Game news

Last week I talked about Vermintide, and now with the game live, I've played some more.

Although I haven't gotten even close to a complete playthrough I'm pretty confident in saying it's a great game. Well, it's great if you play with enough players. The AI is pretty dumb. I tested a map with a friend, letting the AI control the two remaining characters, and that did not go well at all. The AI would rather just stand there and look around, than pick you up if you've been beaten down. With three players out of four, the same map went just fine.

So if you have enough friends, or don't mind playing with randoms it's a really cool and intense game.

Total War Warhammer just made the news with pre-orders available six months in advance. Yeah, they want you to pre-order half a year before the game is released in April 2016... And as a pre-order bonus, they are giving you “for free” a fifth faction: Chaos Warriors. Come on now, really? We're not talking some cosmetic DLC here, but a whole fifth faction. They haven't even shown us anything about the Vampire Count faction yet and now they pull this. Just imagine how much love they would get if they had just said “Surprise, were adding a fifth faction. Here you go”. But instead they're pulling the whole pre-order garbage move. It wasn't even that long ago that Square Enix had to pull their ludicrous “augment your pre-order” crap because the players wouldn't stand for it. And now Sega goes and does this. Cutting out a whole faction that's already in the game just to push your product six months in advance? Not cool guys, not cool at all.

And show us the vampires already!

My third and final entry concerns the new expansion for Star Wars The Old Republic: Knights of the Fallen Empire that I got early access to due to being subscribed at a key point. Now the KotFE expansion is a pretty mixed bag.

It goes without saying that no mmo expansion goes off without a hitch, and there are bugs. Otherwise it's fine from a technical standpoint.

But (and minor spoilers ahead) you have to play the entire KotFE story alone! In an mmo! My main character has always hung out with my wife’s main, but now they are forcibly separated. It was bad enough in the last expansion, Shadow of Revan, where you could do all the side content together and they split you up in all the story parts, but in KotFE there are no side elements. They have turned an mmo into a single player corridor runner game. Very railroady.

The story is OK. It's only the first nine chapters out of sixteen. It's by no means great so far, I'd even go so far as to say it's cliched and predictable. But it's incomplete so I'll reserve final judgment until we know it all. However, they went on and on about how your choices matter, and so far I haven't seen anything that matters.

As a part of the story, your companions are gone and you have some new ones. You will apparently get the old ones back, (when the system is not broken) and you can even get some of the other classes companions if you work for it. As a part of the new changes, all companions can now heal/tank/dps according to your wishes, that's fine. But they no longer use gear for anything other than appearance. Instead they get their stats from you. What I found as a result is that all the combat in KotFE is absurdly easy. I died once and that's only because I fell off a ledge due to my own clumsiness. The boss fights are hideous though. Not because they are in any way dangerous. No, they are mind-numbingly dull. The bosses are immune to everything you do except damage, and worst of all, they lead no where. The most climactic fight in all nine chapters led to nothing.

Once you get through the story you get to manage your new base. But although all the NPC's are voiced, you are not! Instead they have opted for a “retro” style familiar to all players of the original Knights of the Old Republic, or Kotor. Personally I think it's just about cost cutting and that's fine, just admit it.

It's worth noting that I am having fun. It may sound as if I hate it, and that's not true. It is enjoyable, but it's so damn frustrating when the rest of the game is so good. You go from having an intense and personal story to a narrative that makes more or less sense depending on which class you're playing. Oh yeah, almost forgot. A lot of importance is laid on what happened on Ziost during Shadow of Revan. But it's not mandatory to that expansion. By the time you get to go there, you have already defeated Revan, and my main missed it. I just never got around to going there, but KotFE assumes I did. Please don't base a new story on something that is essentially extra content.

That's enough rambling and ranting for this week. So until next time, have a great week!