2015 is almost done and it’s that time of year where I both start to reflect on the past and try to visualize the future.
I bought a lot of games this year, and particularly this fall. I really didn’t play most of them very much (and I have a good number that I haven’t even touched). That needs to change, and rather than me playing more, I think it’s time to buy less, and there’re several reasons for that.
First is financial. As I mentioned, my freelance writing gig ended in October which means my annual income in 2016 will be reduced significantly. At the same time our expenses are going up; Angela’s ACA health insurance tripled in price (though to be fair it’s still a lot cheaper than what I pay through work). The result is that we’re going to have to pay a lot more attention to money going forward. I haven’t really ‘felt’ this yet since my last freelance check came in November and December was one of those months where I got an ‘extra’ paycheck between rent payments (I get paid bi-weekly so twice a year there’s an extra check).
Second is lack of interest. Over the past few months more and more often when I sit down on the couch during my usual ‘gaming hours’ I find myself turning on some music and reading the paper, a magazine or a book instead of playing games. Maybe it’s just a phase; I was playing Destiny a real lot for a while there and maybe this is just a kind of ‘rest period.’ Or maybe its just part of getting older. I wrote recently about pretty much giving up on platformers and lately I’ve found myself feeling frustrated by any kind of fast moving genre. I tried going back to Infamous: Second Son a couple weeks ago and found it now made me really motion sick! Or maybe it’s just too much of a good thing. Some times I struggle so much with trying to decide what to play that I just decide to play nothing.
So between a lack of $$ and a lack of interest, I’ve decided to put a strict budget on my gaming. Starting in January I’m going to set aside just $15/month to spend on games. While that sounds pretty strict, there are some loopholes. First I get free games through Xbox Live, Playstation Plus and EA Access (though of course I can’t pick what I get). Second, my credit card ‘reward’ program gives me Sony Reward points that I can turn into Playstation Network $$ cards every few months. Third, I have a ginormous backlog. Fourth, Uncharted 4 is already pre-ordered and paid for. 🙂
The overall goal is to save money, make smarter purchasing decisions (I’m particularly annoyed with myself for buying some expensive “deluxe” versions of games that I wound up barely playing at all: Forza Motorsport 6 and Halo 5 but come to mind), and ease the vague sense of guilt I feel when I look at my collection of unfinished or barely-touched games.
It should be fairly easy to keep this resolution for the first 2/3rds of the year, but it’ll be much more challenging when the 2016 holiday launch season kicks in around August. I guess I’ll see how it goes.
Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise: there’s no upside to getting old. I’m speaking from experience. In terms of ‘traditional’ video games I’m in what I imagine is a fairly small group: folks over 50 who still spend a lot of time with a controller in their hands. Old age means your eyesight starts to go wonky (I had 20-20 vision for most of my life, now I wear $500 progressive bifocals and I have to get them upgraded every few years), your joints start to hurt and your reflexes (both mental and physical) start to slow down.
A few months ago Rock Band 4 came out. I had a lot of fun playing Rock Band back when it was hot so I bought the game/guitar controller bundle for RB4 as soon as it came out. So far I’ve played it once. I have just enough arthritis in my hands that trying to play on that controller causes me a lot of joint pain in my fingers. That wasn’t a problem as recently as Rock Band 3 that came out in 2010. But once your body starts to degrade, things go downhill alarmingly quickly. If I played through the pain it might get better (I can use a traditional controller without any pain I think because I’m so used to it) but so far I haven’t wanted to play badly enough to endure the discomfort.
RB4 is just one game and its loss isn’t all that great, but this week I discovered an entire genre has been closed to me: side-scrolling platformers. Earlier this week I was going through my PS4 collection looking for games I felt good about removing from the hard drive, which is getting pretty full. I stumbled on Guacamelee! Super Turbo Championship Edition, which I believe was a PS+ freebie a long time ago. Or maybe I bought it during a sale…who knows? In either case I had it installed but had never played it.
So I tried it, and it was super-fun for about 3-4 hours. But as is the case with most platformers, the farther in you go the more complex the moves you need to use to progress and soon enough I came to a section of the game that I just couldn’t get past. I knew WHAT I had to do, and if I was playing back when I was 45 I’m sure I could’ve cleared it without too much difficulty. But now? I just couldn’t keep my fingers moving fast enough for long enough to pass through this area. This passage had me doing that ping-pong wall jump routine that many platformers challenge you with, in order to move vertically up a shaft. The twist here is that 1 wall is in the “dead” world and 1 wall was in the “living” world so in addition to wall jumping back and forth I had to phase between worlds as well.
