mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:
Titanfall, lots of Titanfall. I may be a year late to the party, but it was only $20, it runs decently on my PC, there are still a decent number of people playing, and they made all of the DLC free. It's a super fun game anyway, helps satiate my appetite for a CoD-like shooter, without the utterly pathetic CoD community or generic modern military shooter theme. I guess you can say that it combines the best aspects of CoD and Halo, while throwing in mecha and simplified Quake/Unreal Tournament-style movement. I only wish there were more weapons to choose from, but I can see why they kept the number of weapons small, as it makes things much easier to balance.
Number of weapons and other things being low is attributed to just two things: Too much time/money spent everywhere else, and a general dumbing down so as to make sure "everybody" can play it (which is often also said to excuse the first reason, for some games). It was that very lack of content that cut down the playerbase so heavily, as it creates a huge lack of variety, and was THE main complaint. It didnt help one bit that, like alot of corporate morons lately, good ol' EA had just ASSUMED that the game would get an e-sports following and such, so resources went into preparation for that as well. Not to mention further resources squandered for a "story" mode that nobody wanted (my cousin had a theory that this was ENTIRELY the result of corporate meddling, where the addition of a story mode with cinematics not only didnt really make sense as every little thing about the game was designed, from the ground up, for pure multiplayer, and AI that could actually handle the complicated movement and terrain would be nigh-impossible to make currently, so it'd likely end up terrible anyway... so it wasnt necessary, but the higher-ups think that cutscenes alone will sell it, so they tell the devs "do it anyway, or else". I have to agree that this is a very strong possibility) Evolve suffered the EXACT same set of problems (and I really do mean "exact", right down to the story mode that wasnt really a story mode) that Titanfall had, with the same damn stupid assumption. Hell, even smaller developers... particularly those of the moba genre... are falling into that trap at times. The e-sports stuff can be fun at times, but it's also doing alot of damage as publishers just dont seem to actually understand (at all) what gets a game to that point.
Heck, Titanfall's balance actually wasnt even all that good: Most players were using JUST the carbine, and that's IT, as other weapons just werent really needed. Except the occaisional sniper. But most used just that.
One way or another, I was disappointed in the end. I thought, finally, after all these years, an FPS that I wont completely hate. And it just.... bombed. Hell, the amount of content was so low that it even bothered me (I mean, really... THREE Titans? Among other problems...).
Probably going to be a LONG time before something appears that can get me back into that genre. Too many bad trends are way too ingrained right now and not likely to go away anytime soon.
28 Mar 2015, 9:15 am
