Death Bat's Top Five Computer Games of 2015

As always this is the list culled from what I played and enjoyed, and not necessarily suggestive of ALL that was worth playing and enjoying. This year I'll go by category:

#5. Best Shooter: Star Wars: Battlefront

I would not have called this one two months ago, and in fact was expecting to be all Halo 5 all the time in this slot. Instead, I am an enormous number of hours in to playing what is the most rewarding and compelling multiplayer experience in the Star Wars universe I've played in ages, and the only shooter I can actually play with my family, thanks to the fact that it provides the cleanest play environment out there of any shooter, period. Tight game play, a progression system that works well for my needs (even if it has been criticized by the hardcore for not emulating the other shooters out there) and a variety of maps that remain fresh, with a ton of unique, emergent gameplay that encourages even the most solo-minded players to try and coordinate actions in the game make for my favorite shooter experience of 2015.

Runner Up: Destiny: The Taken King which moved the series in a new direction, brought back old fans, kept the new, and provided a dramatic improvement in the boss encounters.

#4. Best MMORPG: The Elder Scrolls Online

There really weren't any new MMORPGs of note this year, but in terms of existing games with new support and expansions there's no contest. This was the year Elder Scrolls moved first to free to play and then appeared on consoles. It subsequently introduced The Imperial City and Orsinium expansions. The real money transaction store remains full of cosmetic stuff, pets and mounts, while generally shying away from game-affecting purchases other than boosts. Having been playing since almost day one I, and many others, feel that the game today is remarkably more fun than it was a year ago, and continues to show effort at polish. It remains one of the few MMORPGs on the market today that appeals to gamers looking for more of the "RPG" side of the equation while appreciating the "MMO" part should they so desire to explore it. I am incredibly slow in this game, and still have yet to reach level cap on my dozen-odd characters, but once they introduced controller support for the game I found my enjoyment increasing a great deal over just sticking with the keyboard.

Runner Up: Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns, which has sucked me back in and has some clean, innovative improvements that have made the game more enjoyable for me.

#3. Best Open-World Sandbox Game: Batman: Arkham Knight

Outside of the tank levels which some have found tedious, Batman: Arkham Knight was a fantastic finale for the series and remains a genuinely fun experience. I did not expect to like it as much as I did, but I guess the Batman fan in me was really craving a chance to drive, glide and swing around Gotham for hours on end. Still playing it, and the only other negative I can say is that yes, some of the DLC isn't worth paying for, but luckily I didn't buy the season pass and have been picking and choosing only the good stuff. Still, the core game is robust and well worth playing even if you ignore the season pass. Get it on console, as they never did seem to get the PC release right.

Runner Up: Mad Max, an impressive sandbox experience built (I am told) from the same engine used for the Arkham games and Shadows of Mordor, but now with 100% more apocalyptic car madness. Only failed to get top billing because the overall story is not quite as long.

#2. Best CRPG: Fallout 4

Fallout 4 annoys me a little bit because it doesn't quite feel like it's predecessors (Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas), and it gave me the "cool stuff" way too early on, all while still delivering on the atmosphere and exploratory fun that made me such a dedicate to the series in Bethesda's hands. It adds a lot of additional content to the mix that I haven't even bothered exploring in depth, especially the crafting and settlement building which is all very cool and tells me I'll have many more months to enjoy the game; it's mechanical process is incredibly tight, and the Fallout 4 universe is as rich and interesting to wander in as ever....and the graphics (while not up to PC Master Race standard) are worlds better than Bethesda fans are used to. Thanks to Star Wars: The Force Awakens the never-ending hype cycle of people playing Fallout 4 and blogging/promoting it was lost in the Star Wars madness, which means it's safe now to get into the game without having too many spoilers randomly popping up online.*

Runner Up: Pillars of Eternity, which is an isometric RPG of the finest form, and also got it's first major DLC expansion, The White March, just recently. Some of the isometric CRPGs out there are hit-or-miss, but Pillars of Eternity is very much the game we wanted to see following in Baldur's Gates' footsteps.

