A break in the role for action - Wolfenstein The New Order

Shooters are such a weird thing to me, nowadays.

First off, not that many people played Doom or Quake. Not among the gamers you see talking about "old school" shooter design. I've come to the conclusion "old school" is basically the most meaningless pair of words you can see applied to a shooter, and that people say they played old school in the same way people claim nintendo and apple are innovators.

Wolfenstein The New Order is old school, according to the usual chorus of voices on the internet that always say that. But that doesn't actually mean anything, and if you're like me and expecting a Doom/Quake early era design... Welp, forget it, that's not this game. That's not this game at all.

Second, texture pop in is so strange. I only ever see it in shooters, for obvious reasons, but it's just so wonky to me. It feels like something you shouldn't ever see, but you clearly do, and what's up with that?

Also was I the only one who seriously thought this game would pick up after the earlier Wolfenstein and just involve a time travel plot? I guess that's sort of a spoiler, but it doesn't involve any time travel, which totally disappointed me. I guess that's sort of the theme of this game and my interactions with it.

Wolfenstein TNO is a first person shooter about violently attacking fascist ideology with firearms, and then a lot of strangeness around that. If you played the last Wolfenstein shooter, though, you'll be confused to find this is more of a "weird science" than "occultism" centric shooter, which I believe goes more toward the game's roots but I could be remembering wrong.

It's also kind of generic among id games for that. Actually it kinda reminds me of Fallout mixed with Quake 2. It sort of does that more than anything, though.

Eight long weeks of rolling: Divinity Original Sin

the review is actually negative, nice one steam

In gaming, there's a layer to reading reviews not quite as present in other entertainment mediums.

Gaming is very, very subjective. You might argue it combines all the subjective elements of other forms of entertainment and rolls them together, creating a truly finicky state. From there, you read reviews and wonder is that person's subjective view going to work with my subjective view? And it's hard to tell.

So, often enough, I hit on games that get rave reviews but I'm baffled at how high its marks are. Sometimes it goes the other way, sometimes bad games click. I do think there are some objective elements to gaming: Visual fidelity and quality, clarity of explanation and coherence in UI, so on and so forth. But most, if not all of it, is sort of up to the end user.

Divinity Original Sin is the byproduct of the kickstarter era of a couple years back. I think you could argue there's a pretty clean sweep of isometric-ish rpg-is titles born of KS; a "sequel" to Planescape Torment, a sequel to Wasteland, a "spiritual successor" to Baldur's Gate-ish and then whatever D:OS was supposed to be spawned from. I suppose on a level it is worth noting the game was marketed on its own graces, without claiming it's going to relive torment or BG2 or the lost direction Fallout took.

That being said, I can't really say I understand how or why this game is so positively reviewed. There's not so much hype to it, not really, as I don't know anyone who played it other than a friend I fear I unfortunately talked into it.

Sorry about that.