The long wait is over for some Fallout 4 news as an official trailer was released today. After teasing an announcement yesterday and amidst much speculation that news on the franchise would be coming along with this year's E3 Conference, the new trailer is a pleasing mix of old and new.
The trailer begins by establishing this juxtaposition, pulling back from a television screen to show a ruined home decaying in the harsh sunshine of Post-Apocalyptia while flashing back to the time before the bombs went off. The trailer's first actor, a german shepard dog, is juxtaposed with a support robot which looks like a "Mister Handy" series robot. In this instance, the dog represents the "new" while the robot represents the "old", which serves the ironical portrayal of "past versus present" always so apparent (and so apparently well loved) in the Fallout series.
The Ink Spots are again serenading the series with "It's All Over But The Crying", which plays throughout the trailer. Having already contributed "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire" to Fallout 3, this is another beautiful serenade which captures the serenity of the Wasteland. Moreover, drawing Fallout 4 closer to Fallout 3 helps to make the series feel connected beyond merely visual aesthetics. In the past (and, so far, looking forward) the team at Bethesda has done an absolutely outstanding job of putting together a soundtrack that is at once contemporary with their theme as well as incredibly entertaining. I've played Fallout just for to the radio before, and now I'm hopeful that I may again.
As the trailer continues, the flashbacks start to include more than the familiar robots of the past. People appear, as families with children and as civilians rushing to the vaults, while an anonymous radio announcer from the time that the bombs went off mourns the ending of the world as he knows it. This is all a pretty depressing juxtaposition between the dead Wasteland and the living Republic of yesterday. Yet while the bigger issues tell a sad tale, the glimpse of Pre-Apocalyptia is enticing. It's easy enough to imagine Fallout's world is based on the idea of the Cold War getting hot and leave it at that, but the lore and history which the fastidious gamer encounters tells another story. The world of Fallout is actually far less like our own than one assumes. I hope that Fallout 4 will find a way to let the players explore this history.
The folks at Bethesda, and indeed the loyal gamers who play their games, may be tired of the oft quoted "War, war never changes" that accompanies every game in the franchise, but even that (cleverly) only serves to illustrate the truth of the quote. While I do hope for a fair bit of change in the next game, it's nice to see that some things will stay the same.
The player, it appears, will be from Vault 111 and the german shepard from the beginning of the trailer will be his companion. A set of Power Armor is also present and seems to belong to the Vault dweller. While I do not feel opposed to exploring the Wasteland as someone else, the reiteration of certain elements helps draw the series closer together. It's the opposite of what we're experiencing in the Assassin's Creed franchise and while that enables Ubisoft to explore a wider array of narratives and settings, Bethesda has never made me feel limited for places to explore or ways to handle enemies (although, I wouldn't say no to helming a pirate ship--or maybe a pirate airship!?)
All in all, the trailer doesn't provide much more than some pretty visuals and a definitive theme, nostalgia. The narrative and exact setting remain unclear but the developers focus on delivering the uniquely "Fallout" experience is not. I'm looking forward to this reiteration of the series and I can't wait to hear more details!
Developed by Bungie and published by Activision, Destiny is the newest FPS making headlines. Touted as "an online, persistent world, first-person shooter", the game was released earlier this month on current- and last-gen consoles. As the "next big thing" from Bungie since they started the Halo franchise, Destiny has endured a lot of hype over the last few months.
Having gotten my hands on the game first during the final beta test and now after the official launch, the game can be summed up as Borderlands in a Halo-esque universe. Unlike Borderlands, the laughs are few and the tone is serious. Unlike Halo, loot grinding and exploration are core gameplay components.
What do they mean by "The ultimate adventure that unfolds over the next 10 years"?
Let's hope they mean that the game will get better...
Gameplay: Destiny's gameplay is perhaps the greatest disappoint of the game if only because it was the biggest victim of the hype. The simplest way to describe Destiny is "Halo with loot". While that isn't an insult, it doesn't describe the sort of game that will define a console (much less a generation of gaming).
Destiny is not "the ultimate adventure" in many ways. Classes are limited to just three, and the difference between them amounts to a choice of super power. While the action is frenetic and fun, the levels and missions that the player is given are contrived and linear . While performing "impossible" tasks time and again, I actually suffered more deaths from falling off of cliffs than from actual gunfire.
