I'm still going strong with consuming all this hot video game content, and now here's text I wrote about it! Rather than a deep dive into one game, this is more of a shallow swim into a bunch of games. I know I didn't need to tell you that, but if I went through the trouble to think up "shallow swim" as a companion to deep dive, then I was going to use it! Also, despite my intention to make this a short blog, it, well...
Hitman.
I've spent a lot of this year watching Hitman being played. Almost entirely on Giant Bomb, too. Over the months I watched people get a whole lot of enjoyment out of the game. Everyone was talking about how episodic was a perfect fit for Hitman, because it encouraged people to replay levels to unlock all the extra goodies. I watched people attempt (and mostly fail) to take on the Elusive Targets within their time limits. Everyone loved the game.
I, however, didn't play it until it was basically all out (not counting the Christmas mission), and then not until I got it for half off. And how did playing the game entirely at once, and after seeing almost every mission (Brad and Dan never played the nighttime Marrakesh one on video) in the game?
Eh, it was good, but not great. It took me a while to get into it, and initially I was regretting my purchase, which is not something that happens to me often these days. I got through the tutorial missions just fine, but it felt like I was running into nothing but problems my first couple times through the Paris mission. At first I was still trying to grasp the limitations of the AI, what I can actually accomplish in the game, stuff like that. Once I got past that, I was starting to really enjoy the game. I do love stealth games, after all, and using disguises as a part of stealth is a concept I really like, which for the most part, Hitman does well.
But then I started running into technical issues. First it was the framerate, which I "solved" by changing a setting from unlocked to locked. I admire the developers' gumption in letting it try to get up to 60 FPS, but honestly it was way less stuttery and framey locked at 30. I would hope that's better on a PS4 Pro, but I don't have the money for one of those. Nor for a decent PC, if you're a first time reader here.
The real issue I ran into was the AI breaking. But, before I get to that, let me explain how a lot of the AI works, in case you've never seen or played this game. Hitman, as the name suggests, is a game starring a hitman, and the objectives on each mission always involve murdering someone. In this game, it's always at least two targets in the main missions, and sometimes there's an extra objective on top of that. Like acquiring a document, destroying something, etc. Like most stealthy games these days, choice in how to go about it is key, and each level has numerous paths to success, and multiple bespoke, usually comical or ironic ways to kill the targets. My favorite was dropping a life sized moose statue onto the target.
Rather than moving around at complete random, the AI in the game follows specific paths, and usually these loop. This is good, because if you see a target drink from a specific glass, it's a safe bet they'll come around for another drink later, so you can poison it to kill the target. It's also good because some of the Opportunities (step by step objectives) for bespoke kills require targets, or other AI to be doing specific things, or in specific places. If there was only one chance for any one of those Opportunities during a mission, that would make the game a lot more stressful than it is, and probably in a bad way. It is possible to miss some of them, because not everything loops endlessly, but there's usually ample time for them.
The downside of the looping AI is that you could get everything prepared, then have to wait upwards of five or so minutes for the AI to get back to where you need them to be. Of course there are things that will break an AI off their loop, and make them go do something else, but even then, they tend to move pretty slowly. And on some of the bigger levels, that can result in quite a bit of waiting.
That's all assuming that everything actually works. You may have noticed I leaned heavily on referring to them as "AI," rather than people, which is what they are inside the game. This is because, rather early in my time with the game, I encountered several instances of the AI just breaking. I would set everything up perfectly, then the target would get to a spot, not the one I wanted them in, and just stop. Forever. In one case I realized this was because I had started the fireworks show for no good reason, and the target got stuck standing on a balcony forever, despite the fireworks having ended quite some time before. I loaded up an earlier save, or restarted the mission, I forget which, and on the second try, I got the AI to cooperate, and got the kill I was going for. I left the fireworks alone that time.
The second time the AI broke on me, was completely the game's fault. This was (minor spoiler for one of the kill Opportunities) me attempting to kill Novikov by dropping the big thing above the fashion runway on him. You may have seen Dan do it for no good reason in the most recent UPF. This Opportunity involves preventing the show's designer from going on stage to give a speech, thus forcing Novikov to in his place. I'm sure there's a variety of ways to do this; I did it by poisoning the guy, and forcing him into a bathroom to vomit.
