The Mass Effect trilogy tells my favourite story, ever. I like it better than any book I've read or any move I've watched. No other game has moved me so much with its storytelling. I can watch Atreyu's horse die in the Neverending Story, laugh about it and eat a steak. Made of horse. But when Mordin Solus made the ultimate sacrifice, I could have cried like a bitch. I didn't, because my girlfriend was in the room, but damn. What a guy!
He was the very model of a scientist salarian.
When I heard they were making a new Mass Effect I got angry. For me, Mass Effect was done. Finished. There was no need for another story in this setting. Better stop while it was still great. Yeah, yeah, controversial ending, whatever, go choke on a bag of dicks.
Then they announced it - Mass Effect: Andromeda. Meh. No Shepard, a setting countless miles and years apart from the original trilogy. What's the fucking point?
Things went quiet for a while, then we got the E3 trailer and people (rightfully) took the piss out of the goofy facial animations. Now release is around the corner, I've watched a few gameplay streams, particularly over on PC Gamer and struggled to stay awake, while the hosts kept saying things like, "I fucking hate this", "I'm bored out of my mind" and other such high praise. It all looked a bit shit. In fact, they released an article, saying that Andromeda does in fact, seem a bit shit from what they've played. And a bit more shit. Rockpapershotgun fully agreed.
It was painful to watch.
Aaaaaand you've probably heard how the internet is currently flooded with memes, because yeah, those facial animations are awkward. I won't lie, I thought some of them were actually pretty funny. Though none of that stuff helped make me want to play this game any more. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Two or three others may have joined the bashing bandwagon.
But here's the thing. Unlike certain publishers, who don't want anybody to see their stuff pre-release, EA lets you play a whole bunch of Andromeda right now, if you're signed up for Origin Access. Doing so cost me literally tree-fiddy, which I'll get back, should I choose to buy the game. Because you get 10 percent off. Should I not buy it, giving it a go will have cost me said 3,50 rather than a full 50 Euros. You can't complain about that.
10 hours with Girl-Garrus.
And yes, after my ten hours I can confirm the horrible faces. I've spent half an hour trying to create a somewhat decent-looking character, but in the actual game he looks like a cross-eyed, goofy-faced idiot. It was the lesser of two evils. The default female character has a permanent, creepy, vacant-minded smile on her face, most of the custom female options look like dumpster-crackbabies. Characters have those oversized eyes, making them look like something made by Pixar, rather than realistic beings. There's also a slightly cringey, suuuper predictable bit in the story... if you don't want ULTRA MINOR SPOILERS for something that happens within the first five minutes of the game, just skip the following paragraph.
Your space-dad is the super duper awesome N7 Pathfinder hero guy, you hardly ever get to know him and then he dies and you're supposed to take his place. That shit was already overused when every console JRPG put you in the shoes of some teenage boy, who picks up his father's sword after he fell in the war or some such garbage. Certain previews are already bitching about it, because "Durrrr, how are we supposed to feel anything if the game didn't even give us the time to build a connection with space dad, the writing is soooo terrible". Right. See how your character literally says "I hardly knew him" when people say they're sorry for Ryder's loss? That's because you're not supposed to feel massively sad or attached. Because you're not. That's the fucking point. Figuring out who your father was, is a massive part of the storyline, which is precisely why the game doesn't establish any sort of connection between you and him at the beginning. SPOILERS OVER!
You can be a hot, sword-wielding Asari ninja in multiplayer!
Without wanting to reveal any more details, I found the story interesting and felt that it drew me in pretty much straight away. I like the voice actors and most of the characters you get to meet in the first ten or so hours and Ryder comes across as a pretty cool guy/dumpster-crackbaby. The one thing I've immediately missed was the cool Mass Effect music. The star chart music from ME1. The haunting piano tune whenever some depressing shit happened in ME3. I've exited Andromeda about an hour ago and I can't even remember any of the tunes from the trial.
Despite all the bitching about the characters, Andromeda's surroundings look great, sometimes amazing. The first two planets I got to hang out on were beautiful and detailed, space looks absolutely gorgeous and while I agree that planetary scanning is slower and even more annoying and tedious than it was in the previous games, I don't absolutely hate it and it's stunning to look at.
Hair, however, looks like somebody drew over a photograph in MS Paint.
Regarding side missions, I've read complaints where people compared them to the kind of quests you'd find in a Korean MMO. And yes, I had the literal "go there and use a thing" kind of mission, but I also had two side quests, which involved a bit of sleuthing and dialogue and stories, which I found pretty interesting. Some guy seemingly shooting his superior in cold blood, while he claims it was an accident. You get to dig around for evidence, question witnesses... heck, it's not the greatest quest I've ever played, but it sure as fuck beats "kill ten space bandits" or "skin six space pigs".
Combat is fucking awesome. I went for a Vanguard build, because that was my playstyle of choice on ME3. Basically, I attack far-away baddies with a spammy, semi-automatic sniper rifle, like so:
If baddies get too close, they get to enjoy some sweet face time with Mr. Shotgun. Right to the face.
BOOM... um, bitch!
Anyone sits behind cover and never comes out like a total pussy, I teleport right at them and give them a pounding. Like so:
And if none of that helps, then I just beat the shit out of them in melee. I did that to a ridiculously huge monster, which easily filled up all of my screen. It takes some Krogan-sized balls to do that. All four of them.
I killed that thing with my hands is what I'm saying. Then motion-blurring ruined the moment.
Yes, the AI is as braindead as in every computer game, ever. Baddies sit behind cover and occasionally show their stupid heads, so you can shoot them. Your teammates may be helpful or they may just get stuck in the scenery. There's absolutely nothing to say here that hasn't been said about every other game with a combat system.
My ten hours are over, Claire is nearing the halfway point and we're both sitting here, grinning to ourselves like idiots. I'm giddy. We're playing fucking Mass Effect. We're buing the damn retail version. Claire is running this thing on an old Bulldozer CPU and an HD 7950, with settings on high, averaging somewhere around 40 FPS. That's pretty amazing performance for such a dated machine, considering the high requirements. There are occasional slowdowns, even on my i7-4790k running 16GB RAM and a GTX 1060, but it's all playable and stable. We had no crashes here, I can tab in and out all the way I want and the game keeps happily chugging away.
