review – Page 6 – MMO Fallout

Bought It On Stadia: Wolfenstein: Youngblood

Yea I bought the thing on the thing.

I wanted to talk about Stadia without having to dedicate an entire piece just to the hardware because you can’t really talk about the service unless you’re talking about a game. Those of you who keep track of my social media and other posts on this website know that I fell on the grenade and pre-ordered Stadia way back when it was first announced and made available. Yea, I’m willing to take that $129 hit because I love all of you (especially you).

Fast forward to yesterday and my Stadia came in the mail. Following a ridiculously convoluted setup process which involved downloading the Stadia app, using my invitation code, plugging in the Chromecast Ultra, downloading Google Home, setting up the Chromecast, tying my controller to the phone via bluetooth, updating the controller, registering the controller to my Chromecast, registering the controller to my wifi network, and speaking the seven words of the forbidden one, I was finally able to start. Thing about the Stadia is that you can’t buy stuff through the website, the Stadia service, or in-game. You have to use the Stadia app on your phone for all purchases, even in-game DLC.

The Stadia controller is nice, it has some heft without being a big chungus. Design-wise it’s like someone asked Mr. Google “should this controller look like the Xbox One or the Switch Pro” and his answer was “yes.” The Stadia controller has easy sharing in the form of a snapshot button (that can be held down to record the last 30 seconds) as well as a vestigial button that will eventually be used for something or other as a Google help feature. The controller even has a built-in microphone which is creepy, and I’ll explain why later.

Gotta give Stadia an initial positive: It’s nice to be able to buy a current game and have it immediately ready to play and not have to worry about updates, downloading, clearing space, or day one multi-gig patches. Even the Switch can’t get away from installations for most of its titles.

So why Wolfenstein? Simple; I don’t play fighting games so a fast moving first person shooter is the best way to test just how well the Stadia holds up under high stress situations.

Wolfenstein: Youngblood is simultaneously a load of crap and a bit of a masterpiece, depending on what sides of the coin you’re looking at. At the end of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, BJ Blazkowicz and his very pregnant wife Anya have helped spark a resistance against the Nazis. Youngblood picks up from that story nearly two decades later and skips over all the fun stuff. The United States successfully pushing the Nazis back? BJ killing Hitler? We just hear about it in retrospect, without actually getting to play it. Youngblood puts the player in control of twin daughters Soph and Jess who plot a rescue mission to France upon learning that BJ has gone missing during a covert operation.

My big fear going into Wolfenstein on Stadia was that the game was going to play like garbage, being a run and gun shooter using a streaming infrastructure. What I found instead is that the game worked quite well. In the nine hours it took me to finish the campaign and most of the side missions, I had one instance where the stream started to break up but otherwise it was almost buttery smooth. It’s difficult to pinpoint what is a case of lag in Stadia on Wolfenstein. There are several moments where I’m fairly certain that I was on target but my shot missed regardless, but I can’t definitively say it was from lag.

I liked Youngblood a fair bit more than the general audience did. As a budget ($30) shooter it played a role as filler between Wolfenstein II and the inevitable Wolfenstein III, a side story that advances the plot without being completely necessary to the overall structure.

Youngblood’s first cardinal sin is that the game introduces a completely unnecessary RPG system to pad out gameplay. Different areas have level requirements and if you head in underleveled you’ll find that enemies can simply tank your damage. Previous Wolfenstein games have had armored enemies, sure, but it doesn’t make sense even in the context of the game why an unarmored Nazi soldier should be able to take six shotgun shells to the face and brush it off simply because they are higher “level” than the player. I also noticed that enemies level with you once you out-level a zone, meaning while Jess and Soph will regularly feel underpowered, there never comes a time when you feel like badass Nazi-killing machines.

Youngblood’s second cardinal sin is directly tied to the cooperative nature of the game. Jess and Soph have a shared life system where you can get up three additional lives. Get knocked down to 1hp and instead of dying outright you’ll enter a downed state and can be rescued in a short span of time without losing one of those lives. If you die without extra lives, you’ll get knocked back to the last checkpoint. In raids, this can be a long setback. Because you have the ability to pick each other up and because the game assumes there are two people playing, Wolfenstein ramps up the number of armored enemies packed into very tight corridors leading to deaths that aren’t quite…fair in the grand scheme of things.

And while I’m tearing this game apart, I’ll point to a third cardinal sin: Deescalating boss encounters. The bulk of Youngblood’s story centers around taking control of three towers. At the top of each tower, you end up fighting a big armored Nazi boss in a mech suit. The first encounter, strangely enough, is the hardest as not only does the level offer very little in the realm of proper cover but large parts of the floor are randomly engulfed in deadly lasers and you get easily overwhelmed by the couple waves of lower Nazi grunts that come in. The latter two fights against the same type of mech suit lose the laser floor and offer several places that the mech suit can’t get to. Couple that with the fact that by the second and third encounter you have more health, better armor, and more weapons at your disposal and the progression doesn’t quite make sense.

As with prior iterations, Wolfenstein Youngblood is a game that can theoretically be played as a stealth title. I didn’t find any reason to, as now any Nazi soldier can raise the alarm and bring in reinforcements. You end up wanting those reinforcements because more Nazis killed means faster leveling, whereas stealthily getting past soldiers gets you nothing except potentially underleveled and forced to replay levels as punishment.

So was there anything that I did like? Of course. Wolfenstein’s’ trademark gunplay is back. Guns pack a punch that make each of your kills feel impactful as you run down corridors shredding Nazis into confetti. The credit system used to buy upgrades stonewalls your progress in the beginning but by the end of the game you’ll have more coins than you know what to do with. My personal favorite weapon was the automatic shotgun.

Youngblood also excels in world-building. Each level is a combination of open world French streets, closed corridor buildings, and underground sewers. The implementation of double jumping adds a new element of height as you jump across balconies, fight enemies that can leap across buildings, and use cover to your advantage.

I also got used to the two main characters; Soph and Jess. As the daughters of the famous Terror Billy, the Blazkowicz daughters have big shoes to fill and are ready to go out and kill Nazis. As a couple of presumably-18 teenage girls, they are also one to goofing off which can be seen in the elevator sequences where the duo dance, make rude hand gestures at one another, and just generally screw around waiting for the killing to start up again. The game also acknowledges how ridiculous it is that a couple of young girls with no military experience but an arsenal of guns and some power armor are beating the crap out of a trained Nazi regiment. There are also “peps,” which are basically emotes that carry buffs. The Blazko sisters can give each other thumbs up, metal horns, or do a dance to give each other buffs.

What Youngblood sets itself in is the 80’s punk atmosphere. You’ll come across campy horror movies with a fascist twist, 80’s synth bands singing in German, and versions of comic books and other products that are reminiscent of real world things while also clearly being Nazi propaganda.

