Rally Point: Mega-mod Terror From The Void finally pushed me into loving Phoenix Point - Related to all, mega-mod, rps, pushed, point

Rally Point: Mega-mod Terror From The Void finally pushed me into loving Phoenix Point

This is The Rally Point, a regular column where the inimitable Sin Vega delves deep into strategy gaming.

I found Phoenix Point difficult to love, despite wanting to. I didn't cover its original 2019 release at all, partly preferring to give something else positive coverage instead, and partly suspecting I'd attached hope to it in a way I seldom do, and was overreacting. Perhaps that was a disservice to you, The Reader. We ponder.

Its final form left me ambivalent, and hoping its new modding support might provide the leg up it still needed. Well. It did. Terror From The Void is a major overhaul that touches on just about all the problems I had, while preserving what worked. And after it consumed me for several months, I'm ready to call it the game that Phoenix Point was trying to be.

TFTV rewrites the story to centre on a new strain of the Pandoravirus that reduced the Earth to a wasteland dotted with occasional "havens". With its spread comes "oneiric delirium": a Lovecraftian madness presented on the strategic map as "Void omens". These impose worldwide curse-like restrictions like limited human perception, or a lower soldier-per-mission cap.

Delirium appears directly in tactical missions too, occasionally spawning incorporeal monsters from bodies, and piling up on soldiers exposed to its carrying mist. Low levels are easily mitigated by resting, but otherwise sap the Will Points that serve as both morale and fuel for special abilities. Cyborging or mutating your soldiers provides some optional protection, and investing more levelling juice into their Will Points buys time. You may find that by the time you research the best non-final medicine, you've already stockpiled enough resources to make it practically free... but even that treatment has side effects. It's a hint at what Phoenix Point's overall strategic dynamic should be - not to exterminate but to explore and seek a permanent solution.

Void omens and side effects are, candidly, more "gamey" than I like. I'd even say "roguelike-y", an unnecessarily distasteful expression, but that's more true of squads. Many side missions add a randomised twist to the enemy; idiosyncratic habits and specialties of the individual squad you're facing. You might fight scrappy bandits whose accuracy increases if they stick together, say, or New Jeric-holes who go berserk when you kill a high-ranking member. They're generally dispelled when you zap the leader, and a few can be a real pain. But they add a little unpredictability to the still quite limited mission set, and colour in the world a little.

More-common ambush missions discourage the previous strategy of minmaxing to a second dropship with one recruit exploring the globe solo. They double as resource scavenging sites too, incentivising prepared exploration. It's a measured, carrot-over-stick change, rather than the too-common habit of some mods and games to overcorrect for a minority of powergamers. Expansion is still vital and rewarding, but it's a more open question when and how, allowing for more personal choice than the one obviously best answer.

Complementing this are changes to "Pandoran evolution". Phoenix Point's main villain became stronger over time, but by counter-intuitive means that contradict the premise - Pandorans got stronger the more you defeated them or sterilised their bases. That's all gone now, and most of their progress comes passively - the more of their strongholds remain intact, the faster they field stronger monsters with more varied abilities. They're harder to find too, as radar coverage now makes detection more likely, not certain.

Undiscovered NPC havens now broadcast an open SOS, rather than quietly dying. Sure, they'll still be out of range sometimes, but now you know who you're letting down, where you should be stronger. The world feels more desperate, actively crying for your help. Since a colony anywhere generates enemy progress, you're naturally pressed to do what the setup implores - to defend the world, to root them out. The lower detection chance makes expansion more complex - a more distributed network plays the odds superior. It also hints, too, at the true path to victory - wiping them out is impossible. You must chase the marked plot missions and press the right research.

Managing their progress now feels more natural than being punished for success, which only accelerated the tendency for the Pandorans to become near invulnerably-armoured damage sponges. That narrowed the range of viable strategies, and led even some reluctant players to the natural solution of puzzling out the most game-breaking perk combinations, which bluntly cheapened the experience.