Advancing and upgrading throughout the game is simply a matter of grinding experience points, which leaves a lot to be desired in the way of RPG elements. I figured that once Call of Duty eventually figured out that I should be able to allocate my progress where I want it to be the rest of the gaming world would be smart enough to follow suit, but Destiny is hardly so customizable. Traits are earned in a specific order and only after achieving certain levels. Not only does this vastly underserve lower level players who try to compete with higher level players in the PvP modes, it takes away the pleasure of connecting with your particular character if every Titan, every Hunter, and every Warlock level in exactly the same way. At the higher levels, when choices have been unlocked, there is a degree of choice in how you want to play, but tucking this away at higher levels is just unnecessary. Bungie said that 20 hours into Destiny you'll feel like you're playing a new game, and that's somewhat true, but the cost is keeping good parts out of the beginning of the game.
Loot is a major aspect of the game as well, but this, too, has its flaws. Finding chests and getting good drops are infrequent enough that when they do happen you get excited, but like any lottery you lose more often than you win. Most of what you find is more or less just a chance at getting a good item, and most of the time you come away a little disappointed. Unlike Borderlands, where loot was nearly constant if not always beneficial, Destiny gives you half the loot and a slim chance at any real reward.
Ultimately, Destiny is a mix of good and bad. Enemies don't overwhelm you and yet they still challenge you at points, which is good. The "sticky" targeting controls are friendly, but take away from the competitiveness some look for in an FPS. Maps and modes are well matched in PvP matches, but the player's levels make for such a disparity in ability that lower level characters just aren't welcome. Pick-up missions keep the leveling goal-oriented when the main story does not, but fail to impress the player and are solely used for grinding reputation points, money, and experience. In the end, Destiny's gameplay amounts to endless repetition and, as Nerdist says, it feels "spiritless".
Visual Effects / Art Style: Visually, Destiny is immediately reminiscent of Borderlands and I felt the influence of Bungie's last few Halo games as well. So, simply put, nothing you wouldn't expect artistically. While there isn't anything wrong with doing what works, there are a number of vistas in the game which are quite striking, but then turning back to face your mission becomes a bit of a bummer.
For the first ten levels or so there is little to differentiate new enemies from old enemies, and that underwhelming feeling bleeds into the later levels when the biggest difference is whether the critical point is the head or the belly. Every enemy race has fodder, bigger fodder, shieldies, and heavies all of which move, hide, fight and die alike. Moreover, set piece environments and retraversing old ground serve to shrink the environments and bring the player to boredom more quickly than they should. Seeing the same cave three times turns what should be a planet into a sandbox--and an unimaginative one at that. While this lightens the load for level designers on the production side, it costs the game its potential to immerse every player deeper into the game's universe.
And as long as I'm on the subject of aesthetics, my experience with piecing armor together has been far from satisfying. When granted to good fortune to upgrade a piece of armor, more often than not that upgrade is a different color or style from my various other pieces of armor. As a result, the players armor is seldom uniform and (at least in my case) the character ends up as mismatched as a birthday clown from Craigslist. With color being the primary aesthetic difference between pieces and dye items unavailable until later on, there is little in the way of satisfaction throughout the first fifteen to twenty hours of Destiny.
Sound Effects / Music: Happily, the sounds in Destiny are a brighter spot. Through some levels, ambient environment sounds feels out of place and become repetitive after just a short time, yet these tend not to be obtrusive or detrimental in any significant way. This can be said of the gunfire or the reloading sound effects as well, but less so as both of those come with the distraction of action. And, in any case, the upsides here outweigh the downsides.
The game's music is great. It's evocative and effective, though certainly not ground-breaking. The game's soundtrack is recognizable on the whole, and even though I would be hard-pressed to match certain music with certain game sequences, it does carry a uniqueness that allows the music to be identified immediately with the game. There are flashes of Halo's influence here as well, with chanting and bass drums, but they are too much mixed together for my taste. Gregorian chant has an eerie sense of isolation that was so fitting for playing as the Master Chief in Halo that I could see it fitting my Guardian as well (after all, the characters are virtually identical, but more on that later). As it is, the chanting comes with too much accompaniment and the accompaniment with too much chanting, but, all in all, I was very pleased with this aspect of the game.
The glaring issue with the games sounds is the complete absences of voices. There is no voice chat. Not in PvP. Not in the quest hub. Not in proximity to other players. Nothing. It's utterly, rampantly, infuriatingly, foolish. I don't care if they are pre-teens spouting inflammatory gibberish, at least they would make the world feel alive. As it is, the only way to communicate with other players is to do so through Xbox Live's party chat, and it's just unacceptable. This alone prevents Destiny from being a place to make friends. It restricts it to a game for you and the friends you already have, which is a major problem as it is also a game that is only worth sticking to if you have friends around you.
Story and Narrative: If you check out other reviews, they probably describe the story as "shit" or simply "not good". Let me try to do a better job of explaining the nature of the problems.