Then all I had to do was get onto the thing with a crowbar, and wait. And I waited...and waited...and waited. It didn't take long for Novikov to get to the runway, but he never actually walked onto it. Eventually I realized it was broken, and reloaded a save. This time he got onto the runway before I even had time to get up onto the thing! I reloaded again, and it might not have been until the fourth attempt when everything worked right, I don't remember. Either way, it was frustrating, to say the least.
I ran into other issues with that runway. When I was doing the Helmut Kruger Opportunity (which I think the game never gave me credit for, because that stuff is buggy too), I found that if I didn't hold up on the control stick the entire time, 47 would stop walking. And, naturally, if he stopped walking for even a second up there, everyone would instantly see through the disguise, and the guards went on alert. Because I didn't realize I needed to hold the stick and the AI didn't like that.
That was the brunt of my bad luck with technical issues, thankfully. In Marrakesh, I did have to redo one of the Opportunities because the game didn't actually count it, and that same Opportunity involved more AI breaking and just standing in place as well. I soon realized that when everything works the way it's supposed to, Hitman is pretty good. I did have a lot of fun replaying a lot of the missions to see all the bespoke kills, and to unlock more of the goodies. I got an exploding rubber duckie! I still need to unlock the other one though. The one I got is a proximity duck, and much like Brad and Dan with proximity explosives, I didn't really use it effectively when I tried.
But after the first three levels, I felt like I needed to pick up the pace, because I had other games to play, so I haven't spent nearly as much time on those maps. In fact, I've only done the last two, Colorado and Hokkaido, once each. I dunno that I want to play Colorado again, because that mission has five objectives. Four targets to kill, and then a locked room to get into. Not a room that a lockpick can be used on either. I wouldn't mind playing it again to see a couple more of the bespoke kills that I didn't get, but I don't really want to have to kill ALL of them again. Especially when three of them seem like they only have one bespoke Opportunity, but then one of them has two or three.
This was really annoying on Sapienza too. The two targets were fun to kill a bunch of times, but the third objective, destroying a prototype virus, got old fast. Again, each target has three or four good, worthwhile Opportunities (and a bunch of challenges on top of that), but the virus has...One? Or, I guess there's one for a specific way to get into the lab, and sort of one for destroying the virus? The ability to start the mission in the lab can be unlocked, but there's still only two ways to actually do it. Either distract the other scientists in the room and then overheat the virus, or pull out a gun and shoot it.
The point I'm trying to make is that I wish there was a way to load up a mission, just kill one of the targets, then exit the mission and have that count toward unlocking stuff. Reloading saves and re-killing targets other ways usually works toward that, so long as the mission does get eventually finished. But I also ran into some weirdness with that not working consistently, so I gave up on that after a while, and went back to playing the game normally. Which resulted in me destroying that virus in the same way a bunch of times, because I had to get my Sapienza mastery up to the max level of 20 to get that exploding duckie.
All that said, I did have a lot of fun with the game. I also had more frustrations than I would have liked to. Overall, it's good. I dunno if it was good enough to make me want to plop down $60 for Season 2 and play along with everyone else next time. But it was good. After watching almost the whole game be played before playing it, I do wish I had played it "blind," and maybe that might sway me toward playing Season 2 whilst everyone else is. Or maybe not, with Dan and Brad on separate coasts, I dunno what that'll mean for coverage. We'll see.
In the time since I wrote most of this post, I went and played the recent (still going, as of this writing) Elusive Target. While I quite like them conceptually, the realization that I can restart and replan them as many times as I want, so long as as neither any of the targets or 47 die, kinda broke it for me. I'm bad at not using stuff like that to my advantage. And, I did replan the mission a few minutes in once I realized there was a way to snipe the target almost instantly if I started from somewhere else. And so I did.
