Follow the Shiny Bauble

Too Many Things

So for whatever reason this weekend has conspired to have a bajillion competing things happening at once it seems.  Firstly this weekend is like the prep weekend for the conference that I will be taking off from work next week to help my wife with.  Three years ago her and several of her twitter buddies decided to make a conference appear out of thin air, and this year it is being hosted here in the Tulsa metro.  As a result I am being a dutiful husband and helping out however I can.  That means today I will be moving things and testing out the various technology in each of the classrooms that will eventually host random speakers.

Right now my only fear is that the systems are designed to be hooked up to a VGA out and 3.5 mm jack.  Some of the newer laptops only actually have HDMI out…  especially the Mac laptops.  So here is hoping those people bring their own hookups because otherwise we might be pantomiming some of the power point presentations.  Needless to say my entire day today will be spent running around like a madman trying to get things set up as much as we can.  The problem is there are lots of other things going on this weekend.  Honestly I think game companies do this shit on purpose…  where they should time their events to be on opposite weekends as a thank you to the fans.

Destiny Beta

Destiny Beta_20140719081821 This weekend is the return of Destiny to my PS4.  I wish I could embed some video from my play sessions to date, but alas the Hitbox export to Youtube is still on the fritz and I have not figured out how to embed videos directly.  But if you are so inclined you can check out the first and second videos.  At some point this weekend I want to record some more footage in the hopes that someday I can upload it somewhere meaningful.  The second video is especially hilarious because I did not realize that it was picking up teamspeak while I recorded as well as my PS4 chat.  However once again it seems like the PS4 only picks up MY side of the conversation even though I am picking it up from an external capture card.  I really wish I knew a way to hang out on teamspeak, but have my voice from teamspeak get transferred as mic input to PS4 party chat.  I have some ideas but it involves a massive rube goldbergian effort.

Destiny Beta_20140719082406 I have to say I still very much love this game, and compared to the Alpha weekend… it seems extremely polished now.  A lot of the issues with voice acting are gone and the end product feels really good.  Similarly I seem to get items that are way over my level a lot less, so I am actually able to use and equip the various ingrams I find.  Ingrams for un-initiative are basically like unidentified loot from Diablo or similar games.  You get them while out in the field and you have to take them back to town… or in this case Tower to have a scribe identify them for you.  Most of the time the items you get are way better than anything you have access at that level, and they often have the side effect of “leveling up”.  When an item reaches a certain point they unlock special abilities that you can purchase on the item.  I have a pair of gloves for example that greatly increases the striking power of my grenades.

Destiny Beta_20140719082201 Everything about this game is awesome if you really want to get down to it.  You take a really good shooter, probably one of the best I have played in years and wrap it in a warm blanket of MMO style progression… and you have a game that is right in my wheelhouse.  My only question is just how many of the traditional Call of Duty/Battlefield crowd will be jumping ship.  I really don’t feel like the game is for that demographic, but instead for the players that absolutely love Borderlands 2.  While the loot doesn’t drop quite as frequently as it does in BL2, all of the leveling options feel really good.  The one thing I wished from BL2 was that I would have a persistent character that existed on the server, instead of one that existed in my local save game, with all of the things that come along with that.  Destiny gives me that, and I really think we are looking at the new model for MMO gaming.  Player Interaction light, action oriented co-operative and competitive environments.  That is not to say that grouping is not key in Destiny, but it is on a scale that is much more casual friendly in that you only need two other people to really tackle the most intense of situations.

Destiny Beta_20140719081907 Once again I am playing a Titan, because it fits my personality.  I want to be able to rush in, gun things down and throw them the hell back with a shockwave.  I don’t remember the name of the attack but you get it around level 5 or 6 and it is executed by pressing left and right shoulder buttons at the same time.  There are few more satisfying things in a game than jumping up in the air and watching everything fly away from you in brilliant slow motion ragdoll physics.  This class makes me feel powerful and mighty, and about as subtle as a nuke.  All of which fit me perfectly in how I like to play.  Kodra was playing through Wolfenstein last night… and to make a point Tam asked if I could remember what the crouch button was.  Kodra immediately chimed in “you mean the most important button?” and I was like “Nope! I have no clue what crouch is… I just baited the enemies to come attack me in the open and gunned them down.”  Subtlety feels like a complete waste of time when you could just kill every last thing that moves.