The story lacks substance in the same way that Halo once did, and that's a reason to be hopeful. At the moment, however, the game lacks a strong main character. In part, this is a hazard of the various options given to the player at the start, but on the other hand this is exactly the sort of issue that game designers should be solving. Mass Effect, for example, balanced providing the player choices while still telling a character driven story, so Destiny comes in well under that bar. Most characters are never even given real names. Everyone is known simply by a cryptic title: Guardian, Speaker, Stranger, Gunsmith, Cryptarch, etc. This leaves you feeling disengaged from a personal connection with anyone and makes everyone feel distant. Something as simple as a name is a first step toward knowing a character, but when even that is kept away the player is never invited to care for the characters in the game. Couple this with repetitive appeasement of seemingly menial tasks assigned by your "Ghost" (think, Na'Vi from Ocarina of Time) and there just isn't a story that engages you and draws you into the world.
This lack of story building elements extends into the PvP element. With no reward for a Guardian that performs well relative to one who does not, there is no sense of accomplishment. With only a thin explanation as to why these exercises are even being conducted, the PvP matches feel disconnected from the rest of the world. While this is advantageous as a way of stepping back from the story missions, it means that half of the game contributes nothing to the overall story.
Bungie promised an MMO-length game, but the gameplay and story don't comprise something worth that amount of commitment. The background narrative is passe, Light versus Dark, and the actions of the player are soon erased by short respawn timers. All in all, what story is made available is not made exigent, and so most gamers are left wondering why they should bother to listen to the story at all when they can just follow their objective indicator and clear the waves until they level up.
Entertainment Value: For a AAA title, Destiny falls short of providing the player with the experience that it should. The best chance that the game has for being worth its cost is the promise of future support, and since that means waiting for the game to get good you might as well wait for the game to get cheaper. There is just too much missing at this point, most importantly the lack of social mechanics. If you've got a few friends who want to play with you then the game is well worth the cost, but as a single player the story isn't strong enough and the game does nothing to help you make friends.
The PvP is the stronger part of the game overall, but what you'll encounter there is mostly the standard fair that you could get anywhere else. King of the Hill, Deathmatch, and Free-For-All are studded with the occasional, "special" Capture gametype, but there's nothing "special" about any of them. While PvP makes a distinct and refreshing break from the single player mode, the disconnection between them will leave some players only really wanting half of the game. Matchmaking does a poor job of matching players with similar levels, gear, or attitudes, leaving every match dominated by those who have unlocked more high-level skills.
But far and away the greatest detriment to entertainment in Destiny is the loading times.They are incessant, interminable, and before very long you know you will be loading again. Mass Effect gave you snippets of conversation, Skyrim let you fiddle with game objects, but Destiny makes you watch the same lame videos over and over again. There was little to no thought put into this aspect of the game, which comes as a huge disappointment considering how much time is spent with them. One can only hope that current-gen consoles have an easier time of it, but in any case it is a seemingly minor issue that makes the game a whole lot less fun to play and should be addressed sooner than later.
Conclusion: Destiny is not a game to play for a single player experience. It is a relatively long grind up to the top tiers of level and gear, and only from there can the PvP experience can be a satisfying one. Destiny is a game to play with your friends, and not a game to play to make friends. It is a game to enjoy for the thrill of the gameplay, and not a game to play for a compelling story. What the future holds for the game as DLC is rolled out I cannot say, but there are some glaring issues which Bungie and Activision would do well to repair before they try selling more of the same thing.
I've been very critical throughout this review, but in the end I still enjoy playing the game because it's the sort of game I like to play. Let me put this very simply: Destiny is Halo with loot. If you read that as criticism, this isn't a game for you to play. If you read that as interesting, though, and you think loot is just what Halo has been lacking all these years, Destiny is absolutely worth playing (just bring along a friend or two).
"Shattered Horizon" is a first-person zero-gravity space shooter by a Finnish software development company called Futuremark Studios. As a leading producer of computer benchmark software, one might expect that Futuremark's "Shattered Horizon" is a game designed for cutting-edge PCs but it seems that they've elected a safer, simpler approach to their game design.
Gameplay: The first hurdle the player faces in Shattered Horizon is the control scheme. The game's tutorial consists of four images explaining the keybindings, the HUD, and the game modes, which altogether does little to prepare the player for the experience. It takes a game, maybe two, to adjust to the spinning and rotating which make this game special. Unfortunately, that is typically about as long as you'll be playing this game unless the number of players online picks up dramatically. Single player is simply a match versus bots and, since I have never seen another player playing online, the multiplayer mode is virtually identical. This might be related to the fact that there is no clear means of creating a multiplayer lobby. Beyond this, the game itself includes just five generic classes ranging from shotgunner to sniper.
