In passing. RPGs set in a fantasy land seem dime a dozen, so it's kinda difficult to get excited unless being part of an established IP. Because it's not like I'm craving for yet another opportunity to hack things into little bits with a sword and perhaps some magic, while having talky-times inbetween. I don't mean to pan it, but if it had a setting a little more unorthodox, like say, some kind of modern spy caper (such as Alpha Protocol a few years back, objectively a pretty crappy game but played it for the setting anyway) or pirates, I might actually hope it turns out to be good.The Drifter said:Also: There's a WRPG that hits in May on the PS4, PC, 360 and PS3. Has anyone heard about this? It's on my radar for sure. (Finn, I'm sure that you've heard about it.)
Of course, if this one does, it will likely go to the to-play list. But I'm definitely waiting to see what the hive mind thinks of it before I bother to get excited.
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Looks like it's been a while since I've been to this thread. Kinda logical, since I didn't want to turn my posts into daily logs of "what I did in Skyrim today". Though that does not actually explain my absence since January, because that was when I finally realized that with the way I was playing the game, wrapping it up would take me a while. All the while the backlog bloats further on. So one day, roughly three months ago, I just left my Dovahkiin sitting in the Bannered Mare, waiting for some kind of hush-hush meeting he was to have that evening with some of the Companions. By that moment, roughly three to four months had passed in-game, and in that time I had been to six of the Skyrim's nine (or eight-and-half) major settlements, had advanced the main story up to a point where Delphine told me she was to do some due diligence on the Thalmor - and left all other major story strands save for the Companions pretty much untouched. Mostly because from the overarching story perspective, it made sense to me. While the actual gamespace is greatly compressed, in-lore Skyrim is a big place, so things happening there should take time.
I fully intend to go back one day and see the rest it has to offer, but right now it's on hiatus while I have a go at other things. And thus far, said things have been Remember Me, Splinter Cell: Blacklist and Assassin's Creed Liberation. Currently underway is Black Flag.
Without further ado, brief impressions of them...
Remember Me is a game that essentially holds tons of promise, but the execution falls flat. The premise deserves so much more than a linear corridor beat-em-up with some ****-easy platforming in-between. Which is why I hope it gets a sequel. In a sense, it's a game like the very first Assassin's Creed or Hitman way back when. In other words, games that display plenty of promise and originality, but on execution, are little more than technology and gameplay demos. However, both got did get sequels that simply fixed everything wrong with their predecessors, and helped turn said IPs into modern classics. I'd say Dontnod deserves another shot at it too.
Blacklist finally brings back the Sam we've been waiting for from 2005 onwards. It is, simply put, the best Splinter Cell since Chaos Theory. Thanks to its attempts to pander the fans of myriad of playstyles, it does not quite reach the levels of the first three titles in the series (for example, stealth is still a binary choice, either you're fully hidden or not), but it finally truly rewards being subtle and thinking out-of-the-box again. Thumbs up.
AC Liberation is pretty much what you'd expect from Assassin's Creed at this point. All the pieces are there, plus a gimmick of its own, which in this case is the disguise mechanic. If you're a fan of the series, you'll likely find this one fun too as long as it lasts. If not, it's still not a bad game but you won't miss anything earth-shattering.
Black Flag... I'll give my lasting impression once I'm done, but yeah, it's at the very least the second best entry to the series. I'll wait 'til the credits until I say whether it's actually better than Brotherhood. But given how suspicious I was of its foundations and the current series development cycle in general, I'll have to grudgingly tip my hat to Ubi for actually pulling it off.