Wednesday, April 30, 2014

TO BOLDLY GO...

WHERE LOTS OF THROPHIES HAVE GONE BEFORE



Hello everyone! Since I'll be going... on vacation (not there, and yes, it got pretty necessary) I thought I will provide you with something more lengthy to enjoy in my absence. I suggest you take about an hour of your time, lean back and enjoy this collection of some really awesome workplaces...


VALVE




 

NAUGHTY DOG




 

BLIZZARD




 

EA SPORTS (Canada)




 

EA DICE (Sweden)




 

EA REDWOOD SHORES (California) //italian




 

BUNGIE - Destiny Tour




 

UBISOFT (Toronto)




 

BETHESDA





As certainly do most gamers, so do I more than just like these places. In my opinion everybody who got a job in such an environment can consider him/herself lucky as hell. Of course work is hard and often a lot, but... but... fitness centers, game libraries, chill-out lounges, cafeterias, arcade machines, statues, theaters, conference rooms, even soccer fields. - They have everything! And essentially now you know where your money goes...

You know what such company buildings remind me of? - The Starship Enterprise... or any other Federation Starship from the Star Trek universe, basically. Is that good? I think so. It is the perfect place to work and at the same time relax and socialize with open- and like-minded people that share one common goal and philosophy. A protected and clean environment that finds the ideal balance between work and leisure, structure and freedom, severity and fun. Yep, Star Trek showed us the way, we made it real. The only thing missing is that the studios also use some of their numerous floors for living quarters, but who knows what the future will bring, right? Maybe at some point those places will even hover in the skies. - Wasn't Apple building their latest headquarter in the shape of an UFO?

Play more! Strive more!

PS: And for many other check out this link to a playlist: Studio Tour - Playlist

Monday, April 14, 2014

TITANFALL

HIGH EXPECTATIONS, HIGH DISAPPOINTMENT


Ok, so finally (about a month after release) I spent some time playing Titanfall - a game that caused me to wet my pants from the moment I first heard of it. Also a game that almost made me buy an Xbox One.... puh, I am glad I didn't. To me the Titans fall way behind expectations!

First of all, the game didn't work! I preordered it, scheduled my free time... I was ready to play from minute one. Well, I was... the game wasn't. Allegedly EA/Respawn gave the source code of the game about a week before release to Nvidia. So naturally Nvidia was not ready and my card, together with my whole (very expensive) system architecture wasn't able to run the game without constant crashes. No, forget what I said. Why blame my system? Isn't it the creators responsibility to make sure the game runs on as many systems as possible, if not on every system? And like I said before my whole PC system wasn't cheap. Anyway, the game got patched, and me and thousands of other players with Nvidia graphic cards could finally start playing the game.

Origin... the next thing that ruins the game for me. Why the hell does every single game nowadays need a fucking launcher. No, "why" is stupid... actually formulating a question at all is stupid, so let me rephrase it to a statement: You need Origin to play, you need to install it, you need to register and support data mining, you need to update it, you need to be always online if you want to play Titanfall and that SUCKS!

The game itself is nothing more than an online multiplayer shooter in the style of Battlefield. Yes, I could have known that - basically I did - but still I hoped for a bit more. Besides to the obvious imbalance between players that played the game for hours already and players that start the game fresh, I am mostly disappointed by the fact that there is absolutely no love for detail in that game; Don't get me wrong, because the setting and the graphics of the game are great, but just take a look at the menus! There is one generic, static background in every menu screen. That is boring from the begin with but they didn't even put in some cheap 2D animations with layers. The images for the soldiers (pilots), weapons and Titans are also static, non-customizable and boring. They look as if they were cut out of a catalogue or imported from some other game...

Except for when you are in an actual game (which takes way too long to start btw.) the game features zero atmosphere or immersion! - In Halo the menus alone are already making the game worth buying. Titanfall doesn't have any campaign at all (although there is a menu option called that way). I knew that... still, I expected to find some levels that I could play alone or with my friends just to try the game. You know, I imagined the same fights but with an enemy team full of stupid AI enemies that give us the time to get familiar with the levels, the weapons and so on. Don't you like to watch and explore a bit? Well, inside a real battle against other players you can't. And unfortunately EVERY battle, even the ones that occur under the label "Campaign" are online battles.

No... sorry, the game looks damn good, the mechanics are great and the idea of bringing mechs into a shooter is great, but still the game is absolutely not for me and I regret buying it. If you like games like Battlefield and you want even more fast pace and action, this game is clearly for you. If you hate being level 3 and fighting with the basic machine gun against players in the 5th or some generation (= prestige levels) with super explosives and abilities, this game is not. If you have just a bit sense of art and presentation, if you want just a bit customization options (which were actually announced with Titanfall but seem to only apply to loadouts), if you want at any point just a bit more than a senseless "click on start, wait for teams being filled, wait for countdown, battle against other players, and repeat that"-game, forget it.

Sorry I might have been too hard with that game - you know, I was looking forward to it a lot, but in the end there's mostly disappointment for me. Maybe they shouldn't have used the outdated source engine for this game just because it's "cheap"... I am damn sure if they had invested in a good and contemporary engine they would have had more time to work on the actual game instead of wasting probably 80% of their resources to get this engine running on Xbox One parallel to PC...

Play more! Regret more!