Look, if you're on the fence, just give the fucking trial a go. Costs next to nothing and if you hate it, all you'll lose is tree-fiddy, rather than AAA-money.
Roses are red,
the Normandy is grey,
I'm buying Andromeda,
we'll bang, okay?
Once upon a time there was a crowdfunding campaign, which promised a large-scale Warhammer 40K shooter. Literally hundreds, if not thousands of players were supposed to be fighting over territory on gigantic maps. Planetside 2 in the 40K universe, they said. Then the lead designer quit his job halfway through the development process and people got an arena shooter with a maximum player count of, um... was it 40? 60? Something considerably less than a thousand per map.
The new game director said this was just work in progress. Work out the combat mechanics, get the shooting right, then they'll scale things up a bit. Except that never happened. In fact, most of the stuff they promised for this game (large persistent world, meaningful campaigns, proper pve content, thousands of items) never happened. Which didn't stop them from showing gameplay that didn't actually exist in one of their launch trailers. They also promised non-existing features until literally hours before release:
Immediately before release they changed the infographic for something far less impressive:
There is still no "persistent" world and the alleged "campaign" was added months later and boils down to "win 5 matches in a day for a reward". There are no 1000s of weapons. Not even close.
A week after launch, the game had a peak player count of something around 1,300 players, struggling to maintain 800 users at prime time. They charged 60 Bucks for this game and people felt ripped off, lashing out at the developers. The community manager responded in kind:
We were all a bit stressed. We are all better people now.
Add constant lag, performance issues, messy graphics and complete and utter lack of balancing to the game and I've bashed Eternal Crusade with a well-deserved 40/100 over at GameStar.
I kept an eye on the game over the following month or two, occasionally firing it up here and there to see if there were any interesting changes. But apart from a rapidly declining player base and tons upon tons of promises by the new lead developer, there was really nothing going on. Until now.
2D sun prite, ultra settings.
I checked the game's stats on SteamDB and suddenly, Eternal Crusade had a peak of 2,800 players, as well as over 1,200 active players in the past 24 hours. That's still abysmal, but it's considerably more than I had ever seen on there before. What happened?
As it turns out, the game is getting a F2P option. Or "Free 2 Waagh", as they call it. You can now play the game without paying anything, albeit with a bunch of restrictions. Progression is slowed down to 1/3 of its normal speed and you only get to play orks. Once you've unlocked the full version by spending 20 Bucks in the cash shop you get full access to all content and features. Meanwhile, people who purchased the retail version get 40 Bucks worth of premium currency to spend as they please. On top of that, they get an extra retail version of the game, which they can freely sell or gift to an unsuspecting victim on Steam.
Main menu looks a lot nicer now, too.
'Campaigns' are a thing now, though they hardly deserve their name. Basically, if you manage to win five matches within a certain amount of time, you'll get a bunch of premium curreny. If your faction outperformed everyone else, you get a bonus. That's it. For what it's worth, you can now earn premium monies for the cash shop without actually spending anything and there's a bunch of cool-looking new customizations. Check out my wolf priest above. I think he's adorable! ♥
I played for a few hours and actually had fun. Balancing is still chaotic, but in a good way. I've been one-shot by guys with plasma cannons and orks with claws and rocket launchers. With that said, you simply shouldn't try punching somebody who aims a missile at you. And the clawy ork had such a massive windup time on his heavy attack, I should have seen it coming from miles away. Teamkills are extremely frequent and players aren't shy to throw grenades, rockets, plasma and other shit into a room full of enemies and friendlies alike. Ingame chat rarely reached CoD-levels of toxicity, but things are only about as friendly as you'd expect in a competitive shooter.
Cutting a guy up in an execution attack is still very satisfying.
The game is so chaotic, I had some genuine laugh-out-loud funny moments, where I tried to heal a wounded team member and accidentally threw a grenade instead. Such happy little accidents aside, I actually enjoy playing a healer, which is something I've never done in any game, ever. I don't even consider rolling one. But in Eternal Crusade I get to poison enemies (or friends, if I'm not careful), beat the piss out of them, revive fallen comrades and shoot people's heads off with my unique bolt pistol, which comes with a really handy burst mode. I've unlocked it through a reward crate, which you can frequently claim just by playing the game. 90% of the stuff I get from there is useless for my class, but it feels great when you finally get some good new shit that makes your character feel more powerful.
The game awards points just like Battlefield, so you get rewarded for defending objectives, supporting other players, spotting and highlighting enemies and just about every other useful thing you could do on top of killing stuff. And I won't lie - throwing a grenade to take out three players (on the enemy team, for a change), then chopping another guy up and finishing him off with an execution whilst reviving the occasional fallen brother in the middle of things did make me feel like a total badass. Squad mates follow me, I get to keep them alive, but at the same time I'm powerful enough to kick some serious ass. Granted, I won't be blowing up tanks or sniping enemies from halfway across the map, but I can hold my own in a mid-range gunfight or a melee encounter.
Friendly fire is a thing. Imagine what a grenade could do here.
I've played against orks, chaos and eldar as a space marine and won and lost matches against all of them. Faction balance seemed much better than it was at launch time, where eldar dominated absolutely everything. Map timers and spawn tickets were well-balanced. If you check out my video on top, you can see the space marines narrowly winning a match at what's literally the very last second. We would have lost, had the orks managed to interrupt the final capture one last time, but they ran out of lives just a few moments too soon. It doesn't get any more close and exciting than that.
Performance is still a mixed bag. On the plus side, you now get to choose whether you want to play on EU or NA servers. And the game now actually shows a ping of 200ms and up when things get laggy. In the past, you'd never see your ping go above 40, even with players visibly rubberbanding and teleporting all over the place, so things were clearly considerably worse than 40ms. And what do you know - said teleporting and rubberbanding never happened once when I gave the game another go, so there's that.
