During an EA earnings call, company CFO Blake Jorgensen confirmed that Star Wars: Battlefront will hit store shelves before the end of the year and be aligned with Episode VII.
This can only mean one thing by the rules of video gaming: it will be broke as shit.
Not wishing bad luck on the game in any way. I want to play Battlefront as much as you. Until I have the game in my console and I am killing Ewoks there will always be doubts. DICE has to live down Battlefield 4 which was having issues a year (!) after release. Now that they are on a timetable the heat is on. Will they deliver?
Not content to stay on the mat, EA’s UFC continues to be the best in the glitch business. Here is another helping complete with Joe Rogan* and Mike Goldberg* calling the action.
While EA’s first UFC game is receiving middling to decent reviews, the glitches in the MMA title are worthy of a perfect score, especially when watched with commentary by (fake) Mike Goldberg and Joe Rogan.
Be careful watching this around people. I laughed till I cried, I sh** you not.
“Alex goes for the leg, gets a hold of a ghost that has been haunting the arena.”
We are in the middle of the Stanley Cup playoffs and EA has announced that NHL 15 will be the first game in the series to go next-gen when it is released this fall. The game will have a new broadcast team of Mike Emrick and Eddie Olczy and also feature an NBC Sports Game Day Presentation.
Like with past titles the cover athlete will be voted on by fans, but this year will be done differently. Voting will be done on Twitter on Twitter Vote Thursday’s where fans will use the hashtag #NHLCoverVote and then hashtagging their favorite players from the available players that are:
Yesterday, for the first time in years, I took an entire day off doing one single thing: Playing a video game. With the exception of breaks for meals, doing some laundry between matches, and reading a chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring before bed, I didn’t do anything yesterday other than play Titanfall. In the interest of full disclosure, the event actually began at around 8:30 Tuesday night, since my entire team had the day off on Wednesday. That means a solid 24 hours was mostly dedicated to playing Titanfall.
This is going to be one of the easiest reviews I’ve ever written, because Titanfall can be boiled down to a single question: Do you have a core group of friends you play online shooters with? If the answer is “yes,” you don’t really need the review, as I assume you’re already playing Titanfall. If the answer is “no,” and you’re wondering if Titanfall is worth it solo, I’m afraid I have some bad news: It’s not worth it solo.
By “solo,” I mean playing the game solely with an interest in the story being offered, without worrying about being “good” at the game from a multiplayer perspective. For starters, there is ZERO in the way of a single-player experience. This is SOCOM and MAG taken to the next level; yes, there is a campaign, but you literally play through nine of the game’s fifteen maps with some audio and special intro scenes thrown in for good measure. There are other players playing with you, on each side of the story, and to keep things fair it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose each match.
I knew going in that I wouldn’t care about the story, which is good, because it’s delivered in three of the least efficient manners imaginable in a game like this:
1) Audio that plays in the match lobbies.
2) Scenes that happen at the beginning and end of each match.
3) Audio and picture-in-picture video that plays during the match.
So basically, they try to tell you the story while you are talking with your team or party about the last match, figuring out your loadouts, talking about the match that just finished, or worst of all, while you are PLAYING THE GAME. I don’t know about you, but in a fast-paced FPS featuring giant robots and jetpacks, I am devoting less-than-zero attention to watching the little video at the top corner of my screen.
The game randomly picks which side you play as – IMC or Militia – when you begin a campaign, and automatically puts you on the other side when you start your next run. You can’t select individual missions until you’ve beaten both campaigns, which you’ll need to do to unlock all three titan cores. This can be a little frustrating if you’re playing with a party where everyone is at a different part of the game, but we found ways around it until all of us had completed each mission from both sides.
The side you’re on affects what audio, intro, and in-game story bits you see and hear, but the matches themselves have almost no impact on the story. For instance, one match involves the Militia trying to overload some reactors while the IMC defends them it a hardpoint domination game type. Even if the IMC wins by a landslide, the story finds a way to still have the reactors detonate. This also leads to weird situations when a match is close, where your pilots’ COs alternate radio chatter between “we’re crushing them” and “our forces are being decimated.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtbKyM263tE
To be as honest as possible, I refrained from doing any research for these next paragraphs, which is the best story synopsis I can give based on having played the campaign from both sides twice: The games takes place far into space, on the “Fringe,” and focuses on a war between the IMC and the Militia. The IMC has decided to start using AI-controlled soldiers called sentinels. The Militia is losing badly, until the IMC ends up attacking a colony where an old, presumed-dead war hero is living. He joins the Militia, and together they stage a series of attacks on IMC bases.