#1. Best Overall Game of 2015: Metal Gear Solid V

So how to talk about this one...it's a bat-shit crazy tale told through a menagerie of very, very damaged soldiers and their victims/support/compatriots and enemies. It fits into a weird corner of the Metal Gear history, which if you try to comprehend will force you to make Sanity checks. The true hardcore fans of Metal Gear Solid have issues with MGSV and it's revisionist canon, but if you've only experienced portions of the story like I have and have never really been able to follow the series in it's entirety, then you'll be very impressed with this game: it's story is dramatic and well-told (even if incomprehensible at times). But the thing that is most amazing is how incredibly fun it is to play, with open-world missions that let you tackle them any way you like, with a ridiculous number of weird tools and allies at your disposal. When I'm not playing Star Wars: Battlefront I am playing MGSV...and then there's all the other games I just mentioned.

Runner Up: Star Wars Battlefront was a close second, although throughout the list I really felt like I needed to put Destiny: The Taken King in somewhere.....but I just couldn't justify it. Destiny's second year is full of improvements, but it's still at core the same game I played last year, but now with more missions and less Peter Dinklage.

Honrable Mentions:

Best CGI Cutscenes: Halo 5 Guardians because seriously this game's cutscenes are amazing. Also, Halo 5 is a great deal of fun, just not innovative enough to claim any special honors.

Best Revamp: Destiny: The Taken King which kept the old fans, mended wounds with others, and brought in new thanks to some very clear efforts to bring story to the fore.

Best Effort at Reviving an Aging Franchise: Look no further than Call of Duty: Black Ops III which really does bring some interesting new elements to the game, but I fear a bit too late. CoD's only hope feels to me like it needs to find a source of players who want this sort of game yet inexlicably haven't already been saturated by the market...even I, a guy who has played every CoD since Modern Warfare came out, feels it is getting old and stale, despite their best efforts.

Best Henchman: Chumbucket from Mad Max. Nuff Said!!!!!


NOTE: I might have included The Witcher III: The Wild Hunt on this list but only recently purchased it on the Xbox One during  a Black Friday sale and STILL haven't had time to even start it. So keep that in mind....this list is based on what I played, not everything actually out there.

*Sometimes it sounds like damning with faint praise, and Bethesda fans can be like that, but it's because these games are so good and we spend so much time with them that they are scrutinized. I mean....imagine if you didn't play, say, Witcher 3 because you saw one of the levitating horse videos on Youtube. It's a smart thing if you need an excuse to keep you from spending precious cash you don't have, or time you don't have....but if you've got both, and you love good (modern) RPGs, then you'd be a pernicious fool not to play Witcher 3 or Fallout 4.

Steamrolling through Steam. Also, Juno Reactor

I came across Boathammer, in which boatorious is attempting to dedicate 6 hours to each Steam game he owns, and he owns something like 70 of them. This seems like a great idea....on the surface.
I own 412 games on Steam last time I checked. I don't think I could pull the same stunt off, as a massive number of those games come from bundle deals that I couldn't resist simply because I only wanted to get the 2 or 3 games in the pack that separately cost more than buying the pack on one of Steam's holiday sales. Also, because some of the games I ended up with over time are just hideous. Atrocious. Painful to play. Finally, and it goes without saying, not all games are worth 6 hours of time. And a few are worth a lot more.

I also have a bad habit of contributing to indie bundle deals; and those "pay what you want" indie deals. Which means I have accrued a large number of indie titles, but have also found that I have enjoyed maybe less than 10% of them in a meaningful way, and found most of them to be either drek or at best mildly entertaining for 5-10 minutes.

So yeah, I thought about doing something similar to what the guy in the blog is doing, then came to my senses.