Youngblood ultimately tastes like half of a Wolfenstein game which fits that it was sold for half the price. On a 150/150 megabit internet connection with my Stadia hooked up by wifi and sitting about seven feet from the router, the picture quality never really dropped from a crisp image and outside of one big stumble I don’t think I would have fully recognized that the game was streaming if I hadn’t already been aware of it.

Now Destiny 2 on the other hand is trash, and I will dive into that more in my next piece.

As a note of humor, after several hours of playing I had forgotten that I left my session on public (anyone can drop in). A user came into my session without my noticing and left his microphone on, treating me to the creepy faint sound of an infant crying as I stealthily made my way through the Paris underground. I nearly jumped out of my seat at the loud “Papi, que estas jugando” coming over the speaker.

As another point of contention, the snapshot system in Stadia sucks. Sure it’s easy to take snapshots, but you can only view them from the app and there is no method to download your screenshots so I had to bring each one up on my phone, screenshot the photo, and then upload them to WordPress. The quality may have degraded.

It Came From Origin Premiere: Let’s Talk Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order

Boy what a ride.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is the most video game-ass video game to come from the AAA sector in recent memory. It makes me a bit sad to recognize the fact that this is the first Star Wars game in over a decade that feels like it was made foremost to be a fun game and not to be a vehicle for disgustingly greedy microtransactions. In fact, the game doesn’t have microtransactions period. I know, right? From a subsidiary of Electronic Arts and in 2019 no less.

There are a lot of things that Fallen Order does not have. It doesn’t have a tacked-on half-baked multiplayer mode that would be dead within a month. It does not have shoddily-implemented RPG mechanics to artificially extend the game’s lifetime by forcing the player to grind for gear with incrementally higher numbers. There are no daily missions, no loot boxes, no weekly checklists or login rewards. No season passes or ridiculous cosmetics to give Vade pink armor. It’s like the developers at Respawn fell out of 1998 and said “let’s make a modern Star Wars game.”

Fallen Order is set shortly after the events of Revenge of the Sith. The Jedi are mostly wiped out, Yoda and Obi Wan are headed to their respective hidey holes for the next couple of decades, and the newly formed Empire is on the prowl wiping out the good guys wherever they may be hiding. Luke and Leia are probably just reaching the age of saying their first words, so don’t count on them for help. You are Cal Kestis, a name you’ll probably forget about two minutes after hearing it. Cal is living his life as a normal scrap miner (who would have thought) when his life is flipped turned upside down; the Empire knows he’s a Jedi. With the help of the mysterious Cere Junda (played by Debra Wilson) and space pilot from Space Bronx Greez Dritus (Daniel Roebuck), your goal is to rebuild the Jedi Order.

1. Exploration Is Encouraged, Not Forced

Exploration in Fallen Order tastes like Respawn made a gumbo using a 50/50 blend of Metroid and Uncharted. You’ll visit several planets over your trip that amount to a variety of open world locations with twisted, winding paths and a variety of local wildlife. Each zone basically amounts to taking the long way to your goal while simultaneously opening up shortcuts for when you come back. And you’ll come back, they always come back. After all, you’ll need to return to the planets you’ve visited (of which there are roughly half a dozen) to unlock new areas.

As you journey through the world, you’ll obtain new force powers, upgrade your BD-1 unit to access more areas of the map, and find more unlockables. The unlockables are wholly optional and amount to new cosmetics, bits of lore, and doodads that incrementally increase your max health/force. The map is also very handy for showing you areas that you can access and those that you can’t, so you’ll never be scouring an area for a frustratingly long amount of time wondering where to go next.

2. The Darkest of Souls

I am legally obligated to point out that Fallen Order is the Dark Souls of Star Wars games, and the analogy actually works this time. Let me summarize: Fallen Order is a game where your capabilities in combat are tuned around timing your strikes, parries, and rolling dodges. You come up against enemies, many of whom can strike you down within a handful of well-placed hits. Defeating enemies grants you experience that translates into skill points that must be spent at meditation points. If you die in battle, you lose your accumulated unspent points and must go back and strike the NPC that hit you to get them back. Meditating, dying, and leaving resets all enemies on the map. For healing you have limited stims (estus flasks).

For Soulsborne fans, I recommend playing on higher difficulties. Respawn’s difficulty system is rather ingenious in that it doesn’t change much. Lower difficulties make enemies hit for less damage and moderately increase the parry window. Regardless, this game will beat the crap out of you on pretty much any mode except for Story Mode. You are expected to die, and die a lot.

3. Artificial Unintelligence

That being said, Fallen Order can be cheesed by playing the game in ways that it was clearly not meant to be played.

Fallen Order’s artificial intelligence is fantastic in a very closed environment. Respawn manages to keep a tense atmosphere from start to finish by pitting you in a world where even the lowliest stormtrooper can knock you silly if you aren’t careful enough. Enemies parry your attacks, anticipate your movements, and generally fight like intelligent creatures with real experience.

Pull it out of that environment, and Respawn’s AI falls apart. I was able to get through several areas that should have been difficult simply by force pulling mini-bosses into adjacent rooms. The mini-bosses didn’t understand the layout and ignored me bashing at them with my lightsaber while slowly waltzing back to their zone. Mobs will often just stop pursuing you at the boundary point between rooms at which point they just sort of shut off and won’t acknowledge your presence until you walk back into their zone. Even worse than the dead-brain mode when getting pulled into other rooms, I found that some mobs will just hit a kill switch and die if they wind up on unfamiliar terrain. It kills the atmosphere when you pull a mini-boss on to solid ground and he just keels over for no reason.

When it works, it works. The few lightsaber battles you’ll get into with Fallen Order’s bosses are some of the best since the old Star Wars Jedi Knight titles. You’ll go from getting your ass completely kicked by a boss to doing better, then even getting an advantage, and finally you’ll be finishing the fight without taking more than a couple of hits. And you’ll know that you accomplished that on your own, not because you min-maxed or overleveled the game but because you paid attention and learned the cues.

4. I F*#@ING LOVE STAR WARS

My interest in Star Wars in general has been rekindled thanks to the impressive launch of The Mandalorian, and Fallen Order couldn’t come at a better time for the franchise. This game has a lot of what you’d want out of a Star Wars Jedi game. Customizing your lightsaber? You can do it, even though it’s a thing you don’t exactly see the details of when it is slicing through a stormtrooper. Your lightsaber works like a lightsaber should, cutting things in half with ease. The game does make tougher enemies take more hits which can pull out of the experience, but you have to make some compromises otherwise you’d be the One Punch Man of a galaxy far far away.

Fighting AT-ST’s? Check. Scaling the side of an AT-AT Walker? Double check. One of my favorite bits showcasing the attention to detail is in the stormtrooper dialogue. You can sneak up on stormtroopers and hear them chattering amongst themselves (“it’s your turn to fill out casualty reports!”) and it’s just jump up on a group of soldiers to hear them amping themselves up for the battle only to see that enthusiasm drop away as their comrades fall one by one.

