Video Game Tuesday: E3 2018 Predictions

Hey all I’m back with a look at some of the possibilities from this year’s game development version of Christmas! It’s my E3 2018 Predictions!

NO Next-Gen Console Announcements: I’m not expecting to hear about the next generation of consoles this year. If they announce anything other than slim versions of the XBOX and PS4 Pro I’ll be honestly shocked. Regarding the Switch, I’m expecting to hear nothing new, except maybe a more streamlined version equivalent to a slim version if anything at all.  Next Gen consoles are the announcements I’m expecting to hear about next year at E3, but not this year.

Pride Reductions: I’m expecting to hear that the PS4 Pro and XBOX will get some price cuts, and probably the switch as well.

EA to announce more annual sports games: This is less of a prediction than a certainty to me at least, but I’m fully expecting to hear about the next Madden game and other sports game equivalents. Color me unimpressed and uninterested once more.

Super Smash Front and Center for Nintendo: If they don’t really beat the marketing drums to death on this one I’ll be just as surprised as if Sony and Microsoft announce the next gen consoles. Nintendo has no reason not to keep up the momentum that last year’s launch of the Switch and Breath of the Wild brought to the company. Smash Bros is a surefire way to do that.

Pokemon Switch: I’m also expecting to hear about a mainline Pokemon game for the Switch. The system is just begging for a brand new Pokemon game given it’s dual nature as a portable and a console.

That’s it for this week’s Video Game Tuesday and my predictions for E3 thus far. I may do a what’s been leaked so far post closer to E3 happening, but we’ll see. Do you expect to see anything that I didn’t mention happen at this year’s E3? Leave a comment below!

Video Game Tuesday: Console Mods

This week for Video Game Tuesday I’m covering a subject that I find both frustrating and interesting. It’s all about Console Mods.

Why frustrating?: Because companies like Bethesda have made an effort to bring mods to consoles, but are doing a terrible job of it. They won’t properly curate the mods for games like Skyrim’s Special Edition and Fallout 4, and this causes many mod authors to have their work stolen by thieves without proper acknowledgement. I know if they did acknowledge it that a lot of mod makers wouldn’t be so upset, but the fact is that Bethesda has done a piss poor job with their efforts to bring mods to consoles. I’m not surprised that Sony won’t allow Bethesda to bring mods with unique assets to the PlayStation 4, they just don’t respect the mod authors that breathed so much life into games on the PC. Skyrim has a thriving mod community, but Bethesda has continuously screwed them over, with paying for mods on Steam and the console mod debacle.

There’s other games and companies that won’t allow mods, like Square Enix with Final Fantasy XIV. However Square Enix actually has a valid reason, FFXIV is an MMORPG and as any MMO gamer will tell you, if a portion of the audience can’t download mods the mods are next to useless. Plus theres the toxicity that comes with mods like Damage Meters, something that can quickly devolve into huge flame wars on forums and chat channels.  I used mods when I played World of Warcraft, and I required all my raiders/guildmates to install them if they wanted to raid. Some were invaluable, like Deadly Boss Mods, while others were just for fun, like Bejeweled. All of them were useful in one way or another, but I don’t regret not having them in FFXIV. I actually enjoy that I don’t need any mods or VoIP programs to succeed in doing the hardest content. Yes it’s helpful, especially the VoIP programs, but they aren’t necessary at all.

Why interesting?: Because I love mods, some of my favorite game modes in games like Warcraft III were mods like the Angel Arena maps. They had custom models and I had great respect for those who made those models. I hope one day we’ll be able to use mods on consoles properly and add fun things like Thomas the Tank Engine to games like Skyrim in the future. But until such mods are properly curated and monitored we won’t be getting them with any amount of frequency if at all.

That’s it for this week’s Video Game Tuesday.

Retro Game Friday: Oblivion

This week for Retro Game Friday I’m covering an entry in a series I love. It’s The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion!

Plot Synopsis:  The story begins with the player imprisoned in a cell for an unknown crime. Emperor Uriel Septim VII, accompanied by Imperial bodyguards known as “the Blades”, arrive in the prison, fleeing from assassins who have murdered the emperor’s three sons and are now targeting him. The emperor and the Blades reveal that the player’s jail cell contains a secret entrance to a part of the city’s sewer that functions as an escape route. Pardoned by the emperor, the player follows the group into the sewer, where they come under attack by assassins. All but one of the Blades are cut down in the fighting that ensues. Knowing he is destined to die by the hands of the assassins, Uriel Septim entrusts the player with the Amulet of Kings, worn by the Septim emperors of Tamriel, and orders the player to take it to a man named Jauffre, the grand master of the Blades, at Weynon Priory. Immediately afterward, one of the assassins kills the emperor. The player escapes the sewer and heads out into the open world of Cyrodiil.

Plot: The plot of the game is pretty decent, but it’s also not anything super great either. There are some really interesting sidequests, particularly the Sheogorath DLC, but the main story falls short in my opinion.

