Tag: xbone

2506: Fifteen

Well, it’s Final Fantasy XV day and I’ve spent a good five or six hours playing it this evening.

It’s good. Real good.

I haven’t progressed that far in the story as yet as it’s simply fun to wander around exploring, doing sidequests and listening to the soundtracks of old Final Fantasy games while the gang drive around in their car. However, I’m very much looking forward to the world opening up a bit more — I’m penned in to a relatively “small” area at the moment by barricades that prevent going more than a certain distance by road or on foot — and seeing what is out there to discover.

Even in this fairly fenced-off starter area it’s clear that it’s going to be a fun ride, though. In particular, I’m very much enjoying the combat; far from being a hack-and-slash action game along the lines of something like Kingdom Hearts, it manages to blend what looks like fast-paced action with relatively strategic, cerebral combat that rewards careful positioning and exploitation of enemy resistances and weaknesses.

And the world of Eos is one simultaneously filled with wonderment and pleasingly familiar mundanity. In the first few hours, I’ve spent time at a seaside resort, a motel and a truck stop, but also fought recurring Final Fantasy monsters such as goblins and flans, and run away screaming at the sight of an Iron Giant. I’ve hunted down groups of monsters and fished up a meal for a stray cat. And I’ve witnessed the devastation that Niflheim wreaked on protagonist Noctis’ home city of Insomnia.

And the music. Dear lord. I already knew that the soundtrack was going to be something special from the preview tracks I’d previously heard, but the full experience is something else. Multiple battle themes according to the context make me very happy indeed, particularly as they’re all wonderfully energetic, blasting pieces full of drama and excitement. But the more incidental music is very pleasant, too, changing according to the time of day and your surroundings and, in settlements, adjusting its mix according to whether you’re inside or outside.

The whole concept of it being “a fantasy based on reality” has been pulled off very effectively so far. The world and the places you visit are all very plausible and realistic, but overlaid on the top of all that is the wonderful sci-fi/fantasy blend that Final Fantasy has been so good at for years. It really, really works as a setting, and I’m looking forward to exploring it in more depth over the coming weeks.

For now, though, as I have an eight-hour shift to work tomorrow and I have a cold coming on, I should probably call it a night there. Probably.

2304: Blizzard’s New Phenomenon

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I know I wrote about Overwatch the other day, but having been, well, present on the Internet for the past few days I think it’s fairly safe to declare that Blizzard has an honest-to-goodness phenomenon on its hands.

Overwatch’s open beta (read: free demo — the best marketing tool they could have possibly used) ended at the start of this week, but people haven’t stopped talking about it since. They also haven’t stopped producing fan art, incorporating Overwatch characters into memes and cartoon strips, discussing strategies, taking the piss out of people who play nothing but Bastion and admiring Tracer’s admittedly fine posterior.

It’s kind of remarkable, really, because it seems to have come out of nowhere and evolved organically without a trace of interference from the marketing or PR machines. A few weeks ago, I knew very little about Overwatch and had little interest in it; after a couple of days with the beta on both PS4 and PC, I’m well and truly sold and am happily enjoying the wealth of fan-made content that’s been produced seemingly in just the last few days.

Blizzard has always been a somewhat unconventional developer-publisher, producing wildly popular games that eschew popular conventions — mechanically, aesthetically and even functionally. Their insistence on using their own proprietary client Battle.Net to distribute, update and even sell their latest games initially drew criticism — particularly in the case of Diablo III — but as the world has become more and more comfortable with the idea of being always online and multiplayer-centric titles, these complaints have started to fade into the background until now, Blizzard’s ecosystem allows it to have extremely successful titles without having to rely on the more established distribution channels such as Steam.

Overwatch’s stealth marketing is another example of this. While there have been TV spots, video ads and site takeovers for the game, it has never felt like an aggressive marketing push in the same way that a Call of Duty or a Battlefield sees. Instead, Blizzard chose to rely on the most powerful marketing tool in the world these days: word of mouth. Putting their absolute confidence in their game and releasing it to the public for free for a few days achieved more than any multi-million dollar marketing campaign ever would; it allowed people to try the game for themselves and either confirm that yes, they did want to play it, or, in many cases, sate their curiosity as to what it was all about. In more than one case, the satiation of that curiosity has led to additional sales.

So why is Overwatch such a phenomenon? Well, a lot of it has to do with its striking visual design — it’s immediately recognisable — but I think the biggest contributing factor is its wildly varied selection of playable characters. There’s something for everyone in Overwatch’s cast, whether you’re into moody, dark types; big, stompy robots; hot girls; cute girls; frightening muscle-bound girls who probably have a Tumblr page; Westerns; sci-fi… there’s a bit of everything. And somehow despite this massive variety in its cast, Overwatch feels coherent and none of its characters feel like token inclusions.

This, naturally, leads to people picking favourites — never underestimate the power of the waifus! — which, in turn, leads to people producing fan-created content based on their favourite characters. And, from there, other fans can enjoy this content and express how much they like their favourite character through sharing these fan-made productions or engaging with the artists. Over time, a whole meta-community outside of the game builds up, even bringing in people who don’t actually play the game but just like watching it, or appreciate the art direction, or like the look of the characters.

In short, Blizzard would have to do something absolutely spectacular right now to fuck up Overwatch. I’m really looking forward to giving the full version a go at the end of the month, and if you’re up for a multiplayer rumble in its wonderfully colourful world, be sure to hit me up.