Community Chronicle: 08/11/15

I’m not a particularly avid follower of MotoGP – I would always miss the race weekends when they were on BBC, and now that they’re locked to BT, I’ve little hope – but the scandals swirling in the run up to the final race and the uphill struggle that Valentino Rossi has from the back of the grid certainly make the race, which is starting right about now, quite a tantalising one.

Following Sony’s bevy of announcements at Paris Games Week last time out, it’s been a pretty quiet and/or uninteresting week for news. Anyone with an ounce of common sense would have been able to put together the reasons for Ubisoft’s six month loss in their latest financial report, as AC Syndicate sales were dampened by Unity’s buggy release last year.

However, apathy has to come into the equation as well, and Youles wrote, “I stopped buying AC, not because of the glitches – most games seem to have their fair share – but more that I didn’t feel the franchise warranted an annual release. Gameplay never seemed to change that much, and the settings weren’t different enough to tempt me.”

Forrest could be tempted by those changes, though, saying, “Last one I bought was Black Flag and that was because it had a major change in ship battles and the like. Still haven’t felt the urge to actually play it though! Syndicate intrigues me because of the setting, but I’m still not gonna bother with it as I know beneath the different landscape it’ll be the same game I played many times over from AC2, through to AC3.”

Looking at their other games, and with Watch Dogs referred to as a “major franchise”, Amphlett said, “I have a feeling that the initial screens and videos for Watch Dogs 2 will be amazing…”

I’m sure you can all get that reference…

Another game series battling to stay fresh and relevant from year to year is Call of Duty, with Black Ops 3 seeing Treyarch’s first effort on this current crop of consoles. Activision actually let them loose to only focus on the PS4, Xbox One and PC versions of the game, with last gen versions ported separately and seeing a number of cuts. Even with that in mind, the graphical step down could be somewhat surprising.

“Are you sure its X360 and not just the Xbox?” asked dizwod. “looks terrible.” MrYd also picked on the visual deficiencies, saying “Trouble drawing all that stuff on the other side of the window? Why not put a nice orange wall up instead? Problem solved.”

Of course, the gameplay for COD often receives a lot of stick, with Ouninpohja saying, “Doesn’t matter how good the next gen versions look in comparison. They’re all pretty much an 8 year old formula in need of a major overhaul.” Amphlett replied with a story, that “my neighbour is a huge fan of COD and I asked him today what Blops3 was like, his eyes lit up and he got all excited, professing the excellent gameplay mechanics and new graphics… I give up.”

Personally, I’d argue that, while the core shooting mechanics and the overall framework haven’t changed much, the double and boost jumping movement of Advanced Warfare and Black Ops 3 are a quite significant change to the former, somewhat staid gameplay. Wouldn’t you?

Well, some of you have been very, very busy, and a lot of it being spurred on by the impending release of Fallout 4. DividSmythe polished off the GTA V story, with 100% completion, and managed to post a comment on TSA with nary a hint of a typo. Congratulations!

Youles grabbed the Until Dawn platinum trophy, as well as completing the Call of the Dead zombies easter egg in Black Ops 1, while eagerly awaiting Black Ops 3. Eldave0 was also grappling with the undead, playing through The Walking Dead – Season 2, albeit without having played the original.

Those Telltale-style adventure games also came to the fore for Lyts1985, as he grabbed the platinum for Life Is Strange and is about to do the same in Tales from the Borderlands. Then again, it was the Metal Gear Solid V platinum which was the highlight of his week, after a whopping 182 hours of play.

Sticking with Borderlands, R1MJAW managed to close off the Borderlands 2 platinum with his regular gang of co-op partners. He’s also been ludicrously busy completing Dying Light’s story (again in co-op), Saints Row: Gat out of Hell and nabbing the record for Driveclub Bikes. All of this managed to push him past trophy level 45!

Rounding things out, Ace-Mitchie has staked a claim to The Witcher 3’s platinum trophy record, while Carrot381 nabbed the platinum to Bloodborne, just in time for The Old Hunters.

A inferior race has been busily tapping your latest trophies into his tables, and you can head over to page 2 to view the latest trophy leaderboard. Meanwhile, I leave you with the usual submissions form below: