It's fascinating how gatekeepy shooters have become (with the huge downloads, and endless splashscreens full of shite). I assume that as kids grow up, the format will be entirely normalised going forwards, but it's always going to be a huge hurdle for anyone who fancies just dipping their toe into a new game.
Riot, I think, do a good job in Valorant. Small, single download. The graphics are hyper simplified. And the UI is clutter free, and doesn't relentlessly pimp paid for content. There is a single forced tutorial which explains the mechanics of the game and that's it. Overwatch 2 and Apex aren't too bad either (at least the GAS stuff is hived off to an extent), but nearly all flavours of COD and MW (including the BR variants) are a shitshow.
Now that the dust has settled, and discounting the launcher itself (which really is terrible), Black Ops 6 is fun. It all seems quite basic too, in a way that appeals to this old man. There are some grounded maps, set in various 90s conflict zones. There are a few guns, none of which seem overpowered. Nicki Minaj has not yet appeared. There are 9 game modes, but they're all old faithfuls such as Team Deatchmatch and Capture the Flag. There isn't even a battle pass, just one quite pleasing screen with a 'Find match' button.
Maybe the bloat that I saw in MW3 comes later. But for now Blops 6 is a fun, crunchy, entirely un-Gen-Z shooter.
I've tried the Campaign and it's a bit 7/10. It's not as good as the campaign for Infinite Warfare so far.
I'm still struggling my way through Starfield, in the absence of any other big, open-world RPGs to play. There are some frustratingly brilliant quests later on.
Frustrating because it reminds you what the game could have been. You plod along for 20 hours, zipping from one slightly dull quest to another, and you start to think maybe this is what Bethesda games always were. Maybe the formula's just dated. But then you come across a genuinely brilliant quest, and you remember just how good these games can be.
This could have been something really special.
But how is the moment to moment mooching around? That was when Starfield died for me, when I realised all these planets are just going to be the same and I would be walking miles to each point of interest for another empty cave or a pirate den with absolutely nothing emergent happening between A and B.
They've added a car, so there's zero mooching. It's just fast travelling between places in menus, with no opportunity to discover anything along the way.
It's as though they looked at what made Fallout and TES great, and purposefully abandoned it. Or more likely, they thought 'we've got a fantasy one and a post-apocalyptic one, let's do a space one'. Then halfway through development they realised there's no way to combine Bethesda-style open worlds with planet hopping, but by then it was too late.
In isolation though, some of those later quests are as good as anything in Elder Scrolls.
Anyone know of any good deals for Xbox Gamepass Ultimate? I feel like playing some games.
I remember someone on Twitter basically pointing out how Starfield has basically zero cultural impact after release, no memes or art or funny twitter clips or anything, let alone people talking about it. I know that's not the be all end all of it's mark as a good/bad game but man, it's true. It's such a nothingburger that the I keep forgetting the dlc released because no one mentioned it even in the context of 'this made the game better/worse/same'. Considering the DLC their other games that's pretty rough.
Starfield's a weird game because you can clearly see that it was intended to be something else at some point in its development. It's got a whole resources gathering/survival element that's completely underbaked in the final game to the point of being irrelevant, but it must have had loads of work put into it. It's got a whole base building mode you don't need to engage with at all, loads of empty planets that you're supposed to use to gather resources that you don't need, a ship constructor that's entirely superfluous, and the ability to gather fuel resources that literally nothing uses. On top of all that you've got something like 12 different types of ammo to keep track of and a LOT of inventory micro-management all the way through the game.
It's like they spent a few years trying to develop some sort of No Man's Sky type survival game, then someone at Microsoft panicked and told them to make it a standard Bethesda game which they then did but also left all the other stuff in. Even with a year's worth of patches they haven't found a way to make it all pull in the same direction. It's really very odd.
Anyone know of any good deals for Xbox Gamepass Ultimate? I feel like playing some games.
HotUKDeals tells me this is your best bet currently: https://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/xbox-game-pass-ultimate-3-months-4454769
Re: Starfield, mods help a lot with the inventory stuff. In typical Bethesda fashion, I've got 24 mods installed, and they all basically just fix QoL stuff. But also, to Alastor's point about the lack of impact this game has had, there really aren't many mods available. I feel like Skyrim had thousands of mods and conversions by this point. Starfield doesn't even have some basic stuff like new perk trees, and the mods that are there have very few downloads, and haven't been updated in 12 months or so.
It does feel a little dead on arrival.
Not really a hot deal, but just noting what I did earlier this year: I bought my partner a year of Core from eEneba, thinking that would be enough since she never plays anything but Sea of Thieves. Turns out she wanted Ultimate anyway, so I then bought a month of Ultimate and used it… it upgraded her year of Core to 11 months of Ultimate. Was quite a bit cheaper overall (€49.80 for the year of Core, €10.19 for the month of Ultimate). So, maybe that's an option… but I dunno if it'd be the same now.
I think they removed that upgrade thing a few months ago. I'm paid up until 2026, then I reckon I'm done.
I plugged my Xbox in and decided not to spend money on the months of Love that I might not use. I bought Pentiment instead.
I was impressed that despite being unplugged for a few months and needing a few updates and a restart today, my game of Crackdown was still paused exactly where I left it in July.
