Action Shooter Archives - Page 7 of 11

Regularly Playing

March 7, 2025May 27, 2016 by Belghast

Yesterday I decided to start “truing up” my “Regularly Playing” section of my hot bar. This area has been through many changes throughout the years and the whole idea was just to let readers know what I am actually playing right now. It originally started as me simply i-framing in the information from Raptr… but since I don’t actually use that server or any other equivalent games tracker that isn’t going to work. I shift games quite often, and I wanted a way to indicate what games are currently “on tap”. So this shifted from “Now Playing” to “Frequently Playing” and eventually wound up with the verbiage of “Regularly Playing”. The goal now is to evaluate the list once a month and make adjustments to keep it “mostly true”. I realize I am finger quoting a lot of shit in this post, but the truth is I come home and log into whatever seems enjoyable unless I have a specific activity planned that night. Over time some stuff fades away and other games get added, so I thought as part of this process I would talk a bit about where I am currently in each game on the list, as well as a bit about any that I might have removed or didn’t quite make the cut.

Destiny: The Taken King

I am still just irrationally enthralled by this game, though over the last week I have not played quite so much because I am starting to get back into MMOs once more. This week has been all about Iron Banner, because I am trying my best to get my Hunter to Rank 5… in spite of not being here for the weekend due to travel plans. The major goal of the month was to hit 335 light and I have managed to do just that on the Titan, however I am still lagging on the Warlock and Hunter with the primary slot that they need the worst being literally any legendary quality artifact. I need to sort out what I can do to get one of those because I have plenty of infusion fodder to feed into an artifact… they just have 320 blues currently equipped. The only real frustration that I have with Destiny right now is that Bungie is apparently shit at math. We were told that several activities would drop an item equal to your current light level of better. However now sitting at 335, there are still a truly silly number of activities that drop 334 items. From Challenge of Elders turn-ins last night I got both a 334 weapon and 334 arms, and from an exotic engram I got a 334 secondary… all while showing up in game as 335 light. This is pretty maddening since 334 is useful for infusion if you are desperate but what you want to see is 335s so you can bring up ALL of your gear to that light level. Regardless I am still loving the game and I am hoping that the next big patch will address this problem. Also hoping that when I get back from my trip I can finish the push to Rank 5 because I am roughly halfway to Rank 4 at the moment.

Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward

This marks the second week of me being “back” at least as far as doing the Tuesday night raid content is involved. I am still very much in “catch up” mode, but I am enjoying myself. As far as downtime activities I have started the grind to get elemental crystals for the first Anima weapon, aka the Relic 2.0 or 3.0 depending upon how you are counting. I am loving being Lala-Bel once more and I guess whatever funk I was going through that was keeping me from playing MMOs has passed because I am enjoying myself again. I very much need to be doing a nightly Expert but that has yet to happen quite yet. After yesterdays post however I found a whole slew of people willing to be tagged and pulled in for expert running. Now I just need to get back from this weekend and get started on this proper. Also apologies ahead of time for the nightmares that will be induced by the creepy-assed Calcabrina dolls.

Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls

Season Six is very much winding down to a close, and I have managed to accomplish pretty much everything that I could have hoped for… at the very least I got my additional stash tab. I have friends who still have things to knock out to get theirs so I am very much in a help as needed mode. That said I am still poking my head into the game on a regular basis to farm for Menagerist Goblins…. something I have yet to actually see. The highlight of the season was something that I did not even realize was a thing until it dropped. I guess the cosmic wings are among the rarest item this time around.. because it is RNG on top of RNG on top of RNG. You have to get one of the rainbow goblins to show up… and then have to get it to drop the Whimsydale portal… and then have to get a specific mob to show up in there to get them. In any case pretty much any time I get a Whimsydale portal I holler at anyone who happens to be on to come along with me now just in case they drop again. I’ve made it way further this season than at any other time… the only thing I am not looking forward to is trying to merge my current seasonal bank into my non-seasonal bank once more.