TFTV requires the complete DLC set, some of which was frankly pretty bad. But they're rearranged - their major side plots kick off later, instead of piling up almost immediately. Specific issues aside, the shared problem was that most of that DLC was additive, new weapons mostly countering their own additions rather than hooking together and punishing players who didn't know what was coming in advance. The air game in particular is still dissatisfying, but much less demanding. The evil robots and viral attacks are more manageable, and a rejig of vehicles and modules make them more useful and cost effective (especially in ambushes). The "Kaos Engines" marketplace of unique weapons is readily available, and sells faction research too. Normally, see, access to the best technology depends on allying with one or two of the bickering factions, or stealing it from their laboratories. Those are still true, but the marketplace offers a third, expensive way. You generally have more viable options and fewer mandatory resource sinks.

The most welcome changes, though, are to the class system. As before, a soldier's starting class grants weapon proficiencies (without which they're generally useless with a weapon), and seven perks to spend Skill Points on. Where the awkward perks formerly led to absurdities like heavies using their giant guns primarily to whack enemies over the head, or the ostensibly melee-oriented Berserker having almost no actual melee advantage, TFVT rebalances and redistributes so well that every class excels at its core designation, and dramatically increases the room for variety and personalisation.

My particular bugbear with Heavies is immediately improved by moving the Assault-only "return fire" ability to their easily-gained second level, and multiple damage-reducing options. Instead of a slow, inaccurate waste of space until leveling up enough to reach the silly "war cry" power that took away enemy action points (and still rarely getting to shoot anything), they're now natural tanks who run to the front line and counter-attack when a friendly is shot at. Stealth-specialised Infiltrators benefit from UI tweaks and bonus action points from far more effective sneak attacks to get them out of, or further into, trouble. High level snipers can access a huge "fire twice in overwatch" perk.

enhanced still, everyone gets a line of seven (formerly three, often underwhelming) "personal perks", reflecting their randomised background, original faction, and guaranteeing access to a bonus weapon proficiency. They can still multiclass too, opening a potential 21 perks before even factoring in bionic and mutant augmentations. It's so much enhanced.

The infiltrator who can whip out a shotgun to finish off a newly-armourless target, the sniper who can double-fire a heavy cannon (with a 50% bonus to overwatch accuracy thanks to her faction background) at a charging crabman even before multiclassing. I have a Berserker who can, well, berserk - charge in for multiple taser attacks - and support with a light sniper rifle when the situation changes. The new perks can make even a single class soldier very capable - boosting raw stats instead is often just as useful. And there are still no prerequisites - you can skip or delay any unwanted perk.

If phrases like "axe medic" or "jetpack priest" aren't enough: it gives room to characterise them. I don't even change their lurid colour choices now, but try to find armour and tools that lean into their super speed or morale-sapping counter attacks. There are no doubt overpowered combinations, but between the fairer Pandoran progress and breadth of options, it's no longer necessary to seek them out just to keep up. Their skills generally feel less artificial too, more a product of scrappy post-apocalypse experience than magic and meta-knowledge about how many action points an Arthron needs.

There are some partial misfires. Acheron enemies are still too common and cover every map in absurd amounts of mist (which is wildly more demanding graphically than anything else, and plain annoying to see through), and the Revenants don't quite work for me. Dead soldiers can come back as mutants who bestow a special power on their pals, ostensibly one based on your established tactics. For example, my focus on single-shot attacks (apparently?) led to a revenant who halved the damage of all my first attacks on an enemy. It's an effort to realise PP's initial idea that the mutants would respond to your tactics over time, but the brute force implementation feels too magical for my taste. But hey, it's a meetable challenge, and varies things a little.

Phoenix Point still has its limitations, but Terror From The Void has finally pushed it from mixed feelings to a recommendation, albeit with a caveat or two based mostly in the need to approach it differently to its peers. It's been a long time since I played an overhaul mod that felt so much like an effective corrective procedure, and more than ever, I hope we get to see a follow-up that builds on its successes and ambitions.

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RPS Verdict: Monster Hunter Wilds

Is it wrong to eat a dinosaur that wants to be eaten? What if it asks you to make a little hat out of its gall bladder? What if the gall bladder has different opinions on the matter? Discover the answers to these and more as our merry band of conservation enthusiasts/trophy hunters discuss Monster Hunter Wilds.

Nic: Life, the absolute bastard, has kept me away from the Monst. Let me experience it through you. What's the best Monst so far?

