Dying Light - A Turn of Opinion?

Allow me to begin by saying I have, for the most part, grown tired of the zombie genre in the video game industry. These are all the games I've played that sport the zombie trend;

• Resident Evil
• Resident Evil 4
• Resident Evil 5
• House of the Dead
• Dead Rising 1 & 2
• Call of Duty World at War's Nazi Zombies
• Call of Duty Black Ops' Nazi Zombies
• Black Ops II Nazi Zombies
• Sniper Elite Nazi Zombie Army
• Dead Island
• Left 4 Dead 1 & 2
• Zombie Apocalypse 1 & 2
• Plants vs. Zombies (it counts)
• Dead Nation
• Forbidden Siren 1, 2 & Blood Curse
• Silent Hill
• Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare

I'm sure I've missed a small few more. But these are the games I've remembered.

Dead Island was the latest iteration of a zombie survival game I bought and played (back in 2012) where I said "I'm sick of this genre" and traded it in.

Dead Island promotional poster

And I didn't pay much attention to a zombie game since then. The Last of Us is ignorantly and blindly referred to as another zombie game, but it is foreshadowed by three facts;

• It has a fantastic, gripping story
• It has amazing, solid gameplay (thanks again, Naughty Dog!)
• And they aren't technically zombies, they are infected by a virus which actually exists! (only it affects plants in real life, not humans...but What If??, et voilà, The Last of Us)

So I have not included it as a true zombie game which I have played.

I have seen so many zombie games emerge since I switched myself away from the genre, such as

• DayZ (A stand-alone ArmA 3 conversion)
• H1Z1 (An MMO Zombie Survival game)
• TellTale's The Walking Dead (this is prone to be an exception for me as it's not a survival horror in it's true sense, look it up)
• The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct (Was received terribly)
• Deadlight (A side-scrolling zombie title)

These are games I paid little-to-no attention to.

Then Dying Light was released in January of 2015. At first I dismissed it as another zombie game. I was even more switched off at the fact that it was made by the same developers that made Dead Island, and that it played relatively similar, so I didn't care for it.

However, I saw the game being mentioned a few times on forums and I decided to do bits of research. Yeah, it was open-world and it had action mechanics that were almost identical to Dead Island (Customizing your melee weapons) but that was all it seemed to be: another zombie game like Dead Island only set somewhere else. I didn't find anything interesting about it, I also didn't understand why they would make a game that would near-identically resemble another game they already made. So I jumped back on the fence again and leaned away.

Six months later I can't count how many times I heard Dying Light being mention on forums, social media and other websites throughout the first half of the year. I impulsively bought it mid-July (I was so broke at the time I'm still paying money back for the game in installments :P)

So a few hours in and I finally see the difference between Dying Light and Dead Island, and why Dying Light is considered to be miles better than Dead Island as a zombie survival horror.. Because Dying Light is actually a survival horror. Compared to Dead Island, in which just brainlessly hacking at zombies with customized melee weapons was the fun factor (you can still do that in Dying Light, but it's not recommended as much), Dying Light encourages you to SURVIVE! There are some similarities to other games;

• Dead Island is the obvious one, as it implements very similar combat mechanics, with the inclusion of guns (although the guns aren't really handled all that well in the game, and early on they are pretty-much unseen) and the ability to free-roam the environment and craft your own customized weapon.
• Far Cry is also a game that comes to mind when it comes to scaling radio towers and then using the zip-line to get back to ground-level quicker and there are also loads of loot chests that are discovered similarly to Far Cry. Let's not forget there are plants and herbs you can pick throughout the game's world, also a known Far Cry mechanic.
• The parkour free-running was clearly borrowed from Mirror's Edge as I can't think of any other first-person game that implemented the mechanic as famously as that game did.
• And the behaviour of building scaling is similar to Assassin's Creed

Don't allow these similarities to take sway your head away from it, though, as, much to my surprise, this game implements some of the best solid gameplay of any zombie game I have played in the last decade and a half.

Night-Time is a lot more scarier than Day-Time, naturally.

