this was a throwback reference to the events of Legends.

1a. How did large pieces of the Death Star survive the destruction?

I addressed this in a direct tweet to Joe, but I’ll expand on it here, and this is where I think Joe was a bit dishonest with his reasoning, because to justify this point, he looked at the ending of Return of the Jedi to show the Death Star getting blown to smithereens. Here’s the thing. Return of the Jedi was released in 1983, which was a long time before modern advancements in CGI were available. Movie technology, while good, was not as good as it is now so that explosion was missing a lot that -would- have been on the screen if it were made today. Explosions, even ones from moon-sized super-weapons, do not vaporise everything. There would be debris, a lot of it, especially from an internal explosion So it is not beyond the realm of possibility that large chunks of the Death Star fell onto the moon. I’d wager that there would be similar chunks found around the Yavin system where the first Death Star was destroyed too.

2. Luke was hesitant to train anyone after Ben fell to the dark side and became Kylo Ren, why would he train Rey when he knew she was a Palpatine?

The timeline for events surrounding Rey’s training was not as simple as her showing up and getting training. Luke refused to train her initially and refused to come out of seclusion to fight the First Order. It wasn’t until he was confronted with Han’s death, combined with knowledge of Rey’s true purpose and a replayed message from R2-D2 that he agreed to train her, and even then he only gave her 3 lessons. As for when he learned of her lineage, that happened during her training when Luke sensed the strength of her connection to the force. In the movie he stopped training her at that moment but picked up the lessons again later. His concern about her raw power, however, remained.

3. If Lineage matters, how come Palpatine’s son wasn’t force-sensitive?

How do we know he wasn’t? That is never disclosed. We know next to nothing about Rey’s father, only that he was the son of Emperor Palpatine. We don’t even know his name at this stage.

4. Hyperspace Skipping

This, while introduced in Rise of Skywalker, does not go against established canon. It is possible to jump while in the gravitational pull of a planet, it’s just that most ships have safety protocols which prevent that from happening. Those protocols can be turned off, although it’s very dangerous to do so, which is why most ships don’t, especially larger vessels like the shuttles seen leaving Hoth during Empire Strikes Back. 

To expand on this, there are sources in canon lore where ships have jumped into hyperspace while in the gravitational pull of a planet or other extremely dangerous situations:

• Jyn Erso and Company jumping to hyperspace while in the gravitational pull of Jedha after the Death Star destroyed the moon’s holy city (Rogue One).
• Hera Syndulla jumping to hyperspace directly in front of an Imperial construction module while attempting to escape Lothal (Star Wars: Rebels)
• Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo engaging the hyperdrive of her cruiser and using it as a weapon to destroy the First Order’s mega-class Star Dreadnaught, the Supremacy. (The Last Jedi)

5. How do the TIE Fighers Hyperspace skip as well?

So this is easily explainable. Despite being similar in appearance, there are multiple different models of TIE fighter. Within the First Order, there are 8 models, but there are only 2 different models that we care about for this question, the TIE/fo, which is used by the bulk of First Order pilots and the TIE/sf, which is used by First Order Special Forces. The TIE/fo while having upgrades over the Imperial TIE fighters used by the Galactic Empire, did not have hyperdrive technology onboard, however, the TIE/sf does. Those ships are capable of jumping to hyperspace, allowing them to keep up with Poe as he attempts to Hyperspace Skip.

But how do the pilots know where Poe skipped to? How were they able to keep up with him as he jumped multiple times? This is unexplained, so yes, this bit is a plothole, although it is my personal belief that the First Order advanced the technology that they used in The Last Jedi, giving their ships the ability to actively track through hyperspace. Given that the Falcon was being chased by the special forces of the First Order. It’s feasible that their ties were equipped with this technology, making them even more deadly, while standard TIE/fo models were not, but this is just conjecture.

6. The Sith Eternal. How does this affect the balance?

The members of the Sith Eternal, despite the name are not Sith, they’re members of a cult that are loyal to the Sith religion. Their existence doesn’t alter the balance at all.

7. The Prophecy was for 30 years of peace after 1000’s of years of previous Jedi peace?

The Prophecy only foretold the destruction of the Sith, not the end of the Dark Side or that there would be peace eternal. When Darth Vader died after killing Palpatine, he fulfilled that prophecy, at least for a time (until Palpatine returned via dark science cloning) as neither Snoke nor Kylo identified themselves as Sith, but as dark-side practicioners.

