Welcome to Respawning’s new regular feature, Club Articles! These articles have been created as a way of all us guys getting together every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday, and generally waffling on about whatever takes our fancy! Today we’re talking about what games we’ve been playing, and what’s been taking our fancy in the world of gaming recently!

James

In terms of new games there hasn’t been that much recently that I’ve found compelling enough to play, so I’m mostly playing games I’ve played before currently, namely Dark Souls III. I didn’t get too far previously and left the game on the shelf for quite a while, but I’ve recently picked it back up again and really gotten drawn back into the unique world. My play time has mostly consisted of sticking an album on and just consistently grinding to improve my level, which if you’ve got decent music playing isn’t as monotonous as it sounds.

It has been an interesting week for video games though (Understatement, I know), what with the major backlash of Star Wars Battlefront II. I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. On the one hand its sad how much of a missed opportunity this franchise is. The look of the game and the sound design is spot on, and it really is great at immersing you into the world of Star Wars. BUT of course it is also infuriating that EA have been stooping as low as they have to squeeze as much money out of players as they can. What the repercussions of this have shown though, is that if enough people put their foot down change can happen. Its good to see that many people are waking up to this, so let’s hope it lays a groundwork for positive change in greedy companies like EA.

Joe

Recently I’ve been diving head-first into DOOM on the Nintendo Switch, trying my hand at the multiplayer aspect of the game after having beaten the main story of the game – Regardless to say, I’ve been having a bloody blast, bringing me back to the good ol’ days of Halo and Unreal Tournament’s great multiplayer; it’s not quite as good as those titles, but just being able to have an Unreal Tournament / Quake-like multiplayer shooter on the go is absolutely amazing. Now, I’ve just got to fend off the urge to splash out on Skyrim on Nintendo Switch – I’ve got Xenoblade Chronicles 2’s Limited Edition coming in just a few days dammit!

In the world of gaming, I’ve been closely looking over the changes made to Pokemon Sun & Moon in the newly released Pokemon Ultra Sun & Ultra Moon – I’ll be working on an article explaining why I’m not buying these titles for the first time in my Pokemon career, and my thoughts on all the changes made to Sun & Moon (Both good and bad), so I shan’t spoil anything here! Keep your eyes out!

Luke

I am STILL playing Shadow of War – One of the main things a lot of people said to me before starting this game was that I would have to grind Orc captains for quite a while before being able to progress in the game, that, or i would have to start spending real money on the loot boxes in the game… Well I don’t know about you guys but after playing the first game, I personally see that the majority of the game is hunting Orc’s anyway so I didn’t see the issue here.

I have also been playing A LOT of Warframe with Javier (And our friend Zeke) after the disappointing endgame of Destiny 2… One thing we cannot believe is that this game is FREE. Seriously go look it up – You don’t even need to EVER spend money in it.

I have taken a bit of a backseat in looking at gaming news as of late – Partially due to the fact that I simply cannot afford to get excited about any games with a backlog of 200+ games.

Ben

So what have I been playing this week? Mostly, a very large amount of Final Fantasy XV. I’ve never played a game in the series before so I was advised that it would be a brilliant introduction to the series, which I can agree with – I haven’t really gotten that far through the story as I have spent most my time playing through the side quests… I’m only in Chapter 2 and I’m level 29…
I have played a lot of two other games this week as well. The new Need For Speed game, Need for Speed: Payback, which has some definite improvements over the previous game but I won’t go into that now, you’ll need to look out for my review of the game! The other game I’ve been playing is a blast from the past, Assassin’s Creed 2, probably my favourite game in the series that I’ve played so far. I can’t say anything about the games after Assassins Creed 3 as I have never played them due to my personal opinion that the series should have ended due to events at the end of the game, however I do plan to play Black Flag and will decide if I wish to continue playing the series from there onwards.

Javier

Recently I’ve been playing Assassin’s Creed Origins, which is impressively fun, I am deep into the story now to liberate Cleopatra, and want to pursue but the open world exploration is so fun that I can’t ignore the side quests and seem to get drawn in to hunting hippos every time I turn it on. I’ve also recently gotten into Warframe which is so much more awesome than I had anticipated (So much so that myself and Luke played it for about 12 hours straight on Saturday) with many game modes and gameplay built around grinding for armour and weapon blueprints there’s literally hours upon hours of fun to be had. The new Plains of Eidolon update is really great and makes me more excited for virtual fishing than I should be.

It’s hard to ignore the talk of micro transactions in the gaming community. My personal view is that I strongly dislike them, I remember first really noticing them in mobile game such as The Simpson’s ‘Tapped Out’ and understood it as it was a free download but they needed to make their money somewhere. But when you’ve paid £45+ for a new game you really expect the majority of the game to be there without having to pay extra, and this goes much further than paid DLC (which aggravates me anyway). The thing that baffles me is why would you pay the price to play a game and then pay extra money to upgrade your character (or whatever) which is essentially skipping parts of gameplay that you’ve paid to enjoy in the first place. It was pleasing to see the almost boycott of Battlefront 2 but I know this is the start of a new evil. I hope that we all realise how shit this really is, long gone are the days of having a full game on release day.