With Dying Light's solid weapon combat comes a feature many may have seen in plenty of open world games these days, and that's the day/night cycle. But as many games have this, most of them don't provide much difference as to how you play the game. And that's where this game sets itself apart from it's genre peers. By day, zombies will aimlessly wander the game's world, attacking you on site as you can expect. But by night, the game becomes more challenging. The world will be infested by unique types of zombies that only appear after dusk, and come equipped by a field-of-view cone in the mini-map, similar to what you see in Metal Gear Solid and the Driver series. The game's world is essentially more dangerous, and encourages you to walk on eggshells around enemies. With this, the game also ups the ante by giving you double the XP when night-time occurs, giving you more incentive to play the game in the dark more often, whilst making it extra challenging. This is very dynamic, and a welcome feature, as it will force you to change up your approach, and adjust your tactics as the pace of the game will differ, completely.

With all these good points come the bad. And this game has a few of them, but are more directed towards the game's narrative, rather than the gameplay, as from what I've played, the gameplay seems fairly solid.

The game's story is heavily clichéd. You can see a few scenes coming as you watch the game's point-of-view cutscenes and afterwards you shout "I knew that was going to happen!". Dying Light also suffers from one of the most horrible type of missions you can think of - fetch quests, and there are plenty of fetch quests. Even the main protagonist gets impatient, as if the voice-actor knew the frustration of it when he lent his voice. The characters are somewhat forgettable, save for two or three of them.

And, although by this blog I'm barely past the halfway stage, the characters in the game almost behave as if the zombies are an afterthought. It's as if they aren't aware that they exist. There have been a few characters that have referenced certain types of zombies that you encounter - one set of missions will focus on finding out the identity of particular zombie but as far as I've seen, that's all that has happened. You're doing missions for people that don't seem to give two shits about whether you live or die, they just want the jobs done. But like I said, I haven't seen enough of the game's story to have that as a final opinion, so call it a preliminary opinion as of this point.

If you're buying this game just for the story, or to see characters develop, you won't find it here. This game obviously focuses on the gameplay, first and foremost.

Multiplayer is ever-so-present in this game as well. It doesn't force you into it, but it has been regarded as the mass-preferred way to play, as you can team up with 3 other players to play the same game as you, or join other players' games and tackle the campaign with them. You can pretty much do what you like, but I would say if multiplayer is your thing, play it with friends. It would seem more fun that way than playing with random strangers. Personally, I don't particularly care for the multiplayer - I do fine on my own and I don't really have any friends that actively play the same games as me. Boo hoo :'(

As far as technical jargon goes, the game holds a pretty solid 30 frames-per-second on the Xbox One version, save for a few instances where the frames drop during intense action (personally, frames don't bother me) and there have been a few cases of screen tear, but only if you look for it. Otherwise it's pretty unnoticeable. Graphically, the game looks gorgeous. Although I've recently developed a dislike for motion blurring and film-grain, and all those other camera-lens effects, and this game has them heavily embedded into the console version. It would be nice to have the option to remove those effects but I can deal with it if I have no choice in the matter (my PC wouldn't be able to handle this game for now). Since playing Dying Light, I have had one or two sensations of nausea while playing but it goes away quick. The game's highly detailed graphics, plus the 30 frames, plus the slightly zoomed-in field of view, and the fast movement that you will be frequently doing during free-running, is enough to cause anyone that suffers motion sickness easily to feel ill. But they have disclaimers on each console for that kind of thing, including photosensitive epilepsy so I'm not going to develop excuses. It is a bit nauseating to play if you haven't played any game like this before or you're just flat-out sensitive to it, but I digress.

Whether it's on your own or with others, this game is a blast to play. It's a lot better than I thought and it certainly is a very creepy game. It's the first time in a long time where I've been scared of a zombie in a video game. It's fun, disturbing, scary, solid and challenging.

Any zombie fans out there will obviously buy this - it's a no-brainer. But for anyone on the fence about the zombie genre, or are like me and got sick of it, I encourage you to get this game. It redeemed my opinion, anyway.