The zero-gravity element, however, adds flavor to all of this blandness. Once you've learned to land, roll, lift-off, and boost the maps become playgrounds of skill and strategy. The first time I encountered an upside-down AI bot firing away I was convinced that the concept of this game was its strength. Not only is the zero-gravity element exciting and refreshing to a genre that is beyond stale at this point, it invites a gamer to imagine how awesome first-person zero-gravity games could be. The experience of this game is one that does not entirely serve the game because the best parts have nothing to do with the objectives. There is an undeniable joy and an immutable sense of freedom in jetpacking around structures in space which overshadows the combat-centric game modes. The fundamental flaw in Shattered Horizon is that winning the game asks the player to ignore the most enjoyable part of the game's experience--the atmosphere.
"There is an undeniable joy and an immutable sense of freedom in jetpacking around structures in space which overshadows the combat-centric game modes."
Visual Effects / Art Style: Shattered Horizon relies on the atmosphere it creates to deserve your playing time. To this end, it is important that the game's visuals serve both as interesting spectacles and entertaining battlegrounds. Satellites, shipping containers, and asteroids create an environment which is desolate, eerie and captivating. The cold silence of the final frontier can be felt best when the player deactivates their HUD (purportedly to make them harder to detect for enemy sensors) leaving them in the soundless vacuum of space. The environments themselves are highly satisfying and provide an engaging backdrop to the task at hand, but the backgrounds beyond are less adept at maintaining the ambiance as they tend to be mere star maps. As for the visual effects specifically, the HUD is hard to read and the maps are entirely static. It would be nice to have a chance to blow up a few things or start a fire here and there in order to make the environments a more engrossing place in which to play. As it is, the map textures are pleasing, but the game lacks a deeper attention to details.
"As it is, the map textures are pleasing, but the game lacks a deeper attention to details."
Sound Effects / Music: The most powerful sound in space is silence. The darkness is vast and bleak and the game should capitalize on the opportunity to make the player feel lonely. While deactivating the HUD and drifting near your team's spawnpoint demonstrates that Shattered Horizon is capable of this, the objectives and endless respawns of AI bots counter this effect a great deal. Given the space-faring concept of this game, it is subject to the principle of 'less is more', and yet it seems the developers did not keep this well enough in mind. It's nice that deactivating the HUD gives the player that deep-space feeling, but the game's design makes this an unreasonable strategy. Between the gunfire and audio messages a great deal of the ambient satisfaction is lost, and that's a real shame in a game which has demonstrated that it is capable of it.
"Between the gunfire and audio messages a great deal of the ambient satisfaction is lost, and that's a real shame in a game which has demonstrated that it is capable of it."
Story and Narrative: I wish there was more to say here. The simple fact is that the majority of the story that Shattered Horizon provides comes in blurbs tucked away in loading screens. While long loads makes for ample time to peruse these tidbits, they do little more than explain the motives for each teams presence. The teams themselves aren't any different, so the games have nothing beyond a simple "red vs. blue" setup. I mentioned above that the game invites the player to imagine ways that the game's concept could be employed elsewhere, as in an FPS-RPG à la Mass Effect. In short, it feels like there is a lot of potential here that's being squandered by a tired game model.
Entertainment Value: There are a few things worth experiencing in Shattered Horizons. For one, there is the atmosphere that a zero-gravity first-person game creates. For another, there is the joy of exploring the space-scape, dodging behind asteroids and peeking over solar panels. And yet for all the promise held in the game's concept, the execution leaves much to be desired. They started with a great idea and they made that first idea work, but then they followed a formula for everything else. Couple that with empty multiplayer lobbies and you've got a dud on your hands. A pretty dud, mind you, but a waste of $9.99 all the same. If this were a F2P game, I'd say download it and experience the atmosphere, but instead you're better off waiting for a better developer to pick up the idea and do something worthwhile with it.
"...you're better off waiting for a bigger developer to pick up the idea and do something worthwhile with it."
Lastly, I've got a couple 3-day passes for the game. Leave a comment if you're interested!
Twitch.tv, an internet streaming service, isn't the only site on the net for streaming games, but it is quickly becoming the most popular. Through a Twitch account, users can stream live video onto the site for anyone to see. Streams can also be recorded and re-watched later. Similar to the "Let's Play..." style videos on YouTube, Twitch's service is providing a platform for players to connect, communicate, and learn from one another. But beyond this, the service enables gamers to watch their favorite e-sports in much the same way as they watch more traditional sports. In short, gaming livestreams are making e-sports more accessible and that enables them to grow.
