Just me this week as Murr settles in to his new job and new routine, so what have I been up to?
Star Wars Battlefront 2
I wasn’t the biggest fan of Battlefront, sure it looked and sounded fantastic but the overall gameplay felt shallow to me – it quickly got boring. I’m open minded however and wanted to give Battlefront 2 a go. On the surface it certainly seems like the game has gone through a lot of positive changes – a single player campaign, content from all films, free DLC following in the vein of Titanfall 2, it’s good stuff!
The Beta offered up three multiplayer modes, Star Fighter Assault – a 24 player space battle where you’ll get to dogfight to your hearts content, Galactic Assault – a 20vs20 game mode set on Naboo where you’ll play as either the Clone Troopers or Separatist Droids and finally the Strike game mode, where you will have to work together to complete objectives, kind of like and attack and defend type situation.
But, is it any good? Well, yes and no. Battlefront 2 feels very much like more of the same to me, just the settings are a little different, so if you liked the first one I think you’re probably going to like this one. Personally, I can see myself getting a little bored with it as I did the first. The thing is, is I’m not really sure why I feel that way, the gameplay feels pretty good, it was running really well – I was getting around 80-100 FPS on pretty much the highest settings, it looks brilliant and the fantastic sound design is still there, it feels very Star Wars and I love Star Wars. Plus some of the changes to the game seem good, i.e. there are no more random hero pick-ups instead you now have a battle points system similar to REC points in Halo 5, you’ll generate them as you play from killing enemies, taking objectives etc… you can then spend them on ‘better’ versions of soldiers, ships and tanks including heroes like Darth Maul. It’s a good change and one that I feel was needed. But I just feel something is missing from it to keep me interested over time, plus the price puts me off. If I could get it for around £30 then I’d be very tempted, but I’m a bit of a stickler when it comes to paying full price for games nowadays – too many disappointments from the ‘AAA’ scene to make me want to splash out.
One potential issue that already seems to be rearing it’s head is the potential for pay to win. With each class you can assign cards to them which give you better abilities or boosts to certain things like extra damage. These cards can be earned from loot boxed which of course can be bought with real money. Yes, you can still earn them from normal play, but the fact that you can also buy them and that this is yet another game with loot boxes in them that will have an effect on gameplay is just ridiculous. This alone is pretty much reason enough for me to not want to buy in to the game. Whether it turns out to be pay to win or not, I don’t care, the fact that you have a free to play style system in a full price game is not on. It needs to be stopped.
Guild Wars 2
A couple of weeks back I wrote about how I’d decided to get back in to Guild Wars 2 following the release of the Path of Fire expansion and that I would be documenting my adventures as a new player to the MMORPG world. Well, last week that adventure took flight and I made my first post giving a few first impressions of the update and letting you know what I’d been up to, you can catch up on it here.
Warframe
I’ve played Warframe a few times since it’s release, I’ve always thought it was pretty good fun with it’s fast paced slick combat, but I was always a little put off by the grind of it all. Recently I keep hearing about how much it’s changed and about how good the game is now, so I decided to reinstall it and check it out. I will be honest, I’m not entirely sure what has changed over the years…
I’ve heard a lot of people compare Destiny with Warframe and that was another reason why I wanted to jump back in and try it out.
After making my way through a few missions both solo and grouped up with other random players I have to say I was having fun, I wasn’t entirely sure why I was doing what I was doing, but the gameplay was good. I was picking up a lot of materials, but I’m not entirely sure what for. I’ve noticed that other players like flying through the levels as quickly as possible where as with me still being fairly new I’m happy to take my time a bit more and have a look around trying to find secrets.
Warframe is a free to play game and it certainly feels like it, there is a lot of stuff locked behind various currencies that, by the looks of it, you need to buy with real money.
Another reason I was keen to play was because of the upcoming content Plains of Eidolon, it’s an open world area that’s being added to the game and this part actually does kind of remind me of Destiny, and it looks pretty cool, so I’m keen to try that when it hits – which I think is this week.
So far so good on the return!
Heat Signature
I mentioned last week that I was going to be doing a Let’s Play of Heat Signature and I got the first episode out last week if you want to check it out!
-Will