In mechanical terms, I had to tap X, then X again (a double jump with a brief pause to get enough height to make progress), then R2 to phase between the dead and the living world, and then push & hold the left stick left or right to stick to a wall. That sounds easy, right? And it was, but I had to do it smoothly about 6 times to get to the top of this passage. And time and again I’d do something stupid on repetition 4 or 5.
I spent about 10 minutes trying to get past this segment and decided maybe I needed to take a break (I’d been playing for a while). So I did and came back to it fresh and spent about 20 minutes and STILL didn’t get past it. At that point I gave up, and deleted the game from my PS4 (in part because I was trying to clear up space and in part so the icon wasn’t sitting on my dashboard mocking me).
It’s possible that had I kept trying I might have eventually gotten past this section, but the other thing about getting old is that you become more and more aware that you have a finite amount of time left to live. I know that sounds way dramatic and it’s not like you think in these terms, but it’s more like a background hum of “I don’t have the time to waste on this.” I mean video games are inherently a waste of time I guess, but at the same time I find they can be super-satisfying and often relaxing. But there are a LOT of games I want to play (with more coming all the time) so when it’s taking me too long to get to the next “rat pellet” (by which I mean some kind of dopamine producing happy moment) I move on to something new.
After I deleted Guacamelee! I went back to clearing out old games, and I found a few other platformers and realized that for the most part, I may as well delete them too. I’m not meaning to pick on Guacamelee! in this post. I don’t think it’s an unusually hard platformer. My issue is with the entire genre (specifically 2D side-scrolling platformers). With a limited palette of moves to work with, the only way for designers to ramp up the challenge as you move through the game is to either ask you to string together longer and longer combos of moves, or making the timing required more and more precise. Neither of those things is a good fit for an aging gamer who doesn’t have the mental and digit-al (digits like in fingers…get it?) dexterity that s/he once had.
Another genre I’ve given up on is competitive MP shooters that are played in small arenas, because again my brain-to-finger connection just isn’t fast enough to compete with younger gamers (games that offer more space to move around in tend to also reward tactics and sometimes I can still do OK in those).
I’m not sure what genre I’ll have to give up next and I hope I don’t find out for a while. But in broader terms as both the console gaming audience and the developers who make games age, I wonder if we’ll ever see a time where some games cater to older players. I read an interview with Cliff Bleszinski (I can’t remember where) in which he said that his next game is going to offer some kind of class or weapons meant for older gamers because he (and he is way younger than me) is already feeling that he can’t keep up with the youngsters who can snap off headshots without breaking a sweat. That was pretty encouraging to me and I hope more developers adopt a similar philosophy.
It won’t be easy though, because if a developer makes a game and puts in giant bright red sparkly letters across the box that the game is intended for gamers over 60, the 20-something internet blowhards will still rip it to shreds as being too easy and the game will end up with a 40 at Metacritic (in spite of the old gamers loving it) and the publisher will lay off the entire dev team. It’s why we can’t have nice things.
On the bright side, I only have 20 years or so left to worry about any of this.
Yesterday early access for the free Star Wars Battlefront DLC, Battle of Jakku unlocked. I’ve really been enjoying my time with it so far.
This scenario (there is only 1 map for it) takes place between The Return of the Jedi and the upcoming The Force Awakens. The Empire is in full retreat and the Rebels are closing in on their base on the desert planet Jakku. This is an asymmetrical scenario: the Empire is always on defense, the Rebels always attacking.
The battlefield is a desert strewn with crashed spaceships and other debris. They gives the snipers out there some long sight-lines, but there’s also enough cover to keep you safe from them if you play smart.
At the start of a battle the Rebels are tasked with taking over one of 3 control points (it doesn’t matter which one and they only need one). When Rebels occupy the area of these control points unopposed a clock-gauge starts filling up. If it fills completely the Rebels have won that segment of the battle. At that point the 3 control points wink out of existence and two more appear deeper in Empire territory. Once again the Rebels have to take one of the control points. If they succeed, those control points vanish and two more appear even deeper. If they take one of those control points, one single final point appears and if they can take that, they win.