8. Where did the insane resources required for the Emperor’s Last Order Fleet on Exegol come from?

This is explained if you dig into the Sith Eternal. As they are a cult dedicated to the Sith religion, they have thousands of members, each with access to resources. It took years to build Sith Eternal Fleet (which became the Final Order fleet after it was integrated into the First Order) and fill the ranks of the Sith Eternal army. Given how Exegol does not have a shipyard, these ships were flown to Exegol, which is possible. After all, General Pryde (the man who shoots and kills General Hux for being a spy) was able to navigate his ship to Exegol.

But if Pryde could fly his ship to Exegol, why do Kylo and, later in the film, Rey require a Sith Wayfinder to get there? Both of them go to the location without an ‘invitation’ so to speak. Meaning they’re reliant on the wayfinders to get them there, where as Pryde was likely being guided by the same guidance tower that the Final Order fleet needed to use to leave Exegol. Essentially if you weren’t getting a route from the comm tower on Exegol, you needed the Wayfinder.

9. How did they miniaturize Death Star tech thousands of times over? Where did they get the Kyber Crystals from?

This is a plothole, but according to the Star Wars: The Force Awakens – Incredible Cross-Sections book, the Kyber Crystals come from a ‘secret location in the Unknown Regions’. Not exactly helpful, but there it is.

10. Why does a Sith Knife lead to a Wayfinder that leads to Exegol?

The Sith Knife was a tool used by the Sith Assassin who was tasked by Palpatine to kill Rey’s parents and recover Rey so that she could be taken to Palpatine and turned to the Dark Side. Once the Assassin completed his goal of recovering Rey and killing her parents he would no doubt need the Wayfinder to get to Exegol with Rey.

But why not just give the Assassin proper directions? Why go through all the song and dance with the knife? This is unclear, although in my opinion it comes down to secrecy. Radioing to Palpatine that the job was done and he needed to return to Exegol could have alerted the Republic to the Emperor’s existence, something the Emperor likely did not want. So he gave the Assassin the means to find a tool that would bring him to Exegol, but did not make it obvious, on the off-chance that the assassin failed or lost the knife.

11. It’s stated specifically that Snoke is not a Sith, yet he technically is and uses Sith powers?

He’s not a Sith in the sense that he was not trained by a Sith Lord. He did not apprentice himself to anyone as he was created via Dark Science to serve as Palpatine’s puppet. He was able to use the Dark Side, but using the Dark Side does not instantly make one a ‘Sith’.

12. Poe was suddenly a smuggler/spice runner in his past. How?

Without further expansion to understand where this fits in within the Star Wars timeline, this is a significant plothole for Poe’s story. According to previously released material, Poe served the Republic before he joined the Resistance. One of his last missions with the Republic takes place on the same year that he joins the Resistance, which doesn’t give Poe much time to be a ‘smuggler’ and build a relationship with Zorii Bliss, who claims that he abandoned the smugglers to ‘join the Resistance’ in Rise of Skywalker.

13. How does Kylo Ren get off Kef-Bir?

This is unexplained (and I question whether it needs to be, not every scene needs to be shown, especially if all it does is act as filler) but he shows up on Exegol in a TIE fighter. Presumably, even though he threw away his lightsaber and abandoned the moniker of Kylo Ren he still had enough authority within the First Order to be rescued and then commandeer a TIE fighter to fly to Exegol. Joe once again points out that TIE fighters don’t have hyperdrives here, but the TIE/sf fighters used by the First Order do have hyperdrives installed on them.

14. How is Luke’s X-Wing still functional?

This is potentially another plothole, but I cannot say for sure as I have not read the book that they refer to in this point. In the Last Jedi, however, the X-Wing in question can be seen by Rey, submerged in the water, but otherwise intact. It certainly seems capable of being operated, as it isn’t missing any major components in that scene. Alex points out that it’s non-functional, which, yeah, that’s accurate, you can’t operate an x-wing while it’s fully submerged under water, but that doesn’t mean it’s fully incapable of flight once it’s been pulled out of the water by the force.

15. Palpatine decides to bury his fleet under the planet where they are essentially stranded.

Except that they’re not stranded, and they can easily leave Exegol when they need to provided that the signal tower is transmitting the signal that directs them through the harsh conditions surrounding the planet. This is how one of the Star Destroyers of the Final Order manages to destroy Kijimii. It’s also worth noting that the ‘Sith Wayfinder Macguffins’ as they’re called are not public knowledge. Kylo has one, he’s not going to share it with the Republic so they can kill the Emperor for him, and the other one was hidden within the ruins of the Death Star, and could only be found by translating ancient Sith off a knife, which was buried beneath the sands of a planet until Rey found it.

Until Rey gives them a route to Exegol, the Final Order Fleet is perfectly safe. It’s under no threat at all for most of the movie.

