Gaming
Review: Episode Prompto, Putting Together the Missing Pieces
After the 10-year wait for Final Fantasy XV, it released with a flurry of mixed reviews from fans and critics. Being a long time Final Fantasy fan, I have to say, that I was one of the people who really enjoyed the visceral and large open world of Final Fantasy XV. I purchased the season pass based on the promised episodic character DLC and eventually a multiplayer DLC. Unfortunately, the Season Pass has been a giant let down so far, Episode Prompto Included.
For anyone that has done a full playthrough of Final Fantasy XV, you’ll know that these single character focused episodes fill the missing pieces from the main story, bits where party members went missing for inexplicable amounts of time. After completing the hour and a half long DLC, Episode Prompto, I was quite disappointed.
First, let’s talk about the story in Episode Prompto. I actually really enjoyed the story. I loved getting a chance to explore Prompto’s dark past, however, it could have been delivered better. Having all of this information crammed into an hour and a half felt rushed. Prompto finds out where he came from, faces his fears, and defeats a major enemy in this amount of time. Prompto seems like he could possibly be the least generic character from FFXV, and it would have been great to have more time with him.
Somehow Episode Prompto gave some important information and made it feel like the complete opposite. Every time it felt like the story was going to climax, I felt abruptly pulled out and rushed forward. Emotional conversations, plot reveals, and action sequences were all very short lived making it hard to connect with the character.
We get to explore Prompto finding out that he was manufactured to be a Magitek Soldier. After being separated from his friends, Ardyn taunts Prompto with hallucinations of being a Magitek soldier. There is even a sequence of Noctis chasing Prompto, treading on Prompto’s fears of betraying or losing his friends. Prompto struggles with the idea that his friends will not accept him for who he really is.
There are some hidden tapes and different things added in order to give some exploration aspect, but it didn’t really help. Instead, the tapes felt like a cheap way to give me story details and avoid giving me more gameplay. We also got a chance to see some more Arena, which also felt like a plot device to move the story forward, basically showing up to offer some suck it up style inspirational speeches to Prompto and some companionship in the heat of battle.
The controls were a bit interesting for a third person shooter style gameplay. They were kind of unique and took a second to get used too, but by the time I did, I had finished the DLC. You basically had a knife, your pistol, and random generic weapons that could be picked up as you moved forward. This included a submachine gun, a sniper rifle, a bazooka, and a grenade. The attacks were pretty basic and unmemorable.
You’re also given a snowmobile to travel and I actually enjoyed it. The trailer for this made it look gimmicky, but I found myself having fun running over enemies, shooting them at high speeds, and ramping off of mounds of snow and rocks. It was fun to have full control of a vehicle, opposed to the train track feel you get when driving the Regalia.
If you’re a fan a Final Fantasy XV, I would suggest waiting on purchasing the DLC if you haven’t already, as I don’t expect much more from Episode Ignis. I’m still holding out hope for Comrades the multiplayer DLC, but with Episode Ignis slated for December, it’s safe to say we will have to wait until 2018 to see any multiplayer gameplay.
Gaming
Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Gaming
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Gaming
This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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