Tag Archives: Uplay+

Blog: A Big Bloated Blog – 11/25/20

It’s almost Thanksgiving here in America, which traditionally meant that we all had an excuse to break any diets we were clinging to, were subject to horribly racist and misguided “conversation” with distant relatives, and would ultimately result with hiding in a bathroom to avoid your family. Luckily you don’t have to engage with any of that shit this year and that’s fucking great. Don’t get me wrong, I would have loved to have eaten a traditional Thanksgiving dinner this year but between the whole pandemic thing and the election thing, I’m super good with just staying home.

And you should be too, quite frankly. I don’t know if you’ve checked recently, but that COVID-19 thing that our nincompoop of a president and his deluge of moronic followers consistently bellow is a “hoax,” much to the surprise of nobody turned out to be real. But people are going to travel out of spite and ignorance regardless of how much that “liberal science” keeps pleading for them to stay home. So do yourself a favor and stay the fuck home if you can. I know that not everyone is in a situation where they can do that, but for those who can make that choice, pick the option where you don’t endanger the lives of everyone around you.

Yeah, stay home and distract yourselves by maybe watching some movies or reading a book. Definitely don’t refresh certain retailer websites in the hopes that a certain stupid looking console might suddenly become available. If everyone could just ignore the internet for a short period of time, that would be so ideal. I must have signed up for so many notifications for when the PlayStation 5 is back in stock that I’m certain my phone will explode when retailers make the console available again.

What else is going on? Oh, the president is still trying to undermine our democracy and erode the foundation that our country is built upon with frivolous and baseless lawsuits, but what else is new? It’s kind of like when you see a kid throw a tantrum in Target or something, it’s loud, annoying, and inescapable unless you just leave the store altogether. That’s basically what these past few weeks have been like, except it’s a grown man with a bad spray tan that’s doing it in front of the entire world. Hopefully this all comes to pass without too much more damage.

I don’t have a great segue to pivot off of that, so I’ll just say that I’ve been playing some Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and boy howdy is it unremarkable. On the plus side, it runs on my computer at a stable frame rate and looks gorgeous while doing it, unlike another Ubisoft release from a month ago. But on the flip side of that coin, it’s just kind of boring. Admittedly I haven’t played too much of it, but I haven’t found the story, characters or mechanics to be all that interesting. Honestly, it just seems kind of bland.

Remember when Assassin’s Creed started pumping out sequels that were basically the same game crammed into a new setting? That’s what Assassin’s Creed Valhalla feels like. It isn’t a bad game at all however, it’s just unremarkable. Not every game needs to be revolutionary or anything like that, but Assassin’s Creed Valhalla just kind of feels like another solid entry in the series and nothing more.

Also, I couldn’t play it for the first day because I kept running into an infinite loading screen that stopped me from actually ever starting the game. I tried a bunch of different options and tweaks to try and get on the other side of this blank void of a loading screen, but nothing sufficed. But for the first time in history, I have to say that a game streaming service saved the day.

I noticed an ad on Uplay+ that alluded to a glut of Ubisoft games, including Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, were currently available on Amazon Luna. Amazon Luna is Amazon’s (surprise, right?) game streaming service. It works fine, but is not the way I’d ever play these games. That is unless they offered cross-save functionality that would allow me to get through a busted loading screen and then take that new save back to the version I had installed on my computer. But what are the odds of tha… oh wait.

Yeah, for the first time in my life I’m thankful I had access to a game streaming service. Oh, and for those of you worried about my finances, I have no intention of keeping the service after the free trial is up. But hey, maybe before the trial is up I’ll try to whip up an article or something about it.

Also, with the holidays coming up and the end of the year approaching it’s time for me to start thinking about Game of the Year type stuff again. I’ve got some ideas and loose plans for things, but we’ll see if they pan out the way I want them to.

I think that’s about it for me this week. Hey, thanks for stopping in and reading this rambling mess. I appreciate your support. Be safe, be smart, and enjoy Thanksgiving if you can, and you’re an American. To everyone else, enjoy your week and ignore all retailer websites for a few days so I can get the funny looking console. Thanks!

