Geekly Review #157

The end of the year is ever drawing closer. Can we start to talk about Christmas now without people getting annoyed? Please?

Gwent

A few months back I wrote about how I struggled with completing single player games recently – mainly games with a longer story. The Witcher 3 is one of those games, yes, I still haven’t completed it. One of the reasons for this is Gwent! The card game and deck building game that I just found supremely addictive.

It’s being made in to a standalone version and is currently in Beta. I was lucky enough to get a code sent to me last week and I’ve been playing it quite a lot recently!

I have to say that I’m mightily impressed by it. I think I might actually like it more than the original version.

For the most part I’ve been playing using the default decks, but I’ve started to create my own with a few factions as I start to get used to them a bit more and understand what cards are best used together.

There is quite a lot of strategy that can go in to creating your decks and when actually playing. The problem is, is that at the start of the game you only really have access to basic level cards. You can buy packs of cards – called kegs, and you can craft them so over time you’ll be able to starting building up a good and competitive deck.

I was a little worried that with the ability to buy packs of cards the game might turn out to be a little bit ‘Pay to Win’. But so far I don’t think that’s the case. I’ve been completely destroyed by some players, but they’ve just been using the ‘standard’ cards very well.

I’ll be done a more in depth write up of my views after I’ve spent a little more time playing!

Miscreated

I actually bought Miscreated during the summer sale, but it’s taken me this long to really try it out. Miscreated is a survival game in early access- yes, another one. I’ve been following it for quite some time, keeping an eye on what people thought of it and how it was progressing. To me it seems like it’s been getting some good attention and general views on the game are positive.

I started out my life near the sea atop a little hill, just in land there was a gas station that I started to make my way towards. I very quickly spotted another player. Not really knowing the player base I wasn’t sure how to react to I just stood still in a field tying to look non threatening. Thankfully the other person was friendly, we soon teamed up and went about exploring towns and cities. He showed me the ropes and we eventually managed to gather parts to fix some cars we found outside of a city. We then went on a little journey to one of the big new cities – he seemed pretty scared and was telling me about how we’d die very quickly and it was a bad idea, but I wanted to see the sights and I wasn’t afraid of death. We managed to explore this big city with no problems and left unscathed, found a quite spot and built our selves a camp fire as a very thick fog rolled in reducing our view distance to about 15 feet.

My first couple of hours were pretty good fun and left me feeling happy and excited about the potential for the game. We didn’t really get in to any trouble and even when bumping in to others we found everyone to be friendly – coming from Rust and DayZ this is not something I expected.

Generally it seems like a good game with quite a lot of content to it with the ability to build bases, fix up vehicles etc… It also looks really good and has some great weather effects -the fog for instance! Apparently there are also tornadoes!

I’m definitely looking forward to playing this more!

Overwatch

Sombra is finally here! Well sort of. Blizzcon was over the weekend and Blizzard finally revealed Sombra after months of teasing and stupid ARG stuff that quite frankly dragged on way too long. Check out her animated short below.

She fits in to the offense class and has some pretty interesting abilities – that mostly revolve around hacking. She can hack other players abilities and render them useless, she has a teleporter that can help her get out of sticky places quickly and she can hack health packs that make them regenerate quicker, whilst being unusable for the enemy.

She’ll be hitting the PTR pretty soon I presume and I’m looking forward to trying her out.

Abandon Ship

We put out a new ‘One to Watch’ last week and that was Abandon Ship from Fireblade Software, check it out here.

 – Will

Doctor Strange

A little later than I’d wanted, but I got round to watching Doctor Strange on the weekend. I’ll admit that compared to other Marvel Cinematic Universe titles my anticipation for this wasn’t as high as previous films or future films for that matter. Next year’s lineup of Guardians of the Galaxy 2, Spiderman: Homecoming and Thor have me hyped! But given the time invested in other Marvel Cinematic films, and where we are now in the overall story you’ve got to take the good with the bad and watch them all (apart from Agents of Shield, I dropped that mid way though season 1).

That said I actually really enjoyed Doctor Strange. It did exactly what it needed to do in typical Marvel fashion. It was a very solid introduction to a new to the films universe character and made sure to remind audiences that he is going to be teaming up with the rest of the Avengers eventually with a fair few scenes involving namedropping the Avengers and bringing up the now infamous Infinity Stones.