Along the way, you’ll play missions with objectives like stealing data from a crashed IMC ship, taking over anti-ship guns to attack a dry-docked IMC ship, and bringing down towers around an IMC base to allow the giant, vicious life-forms that live on the planet to attack. There are also at least three missions where I can’t remember who’s doing what, to whom, or why.
This culminates in an attack on some kind of base on a world directly next to a star, in which the war hero sacrifices himself, and an IMC commander defects to the Militia, and control of the IMC is granted to Skynet… sorry, “Spyglass,” and a heavily-accented sociopath is a dick to everyone. There are some vague shots of spaceships, and some radio chatter from the corresponding sides. Then, for some reason, the game doesn’t end; there is a final mission where the Militia attacks the sentinel manufacturing facility, and the game essentially gives you another set of vague shots of spaceships and radio chatter.
If my recollection seems very pro-Militia, it’s because the game doesn’t even try to blur the lines about who the heroes of the game are. The very first mission involves a Militia raid on a fueling facility; if you’re the IMC, you have to stop them, despite the fact that there are numerous civilian ships with the fleet. If you “win,” the heavily-accented psychopath remarks that “Today’s civilians are tomorrow’s militia.” The very next mission starts with sentinels slaughtering civilians, and that same asshole remarking that it’s not a good enough test of their capabilities.
The characterin this picture could be named Tits McGee for all I know.
All that to say this: I don’t remember a single character name, meaningful moment, or piece of non-cliché dialogue, and I played this through four times. So when I say that the game isn’t worth it for the solo experience, that’s what I mean. Nothing this game provides is worth it outside of the core experience of playing the game. If you think you can play the game online, but without a team or core group, then it might be worth it to keep reading.
Now that you’ve made it to this point, forget the last four paragraphs and read this: Titanfall is the single best multiplayer experience since Bad Company 2, in my opinion. It is the culmination of a lineage going back to CoD 4: Modern Warfare, and is actually made by many of the same people. It borrows and learns from Battlefield, Halo, Call of Duty, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, and a half-dozen other pedigree franchises.
As a moderate FPS veteran of multiple console generations, nothing in the game feels out-of-place, unnatural, or difficult to grasp. There’s a twenty-minute training simulator at the very beginning that gives you the basics, but moves along nicely to keep it from getting boring. There are a few mechanics, such as wall-hanging – hold left-trigger while on a wall – that I didn’t know about until they popped up on a loading screen tip. It also seems like you can switch pilot loadouts at any time without a respawn, or maybe in it’s just in certain circumstances; I really don’t know. These oversights in the tutroial are minor at best.
Basically, you spend all of your time either as a pilot or piloting a titan; playing as a pilot is like Call of Duty with jetpacks and parkour, and piloting a titan will feel familiar to anyone who has ever played another game with mechs. There are different weapons, perks, explosives, and whatnot available on both sides, and pretty much any play style can be rewarding if utilized correctly. I will say this, though: Moving around on the ground, half-crouched any checking corners is going to get you murdered.
The game is a symphony of mobility, and the most effective players are going to be the ones who can learn how to think in three dimensions, more than any other game on the market. In hardpoint domination, for instance, most areas can be accessed from any side, from above, and potentially from below. While titans can’t jump, players seem to be quickly adapting to the idea that you can call a titan in and then keep moving around outside of it.
This is accomplished by the game’s impressive auto-titan AI system for the mechs, which can be set to either guard a location or follow you as best they can. More than once I’ve left my titan to guard an area and then run off elsewhere. There are limits – stay gone for too long or go too far and your titan will shut down until you climb aboard again – but the game obviously encourages this play-style. In fact, a later perk allows your titan to be more accurate and efficient while in auto-titan mode.
The game also rewards people who can manage multiple loadouts as necessary. I tend to find two loadouts, tops, that I excel at and stick with them. In Titanfall, though, I actually have all six loadouts ready at any given time, and switch freely between tactics. The same goes for titan loadouts; what may work well if I’m piloting manually in an attrition game doesn’t necessarily perform well in guard mode during a capture the flag.
The only mechanic that the game really fails at explaining is “burn cards,” though we all pieced them together fairly quickly. Basically, these are one-time use bonuses that last from when you use them until you die and respawn. You have a maximum of three slots, and cards can be set in each slot from your deck between matches. Once in a match, they can be activated from the loadout menu. Some will kick in instantly, others not until your next spawn, and you can only have one active at a time.
