Hey o people of the internet, cringy as hell I know, but this week has been massive for announcements around action games. Our big three this week are Modern Warfare Season 2: a new contender in the Battle Royale genre, Division 2 goes Destiny: news on the games newest DLC coming out March 3rd, and Anthem: will we have a rebirth? What the recent announcement from BioWare means for the game and it’s players. As for our game recommendation I’m going to do a brief bit on the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot.

First off, I want to start with something I’ve already had personal experience with. Modern Warfare has in my opinion been a worthy addition to the series and even among the issues Activision has had in the past I enjoy it. MW opened with a season of content adding a battle pass, new operator, and new weapons not long ago but that season came to an end on the 11th, marking the begining of something new. We have Ghost, more new weapons, the return of Rust from MW2, other new maps, and curiously the addition of a ‘Classified’ mode on the main menu. I was playing with McCoy on Wednesday and we got to talking about what it could be, is it a new CoD League mode? Are we going to see the addition of ranked games for the more hardcore players of the decades old franchise? But then we thought about the cutscene that plays upon launch after the update. Also about how the co-op missions work. After that it hit us, it’s going to be a Battle Royale mode. Most all co-op missions take place in a part of the larger map Verdansk. They have randomly generated munitions boxes that contain killstreaks that spawn randomly across the map. In the cutscene we see the games operators killing each other even from the same side. Followed by parachuting people outside the area. I never got to play Blackout in it’s prime, I still was a PUBG player at the time and didn’t invest in that installment I’m the series, but I wouldn’t mind a fresh BR mode with how MW gunplay is. I for one welcome the idea, as well as the addition of Ghost back into the game. There’s still a lot of speculation as to if he is Riley from the campaign mode who survived only to go off the grid and join the 141. Personally it would be cool but seems a tad off the wall and not something that would be easy to explain. While the content doesn’t seem all expansive it’s been fun and I managed to max out my Desert Eagle playing hardcore Rust Issues. All in all the game really solidifies it’s standing in the casual shooter market while it’s competition seems to be lagging behind slightly in recent months.

As for our 1st story break I have some numbers from a few games for you guys. As of this week The Outer Worlds has sold over 2 million copies, a huge milestone for the Obsidian developed game. Don’t get me wrong they have made great games in the past, but fresh IPs can be a sink or swim moment for even experienced developers. Next we have big things after CAPCOM‘s newest report for last year, Resident Evil 7 has crossed 7 million copies sold since launch, Devil May Cry V is now the best selling game in it’s series and finally Monster Hunter World, a game I recently picked back up myself has reached nearly 15 million copies of it’s base game sold making it CAPCOM‘s highest selling game ever, beating out second place, Resident Evil 5 at 7.6 million, by almost double. Been a big week for games and here’s to hoping some good trends continue for our next two stories as well.

Next we find ourselves talking about yet another game I have a good bit of experience with, and its possible transition to the style of a game I have far, far more experience with. This time we are talking about Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 and its choice to move to a more Destiny style of play with its newest DLC entitled Warlords of New York. They are going to be upping the level cap from 30 to 40 as well as doing a 1:1 recreation of four of Manhattan’s city districts. In the story veteran players will be returning to Manhattan, or new players for the first time, hitting the now flooded Summer streets post hurricane. This isn’t DC anymore and it sure as hell isn’t Winter this time around. If you have played The Division or read into some of the more interesting pieces of The Division 2 after finishing, you’ll know about Aaron Keener. The First Wave agent who plays the elusive antagonist of the first game. This time, 8 months after the events of The Division you go back to hunt him down. The game will see a number of new overhauls, including a new level scaling system so that enemies scale to player level regardless of whether their friends are max level, and UI overhauls to help streamline the understanding of the coming changes to the games gear and weapons systems. All in all it sounds like it is going to be a really nice update and I am quite tempted to get the DLC when it releases on March 3rd to give it another run through. I haven’t played the game much since beating it and doing a chunk of end game content after launch, but I suspect there might be a resurgence and a reason to go back with the new systems. Currently the DLC is slated to be 30 dollars with special editions available as well. As I am writing this I went to the Ubisoft Store page and the base game of The Division 2 is currently only $3. If you have 3 dollars that you don’t need for coffee or an energy drink to get through this Friday you should definitely look into it. For $3 this may as well be a steal as you can play it with your friends for a total cost of less than what you would pay for game night pizza. I don’t know how long this sale will last so if you see this late or it changes between my finishing writing and editing this and it going live I’m sorry but if not go look into it.

