Blizzard has this whole "games as a service" thing under control. I've been playing Overwatch for about two years now - actually since the beta - and somehow I just can't seem to stop. To be honest I didn't have a ton of interest in the game when it was first announced. My previous experience with competitive shooters was stuff like Team Fortress 2, which just didn't click with me at all. But I had admired what Blizzard had done in recent years with games like Hearthstone and Heroes Of The Storm. They seemed to have a certain knack for making these sorts of competitive games very accessible. My early experience with Overwatch was nothing special. For whatever reason I picked Mercy to try first and rather quickly discovered that I was pretty lousy at playing support. This was during the official launch of the game. I mostly just shrugged and said "eh, it seems like a pretty cool game. I'll fire it up again from time to time I guess." But here's the thing - I didn't really get the game at the time. I guess I just saw it as like... two teams who shoot each other. Y'know? But that's totally not the point of Overwatch. It would just take me some time to figure that out. Over the next year or so I slowly started getting more into it - partly because I'd continue to read up on what was going on... who was being added, what the new meta was like and so on. Eventually I started experimenting with D.Va and suddenly the game became totally awesome to me. I loved D.Va. Well, I mean I still love D.Va. Then I started using Soldier 76. Overwatch is the sort of game where I need to play a few matches before bed. Y'know? And this before-bed game changes throughout the year. Sometimes it's Rocket League. For a while it was Spelunky. For much of the fall it'll be Madden. But Overwatch is always in that rotation. I had taken some time away from Overwatch again this past year, but then they announced the Halloween event and it just sounded so awesome. And so I picked up an Xbox One copy of the game so I could play with some friends there. That was three and a half months ago and I'm still playing a few matches almost every night before bed. Part of the relaxation of it all is that I barely play in Competitive Mode. I'm really just here for funsies. I have no delusions about ever being great. I just want to be competent and have a good time. But I'm always learning. I'll settle on one character for a while, and then decide that I should really know how to play some other role. I still think I'm terrible at support, but at least I can manage playing Ana better than Mercy. And I actually kind of love playing as Zenyatta, though I play him more aggro than support, which can be a big help or detriment depending who you ask. I'm not great on defense but Bastian is fun to play as. And I guess you could call Orissa defensive with her shields. If someone snatches up D.Va and it looks like a second tank is a good idea, then I'll grab Rein. Though Soldier 76 is great, Sombra and Tracer both offer different angles on offense. And so on. I wish I could play Widowmaker well. Just saying. I've actually been trying to force myself to play whichever role is needed rather than who I feel most comfortable with. Sure this can be frustrating, but it's also a trial by fire. The other night I saw a glaring hole in our Tank department, so I went with Rein. Our team ultimately lost, but all my teammates gave me the little digital thumbs-up thing at the end, so that made me feel good. Like trying is really worth something here. It's not just characters of course. I'm also constantly learning How To Play. I'm always trying to develop better habits. Trying to better understand my role at any given moment. Trying to keep the objective in mind. Maybe the weirdest thing about all of this is how I've gotten interested in Overwatch as a so-called esport. I'm a guy who neer watches streams of other people playing video games. But I'm always checking to see when the Uprising is playing in the Overwatch League. So weird. I don't know if or when I'll ever stop playing Overwatch, though. It seems like I find other games to steal away my attention, but I always end up coming back to it. I'm currently trying to convince a group of friends to take the plunge, so there may be no end in sight. I think in a lot of ways, Overwatch has become my favorite game of the generation. However you define that. To me, the game is ubiquitous with the era of gaming. It got me into playing a competitive game heavily; it made me a fan of e-sports, at least for a while. Heck, I own Overwatch shirts and socks and blankets and even a pretty awesome figure of D.Va. I'll probably never be great at the game, but I always consider it fun.
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When Wolfenstein: The New Order was released in 2014, I was blown away. It was an amazing modern first person shooter that spoke to my inner thirteen year old. Although I was playing a new game with HD visuals and full spoken dialogue and a full original score, I was somehow sent back in a time machine and felt myself installing shareware on a school computer. Games, like any other media, have an incredible way of imprinting their fingerprints upon your memory.