But enough of Steam and computer games! Here's some more music:

Inca Steppa by Juno Reactor, my all time favorite professional techno group, going on 20 years now:

MMO Monday Update

Just a brief update. Last time I took some time to talk (i.e. complain) about MMOs I was mostly happy to play a little WoW and that the kid seemed to enjoy sitting on my lap while I did so. That lasted about a weekend, as it turned out (playing WoW, that is; kid still loves watching whatever I play....he's also into grabbing the controller whenever its close enough). So I rapidly burned out. I just can't enjoy the game anymore, I have reached the point of no return, total saturation apparently. That, and I have conceded that while I like some of what Cataclysm brought to the table, in the end I really miss the game's feel, flavor, and amazingly enough slightly harder difficulty from the days of 2005. For some reason WoW feels dumbed down to an almost ridiculous level these days. If we were talking cooking, WOW is like an E-Z Bake Oven. (This may not be true for endgame content.....but I'm a ultra-slow leveler who likes the 1-84 process to actually be a fun challenge as well and not just a speedbump on my way to raiding. I hate raiding.)

I don't want my MMOs to be too hard, or too party-focused.....but I do want to feel like there's an effort at plot, pacing and just a smidgeon of system mastery. Blizzard has gradually stripped almost all of that out of WOW. And now I'm hearing ugly rumors from people that the beta for Mists of Pandaria is turning out to be a huge disappointment. As my wife put it, playing MoP only made her want to go play Guild Wars: Factions, instead. Not a ringing endorsement.

Aside from realizing my time with WoW is officially over (I even deleted it), I tried Champions again and found that Perfect World's attempt to merge accounts had made a mess of mine. Once I got it sorted out I found that they had apparently added Champions' version of a random dungeon finder, which was cool, but for some reason I found the game tedious and exhausting this time around. Moreover, I found the game itself continued to run processes in the background even after I'd closed it out. Steam says I played continuously for four days straight. I don't know if this is glitchy programming or something sneaky...and now that Champions is part of the Perfect World fold I'll believe either option (never loaded a PW game that didn't act weird). So I deleted it and moved on.



DDO was up next. I want to get back into DDO, but the tedium and grind is preventing me from caring. I could level up still more of my 20 characters to past level 10, or I could play one of my two existing level 10 or level 12 characters and see how many eons it takes to get to level 20 in time for the forthcoming highly nonsensical "Drow fuck up the prime material plane" plotlines in which only the heroes of Eberron can save the Forgotten Realms or something....I mean, it's the kind of lore blending that induces headaches in anyone who even remotely cares (I don't even care and it causes me a headache in the same way I hate poorly done what-if alternate history fiction). So when a game causes physical pain at the sight of a mere loading screen, time to move on. But I'm not deleting DDO yet. I want to play....I just want to feel like there's a chance I'll see some new content I can actually get to experience some day.



So anyway, I accidentally got into Rift and am now really, really hooked on that game. I also accidentally fired up Star Wars: The Old Republic again with the free game time being extended right now to lapsed players and am being reminded of how amazingly well done it is. I want to resub to SWTOR, just trying to balance my free time issue with it is the only issue.

Rift, however, is exactly what I needed at this time, it turns out, and I love the game's backstory and premise, featuring two philosophically opposed groups facing a common menace, but unable to reconcile their methods of dealing with that threat. I love the rift concept itself and how it works, I love the graphics, I love the amazingly flexible and not at all dumbed down soulshard system for class combinations and the fact that I can run two different fighters who don't even feel like the same class as a result. I also love the rogues, which are much more fun than any other rogues I've seen in fantasy MMOs (barring DDO's amazing rogues, but, well....D&D rogues, of course they'll be fun!)

So anyway, my Tuesday news isn't really much more than: guess I'll be taking a bit of a break from the single player games to focus on Rift and possibly SWTOR for a while. This ought hold me over until Guild Wars 2 arrives in June, at least!

The Free To Play Conundrum

I just received an ad email letting me know that Star Trek Online had gone free to play and that it would very much like to see me come on back. In recent months I have received the same ads for many other games including Age of Conan, Fallen Earth, Everquest I and II, DC Universe Online, the Aion announcement that it will soon go F2P and many more. I kicked off last year with Chapions Online going F2P and pretty much spent most of February 2011 playing the hell out of that game (which I'd love to get back to some day but all these single player experiences kept clogging the pipes last year in my mad and futile dash to play All The Games before Marcus was born).