16. How do Zorii Bliss and Babu Frik get off the planet if she gave her escape coin to Poe.

How she escaped is a relative unknown (another scene that would have essentially just been filler if they included it) but I figure personally that someone trained in how to smuggle spice would find a way to escape the planet at some point, the coin would have simply made it far easier for that escape to happen. As for her ship shooting the canon, as pointed out by Joe, well, none of the Star Destroyers in the fleet have deflector shields online. None of them! This was something explained by the movie (given how Joe seriously disliked it, I’m not surprised that he wasn’t paying attention near the end) as they can’t have them online while they’re in Exegol’s atmosphere. That’s why the Resistance strikes at the fleet there, because the ships are vulnerable.

17. Why doesn’t Palpatine know about the Force Dyad if is, or was controlling Snoke.

Snoke was not Palpatine, not in the sense that it was Palpatine’s spirit pulling Snoke’s strings like a puppet. It’s clear that Snoke is an independent figure, he was simply created by Palpatine to act as his agent. Kylo even states, fairly early in Rise of Skywalker, that Palpatine has no idea about the connection between the two, with whatever knowledge Snoke had of it going with him to his grave when he died.

18. How did the Jedi manifest in the force to help Rey if they were not trained by Qui-Gon Jinn?

Who said they manifested in the force the same way as Yoda and Obi-wan? Yes, you hear their voices, but here’s the thing. If you dig into the story of Qui-jon Jinn and you learn what happened to him after his death, you learn that he never finished the training, so he was never able to appear as a force ghost, only as a voice, a voice that reached out to Yoda and Obi-wan, instructing them both on how to appear as force ghosts.

But it is arguable, however, that training is even required. Anakin recieved zero training from Obi-wan, Yoda or Qui-jon on how to manifest as a force ghost, and yet, he was able to do so, with his ghost appearing next to Yoda and Obi-wan at the end of Return of the Jedi. Likewise, neither Luke, nor Leia recieved that training, that we know of, and yet both of them were able to appear as force ghosts, Luke, multiple times to Rey, and Leia alongside Luke when Rey arrived at Luke’s former home on Tattoine.

19. If Rey is a Palpatine, why did Luke’s Lightsaber call to Rey?

Objects with a particular bond to the force will call out to those who are force-sensitive. We’ve seen this before at the very beginning of Star Wars Rebels, when Ezra is called into Jarrus’s quarters on the Ghost, where he finds the Jedi Holocron and Jarrus’s lightsaber. Did the Holocron ‘call out’ to Ezra specifically? Did the Holocron know specifically that Ezra was there? Unlikely. It’s not sentient, meaning that any force-sensitive individual on that ship would have been able to sense the Holocron.

This is what happens with Luke’s lightsaber. Rey and Maz were the only force-sensitive beings on the planet at that time, that also happened to be close to the blade, so it ‘called’ to her in the same way the Holocron called to Ezra on the Ghost in Star Wars Rebels.

20. Where did Maz get Luke’s Lightsaber?

This is never explained (not a significant plothole though, again what this constitutes as is more filler if it was included in the films), but it’s fairly easy to guess what happened, seeing as it is the Lightsaber that was originally wielded by Anakin and given to Luke by Obi-wan and not the one that Luke constructed later. That particular Lightsaber was lost when Darth Vader lopped off Luke’s hand in the underbelly of Cloud City.

The blade was likely picked up by scavengers (as Luke certainly didn’t pick it up) and was bought and sold over time until Maz located it, likely the same way that Rey did, as Maz is force-sensitive herself. Knowing the significance of the blade, she chose to keep it, rather than sell it to the highest bidder, and likely would have held onto it had Rey not been called to the blade.

21. How did Lando get all those ships to join the Resistance?

Unexplained, but I don’t consider it to be a plothole, especially when you consider that the fleet does not show up instantly, and it almost seems like the Resistance is going to lose before the fleet shows up. Other Joe points out that yes, the stakes are much higher this time around, the navigation to Exegol is not simple, but so is the threat that the Final Order represents. A threat that everyone knows about, as Palpatine made it no secret that the fleet existed and what he was going to use it for. He sent the word out, and plenty of folks responded.

If you want a comparison to real world history of something similar happening. Look at the events of Dunkirk in World War 2. It took a lot longer (because human made naval vessels take longer to get around than star ships with hyperdrives) but a call went out for aid and over 800 ships responded

But honestly, what bothers me the most about this ‘plothole’ isn’t what Other Joe brings up, because, it can be seen as a legitimate point in the right circumstances. What bothers me is Joe’s justification as to why it’s a plothole. “He has to go to every system…” did you not watch Revenge of the Sith? Palpatine was able to broadcast Order 66 to every single clone out there. Hell, in Episode 2, Attack of the Clones, Anakin can send a message from Tattoine directly to the Jedi Council on Courscant. If that is possible, surely Lando could reach out to his contacts on other worlds from the Falcon, or send out a broad message calling for all ships willing to take the fight to the Final Order.