Overwatch

This is the newest addition to the list and also the one I have spent the least time playing. This week was the official launch of Overwatch, and my friends list has been completely on fire about this game. I played it enough in beta to know that I liked it, and then ceased to play it any further waiting for launch. Now that launch is here however… I have all of these competing priorities. The game is really good and so far I have yet to find a champion that I don’t like… pending I give them a serious chance. I was largely diametrically opposed to D.Va largely because the mech looked like a killer whale mixed with a guardian mode veritech. However after getting the carbon fiber skin from a loot box… and giving her a proper try I found out that I really enjoyed it. The game is probably the best designed shooter I have played in a very long time. The thing that is going to keep me from really sinking my teeth in however… is it has no PVE/Exploration gameplay like Destiny. If I could have Destiny set in this universe with character progression and collecting awesome weapons… I would be completely hooked. This will likely always be a game relegated to the “once or twice a week” column for me largely because I am just not that competitive. Earning loot boxes is a cool reason to keep playing, but eventually there will come a point where I run out of things I care about that came come from lootboxes.

World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor

This is the backburneryist of backburner games for me right now. I’ve gotten in the habit of logging in daily and collecting my free money from the garrison… especially now that I put a massive dent in my finances and bought the Grand Expedition Yak. That said every now and then I do play one of the characters that I am still in the process of leveling. I have this grand idea that it would be fun to roll into Legion with a full list of level 100 characters, however I somehow doubt that is going to happen… much the way as it has never actually happened during any of the other expansions. However that said the alt of choice right now is my druid that I am slowly pushing up. In truth I am in a holding pattern until Legion and largely not paying a ton of attention to the game in the meantime.

Things Removed From List

Elder Scrolls Online

The truth is the MMO Funk hit and I never really returned to playing this regularly. I still very much want to, but it is going to need another lag in some other game for me to really sink my teeth into it. The game that exists today is amazing and they have done a really good job of keeping the content fresh. The biggest problem is I really don’t have anyone to play with over there on the North American server cluster. Now if I were playing on the EU side… I know lots of active and happy guilds. I would absolutely play with the Whitestar folks were that really a viable option.

Warframe

While initially interesting to me, this game just did not sink its teeth into me the way it did the rest of the AggroChat crew. There is just something that I don’t like about it… and I have tried to reason out what exactly it was. I still have an account and still have some cool stuff on it, so I might at a future date return to it, but it never really replaced my love for Destiny.

The Division

While technically it was never actually on the sidebar… it probably should have been. I was all about The Division at launch and that excitement did not even manage to carry me through to the level cap. I am sitting around level 26 and I am just not sure what is holding me back. Largely the content at that level doesn’t feel nearly as interesting or rewarding as it did at lower levels. The packs of mobs out in the world seem to be scaled for group play, and when you down folks… they don’t seem to be dropping anything interesting. In theory I could hold my nose and grind through it… but what would I be grinding for? I am so far behind the curve in gear and it doesn’t feel like the game really gives you a lot of great options to catch up. There has been a sequence of changes that I really didn’t feel like had me in mind. At first I liked that it felt like you could progress through the game on many different vectors and end up at the same loot goal. However the crafting material nerf really hurt that feel for me. This is something I might return to later, once they offer some Destiny like catch up mechanisms to give players a hand up.

E1M1

May 14, 2016 by Belghast

Doomed

Awhile back I wrote about my feelings regarding the Doom multiplayer tests on both the PC and PS4. It felt so much like they had missed the mark, and it seemed very much like someone trying to recreate the experience of the original Doom… without realizing that certain parts of that experience were due to a limit in the ability of the technology at the time. The experience just was not fun, and that is the most scathing indictment you can honestly give any game. So as a result I had for the most part decided to ignore that there was ever a Doom 4… or in this case a weird reboot. Then yesterday I started seeing the first impressions of the single player campaign come in, and they were positive enough that I thought I would take a look for myself. Even though at this point I have only really played an hour and a half of the game, I am glad I wound up grabbing it. The impressions I had of the multiplayer were correct, in that this is an attempt to boil the game down to its original roots. While this doesn’t really work for a multiplayer experience, it does work really well for single player. The game functions in a way that you don’t really see games function in recent years, in that the game is not open world. It is a series of closed loop levels that are designed to be approached as a single map. The first one is quite literally E1M1 as the title of this blog post suggests, borrowing the same naming as the original Doom. They are a closed puzzle that needs to be solved and involves opening a familiar series of Blue, Yellow and Red key card areas to progress through.