The gameplay and story are compelling enough to make you almost forget that Cal is on a path of failure. Yea, Fallen Order takes place within the canonical universe of Star Wars. In case you hadn’t noticed by the end of Return of the Jedi, the Jedi Order is still not a thing. The ending isn’t clear until well after the three quarter mark, when you kind of get an idea as to how everything is going to summarize itself. It is a powerful ending and one that makes sense in the greater universe. After all, the future does not know who Cal Kestis is.

If I had to nitpick, I’d also point out that the game does absolutely nothing to explain or acknowledge the fact that Cal respawns at meditation points when he dies, or the fact that zones respawn when you meditate. In Dark Souls the mechanic makes sense, here it’s thrown in with no real connection to the world or lore.

5. In Conclusion

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is not an open world RPG but instead a mostly linear storytelling experience with some optional exploration sprinkled in. It tells a great story though, one that gives me hope for the future of Star Wars as a video game franchise (one which ironically was also killed by the same publisher). Fallen Order has great characters, a fantastic story, and combat mechanics that keep the game exciting from the moment you pick it up to the moment you put it down and the credits roll.

Finishing the main story without doing much in the way of exploring the optional mechanics took me roughly fifteen hours and some change. Your mileage may vary. That said, there is little in the way of replayability outside of going back and roughing through the game at a higher difficulty.

If playing on PC, I highly recommend just footing the month of Origin Premiere and playing through Fallen Order over the weekend for $15 and then spend the rest of the month doing whatever with the remaining library of games. For Xbox or PS4? Rent it from your local Redbox. It’s a fantastic game by all means, but I feel like most people will be done with it once the first playthrough is over with.

2019 Developer Report Cards: Ubisoft Edition

Oh Ubisoft! What can I say about Ubisoft that hasn’t already been said about Flint’s water supply?

Ubisoft confuses me as a gamer and as a guy who writes about games. On one hand, they are constantly pulling maneuvers that make you wonder what chucklehead is driving the vehicle. On the other hand, they’re competent enough to put out some actually good games and fix what they screw up. Let’s look at Ubisoft’s 2019 releases.

Trials Rising: It came out, it sold copies. Honestly don’t have much to say about this one.
Far Cry: New Dawn – If you enjoyed Far Cry 5, New Dawn was basically an expansion pack’s worth of content at an expansion pack’s price of $40. If you enjoyed Far Cry 5 and wanted to see what happened following the rather crazy ending, well you pretty much got what you wanted. As far as Far Cry plots go, the story was fine. Just fine. It allegedly sold worse than Far Cry’s prior spinoffs including Primal so perhaps it would have been better off as a cheaper DLC release for Far Cry 5 instead of a standalone title.
Anno 1800: Anno 1800 marks the first of Ubisoft’s titles this year to go to the Epic Store for exclusivity on PC. It sparked quite a controversy since the title had already been available for pre-order on Steam before Ubisoft summarily yanked it. Not willing to let that controversy hold it back, Anno 1800 evidently went on to become the fastest selling Anno game. It also seems to be very well received by those who bought it, looking at Steam reviews.
The Division 2: And here is where Ubisoft first pooped the bed. By all means The Division 2 was exactly what a game sequel should be. It implemented a lot of lessons from its predecessor and actually fixed them instead of ignoring/exacerbating them. It wasn’t perfect, The Division 2 launched with some issues surrounding loot and the first raid was kinda crap because console players literally couldn’t handle it. And Ubisoft fixed most of those problems and has been supporting the game with some good content. Unfortunately for them the appetite of the general consumer base just wasn’t looking for another open world sequel and The Division 2 hasn’t quite lived up to expectations in terms of sales.
Ghost Recon: Breakpoint – If there is one positive thing that can be said about Breakpoint, it’s that it beat the sense back into Ubisoft (hopefully). Breakpoint is a dumpster fire that should have never been acceptable within Ubisoft and its failure not only snapped their stock price over its knee, it led to a restructuring of how Ubisoft approves games. Riddled with major game-breaking bugs, obviously half-assed systems, and drowning in microtransactions, Breakpoint shouldn’t have been this broken given how close it is to Wildlands. It serves as a reminder that Ubisoft’s titles are quickly hitting the singularity, becoming so blandly similar that they are hard to tell apart.
Just Dance 2020: I’m sure it will do just fine.

2019 also brought us changes in Ubisoft’s business plan, primarily the announcement and launch of Uplay+. This may come as a surprise, but I honestly don’t have much of a problem with Uplay+ from a consumer standpoint. As with any service, it’s a value proposition. If you want to keep buying your games and “own” them, whatever that means in a world where games as a service ties your playability to servers remaining online, you can still buy the game. If you want to spend $15 to binge some Ubisoft games for a month and then cancel, you can do that too. If you think that long term subscriptions in exchange for having the best versions of Ubisoft’s titles is worth it, go ahead. It’s as valuable as you think it is, and obviously Ubisoft knows this because it’s not mandatory in any sense.

I’d like to give Ubisoft a higher score for having their come to Jesus moment during the last gasp of 2019. Unfortunately their moment of lucidity was not due to personal reflection but due to the potential for financial ruin brought upon by the insane failure of Ghost Recon and the potential that their upcoming titles could perform worse, a game that they were all too happy to release in its state and with all of its microtransactions. At the same time, the company is not completely incompetent and has shown that it is somewhat capable of learning from mistakes. Ghost Recon has received a couple of patches since launch and they have promised more coming.

At the same time, this is a company that supports its products. Ultimately I have to give Ubisoft a B- for 2019. Let’s hope the failure of Ghost Recon: Breakpoint teaches them a lesson. Let’s also hope that I get around to making more of these report cards.

Review: The Outer Worlds

(Editor’s Note: I received a review copy of The Outer Worlds on Playstation 4. Given I have an Xbox Game Pass subscription and would have had access less than 24 hours later anyway, this has not changed my opinion on the game)

Why are you reading my review of The Outer Worlds? You can literally get access to this game right now on PC/Xbox One for $1 as part of the Xbox Game Pass trial subscription. Get the game, download it, play it, maybe read my review while it downloads? Buy an ewin racing chair using the MMO Fallout discount code (that’s promotional humor, please don’t kill me).

Those of you who read MMO Fallout may be aware that my passion for video game stories has, shall we say, waned a bit in recent years. I’m currently loving The Division 2 even though its plot is rather thin, but I play a lot of massively multiplayer games and that means that the story is pretty threadbare. It also doesn’t help that a lot of AAA games have gone toward the open world sandbox where you’re basically spending dozens of hours taking out bad guys you didn’t know before the mission and don’t care about after. Not all games, obviously, but enough that I have found it difficult to get engaged in stuff.

