For a brief moment, I didn't actually feel stupid for wasting 200 Quid on CoD: Ghosts. That was for about an hour, right after the patch. I played in three different lobbies, none of which contained players with every single perk enabled. Or people, whose crosshairs snapped on to you through buildings from halfway across the map. Or enemy teams, where every single player had a K/D of 3 and up. No players with prophetic abilities, who start shooting before you're even anywhere near the corner you're about to pass. Life was good.
Unfortunately, if something seems too good to be true, it usually isn't true. I fired up the game a few moments ago, hoping to actually have fun with this stupid game for the first time since launch. Aaaand the aimbots have been updated. Heck, some of them seem more amazing than ever. Guy jumped off a rooftop, turned a full 180 degrees in mid-fall and shot me before he even touched the ground. Of course I can't rule out that he just had a hunch and he somehow heard me coming all the way from the other side of the level and maybe his 37 kills without dying were proof of his skill. *coughs*
But wallhacks and aimbots aren't even the main problem right now. It's custom lobbies, which boost people's levels to insane heights against their will. And since there are no server browsers (or servers, for that matter) and you have zero influence on what the fuck the stupid matchmaking system is doing, it's impossible to avoid shit like that. Well... if the game lets you play in the first place. The patch has improved the shitty performance somewhat, though it's still far from ideal. I can't play in fullscreen mode, because the game will freeze within two minutes. Looks like I'm not alone, either.
This shit is happening across all platforms right now.
I could go on about how it's still perfectly normal to get killed the second you spawn, even though the patch was supposed to fix that. About godmode and one shot kill hacks. About how the dedicated servers they were "hoping to bring to Ghosts" are nowhere to be seen. Fuck it. I could go back to Black Ops 2, which works perfectly fine. But that would only frustrate me more. Paying a fuckton of money for some new game, only to go back to an older version, reminding me of what an idiot I was to preorder in the first place. I never preorder. This shit right there is why I never preorder. I don't know what the fuck I was thinking.
On a happier note, Star Trek Online Season 8 is here!
There's some really cool new content there, though you can easily see all the new stuff in a single day, as seems to be the norm with Cryptic games. There's a fantastic space mission, which has you attacking a gigantic space station or a mothership or some shit, which starts off with people flying across the surface of the station. The whole experience is somewhere between Death Star trenches and Zaxxon Online. Then you blow a hole in the hull of the base, fight your way inside and nuke the entire thing from the inside, causing your entire group to die a painful, fiery death in the process. Apparently, there's some way to escape the inferno, but I have yet to figure out how the fuck I'm supposed to do that.
There's a far less fantastic space mission where you protect friendly troop transporters and shoot down enemy transport ships and in the end you get to fight a giant dreadnought and hunt down enemy escape shuttles, which seems to go against everything Starfleet stands for, but fuck canon. What bothers me about this bit is how it doesn't even fucking matter what you do. You can save as many or as few allies as you want, destroy the dreadnought or get blown up by it, the whole thing just ends after 15 minutes and gives you a rating, then you get a couple reward tokens, that's it. Apparently, better performance rewards slightly more tokens, but the difference is hardly worth it.
There's also the new battlezones, one of which happens on the ground, the other one is explored by ship. The former is pretty impressive, with well over a dozen players and their bridge officers fulfilling mission objectives, shooting endless amounts of baddies, liberating sector after sector of the area until the final showdown against some weird cyber dino things. Imagine Jurassic Park meets Robocop. Then the whole thing starts over.
The whole thing causes something unprecedented in STO: People prefer ground combat to new space stuff. You get large-scale battles, people show off their gear and officers, rewards pop up everywhere around you and while the action is getting a little stale after a whole week of non-stop battlezone fun, it's easily the coolest new addition to the game in a long while. Dear Cryptic - why not make ground pvp a little more like that? Make it faction-based and have people buy all those armored mech suits with reward tokens they earn in battle. They don't have to be permanent, they can only work on the battlefield and only until they get blown up. Balance and all that. But damn, I'd play the shit out of that!
Unfortunately, the ship-based battlezone is, well, poo. It's full of entirely boring, mundane and borderline nonsensical crap, which is absolutely no fun to play. My personal favourite awful mission would be: "Clear the way for the cargo ship". So there's this cargo ship floating around the place. And there are floating crates nearby. Cargo, duh! And the ship keeps bumping into these crates, so you have to move them out of the way. Because, you know, a fucking cargo ship doesn't come pre-equipped with the ability to move fucking cargo, apparently. Or the ability to fly AROUND the god damn crates in three-dimensional space. It would be hilarious if it wasn't so unbelievably sad and stupid. The ship is steering straight into a bunch of floating crates and gets stuck there until you move that shit.
Some of these missions aren't just dumb, they're also broken. You get a little map marker telling you where to fly (which is usually impossible to see) and, more often than not, nothing happens. At all. And while the ground battlezone lets you liberate sectors for kickass rewards, all you do on your ship, aside from playing Space-Tetris, is capture towers. You sit near a tower, shoot a few baddies and wait for the thing to turn, that's it. Not very exciting.
What's more exciting is the shit ton of fun reputation rewards for doing all of this stuff. It's not as grind-heavy as the other factions, so I'm already halfway to maximum reputation, just a week after release of the new season. Give me another week or two and I'll have both the new space and ground sets introduced with Season 8. Unfortunately, the whole thing is a bit flawed, as well - I have no way to tell whether or not I should even bother with these items, because there's no way to preview the damn set bonuses. I'm farming tokens playing the admittedly fun new content in order to buy an item set, which may prove completely useless to me. Dear Cryptic - why not implement a little preview on all the set bonuses, so I can see what these items do before I spend several weeks trying to obtain them?
And it's hard to deny that STO is starting to show its age. The game looked pretty amazing four years ago. Space still looks good, the ships are stunning and incredibly detailed, but every nebula still flickers, many of the ground textures are muddy and the characters no longer look as hot as they used to. This is especially the case during cutscenes, where the mix of bad animations, complete lack of lip-synching and hysterically bad voice acting turn the whole game into some sort of comedy. None of this is enough to make me want to stop playing, but it would be nice if publisher Perfect World Entertainment sunk a few of their billions of bucks into STO for a little engine upgrade or some up to date textures, character models and animations. Probably not gonna happen in this life, but other MMOs get the occasional facelift, so why the hell not?
I like Season 8, despite its obvious flaws. It takes an hour or two to see the new space missions and battlezones and you can finish all the new content just as quickly. Then you spend several weeks repeating all of that stuff over and over again whilst waiting to unlock items, which may turn out to be entirely useless to you. So there really isn't a whole lot to it, but then again, the game has never been aimed towards core gamers and the average trekkie seems to enjoy things in a more casual manner, apparently. There's also a new Federation tutorial, which has you starting out as a cadet of Starfleet Academy. And the ground-based battlezone is fantastic. Let's hope they're gonna implement more of that, possibly as pvp-content, before the whole thing goes stale again and people lose interest.
-Cat
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