The combat itself is also really interested and reminds me of the way these games used to play, where you would have a truly frenetic amount of enemies spawn in on you and have to deal with them rapidly. However once you dealt with that room you were granted time to roam around the area freely before moving ahead and engaging the next set. In many ways it reminds me of the way that the Painkiller games felt, where each room is this challenge to survive and then you restock your ammunition and health in an attempt to prepare for the next such room. What helps make this manageable is the games “Glory Kill” system. When mob is near death it will glow slightly and stagger around letting you know that you can sweep in and with the F key engage a sequence where you do an almost Mortal Kombat like fatality. Sometimes you rip the head off of the monster, other times you rip the arm off and beat it with it. Other than just being a carnal ballet, they serve the purpose of giving you life or ammunition back allowing you to keep up the killing streak a little longer. I found it very needed for getting through some of the later rooms. Often times the mobs will spawn in with such number that you have to keep running around the room to avoid getting wrecked. The imps are also more frustrating than they have ever been with their ability to hang off the edge of things and gun you down with their fireballs.

Nothing Will Save You

Unlike the original Doom, there is no “save game” that you can rely on. Instead there are a sequence of Checkpoints that unlock as you go through the level. When you die you either fall back to the last check point or restart the level in its entirety. These checkpoints generally coincide with the various lulls in the action that I talked about. The only frustrating thing is that they sometimes encompass several rooms worth of encounters. I ultimately stopped last night playing because I died and rolled back to a check point a few rooms back… and simply didn’t have the strength to deal with the shit storm I had just waded though to get there. Even on normal difficulty that game is really tough at times, and you find yourself having to keep glory killing just to maintain your health long enough to push through to the next room. Ammunition also feels like a constant problem with both the 20 round shotgun and the 50 round or so Heavy Machinegun. Similarly the Chainsaw this time around relies upon gas tanks that you find scattered throughout the levels. What was surprising is just how fast you get into the action, similar to the original doom you are planted in a room with mobs that you have to chew your way through with only a pistol. The secret areas that can be found feel every bit as meaningful as they used to in Doom, with them often granting access to a weapon before you would find it in the normal flow of the game.

One of the more interesting aspects of the gameplay is the weapon modification system. Each gun has an Unreal Tournament style alternate fire system but these are unlocked by finding weapon kiosks scattered through the levels. Each mod package changes the way your right mouse button interacts, and once you have unlocked multiple modes you can change between them with your R key. For example with the shotgun its two alternate fire modes allow you to choose from what is ultimately a grenade launcher and a three round burst that can both be accessed by holding the right button for a charged shot. I personally tend to favor the grenade launcher because it allows me to bounce a grenade between several different mobs taking out the entire pack. However for boss fights or tougher enemies I could see how the three round burst would be extremely beneficial. The problem there however is that when you only have 20 rounds in the weapon, chewing those up 3 rounds at a time means you empty the gun quickly. The big takeaway is that the game is very much a 90s shooter, with 90s shooter sensibilities… remastered for the 1080p and beyond world. Some of these work amazingly well in single player, but not in multiplayer. However I might change my tune once I see how the snap map system works. In any case I am definitely enjoying the single player campaign, and it has just enough story and intrigue to keep the game moving forward…. but not so much that you get bogged down in character development. This is in no way the rich narrative environment that Doom 3 was for me at least, but it has enough atmosphere to keep my interested. If you want a good shooter, give it a shot… but if you are looking for a deep storyline… this is not the game for you.

