THE HIGHS
Tim Clark: Criminally good
The lack of good police procedural games continues to baffle me, when you consider how popular the genre is in the rest of pop culture. I’m certain that whoever gets the detect-’em-up right will blow open the doors to a sizeable goldmine. The reason that hasn’t happened so far is probably to do with the difficulty of making the deductive process actually engaging, rather than an onerous admin simulator. Her Story, the rapturously-reviewed indie murder mystery I played this week, manages just that, and whilst it might not be the game to utlimately get the goldmine, it deserves to do very well indeed.
No doubt the usual blowhards will try to claim that it isn’t a game at all, but to them I say I had more fun with it than anything else I’ve played this year. Certainly no other game has stuck around so determinedly, it’s revelations and inconsistencies rolling around in my head. I played it sat with my other half, both of us making notes as we theory crafted motives, and it got me to think what are the best games played as a couple? Not romantic necessarily, but stuff that just works best experienced as a twosome. Tell me in the comments.
Tom Sykes: The Division’s companion app is KIA
Ubi's apocalyptic MMORPG has been delayed a couple of times since it was announced two years ago, and might actually emerge a better game for it. Not just because it gives the devs more time to polish it before release, but because it will emerge the other side of The Great Ubisoft Drubbing of 2014, in which their fondness for companion apps, microtransactions, and not finishing their games reached boiling point with the catastrophic Assassin’s Creed Unity launch. Announced back in 2013, The Division was of course going to come with its own companion app—but Ubi has revealed that it's now been ditched. (They've also confirmed that there won't be one for this year's Assassin's Creed Syndicate either.)
Had The Division come out when it was originally supposed to, perhaps it would have been riddled with insidious nonsense in the same way that Unity was at launch—but I like to think Ubisoft are learning from that particular mistake. (No gimmicky companion apps is certainly an encouraging sign.) In fact, part of me hopes The Division will be delayed even further, to a time when Ubisoft has finally given up on Uplay, towers and samey open worlds. A man can dream. A man can dream.
Tom Marks: I would have gotten away with if it weren’t for you meddling kids
Sam laments the debacle that is Batman: Arkham Knight’s PC launch in the lows of the week on the next page, but the actions Rocksteady and Warner Bros have been forced to take are actually my high. I’m not happy the PC version was neglected, and I’m definitely not happy that PC gamers were essentially told they didn’t matter by the quality of the port. What I am happy about is that they didn’t get away with it.
As Chris Thursten mentioned in his breakdown of the situation, a game of this size being pulled from sale is unprecedented, which means something has changed. Arkham Knight marks the biggest launch of a broken game since Steam updated its return policy, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that had a large impact on WB’s decision. If that policy means that large developers and publishers are going to finally held accountable for delivering terrible ports, then I’m overjoyed.
We should all be angry about Arkham Knight on PC. It was unacceptable. But we should also be excited that, for the first time possibly ever, the offending game didn’t get away with a half-hearted: “Sorry, we’ll patch it later.”
Phil Savage: Taking it back
A lot was made about the potential abuse of Steam's refund system, especially with regards to indie games that can be completed before the two hour cut-off point. Whatever problems the system may have, this week we saw why it's ultimately a force for good. Without easy and guaranteed access to refunds, I doubt the Batman debacle would have played out the way it did—Warner Bros. removing the game from sale in an effort to come back with a better version.
Arkham Knight's release is a disaster, and, not long ago, it's one that people who had bought the game would have been stuck with. Now they aren't, and that fact will hopefully force publishers to sit up and take note of the quality of their ports. I shouldn't have to praise Valve for finally implementing basic consumer protection, but at least, now that they have, the benefits are clear to see.
Evan Lahti: Beast mode
One of the great myths about writing-about-gamesology is that we sit around in multicolored ball pits playing stuff all day, only occasionally descending from our Mountain Dew waterslides to assign a number to the newest Total Duty: Honor of War. In reality, we don’t play games nearly enough as a group, but we did carve out a few hours for that this week.
Some great stuff has come along since the last time we traded our various chairs for a couch to look at the best local multiplayer games on PC: Duck Game, Knight Squad, Regular Human Basketball, and Gang Beasts, which I’d been wanting to play for months. We managed to shove seven people into Boneloaf’s Play-Doh-man brawler, and it was raucous, ludicrous fun. I played plenty of wrestling games growing up on other platforms, but I always did so begrudgingly, at my friends’ houses, frustrated by the button-mashing and weirdly technical gameplay. Gang Beasts just softens and streamlines everything I didn’t like about conventional wrestling games growing up—even failing miserably is fun because it creates physical comedy for the rest of the group. Here’s my favorite moment from our couch gamesapalooza.
Samuel Roberts: Free weekends FTW
This weekend, Creative Assembly is opening up a big slice of its back catalogue of Total War games for a free weekend, as well as discounting a load of its most recent titles like Attila and Rome 2. It’s the perfect way to gear people up to speed for Total War: Warhammer who might otherwise not be familiar with CA’s unique mixture of turn-based and real-time strategy, but are now jonesing to send orcs to fight men on horseback.
