So here's a nice surprise - Claire downloaded Quake Champions without even telling me. Played a few rounds and it turns out she's doing a lot better on there than she does on any CoD game. She's even topped the scoreboard a few times. So that's neat. :D
My dick has permanently grown 2 inches after this one.
Getting into Paladins on the Switch some more, as well. I still hate having to control it with an analog stick and I reeeeeeeeeeally hope they're gonna add fucking gyro aiming already. Still, it's nice when things actually go right and the game broadcasts a little bit of your gameplay as the moment of the match to every player at the end of a round. A feature the cunts at Activision Blizzard are trying to patent now, because we can't have nice things.
Watch as I put you in your place!
My thing I'm currently doing and hoping to blog about if it succeeds is going surprisingly well. I'm halfway done. The positive changes are already kicking in. Life is good.
In other news, I'll be attending Gamescom in Cologne this year for the first time in my life. For work. Got a TON of people wanting to meet me in person. Nobody from any of my writing and magazine jobs, none of my German friends, pretty much no one outside of family has ever met me IRL, because I've got zero social skills and all the anxieties. Trying not to think about it too much right now. Yay.
It's official. I'm hooked. After a bit of a shaky start I'm finally getting the hang of Quake Champions and my scores are starting to get a little more decent. I don't think I'll ever bother with any ranked 1vs1 and 2vs2 stuff, because I find (T)DMs so much less stressful. When you look me up on the stat tracker (please don't), you can see I've been steadily and consistently getting better. I can't remember the last time I've had so much fun with an arena shooter. Or any FPS game, for that matter.
The guy kept insisting I wasn't a real kitten for the entire duration of the match.
There's just something immensely satisfying about watching Doomguy and Quake guy and a bunch of other weirdos running all over the place, blowing each other into meaty chunks with rocket launchers. I sincerely hope the game is gonna maintain some of its momentum and won't immediately disappear into oblivion, like certain other shooters, which aren't Overwatch, Fortnite or CoD. It's been far too long since I've played a decent arena shooter! Back in my teens, we'd talk about nothing but Quake and Unreal (Tournament) in school, we'd all meet online after class, shoot each other to pieces, then talk about it back in school the day after. Life was good. And then came Counter-Strike.
The gaming industry is terribly boring and unoriginal. We were all instantly hooked on CS, there was absolutely nothing like it, and CSGO is still one of the biggest, most important shooters out there today. And suddenly every shooter had swat teams and terrorists and realistic weapons and objectives and one life per round and all that over the top silliness with rocket launchers and miniguns wasn't cool anymore. I'm exaggerating a bit here, but arena shooters haven't exactly been relevant since the early 2000s. It was all terrorists or nazis, then zombies or nazi zombies. Just like everything is battle royale today, everything had to be a MOBA at some point and everyone made an MMO, which set out to be the next WoW-killer. Because why innovate, when you can just take something popular and fucking copy it? Which can absolutely work if you add your own ideas and improvements, like Fortnite did over PUBG, but can also hilariously backfire twice if you're Cliff Bleszinsky.
I gitted gud.
In other news, fucking Paladins. Never played it, never looked at it. Same for Overwatch. To me, these games are like MMO-style battlegrounds with guns. You're a tank, healer or damage dealer, people in chat will yell random abuse at you if they disagree with your choice of character or the way you play, everyone is an asshole and you always end a session feeling just a little bit miserable. There are plenty of videos all over YouTube, where people lose every last ounce of their shit in ranked mode voice chat, even (and particularly) when they're all the way at the bottom of the scoreboard, contributing absolutely fucking nothing. Not how I want to spend my precious spare time. And then Nintendo came along and added the magic words, which make EVERY GAME EVER attractive to me. "But you can play it on the go." Not Overwatch, but the next best thing - Paladins.
My damage is best damage.