The effects they offer include upgraded perks, enhanced weapons, extra XP, or even instant-access to a titan; normally, titans have a “build timer” that can be reduced by scoring points in various ways. There is a twenty-five card limit to your deck, so it’s worthwhile to use and even discard cards frequently. Early on I tried to keep cards for “that one special occasion,” but quickly found this wasn’t worth the space, as I just never used those cards.
Interestingly enough, I’ve already written a fair amount more than I intended to, or even really thought possible. To be honest, though, I don’t really think I’ve offered much insight; I’m ok with that, because again, there’s no insight to offer. Odds are anyone with even a passing interest in this game already owns it, especially if they have friends they game with. I’m sure there are a handful of FPS enthusiasts out there who won’t mind picking it up and playing with strangers; if so, more power to them, because this is a Hell of a game.
As multiplayer-driven experiences like Call of Duty and Battlefield have grown bloated in recent years, I’ve stood by and sneered. I don’t have anything against a great multiplayer experience, but all I saw was the same game coming out ad-infinitum. If you had told me I would willingly pay $60 for a game that was online-only, and featured a lackluster campaign I would only grind through to get unlocks, I would not have been pleasant in response. As it stands – or, in this case, falls – I’m going to wrap up the review here, “because Titanfall.”
I downloaded Titanfall directly from the Xbox One marketplace. It was my first time ever getting a launch of this magnitude digitally, and I have no complaints thus far. It is also [amazon_link id=”B00DB9JYFY” target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]available on PC, and will be released for the Xbox 360 on March 25.[/amazon_link]
EA Sports has revealed that current UFC Light Heavyweight Champion Jon Jones will be on the cover of their first UFC game due sometime next year.
Now that they have gotten one half of the cover right it is up to us, the fans, to make the other half just as good. EA is letting fans vote on the other fighter that will share the cover with Jones through a tournament of 16 gladiators of the Octagon.
The 16 fighters are: Demetrious Johnson, Dominick Cruz, Urijah Faber, Jose Aldo, Benson Henderson, Georges St-Pierre, Johny Hendricks, Chris Weidman, Junior dos Santos, Chael Sonnen, Michael Bisping, Anthony Pettis, Daniel Cormier, Ronda Rousey, Miesha Tate and Alexander Gustafsson.
EA will once again take on Call of Duty this year with Battlefield 4. While the shooter has never come close to taking over the throne from Activision’s giant, it has its own niche in the FPS world. Battlefield 3 was forgettable it we are being honest. The multiplayer was decent and the story was…well I am pretty sure it involved words written in crayon on construction paper. Has DICE been able to make a more well crafted experience this time around? God I hope so because they are developing Star Wars: Battlefront and they better not screw it up.
Single player- “Its campaign is an obnoxious assault of explosions, blood, profanity, and anger wrapped in an apparent parody of a first-person shooter. In five hours, Battlefield 4 hits on almost every predictable cliché expected: Tank mission, boat mission, stealth mission, jailbreak, sewers, sudden but inevitable betrayal, dastardly Russians, defying orders, and, of course, a torture sequence.”
Multiplayer- “Where Battlefield 4 most brilliantly distances Battlefield 3 is in its map design. The best Battlefield maps are challenging and satisfying, demanding you take advantage of everything at your disposal, and Battlefield 4 does this extremely well.”
Single Player- “Occasionally in Battlefield 4’s solo campaign you’ll meet some variance. Jump out of a plane to land on a ship, ready to attack immediately after landing. Ride a speedboat while shooting down those of the enemies’. Hike around that quintessential snow level. You know the sort of thing if you’ve ever played any shooter ever.”
Multiplayer- “You can destroy levees and flood part of the map, forcing everyone to swim. You’ll block off paths and create new ones. Battlefield has always been a playground of death, and now DICE has given you even more play-doh to work with.”
Single Player- ” The story culminates with a choice-driven ending, but given my lack of attachment to the characters I hardly felt engaged enough to weigh my options seriously. Thankfully, the campaign is short, clocking in at roughly five hours.”
Multiplayer- “No matter what mode or class you are playing, you continually earn rewards thanks to the deep and varied progression system featured in Battlefield 4. The variety is staggering, with more types of sights, grips, knives, rocket launchers, and camo than any previous Battlefield game. Some are unlocked by ranking up your class or weapon, and others can be acquired at random in a Battlepack, which you receive roughly every three levels.”