Brendan: I am fond of the squiddy critters that slop about. The Nu Udra is a giant gloopy octopus that feels like a stand-out fight partly because of its many, many arms, but also because of the environment you fight it in. It's horrible (in a fun way) to wade about in the oil of this region, and try to avoid the flames that inevitably start to spread. Another later squid-like beast has some horrible knifey hands at the end of its tentacles, but I'll let the readers discover the rest of that creep's tactics by themselves.

Ollie: I'm partial to the Yian Kut-Ku myself. It was the very first monster I ever fought in any Monster Hunter, back in the days of Monster Hunter Freedom on my PSP. And all these years later, I still recognised all its moves, and it made the whole act of beating up the big fire-breathing chicken even more enjoyable and satisfying than it already was.

Brendan: Oh, it's a good one. I like the way it soars between areas, limping through the sky on holey wings. Shame it only arrives at the end of the lengthy story, mind.

Jeremy: The Lala Barina, an early game spider monster that exudes a web of scarlet flower petals and fluffy white poofs of fur, is one of my favourites. This came as a surprise because I usually veer on the side of disliking spiders in just about everything. I think it’s just a splendid design that somehow manages to make one of the dullest video game bosses - the giant arachnid - compelling and even beautiful. Also, all of its weapons are sleek, refined, and kind of princess-like, and you can get a frilly dress as one of the armour pieces that makes your hunter look like a Nier character. I feel very pretty wearing it.

Nic: Are some of the later monsters still exhausting to fight? That's something that stopped me getting into the last one as much as I wanted, just realising I'd have to carve out 40 minutes for non-stop wailing.

Brendan: I got tired of emptying endless arrows into the final boss. I won't spoil the exact nature of it, except to say that it goes through phases which mix up the fight's flavour, but I still felt fatigue as it dragged on. Battles do get more protracted the further you get into the endgame. There are new "tempered" abominations that are there to act as more challenging fights. Big bruisers who have seen the wars and won't go down easy. That feels like work to me, but I've read complaints that the game feels too easy to long-toothed veterans of the series (it's true that I've only fainted in two battles so far, and only properly failed one quest). So where I see a long battle and think "god, just die" a lot of fans will probably stomp in gung-ho, glad to have a lengthy hunt.

Brendan: Ah, yeah. The geography itself probably would feel layered and interesting, but all the actions you perform within the space remove that feeling. The auto-piloting dino plays a big part in this. Even if you wrestle control back there's still an always-on trail of fireflies leading you straight to where you need to go. I couldn't find any option to turn this stuff off, and I'm not sure how the game would play if you could. It frustrates me that level designers and environment artists have put so much effort into providing a sense of place, but you quickly become numb to it because you don't actually need to think about the routes you're taking. It feels more like getting on a bus to the next fight, rather than driving there yourself. You don't need to worry about shortcuts.

Edwin: Do people have favourite weapons? I was hoping to do an against-the-grain run as a solo Hunting Horn user, because back in the day, the Hunting Horn was designed quite deliberately for support roles in multiplayer. Sadly, they’ve made it a lot more single player friendly, though that’s possibly more to do with the other changes to the controls over the years. I might fall back on my old friend, the Gunlance.

Brendan: I read in the recent past that the designers wanted all the weapons to be equally "viable", so you can still pile on the hurt even with a traditional support bubble machine. The Gunlance I didn't try (I got scared when I tried to use it in Monster Hunter World and could NOT understand the best way to use it). I started with the Twin Blades, which feel like absolute wreckers once you learn to perform the mega twirly sawblade manoeuvres. You roll down a monster's entire spine like a hideous human buzzsaw. But I found that fighting up close made monster movements harder to track and I kept getting knocked down. I swapped to the bow, and it was very satisfying to learn, if a little fiddly at first.

Nic: "This is a story of monsters and humans and their struggles to live in harmony in a world of duality". Discuss.

Brendan: This is a comical line of marketing for a game about murdering dinosaurs for high-heel boots. But it is a minor theme of the story. These monsters are simply animals doing what they are naturally compelled to do, we are sometimes told. A small boy comes to relate to a big bad mega monst who once wrecked his village, but his emotional turnaround is so unconvincing it doesn't land at all. I could scoff and chuckle and wryly fnar-fnar-fnar at how the dialogue and characters try their best to tackle this subject and ultimately fail. But that might just be making a stink out of the game's mild lip service to wildlife preservation. As humans our relationship to animals is an absolutely batshit web of intractable contradictions. My brother's dog is dying and my entire family is currently in bits. But we eat endless cows for supper without thinking too much about it. The natural instinct is to try to scrunch these contradictions until some "right" way of thinking about animals emerges. But it rarely does. All this is to say that preservation and good treatment of wildlife is beyond both the scope of this article, and the scope of a game in which you ride around on Yoshi from the Bob Hoskins Super Mario movie while killing his lizard cousins for their glands.