When I first heard about Paladins' impending Switch release, I just shrugged at it. So what? Fortnite is on Switch now, runs at 30 FPS, looks about as crappy as the Android version. Doom, whilst super fun on the Switch, struggles a bit performance-wise and, no matter how much I genuinely love it, is a blurry, pixellated mess. The fun gameplay, motion controls and the fact IT'S FUCKING DOOM 2016 IN MY POCKET totally make up for all that, but fuck Paladins with a rake!
Yeah well. Paladins runs at 60 FPS on the Switch. And in docked mode it looks more or less like the Xbox One X version, except at a lower resolution. Seriously, check out the comparison tool over on Eurogamer. Yes, the Switch footage is a little less clear and crisp and a bit fuzzy around the edges, but for a portable hybrid console, this is ridiculously impressive. So I went and downloaded a game for my Switch, which I had absolutely zero interest in five minutes earlier.
And did I mention my horse is amazing?
I've been playing the shit out of this game non-stop ever since. I woke up this morning, stayed in bed, fired up the Switch and played a fast-paced 5on5 multiplayer FPS over the internet IN BED! I play a huge-ass dragon with a rocket launcher, I shoot people in the face, push carts full of explosives into enemy base camps, gain levels, unlock cosmetics and I'm having way too much fun with a game I completely suck at. I can't aim for shit with a controller, I'm still waiting for them to finally implement motion/gyro aiming, but for some reason I just can't stop playing this game all day long. It helps that there's cross-platform play with Xbox users, so there's a large pool of players around no matter what time of day I try to get into a match.
Even my MVP footage is garbage, but I'm having too much fun for it to really bother me.
I won't lie. One reason why I'm enjoying the Switch version so much is the complete lack of text and voice chat, apart from a few canned phrases. The moment they add voice support will probably be the day I remove this game and never look back. But right now it's just good fun and the worst thing that ever happens is when somebody on your team gets salty and decides to go AFK for the duration of a match. It doesn't happen a whole lot, but it happens. Again, just like battlegrounds in an MMO.
The only real downside to Paladins on the Switch is how right now the game is in 'Early Access' and you can only play if you shell out $25 on a founder's pack. Sure, you unlock every current and future champion for life when you buy this thing, but it's a steep asking price for a game that's free2play on every other platform out there. On the plus side, it's also going to go F2P on the Switch this summer if you don't feel like ponying up for a founder's pack. And they might even have gyro aiming by then!
We re-visited the ultimate asshole simulator to play the Doomsday Heist. It's insanely good - if you can afford to unlock it or have the patience of a saint.
I can honestly say that I know Los Santos better than I know my own town. I don't need my GPS to get to most places these days. There's Del Perro Pier with the ferris wheel and the rollercoaster. Drive up the road a bit from there and you get to Del Perro Heights, where most of my German heist mates live, because it's the cheapest safehouse you can get as a base of operations for heists. They're not really active anymore these days, but back then we completed all of the heists together several times. I remember spamming C4 all over the parking lot to nuke my friends the moment they'd come out with their cars. Sometimes we'd troll each other with attack helicopters and dick around with them right in front of the windows of the Del Perro apartments. Good times.
You kinda had to be there.
Bit 'round the corner from there is Little Seoul, where Claire's mother owns the shittest apartment in all of Los Santos. It's filthy, you can almost smell the cold smoke from hundreds of cigarettes and permanently-closed windows. Her character is some sort of punky murder hobo. Unlike my high-rolling German friends, she usually gets around on a little pushbike or in some ancient car, bumps into random people at the beach to start brawls between them or sits on random rooftops to watch the police AI glitch out. We don't really play any super challenging content together, but entertain ourselves by piling up lots of cars to watch them chain-explode.
Up north from there you'll come to the Eclipse Towers, where I've got my place with its original interior, before they made it all customizable. You can get to Vinewood Hills from there, which is where Claire lives in what's probably the nicest house you can currently get in the game. I'll always be jealous of that, but I'm not buying any other homes unless they suddenly decide to start selling one of those fakey Malibu Beach houses.
