I won’t be talking about Epic “stealing” Metro.  Or Steam saying it’s unfair.  Or the review bombs that clearly show why Steam reviews are a cesspool.  Or the entire irony of the situation.

I won’t talk about WoW’s recent patch that still doesn’t have Zandalari or Kul Tiran unlocked.  Or that the Horde/Alliance buff bonus caused Limit to faction change in order to take advantage.

I won’t even talk about the dumpster fire of Fallout 76 re-introducing old bugs with a recent patch.

Maybe I’ll talk about Facebook admitting to committing a crime when they harvested data from teenagers who “consented”?  Nah.

Glorious Friday is here.  Time to do things outside of the office, and take advantage of the small break in this polar vortex.  Keep shopping for some gaming laptops (kinda set on a GE73 or a GS73).

Oh, and maybe play some more of that Anthem demo.

Expectations

I have such a ridiculous distaste for EA’s business practices, yet a fondness for BioWare that this is causing a weird internal debate.  Ethically, I cannot pre-order any game, least of all from EA.  In terms of lockboxes and general RMT, EA’s model hit peak insanity with Battlefront 2.  And people still pre-ordered it.

Yet here I am contemplating an EA game.  It’s said that there are no lockboxes.  That there’s no paid DLC (which seems a bit odd… but ok).  It will likely have new javelins at cost (I guess like Rainbow6).  And there are customizations out the wazoo (at some pretty crazy price points).  We’re not talking $3 horse armor anymore.

I do like what I see so far.  When the game actually loads, the moment-to-moment stuff works, and works well.  There’s much more class diversity in terms of skills and weapon choices that’s more in line with Warframe than Destiny – a model I really liked.

The gaps that remain include:

• the integration of story / player choice
• the diversity of activities / creatures (Warframe’s model here is really hard to beat)
• the diversity of sytem-wide events (e.g. Shaper Storms), though apparently that will happen on Sunday afternoon
• the scalability of playing with people of different levels, and at different points in their quest line
• the long-tail portion of the game at max level

All but the first one have significant impacts on the long term viability of the game.  The group interactions, multitude of events, and continual progress of the grind for loot drive engagement.  Quite curious to see how that plays out.

For now, it looks like a fun purchase.  And that’s the point, right?