Category: the first few hours

The Old Republic – the first hour

I had a plan.  And like most of my plans, it fell apart.

The plan was that I wasn’t going to even think about Star Wars: The Old Republic until at least a month had passed after launch.  That would accomplish several things at once:

  • It would let me finish Skyrim
  • It would give Bioware time to work out the launch bugs, since MMOs almost never launch in a working state
  • It would also give Bioware enough time to add more servers and reduce the queue hassles
  • A month would be enough time for the community to form a general consensus as to whether it was a worthwhile experience

Etc.

Well, wouldn’t you know – a whole bunch of podcasts came out on Tuesday talking about TOR, and the general critical consensus was that it was actually pretty good, even according to people who were not big Star Wars fans.  And it’s pretty obvious at this point that I am a consumer whore, and so guess what.

The installation was around 10gb, so while I bought the thing on Tuesday evening, I didn’t get a chance to play until last night (Wednesday).

I only played for about an hour or so.  I’m still not entirely sure how I’m ultimately going to roll, so I figured I’d roll a bunch of different characters and see what sticks.   Because my general inclination when playing a morally-guided RPG is to at least start out as a nice melee fighter, I started as a Jedi Knight.  But I’m also really interested in checking out the Smuggler class… and of course I’m interested in seeing what the Sith side is like.

Anyway.  As I said above, I am currently a level 3 Jedi Knight (named Hermano) on the Whitebeam Run server.  The server was lightly populated and I had absolutely no problem at all logging on and getting down to business.

First impression:  it felt very familiar.  Definitely takes a lot of cues from World of Warcraft, and why not.  It looks quite good – my PC is somewhat powerful and I’m running it on generally high settings, and I must say I’m impressed.  Didn’t run into any lag, and for the most part it plays quite smoothly.  I did get stuck in level geometry a few times, but there is a “Stuck?” button and that did help – although the first time I got stuck, it warped me into an area that was filled with level 10 enemies, and I was barely level 2 at the time, and it was all I could do to run like hell back to the starting area.  Good news, though: I learned what the death penalty is like!  And the death penalty isn’t all that bad.  Quite forgiving actually; instead of endless corpse runs, like in WoW, you can choose to respawn after a few seconds at the nearest safe point, or wait around 15-20 seconds and respawn exactly where you died.

I’m hearing from the critics that the game is very solo-friendly, which in my case is great.  I’m very much a solo kind of guy in general, and that certainly made my first days in WoW a pretty difficult slog – especially since I, as an MMO noob, had no idea what being a “tank” meant except that everyone told me I was doing it wrong.  I’ve nothing against groups, and hopefully, when I settle on the character I want to stay with, I’ll eventually find some cool people to play with.

Are you playing it?  What do you think?

further adventures in multitasking

Firstly – apologies for the weird takedown of the site the other day; WordPress apparently let some feral hamsters inside their servers and shut both of my blogs down for some alleged (and non-existent) violation of their Terms of Service.  They fixed it, apologized, and so here we are, no harm, no foul.  #OccupyWordpress

There’s a lot to talk about, and little time to do it, so here goes.

1.  Gamespot is reporting that Microsoft is going to release its new Xbox next year, during the holiday season.  This is maybe a little on the early side – I wasn’t expecting anything until an announcement in 2013 of a console release in 2014 – but in a way it makes sense.  Judging from the amount of sequels we got this year, I’m thinking that developers are a bit reluctant to launch any new IP so close to the end of the Xbox360’s life cycle.  I’ll have more to say about the next round of consoles in a later post – I’m already starting to ramble (in my head) and I haven’t even gotten started yet.

2.  I’ve started working on my favorite annual post to write – the 2011 Game of the Year.  Problem is, I feel like I can’t really get into the nitty-gritty until I finish Skyrim, Saints Row 3, and Assassin’s Creed Revelations, and meanwhile I’m still plugging away in Modern Warfare 3 and I haven’t even touched Rayman Origins yet.  I don’t think there’s any chance that I’ll be done with Skyrim until next spring, frankly, but I do want to at least put in a good dent – and yet I’m trying to stay away from it until Bethesda releases the patch that will let me install it on my HDD – my 360 (the newest model) tends to get very hot when it spins a disc, and this would be the absolute worst possible time to have a meltdown.