An Old Friend

ffxiv 2014-07-19 08-45-57-846 Another thing going on this weekend that is fighting for my attention is that they are having a free weekend for Final Fantasy XIV ARR.  For whatever reason lately I have been missing the game, and I feel like it is one of those games that I parted on good terms with.  I simply ran out of things that I wanted to do.  Right now the biggest problem I have with the game is that the people I know that are still playing it… are spread out in various tiny puddles scattered across a long list of servers.  When I first connected to the game it had me choose my Data Center, which temporarily gave me some hope that they had done something to consolidate the long list.  Apparently that is not the case and each server is still its own little island as far as grouping and guilding, but instead the Data Centers serve the purpose of the Battle Groups in World of Warcraft.  They are essentially your pool of players for doing anything that requires a group.

ffxiv 2014-07-19 08-46-45-762 The game is just as enjoyable as it ever was.  The hardest thing so far was remembering where the hell I kept my abilities and getting my hotbar back in order.  I think I got most everything to a place where my fingers can return to muscle memory for hitting.  I am sure a few things are out of place but the key combos that I hit constantly are all in the right places.  The main thing I did last night was participate in a hunt, which is a kind of daily event that appeared in a patch while I was out.  Basically each day you got to a hunt NPC and they give you this card… which is a physical item in your inventory with a bunch of wanted posters for the day.  These involve wandering around the world and killing specific mobs that appear in specific places.  The first three were pretty easy, and then the tedium set in for the last two.  Apparently these mobs were part of rarely occurring FATEs so I had to just sit around waiting for it to spawn.  For the most part it wasn’t too bad except one of them occurred in a level 3 area…  so I couldn’t even work on leveling my chocobo while I waited.  I am not sure if there is enough here to keep me for very long, but I am enjoying playing for the time being.

The Path Not Taken

archeage 2014-05-08 22-34-42-478 Another big thing happening this weekend is the beginning of ArcheAge closed beta.  Up until this point there were only two ways to get into Alpha testing.  Either you had to know someone like I did, or plunk down your $150 and buy the most expensive founders pack.  This weekends the floodgates have opened letting everyone in that has bought even the cheapest of founders packs.  The problem is I feel like I have been burned by my experiences in Alpha.  The community was so heinous and toxic that I just don’t want to have anything to do with it.  At this point Glyph is running in the background right now downloading the 21 gig patch that is needed to get it up and running in closed beta, but that said I am not sure if I will play it much.  There are a lot of problems I have with the game, not all of which can be improved.

I still have a fundamental problem with the character design.  While I managed to find one I could live with, I am still not terribly happy with it and the lack of “real” beards in most Korean games.  I do want to give it a try to see if letting in all of the closed beta players may have fixed some of the problems with the community.  One of two things is going to happen… either the super toxic voices are going to be drowned out in the sea of not so horrible…  or they will adapt to the “young eating” culture that is the Alpha game.  I know Trion is working hard on trying to find ways to moderate the toxicity, but I am just not sure if it will be enough for me.  At the end of the day I am a huge carebear and want to spend my time collaborating with other players… and not competing with them.

Follow the Shiny Bauble

The thing that frustrates me the most about this weekend and weekends like it when it seems like every single company is fighting to steer the hype train, is that it trains us to be flighty.  I feel like what is happening right now is that each of these companies is trying to fight for front page presence against any news that might be coming out of QuakeCon.  The problem is…  your player base is nowhere near as loyal as you might want them to be.  By constantly dangling shiny baubles in front of our faces… all it really does is train us to constantly be on the look out for the next shiny bauble.  So many weeks when it comes to gaming I feel like the James Woods character from Family Guy “Oooh a piece of candy”.  Ultimately I feel like the constant vying for our attention is only serving to make us less interested in staying any one place for terribly long.