If I was to give this a score I would give it an 7/10, with the only cons being the story and the repetitive missions. The gameplay is enough to make it a must-buy. So go out and buy it!

Good Night
Good Luck

-David 'Gamer Bhoy' Cameron.

Gaming in the 8th Generation: Video Game Sizes

Gaming in the 8th Generation

Video Game Sizes - A Gig Too Far

I've played games my whole life. I've always had a somewhat-large collection of games to compliment the console(s) I actively use. I have owned;

• over 200 PS2 games
• 100 PS1 games
• 400 Xbox 360 games both physical and digital (as well as arcade titles)
• about 40-50 PS3 games (I got the console late on)
• about 10 Gamecube games (I got the console in 2013)
• roughly 12-13 Xbox Original games (same reason)
• Over 300 PC games to my name, including Steam purchases, which is in the +130 region, as well as Origin (20 something games) and about 60 physical games.

and I still own about 20 Sega MegaDrive games (only in recent years have I discovered buying these games off eBay, which I have been doing now and then)

I currently own over 50 PS4 games;

• 17 Physical
• ~40 Digital (Both owned and with PS Plus)

And I have a handy amount of Xbox One games. That library is growing, slowly but surely.

I imagine one would wonder why I'm putting down the amount of games I've owned throughout my life. Well, I don't mean to brag, or gloat, because believe me, there are people out there with ridiculously larger collections than I do.

But the reason I'm saying all this is, I'm here to ask: What is the difference between playing games in today's generation and playing games of generations past?

The answer is this:

Between 1993 and 2013, I have enjoyed playing my games whenever I wanted. If I felt like turning one game off and putting another game on, I could just eject the disc, place it in it's case, grab another game, insert that disc, and play away...

But recently, with the likes of my PS4 and Xbox One, I'm now becoming aware of the sizes games have become, not in scale of visible content, but rather in size of data.

What I mean is, for the first time ever, I'm experiencing having to uninstall a game I'm not actively playing to make room for another game I want to play because my console's hard drive (on both consoles) is 500GB, and I have to install every game I first boot, as mandatory.

To rub salt into these little wounds, along with large game installs comes the now-expected Day-One Patches with some of these games. These patches are the bane of gaming today, as games are now being released too early (to fit a specified target date) and as a result, the remaining fixes for the game are left to us gamers to download in order to play the game in a stable state. Now, in the previous generations, there were patches for games that were updated on a regular basis to keep the games stable, the Xbox 360's games would have regular updates that never took any longer than a maximum of 60 seconds, and some as quick as 3 seconds.

The PS3 was a little bit more sinister as any fresh game would require every patch and update to be downloaded to date, which would result in some rather long waiting times for these updates to download. It wasn't the case with every game, thankfully.

But with today's generation, digital games are becoming the norm, and large game sizes are slowly becoming common. 

To elaborate further on the difference between playing games today as opposed to previous generations, I now experience the dread of bothering to install, and update a game whenever I feel like playing it.

I'll use a perfect example of this.

On my Xbox One, I have GTA V and Halo: The Master Chief Collection on physical copy. GTA V is 60 GB, and Halo is between 40 and 50GB if I remember correctly. Those are some large game sizes. I will never delete GTA V off my Xbox because it's my favourite game on that system at the moment, and it's my go-to game if I can't think of any other game to play on that console.

But with Halo, there have been moments where I've needed to save a significant amount of space on my HDD and I have hesitated on uninstalling Halo from my HDD because whenever I decide to reinstall that game, I have to sit through that day-one patch download again, which is over 20GB.

It has gotten to a stage now where the games that I have uninstalled, I have thought about playing them another time, and when that time comes, I'm discouraged from doing so, because I have a fear of needing to download large patches for that game.

I uninstalled Forza 5 two months ago. But last week I wanted to play some Forza 5 again, so I decided to install the game. It was taking a long time to install and update the game so I stopped the installation and looked for something else.

It's bad now, when I look at this generation of games and I have to pick and choose my games carefully. Think of what game I MIGHT play again in the following week and what game I have no interest in playing until further notice.

