Halo

Halo Reach

I have to admit I got caught up in the Halo hype last night like so many other players. The key difference for me is that I have never really been a Halo aficionado. I never owned an original Xbox and I first played the game with the pretty tragically bad PC port that came significantly after the fact. At the time I thought Unreal 2 was a much better game and doing a lot of the same things that Halo was. However there are times when you see how much a franchise means to people that you respect, and you desperately want to understand what they like so much about it. This is why I keep throwing myself down the path of Halo games and trying to figure out how to flip the switch inside of me that makes me love them.

With the PC release of The Master Chief Collection, Microsoft has opted to dole the games out one at a time rather than giving us all of them at once like exists on the Xbox One. The first game up is Halo Reach, which came out in 2010 and is in theory the second game chronologically, centering around the defense of a planet called Reach. That is pretty much all I know about the game because at this point I am only two missions into it. The controls do not feel amazing by modern standards and the voice acting in 2010 was significantly lower fidelity than what we are used to today as well. Both of these things lead me to bounce out pretty early last night on the campaign.

The core problem that I always have with Halo is its weapon system. There are weapons that feel good to use, but they are generally the Spartan weapons and while out in the field you can never seem to find ammunition for them. This means you are going to ultimately have to keep throwing away the gun that you like and picking up some random piece of trash just to survive. This gameplay feels awful to me, and I am super thankful that Bungie went on to create Destiny… a game largely focused around playing with amazing feeling weapons. I appreciate that Halo exists because without it I wouldn’t have gotten Destiny, but I am still struggling to glean what makes the game so magical.

Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem

On a whim I decided to reinstall Wolcen the other night, because it had not significantly played the game since February of 2018. At that time I believe my assessment was that the game was “very alpha” which is my polite way of saying it is a buggy and formless mess. In the months between then and now the game has completely changed into something that is extremely playable, and to the best of my understanding has at least one act completely finished. There is also a planned launch in January, which would indicate to me that we are getting pretty close to its final form.

The end result is a game with a pretty solid storyline and good voice acting, as well as combat and systems that feel pretty polished. Gone is the complete free form system and instead one that sort of nudges you into one of three paths largely centered around melee combat, ranged combat or magical casting. However you can at will jump off the rails and go in whatever directions you want to because in theory there isn’t much difference between these paths at the beginning of the game. You pick up spells while roaming through the world and these serve as your abilities. Each one has specific weapon requirements, leading your way down those three paths for the most part.

Combat feels solid and fluid and a seemingly good blend of difficulty, where it is absolutely easy to sink into but can be punishing if you are not paying attention to your surroundings. There is a dodge system bound to the space bar and it follows a pip based system giving you 4 charges of dodge before you have to wait for them to regenerate. Shocking to no one I am largely centered around a melee build and have an interesting blend of abilities including: a leap attack, a charge, a death grip, a warcry shout of sorts and a big hammer that I slam down dealing AOE damage. The interplay between abilities feels really good and they have added little perks like you automagically charging into combat with your primary attack as a gap closer if you were out of combat.

The gearing system all seems to more or less be standard fare for an ARPG, with the added element of wearing armor of a specific play style giving you extra attribute points for that play style. So ultimately your “build” becomes a combination of your skills that you use, your talent picks and the items that you happen to be wielding… all of which sort of adding up to a total character identity. I’ve more or less stuck to heavy armor which greatly increases my resistances, but there have been moments when a significantly better item drops of another armor family, and I was able to freely swap stuff around to fit the need. I know Grace also has Wolcen and at some point I would like to group up with her and see how the group play feels. Ultimately that is going to be the make or break for the game, because while I enjoy playing an ARPG solo… there is limited life in doing that. We come together each Diablo 3 season because group play is fun and rewarding, and while I want to see the story play out in Wolcen, unless it also has rewarding feeling group play I am not sure if it becomes a real option for the long haul.