Oh! One last thing. As a game that takes place all around the world, it's weird that everyone, throughout the entire game, speaks english. Maybe it's supposed to be like MGS3, where all the dialog is in english, but it's implied that they're actually speaking Russian a lot of the time, but Hitman never conveyed that like MGS3 did. It's also a little weird that so many of the NPCs in the game are voiced by the same handful of people. Just odd.
Mirror's Edge Catalyst.
You may remember that I played the beta of this game months ago, much earlier in the year. It really seemed like a game that was released, and everyone promptly forgot about, huh? Well, I couldn't help myself when it was on sale, so I finally played it. And what did I think?
It's all right. I think it's a solid core stuck inside a mediocre game. At its best, it's just as fun to traverse stuff as it was in the first game, maybe even better. But I think the game's biggest problem is the "open world" side of it. Sure, I spent a lot of the game roaming around, picking up collectibles, and didn't exactly dislike it, but it also didn't really leave an impression on me. I understand now why it felt like even the people that played the game forgot about it. It feels like a game that had an open world slapped onto it because someone at EA thought that would make it sell better, but then the developers couldn't, or didn't have the time/resources to make that part of the game especially worthwhile.
Mirror's Edge was a game about movement, and it was a game that kept Faith moving, and more importantly, moving forward. Catalyst meanwhile, is still a game about movement, but instead it keeps Faith moving in circles. Sure, I could've just skipped all the side stuff, because the game never forces you to do any of it. But then I wouldn't have finished the game with all the skills unlocked! And what a shame that would be for a pseudo-completionist like me.
Most of the collectibles aren't even that fun to get. Some of them are the good kind of collectible, where the act of getting it involves solving a small environmental puzzle. But most of them are just big glowing orbs that are easy to get, or panels on walls with a chip to yank out. And they all give XP, which does the thing XP does in games. I don't mind there being skill trees in this game, what I do mind are some of the abilities that need to be unlocked, but should be by default. Stuff like rolling out of a big fall, or the quick turn button should be there by default.
But it's also stuff like the double wall run. Because that's on a skill tree, and thus something some people might not have, none of the story missions can require stuff like that to proceed. There's only a couple abilities like that on the trees, but I can't help but think that held them back on some of the level design.
Also, after reading up on what happened in the first game (turns out even though I played it last year, I've managed to forget most of the story), I think it's weird that this game is a reboot of the "franchise," rather than a normal sequel or prequel. I think it's even weirder that they probably changed it for the worse? The first game had a pretty straightforward story, but this one has some weird plot holes, and feels like they were maybe trying to ape Metal Gear, but all literally they could remember was "nanomachines."
I could go on, but I added in this section after finishing the rest of the blog (because I finished the game before doing my final proofread), and I've said enough about Catalyst. I still enjoyed a lot of the game, but I think it would've been better as a more focused, linear game. Neither of the Mirror's Edge games have reached the potential of what this series could be, and both have different problems. Maybe if they make a third one in another 8 years that will be the one to finally nail it.
Let It Die.
Let It Die is what happens when Suda and his crew at Grasshopper Manufacture made a game that is part Dark Souls, part rogue-like(-like-like), and part free to play game. It has the same quirky, weirdness their games are known for (though it feels a bit toned down compared to some of them), the combat has a strong focus on stamina management and other Dark Soulsian things, and dying results in a loss of whatever gear and leveling that fighter had. And, like many free to play games, there's an in game currency (Death Metals) that can be bought with real world money, and used for a variety of things. It can be spent to buy another currency (Kill Coins), used to buy a 30 day elevator pass (which also increases inventory space and gives access to other things), or spent to revive instantly after death, and not lose anything. The regular elevator costs money to use, and I imagine it gets pricey once you've gotten access to the higher levels of the game.
It's a weird mix, but for the most part, I think it works. Aside from the lock-on not actually focusing the camera on the locked-on enemy, I like the combat. And the fact that Circle is both dodge and block, depending on if the stick is being moved. The end result of that is that I almost never block, because my MO in games like this is to always keep moving. I have no idea if that's actually a good strategy or not. You can parry attacks with a well timed block, so maybe not.
