What we played – Arthurian sandboxes, old favorites and Connections

June 28, 2024

Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little about some of the games we’ve been playing over the past few days. This week we’re taking on a new fantasy MMO that’s something of a social experiment; we return to an old favorite through something like the Director’s Cut; and getting the obscure categories first.

what did you play

If you fancy catching up on some of the older releases of What We’ve Been Playing, here’s our archive.

Pax Dei, PC

Pax Dei has fascinated me ever since it was announced. It’s a medieval MMO, and the unique part of it is that everything in the world is created by the players. There are no pre-built cities or settlements; you built it all. The same goes for all the equipment in the world. What makes it all the more interesting is that it is something of a social experiment. Ultimately, the goal of the game is to get players to organize feudal societies. It wants them to band together to create barons, appoint knights and go on crusades. Check out some of the player-driven stories that came out of spaceship MMO Eve Online – developer Mainframe Industries wants it. That’s a targeted comparison, by the way; Pax Dei’s creative director, Reynir Hardarson, was one of the co-founders of Eve creator CCP.

Until now, the excitement has been based on promises and some popular playtests. But on June 18, the Pax Dei started. However, it only launched in early access and is far from a finished game. There is a basic implementation. It focuses on building houses and many detailed and working systems are based around it. In general, it’s very similar to other crafting games: cut down trees, mine stones, collect things and then modify them on different machines to make what you need. What is somewhat different is how open the building of the house is and that it is underpinned by a certain system of building integrity. Roofs and walls will fall if not properly supported.

This approach means that the houses look different in the game, and it’s nice to just walk around and see what people have made (and steal ideas about what to build in the process). Pax Dei being an MMO also means that there are a lot of people playing in the world, so there are a lot of houses to look at. And it helps that the game world looks beautiful – like a southern French mountain dream – and that it’s realized in the manner of a quiet summer evening. I built high on a mountain to have a view of the valley below and when the sun sets or rises it’s amazing.

But it’s very rough – the raw material costs for individual house parts and armor are high – and there’s not much you can do besides building a house. You can equip some fancy looking armor, but I don’t know what to fight besides a boar. That’s because big pieces of the game — and of that grand vision — are still missing. Mainframe is open about it; I’m told, and the community is told, that adventure systems and civilization systems are the next big things it will work on. But that doesn’t stop it from looking a bit like a tech demo – a very enjoyable tech demo – for what it is.

– Bertie

Beyond Good & Evil: 20th Anniversary Edition, Xbox Series X

There is a universe where Beyond Good & Evil has sold millions of copies. It was what Ubisoft was hoping for: a homegrown Zelda that would blow up and become a big new franchise for the company. Instead, this offbeat adventure earned a different kind of success as a cute cult classic.

I doubt we would have received Beyond Good & Evil’s 20th Anniversary Edition the same way if it had been a barn-storming billion-seller. Alongside the original game – now enhanced with updated textures and a re-recorded score – the package includes a surprisingly detailed and candid behind-the-scenes archive, full of documents and commentary detailing its original development.

I love that honesty, especially when talking about how the game was trying to explain itself to a wider audience. Photos from May 2002 — when Ubisoft took the demo to E3 to show it off for the first time — noted that “Project BG&E” was having a hard time keeping up with the company’s other monster franchises. A summary of press clippings stated that media coverage was “thin but positive: journalists seem to really like the demo”. Too bad the coverage didn’t inspire more sales.

But it’s to Ubisoft’s credit that it’s persisted with a series that many cherish for two decades, and that – despite memes about its never-ending development – Beyond Good & Evil 2 is still in the works. Like its story of a courageous hero battling seemingly insurmountable odds, Beyond Good & Evil continues.

-Tom

Connectivity, iOS

I’m not wild about Connections, but I play it sometimes with my wife in the evening, we both try to start at the same time and we both scream when we lose a life or get a category. It’s one of those games that’s most interesting when it’s obscure, cheap, or just plain broken, when its categories are just categories, if you’re really willing to go along with some bogus arguments.

But it actually led to a bit of fun. Connection shouldn’t be about how to get all the categories quickly. It should be about bringing the obscure categories to the fore, moving from the deeply stupid and improbable back to things that are reasonable to obvious.

Playing this way kept the game alive a bit longer for me. I still envy that it holds me, but I don’t envy it as much as I used to.

– Chris Donlan