The Empire just defends. The Rebels have a timer (and get some bonus time everytime they take a control point) and if they don’t win before time runs out, the Empire wins.
So far I’m loving the dynamics of this mode. At the start of the match with the three initial control points the battle is quite spread out but as the Rebels push deeper into Empire territory everyone is funneled together. The battle for the last control point can get really intense.
The Empire has AT-STs while the Rebels have Landspeeders. Both of these can be tough to bring down with no big turrets. I haven’t yet seen any Tie Fighters or X-Wings, nor have I seen any hero units. It’s possible I’ve just missed them but I played about 8 matches.
If the Empire pushes the Rebels off a control point, the gauge doesn’t “unfill” as far as I can tell (or if it does, it happens very slowly). This means the Rebels can take a control point through successive assaults even if they get wiped out at the end of each assault. With no voice chat to help organized the teams the battles have a very organic feel to them as players move from control point to control point trying to capture (or defend) a point that is wavering. Having a JumpPack can be pretty handy since it’ll let you move from point to point quickly.
Battle of Jakku is arriving just in time. Walker Assault needs some balancing now that there are plenty of players who have the knack of using tow cables to bring down the Walkers. During the beta many gaming blogs commented on how unbalanced Walker Assault was in favor of the Empire. It wasn’t, it just took a few days for players to figure out how to win as the Rebels. But EA capitulated to the gaming blogs and made it easier for the Rebels anyway, and now it’s pretty tough for the Empire to win, at least until we figure out a good defense against tow cables.
It’s still fun, mind you, but when you see 1 lone player take down 2 Walkers with tow cables it kind of makes everyone else feel less relevant.
Anyway, Battle of Jakku is a nice change of pace and I look forward to playing more of it.
PS: Sorry for the lack of video. I wish the PS4 would let me capture a clip without exiting to the share menu (the Xbox One lets you do this if you have a Kinect). Every time I try to share something I get killed; as with most shooters standing still isn’t healthy in Star Wars Battlefront. So I never get around to capturing video.
Holy smokes, time flies. I can’t believe it’s been over 2 weeks since I posted. I haven’t really been doing too much worth talking about I guess, but just so Google doesn’t decide the site is dead again, here’s a recap of recent gaming.
My last post was about being conflicted over Star Wars: Battlefront. Well OF COURSE I bought it, because when in doubt I always take the road of retail therapy I guess. The good news is that I’m glad I did. It is exactly the gaming experience (for me) that I expected it to be. I play a few matches a few times a week. It’s kind of my “side game” and it is perfect for me as a side game. I stick almost exclusively to Walker Assault, one of the 20 v 20 modes, and I tend to wind up somewhere in the middle of the rankings. At a guess I’d say that 11th is my sweet spot, though I have been as high as 5th and as low ~blush~ as 19th. I’ve dabbled with a few of the other modes and they’re more fun than I expected them to be, but Walker Assault always calls to me and after 3 or 4 matches of that I’m ready to play something else.
The game is getting a lot of hate but that’s EA’s problem, not mine. I’m enjoying my time playing and I’m glad I made the purchase. It IS too expensive for what you get but for me it was worth paying full price in order to be able to play while the servers are still nice and full. It takes seconds to get into a match right now and that is worth something to me, being as impatient as I am. There’s a lot of complaints about things relating to playing with your friends but since I don’t play with anyone else that stuff isn’t relevant to my enjoyment of the game. I guess what I’m saying is that while I’m enjoying myself, don’t take that as a recommendation; I’m kind of a weirdo in what I like and don’t like.
I was really enjoying Fallout 4 and I need to make sure it doesn’t drift off the homescreen of my PS4 but for the past couple of weeks it has been pushed to the side. My plan is to play Fallout 4 on and off for about a year 🙂 so I’m not in any great hurry.
I strongly believe in voting with my wallet when a company does something I’m enthusiastic about. When Zenimax released the Imperial City expansion for The Elder Scrolls Online it seemed to me like it was dedicated to the PvPers and instanced dungeoneers so I ignored it. But then they brought Orsinium to the consoles, and that expansion had a lot of stuff for solo/open world PvE players so I wanted to support it. I bought the big bundle of crowns and spent most of them on the Deluxe Edition of Orsinium (because, duh, it came with a mount and pet and how could I resist them). I wound up buying Imperial City too just for the sake of completeness. Then during the Black Friday insanity the big pack of crowns was almost 50% off so I bought ANOTHER one, and those will sit in my wallet until another expansion comes along (I know they’re working on at least one more, the Thieves Guild expansion).