22. Why didn’t the Emperor simply transfer his essence into his son.

This isn’t a plothole, but it is a good question, which hopefully we get an answer to as more details are revealed about Rey’s parents (if that ever happens at all). For now, we simply don’t know enough about Rey’s father to know why he wasn’t picked a vessel. He may not have been force-sensitive, which is possible, as force sensitivity is determined by the midichlorian count in a body, and there is a possibility that Rey’s father didn’t have the necessary levels to harness the force. Or he may have been force-sensitive, but rejected what his father stood for, which is also possible. Judging only by the flashback we see of Rey’s father, he seems to be in his late 30s, if not early 40s, which if accurate, would mean he would have been alive during the Clone Wars, before his father was disfigured and became the Emperor. If he was alive during that time, seeing what his father did, what his father would then go on to do? I can imagine that being a good enough reason to reject good ol’ dad’s plan for him or his grandchild.

Unfortunately until more is revealed about Rey’s parents, we’ll never know the real reason why Rey was picked as the vessel over his son.

23. How did Rey know how to pilot the skiff on Bef Kir, especially in those conditions, which even experienced sailors would have trouble with?

This is a really good question, and yes, it’s a plothole. While it could be argued that Rey could pick up how to use a skiff fairly easily, she would not have been able to use it in those conditions, and it would have destroyed the skiff and possibly caused her death.

24. How is Rey a Jedi? If everything she is goes against what a Jedi is supposed to be?

This is probably one of the stupidist points that Other Joe makes in my opinion, because it sets up an arbitrary gate. You used anger and rage? You can’t be a Jedi. Well, then clearly Luke cannot be a Jedi, because he used his anger and rage in battle against Darth Vader on the Death Star in Return of the Jedi. Luke went into full rage mode when Vader brought up the possibility of turning Leia to the dark side, whaling on his father, beating him down before taking off his hand, and it was only after he took off Vader’s hand and heard the Emperor laughing that he realized what he had done and calmed the fuck down. Yet, despite this, he is still considered a Jedi, but when Rey taps into rage, suddenly the question becomes “Why is she a Jedi?”

Mastery of emotions requires training and dedication. Even Anakin, who recieved a full regime of Jedi training from Obi-wan and advice from other masters had trouble reigning in his emotions, which is what caused his fall to the dark side. Rey by comparison recieved none of that training. She got a total of three lessons from Luke and while we’re told that Leia also trained her, we don’t know how Leia trained Rey. Her emotional control is not going to be anywhere close to other Jedi.

25. They fly now?

As much as I hate to say it, the three of them are spot on here, because this line was delivered poorly in respect to the canon.

All this was supposed to be, was a bit of humour injected into the movie, which, at least when I watched it in the cinema, it worked, folks laughed. For those who know the lore though, it doesn’t make sense for Finn or Poe to say “They fly now.” because they would know that they fly. Finn, being a former First Order Stormtrooper, would know that the First Order employed Jet Troopers, and Poe, having fought them before the events of any of the movies, would also know about Jump Troopers. The only folks that should be surprised by their use of Jetpacks should be C3-PO, Chewbacca and Rey.

26. How does the Emperor’s lightning only affect the Rebels?

We don’t know for sure that it does. We never see the effects of the lightning on the ships of the Final Order. The only time we see the crew of a Final Order ship is actually during the fight to knock out General Pryde’s vessel. Let’s break it down though and explain this, because it can be explained easily. Simply put, lightning and electomagnetic fields don’t pick and choose who they effect, so we can safely assume that all the ships were affected, in which case it comes down to a matter of size. A smaller fighter like the Millenium Falcon or an A-Wing, is going to have a very different reaction to being struck by lightning compared to say, a massive Star Destroyer. What knocks one ship out of the sky, may be completely ignorable by others. This applies to all vessels and armoured units in the Star Wars universe. A rocket trooper may be able to take out an AT-ST with a well placed rocket, but that same rocket isn’t going to bring down an AT-AT.

27. Why does Palpatine only have one waypoint tower for his entire fleet?

Why would he need more than one? Let’s look at the scenario real quick, you have a massive fleet on a planet called Exegol, which can only be reached if you are either being directed by the waypoint tower (which is how Pryde’s vessel got there), you have a Sith Wayfinder (which is how Kylo and Rey get there) or you have the route mapped by another vessel (which is how the Allied fleet gets there after Rey maps the route for them using Red-5).