Now I get to hammer these bitches before they magically appear behind me.
Actual game performance still ranges from playable to shit. On smaller maps with 16 or so people on both teams, things remained smooth and relatively stutter-free. On some of the larger maps I get stutters and freezes. You can see it in the tank gameplay starting at 3:26 in the video at the top of this article. Freezes, hitches and hiccups, making it almost impossible to aim at a moving target. At its worst moments the game froze when I came across an enemy, remaining frozen until I was greeted by the death screen. These moments were rare for me and only happened on the larger maps with lots of vehicles and 50 or so players, but they happened. It may not be as awful as it was, but it's still a problem.
If I had to rate this game today, I'd probably give it a mid to high 60, based solely on my most recent experience with it. And, obviously, ignoring all the broken promises and blatant lies made by the developers. If they ever manage to eradicate the annoying performance problems and stop pretending there was actual fun PvE content happening (I didn't get to try it, because it's completely dead), it could even be a 70. It's still a somewhat ugly, small-scale Battlefield clone set in the 40k universe. It's a chaotic, violent clusterfuck, where the next death is just one stupid plasma cannon wielding teammate away. I'm not proud of myself, but I'm enjoying myself on there. For the first time.
I have spent the past month completing every single class storyline in SWTOR. Most of them are good, the smuggler storyline is hilarious, the bounty hunter is super badass and the Imperial agent's personal quest is a work of art. I have lied to a target's wife, pretended to be an old friend of the family, cooked dinner with her, then held her hostage and threatened to kill her when my mark came back home. I got married to an alien lady to earn the trust of her people, then abandoned my new family as soon as the job was done. The Imperial agent has no face, no name, no life apart from the roles he assumes for each mission and BioWare have done an incredible job making me feel like a cold-blooded professional in a game, which basically boils down to 'click three things' and 'murder twelve guys' in pretty much every single mission.
He's basically this guy is what I'm saying.
Playing all the class stories before jumping into the latest two expansions is by no means necessary, but you get rewarded with a bunch of cool skills and you get to know each class' companions, some of which play a relatively big part in Fallen Empire and Eternal Throne. It's a lot more awesome to see Vette popping out of a nuclear warhead if you know who the fuck Vette is. It's easier to care about characters you actually know.
So I finished all the classes, completed all the older expansions, while the one thing I really wanted to play, the main reason I decided to give this game another try after a half decade was this:
Awesome though it may be, this new setting is a bit problematic. Aesthetically, the Fallen Empire and its inhabitants look too good. Up to this point, SWTOR used this stylized, almost cartoony look for landscapes and characters throughout the entire game. Characters don't quite look 'Clone Wars', but they have this timeless, comic-esque look about them, much like characters in World of Warcraft.
Looks perfectly alright, but not exactly photorealistic.
SWTOR's hairstyles look like they're made of Play-Doh, beards look drawn-on and many pieces of body armor are simply pixellated textures, tattooed onto the body of your character, because this is a five year old MMO, where people are happy to sacrifice visual quality for the sake of performance. Fast-forward to the game's latest two expansions and the new NPCs are so detailed, you can actually see the pores on their skin, little pimples and imperfections, as well as bump-mapping on clothes, making them look like real fabric and leather.
Skin pores, bumps, freckles - those new NPCs make everyone else look shit, including player characters.
It's not a deal breaker, but it sure feels weird hanging out near all those ridiculously realistic people while my character is this skinny blue alien, who looks like she was molded out of cheap plastic.
Another problem is how they've upped the quality of some character models, but they're still using the same old facial animations to convey emotion. And while that's alright for the cartoony default models, watching the new guys smile or frown takes you right to the uncanny valley, making them look ungodly and terrifying and something that entirely should not be. Awesome!
The other problem lies within the setting itself. In a nutshell, the Emperor, ruler of the Sith Empire, ultimate badguy you had to destroy in the jedi knight's class story, is alive and well. Turns out he has built a whole second empire, married, settled down, made some creepy-ass children and now he's ready to conquer the entire galaxy. In fact, the guy tells you that he hasn't been keen on this whole Sith Empire thing for a while now and he's much more into that whole Eternal Empire gig he's running for the sake of the expansion. Imagine that. The Emperor had two lives, two identities, two empires and he considered this whole sith thing to be little more than a side project. That's a bit shitty all in itself, but it also cheapens just about everything you've worked for if you've played a jedi knight. You're basically going from defeating the Emperor and dealing a crippling blow to one of the most evil factions in Sci-Fi history to 'eh, that was just my alter ego and you've never really done anything, because here's my real empire and we're so much more badass over here'. Gee thanks, BioWare!
Let's not even get into how, by their logic, the Emperor could be running dozens of other secret empires and identities.
So to the surprise of absolutely nobody, there's this whole 'hurrdurr, BioWare ruined Star Wars' thing going on, because the setting was drastically changed, suspension of disbelief is a strong requirement and then there's the fact that the game does what every BioWare game does at some point and that's taking shit away from you.
You get frozen. You get stuck in carbonite for five years. That's a lot of time. All those companions you thought were friends for life are gone, your ship is gone and you're a fugitive in a galaxy where nobody gives a shit about your past heroic deeds. In a way it's pretty clever, because lots of people, myself included, completed their class story when SWTOR came out, then quit the game and stayed away from it for five years, which is when these ridiculously awesome trailers brought people back.
To make things more fun you get the Emperor's ghost stuck in your head, so the guy gets to see and comment on everything you do, constantly trying to influence you. Some of your new companions are loyal to the Emperor, others hate him, so they don't trust each other and most of all, they don't trust you. Those loyal to the Emperor hate you for turning him into a ghost in the first place and those who hate the Emperor, don't trust you, because he's probably manipulating you. And then you find this ridiculously overpowered battleship to replace your old starship.