Blog: Distraction – 10/28/20

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Okay, so next week is going to be a wild one for us Americans with the whole election thing going on. I’m not going to lie to you, I’m genuinely terrified for what is going to happen regardless of who wins the thing, but I need to not think about it exclusively for the next few days or I’m sure my head will explode. What I’m trying to do is to look forward to other things that might actually bring me joy instead the giant clusterfuck that is bound to be November 3rd. So here’s a hard pivot into video games.

Did you know that video games were happening this week? Well they are. Personally, I’m pretty jazzed about Teardown entering early access. For those of you who don’t know, Teardown is part destruction sandbox and part heist game. You start a level by looking for these hidden switches hidden throughout the map, then you need to set up an efficient route to get to each of them within a short time window because when you decide to flip that first switch, the cops are alerted and come hunting you.

That part of the game seems okay from what I’ve seen of it, but the real star of the show is the destructibility of everything. See, you can just blast holes in walls and objects all willy nilly if you want, and I definitely do want to do that. I’m just excited for a fun physics-based destruct-a-thon in a pretty voxel-based world. I want to destroy shit and watch it explode into tiny, GPU-burning pieces, and Teardown seems like the perfect way to accomplish that.

Teardown – Tuxedo Labs

There’s also Watch Dogs Legion, a game that I’m fully expecting to both enjoy and recoil at for how either spot on or tone-deaf it comes across. I’ve been yearning for a good action game for a while and based off of my enjoyment of Watch Dogs 2, this sequel seems like the way to go. I also went ahead and signed up for a month of Ubisoft’s Uplay+ service so I could avoid paying full price for yet another video game, especially when you consider that within the next month a new Assassin’s Creed is coming out too. It seemed like the most fiscally responsible way to play these games which is a new look for me.

But to perfectly counteract that small, fleeting glimpse of financial responsibility, I’ve been eyeing a bunch of computer parts that I want… that I need. See, I’ve reached something of a ceiling on how good my computer can be, mostly because I cheaped out when I initially built the thing. My motherboard doesn’t support newer CPU’s, so I need a new one of those to support the new CPU I need because I’m being throttled to hell and back. And also, I’d like a freaking SSD too, so that’s added into the equation. I also would like a new case for my computer that isn’t a third of my height.

“What what about the graphics card?” I hear you ask. Well, even if I got a new 3000 series card, it wouldn’t matter because my CPU is still basically a hamster with a calculator, so he would probably make it difficult to see much of a performance increase. I want to ultimately build a new computer and set my terrible hamster-based CPU free, but money isn’t something I have a ton of right now. And now I’m thinking about why I’m broke, and I’m worried about next week once again.

Fuck.

Well, hopefully by this time next week you’ll be reading a blog with a much happier tone, but like I said up top, regardless of the outcome on the 3rd, it’s gonna be a shit show. Please for the love of god, vote for Joe Biden and free us from this hell we’ve been living in for the past four years.

Blog: Launcher Hell – 11/13/19

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A lot of PC players tend to get pretty uppity about the fact that companies are trying to maximize their profits and keep closer control over their games by requiring the use of an exclusive launcher. For the most part, I don’t mind having to open a different executable to play my games, but some recent developments have made me shift my stance a little.

Looking at my desktop I have six different launchers for my various games. Steam, Origin, Uplay, Epic, Xbox, and the latest addition, Rockstar. But that isn’t even half of the available ways to buy and launch my games. It seems like it would be a lot to manage, but it really never presented itself as much of an issue to me. That is, until Red Dead Redemption 2 launched and required authentication through their launcher.

Here’s the series of events that transpires when I try to launch Red Dead Redemption 2, a game I know isn’t going to work properly:

I’ll click the desktop shortcut, only to be met with a fatal error because I had the audacity to try and use said shortcut. I’ll then open up the Rockstar Launcher and log in because it never remembers my credentials. I’ll click the big, “Play on Epic” button that appears, because I bought Red Dead Redemption 2 through the Epic Games Store. The focus shifts to Epic for a moment, then back to Rockstar, then a windows notification asking me if I’m truly certain I want to play the game.

Finally the game will launch, I’ll play for 5 minutes before the frame rate hitching becomes enough of a burden, and quit.

It’s like a 5 minute wind up to play a game that doesn’t work. These are two separate issues admittedly, but its enough to make me rethink this whole “everyone has a launcher business”.

