What are you excited for from the Nintendo Partner Direct and Elden Ring DLC trailer? | Team Talk24/2/2024  Wednesday saw the biggest contrast in gaming announcements this year so far with the Nintendo Partner Direct and the release of the hotly anticipated Elden Ring DLC – Shadow of the Erdtree. The Partners Nintendo brought to its show included SEGA, EA and Disney, as well as a slew of smaller-scale projects, while there’s nothing small scale about what Bandai Namco and FromSoftware had to share with us in the first expansion to Elden Ring. What are you looking forward to amongst these announcements? Let us know in our Discord.
Chris Brand  As someone without any experience of the base game, the Elden Ring DLC just makes the prospect of picking it up even more daunting. The big, scary, world has been made bigger and scarier and it's still bereft of shotguns. Though I've heard it's more accessible than the typical FromSoftware titles, I'm aware that I have too little patience to spend the time required to reach an appropriate skill level. What surprised me most from Nintendo Direct was the inclusion of Xbox first-party titles, Grounded and Pentiment (both games, along with two more, are releasing on PlayStation, too). With cross-platform play assumed to be a given in multiplayer games nowadays, console exclusives just mean a smaller player-base, so it makes sense for Microsoft to get their games into the hands of as many folks as possible. Pentiment, however, is single player, and the cynic in me suspects that this is Microsoft's way of showing various governmental agencies that they have no intention of creating a gaming monopoly by acquiring every third-party developer they can get their hands on. As they appear to be doing. It feels wrong that my personal highlight from Nintendo's stream was the least Nintendo part, but this could be a turning point for gaming. I'm sure we all have a lot of questions already. Which other Xbox exclusives will be ported to rival systems? Will Nintendo and Sony follow suit? When can I play Mario Kart and God of War? It's probably wise to assume that some exclusives will stay that way. I don't expect to ever see Joel from The Last of Us squaring up against Gears of War's Marcus Fenix in Super Smash Bros. but I do expect, nay demand, to play Mario Kart on my Xbox now, if not sooner. Liam Andrews  I’ll be honest, I was not aware of any impending DLC reveal for Elden Ring until this week’s topic was announced, although having since watched the trailer I can say that it does look very impressive, if a little gloomy.
I’m not into souls type games but I know Elden Ring is supposed to be a great game in its own right. Perhaps I’ll pick it up one day, although like Chris I find the idea of jumping into an even bigger game a little intimidating. The Xbox game reveals in the Nintendo partner showcase didn’t come as a surprise, however, as most people had guessed two of the games making the jump would be Grounded and Pentiment. I’ve yet to play the latter but thought Grounded was excellent. I’m not sure how good it will look on Switch, but it’s still cool to see it arriving on other platforms and giving other players a chance to experience it. Away from the Xbox ports, the biggest reveal from the showcase was the original Battlefront games being rereleased on consoles with full online multiplayer support. While I thoroughly enjoyed the modern Battlefront iterations, I know the original titles are held in high regard so I’m looking forward to trying them out for the first time.  After Xbox fired the starting gun for the year at their Dev_Direct, now it's PlayStation’s turn to blow us away with the fun and games they have in store this year. They may have saved the creamy filling for next week for some, as they invited SquareEnix to show off Final Fantasy VII Rebirth at an exclusive event tomorrow. In the meantime there was a mixed bag of titles to get salivating about. What tickled your fancy? Let us know over on our Discord.
Legendary Tales & Metro Awakening | Liam Andrews  Even though I don’t own a VR headset yet, the VR games were my highlight. I really liked the look of Legendary Tales, especially the combat, which looked like loads of fun. Being able to grab weapons out of the air or use broken off bits of an enemy to block or do damage on the fly is a very cool idea. I enjoy playing Baldur’s Gate 3 in multiplayer, so I’m not put off by the idea of this being an RPG to be experienced with others, however I doubt I’ll be able to convince a few of the regular adventurers I accompany to invest in a headset purely for this game, even though it looks like it would be a lot of fun with friends. Still, I would happily dive into the game solo, if only just to try what looks like a very engaging combat system (it doesn’t get more interactive than throwing a skeleton through a table, then picking it up and giving it a good pummelling!). Metro Awakening VR also looked interesting. I liked Metro 2033 and Metro Last Light, and this looks like it’ll be just as atmospheric as those titles, more so in VR. I am a coward when it comes to horror, however, so I’m not sure how well I would handle the jump scares or gloomy locations, they were sometimes scary enough on a regular TV screen. Legendary Tales | Chris Brand  This was a meatier outing than Xbox's, rather light, presentation a couple of weeks prior. There were a few titles on show which would have piqued my interest on any other day, Judas is looking like it could really be something special and the Silent Hill series is still as spooky as ever. I could have been writing about a handful of titles, if not for one which stood out far above the others.
At first, I assumed Legendary Tales would be nothing more than filler, to pad out the smaller selection of VR titles, but it turned out to be one of the greatest trailers I've ever seen. When games brag about destructible objects the results are usually disappointing, like Battlefield's structures which topple in the exact same way each time, or whatever the hell we got in Crackdown 3's bare-bones multiplayer mode. Legendary Tales not only lives up to its promise, it goes a step further by giving us the thing we all wanted without even realising (the aforementioned skeleton pummelling). The name suggests there's a robust narrative to be experienced and after doing some cursory research I discovered there's quite a lot more on offer than powerbombing skeletons, with skill trees, crafting, legendary items and a quest-driven story, playable solo or with friends. That being said, it all comes back to the combat. I can think of few things more satisfying than defeating a horde of enemies with whatever debris is lying around from the last battle. It's a certain kind of freedom that is missing from most games and something I've been discouraged from doing in real life. As I don't own any VR-capable devices, I've now got to convince one of my friends to take the plunge, which should be an easy task once I show them a video of someone punching a skeleton until it's dead (deader?). |
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