Let's summarize: all your former allies are gone and assume you're dead, your new companions can't stand you or even each other. Meanwhile, you're aboard your new, super-powerful warship, searching for allies, trying to save the galaxy while the Illusive Man is constantly trying to manip... oops, wrong BioWare franchise! But that's an honest mistake, seeing how the setting of Fallen Empire is essentially Mass Effect 2.
Fortunately for me, I love Mass Effect 2, so I felt right at home. I mean, c'mon! A cool new ship, sexy new allies with real depth and personality and finally a bit of girl on girl action!
We'll bang, okay?
So my character is this righteous jedi knight, who loves to blab about the jedi code in order to take the moral high ground, only to abandon all of that nonsense whenever there's the chance to bone someone. The 'relationships' feel weirder and more forced than in any other BioWare game I've played so far. There's this super-serious sith lady who sends me on a mission and one dialogue option is, "How about a kiss for good luck?"
What follows is this really hot, passionate lesbian kiss from an NPC, who never gave two fucks about my character (figuratively or literally). The scene ends with the NPC telling me 'this is neither the time, nor the place.' Really? Then why were you eating my face just a minute ago and completely out of nowhere?
To be fair, the story sucked me right in from the very beginning and kept me wanting to play non-stop until I had finished the whole thing. There are some really awesome, surprising twists, some of which involve former companions from various classes in the game. So when Scorpio makes her utterly brilliant comeback, the effect becomes that much stronger if you've met her when playing the Imperial agent before.
She's secretly EDI, because all BioWare games are really Mass Effect.
In fact, the story is so good, I played it despite the completely broken difficulty. On the default 'story mode' setting, everything dies in one or two hits, apart from bosses, who have ridiculous amounts of health whilst requiring no strategy and dealing absolutely zero damage to the player.
There is also a 'veteran mode', which makes baddies considerably tougher. So tough, in fact, that apparently many players simply cannot beat certain chapters at all. So you really get to choose from 'too hard' and 'too easy' with absolutely nothing in between these extremes. Great job!
Personally, it didn't bother me much, because I was having too much fun with the plot and I didn't mind just eradicating everything like some kind of super-powerful god, but I can see how some players were frustrated with the awkward balancing. Still, the story ticks all checkboxes you'll expect in a BioWare plot. Twists and turns, sex, betrayal... oh yeah, almost forgot one!
So. Much. Posing.
There's also the inevitable moment where the game brutally murders one of your companions with abolutely zero chance to save him. To add context: at some point the story reunites you with Vette and Torian. And then comes the point where both of them come dangerously close to losing their lives and you can only save one of them.
Vette is a Twi'lek female. She has a vagina. She's got exotic blue skin, a vagina, a quirky sense of humor, a vagina, she's really witty, she's got a vagina and she's this fun, lovable, roguish prankster, who also happens to have a vagina. Then there's Torian, a male. Also a bounty hunter or something. Who cares? Nobody has ever fucking saved him and BioWare put him in what's possibly the most unfair popularity contest in gaming history. It doesn't help that he's simply one of the blandest companions in the entire game. He spouts random gibberish in a made-up language and he likes to cook. Yay. See you at your funeral!
Now type 'Torian' into that search bar and you'll get nothing. Nada. Zilch.
Other checkboxes I would have liked to avoid are 'you cannot defeat the boss yet because we say so' and 'here's a talkie mission where you dress up and don't murder anybody for a half hour'. The former checkbox appears multiple times, putting you into fights with some of the ultimate baddies. You can completely dominate their asses thanks to the broken difficulty, only to be interrupted by a cutscene where the bad guy rams his lightsaber up your gut and/or you get saved by somebody from what appears to be a desperate fight you cannot possibly hope to win in the cutscene.
And the whole 'dress up like a generic soldier to infiltrate the enemy castle' mission wasn't fun or believable when this idea was still new and it certainly isn't in SWTOR. Random guard blocks your way because this room is for guard captains only. So you aimlessly wander about the place, pick up a guard captain's hield and - BOOM! Free passage, because obviously you're a captain now and they don't need proof, identification or anything apart from some random shield, which is just randomly sitting about, waiting to be picked up by anyone. Is this how security works in the so-called Eternal Empire?
"Haha! I'm making Arcann look like a total puss... oh."
Speaking of ultimate baddies. Look, I can totally get behind this whole 'nobody is beyond redemption' jedi philosophy. You know, defeat a main villain, take them to the jedi temple and brainw... err, teach them about love, forgiveness and tolerance until they repent, see the errors of their ways and become good guys. At least until the bad guys take them back and make them evil again. But can I just say that sparing Arcann is dumb?
When Arcann takes over as the new emperor, he attacks five of the core worlds, levels entire cities and murders countless millions. The game also never shows or specifies which planets are under attack or which cities are getting destroyed, because whoa, budget! Whatever happened to 'show, don't tell', BioWare?
This guy commits mass-genocide on a level that would make Hitler say, 'whoa, calm down there, buddy' and when you finally bring him to his knees, his mother gets all, "Nooo, spare him, I know he can change, he is actually a really good kid" and you actually have the option to say, "Eh, what the heck" and let him go.
I bet somewhere down the line, she's gonna turn out to be super friendly, as well.
When you beat up Hitler in an ultimate showdown and he suddenly goes, "Wait! Timeout! I changed my mind! I wanna be on your team now!" You don't just shake his hand, forgive and forget, water under the bridge, he eradicated millions, but he's feeling really sorry about it right now. I forgave my brother when he sold the super-expensive 1st gen boxed edition of World of Warcraft I bought him for Christmas to spend the money on pot. I forgave my cat when she hopped on me while I was watching TV the other night, took a massive piss in my lap and went to sleep like it was nothing. I forgave Claire when she tossed off the pizza guy because we didn't have money for a tip. But you don't invite a guy who murders entire planets into your team, saying, "Yeah, I believe this guy has the potential to become a really good person." At some point you've simply crossed the line, you're an irredeemably bad person and there's no coming back from it. I think you can safely draw that line at a body count in the hundreds of millions.
You gotta slaughter several million innocent eggs to make an omelette.