I’m also not saying that Steam should be the de facto launcher and be the only player in town. Every publisher wants control over their product, and wants the biggest slice of profits they can get. Sure Epic is doing an 88/12 split on revenue, but if I bought a game available on the Epic store on the publisher’s storefront, that’s 100% of the take right there. The business behind launchers makes sense.

There are two main categories of launcher in my eyes. The first is the publisher specific ones like Uplay or Origin. Then the second are the storefronts like Steam and Epic. I know those last two make their own games, but the volume of third party games on them warrants the separation. So I decided it would be fun to list off every launcher I can think of, just to give you a visual idea of how many of these damn things there are.

PUBLISHER SPECIFIC

Uplay (Ubisoft)
Origin (EA)
Blizzard.net (Blizzard)
Rockstar (Rockstar)
Xbox Game Pass (Microsoft)
Bethesda (Bethesda)

There’s definitely more of these that I can’t think of at the moment.

STOREFRONTS/ LIBRARIES

Steam (Valve)
Epic Games Store (Epic)
Discord (Discord)
Itch.io (Itch.io)
GOG Galaxy (GOG)
Windows Store (Microsoft)
Twitch (Twitch)

Once again, there are more that I can’t think of at this moment.

But take a moment to consider the fact that there are now several different launchers for organizing your various games spread out across different launchers. Seriously, check out this list.

I’m not complaining about having to use different launchers to play different games. It usually requires me to click a different icon and nothing more. But in the case of Red Dead Redemption 2 and Rockstar, all it seems to have done is add more points of failure to the experience, and that’s my biggest fear with this stuff.

If I buy a game on Steam that needs to authorize through Uplay, but Uplay’s authentication servers are down, that’s a hassle. That’s my biggest issue with all of this. I just want to play my games as obstacle free as I can, but with this endless fragmentation of storefronts and publishers, I think we’re just going to have to get used to these hurdles for a while.

E3 2019: Ubisoft

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One thing you can always count on from a Ubisoft E3 conference, is it’s gonna be weird, people are gonna be dancing, and they’re going to continue to act like their games are apolitical. So here we go, let’s take a look at the stuff Ubisoft brought to the stage that I considered worth writing about.

Keep in mind, a lot of this conference was about updating the games they have out at the moment, and considering I don’t really live in any of those ecosystems, don’t expect to see much of that in the feature below.

ODE TO A SOUNDTRACK THAT NO ONE REMEMBERS

Opening the show was something called the Assassin’s Creed Symphony, playing a lovely medley of of what I assume is music from the Assassin’s Creed games. A weird choice considering this year we’re not supposed to get a new entry in the franchise, and also, I don’t know that any of the music is particularly memorable. It’s good music for sure, but not something I could ever recall if you asked me to.

But the reality of it was that this was some hype for the Assassin’s Creed Symphony tour that’s coming up. That’s neat.

WATCH DOGS LEGION

I love the aesthetic that Watch Dogs Legion is hitting upon here, this slightly futuristic, post-Brexit London, where extremists and gangs rein supreme. Things are kicking off in a major way here though, with so many different gameplay elements being highlighted. Particularly the part where they went from playing as a street thug, died, and then started playing as an old lady. She’s a hacking old lady who used a freaking drone that’s just jumping on people’s faces. Then she pulled out a gun an iced some fools.

The whole pitch here is that you can play as anyone in the city. You recruit new resistance members based on their stats and abilities. Some people were better hackers, fighters, drivers, etc. It actually seems like an awesome idea that probably took a long time to make work well.

Slightly disappointing was the amount of gun-play in the game. I was hoping to see more focus on using your hacking powers and hand to hand combat than just shooting fools. Like, sure, in games shooting stuff is fun, but I was hoping that with the gun laws in London, that would be more apparent in the game.

Also, I’m very unclear of how an actual story will weave together when anyone can be a main character. Either that isn’t the case, or the story is going to feel so nebulous and vague that it feels disjointed.

After the gameplay demo, the director of the game reiterated the fact that anyone can be recruited and played as. I’m assuming that there are going to be pretty influential NPCs that will kind of shepherd whatever the player character is forward. At some point, player voices and backstories will have to be reused, right? It’s gotta be something where, there are like 5 different kind of old ladies in the world with their own voices and animations, and it reused over and over. Or not, who knows.

It’s out next March.