The system was effectively a safe harbour, given how difficult it was for intruders to get there. So why waste resources building more than one waypoint tower when the chances of a single ship finding the planet, much less a whole fleet, is extremely small? Stupid given the benefit of hindsight? Yes. Plothole? No.

28. They can’t attack the towers from the air.

To be honest this point that they’re making confuses me, because I’m not sure exactly what they’re trying to say. So, I won’t get into this one, but again Joe points out that the Y-Wings are shooting the Star Destroyers even though their shields should be up, to which I’ll again highlight the fact that while they’re in the Exegol atmosphere the Star Destroyers cannot turn on their shields, which is the entire reason why the Resistance took the fight to Exegol in the first place.

29. The horses, why not tilt to slide them off?

This would honestly be a legitimate tactic. I can only assume that they chose not to because they have troops on the outside of the ship fighting the Resistance ground forces. Not to mention the interior of ships do not operate on massive gimble devices, meaning that if they tilt the ship, everything inside it shifts, which could cause a LOT of damage to the inside of the vessel, hurt or potentially kill personel inside the ship and cause folks that were at their stations to, well, no longer be at their stations as they were thrown around by the tilting vessel.

30. Force healing? Why haven’t Jedi used this before?

This is something that honestly, they’re freaking out waaaay too much over. Firstly, Force Healing? We’ve seen it in the Mandalorian, Baby Yoda does it, and canonically, the events of the Mandalorian take place between Episodes 6 and 7. It’s something that can be tapped into, but let’s go into detail as to why this isn’t used. The reason why, is that it’s not just magical healing that restores the life of the affected individual without a cost. To use the force to heal you must sacrifice your vitality, which is why in the case of Baby Yoda, it completely drains him. He’s out of action for a while after that, needing to sleep for a long time.

So why didn’t other Jedi use it during the Clone Wars? Unclear, possibly because of the cost. If healing a small wound takes a lot of energy, then saving a life with the force would cost a life in return, which is actually what we see in Rise of Skywalker. Kylo uses the force to heal Rey, restoring her life, at the cost of his own. How is that a good trade-off? Who gets to decide the value of a life? Should a Jedi Knight with great potential for growth in the future sacrifice their life to heal a Jedi Master? Should a Master of the force sacrifice their skill and knowledge to save the younger generation?

These are good questions with difficult answers, answers which I am sure the Jedi were not comfortable with, which is likely why Force Healing was not practiced by the Jedi during the Clone Wars.

31. Why doesn’t Palpatine stop shooting lightning?

This is a good point. I can’t say anything against this. Palpatine is an idiot.

32. Rey finds the dagger, but Luke and Lando couldn’t. Why?

Well to be fair I don’t think Rey would have found it either if they hadn’t landed in that sinkhole and gone under the sand into the serpent cave. A stroke of luck. That’s it.

32a. Luke couldn’t get past the Sandworm?

Well I’m sure he could have, if he knew it was there, but he didn’t.

32b. The ship out in the open, not being scavenged or otherwise stolen.

This is a good point, I have to give it to them. That ship should have been scavenged for parts or stolen by now.

32c. Luke and Lando couldn’t see the black sand.

Who says they couldn’t? It would be impossible to miss, but neither of them would have known what was under said sand. Put yourself in their shoes. Would you be willing to gamble with your life in the hopes that there was a cave beneath the black quicksand like substance? I wouldn’t.

32d. How is the sand still there, why doesn’t it fill the cave?

No idea, this is a good point.

33. Life force drain? Why didn’t the Emperor use it on Luke?

Because he wasn’t trying to find a new host at the time, he was trying to turn Luke to the Dark Side to replace Vader. That was the goal, have Luke kill Vader (who Palpatine had become increasingly frustrated with as Vader grew older) and replace his old, robotic apprentice with a younger model.

By the time of Rise of Skywalker, Palpatine is stuck on a medical device, unable to leave Exegol (at least, that’s the assumption) so he needs a new vessel. He wants Rey because of the bloodline connection and her power, but when she resists him, and he discovers their connection, at that point he realizes that he doesn’t need a new vessel. He can simply drain Kylo and Rey, kill both of them and live for decades as the ruler of the galaxy.

34. Holdo pulled off a one in a million move.

I feel like this is being read into way too much. Finn, a former Stormtrooper with no advanced knowledge of how hyperspace works (he knew about how Hyperspace tracking worked though, which is an issue on its own), dismisses the Holdo Maneuver as a ‘one in a million shot’. Finn doesn’t know any better. The equivalent would be me, someone who watched some sci-fi movies and did a bit of research on the net, telling folks at NASA, that a rocket launch to the moon is too risky because the last person to do it got lucky.