So suddenly I’ve been playing Elder Scrolls Online again. This time out I am completely ignoring the instanced content; no grouping for me. I started to research builds and that wasn’t fun so I said “screw it” and came up with my own builds. The whole beauty of TESO is that you’re supposed to play however you want, and that’s what I’m doing, and it’s working during the leveling part of the game. If I get serious about it I can always re-spec after doing research. I’m not even playing to level, really. I’m just playing to explore. I’m jumping between 3 (sometimes 4) characters leveling them as a dysfunctional ‘family’ since they’re spread all around the world. I probably spend more time crafting than I do fighting, and that includes shuffling materials between characters with is time consuming but kind of soothing.
Basically Bhagpuss is my spirit animal for this Elder Scrolls Online outing. I’m focused on solo exploring and just kind of enjoying the world. I spend a lot of time reading books I find, or trying to get to places that I think I maybe shouldn’t be (yet). With 3 starting zones, a couple of which I’ve barely touched, there’s a lot to do that is more interesting to me than following instructions on a website to build a character that is uber-powerful and completely boring to play.
On Friday I’ll have a new game to play. Xenoblade Chronicles X comes out for the Wii U. I got a Wii U shortly after launch (through kind of a fluke, my boss ended up with two so he sold me his extra) and I bought two games for it: Zombie U for me and Scribblenauts for Angela. And those are the last two games I bought for it until this month, when I’m grabbing Xenoblade for me and there’s an Animal Crossing game that Angela wanted, though I suspect she was more interested in the Amiibos that came with it than the game itself. Zombie U was pretty meh but Xenoblade is getting lots of praise so I’m hoping that I’ll FINALLY get some use out of the Wii U.
Star Wars Battlefront launches tomorrow. I haven’t pre-ordered it yet, but I’ve come close a few times. I’m still not sure what I’m going to do.
You see in the beta, and during EA Access’s “Early Access” period that started late last week, I’ve found the Walker Assault and Supremacy modes to be really fun, but the rest of the game feels like throw-away content. And I like the meta aspects of SW:Battlefront. Here, at last, is a competitive multiplayer game for the rest of us. The e-jocks hate it because anyone can jump in and have fun. The blasters have no recoil and long ranges which I’m told (by commenters on various posts, so it must be true) makes Battlefront a “no skill” game. To which I say “Good, you e-jocks take your attitudes and go back to COD or where ever is in vogue among your kind.” I almost feel a responsibility to pick the game up just to support this decision.
The modes I love most really capture the feel of Star Wars well, too. I frequently find myself just kind of taking it all in. The first time a Tie-Fighter comes screaming out of the sky, clips an obstacle and spins out of control before crashing in a fiery explosion right in front of your face…well if that doesn’t evoke some kind of a smile you’re just no Star Wars fan.
There’s no voice chat in Battlefront which is another reason the e-jocks hate it, and another reason I love it. I can jump into a game and play and not have to listen to crappy music or racial slurs, or be told how much I suck. I can just have fun and do that thing I do where in my imagination the folks I’m playing with are decent people rather than the awful, awful individuals I usually meet in MP games. (And of course if you WANT to chat with your friends you can just start a Party out of game and chat that way.) With 20 people per team (again, in the 2 modes I like) it’s easy to blend in and just be OK and not wind up at the bottom of the charts and feel like you’re dragging your team down. Usually the people on the bottom just spawned into the game shortly before it ended, anyway. You can pretend to be one of those guys! In any case, the point, for me, is not to win (though I do try). It’s to spend a few minutes experiencing a Star Wars battle from the inside.
But it IS generally “a few minutes.” It’s not a game I find myself playing for hours at a time. I jump in, do a few matches, get my fix and move on to something else. Is that worth $60?
If this was a single player experience it’d be an easy choice: Wait for a sale or something. But if I’m going to play I kind of want to play it while the servers are nice and full and games spawn quickly. Plus with new Star Wars movie out next month, there’s the whole Star Wars fever aspect.
