Thursday, December 31, 2015

Year End Wrap-Up, part 2

Disappointments of 2015
In my reviews, I try to find some positives in the negative and some negatives to the positives, but there were still a few things that were disappointing in the world of gaming in 2015.

The biggest one to me was The Elder Scrolls Online.  I'm a fan of Bethesda's games, and while I wasn't initially sold on an MMO version, I figured they couldn't mess it up completely.  Well, I was pretty much wrong.  The game did have a massive amount of content, I will give it that.  Pretty much every other aspect was messed up or ruined, though.  The game just didn't feel like an Elder Scrolls game at all, but an MMO with an Elder Scrolls skin.  Combat didn't feel right.  Stealing was a pain, and you couldn't do the tried and true reload if you messed up.  The fact that you had to pick a class just runs against all the series has established.  I wasn't looking forward to the game too much, and it severely let me down.  I really regretted buying the game at all, let along paying full price for the monstrosity.  My wife was able to stomach enough of it to get our money's worth, but I just couldn't bring myself to play it, and I tried several times.

Most of my other disappointments were minor compared to a whole game, but the main reason I was looking forward to playing some Call of Duty: Black Ops III was another casualty.  I like horde modes in games, and I heard good things about the aliens one in a previous CoD game.  The zombie mode in Black Ops III is just not enough, nor even fun.  There's only one map unless you buy the season pass, which gives you one whole other map!  Wow, what a bargain!  Oh, right, sarcasm doesn't translate to text.  It's dumb.  Plus, you go down in three hits, which happens stupid fast because they will just come up silently from behind and take you down before you can turn to shoot them.  The first three waves go fine, then it just goes downhill for me fast.  There's a whole ritual thing you are supposed to do and items to get, but I just want a standard horde mode.  If they wanted to do this new one, fine, but make it one of a few different maps.  Have at least one traditional one that I don't have to pay extra for.  They also threw low XP into the mode for good measure.  All in all, I pretty much regret buying the game, and I got it for a very low price.

At the insistence of my fellow XPound/Pez of the Mind/WhateverItIsThisWeek member Chriz, I tried out the Star Wars Battlefront beta.  The multiplayer versus was no fun at all to me.  Even the brief time I was a hero did nothing to sway me into enjoying the experience.  It's a pretty game, but didn't have anything I really liked.  The survival mode was ok at best, but even it was only two players and couldn't pull me to the dark side.  If there was some single player I might have bothered, but I'm glad I skipped the "full" game.

Lastly, I will sadly mention some things about Transformers: Devastation.  I like the game, but it was too short.  It has some cool artwork tied to achievements that I would love to use for my background.  Problem is, some of them are for the harder achievements, meaning I'd have to put in way too much time and effort for a minor gain.  One of the ones I really wanted was a community challenge that came and went with likely nobody else trying for it.  The challenge happened a few weeks after release, when most people were long done with the game, considering you can beat it in a day or two easy.  I was able to make due to get a decent background with the screenshot tool, but I would really like to get some of that artwork to make my dashboard look cool.

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