They wouldn’t listen to me, so, realistically, no one should have listened to Finn, but they did anyway, because while Finn doesn’t have a point, suicide ramming a large vessel into a fleet using the hyperdrive is risky for all involved, can easily fail, and it destroys assets which are in short supply for the Resistance. The fact that the Holdo Maneuver is used against a Final Order vessel above Endor after the fact is just icing on the cake.

35. Rey and Kylo kiss, no setup, why?

I honestly have no real response to this, so I’ll just throw in my opinion, which is that the tension between the two has been building up since the moment the pair realized they could communicate with each other, and see each other, through the force. This is why ‘Reylo’ exists in the first place. Because folks saw that tension and wanted directors to use it.

36. Be proud of who you are, the message is ignored.

I mean, not really, Rey no longer sees herself as a Palpatine. She sees herself as a Skywalker. It was the Skywalkers who treated her like family, who trained her to use the force. Whereas her father and mother left her on Jakku (for good reason, but that’s beside the point) and her Grandfather wanted to use her as a vessel for his power/spirit. Would you be proud of who you were if you were related to that family? I don’t think so.

37. How can Ahsoka Tano contact Rey as a force ghost?

Well I think this point is pretty self-explanatory. If she’s communicating to Rey using her voice as a force ghost, that means she, like Kanan Jarrus (who’s voice is also present), is likely dead. Granted she could still be alive and simply communicating through the force, but that is unlikely given what we know. Hopefully we’ll discover her fate in a future movie or Star Wars series, but my best guess is that she died during the fight with the First Order, possibly one of the many who were killed by Starkiller Base during the events of ‘The Force Awakens’.

Again Joe brings up the whole ‘how can she be a force ghost if she’s not a Jedi’ to which I’ll again point out that Anakin managed to become a force ghost at the end of Return of the Jedi despite being a practicioner of the Dark Side for most of his adult life. If he can manage it, I’m sure Ahsoka could as well.

38. What was Finn going to say to Rey?

We might find out later. It’s an unresolved thread, which hopefully we’ll see expanded on if Disney approves an Episode X or movie/series involving Rey and Finn. Either way, not something to get annoyed over in my opinion.

39. Why don’t the force ghosts help Rey against Palpatine?

This is a good question. But I feel like the fact that they didn’t materialize and help was probably for the best. If they had, I feel like this would have caused an even larger furor of disgruntled individuals, complaining about how Rey had to be ‘saved’ by the ghosts, and it would have made her victory over Palpatine hollow (how many super powered ghosts does it take to beat up an old guy attached to a medical device? THIS MANY!!).

It’s also possible that the sheer amount of Dark Side energy on Exegol weakens the spirits of the Jedi, so they’re doing all they can by giving Rey their power so she can strike the killing blow.

40. Why didn’t Kylo’s TIE Whisperer explode when Rey cut it down with her Lightsaber?

Superior engineering? Honestly it’s not the first TIE fighter that we’ve seen impact into dirt and rock and not explode. The TIE/fo that Finn and Poe escape in during The Force Awakens impacts heavily into the ground, but the pod is mostly intact when Finn finds it, and then there’s the TIE that is piloted during the Mandalorian season finale by Moff Gideon. It crashes, and yet Gideon manages to survive and cut his way out of the pod with his fancy sword.

41. Why is Lando on the party planet?

This was brought up by Alex right at the end when Joe was bringing up his last point about Kylo’s TIE Whisperer. Why was Lando on the party planet?

The reason why he was there is because he settled there. He was humbled by the Aki-Aki people and was burying his negative feelings that he was feeling after his failures, both as a father and a friend. Lando’s daughter was taken by the First Order when she was 2 years old and he never got her back (knowing that the First Order was kidnapping children to serve as Stormtroopers, it’s likely that she was taken and conditioned to serve as one) and then he and Luke failed in their mission when they travelled to Pasaana in search of the Sith Assassin, Ochi.

——–

Well there we go folks, my responses to Angry Joe’s plotholes video. Again I want to say that I’m not trying to change Joe’s mind, he’s entitled to his opinion that the movie is bad. He’s welcome to it, but I hope that he reads this, and potentially reevaluates his position on some of these plotholes.

Until next time folks.

• 

Well here it is folks, my Outer Worlds review, and if I could sum it up with one sentence it would have to be this:

“I don’t understand why this game was hyped so much.”