Every corner of this virtual city has some happy memories attached to it, whether we were trying to catapult each other onto the rooftops of random buildings, dropped each other's cars in random swimming pools with cargobobs or crash-landed airplanes right on top of each other in the middle of a busy road. GTA Online has this ridiculously massive assortment of tools, which allow you to be an absolute cunt to all of your online friends, enemies and the virtual citizens of Los Santos. I absolutely love it.
Of course the main reason why we're back on there right now isn't the happy memories or even the joyous torture of friends and loved ones. It's the new Doomsday Heist. Well... by 'new' I mean it was added last year, but we haven't touched it until recently, because gaining access is stupidly expensive and getting to the actual heist content requires even more money or forced online play in public lobbies. So unless you're part of a very active heist team that piles up millions and millions of GTA Dollars, chances are, you're gonna be spending so much money on Shark Cards in order to unlock the new content, you might as well be buying a brand new AAA game. It took me a €45 Megalodon Shark Card to get to all of the good stuff (and skip the annoying public shit). So for all the praise Rockstar get for their "free content updates", they really aren't free at all for anyone but the most dedicated players out there. Because with the ~15k you make in an average mission, you'll be spending the rest of your life grinding out the cash required to unlock all this.
Check out my free new airplane from the free hangar update, which only costs about 40 real life Dollars to unlock!
In order to gain access to the Doomsday Heist content, you need to be either a CEO or the president of a Biker Club, meaning you'll have to buy a company building or a clubhouse. Happy spending! You also need a so-called "facility", a supervillain underground lair of sorts, which is going to set you back another 1.2 million if you go for the absolute cheapest variety with no extras attached. Starting each of the three heist scenarios costs hundreds of thousands in GTA cash. And then there's the prep work. You're gonna have to steal a bunch of vehicles and other gadgets before you can even play the setup missions or the actual heist. Which doesn't sound so bad until you realize this can only be done in a public lobby. And on PC that means constant harassment, trolling and cheaters everywhere.
It's frustrating enough when you're supposed to move a vehicle from one location to another when today's version of GTA has explosive sniper and shotgun ammo, which nukes pretty much anything in a single shot. When you get people constantly caging you, dropping airplanes on your character and remote-nuking you with mod menus, a frustrating, brutally unfair prep mission becomes impossible. The good news is that you can skip all the forced public session crap, if you don't want to put up with this nonsense. The bad news is that doing so costs even more money, meaning the setup to any of these heist scenarios can set you back a million GTA Dollars, meaning you'll earn absolutely fuck all at the end of it. I wasn't joking when I said you'd be spending AAA-game money just to have a chance to play this "free" new content.
All right! So far, 100% of the stuff I've done this update is pay for things. Let's see if it's fun to play.
What you get in return, however, is some of the best content in the entire game and some of the best multiplayer gameplay I've enjoyed in any game for a long while. The whole thing kicks off with cutscenes and voice-acting just like the previous heists and you get to see familiar faces like Lester Crest and one of the FIB guys from previous heists, as well as some creepy over the top Elon Musk knockoff, whose hair is totally natural and he's dating a lot, you guys! The presentation is in every way as good as it was with previous content of this nature, so there's that.
Each of the three heist scenarios comes with its own selection of set-up missions and an actual heist finale, so there's an easy ten or so hours of content here for a first playthrough - more, if you're brave enough to attempt the public free mode prep work. The whole thing is also a bit more flexible than the original heists. Rather than locking you into teams of exactly 4 players (or 2 in case of the Fleeca practice heist), each and every Doomsday mission can be played with 2-4 people. Claire and I did the whole thing as a duo at level 160, which was extremely challenging in places, but doable.
Yay for references from James Bond to Back to the Future!
Almost all of the new missions are incredibly fun to play, not just because you get a whole bunch of new toys to play around with, but also the way in which they are introduced. There's the new DeLorean... sorry, DeLuxo, easily the coolest new addition of the Doomsday Heist update. You start a mission driving around in one of these cars while hacking some armored transports around town. Once the hacking is complete, you get to destroy the transports, which is when the game tells you that your new car can fire a bunch of guided missiles.