All my bitching aside, Fallen Empire and Eternal Throne tell the most exciting story I have ever experienced in an MMO. The whole thing is so action-packed, full of ridiculously good cutscenes, masterful voice acting and surprise plot twists, I simply couldn't stop playing. Not even the completely broken difficulty balancing or a few overused or plain idiotic story elements could ruin an otherwise breathtaking experience. There's the charismatic Emperor, a guy you so want to trust and have on your side, even though you know he's full of shit and lying to you whenever he speaks. There's the tragic mother, who has to face the fact that she gave birth to the most horrifying space-brats in the known galaxy. There's yet another genocidal assassin droid, who derives such intense, child-like happiness from killing stuff, you just can't get yourself to tell him to stop murdering people.
Sure, you no longer get 8 completely different storylines, based on which class and faction you've picked. And the game is even less of an MMO now than it ever was. I don't care. They've already announced the next chapter of the story, slated to be released this spring. In the meanwhile, I'll be raising galactic command levels by playing any content I want, unlocking raid-quality set gear without being forced to raid. Why can't more MMOs be like that?
stuff like this is never easy, so I'll be blunt and come right out with it: I'm leaving you. I know our 4th anniversary is around the corner and we've been through a lot of stuff together. But over the years you've cared less and less about our relationship and I feel the only thing you are ever really after these days is my money. I should have seen this coming when I saw you hanging out with your weird new friends. I knew Perfect World would be a bad influence on you, but I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. Big mistake.
You've taken a lot from me during our last year and given very little in return. You've been teasing me with The War Within since July, only to release it months later, at the end of the year. And sure, it was good, but the whole thing lasted less than 90 minutes and introduced questionable new mechanics like Kuva farming and Riven mods, where a bit of rebalancing would have been so much more effective and less frustrating. But you didn't want to tweak your underused, underappreciated weapons. Instead, you've added hundreds of new mods, one per weapon. You can only obtain said mods by completing three challenging endgame missions. The chance for a drop is about 15 percent. It's much more likely you'll give me completely useless rewards instead, insulting me for my time and effort.
-80% damage dealt by my weapon. Now that's a nice endgame upgrade! Thanks!
Let me repeat this: hundreds of weapons. The chance I'll obtain a Riven mod for the weapon I want is 300something to one. After the initial 15% chance to obtain a Riven mod in the first place. One chance per day, if I can beat the three daily Sortie missions. And in the incredibly unlikely event I'll actually get a mod that is relevant to me, it's entirely possible said mod will reduce my weapon damage by up to 120%, effectively healing my enemy when I shoot them!
But what else am I gonna do, apart from farming worthless new mods? It's not like you had any interesting new events or content for me. Your new quest, The Glast Gambit, forced me to play the exact same "pvp with the AI" type of mission six times in a row. You're so painfully aware of your broken, stupid AI, the final mission actually required me to beat the AI by a margin of 10 points or less. Defeating them with any more points than that fails the mission. This is laughably awful game design! The mission objective was literally 'beat the AI, but go easy on them' instead of raising difficulty and giving me competent opponents.
Speaking of forced, faux pvp - remember how you used to say you'd never want to become a pvp game? How you added it anyway and then said you never want pvp to become invasive, be forced on the players who don't care about it? As a direct result, your pvp lobbies are empty, dead, deserted pretty much all the time and we're okay with it. So why did you think it was a good idea to make the tactical Xmas alert pvp only? Sure, murdering one another is totally in the spirit of Christmas, but come on now, what were you thinking?
The warframe on this image is walking away, because symbolism or some shit.
You refer to me as a loser. And you're probably right, because you're charging me up to ten freaking Dollars for a fucking skin or a new cape. Your current Prime Access Package costs 70 Dollars. If I want Nidus, your newest Warframe, the cheapest variant costs me a whopping 13 Dollars. You know what else I can get with 13 Dollars? A whole month of World of Warcraft, SWTOR or any other MMO that doesn't charge me an arm and a leg on top of that monthly fee.
I used to defend you, speak up for you, tell people you're one of the fairest Free2Play games out there in my reviews. Because you used to be. If I wanted a new warframe, all I had to do is farm a certain boss for a little while, wait 72 hours to craft my reward and I was good to go. I could skip these steps by throwing a bit of cash at you if I wanted to. But you've lowered the drop rates, made it ever more difficult to even reach the missions where new warframe parts drop, raised the crafting resource cost to levels where it's simply impossible for most players to ever get their hands on the new stuff unless they buy it with real money.
Making all your favourite MMOs shit.
I used to like Free2Play. There were some black sheep, sure, but this model used to be an affordable alternative to subscription-based games. Today, getting all the new content on Warframe requires me to spend AAA-money every other month. Add a new skin, a bit of premium currency for boosters and I've spent so much, the same amount of money would have bought me Battlefield and Titanfall 2. My friends are playing these games right now. And I can't join them, because of you. Because I'm playing Warframe. Alone. And you've taken all of my money.
I'm done. As a matter of fact, I'm already seeing someone else. For the past couple of weeks I've been with Star Wars: The Old Republic. Sure, SWTOR ain't as pretty as she used to be and even her flashy new trailers aren't enough to turn many heads these days. But you know what? SWTOR lets me do what I want. SWTOR gives me endgame, gives me all the content, all the story, everything there is for 13 Dollars a month. Heck, I can still go there even if I can't pay up and do most of the stuff I like. With you, 13 Dollars are merely enough to buy me a booster or two, which I desperately need, because you think it's great game design when I'm forced to level up every single weapon up to eight freaking times!
SWTOR doesn't hide the action underneath an ever-increasing amount of particle effects, either.
Speaking of endgame: SWTOR lets me get powerful gear when I complete its story and clear the content. It rewards me and gives me a chance to obtain the best stuff in the game. It doesn't care whether I play solo instances, raid content or space battles. I do what I want and get neat items as a reward.