Rather than a stamina meter, your fighter's heart becomes visible through their body as it beats faster and faster, which is neat. There's a variety of wrestling moves that can either be done as finishers, as a dropkick after sprinting long enough, or a stealth suplex on an unsuspecting enemy. It's fun, and usually not too hard. Like Dark Souls, weapons are equipped to each hand, can be swapped on the fly, and R2 and R1 are the attack buttons. Unlike those games, here R2 is the main attack, and R1 is where the "heavy" attacks (which are unlocked over time by getting kills with the weapons). Weapons and armor degrade over time, and usually are close to breaking when picked up from enemies.
Managing multiple enemies at once can get real tricky, though. Especially if they're fast moving ones. And unlike Dark Souls, it doesn't seem like most of the enemies stop chasing you if you try to run. Or, at least they chase far enough that they might as well not stop, given the small-ish size of the areas I've encountered so far. That, and the camera not locking on have helped to make more than a few encounters harder than they probably should have been. Which, maybe that's intentional, I don't really know. What I do know is that I don't care for having to manually spin the camera around whilst I'm dodging attacks from multiple enemies.
The rogue-like aspect of the game is why I think I probably won't play enough of the game to "finish" it. I'm not actually sure if it does end. I think it does, because Uncle Death (a friendly grim reaper with swirly glasses, a skateboard, and a golden scythe that turns into a golf club) makes it sound like there is an end to the Tower of Barbs, which is where (most of) the game takes place. I think he said it has forty floors, but I don't remember!
It's similar to Rogue Legacy, where there are upgrades and unlocks to be had that stay after dying. Blueprints brought to the local shopkeep will unlock R&D projects, which then unlock weapons and armor to buy forever, assuming you have enough Kill Coins to buy them. When I say "buy forever," I mean you have to buy them again after you die, or if you return from climbing the tower and something broke, not that you buy only once.
There's other upgrades for the "Waiting Room" (your base), but for your fighter that you control, you're basically starting from zero every time you die. I did unlock a couple new classes of fighters, that have different starting stats, or larger inventory space. Unless some of the later fighters start with way higher strength and other stats, it seems like dying means having to grind to get leveled at least a bit before returning to the level of the tower that I was at before. I've heard that eventually there are new fighters with higher level caps, but again, if those start at zero, that doesn't negate the grind.
And sometimes grind even just to equip the stuff I unlocked at my shop! Rather than having a level requirement to use weapons and armor, it's a max health requirement. Regular items require 200, which is the default health. But, the leveled up hammer I researched requires 204 health, meaning I need to run into the Tower of Barbs, get enough XP to level my health once, and then equip the hammer. Unless I started with a fighter class with higher health, but then I wouldn't have the extra inventory space I wanted to find more stuff! Unless, of course, I bought into their 30 day special pass thing, and then get the extra space.
I thought I could get around that by equipping a decal that increased my fighter's max health, but nope, apparently decal health boosts don't count. Decals, as you might have guessed, can be equipped to fighters to give them various bonuses or boosts. The default fighters can only wear one at a time (they get stuck on like a sticker), but the interface makes it look like there's upwards of nine spots for them. Like everything else, decals are lost on death. The other bonus for the Elevator Club (not its actual name) involves special decals that I think don't disappear on death.
Upon death, that fighter becomes a Hater, who then lurks around the level they died on for you to fight. They also travel to other people's games and fight them! I have had one of my Haters actually kill someone on my friends list. So far as I can tell, I didn't get anything out of it aside from knowing my Hater killed someone. But I found that out after he messaged me. I do know that if you kill a Hater, you get some Splithium, which is the game's third (and final, I hope) currency. Splithium is used to upgrade the Waiting Room with things like bigger banks for Splithium and Killer Coins (both of which you keep what's banked after dying), and more storage for your fighters (in the freezer), and captured fighters (in the restroom). I went poking around in the tutorial messages in the menus of the game, and apparently you can send out your fighters to invade other people, and if those get a kill, you get something.