MYTHIC QUEST

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9a5tWM5yQZA

It’s a show from the creators of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia about a game studio that made the biggest MMO in the world. Here’s hoping that at least an entire season or two focuses on unionization in the games industry.

20 bucks says that if this show goes well, someone will actually make this fake MMO game into a reality.

The show looks like it could be okay, but boy howdy it’s got one hell of a mountain to climb. It’s coming to Apple Plus, a service that I’ve only just heard of, right now.

BRAWLHALLA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQWPLKHv2TU

The free to play Super Smash Bros game is getting some Adventure Time characters in it. I like both of these properties and it’s nice to see that they’re still supporting this game with new content. I gotta say, I don’t know if the show is still going or if it’s relevant at all these days, but it seems to be a cool content infusion for a game I forgot existed.

GHOST RECON BREAKPOINT

I didn’t hate Ghost Recon Wildlands, it was just a very repetitive game that I didn’t have people to play with. Jon Bernthal is in the game as the lead villain which he seems to pull off very well. After a CG trailer of Mr. Bernthal being angry and hyping up his army, he walked out on stage with an adorable pit bull who looked very scared of being there. I have no idea why he was out there, but I’m very happy he was.

Then we cut to a trailer of people shooting other people in the woods and doing some military hand signals at each other. I’d play this game only to get more of Mr. Bernthal’s acting. My only hope is that this time around, they put in a button that allows me to snap to cover instead of that auto-cover nonsense.

And here’s something for the hardest of the hardcore Ghost Recon fans, an exclusive streaming and content portal just for fans of the games. It was weird, but probably something the fans will really appreciate and hopefully actually use.

Yet again, there’s another Terminator crossover in this game, cause of course. It comes out on October 4th.

ELITE SQUAD

Uh, they’re making a Tom Clancy themed mobile game. It’s some tactical shooting game called Elite Squad. They put Sam Fisher in it which is the meanest thing they could’ve done quite frankly. This is what they do with one of their most recognizable characters – put him in a mobile game instead of his own title.

JUST DANCE 2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtiXKHNAFew

They’re doing it! The big elaborate dancing sequence where a person in a panda bear costume comes out and dances with a bunch of other brightly dressed dancers. It was just as weird and uncomfortable as it always was. Thank goodness for Ubisoft.

Also, I guess they’re putting another one of these games out this year. Whatever.

RAINBOW SIX QUARANTINE

How do you feel about a spooky scary Rainbow Six game where you and two other players take on some monsters or something? Claiming this to be the Rainbow Six Siege of PVE games, it’s a big claim that I bet could work well. It’s weird though, cause Rainbow Six was always about some tactical, military realism, and this very much seems like a departure from that.

Hopefully it works out well for them.

UPLAY +

You know what this is. It’s another game subscription service you can pay into to play all the latest releases along with a catalog of classic games. The service is coming to Stadia, allowing you to utilize this service anywhere in theory. The price is in line with other services like this, at $14.99 a month, it seemed almost inevitable that this would happen.

ROLLER CHAMPIONS

“A skill-based, team PVP sports game.” That’s what they said about the game. With no real details, they came out and just dropped this trailer for a game without any real information, then said that you can download a demo for the game today. So that’s cool. Then, almost as if they had messed up and announced the demo too early, they showed off a gameplay trailer, which also didn’t tell me anything about this game.

It looks like a mesh of NFL Street and a roller derby. I’ll try the demo though. Why the hell not?

GODS & MONSTERS

The last trailer of the conference was for a game that I guess exists that had absolutely no information about it. It was colorful and made it seem like it would be a more lighthearted adventure game in the vein of Assassin’s Creed. They said it’s a game that heavily focuses on mythology. So who knows what that means.

And it just ended. For a Ubisoft conference, it felt kind of lifeless and straightforward. Also, where the hell is Splinter Cell? It’s getting to the point where they keep putting Sam Fisher into their games, without providing players any modern context for who the character is. The last Splinter Cell was in 2013 and was on the Xbox 360. We’re rapidly approaching the point where we’ve had a generation without a game in the franchise, but the lead character has shown up several times.

What I’m saying is that it’s a crime that there isn’t another Splinter Cell game, and I’m upset. But Watch Dogs Legion looked cool. The rest of the conference was a little muted for my taste. It felt like they’re playing it safe until the next generation of consoles come out.