Blizzard: WoW and Overwatch

April 23, 2016 by Belghast

Puppy Love

This is admittedly going to be a bit of a bummer of a post, but I feel like I want to get it out of me and onto paper. I started this discussion yesterday on twitter but the 140 character limit of that medium kept me from really expressing any sense of nuance. What happened is as the day wound down I ended up watching a really great video from Curse talking about the road to Overwatch, and the first video was talking about the failure of Titan. It really is a great video because while Blizzard refuses to really talk about what happened with Titan, they do a pretty good job of trying to interpret and read between the lines, and managed to get an awful lot of candid commentary from the Overwatch team. However while watching this video I was struck by something. As you watch folks like Metzen and Kaplan talk about Overwatch you see this unbridled love and excitement in the way they express everything. You can tell just how much they are enjoying this game and how excited about the future of Overwatch they feel. This is just something I have not really seen from Blizzard in years in pretty much ANY game. Sure there are standouts like Terran Gregory that are amazing, and every time he talks you can tell he quite literally is living his dream each and every day. However the bulk of the World of Warcraft folks at Blizzard tend to come across with almost a sense of resentment that they are working on that product.

To go even further if you watch some of the Blizzcon Q/A sessions, there is almost a sense of condescension towards the players from the folks up on stage. It goes beyond the “we know better” thing that every IT professional is guilty of doing. It seems at times that they simply are not having fun with World of Warcraft anymore, and when you watch the same folks like Chris Metzen talking about Overwatch it is just such a stark difference. On some level I absolutely get it. There are things that I wrote a decade ago that I am still forced to maintain… and every single time I open them all I can see are the mistakes I made in the past. After a point I began to resent that code, and it is almost painful every single time I have to work in it. I am figuring that in many ways the folks who work on World of Warcraft, and have for a very long time… feel that same way about that game. They see this Weasley House of a game that is knitted together out of several different generations development, and just want to start over. I think this attitude is evidenced in the vast number of game system uproots that have happened during the course of its lifespan. Instead of just fixing the problems of the past, they nuke from orbit things like the talent system and try and rebuild something completely different on the rubble of the past system.

Nostalgia Not Hope

Now when I started down this path yesterday, a friend of mine brought up the Looking For Group documentary. The problem is I see something completely different there when folks talk about the origins of World of Warcraft than I do in the current Overwatch videos. I see a nostalgia for the way things used to be. I see a reminiscing of folks who remember the good times the game had and how excited they used to be about everything relating to the game. Ultimately I see a lot of living off of the whiffs of former glory, and what I see missing is the unbridled hope about what could be and is just over the horizon. In Overwatch the sky is the limit and everything is magical still, because they have yet to actually ship the product. In World of Warcraft, every single turn is dictated by a past decision and often times colored by past mistakes. As a player I want to know that the best days of the franchise are still ahead of me, and not something to be remembered fondly from the past. The development team has not made me feel that way since Wrath of the Lich King, and I realize that is entirely my fault as well. What the game needs now however is exuberance to turn back the tide of negativity and get the ship moving in the right direction, and I see that sort of positive spirit working through the Overwatch team and wish I could somehow bottle it and force feed it to the folks working on Warcraft.

It just makes me wonder if at this point the current team working on World of Warcraft is too tired of the game to really take it to the places it needs to go. The funny thing is… there is a team at Blizzard that is doing precisely the sort of job that the WoW team should be doing. Diablo 3 feels like the property that is largely ignored and was even left out of the “things going on at blizzard” video from Blizzcon 2015. However they are doing this amazing job of slowly and quietly improving the way Diablo 3 feels to play it. The whole seasonal concept has revolutionized the way I play the game and has created this moment that happens every few months where me and my friends get extremely excited to be playing the game again. We need that sort of an approach at World of Warcraft, rather than the slash and burn experience that keeps happening with every expansion. We need someone to take an approach that is constantly refining and moving the franchise forward rather than trying to re-invent itself and often floundering. SOE was the master of this methodoloy, and each Everquest and Everquest II expansion felt like it was pushing the boundaries of what the old tech could do, and the team seemed genuinely excited to be doing each new batch of content. Ultimately the truth is… how are we the players supposed to be excited about a product when the folks creating it seem to be going through the motions. I want Blizzard to love World of Warcraft the way that they seem to love Overwatch right now, and I wish I knew how to make that happen.