The Outer Worlds is the latest game by Obsidian Entertainment, it was announced at the Game Awards in 2018 and immediately right from the get-go it was clear who Obsidian was aiming to compete with when they announced this game. In large letters, splashed across the screen were the words “From the creators of Fallout: New Vegas.” so the competition was obvious, they were aiming to compete with Bethesda, who was not having the greatest time following the flawed release of Fallout 76. We heard many things about the Outer Words in the months ahead, how you could kill anyone in the game, how there would be immersive dialogue options and key decisions that you could make. This generated a lot of hype because the Fallout series under Bethesda was slimmed down with Fallout 4 (especially in regards to dialogue and RPG mechanics) and Fallout 76.

And then the game released and it got glowing reviews, especially from critics such as Jim Sterling and Legacy Killer HD.

But I don’t see how they were so impressed…

See, when you want to compete with someone, the general idea is to do what they’re doing, only better. You want to take what the competition has got, and provide your take on it, but do so in a way that makes your product outshine the competition so that folks buy your game and not your competitors, and to be fair, Obsidian manages to do this, but only in a very limited scope, specifically in dialogue and killing freedoms.

In literally every other aspect, the Outer Worlds, in my opinion, does not live up to the competition.

First though before I rip into the game too much, let’s talk about what the Outer Worlds does right because there are a few good things in this game which do need to be mentioned. First, let’s talk about the setting, which is you, playing a space captain in a dystopian civilization where rampant capitalism has caused wide-spread damage to the colony that you’re located on. This is a fairly unique setting among other sci-fi RPGs and it’s good to see a setting that isn’t cliche being used. Combat is satisfying, especially the gunplay in my opinion, with each gun feeling different and despite the enemies reliance on ranged weaponry. Melee builds are not only possible but can be one of the most powerful builds in the game if you make the right decisions and grab the right gear and the graphics, audio and performance for the title are top-notch, and if you’re reading this on my blog, then by now you should know how my review scores are done, which means that the average for this game by those mentions alone should be very high. If I’m being honest in fact, I would love nothing more than to give this game a high rating, but I can’t do that, because doing so would mean that I’d be lying to my readers, however many of them are out there.

The truth is that sadly what the game does right is marred by the things the game does wrong, and there are more things wrong with this game in my opinion than things that are done right.

Take, for example, character creation. This is a flawed system from the get-go. It has fairly standard customization options, with different faces and hairstyles able to be picked, and you even have the option to have a male character with female hairstyles, or a female character with male hairstyles and facial hair, although whether this was intended or simply a bug is unclear. No, as far as visual customization is concerned the Outer Worlds does a great job, but visual customization was never where the problem was. Instead, it is with the other parts of the system, starting with the attributes. 

Now the attributes themselves aren’t the problem, even if they do little else but provide passive bonuses or drawbacks depending on how you spend your points. What the problem with them is, is how your attributes are tied to your skill points. Increasing say Dexterity, doesn’t increase all the skills under dexterity equally. Rather it puts Long Guns above Pistols and Heavy Weapons by a significant margin, which sounds great in theory, but in practice, when tied to the way skill points works, it makes it more of a hindrance than it really should be.

But what about those skills? How do they work concerning the negative point about attributes? Okay, so first a quick rundown on how they work. Skills in the Outer Worlds are split up into groups, those groups being Melee, Ranged, Defense, Stealth, Tech, Dialogue and Leadership. Each group has between 2-4 skills in it, and each skill has a number attached to it which determines how good that skill is and what perks you have access to. Putting a point in say ranged increases all the skills in the ranged group up 1, but you can only invest points into the ranged group until one of the skills in that group hits 50. Note the specific wording there, until one of the skills in that group hits 50. Now if you’ve preserved the skill balance, what this means is that all your skills will hit 50 at the same time, and then you’ll be able to invest points into specific skills to boost the ones you want to level up to 100. However, if you’ve thrown off the skill balance by investing attribute points into dexterity, what you’ll find is that your long guns skill hits 50 long before pistols and heavy weapons, which is nice if you’re focusing on a build that uses long guns, but if you’re after a build that focuses on pistols or heavy weapons, you’re now required to burn through several levels just to get your pistol or heavy weapon skill to 50, something you wouldn’t have had to do if the point balance had been preserved.

Which means that if you want the best experience with your skill bonuses, your best bet is actually to boost all your attributes to good, using the 6 points you have by default, gaining some smaller passive abilities, and preserving the skill balance.