On top of everything else, you can invade other people's Waiting Rooms, much like the FOB stuff in MGSV. However, unlike MGSV, you can only get invaded when you're not playing, and there's no direct fighting between players. Instead you can assign a few of your fighters to protect your banks from harm. I don't think I've been invaded yet, but I've made sure to spend as much of my Splithium as I can so I won't be a worthwhile target.
I wish the game had co-op. If it had co-op, and there was less loss after dying, I think I could get really into Let It Die. As it is, in the five or so hours I've played so far, I've already started to feel some tedium in replaying the early levels to grind, and I don't know how much more I'm going to play. Normally I know I'd really like to play more of a game like this before writing about it, but I think I have a relatively firm grasp on what's going on here. I've had fun with it, but not enough to make me want to grind that much more. But hey, it was free, so I won't complain. And, even with its issues, I'm glad that Suda and company have put out another game, and that it's good. Maybe I'll end up playing a ton more, and write about it again. We'll see!
PlayStation Plus Catch Up
Invisible Inc.
The most noteworthy thing about Invisible Inc to me is the impassioned speech Austin Walker made about it during Giant Bomb's game of the year stuff. Actually playing the game itself? While I appreciate that the game has many options to make it easier for dummies like me to play, even with that I still felt like I was very bad at the game. I know stuff like that can take time to get good at, but for now at least, I don't really have the time to spend getting good at it. Okay, I have the time, but I want to spend that time on other things.
Part of that difficulty, I think, comes from the level design. Or, more specifically, that the levels are non-linear, and procedurally generated. I ran into a similar probably with the XCOM reboot. I'd start a mission, and not have any idea where the aliens were, so I'd pick a direction I thought they'd be, and move accordingly. More often than not, it seemed like I picked the wrong direction, and wound up facing a turn of aliens attacking my troops from the side, and there wasn't much I could do aside from restart the mission.
In Invisible Inc, the game starts your agents (two by default) in one part of a level. Somewhere in the level is the objective, whatever it is, but at least in the missions I played, the game gave me zero indication as to where it was relative to where I started. And, since the levels aren't linear, that meant it was more or less a guessing game as to which direction to take. Splitting up could make finding it easier, but alone they aren't necessarily as well equipped to deal with enemies, or whatever else might lie in wait.
On the one hand, I do like that tactical considerations like that are in the game, and it is probably a net positive for people that are good at these tactical/strategy games. For me, it resulted in multiple missions in a row where I seemingly went every which way EXCEPT where the objective was. In the process of doing so, I'd also alerted basically the entire base, and all I could really do was retreat and abandon the mission. In one case, one of my agents was literally carrying the unconscious body of the other one to safety.
All that said, I think I get why people like Austin love this game so much. I wouldn't say it was game of the year worthy by any stretch, but I get why someone might choose this as their hill to die on during such a series of long podcasts. I jest, but it is a good game. Just one I'm not any good at. Maybe I'll give it another shot once I'm out of new games to play.
Stories: The Path of Destinies.
Between the bad name, and this being a smaller game I had never heard of before, I expected Stories to be something I played for twenty minutes, decided I didn't like, and then never touched again. This has happened more than a few times this year with PS+ games I didn't think were even worth writing about. I actually think it's pretty good, and played it to completion. Or, at least I got the "true ending," which took five or so hours.
Stories is a melee combat focused game with choices about how the story plays out, what levels get played, etc. The combat is a mix of stuff like Batman (combo system that lets you move farther to hit targets once enough hits are gotten) and Metal Gear Rising (parry attacks by hitting the attack button and the stick in the direction of the enemy), and it's pretty fun. Enemies can be grabbed and thrown at each other (or off cliffs), there's a grappling hook, a dash (that can be upgraded to damage enemies), and elemental sword types with special abilities. It's not amazing, but it's fun.
