Looter Shooter Archives - Page 31 of 111

Games of the Decade: 2017

December 26, 2019 by Belghast

Once again I am continuing down the path to 2019 as I talk through the games of this decade that were important to me. Going back this morning and assembling my picks for 2017 made me realize what a freaking phenomenal year for gaming this was. There are so many games that would have been game of the year… were they not up against other competition. Once again a preface of that this is my personal list of the games that were important to me during the year. Your list probably looks a bit different and there are a few games that were left off because I never quite got into them the way that I should.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Lets be honest… this is the game that sold a bunch of switches. This is absolutely the reason why I bought mine and even managed to start out on the WiiU and then rebought it and restarted from scratch when I ultimately purchased my Switch. I have issues with one gameplay mechanic, and that is the breakable weapons. However even taking that into account there is no denying how good of a game this is. I ultimately greatly prefer playing it now on Cemu running the WiiU game on emulator so that I can apply a mod that removes weapon durability. There is just something about this game world and the pacing that make me want to get out and explore. The fact that through climbing and stamina you can both gate your progress but also feel like you can get anywhere if you try hard enough kept me pushing forward and trying to find the next secret. If I could remove the gyroscope nonsense and the weapon durability this would have been the perfect game.

Assassin’s Creed: Origins

I’ve made attempts in the past to break into the Assassin’s Creed series but there have ultimatley been two obstacles. Firstly they are games that were designed for the console in mind and seem to be way more reasonable when played with a controller than a mouse and keyboard. Secondly they were games that felt defined by a bunch of mini games and things like rooftop chases, which some sneaking around that felt forced and limiting. AC:O pushes the Assassin’s Creed game into a full open world experience where you explore large swaths of the Ancient Egyptian countryside and get a real sense of place and setting that make it feel like you are part of something much larger than effectively being trapped in a single city. The combat itself also seems to be way more forgiving of my desire to rush into combat and not stealth at all, which makes for a better experience personally. I love this game and at some point I will get around to playing the follow up Odyssey.

Night in the Woods

While there are significant issues surrounding the co-creator of Night in the Woods, I cannot write the game off because it is extremely powerful. It spoke to me on such a primal level because it effectively could have been my story. I grew up in a tiny town much like the one depicted in the game, and was one of the few of my friends who successfully transitioned into college… but the fact that I lived at home for the first two years commuting back and forth made for a bizarre experience. I was living in two different worlds… the world that remained the same as High School where I saw the same people I did then on a regular basis… and this new fledgling world of experiences as I took my first steps into college. Like Mae I reached a point in my Junior year where I came perilously close to dropping out of School entirely. This game means so much to me, and nothing is probably ever going to change that.

Mass Effect: Andromeda

While this game was universally panned by critics and social media… I loved it and will be forever saddened by the fact we wont see more of this setting. This is the game that YouTube killed because of some pretty bad issues in the early release candidate that were more or less fixed in the first patch. However by that time all of the damage had been done and all of the demo real of horrific facial contortions was shot giving it an endless stream of memetic images. I liked what this game did to Mass Effect by opening it up and bringing us to an entirely new galaxy with its own issues, while at the same time providing hints of the conflicts from the original game that ultimately lead to the splintering of the Andromeda project. I want to see more of this setting and I am hoping at some point EA allows Bioware to revisit it.

Destiny 2

I love Destiny as a franchise, and while I would have greatly preferred that Destiny 2 didn’t exist from the standpoint of that I would have rather seen the first game transition to the PC and get the necessary upgrades it required, I was okay with the reset because it meant I could finally play the game on my platform of choice. Destiny 2 had a rocky road but today we are experiencing a renaissance of some of the best content that has ever existed in a game of this sort. All of that ground work comes back to the transition from the first game to the sequel and the subtle changes that were made to the way the game functioned. It has been an interesting ride but one that began back in 2017, and for that it will always deserve a space on these sort of lists.