3.  Regarding Modern Warfare 3… I didn’t think I’d get around to playing it, but here I am.  I’m a few missions into Act 3; I have no idea how much farther I have to go before I’m done.  I have no idea what the hell is going on, either; I show up in a strange place and I kill hundreds of enemy soldiers and I press “X” a lot and then a lot of shit blows up.  It occurred to me last night that the Call of Duty games are kind of amazing in that they really don’t allow for any player creativity whatsoever.  You’re almost never alone, for one thing; you’re always part of a group, and you’re being led from place to place by someone else, and if you fail to follow their instructions (i.e., if you move out of stealth or shoot too early), you invariably die and the mission ends.  There aren’t any puzzles; every obstacle is handled by the X button, whether it’s setting a C4 charge, or opening a door, or helping a dying soldier by pressing on a wound.    It’s impossible to get lost; even if you run around looking for “hidden intel”, there’s only so many places you can look – the path is incredibly narrow.  Everything is scripted to within an inch of its life.  If I were the cynical sort – and I am – I’d say that one of the reasons why so much crazy shit happens in Call of Duty campaigns is because it helps distract the player from realizing that they’re not really contributing anything to the experience.   And yet… I’m kinda having fun.  I hate admitting it, and I don’t know why I hate admitting it.

4.  I’ve read in reviews that Assassin’s Creed: Revelations gets off to a slow start, and BOY THEY AREN’T KIDDING AROUND.  It’s funny; I kept being worried about the annualization of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, and yet they’d kept making each successive game better than the last one.  So I had no reason to doubt that this year’s edition would be just as good.  Problem is, it’s coming out at the worst possible time – and not just because so many other great games are fighting for my attention.  It’s that the free-running and building climbing is much better in Uncharted 3, and that the hand to hand combat is much better in Batman Arkham City.  Those two games are still very fresh in my mind, and while I can’t necessarily hold AssRev accountable for other people’s work, nevertheless, I am nonplussed.  The other thing is that the controls are ridiculous.  I’ve played every game in the franchise for many many hours and yet the controls here are still finicky and overly sensitive and contextualized to death, which means that I end up jumping off a cliff instead of climbing a wall, or that I attempt to embrace an enemy instead of killing him with a sword that the game won’t let me pick up.  Being that I’m inundated with other games, I’ve decided that I’ll get to it when I get to it, which at this rate might be July.

5.  I’ve put in an hour or two into Saints Row the Third.  It is, in a word, bananas.  I can’t really offer anything more substantial at this point, since I’ve done maybe 1% of the crazy shit that the game apparently allows me to do.  That said, it looks great, and the combat works and feels responsive and fun, and the driving is a little stiff but I’ll get used to it.  Good times all around.

Skyrim: the first 11 hours

I’m going to be honest here; I’m having a hard time figuring out where to start when it comes to writing about my experience with Skyrim.

The logical answer would be:  the beginning.  But the thing is, Skyrim doesn’t really start out all that well.  The tutorial mission is relentlessly linear and combat-focused, and while that’s more or less a necessity in order to teach you how to play, it’s also woefully misleading (especially if this is your first Elder Scrolls game).  The combat is certainly improved over Oblivion, but it’s still problematic.  The intro is also graphically unimpressive; the people in the game are still ugly and animate strangely, and the creatures don’t look much better. You progress through a murky dark dungeon, kill a few creatures, and then you’re kinda on your own.

Of course, that’s when the game really hits its stride.  The moment I finally emerged into Skyrim proper wasn’t as jaw-dropping as it was in Oblivion, but since I’d already had that moment and knew what to expect, I was more interested in seeing what the world was about.  And it immediately became clear to me that while Bethesda still doesn’t know how to make people or animals look good, they certainly know how to make a world.  Within 5 minutes of aimless wandering I’d found some sort of magic stone that imbued my character (Hermano, an Imperial) with quicker XP bonuses in combat, and then I stumbled upon a dungeon that provided me with some gold and some decent weapons.   And I was hooked.

I’ve played over 100 hours of Oblivion, and certainly at least 40 into Fallout 3, and so Skyrim feels immediately familiar in my hands.  The much-ballyhooed menus are indeed worthy of their praise; they’re much more intuitive and easier to extract useful information from.  (Strangely, though, there’s no sorting option anymore, which makes dealing with over-encumbrance a bit of a pain in the ass.)  I’m a big fan in general of games that level you up based on what you actually do – Resistance 3 did a great job with this in terms of its weaponry – and so I’m seeing tangible results in the skills I’m using the most (i.e., one-handed combat, healing/destructive magic).  The perk system is useful, too – it’s nice to be able to see exactly what you’ll be getting, and the perk trees offer many tantalizing options.

So, yeah.  I managed to squeeze in 11 hours this weekend in short, unconnected bursts, and it’s all I’ve been able to think about today while I’ve been at work.

Uncharted 3: Gut Check

I was home sick today, and so I ended up finishing Uncharted 3.  Some key statistics:

Time played: 8:42
60 treasures found (out of 100)
791 enemies defeated
156 checkpoints failed/restarted

791 enemies defeated – that’s a lot of bad guys.  That’s a militia, is what that is.  That seems like maybe too many enemies.  I’m not sure I’ve killed 791 bad guys in all three Gears of War games combined.