The same is true of the story. After each level (and occasionally mid level), there's a choice about what to do next. After five or so levels of going through this, I was surprised to see the main character Reynardo (and anthropomorphic fox with an eyepatch) die in a cutscene, and then a magic book rewound the game back to the beginning. But, it also revealed the "Truth System" in the game. Basically, even time the game is finished (it only takes about an hour), a Truth gets revealed, depending on what type of ending it was. There's four Truths, and you need all four to get the true ending. Now, let me be clear, there's way more than four endings in the game. I didn't count them, but based on the menu, it looked like twenty or thirty of them.
And no, this isn't a game where if you knew exactly what to do, you could get the true ending the first time. The conceit is that Reynardo himself is remembering bits and pieces of these Truths after rewinding, and he has to piece it together himself. It gives new options, that weren't available before, once you get to that point.
I think that's neat. The combat is fun, there's a lot of upgrading to be done, and the story is enjoyable enough. It's presented as a storybook kind of thing, with a single narrator reading all the dialog with different voices, rather than having a full voice cast. Maybe not what I would have gone with, but maybe they only had the budget for one voice actor. At least they got someone decent for it.
It's a fun little game, and for a PS+ game, I was pleasantly surprised.
Japanese Demo Time!
Like many people, I have employed the dark art of using a Japanese PSN account to access Japanese content in the past, and I've done it again! This was the first time I did it on PS4, though. In the process of doing that, I found it was actually easier to create a new Japanese PSN account (I think my third one), than it was to try to recover my old one's password and all that. I should say that I've never bought anything on there. Between messing with currency exchanges, or whatever, and my not actually being able to read or understand any Japanese, that never seemed like a good idea. Well, I can say that I can navigate menus well enough to be able to discern what the camera inversion options are. My trick is that I look for two almost identical options next to each other, and then change the first one. Usually it works out.
But what did sound like a good idea? The Yakuza 6 demo. And, honestly, I dunno that it was really worth the trouble. It was a huge file to download, but somehow it felt like downloading from PSN Japan (I live on the US East Coast, so about as far away as you can get in the US) was faster than downloading from regular PSN. Sony never ceases to baffle.
Yakuza 6 Demo.
Once it was done downloading, I was treated to a whole lot of cutscenes that I skipped, because again, I don't know Japanese. After I got into the game part, I did enjoy the combat. For the first time since I started playing the Yakuza games, Kiryu's combat felt different. Not completely different, as it was still discernible as his fighting style. But it felt a bit slower, and a bit less...video gamey? I haven't played enough of it to say whether I liked it more or less than the other games, but I do appreciate that they did something, ANYTHING to mix it up after the other games. Getting in and out of fights felt faster, and now instead of just a lone dude that summons thugs from nowhere, enemies travel in packs, so you can tell how many you'll have to fight.
One thing I definitely did not like about the demo is that now it's a "hold X to run" game. And I don't think that works well with this style of game at all. In a game where there's little, or no reason to walk slowly most of the time, I don't understand why the developers would think it was a good idea to make people hold a button to run. If this was the first game of a new series, I might be more lenient, because I wouldn't know what the game was going to be like. But I have played a bunch of the Yakuza games, and I can tell you with 100% certainty that most people are going to spend most of the time in the game (not counting cutscenes) running, not walking. And even if I wanted to take a casual stroll in the game, I'm more than capable of pushing lightly on the control stick.
Yakuza 5 actually had the opposite thing. That game had a button (shoulder button, which is much better for these sorts of things than X) to walk slowly. Slow walking could also be done with just the stick, but it had a slow walk in there. The purpose of that was to be discrete, and not get the attention of enemies, but I think that is a better way to handle it than suddenly making people hold X to run, and in the sixth main entry in the series.
But for all I know there's an option to change that in the settings. I do know my strat of how to invert the camera backfired on me, because this game inverts both the Y and X axis by default. I figured that out quickly, and got it sorted out. If anyone reading this knows Japanese, and has played that demo, let me if there's any options regarding hold X to run. I'm not saying that'll stop me from buying the game once it finally gets its Western release in 2018, but it'll be irksome. It'd take something like overexposure to a franchise that only barely changes things from one release to the next to achieve that. I mean, it's not like there's two Yakuza games coming out in the next six months or...Wait...
