A couple years ago, I posted about a burning question in Dark Souls' lore: who is the "forgotten" god of war (first-born sun of Gwyn) who was expunged from the annals of Anor Londo? At the time, the leading theory was that Solaire was intended to be the firstborn god of war, and I tentatively went along with that interpretation. There were a few holes in the theory, a lot of it was circumstantial, and there were even a couple of alternative possibilities. I also wholly admitted that it was very likely that the god of war character simply wasn't present in the original game, except through the lore references in the environment and item descriptions. Dark Souls II did little to answer this question, other than to provide a possible name for the god of war: Faraam. Well, it turns out that Dark Souls III finally answers this question, and all of us who thought it might be Solaire were totally wrong - and may even look foolish in retrospect.

As is so often the case with Souls games, you'll have to work hard to find all the good lore. In this case, you'll need to find and conquer the optional Archdragon Peak area of the game, which, itself, requires that you find the Untended Graves optional area as well.

These statues of the Nameless King resemble the statue and pose of Gwyn in the first game.

Once you make it to Archdragon Peak, you'll be treated with a large, sunny area populated with serpent men that should look familiar to veteran Dark Souls players. I'm still unclear regarding the lore behind these enemies. The original man serpents from Dark Souls were hybrid creations of Seath's experiments. Perhaps the man serpents in Archdragon Peak are the progeny of the original serpent men from Sen's Fortress. More importantly, however, is that Archdragon Peak is also home to the Ancient Wyvern and the Nameless King.

During your encounter with the Ancient Wyvern, you'll get your first clue as to the lore that will be uncovered in this area. You'll find regal statues of a being holding a massive swordspear weapon. The style and pose of this statue may remind you of the statues of Gwyn that you saw in Anor Londo in both Dark Souls and Dark Souls III. The way that the character is standing, and the way that he's holding his weapon looks like he could fit in perfectly standing next to Gwyn in the Anor Londo cathedral...

After the disappointment that was Cities: Skylines' Snowfall expansion, Colossal Order has tried to renew loyalty in the brand by offering free updates and a whole free DLC. Despite my disappointment with Snowfall, I still love Skylines, and I support its developer Colossal Order. They've shown a great deal of good will towards the consumers by offering their game at a budget price, and by continuing to provide exceptional post-release support, maintenance, and improvements to the core Cities: Skylines gameplay. One of the recent major updates added terraforming tools and the ability to create canals. There's also a free DLC called "Match Day", which adds the ability to build a soccer stadium and maintain your own team.

Its game day in the city!

"Couldn't you already build a soccer stadium?" you may ask. Well, yes you could. But now there's an additional soccer stadium (which is oddly much larger than the original soccer stadium), and you can inspect it in order to customize your team and set a handful of policies regarding them. If you team wins games (which happen annually in the game's calendar), then your city gets a large lump sum of reward money. You can increase the odds of winning by enacting the various policies. They include making public transit free on game day, hiring private security to keep the peace (you know, soccer hooligans), or [the much more expensive] option to enact a youth subsidy that recruits the best players from the community. Ticket prices are also adjustable, and affect both the income you earn from sales and the attendance and support of fans. You'll also need to provide adequate transit to and from the stadium in order to encourage visitors (including tourists) to attend the games.

Your soccer stadium has some limited customization options.

Of course, you won't be getting a full-fledged soccer management game. You won't be managing a roster of players, setting depth charts, recruiting new players, or trading players with other teams. This is a city-building game, not EA Sports! I do wish that the stadium had more secondary color customization option in order to personalize it more. It would also be nice if there were multiple stadium architectures to chose from and multiple sports, but I guess we can leave that to the modders. The stadium that was already in the game is still present, but it does not function like the new stadium. I don't see any reason why they couldn't have moved that stadium into the new "Football" sub-category and make it function the same. Hopefully, it's easy enough to mod, say, a basketball arena that has the same policies attached to it. The Match Day DLC is free, so temper your expectations.

I'm kind of surprised that the devs keep adding stuff that generates more money for the city, since Skylines has always had the problem of money being a bit too easy to come by...

It was a long wait to get this DLC on PC and Steam. It originally released back in January on consoles, while we early adopters of the PC version were stuck waiting out in the cold with no clue whether or not we'd ever get the expansion. I wanted to play it, but I was hoping that a PC version would be released because I was skeptical that controlling a shelter full of characters with only an analog stick (and no pause button) would be unweildy. But it finally did get a release on Steam, and was even discounted during the Steam Summer Sale, so there was no way that I was going to pass that up.