Horizon Zero Dawn

Horizon Zero Dawn was easily my game of the year for 2017, and would be a heavy contender if I was trying to make a game of the decade. I love the setting and how it takes the post apocalyptic genre into some very new and interesting directions. I love Aloy the protagonist because she represents a new kind of character that we really haven’t seen much of to this point. I am absolutely hungry for more of this series and I fully expect to see a new game in this sequence release as a launch title for the PlayStation 5. I would love to see this release simultaneously on the PlayStation and the PC at the same time, but I somehow doubt that is actually going to ever be a thing. If you have yet to play this… it is worth the purchase of a console just for this game alone.

Games of the Decade: 2016

December 24, 2019 by Belghast

We continue this morning towards the trajectory of recounting the games that were especially important to me over the last decade. Yesterday I stated that I had been trying to avoid talking about expansions and DLC… and now this morning I am going to break that guideline and include an expansion. I guess that is the good thing about this being a very personal list and not some attempt at a “greatest ever” concept, because I can make the rules as malleable as I like. All of these games feel very fresh in my memory as though I could have played them yesterday.

Doom (2016)

I somewhat hate that they titled this game the same as the game that came out in the 90s… because it forever means that we are going to be stuck putting a year in parenthesis behind it. However on another level it absolutely makes sense. This game is effectively a re-imagining of the original game and bringing it up to modern fidelity. It feels like a game that is a throwback to an older era of visceral shooters that were fast paced and twitchy. It also adapts the style of the game to include much needed breaks in the action allowing you to catch your breath and collect any power-ups that might be laying around before charging head first into another furious wave of combat. This was one of the things I loved about the Painkiller series, and it is nice seeing the originator cherry picking some of the best features of those who ultimately copied it.

Final Fantasy XV

I will admit when I first saw the concept of this game I viewed it with some serious side-eye. I was not sure how I would feel about what looked to be a boy band on a road trip. The end result however is charming as hell and one of the most unexpectedly touching games I played during this year. I was not sure what the future of Final Fantasy would be, but I never quite expected an ode to Route 66 roadside towns. Having lived my entire life near the “mother road”, there is so much of this game that resonates with me and they somehow managed to capture so many aspects of it perfect… albeit filtered through a Japanese lens. What I found the most compelling however was the combat and how it still very much felt like a Final Fantasy game while remaining fully action based. I need to spend some time and finish this game up and play through all of the side content that I missed.

The Division is a rollercoaster of emotions and feelings, not all of which are positive. I latched onto this game hard when it came out and pretty much dedicated every waking moment to exploring it. The narrative it presented was infectious and I gobbled up every bit of lore I could get my hands on about how exactly the fall happened. I personally found it to have some pacing issues as you got higher in level, and not having a stable group was a major detriment to my long term stability in the title. Soloing the content felt amazing at first but eventually became way more challenging since I am not naturally drawn to cover shooters. I kept wanting to try and play this like my beloved Destiny, with a run and gun nature… but was thoroughly punished for it. Regardless of all of this it still carved out a very important place in this very packed year of games and deserves its space on the list.

This is the year that Pokemon Go became a phenomena and people absolutely lost their shit. This also represents the very first time that a mobile game mattered to me. Up until this point I had downloaded and installed very few games on my mobile phone. The interface never felt compelling to me and it always seemed like a worse version of a game genre on either a hand held or console. Pokemon Go was an entirely new type of game-play that only worked on mobile connected devices, and I took wandered outside of my house at night looking for the illusive creatures. The biggest problem I have had with the game is that if you are in Rural areas or the Suburbs, your game-play experience is not amazing. You have to go places to be able to play, because still to this day I can go for a walk around my neighborhood and only encounter a half dozen critters. whereas if I do the same thing in the downtown Tulsa are I work I am constantly coming across new and interesting things. It has earned its place on my list because I still to this day keep popping it open when I am in a new place to see what I might encounter.