Look at me for example… I already play a long list of games with no real signs of landing in any one place for terribly long.  This weekend I am looking at playing three more games that I was not really playing before.  But I didn’t start out this way, because I played Everquest for 3 years, Dark Age of Camelot for 3 years, and then World of Warcraft for a solid 7 years before the launch of Rift and the beginning of my rampant nomad phase.  Now I just follow whatever happens to suit my mood, and as a result I am popping between games on a weekly basis.  I feel like in part I was trained to be this way by the game industry constantly dangling an every tastier steak in front of me.  So I feel like stacking all of these events on the same weekend is just the highly of how frenetic things have gotten.  I decided long ago that life was too short to be playing something I was not enjoying, so I doubt I will be changing my nomadic ways any time soon…  but folks have to stop and thing that the constant fight over the hype cycle is only serving to make more people nomadic in the process.

#Destiny #FFXIV #ArcheAge

Pairing Down

The Struggle

One of the biggest challenges about this whole “blog every day” concept is that some mornings there is just nothing at all in my head to talk about.  When I am sick like I was yesterday, I tend to turtle and pull my head up inside my shell, disconnecting me from the interwebs and all of you fine people.  Unfortunately when my biggest source of inspiration is gone, I can get a little bit of writers block.  It is mornings like this that I feel outline the importance of just allowing yourself to write whatever happens to pop into your head.  It might not be epic and exciting, but it is staying true to the mission as a whole.  Unfortunately we are well based the NBI 2014 initiative, otherwise I would spin this into some sort of an inspirational post about struggling through.

This is not a slight in any way to the previous NBI groups, but I have been really impressed with just how tenacious the Class of 2014 has been.  Generally speaking there is a significant drop off the month after the initiative as folks take a massive breather after having survived being the focus of so many folks attention.  When the spotlight fades a bit, it is rough to keep posting when you inevitably notice fewer people are reading.  However this group either is blissfully oblivious to the existence of blog statistics, or they really are writing for themselves, because they seem to still be going strong.  A few of the “newbies” are among the most prolific posters in my blog reader, and I am amped to still see them enjoying the whole experience.

Pairing Down

WoWScrnShot_061314_062051Right now I have come to realize that I am playing entirely too many MMOs to feel like I am making any significant progress in any of them.  Over the last two months I’ve played Warlords of Draenor, Rift, ArcheAge, Wildstar, Star Wars the Old Republic, Elder Scrolls Online, Defiance, Everquest II, Landmark, The Secret World, Diablo 3, Lego Minifigures Online and Trove.  While I embrace the whole polygamerous thing, I think even for me this is a bit too much especially when you throw in League of Legends and Heroes of the Storm on top of those… and occasionally some Hex and Hearthstone.  Mostly I think I need to drop some of the games that feel similar to me from the rotation, or at least games that scratch the same itch.

rift 2014-02-13 06-28-10-40 I feel like I have to keep testing Warlords of Draenor in part out of remembrance for River, and him being so damned excited to have gotten into the alpha process.  While I won’t be playing with the same wide eyed amusement that he would have, I am trying my best to enjoy the experience in his honor.  However I can safely say that I will not be playing the actual live World of Warcraft anytime in the near future.  I think maybe WoW has run its course with me for awhile, and Wildstar has stepped in to take its place in my heart without me really wanting it to.  Wildstar really is a much better version of WoW, and I am just embracing that fact.  As a result Rift and SWTOR are also losing out, because to me they still fill the same “wow-like” niche.  As a result I won’t be renewing my patron account in Rift.