Anyway, when I received the notice about STO's F2P announcement (gotta love the truncated terminology of the MMO experience) I realized that in the long term, F2P has got to have a saturation point, one at which the value of a F2P game, no matter how cool and AAA a title it might be, is going to bump into the problem that it's only likely source of meaningful income is the dedicated and foolish consumer with money to burn on highly transient ephemera.

Now, one could argue that all gamers by definition are consumers of highly transient ephemera (at least in the realm of computer games) and that spending cash on a F2P game is no different than chucking $15/month on a pay to play experience like WoW, Rift or Star Wars: The Old Republic (are there any other P2P games left other than those three, anyway?) However, the truth is that in the end, ownership is a powerful tool, and I am really interested in seeing how the concept of ownership plays out in the F2P market.

To compare my own experiences: I played WoW from around February 2005 and subscribed for about 16 months straight before taking my first prolongued WoW break, after which my subscription pattern boiled down to, "subscribe for a few months after each new expansion arrives, or until the sight of Stormwind or Orgrimmar causes physical pain." Although I subscribed to and played many other MMOs after this point (noting that my acquisition of WoW was preceded immediately by my defection from Mac to a real PC that could actually play games), few held me for more than three months before I felt sated for the content offered. Ultimately I lacked the OCD or addictive personality necessary to stay with an MMO for the prolonged period it demanded. I have also found online social networks, another massively compelling feature of MMOs, to be lacking, so finding a big friendly guild was still not an incentive for me.



Okay, digressions aside, the first F2P game I dedicated myself to was Dungeons & Dragons Online (alias Eberron Unlimited). I was part of it when the game first released as a P2P model back in 2006, with a dearth of content, a grind singularly painful and an experience that was at once promising of a vastly more involved and complicated experience for an MMO type game while still being almost impenetrable to a single-player-hardcore, multiplayer-casual type gamer like me who enjoyed multiplayer elements mostly for the ambience and never for the actual pleasure of it all. Or in other words, I played DDO on and off with a great deal of frustration until early 2010 when I decided to give it another shot as a F2P experience, with a thought of "nothing ventured, nothing gained," about the matter.

Ultimately DDO grabbed me and held me thanks to some key improvements and changes in the gameplay experience that made it a fun package for the F2P player, and also made it more fun for the "single, with occasional rare group" style of gamer I was. It's still not perfect, and there are dungeons in DDO I can't hit without a group, which I always resent in this sort of game because, you know, if they want me and my "hardcore single player, casual multiplayer" ass to play the game then they might as well offer me some way to tackle that raid content that demands whole groups of live players (a "buy this dungeon in single player + bots" feature would earn my cash, for example). So DDO hasn't fixed that part entirely, but luckily a large chunk of the game is manageable for me.

Um....so anyway, with DDO free to play I realized that I could, if I wanted to, buy into the game, purchase its various scenario packs and expansions, character slots and so forth, and effectively "own" the whole of the game. I calculated out how much it would cost to buy everything I wanted, determined that if I played the game for ten months I would spend $150 in subscription costs anyway, so if I capped my spending at that amount, bought everything (timed for their sale events with 20% off discounts) and then got at least ten months' worth of game time out of it that I would basically come out ahead of the subscription model, all while effectively coming as close to ownership on a F2P online game as I could, at least until they turn the servers off one day far down the road.

As it turned out, this was a great idea: I have spent more than the $150 I originally alotted on DDO since then, but it was primarily upkeep (and for a short stint I was hooked on bonus XP potions) and occasional "gold seal" henchmen. I have purchased the additional races, classes and scenarios since released, which they admittedly keep up often enough to continue to get some money from me. Overall though the experience was such that I payed the equivalent of maybe 18 months' worth of subscription fees, but I garnered two+ years worth of play time out of DDO to date, and can continue to log in and and ejoy all of the game content I purchased into perpetuity without spending another dime (or again, the Heat Death of the Universe equivalent in the MMO-verse: server shut down--RIP Tabula Rasa).

