Got the gamepass deal for $1 again, somehow, different email? So I took the opportunity and holiday season to try out Black Ops 6 and Diablo 4. Obviously the main reason was to play Indiana Jones, but that's another story..
Here are some points I noticed
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The developers expect you to know the game, no more handholding and tutorial for the 22nd game in the series, you already know the buttons to shoot and crawl and sprint crouch. Zombies mode was a revelation, insanely complex since I played the first one and the tutorial only scratched the surface
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This ties in to new mechanics, new game, new things to do right? BO6 has a grappling hook, while not new(?) introduces some sort of proof of concept and different gameplay in a couple of levels which shakes things up, in Diablo, I didn't notice anything new, it feels like a mobile game now though.
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They have no time to chill, devs think Gen Z or whoever their audience is has no time to admire the view. In old Cod, MoH games, you could blow up some tanks and then admire the French countryside after saving the town, here its curated so tight that I don't even think 5 seconds is allowed for you to explore or relax, its crafted like a movie, every 10 steps there must be a guard standing still for you to stealth kill. In Diablo, you go into a field and there are 20 wolves there for no reason and a bear. I thought you started with a 'normal' amount of wolves and then move on to ridiculous numbers in the endgame or post game. You also level up so fast and get access to the entire skill tree
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Diablo's story is now entirely detached from its gameplay, the protag can see the villains cutscenes due to a plot device, no more clever writing to explain events after, you get rewards not from an NPC but from the menu from completing world events, and somehow there are localised areas of 100s of enemies just waiting for you to start a fight in a random spot on an open field, theres a GPS showing you the way to the next objective
Overall I played both for the story and B06 was short and serviceable and let the player control the amount of lore they wanted (they did rip a level right from Control though) The presentation was top notch and had enough themes to make things different, it was also polished to the point where there were no rough edges and dare I say no personality.
I was completely uninterested in anything Diablo talked about, the intro was interesting then it turned into a bunch of fetch quests
My short review on Indiana Jones would be the opposite of Veilguard "It's a good game but not a good dragonage game"
"Its not a great game but a good Indiana Jones game"
They are right about that. Most people these days, and especially young people, have zero attention span. They must always be doing something, lest they have a moment to examine their own thoughts. Go check out a big budget movie these days and observe how often the scene cuts. Compare it with something from 20 or even 10 years ago. Attention spans have been shrinking for decades now.
In this regard, I like how in Genshin Impact there are places specifically made, where you can sit and chill, enjoying the view.
This is an interesting take because I would expect the complete opposite. I find it extremely tedious when AAA games force the player into situations where they have to climb or walk slowly so they can pan the camera to whatever fancy graphical set piece their art team made, and more time doing that then any gameplay. Why not just watch a movie at that point?
When playing a game I want a game. It’d be incredibly frustrating if every time I solved a square in Sudoku I had to then watch an episode of a TV show. Heartening to hear AAA is swinging back the other way and wasting less time.