Meanwhile, your brand new endgame mission type, Infested Salvage, grants me the exact same mods, resources and rewards I've been getting in level 10 missions all over the game for the past four years. I have to complete every single story mission, clear every space junction, be content-clear in order to even start an Infested Salvage and you throw worthless, meaningless rewards at me, which I can obtain just about everywhere else in the game. Sure, I just might luck out and get one crafting component for a new Warframe (14% chance) if I stay for 20 minutes. But I need three different ones of those. Plus a massive amount of rare resources. This isn't fun. This isn't entertaining. I'm doing my fucking taxes here, Warframe.
Will I spend my next four years with SWTOR now? Of course not. It's just a fun little fling, we're not ready for a commitment. But I'll be seeing lots of other games. Play with my friends. Try new stuff. Because I'm done throwing all my money at you and pretending you're really not taking that much from me. Over the past year you've added almost zero content, but you've steadily raised prices, offered more premium packages than ever before and created artificial scarcity by arbitrarily putting items in the 'Prime Vault', making it entirely impossible to get certain weapons and frames, unless you pay for them. This isn't fair, it's not fun and it sure as fuck isn't Free2Play. Now, if you'll excue me... I've got a galaxy to save. Far, far away.
I hate MMORPGs. I quit WoW once and for all the moment the community shifted from spamming cringeworthy Chuck Norris jokes to simply posting 'anal' followed by the name of an item or a skill. Anal [Raging Blow]. Fucking hilarious. And followed by dozens of people trying to be even more inventive and disgusting than the last. It's a pretty stupid thing to get annoyed at, but between that, a naked weirdo named Pwnerizer dancing naked on a mailbox and a bunch of level-capped guys in full raid gear camping around your corpse to gank you over and over again, I have found that other players tend to harm my immersion more than help it.
Then there's this whole forced 'endgame' nonsense. Repeat the same content dozens of times in order to obtain gear, which will become useless as soon as the next content update goes live. Mostly in order to impress a bunch of people you hate, who will inspect you, judge you and know every tiny detail about your character, whether you like it or not. The item treadmill, the carrot on the stick, the big motivator to keep a bunch of idiots attached to a game for as long as possible. And yes, I believe you have to be a bit of an idiot if you manage to spend all of your spare time in a single game for several years, always doing the same thing without getting bored of it, never trying anything new.
Azeroth. Where the community's greatest morons are celebrated as legends.
The reason why I hated Star Wars: The old Republic in particular is my job. I had to play this game 12+ hours a day, reach the level cap within a few days, then write up 30something pages about how and why you should play a Sith Warrior. Back then the game was basically WoW with lightsabers and a lot more talking. People who wanted a good BioWare RPG hated it for its MMO aspects, people who wanted a good MMO hated it for all the forced solo stuff and the inflated stories around every boring fetch quest. It was the perfect compromise - combine the worst of both worlds and annoy the shit out of the entire playerbase.
We were about a dozen people back then, one for each of the eight classes, as well as a bunch of extra guys tagging along, because heyho. The deadline was brutal, the server queues took several hours every day before we could even log on and after a while we all hated each other. My boss threw several massive bitchfits at me until we ended up on opposite teams in pvp and I murdered the fuck out of him again and again. My team lost by a mile, because killing people wasn't the main objective and of course he called me out on it, but it felt good at the time. We've always been cool around each other, but ridiculous amounts of pressure can make people go psycho.
"What dark side corruption? It's a skin condition and I'd appreciate if you could stop bringing it up!"
By the time my first character was done and the guides were written, I couldn't even look at the game anymore. Which was weird, because being able to 'just play' was my motivation. Just finish the damn guide, get this over with, then I can finally enjoy the game, take my time and just do what I want. But I simply couldn't stand another 10 minute conversation before every simple kill or fetch quest. Not another corridor full of awkwardly-placed baddies, which always attacked in groups of three at a time. I was done.
That was half a decade ago. Then I had to get my first smartphone ever, because of work. Yes, in 2017! And that damn thing plays Knights of the Old Republic! My last mobile phone played fucking Snake! So I dicked around on KotOR for a bit, enjoyed the nostalgia, whilst hating how poorly that game and its sequel have aged. Containers play a five second animation before they open, forcing open a lock forces me to watch my character attack a door for 30 seconds and missing most of the time, main protagonist is the only character without a voice, yada, yada, yada. Meanwhile, SWTOR had reminded me that it's still a thing with some badass trailers. I mean, just look at this shit:
In German, SWTOR KOTET literally means 'SWTOR is pooping'.
So I downloaded the game again and the first thing I had to do was rename every single one of my characters. I think it's okay to take away the names of inactive users, but you try and find a unique new name in a five year old MMO, which had undergone a ton of server consolidations.
To be fair, the Star Wars universe probably doesn't even know what a wolf is.
Each of my characters also had about 16 messages in their mailbox. Anniversary presents, free pets, fireworks and other tat. I also received a bunch of generic companion clothing. The attached letter said there had been a problem with that. And what do you know, I found most of my companions without pants on, so now I could spend an hour playing dress-up with the lot of them. I also had a ton of free outfits and other stuff for Galactic Starfighter, a new pvp mode, which had been added and left to rot in my absence. I genuinely queued up for it and waited a half hour or so, but nothing ever happened.
In fact, the entire game felt a bit dead. I bumped into three other players in the Republic's main hub, two of which were lowbie characters, the third guy was labelled a 'legendary player' who was just posing with his lightsaber out like he was in Ironforge and there were any players around to actually see him. Inspecting people reveals their achievements, so you can still laugh at them for not completing any raids, but you can't see their gear, which I like.
You don't have to be epic. Just hot.
So after a frustrating hour or two of sifting through tons of shit in my inventory, obligatory respecs and figuring out how stuff works, I decided to finally go and complete my Jedi Knight's story. As a subscriber you can now just play one story mission after another and receive enough experience to keep on leveling up without having to play all of the boring MMO filler crap in between the good bits. How weird is that? You skip 90% of each planet, hours upon hours of dialogue, monsters and mini dungeons somebody had to create for this game to have content and you can ignore all of it. Somebody at BioWare actually must have said, "Our shit is so boring, people don't want to touch it. So let's allow them to skip it."
