Monthly Archives: June 2018

We Watched The Microsoft Press Briefing | E3 2018

Grab your game passes and get your asses in line, cause it’s Microsoft time.

Halo Infinite

No real info given outside of a trailer. Seems as if they’re launching a platform for Halo as well as a campaign. It’s unclear as to what makes this different enough to not call it Halo 6, but I’m definitely intrigued.

Ori & The Will of the Wisps

Following up the tremendous Ori & The Blind Forest is something that very much appears like its predecessor with enhanced combat and more mobility options. Not much info was given here aside from a general tone piece and some gameplay.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

Initially I thought this was a Dark Souls-esque re-imagining of the Tenchu series. While I wasn’t too far off, it has a different name and seem to have more exploration and mobility options. Here we have something that invokes Bloodborne and God of War. Time will tell if it’s as gross as those games, but it definitely is trying.

Fallout 76

It appears all the rumors were true and this is prequel to all other games. It’s said to be 4 times the size of Fallout 4 and is a base building focused multiplayer game. No surprises here. More to come when we see it at the Bethesda Briefing.

The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit

This is billed as a story in the same universe of Life is Strange, but not featuring the same characters. With a focus on a young boy and his imagination, it looks like you’ll be seeing a bunch of fantastical stories with different settings, featuring him. It’s releasing for free on June 26th.

Crackdown 3

Terry Crews is yelling a lot, while a virtual Terry Crews is blowing shit up, and driving up walls. Nothing else really revealed. Allegedly releasing early next year.

We Happy Few

We Happy Few seems to have pivoted from its survival roots and has become more story focused. It shares a weird vibe with the Bioshock series which isn’t a bad thing. I personally prefer this approach to their original pitch, but I don’t think I’m breaking any new ground with that one. It’s out on August 10th.

The Division 2

They’re going for it with the setting and story. Shit went real bad in Washington DC apparently. It looks really good graphically but didn’t do much to differentiate itself from the original. From what I gather the end of the trailer sets up the idea that you and your friends can storm other player run bases.

ID@Xbox

This was just one of those classic “indie game montages.” I went ahead and picked out the games that looked interesting.

Afterparty
Outerwilds
Below
Conquerors Blade
Raji
Planet Alpha
Islands of Nine
Harold Halibut
The Wind Road
Ashen
Sable

Shadow of The Tomb Raider

What else can I say about this game? If you liked the previous games or the Uncharted series, this is probably a safe bet as far as games you’ll enjoy. If it builds upon the already rock solid formula of its predecessors, we’ll be in for another fantastic entry in the series.

Session.

Totally got my hopes up for Skate 4. But where EA refuses to deliver, smaller studios will step in. That’s what’s happening with Session. I’ve played the very early demo they put out a while ago and I wasn’t terribly impressed. Hopefully there have been big improvements since I’ve played it and it will fill that skateboard shaped hole in my heart.

Tunic

This game still looks out of this fucking world. It’s a Zelda-esque, isometric action-adventure game that looks charming as all hell. I humbly request that Tunic is released this moment.

Dying Light 2

More parkour, more zombies. Actually they really didn’t show any zombies, there was way more human drama. I prefer the focus on the people rather than the zombies, honestly. There’s a big focus on player choice, for example they showed dialogue options that effect your standing with various factions, which in turn, effect the world and missions you do.

Battletoads

No footage to show, but it has 3 player co-op. So yeah.

Just Cause 4

It’s Just Cause. You know what this game is. It might as well be called “Grappling Hooks and Explosions” at this point. It looked pretty neat, although then again, so did JC3. They showed a tornado, so that could be fun.

Gears Pop!

What if Gears of war, but Funko Pop and on phones? Huh? I guess that’s what this is. God help us all.

Gears Tactics

Looks like a tower defense, X-Com looking game. They really breezed through this announcement.

Gears 5

No “of War” on these games. It’s perplexing. They’re really leaning into the story with this trailer, and as someone who has not finished Gears of War 4, I have no idea what’s going on. But it looks like a personal journey featuring the lady from Gears of War 4. It looks nice and has cover shooting.

Cyberpunk 2077

I wasn’t a huge fan of The Witcher 3 mostly because of its setting. Cyberpunk 2077 seems to be everything I wanted out of the Witcher, but with more guns and neon. Sign me the hell up.

We Watched The EA Press Briefing | E3 2018

Leave a reply

According to the loot tables, this conference only comes out once a year!

BATTLEFIELD V

They opened up the show with Battlefield V, which by all accounts was one of the more interesting things at the EA briefing today. There was a big emphasis on destruction and mobility. A lot of houses getting bowled over by tanks while other tanks were towing mounted guns around.

EA made a point to say that this was their vision of World War 2. Basically a final clarification to the people complaining about historical accuracy on the internet. Being the first game shown, Battlefield V started the trend of touting “no lootboxes” throughout the presentation.

I also get the impression that there will be some focus on building things in the multiplayer. There was a shot of someone holding a hammer, followed by soldiers stacking sandbags, which was followed by a tank hitching up a mounted gun and driving away with it. That might be a reach though.

Also there’s a battle royale mode, because it’s 2018.

Origin Access Premier

It seems like some sort of hybrid game streaming service that incorporates the existing Origin Access games and subscription. It invokes the Xbox Game Pass in some ways, especially with them saying it will include all PC EA games going forward.

Actual in engine render of Jedi: Fallen Order.

Jedi: Fallen Order

A wild Vince Zampella (Head of Respawn) was spotted in the crowd and gave some vague details about their upcoming Star Wars game, called Jedi: Fallen Order. No details aside from it taking place between episode 3 and 4 were given, except for Zampella emphasizing it was the “Dark Times” and it would release in Holiday of 2019.