The Non-WoW Itch

ARCHEAGE 2014-05-08 20-13-50-11It was fun trying to get into Defiance, but the problem is I got into the Destiny alpha… and it was pretty much everything I had hoped Defiance would be.  So I won’t be spending much more time trying to get into that game when I know there is something I will like much better coming later this year.  ArcheAge I want to like, but it has without a doubt the worst community of griefers I have experienced anywhere.  So unless Trion comes out and announces there will be a co-op server… it is pretty much a nonstarter for me and no sense really spending much more time on it.  Landmark on the other hand has an amazing community, but right now there just isn’t much game there for me to play.  They have built this amazing crafting sandbox, but without combat it isn’t all that interesting to me past the initial build phase.  They have added caves so I figure at some point I will poke  my head back in, but exploration without combat just sounds boring to me.  I’ve officially allowed my claim to be repossessed at this point.

EverQuest2 2013-10-02 06-37-39-56 I still have a special place in my heart for Everquest II, and I can’t say I won’t return to it in the future… but for now I think there are just too many other options.  EQ2 was one of those games where I hated the combat system but loved everything else about it.  Wildstar with its systems within systems is really filling the niche that EQ2 always did, which might be why it is feeling so sticky considering it is replacing both EQ2 and WoW for me.  The Secret World is one of those games I love to remember fondly, but never seem to have a desire to log into on a regular basis.  I know there is a bunch of storyline that I have yet to participate in, and I keep thinking that some weekend I will play through all of it.  That weekend just has yet to arrive, and lately the only time I seem to log in is when I get new hardware and want to test how it performs.

The Also Rans

Diablo III 2014-03-06 22-07-06-52 Diablo 3 is enjoyable, and at some point I would really like to get a crusader to 70…  hell I would like to get my monk to 70.  I just struggle to find any drive to play it when my own personal internet zeitgeist… aka the folks I hang out on voice chat nightly, are not also playing it.  It was really fun up until the release of Elder Scrolls Online and then boom we all vacated the premises.  For the time being I am pretty much crossing it off my list until there is another upwelling of desire among my friends to play it.  Trove is similarly really fun, but without a lot of people that I know playing it on a regular basis I have fallen back out of love with it.  I will likely continue to poke my head into the game irregularly but when I do play… so much has changed that the experience feels very off-putting.  The game is in a pretty much constant state of flux, which is awesome if you are devoted to this game, but confusing if you are a “sometimes” player like me. Play 2014-03-14 10-12-29-25 League of Legends will be a permanent fixture in my gaming rotation so long as I have friends who are devoted to playing it.  I don’t necessarily love the game, but I enjoy playing with my friends.  I personally like Heroes of the Storm so much better, but the problem is with it being in a limited release “technical alpha” state there just are not enough people around regularly to play with.  The MOBA genre is really only fun for me if I am playing with a group of friends, and in this scenario League wins out every time.  That is not to say that I won’t keep poking my head into Heroes especially as they add new waves of players.  As far as Hearthstone and Hex…  I am back playing Magic the Gathering in real life with friends at lunch time…  so the draw of these games is minimal right now.

Those Who Made the Cut

WildStar64 2014-06-20 22-30-01-908 So after spending all of this time culling games for this or that reason, I figure I should talk about the games I am deciding to keep in the rotation.  Warlords of Draenor I am actually enjoying when I do manage to get in and play it.  So yes I am partially doing it in honor of River, and his desire to be in the Alpha, but there is something charming about the new content.  I don’t feel like it will be enough to keep me in WoW, but for the time being I am enjoying it while I can.  Wildstar has pretty much filled the corner of my heart that desire to play a theme park MMO, and it really is the most glorious theme park of experiences once you give yourself over to it.  I feel like I have barely scratched the surface on what it has to offer, and I am intrigued at the schedule they have put out before us.  I really like that they are choosing to put in “hardmode” single and small group content before augmenting the raid game.  That says a lot that they understand that they need to focus on both going forward to keep players.