I went from level 37 to 50 and a completed class storyline in a day. And that was okay, because the story was actually really, seriously good. Sure, all of the fighting was still incredibly repetitive, boring, outdated MMO-combat, especially since SWTOR suffers from ability cancer. I just don't like it when a game slowly but surely fills an entire three or more hotbars with shit. Here, have two interrupt attacks with a long cooldown instead of a single quick one. Have two different AoEs, one strong and with a long cooldown and a weak one with a short cooldown. Have a quick resource builder that generates a low amount of power and a slow one, which generates more power. Why do game designers still put multiple different attacks with the exact same effect in their MMOs? Combat doesn't get any more strategic or complex that way. You just get more buttons and shit gets tedious.
Not fun.
Despite being a goodie-goodie Jedi Knight, my character could force-choke bad guys to death, thanks to the game's legacy system and my completed Sith Warrior storyline. Completing the story of any class will grant a heroic ability to all your other characters on the same server. That's pretty cool and really motivates me to complete the stories of some of the other classes, allowing me to unlock more and more heroic abilities. And now that I can just enjoy the story missions and skip all of the filler crap, I don't even have to force myself to do it.
As for the new content - no idea, haven't even tried it. From what I've heard, the current new story expansion is in every way as epic and exciting as any BioWare RPG, but story mode difficulty is laughably easy, yet Veteran difficulty is downright impossible to most players. And that's a step up from the previous story expansion, where total joke difficulty was the only option. I'm still gonna play it eventually to experience the story, but right now I just want to catch up on the class stories I had missed out on since launch.
I'm having fun. I never run into other players outside of the main hubs, which are also ghost towns most of the time. I can't tell whether it's just my server or whether the game is simply deserted. General chat is dead, save for the incessant gold spam you get in every poorly-moderated MMO. I turned it off. Companions are now ridiculously OP and most Flashpoints (read: dungeons) have a solo mode now, so fuck all the other players, if they really exist.
Ironically, my favourite thing about SWTOR is its low subscription fee of 9 Quid (or 13 USD or whatever). I used to hate shit like that, but when I see how Warframe releases new premium packages every month, ranging from 20 to 130 Quid, as well as all the overpriced skins, costumes and premium tokens you get in all those other 'free' games out there, 9 Quid for everything seems pretty damn reasonable all of a sudden. Yes, apparently there are paid lockboxes, which randomly contain ultra rare shit like crossbar lightsabers. You can't obtain those any other way and that's a bit awful. But it's only fluff, while you can get all of the character story content for free if you're willing to live with a few restrictions.
Starbound takes the Terraria formula and improves upon it in every aspect. It's full of stuff promised by No Man's Sky. It's also a bit of Metroid and a bit of 2D-Skyrim.
My life is happy, becaue I'm a gunslinging space raptor. I'm beaming down to a planet I've just discovered. I'm taking my engineer with me, who happens to be a green, bipedal cockatoo with a giant rocket launcher. I've also brought my argonian medic and a sniper, who happens to be a dragon. Thanks, Steam Workshop!
Space is dangerous. Bring friends.
The game features coop multiplayer, so Claire is with me, as well. She's... I'm not a hundred percent sure what the fuck she is. She's wearing a giant goat skull on top of her head and she's summoning space goats, which she captured on another planet with the help of some freaky techno balls. Yes, you can capture monsters like Pokémon and that's not even a mod!
The world we're exploring is covered in eyeballs. There are giant eyeballs on the trees, tiny eyeball monsters are crawling around and curiously watching us and finally, we come across this mountain of eyeballs, which is too steep to climb. I try to dig into it and create an avalanche. Of eyeballs. I nearly drowned in this game before, got buried in sand, but this is new. We dig into the planet's surface until we reach its core, which is made entirely out of flesh. Ew.
You can harvest the eyes and turn them into furniture.
Every new planet is full of wonders and weirdness. We've discovered huge underground cities made of miniature houses, shops and skyscrapers inhabited by pixel-sized gnomes. One world had a huge medieval fortress, inhabited by a bunch of robots, who attacked us using swords and bows. They're a playable race called the glitch. We've met talking mushrooms, frog people, fishy samurai guys under the sea and wild west towns on desert planets.
There's also a race of space apes, who build depressing towns and even more depressing laboratories. Their Orwellian towns have cameras in every room, there are posters telling the citizens to 'OBEY!' and they all seem a bit paranoid when you speak to them. "Are you allowed to be here?" Meanwhile, the labs have all sorts of caged alien creatures and the place is full of computer terminals and brains in jars.
Not the happiest world we've encountered.
There are mutated, radioactive worlds, planets covered in ice and snow or lava, mushrooms or even giant, sentient vegetables. Yes, I've been attacked by a giant carrot monster. Where Terraria gives you one randomly-generated world with a bunch of varying biomes like deserts, snowy mountains and jungles, Starbound gives you an infinite amount of planets with much greater variety. Granted, you'll ultimately see biomes and architecture repeat, because there are only so many possibilities, but there's a great community-created mod, which adds dozens of new biomes, hundreds of creatures, new quests, dungeons... oh yeah, about those!
Not every alien creature you bump into is friendly. In fact, most of them want to eat you in fun and creative ways. On top of that, many outposts have to deal with criminals, who abduct people and hold them hostage. You can lend a hand, rescue hostages, kill baddies, get rewards like tech upgrades and epic new gear and some NPCs will even ask to join your crew when you help them enough. Help a depressing space ape with a difficult quest and he might just become your new engineer! Use tech upgrades from reward bags to unlock wall jumps, dash moves or the ability to morph into a ball and fit into tight spaces like Samus Aran.
You can always start your own settlement on a planet if your ship gets too crowded.
Combat is nothing special. You equip a weapon and click shit to death, but at least there's a decent variety in weapon types and playstyles. I like to dual-wield pistols and attack baddies from a distance, then finish them off with dual daggers or claws when they get too close. Claire charges in with a sword and shield, tanking most damage for the group. On top of that she swings a huge katana. The blade can be powered up, causing it to hum and light up like a lightsaber. Lightsaber-katana. That's a thing on here. You also get shotguns, assault rifles, rocket launchers... again, it's a lot like Terraria, but bigger and with more possibilities.