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with all three games in the Uncharted franchise.  When I’m away from the game and reflecting on what I’d seen and done, I’m swept away by the game’s technical merits.  The presentation in U3 is, as always, outstanding.  Attention has been paid to every last pixel.  The voice acting is terrific, and they’re working from a great script, which goes a long way.  The story is maybe a little silly, but it’s nothing that would seem out of place in an Indiana Jones movie.  The action set-pieces are out of this world.  I had a smile on my face for much of the cutscenes, and I genuinely cared about Nathan and Sully and the gang.

But when I’m actually playing the game?  That’s a different matter.  Enemies continue to soak up large amounts of bullets – it’s not as egregious as it was in the first game, but it’s still pretty bad here, with enemies sometimes requiring 4 shotgun blasts to the head from point blank range before falling.  They can see me when I’m hidden; they outflank me before they have any right to know where I am.  They have uncanny aim.  They do like throwing grenades an awful lot – so much so that I actually got pretty good at throwing them back.  If you see above, I failed/restated 156 checkpoints – I’m assuming that number is specifically related to how many times I died.  That’s a lot of dying, and not all of it was my fault.

I do want to play it again at some point – I want to get all the hidden treasures, because that’s always fun.  Actually, another reason as to why I’d like to get all the treasures is so that I can actually look at the world, instead of looking in the corners and tucked-away places.  Every time I play these games, I get distracted by shiny objects.

A number of reviews have all said something along the lines of Uncharted 3 being a great game although it fails  to surpass the lofty highs of Uncharted 2.  I’d agree with that, for the most part.  Uncharted 2 was unexpectedly great – indeed, it’s probably still one of my favorite games of this generation.  Uncharted 3 has some pretty amazing moments – the burning chateau, the sinking ship, the crashing plane, and the finale are all pretty jaw-dropping.  But the combat remains my least favorite element of this franchise, and unfortunately the combat is what ends up overwhelming the experience.

It’s still a must-own if you’re a PS3 owner, there’s no question about that.  I haven’t even touched the mulitplayer, which is robust and feature-packed and probably pretty fun.  Just know that the campaign can get a bit frustrating, even in spite of your jaw being on the floor.

Batman and Uncharted and GTA5, oh my

1.  I just finished watching the GTA5 trailer.

So it’s Los Angeles.  And it looks like it’s keeping the gravitas of GTA4.  The most impressive thing to me is how colorful the trailer is – not that GTA4 was bland, but everything here is crisp and bright and beautiful.  Didn’t catch a release date, but I’d guess it comes out next spring/summer.

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2.  So I’m a little over 2 hours into Uncharted 3; I finished the “burning chateau” section and that seemed like a logical place to stop for the night.

The good:  it looks absolutely phenomenal.  It is, hands down, the prettiest game of this generation – which includes Uncharted 2.  The dialogue and voice acting are terrific; I like these characters and care about them and I enjoy watching them interact.  The platforming is still engaging, and the few puzzles I’ve encountered so far are interesting and have been immensely satisfying to solve.

The bad:  the melee combat is really awkward and unsatisfying, and this sticks out specifically because I’ve spent the last 20 hours of my game-playing life beating the shit out of every living thing in Batman: Arkham City, which does 3rd-person melee combat better than anyone else.  The gunplay is still awkward, too – the early enemies aren’t bullet sponges, which is much appreciated, but it’s still a bit touchy, and it’s also a bit off-putting to consider how many people Nathan Drake murders over the course of an adventure.   (As noted above, I’m only 2 hours or so in and I’ve already killed dozens of bad guys.)   The walking/running animations are, for the most part, really beautiful and fluid – except when they’re not, like when you suddenly change direction.  And there are quite a few chase sequences when you’re running towards the camera, and the controls in those sequences are pretty rough, and you’ll die a lot, and in doing so you lessen the impact of the chase itself – it becomes less about HOLY SHIT LOOK AT WHAT I’M RUNNING FROM and more about rote memorization and hoping that the controls move the way you intend.

I’m still enjoying the hell out of it, but I’m not as enthusiastic about it as I’d hoped.  Its strengths are still top-notch, but its weaknesses are becoming glaring.

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3.  I’m more or less done with Batman: Arkham City.  As noted above, I’ve put at least 20 hours into it; I’ve found almost 300 Riddler trophies, and that’s probably enough for the time being.  I may put it in every once in a while during a release lull to try and get all 400, but it’s not a priority.

My first impressions were not overly kind, to be honest; in my excitement for the new game during the summer I’d replayed Arkkam Asylum on the PC and so the first hour of AC was pretty much the exact same experience.  But I grew to really enjoy it.  The story is ludicrous if you look at it for more than 5 seconds, but if you’re willing to suspend your disbelief it’s an enjoyable ride, and the ending is easily one of the best endings I’ve ever seen, in any medium.  (Again, keeping my disbelief suspended.)  And I was certainly excited to know that after I finished the story I’d still have more to do – and for the most part, that was true.  But I’m a little fatigued with it now.  Knowing that I have over 100 Riddler trophies to go is not enticing – it’s exhausting.