World of Warcraft: Legion

Up until 2016, had you asked me what my favorite World of Warcraft expansion was, I would have predictably said Wrath of the Lich King. In many ways I considered that to be the pinnacle of the WoW experience and everything since that point has more or less been a downhill slide with occasional plateaus. Legion was an expansion that I didn’t expect much from because quite honestly it seemed like a bunch of elements left on the cutting room floor from other expansion ideas. However what it wound up being was a complete and total revitalization for World of Warcraft that I greatly miss. Battle for Azeroth has been a disappointment in every possible way, and I think that has been all the more apparent because of the unexpected greatness that was this expansion. My hope is that Shadowlands brings us back to this era of the game and I can wholeheartedly love it again.

Games of the Decade: 2014

December 19, 2019 by Belghast

This evening I am going to go see Star Wars Rise of Skywalker, and I am sure tomorrow I will be posting my thoughts about it. However this morning I am going to continue our journey down memory lane as I talk about the games that were important to me over the last decade. Each time I think I am walking into a slow year… I sift through the titles that released and keep finding things that were extremely important to me. Let’s get started.

Elder Scrolls Online

I am not sure if there are words to express how important this title is to me. I could have in theory included this game on 2013, because it also played heavily into that year for me as I began testing it in February. I’m a member of the Psijic Order, the original team of testers that stayed with the game as it progressed through various phases and I am super proud to have stomped a bunch of bugs… or at least reported them prolifically. This game mattered me to not only because it is Elder Scrolls a setting that I adore, but also that one of my good friends worked on it. While this didn’t turn out to be the “WoW Killer” like I had hoped, it is a game that I keep revisiting to spend time wandering through its amazing storyline. In fact it seems like it might be time to dust off my characters and pay another visit over the holidays.

Transistor

This game was the game that more or less inspired the AggroChat game club concept. It was a title that spontaneously we all happened to be playing at exactly the same time, and then as a result we recorded what felt like three full shows worth of discussion as we dug deep into the title and our feelings about it. We tried to make this function artificially as we constructed the concept of the Game Club, but it never felt quite as fresh or in the moment because there was always a time when more than one of us were never really that into the chosen title. Supergiant Games is a phenomenal studio and I am willing to play pretty much everything they put out. Transistor was this fluid fusion of music, story and interesting ARPG gameplay that created a total package that we all kept returning to over and over. Collectively we deemed this to be the game of 2014, and it still holds up. I would have loved to have played this on the Switch as it is now my modern platform for this type of game.

Wolfenstein: The New Order

I love Wolfenstein as a franchise and I have been a huge fan since I first got my hands on the original Apogee title from a shareware disk sold by the local bookstore. I obsessed with the game and editing new levels for it, and then as each new game has released I have spent time playing it. After Return to Castle Wolfenstein the quality of the games fell off significantly, so I was completely excited to see a brand new game being worked on by Machine Games a Zenimax studio. This game is both a sequel and a re-imagining of the entire experience and I loved every moment of it. The screenshot is from one of my favorite sequences where you are scaling the side of the eponymous Castle Wolfenstein, but the images never quite do it justice. There were so many really cool big set pieces in the game, and it wove with it a really interesting storyline that provided the action I craved and the character development that Kodra craved. It is a magical time when a game is planted firmly in both of our wheelhouses.

Divinity: Original Sin

This game is going on the list for a few reasons, but not because I necessarily played it over and over and managed to find deep revelations in it. The first reason why it is on the list is because it presents something that has never really existed in my memory before this game, a two player classic PC role-playing game experience. You can start the game as either one character with a swappable NPC, or you can have two different players controlling each character that is on screen and as a result end up having competing goals and objectives. The other reason why it deserves to be on the list is the sheer depth that this game has. You will go insane trying to track down every single thread and quite honestly this paralysis lead me to not get terribly far in the game as a whole. When I encountered the first town I effectively spent all of my time doing what seemed to be a near endless number of side quests and completely tilting my way out of the main story. I want to revisit this game but set some guidelines about what sorts of quests I am willing to partake in.

