The Elder Scrolls Online Beta Weekend: First Impressions

Well, I was lucky enough to get a beta key for the Elder Scrolls Online beta event last weekend so I dove right into it. Most of the press I've seen regarding ESO has been from the perspective of long-time Elder Scrolls fans looking for their next fix rather than an MMO player checking out a new entry in the genre, which seems a bit unusual to me. Now I certainly have some experience with the past Elder Scrolls games but I wouldn't consider myself a hardcore fan of the series.

So, here are my first impressions of the game from the perspective of a fan of MMOs rather than Elder Scrolls specifically.

Thief Impressions and Comparison to Thief II

With all the old franchises receiving reboots I'm somewhat surprised that it took so long for Thief to get the treatment. Because the Thief series has always held a bit of a niche appeal there's been a lot of speculation about the reboot and whether or not it would carry the spirit of the older games or fall into the trap of over-simplification for mass appeal.

I decided to do as fair a comparison as I could between old and new, so I replayed several hours of Thief II: The Metal Age before touching the new Thief. I examined both old and new with a critical eye, trying hard not to let my own nostalgia of the series cloud what it actually was in order to give the reboot a chance to stand on as even ground as possible.

Here are my thoughts and impressions after playing the first 5 hours of each game side by side.

DMC Demo: First Impressions

So I've been a fan of the Devil May Cry series for quite awhile now. They've always had a great mix of tight and challenging gameplay with unique and humorous characters, settings, and situations. The series drops all pretense of realism in the first few minutes and never looks back, allowing for some truly hilarious spectacles in an environment without the need to question them (of course you can keep an enemy floating in mid air with bullets, it makes perfect sense if you think about it).

When the prequel/reboot of the series was announced I was very excited - that is until they released the teaser trailer for it. Capcom passed development of the new game off to Ninja Theory (previously development had been handled internally) and the design direction was clearly a deviation from previous titles, especially regarding Dante. It was revealed later that this was a conscious decision as Capcom wanted this to be more of an origin story, depicting Dante as a very different character than in the first four games.

While there was a large backlash from fans (as was expected) I was cautiously optimistic. Having an origin story to show the growth into the established character can be very interesting. My primary concern was that it showed a distinct shift of focus onto the story itself, something that had never been a major concern in the previous games. I worried not that the new direction would be negative but that the change in focus would result in a decrease in attention to detail in the aspects of the game that had been so central before.

With the release date fast approaching Capcom released a demo for DMC recently, giving gamers their first real look at the game. Were the concerns of the fans justified, or was it all just fear of change? Let's take a look at how the DMC demo stands as it's own game and in contrast to the series as a whole.

Xenogears Retrospective Part 1: Review

For a long time I've heralded Xenogears as having one of the greatest narratives of all time in games. I first played through this game when I was 13, but even at that young age I remember being extremely surprised and impressed with how complex and believable the characters were.

A few weeks ago Xenogears came up in discussion with a friend who had far less stellar impressions of the game than I did. He had tried to play the game much later than I had and thus asserted that the only reason I held such a high opinion of it was due to nostalgia. This got me thinking - I hadn't played the game through to the end in over a decade, and truth be told the details of the last third or so of the game were a bit hazy to me. Was this game that I have long maintained as a pinnacle achievement of narrative in gaming really as good as I remembered?