THE LOWS
Samuel Roberts: Broken Bat
Whatever happened to the Caped Crusader? Arkham Knight launched this week in a poor state, which ended up being the biggest story of the week, resulting in the game being pulled from sale on Steam a few days ago. Rocksteady has its own engineers working on the port now, according to the studio’s Sefton Hill, which hopefully means the end result will work a lot better on a PC with a £300/$400 graphics card than a less powerful console that costs the same price.
It’s a disappointing state of affairs. Warner did not supply advance review code (we asked, many times), and the game’s release ended up being a nasty surprise; particularly as Batman was draped all over Steam this week like its arrival on PC was nothing less than a triumphant event. That part really annoyed me. Someone remembered to get the banners up selling the game but seemingly no-one checked to see if the port was a pile of ass. I’ve played the PS4 version, and there’s a brilliant game underneath—hopefully we’ll get that in the coming weeks. I also hope this whole thing scares publishers into taking PC ports seriously.
Tim Clark: Cut the car
We’ve expounded enough on the state of Batman’s PC port in this piece (tl;dr it’s bollocks) so let’s talk about Arkham Knight’s real crime: the Bat car. Samuel will confirm that I’ve had deep reservations about Bruce Wayne’s combat charabanc ever since we first saw it at GDC last year. Now that I’ve had a chance to play with it (for an about an hour, chugging slightly on my 970) I can confirm the Batmobile is probably the greatest design misstep made by any AAA game in the last 10 years.
I do not say this lightly, and it’s a topic on which I admit some bias: I also don’t care for the car in the movies or the comics. It invariably gets in the way of the central Bat fantasy of being a brooding misanthrope capable of kicking a man’s hip out of joint from any angle. But the implementation in Arkham Knight is absolutely parlous. It’s like Need for Speed Carbon has been hastily grafted into the core game, only the cars are all rocket-equipped speedboats. And the water is existential dread.
My complaints about this on Twitter prompted my friend and erstwhile colleague Joel Snape to suggest that Arkham Knight, among its other undesirable firsts, could also be the game to pioneer a new type of DLC that just lets you pay to remove content you don’t like. I would gladly drop $5 to excise the Batmobile completely. Who wants to shoot robot tanks? Literally no one. Something to bear in mind, Rocksteady, while Arkham Knight is being turned into a quilt of patches.
Tom Sykes: Slightly Mad go slightly mad, announce Project Cars 2
I can understand the desire to strike while the iron is hot, but announcing Project Cars 2 just a few weeks after your crowdfunded, twice-delayed game finally crosses the finishing line seems, well, slightly mad to me. The developers say they'll support both games simultaneously, but it does seem strange to ask your fans for even more money, only a short time after delivering on your first crowdfunding promise. We all know that sequels are considered as soon as the first game is finished, if not before, but we're rarely asked to invest in them so quickly. Surely it's best to give your fans a breather, some time to enjoy the thing they paid for, before you start eyeing up their wallets?
Evan Lahti: Show me the data
Heroes of the Storm is what I’ve been putting the most time into lately, and as a card-carrying member of its intended audience (people who are variously exhausted by MOBAs), its 20-minute matches, character variety, and potential for comebacks have been treating me well, even despite the fact that I’m an awful 2-8 over my last 10 matches. What’s disappointing me, though, is how Heroes seems misaligned with Blizzard’s own reputation for building great metrics in StarCraft 2, which spits out a sea of helpful data for each match.
HotS feels incredibly slim on tools to analyze your performance. Other than watching replays, I don’t even get to look back at a breakdown of my previous matches after I’ve left the score screen. Tim tells me that this is a long-standing complaint in Hearthstone as well, which at least has an API that other utilities have tunneled through. I have to assume that Blizzard is using data more granular than win/loss for its own internal analysis… I’d love to see more transparency on my damage dealt, when and where I’m dying in a match, and how much I’m contributing to team fights.
Tom Marks: Bad memories
When it was first announced that Harvest Moon: Seeds of Memories would be coming to PC, it sounded too good to be true. Which, it turns out, it was. Wes got a look at E3 2015 last week, and it sounds truly dreadful. It’s only been in development for a month, but comes out this winter and appears to be downright awful. It’s not even made by the same team as the games I fondly remember. Maybe some organic miracle will occur over the coming months, but with plans to simultaneously release on mobile platforms, I’m not holding my breath. I let that ill-advised thing called hope into my heart, and my hubris-filled chickens have quickly roosted.
Phil Savage: Dammit, John
Like every other sentient being, I was fascinated by Chris's exploration of the least popular gaming petitions. It's a reminder that, whatever's happening on gaming's global stage, the biggest grievances are so often suffered (semi-)silently. Maybe it's a game that everyone is enjoying, but, for whatever reason, just will not work on your machine. Maybe it's the continued erosion through patches of a game you used to love. Or maybe it's just that John won't stop cheating.
Fuck sake John, give it a rest will you?
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