I did the same thing (more or less) for Champions Online when it came out as F2P last year, with one caveat: I bought all the content I wanted within the first week it went F2P, and I did so with their super-deluxe one time sale. Champions Online offered a lot of superfluous content, as well; costumes and other cosmetics that frankly didn't interest me much, but nonetheless which I did buy particulars of, along with the remarkably cheap scenario packs and character builds (that are not so cheap if no sale is going on). In fact, it was a great deal then, but I never would have bothered if I hadn't caught the game on sale; since then, the core prices have been fairly fixed (I may have missed some holiday sales, though) and as a result, have been a huge deterrent, especially since unlike DDO I haven't gotten more than a few months' worth of play time out of Champions Online; my staying power hasn't been as great, and it's not as competitive for my time as the many other games I had been playing last year.

So then Age of Conan and many others all flooded through the gates of the F2P circus this year. Age of Conan was especially disappointing, as the prices set for items in the store demonstrated that Funcom didn't actually want you to buy their stuff (or at least, they didn't want people who value their hard earned money and have common sense to buy it), such that it was clear that subscribing was still a better way to play. On top of that they massively overpriced the new expansion content. I love Howard's Conan, but I don't love Age of Conan enough to spend hundreds of dollars on a game that I know has issues after level 22. Maybe if I knew all that money would go to actually finishing the voice overs and later dearth of content in the game (between levels 50-75 or so), I might consider it; but Age of Conan, like DDO, needs a lot more polish. I know Turbine got its act together and turned DDO into a good game, but I really don't trust Funcom to do the same.

So now, today, I see a sea of F2P games, and realize that while I might at some point download all of them on my PC, probably none of them are going to get my money, unless I find something absolutely, unbelievably compelling about the way they handle the F2P experience such that I feel compelled to give them my money (and get a good return). None of the F2P games out there now seem to be in the least bit concerned about the idea that F2P players like me will give them money for unlocked content if they make the return worth my while; they are all seemingly obsessed with the idea that F2P players are a painful aberration, like giant pinatas that when beaten shower down cash, if you can just hit them hard enough. Games like Age of Conan clearly think that they can use F2P as a way of conning you into subbing, and if you don't sub, then they figure maybe they can get money out of you equivalent to a lifetime subscription, if they just truss it up enough in shiny lipstick and make their dollar to funpoint to product relations obscure enough to scare away the "math is terrifying" types. Uuuugh.

There's also a new problem for MMOs on the horizon that I predict will have a major impact: Bioware popped out Star Wars: The Old Republic at last and demonstrated that it is perfectly feasible to do an MMO with an elaborate multi-pathing storyline that is at once filled with emotion, difficult decisions, role playing, voice overs and not a goddamn Kill Ten Rats quest in sight (or at least, showed how you can actually integrate such quests into the general flow of things without ever making it obvious or annoying; never have I seen a game handle "grind quests" so smoothly and efficiently that you don't even realize you're doing them until they're done). SWTOR has set the bar very high for the next generation of MMOs, and I don't think I'll ever be able to stomach paying (or not paying) to play a game that at any point obviously has me collecting ten dead rat bodies.

(I really, really wish that Bioware had gotten ahold of the Conan property and made Age of Conan now.)

Okay, that was a lot of text to basically say, "I will continue to play DDO and Champions Online at my liesure because they beat the rest of you F2Pers to market and made me an offer I couldn't refuse; and I am subscribing to Star Wars: The Old Republic for the next year, so suck it, Funcom." When all MMOs are F2P, no MMO is free....but as a consumer, faced with a nigh infinite number of choices for hooking me with the free h'orderves then hitting me with a major bill for the entree, I choose instead to eat at home.

Basically I guess that is the moral of my raving coluimn for the day!