Redwolf's Journal (continued)

It says something about the game industry when every review I've seen* for The Division 2 starts by giving Ubisoft/Massive basis recognition for releasing an online looter-shooter in a state that is functional and works as a complete game. Consumers in the online/games-as-service market have been getting burned for a while now. Destiny 2 was widely regarded as a large step back from the point Destiny had reached, having to retread a lot of the same development ground to to become a comparable game. Fallout 76 was a technical mess followed by PR disasters one after another for Bethesda. Anthem's recent release was questionable, at best, being much stripped down in detail from previews, having very little endgame content, and suffering from more fundamental design issues around loot. These have been rather disappointing times. The Division 2 doesn't feel like a huge leap over the first game, but it does feel like the developers have been learning rather than starting from sc

I have heard such a ridiculous amount of gender-related politics associated with the movie that I really tried to start tuning it out, but it still kept popping up in my regular news "feeds." Still, I knew it was a question of when I'd see it rather than if. And, y'know, it's good. It's held back from greatness by a few things like the baggage of being another origin movie and fitting into an existing timeline. I have no particular problem with Brie Larson's acting here. She doesn't reach the level of "OMG, no one else could play this character!" but I think that's actually more due to Carole Danvers not being quite so iconic as, for example, Tony Stark. So that's more on the character and writing than the actress in my opinion. The supporting cast, including a younger Nick Fury, all work for me. The "twist" in the story works fine for me. It meshes well with at least one question I had early on, though it raises at leas

I seem to have been on a bit of a tactical scifi kick lately, including the seven books (thusfar) of the On Silver Wings series. From a raw, technical standpoint I have to say the books could use a little more proofreading. I'm guessing these were largely self-published online as an increasing number of books these days seem to be, and there is a little bit of a quality difference there with company published ones, usually. It wasn't so bad to really interfere with anything, but I did notice. The series itself follows a (for the beginning) sergeant Sorilla Aida, part of a Green Beret-descended special operations team for the SolCom. Earth here isn't fully united, but it's less divided than it is in present day, with humanity building starships and using jump technology to expand and colonize several other systems. Implants are heavily used for communications and interfacing with technology. There are some definite scifi leaps there, but there's also an attempt to

So, I ended up putting a fair bit of time into  The Division  before moving on (I think largely to Warframe at the time). It had ups and downs, but was entertaining and with a reasonable gameplay/loot loop through most of the time I played. So, naturally, I've been keeping some attention for the sequel. Over the weekend, they did their open beta - a first chance for me to take it out for a spin in any way. As a consumer/player , this is the sort of "beta" I actually like. That is to say, it came across more as a preview than a beta test . A few early story missions were available for play, along with a few side missions. Then you get access to a pre-built max-level character and one endgame mission (which uses the same map from one of the earlier story missions with different enemies). I didn't sample everything. That was a given as I'm not much of a PVP player. The experience was a good slice of things, though - exactly the sort of thing a prospective player wo