Star Wars Battlefront II

Battlefront II was brought out on stage again to mostly apologize for the loot boxes debacle and to explain that they have improved that system greatly. That was followed by the announcement of some new modes, both competitive and cooperative, as well as announcing that future content will revolve around the Solo movie as well as the Clone Wars era. Now we can all act out our favorite moments from the Clone Wars, when we get to play as General Grevious.

Unravel Two

Unravel Two is deliberately spelled out rather than numbered, because its a cooperative game now. You play as 2 yarn boys who use each other to solve puzzles in this gorgeous world. The experience can be played solo, or via drop in coop. Also, it’s out right now for $19.99.

Sea of Solitude (SOS)

Continuing the trend of having very excited and earnest indie developers on stage, EA introduced us to Sea of Solitude. SOS as they intentionally refer to it, is a game about balancing your emotions, both good and bad. Also it’s about helping a girl transform back into a human because she got too lonely and turned into a monster the way all humans do. It is slated to be available early 2019.

Command & Conquer Rivals

EA brought out the Shoutcasters and had them commentate over a game of Command & Conquer Rivals, a mobile game that looks to speed up and simplify the C&C experience. I’ve never been a C&C guy, but this seemed interesting for what it was. A “pre-alpha” version of it is available now on Android, with a full release coming to iOS as well sometime in the near future.

Talking Points

Right before we dipped into the Anthem experience, we took a moment to hear about how EA values you, your time, your money and your gaming experiences. They followed that with an apology for their bad monetization practices, and hard pivoted to the Play to Give Foundation which promotes exclusivity and acceptance in gaming spaces. They donated a million dollars want you to know that.

Anthem

So this Anthem presentation was weird. It was more or less a round table discussion about each of the core aspects of Anthem. They explained their design process as well as story stuff and mechanics, but did it while the same 4 clips of gameplay kept looping over and over with repeating shots of concept art sprinkled in for good measure. It had me really worried that they had nothing to show on Anthem.

There was a weird moment where they basically called out Destiny, claiming that other games in a similar vein dropped the ball on the story experience. Then came a totally real, Q&A segment with questions from Twitter. One question asked about customizing your appearance. The answer was obviously a yes. The next was about loot boxes and micro-transactions. There will be no loot boxes, and you’ll always know what you’re paying for. So paying for cosmetics is almost a guarantee. Up till right about here, this Anthem presentation was insufferably dull.

Then they showed some gameplay of the classes and gun play. There are some neat abilities and weapons that were on display, but the core loop of the game is you shoot things to make numbers pop out of them. There’s a combo system that appears to inflict more damage when players use powers correctly simultaneously, and a lot of flying around like Iron Man. You have the equivalent of a ghost, he is British and snarky. Aside from that, they once again emphasized the story by saying if you’re a solo player, you’ll have a lot to experience here, but it might be a bit more challenging.

Anthem is set to release on February 22nd, 2019.

E3 2018: Our Plans

Leave a reply

This year I decided to do something different for covering E3. Normally I’d just sit on Twitter and make snarky comments about everything that’s shown, but why focus on Twitter when I have a website I could inundate with my words?

I’m going to try and highlight the things that I’m interested in or that are so glaringly bizarre that not writing something about them would be insane. So don’t expect comprehensive coverage, I don’t have the time nor the resources for that. And quite frankly, that’s boring, there are dozens of other places doing that.

So that’s the weird way we’re doing things here at The Bonus World.

Blog: The Skyrim Debacle – 06/06/18

Leave a reply

byndrim

A few days ago I got it in my head that I wanted to play Skyrim again. I had this craving for some archery-based mayhem, and this seemed like a good way to quench that particular thirst. I had it in my mind that I was going to try and “get” Skyrim by picking a character archetype and role-play my way through the story as if I was an archer who had no patience for anybody’s bullshit. However the game instantly pushed back on my story with its own.

I thought I remembered how slow the opening of Skyrim was, but boy did I underestimate it. First you’ve gotta escape your questionable death sentence. Then you end up at Whiterun to talk to the Jarl, shortly followed by you getting that stupid golden claw and a tablet or something. Then it’s time to kill a dragon and eat its soul. All culminating in you climbing a godforsaken mountain to talk to these four hermits in hoods so they can teach you to run fast, then make you go find a horn or some shit. This is all made even more unbearable when you’re trying to be an archer, having to fight against the busted shooting system they have in place as well as health regenerating trolls.

Seriously, trying to hit anything more that 20 feet away is basically like playing the lottery. I’ll aim at a bear, put the cursor over its big dumb face and let my arrow fly. What I would expect is either to feed that bear this arrow, or have it fall slightly and hit his big bear feet. But how about the secret third option of, the arrow defies gravity and slowly aims itself up towards the sky. That’s what being an archer in Skyrim is like.

Initially I thought that maybe because I had a low archery skill, the game was doing some cool RPG math to throw things off. So I used the power of console commands to level that skill up and unlock everything on its skill tree. Weirdly enough, nothing changed. Here I was, expert archer with the power to paralyze dudes with a good enough shot, if only I could hit something.

Ultimately I decided that my character was comically near-sighted which is why he was such a terrible shot. Because of his crippling ailment, he would pull out a sword and shield to finish off bad guys who somehow managed to close the distance on me. I became the Mr. Magoo of Skyrim, bumbling my way through dungeons.

It’s shit like this that makes me wonder why the entire internet is so in love with Skyrim. Maybe the story is better than I remember, or maybe people just really like role-playing and Skyrim is a good enough sandbox for them to mess around in. But as someone trying to do just that, I felt like the introduction and lackluster combat mechanics kept me from ever really enjoying my dip back into the Skyrim pool.