Taking another brief break from our long stories I want to hit some smaller topics again. We have even more movement of gaming writers and developers this week as one of my personal favorite book authors, Drew Karpyshyn, joins the Wizards of The Coast studio Archetype Entertainment. Karpyshyn has done a lot of writing for BioWare as head writer on Mass effect, Mass Effect 2, and senior writer for Star Wars: The Old Republic. He also has written a number of books including my favorite trilogy about Darth Bane from the Star Wars universe. Archetype Entertainment is shaping up to be a really nice BioWare reunion and I look forward to what they produce as a new studio under Wizards of the Coast.

Finally I want to talk about a game that I took a Friday off of work for and played for damn near 48 hours straight until I beat it and then some. It has a review on this blog, and even after the time I put into it I couldn’t give it more than a 7/10 which it got because I was not plagued by the game breaking bugs so many of my fellow players were at launch. The main progression of the game play just didn’t feel like it was there after I finished and even with a bunch of super grind heavy post game objectives I could do I just found myself not willing. It was a sad thing to reach and I felt bad that I just didn’t want to continue in the fashion the game had laid out. The game also didn’t help my case by me playing largely solo as games were hard to find, laggy, or you risked losing progress if the host left and migration failed. I want to give the game another shot and the recent announcement from BioWare may give me the opportunity to do just that. This week BioWare confirmed what many people read in a report from Kotaku weeks ago that they were working on a redesign of the game. In the announcement they confirm that they are slowing the progression of the games seasons in favor of a plan to instead change the fundamentals of the game. They hope to make the progression better and provide the content that players were hoping for at the launch of the game. This is good news not just for players who washed out like me after the opening weeks of the game but also for the games continued dedicated fan base who are working to min-max gear and characters and all in all still have a good time with the game. As of now the date of the redesign is still TBD but BioWare is hoping to put forward a more dedicated team to the project as to help with communication and game play design. I wish them the best and if this project doesn’t get canceled or stuck in development hell then I will absolutely do a re-review when the redesign comes out.

That ends our story portion for the week, but before we start the game recommendation I want to touch on a couple of things. First re-reviews sound like fun and I’m curious if it is something I should look into doing for some older titles. Working full time and such I don’t have the time to dedicate and sometimes don’t have the finances to allocate either to the newest games to get a timely review out. But I feel like a look back at reviews, similar to something I started doing with my Twitch/YouTube that I really fail to keep up on, would be an interesting addition every so often. Whether that is bi-weekly or monthly as I don’t think I can quite add anything more to my weekly plate at the moment. In other news I do still game regularly and I kind of want to pick back up on streaming it when I do. I don’t have a schedule planned but if I can manage my time well enough I want to start again soon.

Time for our weekly game recommendation. Tomb Raider (2013) was actually my first entry I played in the whole series of games. At the recommendation of my friend I got the first game and played it straight through. I got off work, bought and installed the game, played it until I went to sleep, woke up on my day off and played it until I beat it. The story follows Lara Croft on a rough adventure after shipwrecking on an island and getting separated from her friends. It is a great alternative to Naughty Dog‘s Uncharted if you are not a PS4 player and I would wholeheartedly tell anyone who likes action adventure games with puzzles and some mythological/legends based undertones to give it a shot. If after looking into The Division 2 you still have some spare cash between the couch cushions or maybe all that change that you still haven’t emptied from inside your car that comes from late night drive-thru runs, you should take a look at Tomb Raider. Right now you can get the game for $15-$20 in stores, its on sale on the PlayStation store for $4.49, $20 on Steam, and for $30 on the Microsoft Store.
SurelyNotAScore: 9/10
McCoy Length Score: 4/10 (Maybe 6/10 if you collect everything)

As always if you have any recommendations or opinions, the comments and my email are open to you, or you can @ me on twitter. Thanks for reading this weeks TWIG!

SurelyNotNoah