I have really been missing a good Obsidian-built world.

If you haven’t left this page and started downloading The Outer Worlds, let me just sum it up in one line: The Outer Worlds manifested itself when you were taking a bath and said “gee, I wish they would make a modern Fallout: New Vegas that wasn’t jank as hell.” I’d also like to sum up the humor of the game as taking the absurdity of Borderlands and stripping the memes away. Yea, it’s like that.

The Outer Worlds takes place in a futuristic science fiction world where the universe has been colonized and mega corporations run everything because William Mckinley was never assassinated and the United States did not legislate antitrust laws at that time. The game beats you over the head and neck with this narrative from the beginning where you create your character in a way that looks like you’re literally buying them from a store. You are part of a colony that was cryogenically frozen and for purely bureaucratic reasons your ship was never thawed out, left to become a myth as your people float around in the deepest recesses of space. You are rescued by an anti-corporate activist of sorts and land on a planet to start your journey pissing off the big corporation.

I made the comparison to Borderlands because The Outer Worlds is clearly an absurd story about intergalactic corporations and it knows how silly that concept is. The first person you come upon is a slogan-spouting corporate shill who gets angry if you try to heal him because he’s not allowed to use a competitor’s product. Your first experience with one of the megacorps is my personal favorite; Spacer’s Choice whose slogan is “it’s not the best choice, it’s Spacer’s Choice.” Spacer’s Choice sells products that are cheaply produced, low quality and prone to breaking, but very cheap to repair. There’s some dark humor, like how employee suicide is considered a crime of destroying company property.

One aspect of Obisdian storytelling that I love in The Outer Worlds is that choices are not specifically good or evil. Without spoiling any details, I had to think long and hard about the first major choice in the game. Your starting zone is a town based around a Saltuna factory (try the white chocolate saltuna!). You have numerous side quests that you’ll take on while helping out in the main story, but the gist of the conflict you find yourself in is that you need a power regulator to get off of the planet. The town has one and so do the deserters who left because they were getting screwed by Halcyon’s (the big umbrella megacorp) policies. The power generator cannot properly fuel both groups, so you need to act as arbitrator and figure out the best outcome.

Gameplay in The Outer Worlds is handled as a first person shooter. You can explore the multitude of indoor and outdoor areas, utilizing your various skills to hack computers, loot all the goods, and chat up the locals. As you would expect from an RPG made by Obsidian, there are many situations that you can either fight your way out of or, if your character has high enough speech skills, talk your way out of. Want to be a rootin-tootin bandit shootin desperado? You can do that. Want to go in with your sword and beat your enemies to a pulp? You can do that too. Want to be a smooth talking friendly type or intimidate your opposition into giving you what you want? Check and double check.

One aspect of The Outer Worlds that I can appreciate in theory but didn’t find much attachment to are flaws. Flaws are sort of a unique new feature that pop up once you have done a certain thing enough times. For example, getting hit with enough plasma damage will offer a “plasma weakness” flaw that has the effect of increasing plasma damage by 25% while also offering you one perk point. It’s an interesting idea, but your payout is always one perk point and frankly those just aren’t valuable enough to outweigh the detriments you receive. The game also doesn’t do a great job of explaining some of the more nuanced flaws, like a fear of heights decreasing your perception score while high up.

Loot in The Outer Worlds drops like someone’s making a profit off of it. It isn’t as excessive as it is in Fallout where you’ll find every piece of armor on a person’s body, but you do get plenty of resources and equipment from each person that you kill. Equipment can be tinkered with, modified, and broken down into its components to use on other items.

New Vegas players will love the breadth of freedom that you get for roleplaying in The Outer Worlds. There are dialogue choices out the wazzoo, and you’ll see indications for perception, science, medicine, persuasion, intimidation, and all sorts of options to talk your way through a situation. Want to be a corporate foot licker and do everything for the greater good of intergalactic capitalism? You go for it. Want to stick it to the man and eat the rich? You can do that too. The game gives you the opportunity (although I didn’t take it) to just rat out the guy who saved your life, since he’s a wanted criminal on the run from the greedy Board that controls the universe. You can do that, the game lets you, and apparently it takes the plot in quite a different direction.

Specializing in various skills unlocks a ton of information about the world. The barber? He just kinda prepares the dead for burial. The Saltuna factory whose workers are dealing with the plague? It’s not quite a plague and their remedy isn’t exactly medicine. In many games that I play, I tend to skip through a lot of the side characters commentary because it’s usually very unimportant to the overall plot. Whenever I get into a new area in The Outer Worlds, I am like a Presidential candidate going around and making sure I talk to everyone and see all of their dialogue choices.

Your character has access to a few tricks to survive, including time dilation which is a natural sequel to Fallout’s VATS. Activate time dilation and you’ll have a small period where time slows to a near crawl. Level up and that time increases. The shooting is not great; it is a marked improvement over the jankness of New Vegas but The Outer Worlds won’t be winning any awards for its combat system. Still, it’s more than serviceable despite it being occasionally difficult to keep track of your health in the middle of a fight.

Speaking of which, you may have noticed from the screenshots that The Outer Worlds has some very deep contrasting colors. For the most part they are beautiful. There are some points including one I have shown above where these colors make the game quite painful to look at. Literally. My eyes hurt after some segments where the screen blows out with bright neon colors.

The Outer Worlds is a beautiful game. I played it on a Playstation 4 Pro system and it worked fantastically. I plan on having a piece up once I find some time to start playing on PC.

MMO Fallout Reviews the EWin Champion Gamer Chair

Editor’s note: The chair being reviewed was provided by Ewinracing Corp.

Those of you who read MMO Fallout know that I am the prime authority on activities involving sitting on your duff. By day I am just a mild mannered MMO reporter, so I spend a lot of time typing on my laptop. Also by day I am a student attorney which means doing a lot of legal research, sitting in court, writing up stuff, and you guessed it…sitting down while I do those things. As a six-figured debted student, my history of chairs has generally fallen into the “what’s on clearance at Office Max” stack, chairs that are not exactly ergonomic, don’t provide lumbar support, and cost less than a new video game for a very good reason (low quality). Unsurprisingly, I’ve had some back problems arise from this.

So you can imagine my excitement when Ewinracing Corp reached out and wanted to talk business. If you don’t know who Ewinracing is, they sell those gaming chairs you might have seen your favorite Youtubers being sponsored by. They also sell gaming desks, tablet holders, and mini-PC sticks. I accepted the offer, and because I am a champion they shipped me out an Ewin Champion Series chair in my favorite color; Neon Green, and the rest as they say is about to be written in this review.