Old School New School

April 18, 2016 by Belghast

Doomed

Firstly if you didn’t check it out I highly suggest you read yesterday’s blog post if for no reason other than the amazing custom artwork by my friend @Ammosart. As far as this weekend went, it was a bit of an odd one. I once again played a lot of Destiny, but this morning that is not one of the shooter experiences I am going to be talking about. I really hate it when game companies gang up on each other, because this weekend there were “special” beta tests going on for Overwatch, Battleborn and Doom. While at first they might not seem all that related, they are each chasing a multiplayer experience that they would really love you to care about. Battleborn is not even on the list of games I was interested in, thanks to a really bad alpha experience causing me to pitch it to the curb. Doom however… I really want to like and keep giving it ample attempts to sell me on its regressive notion of what first person shooter multiplayer should be. Now please note… I’ve had access to the alpha for quite awhile now thanks to a strange presell deal that they had for Wolfenstein The New Order. I have not really talked about it before now however due to the NDA it has been wrapped in, but with this weekends big beta event… that has been dropped.

Doom Multiplayer is a game that really hopes that you remember Quake 3 Arena fondly, and have been craving that sort of gameplay with marginally better graphics. The gameplay honestly gives flash backs to playing Rocket Arena… during a time when even then I thought the Quake Arena experience was far inferior to Unreal Tournament that I tended to play more often. If you miss the days of being shot across the map from someone you can’t even see as you spawn in… then this is going to be the game you have been hankering for. The big problem I had was in all of the matches that I have played… I never really found myself having fun. I mean I did okayish, but it very much felt like wandering around the same claustrophobic hallways that we used to in Quake. The worst sin however is the movement… it feels completely unrealistic and the same sort of stiff speedy running that those original Quake games had. What it is trying to be is fast paced run and gun action, but in an era when we can do that without sacrificing animation and design aesthetics. I’ve now played several different PC alpha tests, and installed it on the PS4 to give it a go there… and no matter what I keep coming up with the same impression. This is not a fun multiplayer experience.

Molten Core!

The general “unfun” nature of Doom was only drilled home thanks to also being in Overwatch this weekend. It feels like both games are trying really hard to deliver something similar, at least in the department of a faced paced shooter department. Also both games really want you to want to watch them as some sort of an e-sports extravaganza. However Doom is a world that traded the drab green and brown nothingness of Quake for various shades of orange and blood red… whereas Overwatch is almost more game world than it actually needs to support the combat. As you wander around the world there is a constant barrage of tiny details. Posters on the wall, images up on computer screens… advertisements for murloc themed restaurants. The world is vibrant and feels alive, and almost begs you to inhabit it, and what makes it even better is that every single character is just as vibrant and well designed. Playing Torbjorn feels unique and completely different from playing Pharah or Reaper or Reinhardt. The only negative here is that at times they almost feel too unique, in that the control scheme of one champion doesn’t begin to map up to playing another one. It is fairly normal for “league” style champion design to differ wildly, but at least in League you are always going to be using QWE, but for Overwatch champions there is essentially an array of hotkeys that get used… and not all champions use all hotkeys. The most confusing aspect of this is how some champions have a movement key and others don’t… and even among the ones that do they don’t always sync up to exactly the same key.

So what ended up having to happen is that I started to compartmentalize “this is how I play this champion” from “this is how I play overwatch”. The only unfortunate thing about this game is that you can see how much effort they put into building the world, and personally I get a little nostalgic about “what might have been”. Titan was supposed to be Overwatch the MMO, and I would have loved that. Even if they had given me a game along the lines of Destiny or Division I would have eaten it up completely. So as you are playing through the levels you see signs of what might have been. As far as the game play itself it centers around running multiplayer matches, to rank up… to unlock loot crates… to get sweet skins and other cosmetic stuff… that improve your game play experience for those champions that you really love. At its core this game is a really tight multiplayer team based shooter, and if that is not the experience you have been looking for… this probably isn’t the game for you. It plays like a modern version of Team Fortress 2 and feels tighter than that game ever did. Every aspect of the experience seems like it has been painstakingly planned and the awesome thing about it is that for once Blizzard is probably being more forthcoming with information than any other multiplayer game has been. For example they went into more detail about the netcode behind the game play than any company I have ever seen. The only unfortunate thing is that I am going to have to likely wait until May 3rd to get to play the game again, given that is when the pre-launch open beta period begins. The game lived up to all of my expectations, and I am amped to get to play it with friends.