Ollie: I liked the bit where one of the villagers asked me to deal with a monster that was plaguing their ore miners. I went and clobbered the living shite out of it, harvested its parts for my armour, and then returned to the villager and mentioned "actually, they're really not a threat, you can learn to live with them in harmony".

Jeremy: Generally, I think Monster Hunter as a franchise has made some strides since the early days, which were really more overt about how the setting only existed as a gameplay loop for you to brazenly brutalise big beasts and carve up their carcasses to craft cool clothes. But perhaps that overtness was more honest? As it stands, the concessions that Monster Hunter Wilds makes to the idea of ecology or preserving life come to a halt whenever you run into a big boss. Your hunter immediately turns to Alma, the latest doe-eyed handler who kind of looks like she stepped out from behind a barista counter. It’s obvious what you want - Guild permission to engage the enemy. And Alma grants it without a second’s hesitation, even when expressed enemy is just an ornery toad who’s lashing out because the annoying humans are in its home.

There are moments that hint at alternate worlds where Monster Hunter is less focused on killing, though. I’m thinking of the Lala Barina again, and how prior to fighting it you’re exploring its ecosystem, which is a truly gorgeous forest packed to the brim with enough wildlife to justify the game’s entire photo mode. I was reminded of those edutainment ‘90s CD-ROMs I used to play as a kid, about navigating a rainforest or boating down the Nile. There’s potential here to go further in that direction in future installments of the series, perhaps having hunters navigate environmental shifts or undertake more missions that are about transporting injured monsters or healing sick ones. But ultimately, all of this vanishes when we realise that the Lala Barina has paralysed one of our comrades, so off we go again to beat a behemoth and then use its spinnerets to make a switch axe.

Edwin: It’s sort of fascinating to watch Monster Hunter attempt to carve a coherent throughline from those intractable contradictions. It makes room for a lot of discussion about conceptions of humanity and animality and how certain categories of human have modelled certain categories of nonhuman to suit their purposes. Monster Hunter’s “ecology” is really just a slaughterhouse mechanism with various outputs; the more they try to simulate “natural” behaviour the more glaring the machine’s overall purpose becomes. Generally speaking, I think Capcom could feel less guilty and/or resist the urge to conservation-wash their simulation. This is fiction, and while fiction can be harmful or reductive, it’s often a way of figuring ugly things out. Not being a Japanese speaker, I’ve never had much luck getting Capcom to talk about whether they’ve learned anything from big game hunting or safaris, but there’s surely a great interview there.

It’s also just entertaining to watch the game try to make sense of its own morals. I’m recycling a joke from several RPS Slack meetings, but I think it would be fun for Capcom to go full Edge Doom review and let the monsters talk. Doubtless they would say things like “Oh golly, I’m overpopulating my habitat!"

Brendan: "This will have ramifications to the food chain!"

Edwin: "Quickly, thin my numbers so that the ecosystem can survive.”.

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We all deserve better than this

The first time I woke up last night, somewhere around three in the morning, I checked my phone to see if online stores had already posted and sold out of their stock of AMD's new RX 9070 XT graphics cards, which carried with them the promise of a GPU launch that would finally have plenty of hardware on hand. Too early. At 5:45 am I woke up again and saw that they'd be going on sale in 15 minutes. No going back to sleep this time.

I'd already made sure I had my credit card info up-to-date at Amazon, Newegg, and Best Buy. I had Best Buy's sole $600 MSRP card model from XFX favorited, with a notification set in the app to ping me when it went on sale. At 6:00, sitting in bed in the dark, I tapped the listing. It hung on a blinding white screen. I backed out and tapped again. This time it loaded. 6:01 am: Sold out.

I never got a notification. Was it ever even available?