This is, without a doubt, the best chair I have ever sat in and Ewin was kind enough to not make me review this chair in the form of a Youtube video which is to everyone’s benefit. The chair itself is made of high-density separated foam over top a metal endoskeleton with a 120mm gas lift that claims to support up to 330 pounds. I am not close to two thirds of that weight, and it seemed rather unprofessional to purposely try to break the chair by hauling several people onto it in a way that it was not designed for, but given the metal skeleton I am willing to give EWin the benefit of the doubt and say that you should be good to go in terms of body support.

As far as office chairs go, this is a sturdy, sturdy bird. I did give the chair a heavy wiggle and bounce test to see how it held up as in my experience I’ve found that these self-assembled chairs tend to not feel completely secure, but the Ewinracing Champion Series chair is sturdy as a rock. If you have ever assembled an office chair, you already know what you’re doing here with the exception that there are covers for where the back screws into the base that you don’t normally find on other chairs. Even the bolts that come with the chair are thicker than I’m used to seeing, and add to the feeling of sturdiness that the Ewinracing chair provides.

The first thing you’ll notice about the chair if you are like me are the pillows. It is incredible how much of a difference some simple lumbar support can make on your sitting experience, and for the past few days I have sat in this chair and did not have to adjust myself or have any issues with back pain after prolonged sessions. The pillow is very comfortable and it can be adjusted higher on the chair if you’d prefer that kind of back support. As someone who is six feet tall with much of that height being in my legs, it’s refreshing to see a chair that rises high enough that my feet don’t touch the ground. In addition, the EWin chairs feature what they call “4D” adjustable armrests, which is really just a fancy way of saying that the armrests go up and down, rotate left and right, and even go forward and back. As someone who is rather finicky about my armrests, this is a big positive.

But when I received my chair, I wanted to know just one thing: Does the chair actually recline as much as it does in the videos, and is it as comfortable as they say it is? Short answer: Yes. I’ll be honest with you folks, this chair scared me the first three or four times I sat in it. I just had to check out one of the major advertised features of the EWin racing chair, that being that it reclines back to a point that on a regular office chair would just lead to the whole thing toppling backwards. Unlike a regular office chair, the Ewin gaming chairs have their center of gravity closer to the back of the chair.

This allows you to recline to a point where someone might just be able to check your teeth given proper lighting. It’s terrifying the first few times you do it, because anyone who has taken a spill backwards over their office chair knows that they are not generally designed to recline like this and stay upright with a person leaning all the way back. This isn’t anything to do with the chair itself, which I will reiterate is completely sturdy and gives no indication or reason to believe that it isn’t stable. After a few times reclining the headrest back, I can comfortably lay back on my Ewin chair without the fear of the thing toppling over and me injuring myself on the hardwood floor. It’s perfect for veg out sessions watching Netflix on the TV that is way too large for my tiny room. I recommend getting used to the idea by lowering the chair to a point where your feet are still planted on the floor while the chair is all the way back.

The shape of the chair itself forces your back into a healthy posture, and while it does feel weird at first, you pretty quickly get used to it.

Now let’s talk about negatives of which I can think of very few. The Ewinracing chair is as heavy as you would expect a thick metal framed chair to be, and this could be an issue during assembly if you are buying it because you have a really bad back and assembling a standard chair is already an issue. The chair itself is also very firm, which people who like a soft chair might find disagreeable although the pillows should take care of any of those complaints. There’s also the matter of cost of which this chair is roughly $350. Three hundred fifty smackers is going to sound like a lot for a “gaming chair,” especially when you don’t have the luxury of sitting in the chair beforehand like you do at most office stores.

After having the opportunity to try out what in my opinion are the best gaming chairs in the business, if Ewinracing contacted me and said they needed the chair back, I would happily pay for the chair to just be able to keep it. Don’t tell anyone that I said that. Yes, it’s easy to say that a product is a great value when it is provided for free, but I can say with complete confidence that the Ewinracing Gaming Chair is worth every penny.

Photographed: The clearance office chair

Thankfully you don’t have to spend every penny to get one of your own. If you head over to the official website, you can get 25% off of your purchase of an Ewin gaming chair with the coupon code “mmofallout” (without the quotation marks).

I want to thank the folks at Ewingaing Corp for offering up this great opportunity.

[Review] Fallout 76 Is A Roaring Dumpster Fire

For all intent and purpose, Fallout 76 could have billed itself as Fallout 4 With Multiplayer, and people would be knocking down the walls to get in. Set in Appalachia, West Virginia, Fallout 76 is a Frankenstein’s Monster of various systems coming together in the hopes of providing an interesting, engaging experience. In reality, Bethesda pushed out a title that highlights the worst of its franchise while mostly ignoring what Fallout has always done best.

Fallout 76 is an open world multiplayer sandbox. As has become a series staple, you the player are a vault dweller who at the start of the game finds themselves pushed into the post-apocalyptic wasteland to do mostly whatever you want. The meat and potatoes of the game sits with the various quests that players will take on from letters, holotapes, and robots that dot the land.

Bethesda’s decision to remove all of the NPCs and replace them with holotapes and robots has been called ambitious and it absolutely is in the same sense that being too cheap and lazy to shrinkwrap my windows is an ambitious take on the Buffalo cold winters. It feels like a natural conclusion to assume that Bethesda’s lack of human NPCs has less to do with immersive storytelling and more to do with not wanting to spend the time and resources on drawing, building, and animating those characters, preferring instead to recycle Mr. Handy models and stationary computers.

Todd Howard stated that Fallout 76 is Bethesda’s most ambitious project, and I can’t for the life of me find out where all that extra work went. Visually, the game looks worse than Fallout 4, there are clearly less resources put into animating characters and scenes that might be found in a Fallout game. The assets are 99% recycled from previous Fallout games, evidence has come to light that enemies like the Scorchbeast had their AI code copied and pasted from Skyrim’s dragons, and the only thing new to the game seems to be the occasionally functioning online play.

By all counts, Fallout 76 would be an impressive undertaking by a more competent group of programmers. Unfortunately, Bethesda is not that group. Perhaps analogous to the ultimate demise of Telltale Games, a company that refused to fix its aging, janky engine and ultimately paid the price for it, Fallout 76 appears to be floundering in a market where Bethesda previously seemed impervious to releasing a title that didn’t easily bring in more revenue than the GDP of a small country. It’s telling how seriously Bethesda is taking Fallout 76’s apparently disappointing performance, because they’ve actually started/committed to fixing bugs that have been present in the engine for several titles now.

Fallout 76 is a landscape of wonderfully, shall we say, unique bugs. My character occasionally gives off a grunt like they’re being hit when nobody is around, like they’ve stubbed their toe but without taking any damage. I was forced to quit the game on several occasions because the depth of field bugged out causing the game to look nauseatingly blurry when walking around. I’ve hit points where my character will holster and then refuse to pull out whatever weapon I have equipped, where weapons/grenades get randomly unequipped, and where my character will simply not attack. Then of course there’s the building pop-in, where entire buildings will just not render and take minutes to show up. This would be unacceptable in an alpha release, but Fallout 76 wants sixty bucks for this amateur showing.