But the other big downside is the crazy-expensive season pass. The base game is $60, the season pass is $50. I wouldn’t care about this except for the fact that Season Pass holders get access to new content 2 weeks ahead of everyone else. That means if you don’t have the season pass and opt to buy DLC, you’re going to be experiencing it for the first time playing against people who’ve spent 2 weeks mastering the nuances of the maps. Since this really ISN’T an e-jock kind of game, that might not be as big of a problem as it sounds. but in general I don’t like how hard they’re trying to motivate us to spend $50 on a season pass of mostly unknown content.
Of course if I just opt to buy the initial game and say no to all DLC, that doesn’t impact me at all.
So pros, cons, confusion. It’d also be easier if I hadn’t purchased so many great games lately. I’m still pretty heavily invested in Fallout 4. If Battlefront had launched last summer I would’ve been all over it. I could wait, but again I kind of want the full server experience (and to not be the one level 1 guy playing with a bunch of level 50 characters).
So I had an odd thing happen in Fallout 4 and wondered if anyone else has seen this kind of thing. This post will contain minor spoilers for random (I think!?) events.
So I was headed out past Tenpines Bluff for the first time, traveling pretty much directly east. I came to a small cliff and at the bottom was a derailed train. Climbed down and met a woman selling a Brahmin. Bought it and asked her to deliver it to one of my settlements. Started checking out the train and got jumped by some ghouls. My dog and I took care of them in short order. While looting the bodies I heard voices.
I followed them to a small shack and inside were two men, one threatening the other with a gun. Both were named Art and both looked alike. It was the classic sci-fi conundrum of which man was the real dude, and which was the carbon copy. I tried to use my powers of persuasion to de-escalate the situation but failed. (Had I known I was going to have to be persuasive I would’ve slipped into my sequin dress and replaced my welder’s goggles with sexy sunglasses!) In the end I was pretty much forced to attack one of them, which I did. He put up quite a fight but I won. The other Art thanked me and started wandering off but then curiosity got the better of me (me, in this case, referring to the player, not the character) and I attacked the 2nd Art too, already planning to reload my last save game but just curious if I’d be able to tell which was the “real” Art by the corpses. My plan went awry when he killed me, though.
So I loaded the save game I had from Tenpines Bluff and headed in the same direction. Found the same woman selling the same cow and I bought it again. Started searching the train but did NOT get jumped by ghouls this time. Then I noticed Art wandering down the tracks away from the train. I chased after him and tried to talk to him but he said “I just want to be left alone.” and kept going. I went back to the shack where I’d seen the two Arts arguing in my other game and found a corpse…of Art. And a synth core. So I guess this time the real Art took care of the Synth without any help from me (even though I believe I got to the scene a little faster thanks to no ghouls).
Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but I’m kind of excited about the possibility that the game world kind of chugs along without you, and so depending on when or where you are, or maybe depending on a random number generated when you start or load a game, you’re going to experience difference events in different play-throughs, or the same events in different ways, or… something.
I mean the reality is it’ll be a miracle if I actually finish Fallout 4, but still it’s nice to think that if I do finish it and love it so much I want to play through it a second time, some of my experiences will be different.
Like many other folks, I’ve been playing Fallout 4 this week. By now you’re probably sick to death of blog posts about it. Never let it be said that I shy away from annoying people, so here’s another.
I want to talk about nights in Fallout 4. I’m still early in the game. Level 4 or 5. (I didn’t play Wednesday night so I’m behind everyone.) At my level damn near everything is a danger. There’s an alpha wild mongrel out there that has killed me 3 times already (pro tip: you need to save your game…it’s been so long since I played a game that I needed to save in that I keep forgetting!)
Last night I was working on an early quest, traveling back and forth cross-country. By day the land seems dead aside from the odd killer bug or wild dog or pack of mole rats. But while I was in a building, night fell. Now I had to hike back to Sanctuary in the dark.
I have to say, Bethesda NAILED the night time. It’s not realistically dark, which would be no fun at all. But it’s dark enough that you’ll, for example. see a tree stump in the distance and for a second think it’s a raider. In real-life terms it’s like late dusk, that time when shadows play tricks on your eyes. (In my typically disorganized fashion, I neglected to capture any nighttime screenshots, sorry!)
