When Gears of War launched Horde mode it was the start of something special. Cooperative monster slaying in waves, so much fun, but Halo ODST and Reach perfected it with Firefight. For some reason Halo 5 didn’t launch with Firefight, but that is changing! It will become part of Halo 5’s already great Warzone, so REQ packs and tanks for everyone! Maybe it is time to bust out my copy of Halo 5 and start killing some mobs! See you online maybe?
Are We Seeing The Death Of Free2Play?
After almost a year of silence since PAX Prime 2015, LawBreakers the new asymmetrical arena shooter by CliffyB’s new studio Boss Key Productions has not only changed its logo and character art, but it will no longer be Free2Play (F2P). They have not said how much it will cost, only that it will now be a premium purchase only available (at least initially) on Steam.
One game changing its monetization scheme wouldn’t be that big a deal, but recently Blizzard also announced that their shooter Overwatch would also be ditching F2P, and they will be releasing their tittle for $40 this May. It was speculated that Battleborn from Gearbox would be F2P as well, but Randy Pitchford made it clear that they only release AAA full price tittles. It seems, at least with bigger studios, that the money just isn’t there for F2P unless you are a MOBA (Think Dota 2 or League of Legends) or an MMO (Star Wars: The Old Republic or The Elder Scrolls Online).
I for one am quite happy about this change. As much as I have enjoyed Dirty Bomb by Splash Damage it is annoying to not have all the characters, or at least a good portion of them, and even if you do drop the money to get all the characters you still need to spend money to outfit them properly. Meaning that you are most likely only going to get a couple of characters and then just outfit them which is a shame since half of the fun with asymmetrical shooters is playing with all the random different play styles.
We will see if this trend continues, but I kind of hope it does. I will be keeping an eye on Epic Games’ Paragon to see if it follows suit. If Free2Play dies, I don’t think anyone will morn its death. It works for a few games out there, but not for everything.
Sony Manages To Fumble Their Mic Drop!
A couple of weeks ago I said that Sony needed to launch Project Morpheus now known as PlayStation VR for $499, but they did one better and launched it for $399. Well except that they didn’t. You can get it for $399, but to use it you will need a $59 PlayStation Camera, and for a quite a few of their 50 launch titles you will need a couple of Move controllers for $40 each, so the grand total will be $540. Though for now you can get PlayStation Cameras and Move controllers cheaper than MSRP if you look around, so not so surprisingly the total would be about $500.
Now Sony’s reasoning for launching the VR without any of the necessary accessories was that most of their first adopters will already have the Camera and the Move controllers, which is probably true fanboys tend to buy everything (ask me about my Kinect), but the $399 price was still pretty bogus. They should have just announced two SKUs at their event, $399 for the base headset, and $499 for the bundle. Boom! Problem solved! They still get to have their VR solution be $200 cheaper than the Rift which also doesn’t come with motion controllers, and even with the bundle they still would have been $100 cheaper. It is all win.
Now later in day after Sony was getting hammered for their misleading $399 price point they did say that they were going to announce a couple of PlayStation VR bundles. One with headset and all necessary accessories, and one that also includes the PS4. I can understand not saying anything about the PS4 bundle because by October the PS4’s price will have dropped, so to announce the price of that bundle would giveaway how much the that drop will be, and that announcement is usually saved for the lead-in to the all important Holiday buying season, but not announcing the Camera and Move bundle was just odd and ill-advised.
Sony still got to drop the mic as far as price goes for their VR solution, but instead of getting to enjoy it they had to deal with the wrath of a lot of confused and angry gamers. Now granted confused and angry seems to be the native mental state for a lot of gamers, especially ones that hang out on the internet, and people were always going to be mad that the PlayStation VR was ‘too expensive’, but they could have saved themselves a lot of grief by just acknowledging upfront that the PlayStation VR was going to be more than $399 for a lot of people. You know, more like $499 like a certain blogger told you it would be.
Does Hitman Kill It In Paris?
A few short days ago IO Interactive and Square Enix released the first part of their new Hitman game, and I am happy to report that the Hitman franchise is back on track, but it still has quite a few bugs to work out. Pretty much like every Hitman game before it, there are just a few things holding it back from perfection. Well except for Absolution there were a lot of things holding that game back from perfection.