Todd Howard stated that you would never see a server for Fallout 76, and you won’t…unless of course you happen to have the bad luck of being placed on an unstable server and find yourself hopelessly hacking, whacking, and smacking against enemies that refuse to acknowledge your hits or find yourself smashing that play button only for the game to repeatedly tell you that there are no worlds available. They, on the other hand, have absolutely no trouble landing hits on your character in spite of any server lag. You may also acknowledge the server when, for instance, you fail a timed mission because the node you were required to hit simply didn’t feel like responding in time.

Sharing a world with other players is both a godsend and a curse upon Fallout’s gameplay. On one hand, Bethesda shakes up the formula by allowing people to tackle towns of scorched, mutants, or super mutants with friends and strangers. On the other hand they risk trivializing certain elements of the game as while player acts are constant, loot is not.

In my experience, this led to numerous incidences where otherwise high level safes or locked doors were wide open, allowing anyone to loot their delicious innards just because someone at some prior point came through the same building. Bethesda loves adding quests into their games that require players to navigate buildings only to provide an easy way out once they find the macguffin. Because the door then does not shut for an indeterminate amount of time, anyone else taking on the same mission can simply walk in and finish the quest in a snap. This also means entering buildings with the goal of finding a mission item or to kill a specific NPC, only to find your target has already been taken by another player at some unspecified time. With the time it takes them to respawn, you’re honestly better off just going and doing something else.

Then there’s the fact that a high level character can really ruin your experience. Enemies in most areas will automatically scale to the highest level player nearby, which means that if you the level 10 player are rolling around Grafton, you’re going to encounter generally level 10-15 super mutants. If Remy Remington and his clan of level 60+ hunters decides to take a stroll through the city, however, you’re suddenly going to find yourself getting steamrolled by level 60+ super mutants with crazy stats and buffs, making the area completely unplayable until those players leave.

The worst part about playing Fallout 76 is the knowledge that there is something fun hidden under all of the technical issues. I like the world building elements like how every pack of perk cards comes with a joke and a stick of gum, or the various stories involving the war. Bethesda can do a lot with this game as an online living world and they plan to do so with in-game events, opening new vaults in further expansions, etc. If Bethesda can fix the more glaring bugs and create some semblance of an ongoing story that updates every so often, that would be great.

I’d like to see a few of the prior Fallout staples come back into Fallout 76, like the ability to combine identical weapons in order to repair them. Weapons and especially armor break far too damn fast in this game, and you’re constantly on the lookout for items to make adhesive because if you’re like me you’ll be consistently out of it due to how much goes into repairing each piece of gear. I’d like bobble heads to be items that offer permanent bonuses for having them in your inventory, even if that means they have to be scaled down a bit, rather than consumables that offer minor enhancements for just a couple of minutes.

I haven’t engaged in any PvP since launch simply for the fact that the feature is mostly vestigial and few people outside of hackers even use it, and the same goes for VATS. In terms of player vs player combat, Bethesda should just remove their current system and replace it with one for consensual duels and clan wars. Attacking someone in Fallout 76 is pointless since, unless they attack back, you can expend your inventory worth of ammunition and do enough damage to be nullified with a single stimpack. VATS on the other hand is a barely functioning mess that winds up being less accurate than simply aiming and firing your weapon. Odds are you will completely ignore both of these features in your time playing Fallout 76.

And I haven’t talked much about the story because frankly I can’t find much attachment to it. There are no human NPCs in Fallout 76, this much has been made obvious, but Bethesda for some reason decided to tie a number of missions to radio distress calls that you need to respond to. The implication of course is that you’ll rescue someone, but you already know that whatever you come across is going to be dead, transformed into a ghoul, or a robot. That removes a fair amount of the suspense and interest. Otherwise questing rolls down to hearing about the lives of people who have lived before you, and are already dead or moved out of the area. It’s interesting, but only to an extent.

If Fallout 76 is the most ambitious project that Bethesda has ever worked on, well a lot of people need to be fired for sheer incompetence. The state that this game is in is one that wouldn’t be acceptable for an indie developer early access launch, let alone a AAA developer with more money than God selling it for $60. I’m sure there are plenty of people who can find enjoyment out of the game as it is, but I’m not one of those people.

Verdict: 1/5 – Fallout 76 is an exercise in frustration that only gets worse the longer you play. What little redeeming qualities that the game has are overshadowed by crashing servers, crashing clients, lazy coding, persistent bugs, and other technical issues.

[Column] Bulkhead Interactive Asks Community To Manipulate Steam Reviews

Bulkhead Interactive is playing with fire, and I have a feeling they’re going to get burned.

World War 2 shooter Battalion 1944 currently stands at a 31% “Mostly Negative” rating on Steam, with 115 currently playing users and an all time peak of 16,341. Earlier today, Bulkhead’s community manager posted a thread on the game’s Reddit page asking the community to review, which can be very easily interpreted as “review positively,” especially given the explicitly stated goal of this campaign is to improve the game’s recent review score from mostly negative to mostly positive.

The statement very coyly tries to avoid any guaranteed accusations of review manipulation by telling players that their reviews can be positive or negative, it doesn’t matter as long as they’re giving their feedback. I have to wonder who Bulkhead thinks they’re fooling by trying to play dumb, especially when comments like the one below are being made to players who say that they enjoy the game, but don’t want to give a positive review because the player base is so small. Since Battalion is an online-only multiplayer game with no bots, the low player base can make the game nigh unplayable at off-peak hours.

“Player numbers are not the game that you’re reviewing, is the game good is the question.”

So give the game a positive or negative review, it doesn’t matter, just remember that you’re not to review the game based on criteria that we (Bulkhead) don’t approve of. Specifically criteria that would make the game look bad, like its low player count. Bulkhead even went so far as to dangle an incentive for getting the review score up, noting such feat as a prerequisite for the company to hold a sale.

“Any player who would like to leave a review, please do so as soon as possible. The reason being is that we would like to see the ‘Recent Reviews’ change as soon as possible, so that we can do our first sale. It’s a very achievable task but one that requires the community, new players, devs, and old players to work together.”

Valve Terminates Insel Games (Wild Buster) Over Fraudulent Reviews

Valve today announced the immediate termination of its dealings with Insel Games. According to the news post, Valve employees discovered that Insel was using accounts to post fake positive reviews for their titles.

It has been recently reported on Reddit that the publisher for this game, Insel Games Ltd., have been attempting to manipulate the user review score for their titles on Steam. We have investigated these claims, and have identified unacceptable behavior involving multiple Steam accounts controlled by the publisher of this game. The publisher appears to have used multiple Steam accounts to post positive reviews for their own games. This is a clear violation of our review policy and something we take very seriously.