Not long after, a semi-sequel was released under the title The Old Blood, and it felt like an actual id Software renaissance was happening (even if these games were being handled by Machine Games). And then the unthinkable happened. Acting under the banner of Bethesda (who also published the new Wolfenstein games), id went ahead and announced a new Doom game. Let's get my one shouting-at-clouds moment out of the way here. I hate it when games reboot and just re-use a title. I hate that I have to refer to this new game as "Doom 2016" instead of, y'know, Doom 4 which would have made way more sense. Especially given the fact that it retains the same timeline of the original trilogy. I mean, what really is the point of calling it anything other than Doom 4? Ugh. But my point stands. By the time 2016 rolled around and we got a new Doom game, the id renaissance was in full effect. Though technically, the id brand lived on over the years, the games just weren't quite as impactful. Which is not to belittle id's own Rage, which I've heard good things about. Or Raven Software's own Wolfenstein reboot or even Quake 4, which I probably enjoyed more than your typical gamer did. But these new Wolfenstein and Doom games were just so top-notch that it felt like it was actually exciting again to be getting new releases in the series. It felt like these series actually mattered again, even to the mainstream gaming audience. It felt... like the 90's. I'll tell you this off the bat, for a game that takes place on Mars at the gates of Hell, Doom 2016 looks absolutely stunning. I originally played this game back in 2016 upon its initial release and was just jaw-drop amazed by the visuals. Even now, six years later I feel the same. I still don't have a Series X, so I'm playing this again on Xbox One and streaming it to my Surface Go 3 (which admittedly, has an incredible screen), but wow - I'm still in awe of just how good this game looks. Everything is so life-like and visceral, the settings are so impressively detailed, and I've yet to see a lick of even momentary slowdown. It seems hard locked at 60FPS, which is insane considering how fast and frantic every moment of the game actually is. Which brings me to the most important thing to know going into Doom 2016. This game is about speed. It's a game of movement. Unlike the majority of first person shooters of the current era, this isn't one where you can stand still and regain health and plot out your plan of attack. Oh no. You are constantly under attack! You must be a shark in the game - you must constantly be moving in order to stay alive - you must be a predator. And the result is a beautiful bullet ballet of demon blood and guts. One thing I love to see is that even though the game has such a modern polish, it still feels like Doom in a very 1993 kind of way. Like, the doors you go through look like the doors from the original. The item drops like shields and ammo have an old school pixelated look. It should be jarring to see this kind of campiness surrounded by hardcore violence, but instead it just works somehow. It's awesome. Likewise, the audial atmosphere is top notch. Much of the "music" is atmospheric, and borderline in industrial. And I mean that in an Eraserhead kind of way, rather than a Nine Inch Nails kind of way. The echo of demon howls in the distance only adds to the feeling of absolute dread. As a reboot, Doom 2016 is also surprisingly difficult. I guess you'd call it a hardcore game, in gamers terms. Whatever that means. But yeah, even with some added modern niceties like an automap and indicators of where you're supposed to be heading, the game itself holds nothing back. You will be constantly surrounded and swarmed by demons that want you dead. There's no automatic health regeneration here. Instead, you'll have to look for health drops, or use the chainsaw on enemies to regain some of their health. Of course, the chainsaw requires gas to work, so there's no easy way out of a bind, really. All in all, as far as reboots go, Doom 2016 couldn't really be any more of a success. It is a wholeheartedly modern first person shooter, with all the bells and whistles that should come with such a thing. And yet, it retains all of the tone and over-the-top violence and unironic early 90's extreme-ism that made the series so beloved from the start. When rebooting cult classics like this, there's a lot on the line. And chances are you're either going to disappoint the fans of the original, or you're going to alienate a whole new generation who had never been exposed to the game before. Doom 2016 manages to avoid both outcomes and sticks the landing. As such, this is the sort of reboot that other developers should be studying for years to come. |
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