But even better than the darkness are the lights. If you get up to a high spot during the night and look out over the wilderness you’ll see lots of lights. What are they? I find myself really torn between curiosity and fear. Of course in many cases curiosity won out. Some of the lights are abandoned camp fires (though I’ve been jumped while pawing through these sites looking for valuables when the owner returned from wherever NPCs go), some are camps of raiders. Some are camps of friendlies. And some are just glowing fungus.
I find it really eerie traveling by night in Fallout 4, which seems to be how it should feel.
Of course you can use an “exploit” if you don’t like that feeling. Tapping your VATS button gives you the equivalent of night vision since it’ll highlight any potential targets nearby. I try to resist the urge to use it, but at the same time I’m glad its there for when it’s getting late (in real life) and I just want to finish a quest before bed.
So far I’m really enjoying Fallout 4, which is a nice surprise because I never got very far in Fallout 3, which felt kind of tedious to me. So far Fallout 4 feels a lot more streamlined when it comes to stuff like searching for loot, inventory management and conversations.
Now I just need to find my dog. We were headed for home last night when we stumbled into a camp of raiders. I never even saw them until they started shooting. I had to run, finding enough cover to take a shot every now and then. I killed three or four of them but I was nearly finished myself. I found good cover and ate some food which made me feel better. I started back towards the raiders when a mole rat jumped me, and it wasn’t alone. There were three or four of those ugly creatures and by the time I killed them, I was so turned around I wasn’t sure where the raider camp was. And then I noticed my dog was missing.
I stumbled around in the dark, hoping to find the dog, or the raider camp, or even one of the corpses, but found nothing. Eventually I headed back to Sanctuary, sad and alone. Tomorrow I’ll go searching for my dog. Maybe he returned to the Red Rocket gas station where I first found him.
“At console price points, we’re going to have machines like Alienware’s, which are faster than today’s consoles,” said Newell. “So the same price point as today, except you get better performance and you’re connected to everything you like about the PC and the internet.”
I’ll take at face value his assertion that the AlienWare Steam Machine is faster than the Xbox One and PS4 (would love to hear opinions on that) but Newell is playing fast and loose with “console price points.” The Alienware starts at $450. The Xbox One and PS4 both start at $350. If my math is correct, that means that Alienware is about 29% more expensive than the consoles. My wallet, at least, says that’s not the same price point.
Of course there’s a lot more to costs here. Maybe you already have a big library of Steam Games, or you’re rubbing your hands greedily thinking of the Steam Holiday Sale. Truth is over the course of a few years a Steam Machine + software will probably end up being cheaper than a console + games (this depends on a lot of personal variables, and how patient you are about waiting for sales).
Newell goes on to talk about “knock(ing) down the barriers that keep PC gaming out of the living room” which is something I heartily approve of. The relatively low cost of Steam Machines should help with that, and the Steam Controller is supposed to help, too. More and more PC games also support traditional gamepads.
But there are still problems. Many Steam games have user interfaces intended to be used from 2 feet away, and trying to use them at typical TV-to-viewer distances (say 8-10′) is tough. If Steam Machines catch on we can hope more developers keep couch-gaming in mind and offer UI options that work from a distance, but we’re not there yet. I think it would help if Steam added some kind of “couch friendly” indicator to its game pages. You know, in the section where it indicates controller support and whether the game has Steam Achievements.
The other big limitation to Steam Machines is Steam. These are Steam Machines, not PC gaming machines. Sure we all love Steam but you’re not going to play World of Warcraft or League of Legends on a Steam Machine since (as far as I can tell anyway, correct me if I’m wrong) those games don’t run on SteamOS or Steam. And it goes without saying you’re not going to play Halo 5 or Destiny on a Steam Machine.
If you’re a PC gamer who just wants to be able to go play some of your game collection on the sofa, a Steam Machine might be a fine solution, but I don’t see Valve convincing many console gamers to exchanging their PS4s or XBox Ones for Steam Machines. The ecosystem just isn’t there yet, in my opinion.
Disclosure: I don’t have a Steam Machine. I went for the bastardized route of the Steam Link and Steam Controller, so I’m streaming games from my PC to the Steam Link. Streaming, I have to admit, injects yet another set of issues into the process. On the other hand going this route means I can (in theory) play games on Steam that only run on Windows, not SteamOS. In practice whenever I try to use the Steam Link, after spending 20-30 minutes of fiddling with Steam Controller settings and trying to find a UI I can see, I just shut everything down and fire up a no-hassle console.
