Gaming Updates

I think I’ll start a weekly write-up about games.

I’ve been playing video games since I could hold a controller. My brother had an NES in his bedroom, and I used to play it all the time. Duck Hunt, I think, was the first one. That being said, I haven’t played a whole lot of Nintendo in the last twenty years. That doesn’t mean my gaming hands have been idle.

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

I think I followed the natural progression of gamers, at least in my mind. I had an SNES, then I graduated to the N64 (so many awesome Star Wars titles), then the PS2, the Gamecube, a Dreamcast somewhere in there, and then I had an Xbox gifted to me. The classic one. The Xbox kind of changed my perception on gaming. Halo reintroduced my love for gaming, and really kind of kindled my current affair with first person shooters. Shortly after I started playing Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2 came out, and I was able to carry the hype from one to the next. At some point in there, I also scattered out some PC games — mostly Runescape.

I’m loose on my timelines here, but I didn’t pick up an Xbox 360 until November of… 2007, I think? When they came out with the Halo 3 special edition console. Mostly because I had been playing World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade. That game was near and dear to my heart. I played just a smidge into Wrath of the Lich King, and then I departed from the game for a while. World of Warcraft, of course, became this love affair that I’ve fought with and returned to countless times over the years.

Somewhere in the mix, I bought my wife a Wii, and my eldest son still has his Wii U (it’s a glorified Netflix machine at this point — he has his own PC.)

I played the Xbox 360 and mostly PC until I bought the XBox One, on release day, at Best Buy, at 4AM, in 2013. Then, I played console games for a bit, before returning to PC again, and finally settling on it being my home — and preferred — way to play games. I still have some games on the XBox One, like Red Dead Redemption, but much like my sons Wii U, it mostly acts as a glorified Netflix machine.

In the here and now, I’ve been bouncing between singleplayer titles like No Man’s Sky (since they did their rework of the content) and I’ll find myself playing simple games with my son, like Minecraft and Terraria. But even then, I’ll find myself in the mood to play multiplayer games — more specifically massively multiplayer like WoW, or match-based games like Call of Duty, and Battlefield, or Battlefront. Those are all games I enjoy.

All that aside, not all shooters — or games, in general — are made the same. I despise most modern Battle Royales. I just haven’t found one that I like. I’ve tried Fortnite, Apex Legends, Realm Royale, Black Ops 4 (don’t like their BR, I enjoy the MP) and PUBg. They just don’t scratch the itch — the gameplay varies, but I can’t get behind investing a whole game’s worth of time into something, just to have a luckier player take me out at the end. Just my two cents. I find myself yelling “HACKER!” a whole lot more in those games than I do any other.

I think what I love about video games, in general, is the community. And that’s the bottom line. I enjoy knowing that people from all over the world are getting together to play this one game together, and in real time, are loving/hating/laughing on and at the other players in the match. It’s the evolution of socializing. I mean, I could get off on the tangent of social media, but really, aren’t video games basically the same thing with a medium of entertainment behind it, veiling it?

Anyway, all that background on my gaming scene to have this come out of it. The idea for a weekly gaming post:

This week I’m going to touch on what I know of WoW Classic, and the very recent announcement of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.

WoW Classic is a re-release of the classic servers most of us all got started on. Right now in beta, it’s the diamond in the rough of most MMO streamers, especially WoW starlets like Asmongold and Bajheera, and a good friend of mine ScoutSierra (when it launches.) What it’s done, is it has taken the game back to its basic gameplay of Vanilla World of Warcraft. Server where you can roam around and run into more players — no phasing — and everything has scaled way back down to brass-tacks. I think one of the best parts of it is something I touched on earlier: community. The early community in WoW was a work of art, there was so much more in game communication and discussion. You had to work to find a group, to find a guild, and to figure out dungeons and raids. Maybe it’s the rose colored goggles, but it really was awesome back then… and the future looks great, too. I’ll probably be updating this as I go along, so expect to see some more information on this title and release on other Tuesday discussions.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare seems to be a hard reboot of the game we all learned to love in 2007. It was announced just a couple of days ago, May 30th, I believe. The game doesn’t have a whole bunch of new information for it yet, but what it does have sounds pretty promising. Developers promise that it won’t have a traditional Season Pass, like the Call of Duty’s and Battlefield’s of years past. Now, whether that means it won’t have one at all, or it will have a very different version, is up for debate. For now, I’m going to say that it’s a no-season-pass-type release, because their goal (per the announcement) is for a fuller multiplayer experience, and in the past the game has been limited to owners of map packs, and those who didn’t, because of the inability to play together without those maps. One of the other features this game is bringing back, is removing operators. In Black Ops 4, they introduced Operators/Specialists, like Overwatch or Rainbow Six: Siege. And, though, I’ve enjoyed the game, I don’t care for their abilities.

This newest installment of COD seems to be bringing it back to basics, and keeping it in the modern era, something that we’ve missed out on in the past. The creators kind of went on this scifi-esque tangent. Advanced Warfare had mechanized bodysuits, and Infinite Warfare was in space. It was just derpy. Sorry, Call of Duty — they sucked. But this reboot really holds some hope, and the nostalgia factor means that it has a very special place in my mind. Another feature they’re introducing with in this game is cross-platform play, which is really exciting. Rumors are that they’ll be using the Fortnite system for crossplay, by identifying the peripherals used: controller vs. keyboard and mouse.

I’ll be watching both of these with great interest, and WoW Classic is just me biding my time before I return to the game… again… and lose all outer productivity. It’s a problem of mine. Check out my older posts.

 

I hope you’ve enjoyed this foray. My blogging may take some new life, about more than just my writing in the coming weeks and months, but thanks for reading! Comment below if you’d like to see any content, or if you’d like to play games, my gamertag is HazardActual, across almost all services.

 

Featured Image: Photo by Emmanuel on Unsplash