Another weekend finishes as we get closer and closer to the winter silly season of gaming.
I get a feeling Will’s Geekly Review will be fairly similar to mine this weekend. Involving a certain BETA. Star Wars Battlefront.
So Friday wasn’t actually that heavily geeky. I went out for a meal with my wife, my brother and his wife. We then went out for drinks after having a late night. I did play some PS4 when everyone had gone to bed playing some of the BETA and then moving onto DriveClub till about 3am.
Saturday I played alot of the Battlefront BETA before the rugby with a friend. It was pretty hilarious. Slowly improving with each round. The gamertag of the chap I played with is Kelso, and for a few rounds he didn’t get past 2 kills, so for a while the name 2 Kills Kelso was echoed in our conversations. Perhaps you had to be there to get a laugh out of it. But we played more and more, 2 Kills Kelso upped the ante to 6 kills a round. I had a nice session in the AT-AT and it was in a rather good place to rack up some kills. I ended that round with a 27 kill count, my personal best for the weekend. The more we played it, the more I enjoyed it. We called it quits before the rugby started though. Which was a pretty good choice as the Scotland vs Samoa game was really entertaining to watch.
That night I went over to my brother in laws place with my wife and the rest of her family for a game night. It wasn’t video games but traditional family games. We played some Family Fortunes which apparently the answers come from 100 stupid people for the questions asked. If I were to ask you for Shakespeare plays I’d assume you’re first 2 answers would be Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet? Well these 2 answers weren’t included on the list. Had us puzzled.
Sunday morning I once again played some Battlefront with 2 Kills Kelso, and we had a great run in which we won every round but one. As the weekend progressed the team playing as the rebels finally understood their objective rather than just killing people. Managed to get to the max level for the BETA during Sunday’s session.
To see Sunday out I watched 2 films. Gangs of New York and The Warriors. I’d seen The Warriors many times, but this was my first watch of Gangs of New York. I did really enjoy it, but It’s not Scorsese’s best work. But take nothing away from the film, it is still really damn good.
I can’t sing the praises of BattleFront enough. I read a lot of comments about unbalanced sides and the rebels having a tough time. But I never really felt at a disadvantage when playing as the rebels. Granted there are a few occasions where the AT-ST’s frustrated, but I’d got to the point where I could power up my rifle by pressing triangle and with some ducking and dodging and some well thrown grenades could get a lot of damage done to them with the final blows arriving from the guys around me. With regards to lack of organisation it must depend on who you have on your team when you’re playing as the rebels as a lot of the time when the AT-AT shields went down the first time we’d managed to wipe out one AT-AT and had no trouble protecting the points and had a rather large fleet of Y-Wing bombers each time.
I can understand the grumbles of spawning, but again I genuinely must have had some of the most lucky sessions all weekend as I never had issues of spawning in certain death areas. I think the worst spawning I got was as a rebel spawning miles away from the remaining AT-AT that needed to be taken down. I loved it.
The BETA has been extended and now runs an extra day, So i’ll be sure to get the most out of it this afternoon and evening and hopefully plenty more tomorrow night too.
– Murr
I actually didn’t play the Battlefront Beta all weekend, this was partly due to me being pretty damn ill and because I went to a friends to play Destiny, like we always do!
I previously said that I wanted to try out the raid, but I’m still around the 285 light level mark, and it recommends 290. I’m sure I could probably survive in there, but I just don’t want to be the scapegoat. Instead we got to work with knocking off some of our quests – clearling heroic strikes etc… We also explored the dreadnought quite a bit more, I’m quite surprised at just how much of it I hadn’t really explored at that point – I still hadn’t been to the court of Oryx… I have now, and it’s a lot of fun. What I like about it, is that it’s quick and easy to get in to action. Just drop a token in one of the three difficulty ‘pots’ (providing you have one) and away you go. We attempted a couple of the tier three events, and found that with a group of people they weren’t too difficult to take on.
I really like what Bungie have done with The Taken King, they’ve added a lot of depth to the Dreadnought as we found out. Within the huge patrol zone there are chests scattered about, some of which can only be opened by having a specific key, to get that key you have to summon Taken forces using a wormsinger rune – which randomly drops from enemies, you can then use this to bring out the Taken forces, after killing quite a few eventually a champion will appear, if you can kill it, then it will drop a wormfeeder run, this then tasks you with killing more Taken, once you’ve killed enough (50 to be exact) you will be rewarded with a random key that will open one of the random chests located on the dreadnought. It’s only a little thing, but it’s something that you don’t know about until you actually start to explore around and Bungie have promised that there will be a lot more secrets of this ilk popping up in the future.
Something else that is new, is the Three of Coins, an item you can buy from Xur which grants you a greater chance of exotics dropping from killing Ultra enemies. My luck finally came on Friday as i had two drops from completing strikes. One of which gave me the new hunter helmet Graviton Forefit.
I did also spend a fair bit of time playing the Battlefront Beta. There were things that I loved about it, and things that I really wasn’t so sure about.
Firstly, the good. It looks amazing, and sounds incredible – the first time I stepped in to the bubble shield thing and heard sounds hitting the outside of it, I couldn’t help but smile. They’ve absolutely nailed the sound design it’s quite simply stunning. I was also really impressed with how smooth it all was (I’ve been playing on PC), the loading times have been great and I’ve not had any connection issues.
But the things that I don’t like are how unbalanced the Walker Assault mode feels – it doesn’t help that people only seem to be interested in K/D ratios and don’t seem to want to play the objectives. Playing as the Imperials it just feels like TDM, you can pretty much breeze through a match without really ever having to worry about the objective. But as the Rebels you have to solely focus on objectives if you want any chance of winning – I’m fine with that, but the fact that the Imperials can basically just play as TDM makes it really frustrating at times. I hope that it’s only this level that feels like this, because it would really ruin it for me if they were all like it. I could talk about it for quite a long time to be honest, but I won’t bore you with it all.
Oh, also they need to sort out the span points, quite a few times I spawned in with an enemy directly in front of me. Also when I manged to hope in to an ATST I had about 6 Rebels spawn about 15ft in front of me – I’m sure they loved that as I mowed them down.
Generally I’ve enjoyed playing it a lot – although I wish there was maybe one more map on offer just to get a better feel for it, and it’s still a game that I want to pick up this year.