DXHR: the first few hours

Here’s how low I sunk during this summer’s release drought; I started playing World of Warcraft again.  Thankfully, I didn’t get terribly far into it – it’s free-to-play up until level 20, and I think I burned out at around level 16 or so.  This is good, because I used to have a serious WoW problem, to the point where I was taking sick days from work just to stay home and grind.  And I wasn’t even that good at it, to be honest – I took my first character up to level 46 or so, got sick of him, then re-rolled a hunter and got him up to the 20s, so it’s not like I ever came close to seeing all the end-game stuff.  Playing it now, it feels archaic and weird and repetitive and boring, frankly, and most of all it’s lonely.  NOBODY is in the low-level areas, which means you have to solo like crazy to get anywhere, and there’s only so many “kill 7 beasts” quests I can do before I’m shaking my head and asking myself why I got so hooked on this in the first place.

Also, I re-rented Tiger 12, and somehow I leveled up my dude to the point where he wasn’t totally terrible.  Putting still feels unfair (like it did when I first started out), but I suppose that’s what makes it “realistic.”  I still feel that Tiger 12 is a half-baked game compared to earlier iterations – by and large, the career mode is simply 18 holes at a time, which is a substantial time commitment.  Yes, for each “event” there are 2 smaller, less time-intensive events, but I don’t give a shit about Bingo-Bango-Bongo or Skins and the XP rewards aren’t all that substantial either.  I was pretty much just playing it to fill in the hours and pick up Achievements, which is sad.

The point being, I have not been enjoying my summer gaming time all that much, which is why this week’s release of Deus Ex: Human Resources – er, Human Revolution is so welcome.  Especially since it’s actually quite good!  I didn’t have that great a feeling about it leading up to the release; I kinda just figured it was a late summer toss-off, and thus destined to be disappointing.  Not so!  It’s the real deal.

It’s been so long since I played either of the first 2 games that comparisons between this new title and the originals are more or less irrelevant.  My memories of the first game (which I liked) are limited to a few scenarios, some ugly graphics and endings so convoluted that I needed a walkthrough just to make sense of what the hell I was doing; my memories of the second game (which I didn’t like) are limited to ridiculous load times and a bad quicksave on my part towards the end of the game that made progress more or less impossible.  My gut feeling is that DXHR is being respectful of the first game’s innovations, while still feeling modern and approachable.

I’m not that far into the game just yet – I’ve played for about 5 hours or so, and my current save is right before the first real boss.  The problem I’m having at this particular moment is that I’ve elected to go non-lethal, and as such I have no real weaponry to attack this boss character – he’s impervious to my tranq darts, and I can’t get close enough with my stun gun without being killed.  Furthermore, it would seem that I’ve invested my XP into all the wrong things for this particular encounter – I’ve got no armor, no invisibility, and all my hacking prowess is useless.

I was going non-lethal specifically to chase an achievement, but I’m reading that this non-lethal achievement also extends to the tutorial mission, which is unfortunate, since I did kill dudes with guns.  The lethal/non-lethal thing makes almost no difference in terms of gameplay, as it turns out – you’re still making dudes horizontal, but if you’re doing it non-lethally you run out of ammo much quicker.  Here’s how Rock Paper Shotgun puts it:

It seems reasonable to argue that the finest achievement of the Deus Ex games is to offer some choice about how you handle combat situations. They are combat games, really, but since they are based around infiltration, rather than direct confrontation, there’s considerable scope for activities other than shooting men to death. Getting them to lie down and have a nap, via a range of persuasive implements, also becomes an option. The role-playing ramifications of that are pretty profound, especially when set against the backdrop of most of the games we play. You get to be the guy who doesn’t murder hapless goons (thus neatly sidestepping the “think of the Goon’s family” guilt-joke from Austin Powers) and instead drags their unconscious forms into airducts, traumatising them forever.

I enjoy being stealthy in this game; it works, for the most part.  The cover system works, and the switch from first-person to third-person is never jarring.  Sometimes I’ve been spotted by dudes who can’t possibly see me, which seems unfair, but that’s been something that’s been in games for years and years and isn’t really a new problem.   Sneaking into vents and hacking people’s computers is thrilling, though – indeed, the hacking system here is riveting and genuinely stressful, which it should be.  And there are enough nooks and crannies throughout the world to make exploration genuinely rewarding.

That’s the news from SFTC HQ.  Look for a site redesign shortly; I’m getting bored of what we’ve got going on right now.