Back in the day, I never had that problem. If I was playing GTA 3, and I felt like playing FIFA 2002 later, all I had to do was save my game, turn the game off and insert FIFA 2002 and I'd be playing it within 3 minutes of swapping the games. Then after a brief hour or so playing FIFA 2002 I'd have felt like playing some Def Jam Vendetta so I would turn FIFA off, put it back on the shelf and insert Def Jam Vendetta and fire up the Story Mode.

Nowadays, I have 17 physical PS4 games and I have to think of up to 4 games I want to have installed because of the size they are. It's worse with the Xbox One because I have 2 games installed that take up a total of ~120GB of my HDD space. I can't find myself to get into the mood to play Battlefield 4 because I'll have to download the latest patch AND download all my map packs, which is unbearable to think of considering the fact each map pack is about 4GB.

I have went from playing 10 different games a day to playing maybe two games for the whole day and barely giving myself any encouragement to play any more, all because of the thought of waiting for everything to install/download.

Digital games are worse. I might have unlimited download speeds, but if I'm in the mood to redownload and play a particular game, I can't satisfy that mood right away, I have to download this ridiculously large game which will take 6 or 7 hours to download and by the time it's done, I'm not interested anymore.

I miss being able to switch from game to game on the fly whenever I wanted with any game I had. I didn't have to take 17 games and select up to 5 to install. I liked having my options there for me. I liked looking at my shelf of games and going through all of them to decide on what game to insert and play. I can't really do that anymore. I have to look through my shelf and select a game I want to wait to play.

Right now at this moment I want to play Forza Horizon 2. But it's uninstalled and it's a digital copy and I don't want to wait to download it, to be uninterested after it finishes, or play it for the remaining hour I have left of any interest at all.

Reading back over some of my paragraphs, I realized I sound like an over-entitled little b*tch with too much time on his hands and has nothing but first-world problems and too many games, and I apologize for coming across that way.

Let me elaborate. I said I have "owned" the number of games had in the past. The present tense says different. I no longer have the 400 games for the Xbox 360 as I don't even have an Xbox 360 at all, anymore. Any games I have left for that system would be the digital arcade titles licensed to me - bought over the course of 7 years of owning the console.

I also no longer have a PS3, and I have barely any digital games bar a few PSone classics to look back on.

I still have a PS2, Xbox Original, GameCube and SEGA Megadrive, but they're mostly for collection and nostalgia purposes, and even then, I don't buy games for them as often as I could be. But I digress.

The problem I'm having with games nowadays is a problem many gamers are facing - not just me. I'm just one of few that is blogging about it :P

Bloodborne: The Game That Made an Impression on Me

This is not a review. This is an expression of genuine feeling. I'm not going into technicalities too much, I'm going into the impact this game has made on a gamer that has never thrived for a hard game.

I know fine well that I will take a long break from this game, like I do with many others, and play something else, as this is what an open-minded gamer is tormented with: so many games to choose from and play.

With every game I have played on PS4, Xbox One and PC in the last 2 years, I have been met with brilliant games - some of them are games I may have already played on previous generation consoles, such as The Last of Us, Grand Theft Auto V and Tomb Raider. A few new games have grabbed my attention, such as Dragon Age: Inquisition and inFamous: Second Son.

The Master Chief Collection on Xbox One was amazing and I finished all four Halo titles in the space of three-and-a-half days. The multiplayer was a disappointment but it gets better as the weeks go on.

Games I have yet to finish as of this blog are:

• Dragon Age Inquisition
• Assassin's Creed: Unity
• Destiny
• The Crew
• Watch Dogs
• Knack

While I like all of the games above (yes, even Knack, even if it is a bit cheap), none of them have grabbed my attention as much as I hoped. In other words, nothing in any of those games have kept me glued to the screen or made me leap out of bed the following morning to turn it on immediately and play.

This is where Bloodborne comes in.

I am aware of From Software's titles. I first played Dark Souls when I discovered it in my local video game store. I had never heard of it, and I didn't even know what it was (I had no internet for the best part of a year so I was out of touch). While I enjoyed it, the difficulty was too great and I found myself playing it in little increments. I have played a snippet of Demon's Souls when it was free on Playstation Plus, I wasn't in the mood for it. I haven't played Dark Souls II, currently awaiting the remastered version on PS4.