Some frantic searching over the next few minutes found no listings yet on Amazon, only the most expensive add-in board cards on B&H Photo, and a range of options on Newegg. The sparkle of hope I had at seeing a $600 card available on Newegg fizzled when the website made me login again, apparently forgetting my credentials in the last six hours, and died 30 seconds later on the checkout screen. Out of stock.

So I did what so many of us do when our plans go to hell: I started negotiating with myself. I'd decided I'd only buy an RX 9070 XT at $600, its intended price, because that price was what made it such a good buy, a win over Nvidia's impossible-to-get-anyway RTX 5070 Ti. But I was caught up in the moment. I really wanted a new graphics card.

Newegg still had stock of Asus's $720 card. Another $120 for 60 MHz of overclocking I'd never notice? What the hell. I bought it, got the confirmation email, and went back to sleep. At least I got a card, right?

Nope. Newegg canceled my order shortly after I placed it, "voided due to insufficient stock."

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Nothing about this experience made me uniquely cursed—if anything, it's so normal now for anyone into the hobby of PC gaming that we seem all but resigned to it. Why get mad about a process that feels so completely futile?

AMD has told The Verge that there will be more RX 9070 graphics cards available at MSRP, stating that "it is inaccurate that $549/$599 MSRP is launch-only pricing." That's counter to Swedish and UK retailers, which revealed prices were going up after this first shipment of cards, and from an actual manufacturer who has told us that their own recommended prices are going up after the launch price is done with on the first 24 hours.

AMD didn't offer details on how many cards were actually being sold at $600 (my guess: a pretty small portion!) and caveated its answer with "excluding region specific tariffs and/or taxes." For everyone in the US, that means our big dumb president's big dumb tariff on Chinese imports is almost certainly going to drive up prices.

Considering the absolute shitshow trying to buy a graphics card already was thanks to botters, assholes flipping their cards on Ebay, and comically wasteful spending on AI, we really didn't need the assist.

Our hobby deserves improved from the companies that made their billions on the backs of PC gaming.

All signs point to the RX 9070 launch having far more stock than any of Nvidia's recent RTX 50-series card drops, but does it matter when there are so many people desperate to buy a graphics cards without being gouged to death? When huge swaths of manufacturing capacity are now being rerouted to produce GPUs for AI server farms, which tech companies are falling all over themselves to gobble up? So that they can illegally scrape (steal) more creative work from the internet, all in service of writing a really bland email for you or summarizing things badly?

We shouldn't be resigned to this, because it's frankly too embarrassing and annoying to just roll over and accept.

NFTs may have been dumb enough for us to collectively bully out of existence, but the entire tech economy is now pot-committed to AI, and even if it eventually ends up amazing and life-changing and all the things it's been breathlessly promised to be, in the meantime it's still getting in the way of us being able to buy some damn graphics cards for our computers.

Our hobby deserves improved from the companies that made their billions on the backs of PC gaming, and it deserves improved from the retailers who just shrug every time their sites crash or botters scoop up all their stock the second it goes on sale. If someone bought it, what's it matter to them, eh? Why should Newegg honor the orders it confirmed when cards were in-stock by earmarking the next shipment for those buyers when it could cancel the orders instead and charge more for them later? (I asked; Newegg didn't respond to a request for comment).

We also deserve advanced than misleading MSRPs that barely represent the reality of buying new hardware and misleading marketing pitches that overpromise what new hardware is actually capable of.

The reason to stay mad about all this is that we have proof it can be done improved. Valve proved as much with its reservation system for the Steam Deck, which made it possible for everyone who wanted one of the handhelds to get one, even if it took a while.

During the height of cryptomania, beloved GPU enterprise EVGA established a queue system to allow real human beings to reserve a graphics card with none of this "hope the website doesn't crash under the weight of 1,000 botters hitting it in the first 30 seconds" bullshit. After tariffs led to increased prices, it even honored the original prices for people who'd already signed up to buy a card through the queue.

EVGA no longer sells graphics cards, and I'm feeling the sting of that loss more than ever now. But its absence means there's room for any hardware enterprise to step up and offer an alternative to the misery we've come to expect from trying to build a PC over the last half-decade.

If anyone's going to do it, though, I hope they hurry up—I'd really like to buy an RX 9070 XT before AI datacenters finish cooking the planet.

Is it wrong to eat a dinosaur that wants to be eaten? What if it asks you to make a little hat out of its gall bladder? What if the gall bladder has d......

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