eso 2014-02-23 12-41-25-63 I still feel like I have so much more that I want to do in Elder Scrolls Online.  I want to finish the Aldmeri Dominion content and see the Ebonheart Content, as well as spend time exploring Craglorn.  I love this game even though I am not playing it much, and I can’t see dropping it from the rotation anytime soon.  I realize that not many players feel the same way about the game as I do, but really for me it is like the best possible version of Skyrim.  I have been out so long at this point that I feel like I am going to be extremely rusty.  There game has problems, namely it is awkward as hell to do anything as a group other than Cyrodil.  They really need to fix this, and I hope that the good folks at Zenimax are looking into things like mentoring.  Right now it is a really awesome single player experience, but gets cludgy when you start adding in more people.  That said it still does have amazing dungeon design, and there are so many of them that I have yet to experience.

LMO 2014-06-23 06-41-14-037 Last but not least is a game that has come in and taken my heart by storm.  Lego Minifigures Online is absolutely adorable and I love everything about this game.  Last night this was the only thing I actually played, and grouped up with Rae she managed to catch me up almost to her level in experience.  Right now we have a vastly different set of mini figures, and it is really enjoyable to group together.  We have both opted to get memberships, and the pocket dungeons are awesome… some of them ending up extremely challenging like the Dragon’s Lair dungeon with I think five different boss fights in it.  I’ve already gotten more than my moneys worth of enjoyment out of it, so this is definitely going to be in my weekly rotation for a long while.  It basically scratches the itch that Diablo 3 did, and cashes in on my absolute love of all things Lego.

So there you have it, going forward I am mostly going to be focused on Wildstar, Elder Scrolls Online and Lego Minifigures Online.  I of course reserve the right to change my mind and undo all of these in the blink of an eye.  That said I do have a ton of single player games that I want to play through, and both the PS3 and PS4 ready to stream content.  I spent a good chunk of the weekend playing Assassin’s Creed 4 for example… and I am absolutely horrible at it, but enjoying myself quite a bit.  As far as online games, I am going to try and limit myself to just these games above for the time being.  I know in September I will be digging into Destiny and playing that online with friends quite a bit, but it doesn’t directly conflict with the types of games I chose above.  Maybe with this abbreviated list, I won’t constantly feel overwhelmed when I sit down at night and try and figure what exactly I am going to do.`

Eternal Youth

Something in the air

Struggling to exist a bit this morning.  Yesterday evening we had a series of storms and something blew in with them that is pissing my asthma off.  So at the moment I am taking a breathing treatment while doing this mornings post.  It sucks when my lungs conspire against me, but after almost four decades of this you get used to it.  That seems weird to type that out, but I dinged 38 last week… and as my wife puts it I am officially in my “late” thirties now.  I don’t really feel any older most of the time, but there are moments when it catches up with me…  like when I am talking to a teenager and I realize they were not alive when I graduated high school.

Age is one of those things that sneaks up on you.  You assume everyone has the same experiences you had until you try and make a cultural reference that only really works well for folks born in the same decade as you.  Rae that cohosts the podcast with me is literally a full decade younger than me, and I am constantly reminded of the gulf of time between us.  Being a teacher my wife occasionally brings home of the the famous Mindset Lists for the incoming class of high schoolers.  Nothing is guaranteed to make you feel old like reading through one of those, and seeing it peppered with events you think are “recent” history.

Eternal Youth

LMO 2014-06-22 09-38-31-713 So in contrast when I find something that makes me feel eternally youthful, I latch onto it with both hands.  I think that is one of the things I love most about Lego’s, they bring me back to an earlier time when I was sitting in the floor building 1980s era insane space ships.  It is awesome to see that Lego Minifigures Online captures this optimism and bottles it into a Diablo like form.  I spent a good chunk of the weekend playing and I have to say I find it both adorable and infectious.  The gameplay is simple, but at the same time nuanced when you add in the way the different characters behave in the setting.  Right now I have settled on a team of the Roman Soldier, Forest Maiden and oddly enough the Waiter.