For these reasons, we are ending our business relationship with Insel Games Ltd. and removing their games from our store. If you have previously purchased this game, it will remain accessible in your Steam library.

This affects all of Insel’s titles on Steam, including Wild Buster and Guardians of Ember, as well as The Onion Knights: Definitive Edition. The controversy sparked after an email emerged on Reddit allegedly from the CEO of Insel Games showing the company pressuring its employees to buy the game and leave fake positive reviews.

(Source: Steam)

2017’s Predictions Revisited: How Did We Do?

It’s that time of year, folks, where MMO Fallout looks back on our predictions for this year in order to hand ammunition to the very people who regularly remind me that I have no idea what I’m talking about. This year I did pretty well, out of 30 mostly serious predictions I would say that I only got about 6 wrong.

And when you’re done remembering the year, take a gander at this list of tips to keep your memory sharp into your 50s.

So let’s recap.

Nostalrius getting a cease and desist and Blizzard announcing Pristine Servers: Nailed it on both counts, minus the part about Nostalrius allowing the cease and desist to escalate to a full on lawsuit.
Laura K Dale would continue leaking Switch news: Also true, although we will never really know if Nintendo tracked down the person leaking the information.
Steam overloaded with trash games: Yep, in the form of Steam Direct, Valve has never allowed so many shysters and con artists on their platform as they did in 2017.
Firefall shut down: Called this one, although the folks at Red5 didn’t even bother to acknowledge the allegedly existing console version when announcing the PC sunsetting.
Pathfinder Online will shut down: 100% wrong on this one.
SAG strike ends: Called this one on all accounts, that there would be concessions on both sides and people would go back to not pretending to care about voice actors receiving residuals.
Trions Worlds would bungle a launch: This is like predicting that the sun will rise, so I’m not exactly looking for kudos.
Phantasy Star Online 2 still not coming to the west: And it still isn’t.
MMOs launching in the East and dying before coming to the west: Kritika Online has already shut down in Southeast Asia before coming to Europe/Americas.
Decent selling HD remakes with extras: Kingdom Hearts, Metroid, among other games.
HD Remakes with microtransactions: As sure-fire as it seemed, I’m pretty sure that not a single game released an HD remake with microtransactions shoved in.
Resident Evil 7 the first major VR game and streamers: Both happened, first being that Resident Evil 7 was a smashing success for VR and a streamer eventually did make a video that he crapped his pants.
South Park: South Park released and it could indeed be summed up as “pretty good,” and the game was criticized for its poop jokes.
Activision and Call of Duty: Well Activision didn’t hold development on Call of Duty, but WWII was a return to the series roots, and Activision has not explicitly addressed the falling sales from Infinite Warfare.
No Man’s Sky gets updates, no players: Half correct on this, did not anticipate that people would flock back to No Man’s Sky in the numbers that they did.
Bulletstorm Flops: It did, and odds are you’ll find Bulletstorm heavily discounted at your local game store. Currently Bulletstorm has less than 10 people playing, and peaked at launch at 1,200.
Video game movies: Only one video game movie released stateside this year, the Resident Evil film. It didn’t underperform in box offices, but I’m guessing most of you already forgot about it.
Daybreak becoming a home for wayward developers: Stay tuned.
Valve being sued: Did not happen.
Governments will pay attention to lockboxes: It’s starting to happen, although gamers are not seeing the inherent worthlessness of these boxes in many games.
Troll games and Ukranian money laundering: Troll games have become more prevalent on Steam, and the platform is definitely still being used for money laundering by Ukranian developers.
Yooka-Laylee Launch: Right on this one, the game launched and it was pretty well received.
Game from ex-STALKER developers: I’m going to fit Escape from Tarkov into this list.
Star Citizen misses its release dates: All of them.
Camelot Unchained: The game didn’t launch, therefore the rest of the prediction is meaningless.
Conan Exiles launches, Funcom realizes that developing MMOs is pointless: Yep, enough that they decided to reboot The Secret World as a non-MMO.
Darkfall Reboots: They launched but have not yet cannibalized each other.
H1Z1 will bring on new lead developers: 99% sure this happened.
I get a lawsuit threat from an indie developer: More than once.
John Smedley joins new startup: Of course he did.

Review: Secret World Legends

Secret World Legends is a reboot in the sense that the second verse to a song is a reboot to the first. Functionally it follows the same ebb and flow, but it feels like somewhere along the way the lead singer/manager died, only to be replaced by the studio label’s brand manager who doesn’t so much care about playing sick tunes at the next small gig as he does monetizing the band to death. The end result reminds me a lot of City of Steam, a fun game that didn’t do so well in revenue and as such was resurrected as a shambling money zombie to the detriment of the community and ultimately the game’s viability as people left for greener pastures.

After heavily considering whether I want to review a game that is now several months old and rebooted from a five year old title, I guess you can already tell my answer.

1. Let’s Talk Praise, Before I Tear It Apart

I’ll be the first to admit that my memories of The Secret World are as biased as they can get, owing to the 2012 launch and accompanying alternate reality games that were ridiculously cool. I can still remember sitting at my computer with a few thousand people watching CCTV camera footage of a park in Montreal where one of the chat members met up with secret agents (actors) and was given the next piece of the puzzle as we all tried to crowdsource this intricate puzzle.

Since the meat of Secret World Legends is pretty much on par with The Secret World, I think it’s safe to start with its two big draws; questing and the world. The secret world of the Secret World is one of myths, legends, and conspiracies. Imagine that everything you read on the internet is true, from living mummies in Egypt to vampires in Transylvania, swamp zombies in New England and filth in Tokyo. The Illuminati, the Dragon, and the Templars are very powerful entities unlike in the real world where contractual obligations require me to state that the Illuminati is certainly not controlling your everyday life via radio waves. You once again don the uniform of and join one of the three factions in their bid to stop the end of the world, mostly to forward their own purposes.

Missions vary greatly in length and complexity, from the simple “kill x creatures” jobs to 29 tier journeys that can take more than an hour to complete. Because a lot of the puzzles involve knowledge of Morse code, bible scripture, and 18th century musicians, the game has helpfully built in a web browser to assist you in looking up the answers. As well as aiding in learning about the world in which you inhabit, missions also go far into establishing the plot and actors that you’ll be encountering along the way. I’m not lying about that knowledge of bible scripture by the by, a fair amount of puzzles early on will require you to source from the Good Book.

One of my favorite parts of the story is in the scorched desert which features a series of quests that are basically stripped right out of an Indiana Jones movie. You even get to have a prolonged series of fights on a moving train. Many of the quests start and end with fully voiced cutscenes, and while the voice acting and animations aren’t always so great, it’s a nice change from the walls of quest text that still permeate most games in the medium.