Single Player- “The campaign is one of Battlefield’s best, too, and though DICE continues to stray a little too far into ‘loud and dumb’ COD territory rather than make the most of its large-scale, all-out war heritage, the explosive set pieces offer just enough to keep players entertained throughout the 5 hour experience.”
Multiplayer- “Unlike Battlefield 3, multiplayer appears to be launching in a finely tuned state, with a major balancing overhaul providing a mechanically-solid framework. Though weapon unlocks and upgrades still require a healthy time investment, early balancing issues are sidestepped by providing newcomers with a decent armoury, while vehicle weapon spamming has been restricted by a new cooldown-based ammo counter.”
Single Player- “But Battlefield is about more than just multiplayer these days, and the single-player campaign in BF4 also has some exciting moments. These are sequences that channel the freedom and variety of multiplayer; the levels spent mostly in corridors and in close-quarters combat are more frequent, however, and not nearly as enjoyable.”
Multiplayer- “Fortunately, the online stage is expertly set for some exhilarating moments. One of the best new things about BF4 is Obliteration mode, in which two teams fight to gain control of a bomb and use it to blow up three enemy positions. Unlike returning standby Conquest mode, in which the battle ebbs and flows between a handful of set positions, Obliteration boasts conflict zones that can change in a flash with the timely use of land, air, and sea vehicles.”
Show of hands. Who remembers Battlefield 3’s story? Put your hand down “always has to feel important guy”, no one remembers Battlefield 3’s story.
Well Battlefield 4 is here to make sure you remember that it has a story and it is the anti-Call of Duty. Does Call of Duty have female players in multiplayer? Screw that, Battlefield has one as a main character. You can have a dog partner? Fu** your dog. Battlefield 4’s soldiers punch dogs in their stupid dog faces. Literally. A dog gets punch in the face.
I laughed.
Will the story be more memorable this time around? Who knows? They all blend together anyway. Terrorist with a name with too many consonants either is blowing up stuff or plans to blow up stuff and you as Brick Gunplay must stop him with your squad of varied racial and psychological stereotypes.
Dog punching is an added bonus.
[amazon_link id=”B00BXE4KVM” target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]Battlefield 4[/amazon_link] releases on October 29th.
The other night, my brother Tillman and I dove into the Battlefield 4 beta for the first time since it launched. To give you a little background, he has been playing the series since the first Bad Company, and I jumped in – or was pushed, really, by Beth – with Bad Co 2. We played the single-map beta for BC2 almost every night from the time it went up to when they closed the servers; our total time logged in the full game is measured in weeks. When BF3 came along, I took the steps to actually get in the PC alpha, though it didn’t run all that well; the 360 beta saw a fair amount of play from the entire group, and we were very excited for the full launch.
That game ended up letting us all down, in one way or another, and Tillman was the only one who continued playing it consistently, though even he skipped out on the last few expansions. Tillman makes a habit of buying me a game for Christmas every year that we can enjoy together, and shooters tend to be the trend. We tried Medal of Honor: Warfighter last year, and were suitably impressed with it, but again found that the spark just wasn’t enough to keep us engaged. The BF4 beta offered us an opportunity to test out the assumed front-runner for this year’s holiday brothers-in-arms game.
The beta front-end system wasn’t great – there seemed to be no way to join each other before actually getting into a game – but we don’t play this kind of demo for the menus. Once we were in-game, the first thing we noticed were the textures; more specifically, the lack thereof. From the guns to the buildings to random bits of road, any sort of detail seemed to be either bland or missing completely. Now, I know that this is a beta, not the finished product, but the video shown at E3 was supposedly of people playing this very demo; you know, the one that looked shit-hot and featured a skyscraper falling down in majestic Frostbite glory. For more on the graphics, I’ll let the guys over at video gamer talk in their wonderful accents:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfid4FhL654
To that end, I have personally witnessed that building falling, and while it isn’t quite the spectacle from that E3 video, it was really cool to experience. Tillman and I were on a separate part of the map, and the entire area shakes and fills with an exceptionally robust sound of destruction; it was fun to watch every player stop in their tracks and sprint for the nearest viewpoint to watch. After the smoke clears, that entire area of the map is different, something which a few FPSs have tried over the years, but none have every solidly pulled off as more than a gimmick. The last few Battlefields have at least offered some cool manipulation via building destruction, so I guess it remains to be seen if this large-scale demolition will be part of every map.