LMO 2014-06-22 09-26-01-916 I have to admit, when I got a pack of minifigures to drop and I pulled the Waiter from it…  I was more than a little disappointed.  I had hoped for the Cyclops or the Knight… or even the Space Invader…  but got a guy in a suit with a wine bottle.  The awesome thing about the waiter is he exactly represents the ludicrousness of this game.  Who would have thought that a waiter would be a badass combat character.  All characters come in one of three basic types:  Defender, Striker and Builder.  Defenders have more survival at the cost of slightly weaker attacks.  Strikers have extremely powerful offense at the loss of survival.  Builders are odd things, because they can complete building objectives extremely quickly, but otherwise are pretty useless.  Essentially my lineup is a melee defender, ranged defender and a melee striker and it seems to be working pretty well.

LMO 2014-06-22 10-16-49-728 Over the weekend I decided to take the plunge and become a member, as there are quite a number of features paywalled.  Most importantly you cannot really complete any dungeons unless you are a member, and the world is scattered with these little offshoot areas full of treasure and minibosses…  aka exactly the sort of thing I love doing.  Additionally as a member you get a pack of minifigures a month as well as a batch of their cash shop currency.  For the most part the game uses a league like structure where instead of buying individual champions you buy packs that contain a random champion.  Here is where my only sticking point comes in.  If you purchase or win a pack… there is a chance of getting a minifigure you already own.  Instead of giving you back the diamonds for your purchase… they give you the other in game currency stars, like 1000 of them.  The problem is… that 1000 stars is in no way worth as much as the diamonds that went into purchasing.  Especially since as a member you have a massively increased rate of star drops.

Lego Minifigures

LMO 2014-06-23 06-41-23-422 That said I feel like this is a game where you could play it completely free if you so chose.  Essentially by the end of completing the introduction to the game you have four different minifigures.  The first three you choose upon creating your character, and are doled out your team through the series of a few quests.   The starter team I chose was the Roman Commander, Bee Girl and Fortune Teller, but there are three different sets you have to choose from and they are designed to be a “balanced” team with a defender, striker and a builder on them.   At the end of the tutorial you get a single random minifigure pack.  This is where I picked up my waiter, and while I was disappointed at first he has become one of my favorite characters to play.  So having four minifigures is a good start at playing the game, and I am sure you could complete almost all of the content with only these four.

LMO 2014-06-23 06-41-18-895 The only other barriers seem to be level based.  The big thing I have noticed since switching to being a member is that the drop rates in general are far better.  You get both a significantly larger amount of stars from breaking apart structures and diamonds from completing quests.  So this is going to make progression without payment significantly slower.  Honestly though I feel that is pretty much how it should be.  Free to play games have to make a profit somehow, and after watching Lego Universe crash and burn, I would love to see this one end up far more successful.  Funcom has made an extremely fun game, and it is the perfect… I want to play something, but I don’t want to think too hard game.  Seeing the Lego universe recreated flawlessly in online game form, is sure to be the source of hours of enjoyment.

#Lego #Minifigures #FreetoPlay

Rocket Powered Hoverboard

Baby’s First Diablo

LMO 2014-06-20 06-09-20-013 It is no real secret that I love Lego, as I sit in an office full of sets waiting to be built and have an army of minifigures decorating my cube at work.  So when I first heard that Funcom, the makers of my beloved Secret World were working on a brand new game revolving around the random minifigures bags that I already buy way too often…  I figured I would be throwing money at the screen.  A good friend of mine managed to get into the alpha and without saying much about it specifically she said it was extremely cute and charming.  That about sums it up perfectly…  oh and you might throw in adorable.  I love the whole “toy store come to life” vibe that you get while playing the first level.  You start off with one of three sets of minifigures, I ended up going for the roman soldier, because he is already one of the favorite minifigures I own.