Bloodborne was released on Friday, 27th March 2015 here in Europe. I wasn't even planning on buying it. I was on my way to my girlfriend's house and I normally take my PS4 with me. I thought I had forgotten to bring my games, and as there was no way I was hiking back home, I thought "well I've nothing to play, so I'm just going to buy something". I bet you're wondering, how can I spend 60 quid impulsively. No, I do not have much money, I live on a small amount a week, I'm just a bad spender :P. But I digress. I bought Bloodborne, under the impression I was probably going to get too frustrated by it and shelve it within a few days.

Quite the contrary, much to my surprise. When I died all the time on Dark Souls, it slowly put me off the game. And I would leave it alone for weeks, months, before going back to it and trying again, to progress a little bit further then take a long break again (I'm doing it on PC at the moment. I defeated the Bell Gargoyles and I rang the first bell about a month ago. I haven't progressed since), but when I died on Bloodborne, I wanted to try again, and when I died again, I wanted to try again. Basically, when I died, I didn't want to turn the game off. I wanted to keep going, I was determined.

When I arrived at my first Boss Encounter, I was destroyed. I re-spawned and I ran through the hordes of enemies just to get back to that Boss and try again. I killed it.

Now, this is no big deal to those who are used to games by From Software. However, there is something about Bloodborne that doesn't compare to the previous instalments. It's faster, and your character is more agile, as opposed to the heavy, slow pace of Dark Souls. This suited me down to the ground. And as for the Boss - it was because of this Boss fight that I realized I have found a new game mechanic to thrive on, a mechanic I have little patience for in most games, and it is my own made-up mechanic: the Come-At-Me-Bro Mechanic. In other words, this game's difficulty and ridiculous challenge fuels me to continue. It makes me learn from my mistakes, it has a hard-but-fair trial-and-error style to it's gameplay, where it forces you to try again and learn. No other game makes me tremble after a boss battle like this game does. No other game makes me hold my head in pure relief after capitalizing on a boss like this game does. This game does more than just give you a challenging boss battle and absurdly horrific and ruthless enemies, but with every boss you fight and every encounter you beat, you are rewarded. It's like the game is telling you: "Well done, you killed this boss. Here, take this as a reward and have a rest. You deserve it".

This game punishes you for your mistakes but also gives you a chance to redeem yourself. You die, you lose all your XP, however, you are given the opportunity to trek back to where you died and get that XP back. This mechanic has lived on since Demon's Souls and it was only in Bloodborne that I learned how special this mechanic was. Bloodborne is, by far, as I write this blog today, the best thing to happen on Playstation since The Last of Us on PS3. I have finally found a new thing to look for in my games. I now thrive on the difficulty. I thrive on it's challenge. I thrive on killing the next boss. I thrive on Bloodborne and I will not be shelving this for a long time.

This game doesn't have much of an active story, but more or less puts you into the midst of something terrible and let's you deal with it your own way. You can go anywhere you want, kill any boss you want in any order you want, provided you are fully prepared. This game doesn't give you a big fat arrow to follow. It doesn't give you a map, it doesn't tell you what your objective is. There is no objective, you basically have to cleanse the world of it's filth. You can have help along the way in the form of other players, but once they die, they're gone and may never come back. You might have to hope someone else arrives that does a better job. But you're mostly on your own. Some NPC's provide direction, but it's only brief, and you have to figure most of it out by yourself.

This game is just how a game is meant to be. It is a beast. And it is not a game to take lightly. If you haven't played Bloodborne and are desperate for a challenge, you are missing out. And if you didn't like a game from From Software, I am sure this one will change your mind.

For review's sake. I give this game 9.5/10 with the only negatives I could think of are the relatively small choice of weapons, and the loading times. However, more weapons may be available as DLC in future, and the load times could be patch, I reckon.

Again, I say if you haven't played Bloodborne, you must. It's a masterpiece.

-Gamer Bhoy