Over the course of the past few days I’ve played the Star Wars Battlefront beta on PC, Playstation 4 and Xbox One. During that time I went from super-excited to huge disappointment and finally to completely conflicted. Here’s why.
The beta offered 3 modes of play: Survival, Drop Zone and Walker Assault. Let’s go through each briefly.
Survival is the only solo/co-op mode in the beta. It’s a pretty simple game where six waves of enemies spawn and attack and you have to kill them. I played it solo and it was pretty easy and not something that would hold my attention for very long. That said, it’s worth noting that the beta had only 6 waves and the full game will have 12, and the beta had only “Normal” difficulty and the full game will have higher difficulty levels. Maybe if the challenge level was higher it’ll be more fun, but I’m not sure. Survival might also be more fun played with someone else; it’s basically “horde mode” which seems popular in other games.
There are two other single player/co-op modes in the final game, Training and Battles. I assume Training is all about Tutorials, but I’m not sure what Battles will offer that Survival didn’t. Hopefully a more in-depth experience.
With the single player content quickly exhausted I headed to the multiplayer mode. The full game will have 7 multiplayer modes but for the demo we had Drop Zone and Walker Assault. Multiplayer Mode Select Screen
Drop Zone is 8v8 PVP that plays very much like any other FPS’s competitive mode. It’s fast-paced, short sight distances, cramped and definitely favors quick players that can snap-off headshots regularly. I hated it. I mean, I REALLY hated it. (I also hate this kind of mode in every other FPS in the world.) If you want Stars Wars flavored Call of Duty MP, I guess Drop Zone is for you.
And to be clear, I’m not saying it was bad; my distaste for this kind of gameplay means I can’t even judge a good game from bad in this genre. I’m just saying for me it was terrible and it dashed all my hopes for Star Wars Battlefront. In fact I deleted the beta after playing a few rounds and coming away frustrated and angry.
A friend convinced me to try Walker Assualt. EA does itself a disservice here. If you try to jump right into Walker Assault you’re told you should earn a few levels in Drop Zone first, and that’s what I’d done. For my second attempt at Battlefront I jumped right in Walker Assault at level 1.
And wow, what a difference. I found Walker Assault to be super fun. It is based on the classic “Empire assault on the rebel base on Hoth” scenario. It’s a 20v20 mode with lots of terrain to cover, lots of power-ups, and many many epic moments. Each player spawns as a generic Storm Trooper or Rebel (you can customize your weapon loadout as you gain levels and credits) but via the power-ups strewn across the battlefield you can take control of an AT-ST, the guns in an AT-AT, a Tie Fighter, X-Wing, A-Wing and more. You can also become a hero (Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader depending on your side) and there are more subtle power-ups like Smart Rockets, mini Shield Generators and so on.
The Rebels need to activate a couple of uplinks so that Y-Wings will spawn and bomb a couple of AT-AT’s that are lumbering across the battlefield. Once the Y-Wings hit the AT-ATs they’ll become vulnerable for a few moments, at which time the Rebels have to unload on them. If you’re really good you can pilot a snow speeder and do the harpoon/tow cable “trip-the-walker” move from the movies. The Empire basically just has to prevent the Rebels from destroying the AT-ATs. Eventually they’ll get in range of the shield generator, destroy it and win. The Rebels win if both AT-ATs are destroyed.
There’s a lot to do in this mission even for old guys like me who don’t have the reflexes to compete in games like Drop Zone. I spent a lot of time Activating or De-Activating Uplinks (depending on which side I was on, teams switch sides after every round) or sneaking behind enemy lines to snipe soldiers from unexpected directions.
The scenario has taken some flack for being unbalanced and it is, but it seemed less so on Sunday than it did on Friday, as by Sunday Rebel players had learned what to do. If everyone spawns in and walks away from their gaming consoles the Empire will win, so the burden is really on the Rebels to put up a good fight.
The thing is I never cared if I won or lost. I was IN the Battle For Hoth! That was amazing. Watching X-Wings and Tie Fighters duke it out, seeing walkers stumble and fall, the sky full of blaster fire. It was awesome. You die constantly but there’s no real penalty for doing so, again replicating the ‘cannon fodder’ style of combat we see in the movies. There are hundreds of troops involved in the battle and the game reflects that by giving us immediate respawns with no penalties.