I am not sure who exactly coined the phrase, but so far “Baby’s First Diablo” has stuck, and that is not to diminish anything about the game.  It feels very much like a diablo style version of the various “Lego” franchise branded video games.  You break up blocks to get resources and stars in this case instead of coins.  Then you use special “builder” type minifigures to construct objectives.  You can have three minifigures equipped at a time, and right now my team consists of the Roman Soldier that has a charge and a melee swing, the Fortune Teller who is one of those special builder types, and the Bee Girl that drops adorable honey bombs and attacks enemy legos with swarms of bee ranged attacks.

It seems like the game is going to use a model similar to league of legends in that you buy champions in the form of minifigures packs.  The only gotcha is that I assume they will be just as random as the actual in store variety is.  So if I had to guess you can probably end up with duplicates, but I have no clue at all how that will work.  Will you be able to trade your dupes with other players, or will they have some sort of a deconstruction ability to turn them into resources…  or are they just going to go with “smart random” in that you never have the chance of getting a minifigure you already have.  In that case it would mean you would simply need to buy 16 packs of each type and would eventually get the full set.  This is definitely going to be a game I watch as the open beta continues.

Rocket Powered Hoverboard

WildStar64 2014-06-20 06-18-05-408 Just like Griff Tannen in Back to the Future… my hoverboard’s got power.  Last night I dinged 25 and was finally able to claim both the preorder hoverboard and the deluxe edition hoverboard.  Surprisingly I think I like the deluxe edition quite a bit better.  Originally I upgraded to deluxe when I thought I would be sticking around for awhile, and I guess I am happy I did so.  On the chua it seems so much cooler looking than the original human preview picture did.  I guess the difference is that the preview shots didn’t really have actual in game lighting applied to them, so they made everything look that much more gold and gaudy.  In game it looks pretty cool and as short and fat as my chua is… the regular hoverboard just looks too small for him.

WildStar64 2014-06-20 06-42-26-568 So far moving out of Auroria has breathed new life into the game because I did not really understand at the time just how bored with that zone I was.  It’s weird because I absolutely loved Deredune but couldn’t be bothered to care about Auoria at all.  Now I am in something much more my style the traditional “snowy” zone.  For whatever reason I seem to have an affinity for the snow  zones in games be it Iron Pine Peaks or Winterspring… that usually ends up as my favorite leveling destination.  Additionally I’ve installed a number of mods that make following the quest chains a bit easier so I expect that I will stay on track a little better rather than endlessly chasing rabbit trails.  I am still firmly in the middle of the pack level wise, but there are several that are now into their 30s, so I keep feeling the need to “catch up”.

Battlefield Hardline

Game trailers are pretty much all lies, but even knowing that this one gave me hope that we might see an interesting shooter to play.  You have to understand that my ideal shooter is one of the Enemy Territory series games, where you have real “objectives” that have to be completed in order to progress the map.  Based on this footage and folks using the term objective based shooter… I had hopes that this might be a return to that gameplay style.  So I applied for the beta and got accepted to play it on the Playstation 4.  Within a few minutes of gameplay all of those hopes were dashed.  This game is pretty much exactly like every single Battlefield or Call of Duty game… except this time you get to play cops and robbers.  For some that will be a good thing, if you like Battlefield and Call of Duty…  but for me it is a pretty damning indictment.

The objectives in Hardline are basically “capture the flag” by another name.  Instead of creating a series of complicated objectives that the team has to work together to achieve, it simply creates temporary choke points where death-matching occurs.  On top of this… the game just does not feel like a next generation shooter.  Everything feels extremely low resolution as compared to say Destiny, in fact I wouldn’t even say those two games are anywhere near the same league as far as look and feel.  Everything about this game feels like a “B Team” effort, and I think that is pretty much what players have come to expect out of “off year” titles in the big shooter franchises.  Basically if you just want Battlefield 4 with a few changes, then you might enjoy it.  If you were like me and hoping for something more…  keep looking elsewhere.  After all Destiny is just around the corner.

#LegoMinifigures #Wildstar #Hoverboard #BattlefieldHardline