As with all the Hitman games you take the role of Agent 47. This game starts before he was the feared assassin, and has you complete two humorous training levels complete with plywood yachts and tarp oceans, but the main focus of this game is later in 47’s career at a Paris fashion show. It might be one of the best Hitman levels ever made.
There is so much to do and interact with in Hitman: Paris. The map truly frees your imagination to complete the objectives in any way you see fit. You want to knock out a supermodel steal his outfit and literally bring down the house while walking down the runway? Cool. Want to dress up like a waiter and poison a drink? Good plan! There are a ton of ways to go. Meaning you can play this level over and over again. Which is good since otherwise this game would be incredibly short.
To make things even better they have brought back Contracts mode allowing people to make their own assassination contracts and share them over the internet meaning there will always be a new take on the mission. Hitman has also added optional objectives that help you gain ‘Mastery’ on levels. The higher your ‘Mastery’ score is the more stuff you unlock for that map, like new starting locations and disguises or weapon drop off locations. Also later they are going to add Elusive Contracts that are only live for five hours, and once you accept it you will only get one chance, so pretty much like a real hit.
All of this is great, but sadly Hitman has some problems. For one this game can be glitchy. People’s voices will sometimes change without reason, or people will walk through walls. There was one time I had it where when I loaded the map from a game save I could see people warp from their starting locations to the closets that I had stuffed them in. Also if there is a crate next to a railing make sure that the crate is highlighted and only one ‘Y’ button is showing. If there are two ‘Y’s on screen you are going to dump that poor sap over the railing and on to the ground below. I did this a lot.
The biggest downer is the online connectivity. For the Contracts mode or the objectives to work you need to be online, and more to the point their servers need to be handling the load of all the people playing the game. If not, if you are playing online and the servers crash, your game will crash back to the menu, or if it forces you to play in offline mode you cannot gain any ‘Mastery’. It is really a bummer. I have seen some people complain about load times, but they haven’t bugged me too much, but I am using an external drive, so that may be helping.
For $15 you get a bit sized chunk of assassination with Hitman Part 1. It took me almost three hours for my first play through of Hitman, but I am drawn to play the Paris level over and over. I am also thinking of going back and playing the second training mission over again to see if I can get the Silent Assassin achievement, so for me it is well worth the price of admission. Despite the glitches and the down servers, this might be shaping up to be the best Hitman yet. I just hope that they keep up with the monthly content like they promised for parts 2-5, and that they fix their servers.
Was Grim Fandango Remastered?
Thanks to a recent Humble Bundle, I was about to get Grim Fandango Remastered for $3, which was a steal, but just how Remastered is the game over the original? Honestly it doesn’t seem like they put a lot of work in to this new port. It has some higher res textures, a new lighting engine, it is able to run on modern computers, and that is about it. Luckily the game is still awesome, so it is still worth the price of admission.
If you have never played Grim Fandango before, you take the role of Manny Calavera a Grim Reaper/Travel Agent in charge of getting people to their proper places in the underworld. Though things are not what they seem and someone is rigging the game, so you will have to help Manny figure out what is going on. Mostly by sticking random stuff in random places.
With recent adventure game remasters like the Monkey Island games there have been major graphical improvements. That is not the case with Grim Fandango. While everything has been given a spit and polish it mostly looks like how I remember it from its original release in 1998. The big exception is the new lighting engine: Shadows are cast realistically, and light sources have a more natural look. Also thanks to the PS3/PS4 port, the game now works well with a game pad. Though since I didn’t try it with a game pad in 1998 maybe it already did.
Honestly the biggest additions to Grim Fandango are just the fact it works on modern computers without any finagling and the developer commentary. Listening to Tim and crew talk about creating one of the greatest adventure games of all time is a lot of fun and very interesting. They should just release a documentary about that. I would watch it, that is for sure.
I have been kind of hard on Grim Fandango Remastered, but that really shouldn’t deter you. It is still a wonderful game, and possibly the best classic style adventure game ever created, so now that you can get it cheap and it will work on your computer or PlayStation you should totally buy it. Though just don’t expect anything be crazy different.