Dungeons can range from small, five minute affairs like the challenge rooms (e.g. you have one attempt to dodge the traps and kill the baddies to get your reward) to huge story-driven arenas full of monsters, hidden treasure and a super tough boss battle at the end. Unlike most other areas, these dungeons are hand-crafted and not random-generated. This hurts replayablility a bit, but gives them a coherent structure, which is often difficult with procedurally-generated stuff.
There's still plenty of dungeon-like open world action like this prison.
Fun side activities include starting your own colony if your starship isn't big enough to make you happy, as well as starting your own band. We found a banjo and an electric base guitar, so we paused our adventure for a moment to play 12 Days of Christmas together. Because yes, that's also a thing on here.
I've seen reviews, which refer to this game as a 'Terraria clone' and talk about Starbound as though it was aping its 'big brother Terraria' and other such nonsense. Yes, of course the similarities are super obvious, but this game doesn't simply copy stuff to cash in on a successful formula. It takes everything you can find in Terraria and adds to it, expands it, adds depth and complexity. This makes the game better and even greater than the already amazing Terraria.
However, there is also a downside, which comes in the form of a much steeper learning curve. Important features such as harvesting rocket fuel, hiring crew members or upgrading your crafting stations aren't exactly self-explanatory and the game does a poor job at explaining its features to new players. This game probably isn't for you if you're not willing to make regular trips to the wiki. But if you're content-clear on Terraria or simply looking for a fun, vast game to keep you busy for dozens of hours, then Starbound is a great choice.
The Crew is a shitty racing game. But it lets you enjoy one hell of a road trip when you're too cheap to go places in real life.
Claire and I are broke as fuck. Now, when most of you guys think 'broke', you imagine having to use regular four-ply toilet paper instead of the gold-plated stuff you normally use. But I'm talking seriously poor here. We don't just re-use our teabags for extra tea. We use the string to sew the holes in the potato bags we stole from Farm Foods to wear them like clothes. We don't even eat all the potatoes! We set them on fire, so they can serve as a source of warmth and light. So imagine how happy we were when Ubisoft gave The Crew away for free, because it sucks so hard, people have long stopped buying it.
When I first tried to get into The Crew, I tried to pretend it's a racing game, which is wrong. The game has you play a young Gordon Freeman, who witnesses the murder of Mr. Clean. Then Colonel Sanders shows up and blames you. Now you have to take revenge on the KFC mascot and his gang by beating random people in street races. It all makes perfect sense and is highly entertaining, well-written and in every way as gripping as a Wednesday episode of Coronation Street.
The driving physics in the game are total ass and your car only stops handling like a brick after you spend several hours raising your vehicle's level. There's also some overpriced new DLC, which apes the police chases from Need for Speed and GTA, without adding any of the stuff that makes them fun. The main feature of said DLC is to remind you that you should totally go buy it every thirty or so seconds.
It ain't fucking free if it costs 25 Bucks to unlock it!
There's also a shitty ingame GPS, which constantly forgets where the fuck you're supposed to go, cutting off in the middle of nowhere. So basically, you get to drive around with zero directions while some lady keeps nagging non-stop. The only way to make the driving experience any more realistic would be if they patched in some children, who complain, get hungry, throw up in the car and need a piss stop every five minutes.
There's one genuinely impressive feature about the Crew - its absolutely massive world. You get to visit miniaturized versions of New York, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, drive through the snow in the Rocky Mountains and enjoy some virtual scorching heat in Death Valley and the Grand Canyon. There's a whole ton of amazing landmarks here, a great deal of visual variety and while the entire game looks a bit dated and fugly, just driving from one coast to another and seeing all the sights can be really exciting.
So that's what we did. Claire and I fired up our favourite MP3 playlist (because the ingame radio is complete garbage), got in our cars, skipped the whole shitty story and most of the racing against the retarded rubberbanding AI and just went from the east coast to the west coast and back. And there's an amazing amount of love and detail in that game world. People with RVs and lawn chairs camping in the middle of nowhere, little lakes and cafes near dense forests you would normally just race through at 180mph and tons of wildlife. Eagles, vultures, bears, deer, fighter jets and stealth bombers happily frolicking about!
Suddenly Vegas
We had lots of random challenges popping up along the way. Sometimes you have to maintain your speed and stay on the road, then you have to zig-zag around targets or smash right through them. Doing so will unlock new car parts and upgrades, so it's perfectly cool to just drive around all day, upgrading your vehicle in the process.
This game doesn't look as great or handle as well as Forza or GTA. The story is a total joke. Most of the generic traffic vehicles look so bland and devoid of any detail, they would have looked crap a decade ago. We've also encountered a whole bunch of bugs and problems. Traffic spawning inside buildings or simply disappearing into thin air, infinite load screens, as well as 38 billion mission popups for races we cannot even access without the DLC. Granted, you can filter those out, but you shouldn't have to. The Crew is genuinely bad. There's one notorious, game-breaking bug, which has been around for two years with no apparent fix. The official forum thread about it is 41 pages long.
Having a dozen menus pop up while I'm
driving at top speed is brilliant game design, you guys!
I've played Forza, Shift, Dirt, Outrun 2006 Coast2Coast and just about every other racing sim and arcade racer that came out since the first Screamer. The racing felt better in pretty much all of them. Driving in The Crew doesn't feel any more solid than it would on Autobahn Racer or Eurotruck Simulator. But, also much like Eurotruck Simulator, it can feel incredibly satisfying when you just pick a random far away location, play some good music and enjoy the dated, but highly varied and still rather beautiful landscapes. And it gets really good when you have somebody to enjoy the ride with. And if you grab the game for free or get it for peanuts at one of the many Russian key stores, there really isn't much to lose. But fuck 'em for trying to force that DLC on to people as aggressively as they do.