Destiny

Destiny is the reason why I bought a Playstation 4. It was the single game that was willing to sell me on purchasing a console and I did so more or less to play in the Alpha that was exclusive to that platform. I saw in this game so much promise that I absolutely wanted to be in. However the initial game-play experience was a little lacking for me and I bounced out of it only to return when Taken King released. From that point forward however there has never been a time when I have not at least been playing Destiny a little bit, and I never quite realized just how much this franchise would come to dominate my game time. I love everything about this world and its rich lore… and the subtle mechanical differences between each weapon that make them all feel so unique to me. I view Destiny and Destiny 2 as a continuum and together they are probably my favorite game of this decade.

Where Bel Was Mentally in 2014

It was a really interesting year because it marked the birth of our weekly podcast AggroChat. It also marks the year that I officially transitioned into management or at least was an official supervisor. Diablo 3 Reaper of Souls also dominated my play time, but since I had already talked about it in 2012 I figured that was probably enough of that. It was a pretty good year and considering we record AggroChat 280 this weekend, we set up a firm foundation that seems to still be working.

Cookies for Vance

December 18, 2019 by Belghast

The dawning event is live and once again we are baking cookies for the various NPCs that can be found in Destiny 2. This was a really fun event last year and was worth a mountain of experience. This time around it seems as though we can keep doing bounties indefinitely as Eva once again has the ability for us to buy more bounties. I didn’t get time to play nearly as much as I would have liked last night because we had holiday errands to run, but I did manage to knock out the first few quests and unlock both the chase weapon and the first form of the sparrow. Something of note… the game seemingly remembers all of the packaged you delivered last year and as a result I already had the “deliver packages” requirements finished.

Last year I posted a long list of all of the ingredients, and these are largely still valid. However I am going to copy and paste from that original post to keep them concise. Essentially every recipe requires three components, a green item that you get by killing specific types of mobs, a blue item that you get from specific kinds of kills, and then dawning essence which drops from pretty much everything while the event is going on. You get 5 for example from completing a Heroic Public event, a few from opening chests etc. you are going to need 15 to craft anything until you can “masterwork” the oven… which last year was unlocked by crafting one each of all of the packages if I am remembering correctly.

Green Items – Based on Mob

Cabal Oil – Kill any Cabal Enemies
Chitin Powder – Kill any Hive Enemies
Dark Ether Cane – Kill any Scorn Enemies
Ether Cane – Kill any Fallen Enemies
Taken Butter – Kill any Taken Enemies
Vex Milk – Kill any Vex Enemies

Blue Items – Based on Kill/Damage Type

Bullet Spray – Kills made with “Machine Gun” type weapons – Auto Rifle/SMG/HMG
Delicious Explosions – Explosive kills aka Class Grenades/Rocket Launcher/Grenade Launcher
Electric Flavor – Arc Damage based Kills
Flash of Inspiration – A kill that generates an Orb of Light – Supers or Masterworks
Impossible Heat – Solar Damage based Kills
Null Taste – Void Damage based Kills
Perfect Taste – Precision Damage Kills – aka Headshots
Personal Touch – Melee Based Kills or Melee Abilities like Thrown Weapons
Sharp Flavor – Sword Kills… not sure if Hunter Knives can proc or not
Finishing Touch – kills while using a Finishing move
Balanced Flavors – kills with marksman weapon types so Bow, Scout and Sniper
Pinch of Light – drops rarely while generating Orbs of Light, appears to not drop from Masterworks
Multifaceted Flavors – occasionally happens when registering a multi-kill on any mob type
Superb Flavor – drops from super kills against any mob type

The Recipe List

Each recipe requires 15 Dawning Essence for the base oven and I believe 10 once you can Masterwork it.