So now that we’ve got attributes and skills out of the way, is there anywhere else where character creation is failing the game? Sadly, yes, there is, and while one is minor the other is a rather significant one. Let’s start with the minor one, which is the aptitude selection, basically, you chose your character’s vocation and that gives you an extremely small passive bonus, be it a single point to a skill, or a % increase to buff durations or damage resistance. Not only are these bonuses so small that you can ignore them entirely, but the selection of backgrounds doesn’t even make sense in the context of the story. One of the first things we learn is that the HOPE is supposedly filled with the best and brightest from Earth, that saving them will save Halycon. The smartest minds, the best soldiers, the creme of the crop, so to speak, and yet when you look at the list of aptitudes are any of them significant? Are you able to chose an aptitude which signifies that you are the ‘best and brightest’ of Earth? No, you’re not. You’re instead given options such as ‘Beverage Service Technician’, ‘Food Additive Tester’ or ‘Dirt Farmer’. These are not roles reserved for the ‘best of the best’ but rather the dredges. To use a real-world equivalent, it would be like expecting to get senior management, but instead getting a minimum wage store janitor (which oddly enough is also an option, you can be a janitor, sanitation class)

And finally, I can’t finish a lengthy rant about the failures of character creation without talking about perks. This is by far one of the biggest failings of the Outer Worlds for two reasons. One that the perks are mostly uninteresting and insignificant. There are a few gems in each tier, perks that you’ll want to get depending on your build, but the rest is nothing but filler, things you pick just so you can reach the 5 perk requirement to move to the next tier of perks. Now every 2 levels, you get a perk point to spend, which means that, assuming you didn’t rush through the game and managed to reach level 30, you’ll have earned enough perk points to not only unlock all three tiers of perks but also have the best ones selected, along with filler, from the final tier.

And you know what? This might be forgivable, truly, it might have, if Obsidian hadn’t tied these perks to the drawback system. The drawback system was hyped up as a game-changer in the early announcements for the game. Take too much damage from a certain type of enemy or a certain type of damage and you’ll get a ‘drawback’. The drawback is optional and makes you take more damage or deal less damage to certain enemies, but in exchange for taking this penalty and working with it, you get a bonus perk point. But with the perks being so niche and there being more than enough skill points that you’ll earn just by levelling to have all the good perks and then some, this makes the drawback system completely redundant. Why bother taking on negatives when the rewards you get for doing so are meaningless? 

Now I could go on, I really could. I could write multiple paragraphs about the other things that this game makes missteps on. But instead what I am going to do is just make a few bullet points covering some of the more significant issues that the game has in my opinion:

• Companions: In my opinion, the companions are lacking, perhaps not in personality, but certainly in other areas. The quests for each of the companions that I’ve done are extremely simple and easy to accomplish. The lack of romance options for the companions is also an issue, especially since past games from Obsidian included them. 
• Inventory: The inventory systems in the game are poorly designed. There are far too many consumables that serve no real purpose. The healing consumable is far too easy to find, meaning that you’ll always have an excessive amount, even if you use it liberally and there is no real customization as far as your armour appearance is concerned, as you only have two slots for armour, one of the body and one for the head.
• Weapon/Armour Customization: While the Outer Worlds does have a form of weapon and armour customization in the form of mods which can be slotted into your armour, the system is extremely basic and changes very little as far as the visual aspect of your character is concerned, and the way the mods work is very restrictive. Compare this to Fallout 4 and even Fallout 76 and each change that you make to a weapon or piece of armour is reflected visually and you can swap mods at will at a workbench, provided you have the raw materials and you can perhaps see why I think this portion of the game is flawed.

Now does what I’ve said so far mean that the game is bad? I’ve pointed out far more negative points than positive ones, so it could be argued that the game is bad and that you should avoid it. So I’ll clarify to make sure that folks reading this don’t get the wrong impression.

The Outer Worlds is not a bad game.

But it is not as good as it could have been, and outside of the few areas where it shines, it does not stack up to the competition that they put themselves in league with when they announced their game. So if you’re playing this game hoping to get an experience that is better than Fallout? You’re probably going to be disappointed unless you enjoy dialogue systems. If on the other hand you’re just looking for a casual 1st person RPG that you can play without much of a care? Then the Outer Worlds has you covered.

So with all that said, on to the ratings. How do I rate this game using my review methods? I’m not going to go into detail here, as many of the points that I could cover I’ve already gone over in the rest of the interview, so instead I’m just going to give the category and the score. No muss, no fuss.

• Graphics: 8/10
• Audio: 8/10
• Gameplay: 5/10 (All the issues above contributed to this score)
• Performance: 7/10
• Story: 6/10

Overall if I had to give the game a dirty rating with a single score out of 10, the best I could see myself giving this game would be a 7/10, although I’m more likely to give it a 6/10.

Until next time folks.