Previously, Major League Gaming (www.majorleaguegaming.com) was the place for watching live streams of big-money gaming tournaments. But this limited fans to only popular franchises like Halo, Call of Duty, and Starcraft, while less popular gaming communities were left out. The rise of Twitch and similar services is an opportunity for the gaming industry in many ways, and I'm hopeful for the changes that are coming.
Currently, Twitch is streaming content from League of Legends, Dota 2, Starcraft 2, which are games you could have found elsewhere, but they are also streaming games like Diablo 3, Minecraft, DayZ, Hearthstone, World of Warcraft, and Super Smash Bros. which would have been much harder to find in the past.
In my own experience, streaming to Twitch has been difficult for online games. I wanted to stream some Smite, but the lag I experience while doing so makes the game unplayable. In concession, I went to find another game I could stream and share my thoughts on. So, here it is, in all of its anachronistic glory, Orion: Dino Horde!
I was lucky enough to have the chance to play in Titanfall's multiplayer beta test this past weekend. The game's developers, Respawn Entertainment,are up against high expectations with their first game. The game studio formed in 2010 after Infinity Ward (makers of Call of Duty) fired Jason West and Vince Zampella (one of the Infinity's co-founders) for "breach of contract and insubordination". Following the age-old playground tradition, Zampella and West started their own game--that's Titanfall, a game with a chip on its shoulder.
If you were doin' the Duty before it was just "cod", you know that the folks at Infinity Ward have had some pretty great ideas over the years. Besides being the "The Spiritual Successor to Call of Duty", Respawn Entertainment's Titanfall is an FPS made of equal parts speed and high-explosive. That's a recipe for disaster if the game isn't balanced, but, from what I've played, Titanfall is expertly balanced.
I had a great time playing the game. Multiplayer was exciting, challenging, and everything else a triple-A FPS title should be. 6v6 matches were just right for the maps and kept spawning players away from danger but never too far from action. AI-controlled "grunts" are absolutely a revelation to a genre which has stagnated as big names like Call of Duty and Battlefield begin to feel like are being manufactured on an assembly line. The constant presence of enemy targets keeps snipers sniping and CQB ninjas checking their corners.Their impact in the game has less to do with points and more to do with the experience of playing the game. Pointjockeys will still be better off hunting Titans than peppering the cannon fodder, but a players won't be able to ignore them, either.
Whether on foot or in a Titan, the matches maintained a sense of pace. Messages popping in from tacticians as well as chatter from the grunts filled the environments with a sense of purpose and kept up the pressure. Beyond filling the maps with action, AI grunts provide a thrilling contrast to real players, who in turn feel more like formidable opponents in a single-player mission. And, overall, the battles can feel like they are on a large scale like in Battlefield 4 or Planetside 2 but with fewer players and on much smaller maps.
Besides the AI component, Titanfall's matches feel more like real battles because they have an ending. An epilogue sequence after the final points are scored brings closure to each match in addition to providing the opportunity to finish that last kill or rack some extra experience points. The effect that these additions have on making the multiplayer feel more like a narrative is astonishing. Titanfall is the best game I have played at making me feel like both the single and multiplayer components belong in the story.
But there are still things keeping me from buying this game. For one thing, it's published by EA and will be played (on PC) through Origin. I really do not like the way EA behaves in the gaming industry, so giving them more of my money is something I try to avoid whenever I can. Still, the game looks and feels like a $60 game and I will have a hard time not buying it.
Personal grudges aside, Titanfall is something of a fusion between Star Wars Battlefront and Call of Duty, but with much more from Call of Duty. Calling in Titans makes you tough and a tough-target for everyone on the battlefield, and I was reminded of spawning as a Jedi in Star Wars Battlefront, but the game looks like Call of Duty in so many ways. The menus, the challenges, and the loadouts are all distinctly reminiscent of CoD, and I spent a good deal of time with them as there was more than a minute of waiting time between each match. I do feel that having a lengthy break after each match contributed to longer playing sessions, but it also gave me plenty of time to get distracted.
There are still two things I want to hear about this game before I'm sold on it. One, that the single-player story is significant and worthwhile and, two, that the game has a powerful soundtrack. I realize that soundtracks aren't usually selling points on games in this generation, but, from what I've played so far, I feel it would be an unjustified shame if Titanfall didn't have some incredible music to accompany its stunning visuals--there's just something so evocative about a huge, flaming mech...
Finally, here's a great video from Rev3Games including Adam Sessler, Vince Zampella, and some gameplay video. It gets particularly good around 10 minutes in.