Final Fantasy XV Judgment Disc.
Yes, I also downloaded and played the Japanese Final Fantasy XV demo. No, I don't know why it's called Judgment Disc when it was something I downloaded. Maybe there's also a disc version in Japan? That sounds like something they'd do.
Much like the Yakuza 6 demo, this one had quite a bit of story and dialog in it. But this one felt like it had more of a focus on actually running around fighting things. Or, maybe I just got stuck in the Yakuza 6 demo before it "opened up" (what I've heard of that demo made it sound like it was bigger than what I saw). Either way, I got into more than a few fights with some wildlife in the FFXV demo. And, while I wouldn't call it amazing, it was fairly enjoyable.
Honestly, there really isn't much to say about this demo. I think at one point a dog asked Noctis for his autograph? I got to drive the car at one point, and while I was overall disappointed at the lack of my being able to careen out of control, I was able to hit another car on the other side of the road. Even if the game slowed me to a crawl before impact. The other car thing I didn't like was that if you go into first person whilst not driving, it still went to Ignis' point of view in the driver's seat, rather than Noctis in the back. If I'm doing first person whilst not driving the car, I want to see stuff from the back. Let me look at Gladio's abs whilst he reads. Dumb stuff like that.
That's about all that I have to say about it. Seemed all right. Like the sort of thing I would like if it was in a language I understood. Oh, and the button mapping in the combat seems weird. I think it'd be better with attack on Square, and dodge on Circle, instead of the other way around like it is. But maybe there's different control schemes, I don't know! Maybe I'll pick up the game at some point after the price drops, and they've patched the game with that extra story stuff they're adding.
Overwatch Update!
I've started playing again, thanks to the "Winter Wonderland" event. Not nearly as much as I was back during the height of my interest in the game, but enough. I haven't gotten any good "Winter" items yet. I use quotes, because apparently Blizzard thinks "Winter" means "90% Christmas and 10% snowmen." Not that I mind it being Christmas themed, I just think they should be more honest about it. Or, they could've at least tried to make it more international, and multicultural like the cast of the game makes it seem.
This is also the first time I've played the game regularly since a bunch of more game play focused updates came to the game. Like Sombra, the newest character. She's good! I was playing the mode where it gives you a random character after every death, and I got her at the start of the match. I figured I'd die quickly, but ended up not dying, and getting an 18 kill streak with her. I've not done as well with her since, but at least I got in one good match. I haven't played an actual match as Symmetra since her update, but I do think it's cool that Blizzard is willing to make some big-ish changes to characters.
Other changes to the game I'm less happy about. I don't like that Quick Play limits each team to one of each character. It's not terrible, but now I can't have the spontaneity of everyone picking the same character just to be silly. "But Moosey, that's what No Limits is for!" Yes, in theory. In practice, most of the people are still playing Quick Play, since that's the first option, and it's not hidden inside the "Arcade" menu. And when I do manage to get into a match of that, it felt like everyone was trying to just be silly and do all Torbjorn, or something stupid. I don't want that to be EVERY match, just happen every once in a while. But that was days ago, the last few times I tried to find a No Limits game, I couldn't.
I read at some point they reduced Ultimate meter filling for everyone (aside from D.Va getting her mech back), and I didn't notice it at first, but it does feel like I get ults less often than I used to. And that's no fun. That, or maybe they didn't actually apply that update, and I'm just bad at the game.
There's probably a multitude of other changes made to the game that I don't know about, but that's the stuff I felt like mentioning. Hopefully this time I'll get the skins I want. Still upset I didn't get Junkenstein's Monster.
Anything else?
I started up No Man's Sky this morning, and before I could even get control of my character on a planet, the game crashed. Off to a great start. It did work the second time I tried, and hopefully I won't run into any other issues like that. Then I still have that Witcher III DLC to play, and I have Watch_Dogs 2 ordered on Amazon. Will it arrive in time for me to accurately judge it for Game of the Year? Will it matter? Will any of you care? I don't know!
But thanks for reading!
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