Once that's done, your next set of targets is on the water. That's where you get to activate the DeLuxo's hover mode and glide across the waves as you chase after your next set of targets. The mission ultimately takes you to Los Santos Airport, where the DeLuxo's flight mode gets activated. Now you're hacking an airliner with your flying car whilst battling attack helicopters. It looks even more insane than it sounds and it's easily some of the coolest shit I've ever done on there.
At this point I'm not even mad I had to pay for this.
You get to play around with tanks, jetpacks, missile launchers and stealth choppers. There's one mission where a bunch of heavily-armored baddies stalk you with miniguns and a cloaking device, so you need to rely on thermal vision to spot them. There is so much absolutely insane, over the top stuff happening in each Doomsday scenario, that I can easily forgive some of the weaker missions, despite their annoying clown-car mechanics and unfair checkpoints (or lack thereof). But yes, there are some frustrating moments.
There's one mission in particular, which requires you to hack four servers in the largest, most maze-like server room I've ever seen in any game, ever. Infinite enemies spawn everywhere around you, which makes things incredibly fun when you attempt this mission with only two players like we did.
Once you're done with this bit, you get to escape the server room. Players start on opposite ends of the room and fight their way through towards a central staircase, which is absolutely crawling with enemies. They're surrounding the stairs, they're ON the stairs, they're doing a circle-jerk around the very top of the stairs, shooting you from every direction the moment you make it up there. Once you make it out there, you're faced with a dozen or so cop-cars, a swat team and a bunch of helicopters attacking from every single direction. You get one spare life shared between the team. Lose it and if anybody dies at any point during the escape bit, you'll be sent all the way back to the server room.
The server room of doom
There's another mission where you're supposed to find and escort an NPC, who is trapped in a building full of enemies. That alone would be stressful enough, but the other team (or player, if you duo it) has to sit in a remote corner of the map and snipe enemies, which will never stop respawning and eventually overwhelm them if the rescue team takes too long to free the NPC. And this is where some of GTA's more bullshit mechanics really start to show. Each enemy can take as much as 28,429 hits to the body if you don't hit them right in the head. What's worse, they just fall over after every other hit or so, meaning they'll just lie on the floor, usually behind cover, and take for ever to finally get up again, so you get another chance at shooting them in the head. It's insanely frustrating and tedious, but trying to rush past these enemies will get you killed almost instantly. Knocking them over too many times instead of killing them will cost you precious time and get your team mates killed.
It doesn't help that enemy spawns have always been crap in this game. Sometimes you will simply trigger a spawn, causing bad guys to appear literally behind you, who will immediately begin to shoot you before you can react. There's nothing more frustrating than almost completing a mission on the 20th attempt, only to get fucked over by some jerkwad, who magically materialized out of thin air right behind you.
Cutscenes in Doomsday are top-notch.
Of course, flying cars with homing missiles and similar new gadgets also mean that public online mode is now more fucked than it ever has been, with or without hacks. Everything these days has a mounted turret, explosive ammo, drops mines, cluster bombs and napalm. Which is great for those, who simply want a bit of mindless fun and cause as much destruction and mayhem as possible in the process. Personally, I prefer closed sessions, which are restricted to friends and crewmembers. Let's hope that at least some future content will be available in this mode, because forcing public play really isn't all that great.
If you still have friends you play GTA with and you've got what it takes to tackle some of the game's toughest content, then the Doomsday Heist is absolutely worth it, even if you'll likely me forced to shell out a whole bunch of cash just to access it. There's also the fact that, if you complete the heist missions as the leader, you'll get massive discounts on all the new vehicles and toys.
Still, remember the good old days where the most expensive thing you could get was a Zentorno for around 700k and where the entrance fee to a heist was a 200k apartment? Having to spend millions and millions for every little bit of new content simply isn't fun. Sure, people pay for it, myself included, which is why Rockstar are still raking in stupid amounts of cash with this game almost a half decade after release. But I remember when staying up to date with an online game required a cheap subscription and the occasional expansion pack. Keeping up in GTA means spending AAA money with every update these days and I don't like that. If only it wasn't so damn fun!