I don’t know why this part is surprising as I should expect it by now with Marvel films, but it was also pretty damned funny in places too. It did take a little while to get used to Benedict Cumberbatch with an gritty American accent, but you get over that reasonably soon.

Visually it’s mind blowing, very Inception-esque but for very different reasons. One other thing that did have some worried was just how confusing it would be given the scenes portrayed in the trailers with world shifting and dimensions. There’s no need to worry as it’s not as confusing as it appears, and it’s all explained clearly as to just what is happening when the world transformations occur. Without spoiling it, and putting it into terms relating to SQL Development (GEEK), think of it as a live environment and a test / development environment. In the test / dev environment you can build your code to your hearts content without fear of ruining anything as that environment is there to be broken. Just be sure your code is working as intended before bringing it to the live environment or face the wrath of braking your systems implementing dodgy code. (Perhaps I could have made the terms slightly more universal, but it works that way for me).

Oh also, the first of two after credit scenes is simply brilliant.

Skyrim

Surprise surprise, I’m still playing Skyrim. It’s all come flooding back and I’m now remembering the best ways to level up certain areas in order to become the best nord warrior in all of Skyrim. Without using too many exploits. One of the old classics to increase smithing was to make iron daggers and sell them. Well things are little different now this time and iron daggers don’t get that skill up all that quickly. So now I’m turning Iron ore to silver ore, then making jewelry and selling that. I’ve also since last week joined the thieves guild in the efforts to unlock the Nightingale Armour to make my thieving exploits a little easier. And I may have taken the piss out of one exploit a little bit. The trading caravans loot box in Dawnstar. I might have raided this over and over and over resulting into about 20k Gold and some 300+ lock picks now. Woops.

COD Infinite Warfare Windows Store players – No Cross Play

What an obscure bit of news. Activision’s Windows 10 Store version of Infinite War & Modern Warfare Remaster multiplayer is limited to that player base only. I can see no value in this at all and can’t see many Windows Store purchases of this game at all. It’s surreal.

From Activision Support website:

Stunning, simply stunning. You can probably expect a dozen or so copies of COD:IW for Windows store to be sold.

COD Infinite Warfare – Weak UK Launch

And staying with COD, it appears the fatigue of yearly COD titles is definitely showing as this latest title to the series debuted 48% lower than last year’s Black Ops 3. No official sales figures as of yet, but Black Ops 3 last year in week one sold 635,000 copies, so 48% lower than that would put the figures around 328,000. Which is the lowest COD debut in the UK since COD4 in 2007.

Week 45, 2007] CALL OF DUTY 4: MODERN WARFARE (ACTIVISION) < 215,000 / NEW
[Week 46, 2008] CALL OF DUTY: WORLD AT WAR (ACTIVISION BLIZZARD) – 430,000 / NEW
[Week 46, 2009] CALL OF DUTY: MODERN WARFARE 2 (ACTIVISION BLIZZARD) – 1,600,000 / NEW
[Week 45, 2010] CALL OF DUTY: BLACK OPS (ACTIVISION BLIZZARD) – 1,800,000 / NEW
[Week 45, 2011] CALL OF DUTY: MODERN WARFARE 3 (ACTIVISION BLIZZARD) – 1,773,000 / NEW
[Week 46, 2012] CALL OF DUTY: BLACK OPS II (ACTIVISION BLIZZARD) – 1,386,000 / NEW
[Week 45, 2013] CALL OF DUTY: GHOSTS (ACTIVISION BLIZZARD) – 690,000 / NEW
[Week 45, 2014] CALL OF DUTY: ADVANCED WARFARE (ACTIVISION BLIZZARD) – 730,000 / NEW
[Week 45, 2015] CALL OF DUTY: BLACK OPS III (ACTIVISION BLIZZARD) – 635,000 / NEW

Estimated COD:IW –
[Week 44, 2016] CALL OF DUTY: INFINITE WARFARE (ACTIVISION BLIZZARD) – 328,000 / NEW

It doesn’t help with the double blow from EA launching Battlefield 1 and Titanfall 2 prior to COD’s launch. Despite a lackluster launch for TF2, the overall impressions of it so far have been positive, so word of mouth might spread for that to save some sales, and BF1 didn’t need anyone to talk for it, the trailers alone have propelled it’s figures.

– Murr