It has been five years and a few days since we have had a Mass Effect game, and that one had its share of controversy, but in a couple of short weeks that wait will come to an end! People with EA/Origin Access will start playing the game on the 17th, while the rest of us will have to wait until the 21st, and I am jonesing for it! I will be counting down the days. Check out the final trailer for the game above to amp up your excitement even more!
Amazon Is Gearing Up To Take On Valve’s Steam With Twitch!
I am sure most of you are aware that Amazon bought Twitch for almost $1 Billion three years ago, but I was always curious as to why. I was even more confounded when Amazon Prime members like myself could use Twitch ad free if they linked their two accounts. I love not seeing ads, but it didn’t seem like a move that would help Amazon’s bottom line, but then they launched their Banner Saga promotion, and finally this is all making sense.
In late February all Twitch Prime members could download The Banner Saga through a new app called the “Twitch Launcher”, and for every download the game got Amazon would give a dollar to Stoic, the game’s developer, for The Banner Saga 3. Then on top of that if you actually played the game through the Twitch Launcher the devs would get yet another dollar. Amazon did the same thing again in early March (AKA now) with The Banner Saga 2.
This may seem like Amazon is just being nice, and I am sure that Stoic is thrilled to have the extra development funding, but to me it looks like Amazon is gearing up to sell games through Twitch. It makes sense. The audience is already there watching the games, so why not have a little “buy now” button over the stream of the game that they are playing, and then the game loads on to the Twitch Launcher and boom you are playing it yourself.
Giving away a free game or two is a great way to get that app installed on a ton of PCs. That way the audience is all ready to go. Not to mention it will have all the hooks built-in, so streaming the game they just bought back out on to Twitch will be easy. It is a self advertising loop, and one where Amazon gets to keep all the profits and not share them with Steam. It is just amazing it has taken three years for this to take shape.
I for one am excited. Steam needs the competition. The Windows Store is starting to gets some major games, but gamers don’t trust Microsoft, especially after the Games for Windows fiasco, and GoG, while great, doesn’t get a lot of AAA titles because of their lack of DRM. That just leaves the publisher based game stores like Origin (EA) or UPlay (Ubisoft), but they are mostly just places for those publishers’ games, and gamers like being able to keep all their stuff together. Amazon is just the type place gamers would go, and with Twitch, Amazon has the brand recognition. Amazon and Steam can keep each other honest, and Microsoft and GoG can be there to fill in the niche gaps. Sounds good to me. What do you think?
Shmee Rides The Tides Of Numenera And Finds Joy Not Torment!
The spiritual successor to the cult classic RPG ‘Planescape: Torment’ came out yesterday, ‘Torment: Tides of Numenera’ by inXile Entertainment, and if my initial impressions are anything to go by, this game is something special. For most of you that don’t remember ‘Planescape: Torment’, it was based on the weirdest parts of the D&D universe, so just exploring what the game had to offer was most of the fun, and the characters were all wonderfully written. ‘Torment: Tides of Numenera’ continues this tradition.
In Torment you play as the Last Castoff of the Changing God. The Changing God gained immortality by creating new bodies every so often then casting his old ones aside. However when he moves from one body to the next, his old bodies gain consciousness with no memory of being the Changing God, and if they survive being fully grown infants, they become mostly normal people. Normal people with strange daddy issues. It turns out that a monster hunts the Changing God and his castoffs, The Sorrow. You need to need to stop The Sorrow from killing you, and confront your ‘father’.
Most people now think of RPGs as games were you get cool loot from killing monsters, level up to better kill monsters, and then every now and then make decisions about what monsters to kill. Torment is not that game. That is not to say there aren’t monsters, loot and leveling up, but more that this game is about talking to people and exploring. Even in combat it encourages you to use your skills in ways to end the fight without directly attacking the enemy. Pretty much it is a very large choose your own adventure game, and one that is easy to get lost in. I just started, and all I can think about is the people I met and the different decisions I could have made.
Because of all this, you will need to get a good pair of reading glasses. This was a Kickstarter game (of which I was a backer), so while there is some recorded dialog, most of this game is text based, and there is a lot of text. Just about every character with a name has an expansive dialog tree, and you will want to read it all in order to better inform your actions, or just not miss out on something cool.
The weakest parts of ‘Torment: Tides of Numenera’ are the visuals. While the backgrounds are wonderfully detailed and strange, the character models are low-res and muddy, and even those cool backgrounds sometimes get jaggy and muted. Also, the combat isn’t super interesting, but since combat is not the focus of this game that is okay.
There is a lot more to talk about with this game, but I am just going to say, if you like the idea of walking around and talking to people with interesting backstories, and then thinking your way out of problems, you should give ‘Torment: Tides of Numenera’ a try. The fact this game is so strange and weird makes it even better. If you want to just shoot or hit stuff, this game probably isn’t for you. inXile Entertainment did a great job of capturing what made ‘Planescape: Torment’ the classic it is and channeling that in to Torment. Maybe next time they can upgrade the graphics a bit.
Shmee Enters The Wildlands With The Ghost Recon Beta!
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands feels like the more realistic version of Mercenaries 2. Mercenaries 2 was an over the top open world action title where you overthrow a fictional Venezuelan government, and you got to pick whether you helped the Chinese or the Americans. You overthrew the government by taking out targets. You do the exact same thing in Wildlands except it is Bolivia, it is drugs not oil, and you can’t call down airstrikes to level entire cities. I am not sure that it is an upgrade.
Because of the more grounded world that Wildlands (also Wildlands is not a word) takes place in it just feels kind of off. You are supposed to be helping people, but you can jack their cars or accidentally kill them. Now if you disrupt the local populous too much they will stop helping you out, and killing civilians ends the game, so you go around driving the speed limit and carefully shooting when in cities. However, you do a lot of shooting, so there will be some collateral damage, and that hurts this game’s serious tone. It is hard to have a good time after I accidentally murdered some poor farmer, and then have to reload to a save.
All is not lost though. The world is varied and lush. The shooting is top notch, and something tells me if you have a group that you play games with, the co-op would be a ton of fun. So, I am not saying not to get Wildlands, I am just saying it feels different for an open world action game. Kind of like how Mafia is different from GTA, but again the Mafia games always have those moments where the tone of the game conflict with the structure of the game. Between For Honor and Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands, Ubisoft really has a lot riding on Q1 2017, and sadly for them, while both games seem fun, I am not sure either of them are for me. Though if you convince all my friends to get it, I might just have to join in on some open world co-op.
For Honor Seems Like A Good Game For Other People…
For Honor recently came out, but before that I played around with the open beta, and I decided that it wasn’t for me. That is not to say it isn’t good, because it seems like it is, it is just for other people. For Honor is a mix of a fighting game and an action game with a focus on 2v1 combat. It is an interesting concept, but the way the controls work along with the counter/block/attack system means that you will have to put a lot of time in to get good and stay good. That is a problem for me. I barely have time to play games I like, let alone devote myself to being okay at a Dark Souls/Soulcaliber mashup.
All that being the case, I’m happy Ubisoft made this game. It is different, and games that are different need to be made to keep pushing the industry forward. All games are based on other games, so if someone sees what For Honor is doing and tweaks it a little, there may be a game for me down the line, and to be fair For Honor borrowed more than a little from other games like Chivalry. If you are out there looking for a game where you can show your skill and ability, For Honor just might be for you, and I hope you enjoy it. Though you will not see me playing it any time soon.