The absolute best part of the game, for me, was a series of little events that fell into the category of “Battlefield Moments,” as DICE and EA have dubbed them. Tillman was sniping from the top of a skyscraper, and I spawned in on him and another squad mate. To our back was another, smaller building housing one of the Conquest capture points. We started losing it, so I ran and jumped off our building; about halfway down I popped my parachute, cooked a frag, and tossed it through the skylight above the objective. I was lucky, and it caught the attacker in the blast right as I hopped down into the area.
As this happened, Tillman let me know that there was at least a full squad heading my way from the street; I stuck my head out from a side stairwell in time to see a few drop from his sniper fire, but I was still overrun. I fired for suppression and fell back, but found myself out of SMG ammo. As the radar indicators entered the stairwell, I hit the roof with an RPG; the resulting wall collapse took out another opponent. I was desperately watching my soldier reload the tube when my screen spun to face an enemy player; I was getting knifed. At the last moment, a prompt appeared for me to hit the melee button myself, and suddenly I kicked the other guy’s feet out from under him and turned the blade back on its owner! This was, of course, met with jubilant swearing as I attempted to describe the events to Tillman. He calmed me down enough to let me know a tank had rolled up, and we took it out with a mixture of RPGs and airborne C4.
That entire five minutes was great, and reminded me exactly why we fell in love with the series in the first place. Unfortunately, it was the only five minutes out of the half hour or so we played that captured the “Battlefield Moment” magic. The rest of the match was dull, and that ended up being the biggest issue. There were a few other complaints that I genuinely don’t feel were because the game is “in beta” as well: Several buttons have been remapped with no explanation as to why; the level of small-scale destruction seems to have been greatly reduced; and the few small touches like deployed bridge pylons to stop vehicles, or water shooting up from destroyed hydrants, couldn’t stave off the feeling that the map was… Empty.
I think the combination of those two feelings – “dull” and “empty” – is what I ultimately took away from the experience. I know the larger maps in BC2 and BF3 could generate that feeling when there weren’t enough players, but we were playing on a full server, so it a lack of something for those players to do; other than the previously described moment, I never got the feeling that I was contributing, a feeling which Tillman echoed. Regardless of how many capture points I help take, or the kills I scored doing so, there was never a sense of urgency; I never got the simulation of being on a battle field.
The end result was a strange one, but one that has already paid off over the last few nights: Instead of getting us Battlefield 4, Tillman purchased us each a Battlefield 3 Premium package, which grants us access to all of the existing content. Our thought process was that we did enjoy BF3 for a time, and mostly stopped playing because of the attitude of other players and the exhaustion of what content was available at the time. We were also hoping that the upcoming releases of BF4 and Call of Duty: Ghosts would eliminate certain… unsavory elements from the BF3 playing field.
The plan has worked great so far, with us having a bunch of new maps to explore, and encountering only minimal spawn-camping douchebags with handles like xXn00bzlickerzXx. The Endgame maps especially have caught our interest; the new dirt bikes are the most fun, ever, period, for eternity. I spend most conquest matches performing “patrols” around to each capture point just to ride them. Also, last night I shot down a helicopter, which isn’t unusual in these games, but it is my favorite thing in the entire game. One of these days I’m going to shoot down a helicopter from the bike of a dirt bike, and immediately my spirit will arrive at the Pearly Gates, having accomplished the work it was sent down here to complete.
So there you have it, I guess: I played the Battlefield 4 open beta, and the end result was that I spent less money to buy expansion packs for a game I already own, instead of spending more money on a game that’s not out for 2 ½ weeks. On a side note, the campaign was in no way a draw for me, as I despised the story mode in BF3, and the story trailers for BF4 have either offended or bored me in equal measure. I guess there’s a part where a ship sinks, and Bonnie Tyler is there giving orders, or something? Anyways, I have to go see if I can headshot someone on an approaching dirt bike just right and hop on it as their corpse falls off at full speed.
[amazon_link id=”B0098QPPL6″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]Battlefield 3 Premium Edition is currently available on multiple platforms.[/amazon_link]
[amazon_link id=”B00BXE4KYE” target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]Battlefield 4 will be available on October 29 on slightly more platforms.[/amazon_link]
EA Sports has released a new “gameplay” video for NBA Live 14. I put gameplay in quotations because while it says it is using gameplay footage, it still looks like it is a made-up trailer for looks. I want to see actual in-game gameplay to see how this game runs. We are two months from release and I have yet to see one video that features anything that resembles actual gameplay and that worries me. I have this reserved and was really hoping EA could get NBA Live out as promised.
We will see.
[amazon_link id=”B00CYS5GEQ” target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]NBA Live 14[/amazon_link] releases on November 19th.