The base version of This War of Mine is a fantastic game and ranks up there with Papers, Please, Metal Gear Solid 3, and Ace Combat 4 as one of the best games about war that I've ever played. This War of Mine is a very harsh, brutal, and depressing game. But if you didn't think that it was a depressing enough game to begin with, then wait till you play it with children as playable characters! The expansion adds some new scenarios with child characters as well as a handful of child-specific craftable items, but it's surprisingly skimpy on new content. As far as I can tell, there are no new scavenge locations, ambient events, or neighbor events.

If the game wasn't already difficult and depressing enough, now you have to keep children safe as well.

The trauma of war

Children can be both a burden and a blessing in this game. By default, they can't perform most crafting, they can't shovel away rubble or unlock blocked doors, they can't be sent out to scavenge at night, and they can't do anything to guard or protect the shelter from raids. At the start, they are basically just extra mouths to feed that have the potential to consume more of your valuable medicines and bandages, but they can't contribute directly to your survival. They can also be particularly needy, and their needs can be tough to meet as you struggle just to get the basics like food, water, and an assembly line of crafting stations.

However, it won't stay like this for long, as children can be taught to do many of the same crafting tasks that the adults can do...

Hot off of playing Bloodborne's The Old Hunters DLC, and with Dark Souls III just over the horizon, I thought I'd get myself hyped up by playing through the re-release of Dark Souls II, Scholar of the First Sin. This version of the game is a next-gen enhancement of the original game that was released on the PS3, XBox 360, and PC a year prior, and it includes improved graphics, faster frame rate, and more challenging enemy-placement. It's available on PS4, XBox One, and PC, and is treated as a completely different game as the original version. It's not a DLC or a patch update (though it does include all three of Dark Souls II's DLC content).

Scholar of the First Sin looks much smoother in motion, with higher resolution and framerate.
Lighting and textures are (at best) only marginally improved from the last-gen release.

I was honestly expecting Scholar of the First Sin's graphics to be considerably better than they are. In fact, I honestly don't think the graphics are much better than the last-gen release; I think the only difference is that it displays at full 1080 resolution and plays at a high end of 60 frames per second. Colors are a little more vibrant, and the game doesn't look as washed-out, but models and environments don't seem any more complex, and textures are only maybe slightly more detailed. Unfortunately, darkness still isn't as dark as it needs to be to make the torch as necessary for exploration as it was apparently intended to be. In pre-release demos, darkness was implied to be a complete fade to black that rendered objects within the dark invisible. Simply adjusting the brightness of your TV wouldn't change that. In the released version, darkness doesn't go completely black, so objects are only hidden if your TV brightness is low - lower than the recommended brightness level of the game. Even then, the release game looks brighter, and Scholar of the First Sin does very little to change that.

PREVIEW FOOTAGE showcased greater contrast between light and dark, and more detailed textures and geometry...

This graphical downgrade, the complete failure of FROM or Namco/Bandai to inform the public about it, and the resultant misleading marketing that repeatedly showed demos, screenshots, and footage that wasn't representative of the final product left a huge negative impression on a lot of players - especially those who pre-ordered it. That poor initial taste is probably a huge part of the reason why this game has gotten such a negative reception, even though that negative reception is mostly warranted. Scholar of the First Sin was an opportunity to wash that bad taste out of consumers' mouths and give us the game that was advertised, marketed, and pre-ordered. But Namco and FROM didn't bother.

Darkness is just rarely ever a meaningful component of the gameplay. Darkness may lower the range of target locks though, so even though I could plainly see enemies, I felt like I wasn't able to target lock them as readily as I could in the PS3 version. Even so, there's enough sconces laying around that you can light a sconce, extinguish your torch to fight, then re-light it at the sconce after all the enemies have been dispatched. It ends up just being some extra overhead if you care enough to bother with it, and not an essential element of gameplay.

... FINAL PRODUCT shows low contrast between light and dark, frequent repeated textures, and simplified geometry.

Textures, character models, and world geometry don't look noticeably better. Many areas still have generally blander textures than what was presented in pre-release videos, and the textures noticeably repeat. World geometry also seems less detailed and intricate compared to pre-release videos, which takes away a lot of the personality that these preview areas exhibited. I was expecting Scholar of the First Sin to restore many of these superior textures and models from the previews, and I'm really disappointed that the game doesn't look better than it does.