Combat is, and I know this is something of an unpopular opinion, better than the average traditional MMO, and I can give me sound reasoning. While combat does devolve into the usual MMO repetition of the same five buttons in specific orders, each fight tends to last just long enough that you don’t feel like you’re grinding out, and short enough that each trash mob doesn’t feel like busywork. The game encourages you to keep moving by giving most enemies some form of powerful area-effecting attack, so Secret World Legends basically drip feeds you enough adrenaline to keep it from getting World of Warcraft quest-grind level boring.

But now that I’ve talked about my two favorite parts of Secret World Legends, let’s get the rest of this over with.

2. The Sheer Incompetence Of It

If you want to understand the criminal incompetence of handling in regards to The Secret World, all you have to do is look at the fact that people from Funcom went to actual, physical prison over fraud and corruption related to this game. Criminal incompetence is a term that I’ve used for a long time in regards to The Secret World, and it is still applicable to Secret World Legends, but worse. If The Secret World was held together with duct tape and chewing gum, Secret World Legends feels like the dry gum was hastily covered in a sign that says “nothing broken here.”

To further explain my point, I hit a spot while leveling where the story mode had become completely impossible to progress. I leveled up my character and managed to reach the Scorched Desert, the first desert area. At one point, the main story tells you to complete a quest called “A Time to Every Purpose” for your contact Said before he will let you continue. Funny story, though: This mission is bugged and has been so since long before the relaunch in July. At one point in the mission, you have to craft two items in succession in order to progress, and sometimes the second just won’t craft. At all, for no reason. It also doesn’t help that this quest highlights some of the user interface chunks that are no longer functioning but remain in the game anyway.

After reading through numerous conflicting theories on how to fix said glitch via Reddit and the official forums, I eventually found a method that worked for me. You craft the first item and then leave the area, log out, and come back which resets the quest but doesn’t remove the first item from your inventory. Get to the point where you craft the items and just craft the second item. Voila! Using a glitch to fix another glitch.

Like the pyramids that dot the Egyptian landscape, many of these bugs are old and decrepit. The fact that many of these bugs have been in the game for months and still haven’t been fixed is depressing, the idea that some have been around on and off since the original launch is downright pathetic. It’s indicative of a company that is either grossly incompetent or pitifully understaffed, but considering that Funcom’s history of MMOs seems to be one unmitigated disaster of a launch after another (Anarchy Online and Age of Conan, followed by The Secret World and Lego Minifigures), I’m inclined to believe that the answer lies in both theories.

The game just finished its Halloween event which is effectively just a reboot of an event from several years ago. The event had major, progression blocking bugs including one where a portal you had to step through to continue the quest just wouldn’t appear, for no reason.

3. R-E-C-Y-C-L-E Recycle! Make Gear Grinding Boring Again.

Let’s talk about loot and gear progression in Secret World Legends, more specifically how underwhelming both aspects of the game are. It’s important that we talk about both in the same section as they specifically go hand in hand.

Secret World Legends doesn’t much care about its loot, it knows that 9.9 times out of 10 you’re going to stick with what you have equipped and as such has no problem feeding you tons of junk with every completed mission. At the beginning of the game, you’ll pick your first primary and secondary weapons, a task that the game forces you to do before you even know what each weapon really does, and then locks the rest away behind some pretty aggressive currency grind. Rather than feed you a steady drip of increasingly fancy looking gear, Secret World Legends has you to level up your equipment by feeding it similar equipment, which are obtained via random bags given as rewards for completing missions. A mission might give you a weapon bag, a glyph bag, and a talisman bag, or some combination of the three.

While I like the idea of being able to upgrade your gear, the manner in which Secret World Legends seems to rely almost entirely on feeding garbage into your weapons in order to slowly level them seems to cut entire swaths of content out of the game. It isn’t like, well every single other MMO where part of the reason to play is the hopes that you’ll get some cool piece of gear. It makes completing quests feel less rewarding, not to mention raids/dungeons, as your best bet at sweet loot is some junk that you’ll recycle to incrementally boost your existing gear. Get used to staring at the same weapon for most of your time playing, because especially after the first few levels there isn’t much of a reason to start leveling up a new weapon.

So here you have an MMO with unsatisfying loot and virtually nonexistent gear progression. The more you level up and upgrade your gear to higher ranks, the longer it takes to get the pieces necessary to perform those upgrades. But hey, the cash shop is always there to speed that progression up, a sad reminder that certain elements of the game were functionally crippled in order for Funcom to try and make some extra moolah off of the free to play transition, at the expense of fun and, if it mimics The Secret World, long term financial stability and player loyalty.

4. Funcom’s Generosity With Loot boxes

One thing you may have noticed is that I’ve been talking about loot gained through mission rewards, and I haven’t said much about loot gained through monster drops. This is simple, monsters don’t drop loot. There are named boss creatures that roam around the map that will drop loot, usually just a random item bag, but monsters in Secret World Legends only drop one thing: Loot boxes. They drop a ton of loot boxes, and nothing else. According to the game, my character has 50 hours invested into it right now. In that time, I have managed to accumulate around 150 loot boxes.

Now that translates to one box on average every 20 minutes, which doesn’t sound so bad and also doesn’t take into account the amount of time spent not killing anything. In reality when you’re killing mobs, these things drop every few minutes. This still wouldn’t be a problem, after all I play Neverwinter and that game drops loot boxes like candy, but that’s coupled with the fact that mobs drop nothing else. Literally the only loot that drops from standard level mobs needs to be unlocked with real money.

It also doesn’t help that the loot box drops are nearly completely worthless. Barring the very rare cosmetic item, of which I have yet to obtain a single one from my daily patron keys, the loot boxes drop distillates and pretty much nothing else. Distillates are items that are used to further increase the experience on your gear, so one of the perks of a patron subscription is you get to boost your gear up every day by a certain amount.

This generosity also expands to the game’s varied dungeons, where your limited daily keys can be used in dungeon lootboxes to obtain even more distillates and junk gear to feed your inventory.

5. Yet I Keep Coming Back

I have very little reason to believe that my time in Secret World Legends will extend beyond completing the story, frankly I have neither the intent nor the willpower to continue the endless grind via repeating missions to continue leveling various weapons and equipment pieces. My character just hit level 50, and is about the venture into the relatively unknown lands of Transylvania. Even then, I’m feeling my interest waning in continuing on with the story after making the arduous journey essentially back to where I left off from the abandoned The Secret World.

Verdict: 2.5/5 – Secret World Legends feels bad all around, from the enhanced combat system that doesn’t actually change much to forcing the existing community to either forgo their characters and in some instances purchases to start over or be left behind on the abandoned-yet-still-operating-until-Funcom-arbitrarily-kills-it-for-lack-of-players The Secret World, while ignoring issues that have been present in the game for years. It strips content from the original game, some for the better, while crippling other parts for the sake of the cash shop and loot boxes. While the missions are still engaging, gear progression is a mind-numbing snore and another function crippled for the sake of selling you lootboxes.

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