Characters: There are plenty of interesting NPCs, M’aiq the Liar for instance, but again most of them aren’t super impressive. To be honest I’ve never felt the same level of affection for the NPCs in Oblivion or Skyrim quite like I did in Morrowind. Granted that in Morrowind you could kill any and all NPCs if you so chose, other than the always present guards, but even then it was a choice….

Gameplay: However that choice was removed starting in Oblivion, which is a real shame, because I actually enjoyed the heck out of learning who I can dispatch and who I couldn’t. It also removed the ability to use the levitate spell from the repertoire of available spells, which again was a massive let down.

Art: The art is very badly aged, and the faces in the game look horrible. Especially the eyes.

Music: Decent, but not as catchy as Morrowind or Skyrim’s music.

Overall: An easily skippable entry in the series, it removed most of what I loved about Morrowind and added DLC Horse Armor instead.

 

Video Game Tuesday: Blacklisting

This week for Video Game Tuesday I’m covering an issue that frustrates me greatly. It’s about Blacklisting.

Last week Kotaku published a very interesting article that infuriated me because of the shortsightedness involved by parties concerned in the article.

The long story short is that Kotaku published leaks about games that would later become Assassin’s Creed Unity, Fallout 4 and Assassin’s Creed Syndicate. This put them on a blacklist from Bethesda and Ubisoft.  Some people, who think they are intelligent and aren’t at all close to even being as intelligent as a pile of pond scum, are waving their flags and saying that it was deserved. I say that this is bullshit. Any good journalist will piss people off and if you aren’t doing that you aren’t a journalist.  What Kotaku did was nothing new and despite being one of the biggest websites for gamers in the world, it still got blacklisted. This leads me to think that the people running the companies we love aren’t the people we respect as gamers. We respect good and clever developers and publishers for making games that bring us joy and challenges. We don’t respect them because they can’t take necessary criticism or their product got leaked before being announced without their marketing team’s approval.

Bethesda until last week and Ubisoft until last year around Thanksgiving, were respected developers and publishers whom I always looked forward to seeing what was coming in the future. I’m not going to be bothering with any further Assassin’s Creed or Fallout or Far Cry games until they whip their PR and Marketing teams into line, literally if necessary. I’ve been cheated a bit too much by Ubisoft on games with terrible game-breaking bugs and glitches causing me to be unable to complete games. Bethesda had my respect for years, but after this last week I’ve come to realize that they have stagnated and become like EA. I don’t see innovation or creativity in their games anymore. Skyrim was fun, but it wasn’t anything really new to the Elder Scrolls formula, if anything it was a regression from what Morrowind had.

So when I heard that they blacklisted Kotaku I was furious on Kotaku’s behalf as a fellow journalist and game critic. I don’t hold back on what I see as problems in a game now, I am frank, honest, and brutal to a point in my reviews. Sometimes I even get asked to tone it down, because I’m too brutally honest with my reviews.  I’ve grown a lot since last year when my first review ever was Destiny, and I’ve come to see that sometimes the little guys really do make the best things. Tales of Zestiria was the best game I’ve played all year, easily beating out Destiny: The Taken King for re-playablity and blasting it out of the water in terms of story.  The Tales of team has one person who makes their Battle System. One guy, makes it. That’s outstanding and proves to me that more isn’t necessarily better. So Bethesda and Ubisoft instead of giving us crap like Assassin’s Creed Unity which was broken for over a month and even after being fixed was the single worst game I played last year, make us a game like Tales of Zestiria. Until such a time, you have absolutely no right to offend a critic of your games by blacklisting them. You should be begging them to be your playtesters instead of shunning them.

Video Game Tuesday: My Hopes for E3

 

This week for Video Game Tuesday I’m going to talk about what I hope to hear about from this year’s E3!

What is E3?: If you’ve been living under a rock for the last 20 years, E3 is a trade show for Video Game Companies to show off their up and coming hardware and software, which translates to Consoles and Games! It’s sort of like a yearly Christmas in June for Video Gamers who like to see what’s going to be coming out in the future for gaming.

What’s so special about this year’s E3?: Besides it being the 20th show, this year we are having a couple of companies having a press conference for the first time this year. They are Bethesda and Square Enix and I’m really excited in particular for Square Enix.

What do I expect to see?: Lots of marketing for upcoming games including the yearly installment of Call of Duty, I wish that series would just die, and others like Halo 5: Guardians, Final Fantasy 14: Heavensward, and Batman Arkham Knight, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, and Star Wars: Battlefront among other things.

What do I hope to see or hear about?: Final Fantasy 15 and a solid release date, I’m not talking about an expected released date either, I want to hear it’s coming out in the next 365 days. I also hope to hear about the next Elder Scrolls game, that isn’t ESO because that was a massive failure in my opinion. I expect to hear about FF15’s release date much more than another Elder Scrolls game, but I don’t have high hopes for either.

What are your hopes for this years E3? Leave a comment below with what you hope to see. That’s it for this week’s Video Game Tuesday!