How many months of love have you passed up, Bri? Too many, I'd wager, but then we're all old and tired. I can barely manage an hour.
Last week Call of Duty had a 170GB patch. One hundred and seventy. My gaming PC is in the garden office, so the internet speed isn't great. 10 days after starting the download, it was ready. I double clicked, launched the game and… 'Your game needs a 64GB update.'
That sounds beyond parody
Yeah mental that. I was kinda interested in the campaign but couldn't be bothered with the size for that on Xbox.
Last week Call of Duty had a 170GB patch. One hundred and seventy. My gaming PC is in the garden office, so the internet speed isn't great. 10 days after starting the download, it was ready. I double clicked, launched the game and… 'Your game needs a 64GB update.'
Similar experience but not quite: I tried to boot up Mortal Kombat 1 over the weekend, but it told me it needed an 86GB update. I kicked that off, and my console decided to check if anything else needed to be updated… and it found an 86GB update for Mortal Kombat 1. Which it promptly kicked off after the first one downloaded and installed. Two hours later, I decided to do something else instead.
I think Ghostface is worth 86 gigs!!!!
Dude have you seen his Fatalities? One of them is up there with the best I've seen in the franchise man, they did so good with him. (Best horror villain don't @ me)
Judging by the critical goodwill I'm the odd one out here, but Indiana Jones is fine. Not bad. But definitely not essential, at least based on the first 3 hours.
It's very slow and clunky (the generous assessment would be purposeful and cerebral), which was obvious from the first gameplay trailer. The stealth is rubbish, the puzzling is decent. Troy Baker's Indiana is occasionally perfect, frequently so low energy you stop paying attention.
I'm going to carry on, because it's Indiana Jones. But if this was any other IP I'd have dropped it by now.
Never mind, it's clicked now. I was talking bollocks. (Not for the first time.)
The thing that saved it for me was switching to PC. With its slow pace and physical fisticuffs I had assumed console made more sense. But there's so much detail to the world that it helps to sit close to a big monitor, soaking it all in.
The stealth is definitely still rubbish, but it doesn't matter in the grand scheme.
I played the opening section and the glassy-eyed animatronic Indy was really off-putting, the characters are remarkably bad. He does sound right though.
I’ve played a bit more of Indy now and actually it’s excellent. It must have been a hell of a pitch when they went in and said “we’re going to make a game based on one of the most iconic and charismatic characters in movie history, and we’re going to make it first person so you only ever see him in cut scenes” but bloody hell does it work. They’ve made an incredibly atmospheric Indy game based around archaeology and fisticuffs and completely nailed it, it’s far better than just doing an Uncharted clone like everyone was surely expecting. It’s a little bit Dishonored, a little bit Hitman and I can’t wait to dig into it further.
dig into it
Yeah this has completely won me over. It feels like a game for old fogies, in the best possible way. Slow, thoughtful, story-led exploration. Here's hoping it sells the necessary bazillion copies so they can find someone to do a dodgy Sean Connery impression in the sequel.
I want to like Indy, but the thought of going back to it after the opening fills me with indifference. I should probably give it more than those 20 minutes of tedious nostalgia at some point…
Here's hoping it sells the necessary bazillion copies
laughs in GamePass
Yeah the opening 20 minutes are just a movement tutorial; they don't reflect how the game plays at all. The actual game is part iPhone puzzler The Room, part Deus Ex with stabilisers.
But better than that sounds.
I've played it a bit. It's fine. beautiful environments. I don't have my main PC with me in Ireland and it's running really well on a 3070 equipped laptop (and looking very good).
Clunky as all fuck on mouse and keyboard (I might have to switch to pad). I quite like the voices and I don't think the animations are that bad.
The IP is doing a lot of heavy lifting though - strip Indiana out of this and it's alarmingly bland and average. But that's probably not fair, as that's what the licence is for and it does deliver a rich world off the back of it.
It's more than the sum of its parts, in ways I can't really explain. I spent a couple of hours on it today and I was just completely absorbed in it, in a way that doesn't happen often these days. I think it's mostly the environments - they're just incredibly well designed, intricate but easy to navigate with interesting things to find around every corner, and with a refreshing lack of radars or "Indy sight" or any gamey nonsense to take you out of the experience. (A subtle little indicator of where to go when you bring up your journal is about as far as it ever gets, and that's mostly just to stop you spinning around on the spot as you read your map). Even things like not being able to read your journal in the dark adds to the atmosphere.
Also the pacing is good. The side quests in particular are excellent and I wouldn't advise anyone to skip any of the big Fieldwork quests. They're long and detailed with their own areas to explore and they all feed back into the main story in interesting ways. It feels more of a piece than most games do.
In short, it's excellent, I don't know how you could call it alarmingly bland and average at all. Sure the licence helps but we've all played a lot of shit licensed games in the past, right? This is how it should be done.
Which is why I said the licence elevates it.. Put these mechanics in an off the shelf generic first person game and it would be a competent, slow, methodical, somewhat bland, by-the-numbers videogamey videogame with all the usual eye rolling tropes and design motifs we've seen a billion times. Indiana Jones it up and it's instantly more interesting.