Alkane Dragee Cookies (Sloane – Titan) – Chitin Powder and Bullet Spray
Burnt Edge Transits (Master Rahool – Tower) – Any two ingredients other than those of the recipes below aka the failure state item
Candy Dead Ghosts (The Spider – Tangled Shore ) – Dark Ether Cane and Flash of Inspiration
Chocolate Ship Cookies (Amanda Holliday – Tower) – Cabal Oil and Null Taste
Dark Chocolate Motes (The Drifter – Tower Annex) – Taken Butter and Null Taste
Eliksni Birdseed (Hawthorne – Tower) – Ether Cane and Personal Touch
Gentleman’s Shortbread (Devrim Kay – EDZ) – Ether Cane and Perfect Taste
Gjallardoodles (Zavala – Tower) – Ether Cane and Delicious Explosion – This was a freebie though and the mats Eva gives you
Ill-Fortune Cookies (Petra Venj – Dreaming City) – Dark Ether Cane and Impossible Heat
Infinite Forest Cake (Failsafe – Nessus) – Vex Milk and Impossible Heat
Javelin Mooncake (Ana Bray – Mars) – Chitin Powder and Sharp Flavor
Radiolarian Pudding (Asher Mir – Io) – Vex Milk and Electric Flavor
Strange Cookies (Xur – Varies Weekly) – Taken Butter and Electric Flavor
Telemetry Tapioca (Banshee-44 – Tower) – Vex Milk and Bullet Spray
Traveler Donut Holes (Ikora Rey – Tower) – Cabal Oil and Flash of Inspiration
Vanilla Blades (Lord Shaxx – Tower) – Cabal Oil and Sharp Flavor
Fractal Rolls (Brother Vance – Mercury) – Vex Milk and Pinch of Light
Ascendant Oatmeal Raisin Cookie (Eris Morn – Moon) – Chitin Powder and Finishing Touch
Hackberry Tart (Benedict 99-40 – Tower Annex) – Cabal Oil and Multifaceted Flavors
Hot Crossfire Buns (Ada-1 – Tower Annex) – Ether Cane and Balanced Flavors
Fried Sha-dough (Visage of Calus – Triumph Hall?) – Dark Ether Cane and Superb Flavor
Lavender Ribbon Cookies (Saint-14 – Sundail?) – Vex Milk and Personal Touch
Thousand-Layer Cookie (Riven – Dreaming City?) – Taken Butter and Delicious Explosion

Having not made all of these recipes yet, there are a few I am not quite certain about how to deliver them. Namely Visage of Calus, Saint-14 and Riven… and for those I have given my guess. But also indicated that it is a guess by slapping a ? at the end.

The chase weapon I got pretty quickly after doing an initial series of turn ins. It looks and feels like a slightly modified Antiope-D. The slightly faster rate of fire makes it feel a little more jumpy than the Antiope, but all it all it is a reasonable option for a primary slot submachinegun. More than likely I will keep using Exit Strategy in this slot when I have need for a Kinetic submac, but this is a reasonable option and is kinda cool looking if gold and blue is your thing. There is an ornament on the store that makes it look really nice, but has the standard 700 silver pricetag attached to it.

I am a much bigger fan of the vehicle this year. The sleigh was somewhat entertaining… but the sound effects associated with each time you boosted got on my nerves. I’ve not had a chance to actually use this one but it seems like it is more standard fare with each unlock just adding an additional perk as opposed to the gimmicks like glimmer explosions. It is more or less a snow mobile and I am fine with this.

My hope is tonight to spend more time working on both the Saint-14 quest and baking more cookies. I’ve already gotten 3 levels however since starting the event, so I feel like it is a good time to grind things up. What were your thoughts about dawning so far? I like that the event took the packages delivered last year into account for rewards. I am bummed that SRL the Sparrow Racing League did not make another appearance. That is the one event from Destiny 1 that I miss the most, and I am hoping that someday they bring it back as an actual game mode.