Anyway, so Walker Assault almost sold me on the game except…. it’s not something I played for hours. I’d generally play 2-3 matches and have my fill and go do something else. A few hours later I’d get the itch and come back to play more.
It worries me a little that “Walker Assault” is the name of a “Mode” since it makes me think this might be the only large scale 20v20 battle in the game.
The multiplayer modes not in the beta are still a mystery. “Fighter Squadron” is space combat, I’m fairly sure. But “Supremacy,” “Blast,” “Cargo,” and “Droid Run” all sound pretty vague. If each of them is a single map in the same way “Walker Assault” is then there’s not a ton of content in the game.
And if they are all 8v8 games played on small maps then I have no interest in them. They could have 100 8v8 frenetic headshot-fests and it’d mean nothing to me.
If Star Wars Battlefront had half a dozen missions with the scope and scale of Walker Assault I’d be all over it. But having 3 modes to sample and finding 2 of them are throw-aways makes me nervous. I don’t want to pay $60 to just play Walker Assault over and over and over.
Also, anyone could play the beta for free and there were only 2 MP modes to choose from. Every time I played Walker Assault I got into a game almost instantly. But when the game is $60 (so presumably, there are fewer people playing) and there’re 7 MP modes to choose from, I wonder how long it’ll take to get a 40-person match together. We won’t know that until after launch. Also the beta was limited to level 5. I don’t know what the cap in the final game will be but hopefully level 1 people won’t get tossed in with 39 level 20s.
Basically the beta weekend left me with a bunch of new questions. I want to know if there’s anything more interesting than fighting waves of enemies to do solo. And I want to know if there are more large scale MP maps to play on. So for me, the game is in the “wait and see” category. Once it’s out and we get reports on the other modes and how well MP is working, I might buy.
Here’re a couple of short clips I captured over the weekend. The first 2 are from the PS4 version, the others from Xbox One
When Destiny came out last September I picked it up on the PS4 and had a grand old time leveling my Hunter from 1 to 20. Then I hit the Light system.
For those who don’t play, you level 1-20 in Destiny like you do in any MMO; gaining experience from killing baddies and finishing quests. Once you hit level 20 a new system, the Light system, kicks in. Basically it’s like hitting cap in an MMO and having your gear score on display. Different bits of gear, starting at 20, have a light attribute, and the more Light you have equipped, the higher your displayed level is.
I played for a couple of weeks after hitting 20 and I think I made 2 levels in that time, finishing at level 22. I mostly play solo and so mostly counted on random drops and I just wasn’t lucky. So I felt like I wasn’t making any progress and drifted away.
A few weeks ago I bought a copy of Destiny for the Xbox One and have once again been enjoying leveling a Titan from 1 to 20. But things were different with this character. First of all, he got some “Strange Coins” (a special type of currency) in the (in-game) mail; some kind of promotion from Bungie I guess. I was able to spend those to get a level 20 gold (Legendary) helmet that had a high Light attribute. As soon as I clicked over to level 20, I donned this helmet and my level jumped to 22.
Then a few hours later I was cheesing some Bounty Quests by picking on really low level bad guys. I was doing a level 3 mission (at level 22) and a random mob dropped a “blue” item (item rarity in Destiny goes white – green – blue – purple – gold) that has a pretty large light level. I put that on and I was level 24.
So over the course of a couple hours I made more progress than I made in a few weeks on my PS4 character, and the difference was the Random Number Generator. I mean seriously, the mission I was doing was so easy I was punching everything to death rather than shooting stuff, and I got a bit of gear worth 2 levels. I didn’t feel in any way like I ‘earned’ that gear or those levels.
OTOH on the PS4 I felt like I couldn’t make any progress at all, because I was less lucky there. I actually logged in my PS4 character because I figured he too had Strange Coins waiting in the mail. And he did, but the Vendor didn’t have anything he could both afford and could use. So again, the RNG foiled me.
The good news is we’re a few weeks from The Taken King, where the level cap will be raised to 40 and you’ll level up to it the old fashioned way, gaining experience from quests and killing mobs. They’ve also promised tweaks to the random stuff so you’re more likely to get gear you can use. The Light system will still determine your power, but as you get higher levels you’ll get access to higher level gear with more light. At least that’s how I understand it.