Darker contrast in previews [LEFT] made real-time shadows more vibrant,
and creatures more threatening and mysterious than in the release build [RIGHT].

The improved textures also don't do much to help the game's generally bland art design. There aren't many visually-appealing locations in the game, as they are all just variations of run-down castles and forest paths. Most of them have pretty sparsely-decorated hallways with simple geometry that has little-to-no personality. There's nothing here that even approaches the ominousness of Demon's Souls' Latria, and the oppressive environments of Bloodborne make Dark Souls II almost serene by comparison. Again, Scholar of the First Sin does little-to-nothing to address this. No Man's Wharf probably remains my favorite location in this game, as it's one of the few locations that takes place in a fairly unique setting that actually utilizes light and dark for gameplay purposes.

So while the visual upgrade doesn't really add much to the game, the higher framerate definitely does make a noticeable difference. The PS4 doesn't seem to maintain a full 60-fps at all times, but it seems to always run better and smoother than the 20-30 fps of the PS3 version. Animations are much smoother, and ambient effects (such as foliage swaying in the wind) look much better. I admittedly had to spend some time re-adjusting to the game's speed. After coming back from the rapid pace of Bloodborne, this game almost seemed to be moving in slow motion, and the higher framerate probably contributed greatly to that sensation. That's not necessarily a bad thing; it's just a stylistic difference. Scholar of the First Sin plays smoothly (on the PS4), and it looks decent (even though it should have looked better)...

The DLC level for Bloodborne is considerably easier to access than the DLC of the first Dark Souls. You only have to beat a mid-game boss, and the items that you need to access the DLC are literally just handed to you next time you visit the Hunter's Dream. Unfortunately, if you don't read the pop-up text that tells you where to go to access the DLC level, then you might be in trouble, as there's no other indication in the game of where to go. Not even in the item description of the trinket that grants access. In typical FROMSoft fashion, accessing the DLC is fairly obscure and un-intuitive. In fact, it's even more obscure than Dark Souls because it isn't something that the player is likely to accidentally stumble upon. It requires players to do something that they might actively avoid attempting to do because it's something that probably got them killed in the base game. Granted, there is one other situation in the base game in which you are teleported to an optional location by this same method, so it's not entirely unprecedented, but it still feels contrived. Look FROMSoft, if you have to explicitly tell the player where to go in a text prompt, rather than allowing the player to infer it based on textual or environmental clues, that's probably a sign that you made it too esoteric...

The DLC doesn't require players to jump through as many hoops as Artorias of the Abyss required,
but the actual entry-point into the DLC is even more obscure and counter-intuitive.

Once you're in the DLC's "Hunter's Nightmare" area, you'll be provided with a seemingly much more technical challenge than Dark Souls' Artorias of the Abyss DLC. While Artorias DLC threw a lot of magic-casting enemies at me that required me to cheese my way through the levels by using ranged weapons or mob-baiting tactics to cut down enemies one-by-one while staying out of range of the casters, Bloodborne's The Old Hunters DLC instead pits me in more one-on-one battles with fellow hunters that require more careful technique in order to vanquish. In fact, these encounters kind of subvert one of the common criticisms of the Souls games, which is that enemies are too easy to bait, and fighting one-on-one trivializes most fights. The mob monsters in the Hunter's Nightmare actually back away from you as if they're scared, and the other hunter enemies will actually kill those monsters for you, setting the stage for these one-on-one fights. I hope you've been practicing parrying, visceral attacks, and dashing towards enemies in the base game, because this DLC will test those skills. They aren't as obscenely difficult as the NPC hunters that you can find in the chapel of the Unseen Village or in the courtyard on the side of the Grand Cathedral (opposite the path to the Forbidden Woods), but they can easily destroy you if you overreach or get arrogant.

Or at least, most of the hunters aren't that difficult. There are a few notable hunters that posed quite a challenge. One pair of hostile church agents caused me quite a bit of trouble with the camera and target lock, since one was a ranged spell-caster, and the other was an in-your-face swordsman. These issues were exacerbated by the presence of environmental decorations that kept getting between my character and the camera, and thus blocking my view of the action. It always annoys me when game designers put challenges in the game that the mechanics are ill-equipped to deal with. It's something that Bloodborne and the Souls games rarely fell victim to (other than the occasional tight-roping and platforming), so it's really noticeable when it does happen.

This wheelchair enemy would sometimes wind up on the moving stairs and turn invisible.

There was also a recurring glitch ...