technology – Page 3 – My Game Reviews

Why Battlefield 6 will be the most successful Battlefield game yet

Battlefield 6 gameplay on Liberation Peak in Tajikistan.

The Battlefield games are now in their third decade and its been quite a journey. The games have always had some degree of success but they have been growing in popularity with streaming services such as Twitch making gaming even more communal than it was in the past. Battlefield 6, the newest entry in the series, is going to be going back to Modern warfare that hasn’t been since Battlefield 4 in 2013. Such a huge gap means that many players will be experiencing such a game as novelty over a continuation of their gaming habits.

Battlefield 6 gameplay on Siege of Cairo

Battlefield 1’s success with World War I FPS mechanics and gameplay made the franchise return to older warfare. Battlefield 2042 was an attempt to return to Battlefield 2142, without the Battlewalkers and had a mixed reception upon release. Battlefield 6 is return to the series’ modern style that began with Battlefield 3 in 2011. Such a return will evoke many memories among the older generation of gamers who buy this game as well as younger players.

It is going to be competing with Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. As of right now, it seems that Battlefield 6 will win on quality maybe not on the quantity of its sales.

The screenshots that I took of the beta are not of the official game coming out in October but the game was already of a high quality at that time. The beta was very interesting and I felt the game had a seriousness which is missing in Battlefield 2042. While I like Battlefield 2042, especially some of the maps, the operators make you feel like a mercenary instead of a soldier. Seeing some of the characters with those skins just made it look goofy and distracting in a sense.

What Battlefield 6 had already in the beta was that the gameplay just seems more weighty.

Battlefield 6 Liberation Peak Vehicular Heads Up Display

The vehicular combat has always been an attraction to me in the Battlefield games. Endless infantry combat gets boring and is easier to manipulate by cheaters. The combined arms approach of the Battlefield games make them more interesting to watch on YouTube and Twitch in comparison to other games. Seeing players attempt to outwit each other while infantry and vehicles interact with one another is more interesting than seeing infantry only maps. While I am aware Saints Quarter is a infantry-only map, Battlefield 6 seems to be attempting to give infantry combat a better squad focus over the run and gun approach of the Call of Duty games, which is really harkening back to the arena shooters of Doom and Quake of the 1990s era. There is a place for both, but I prefer combined arms over engaging people in houses and warehouses.

Battlefield 6 Helicopter firing flares on Liberation Peak in Tajikistan.

My main focus for my Battlefield 6 gameplay is going an Engineer. I want to focus on the vehicles. Infantry only will be support as I perfer slower gameplay vs most of the people you see on YouTube; they are generally the higher tier players who also have to put on a good show. They tend to be kind of players who are very aggressive about the score. My main focus is putting in some RPG elements from my experience with playing Skyrim. I have always been serious about the winning over the score, so I tend to be more careful, conserve my lives and focus on helping the team win over my score.

I look forward to getting the game. It has been some time since I have played an FPS in a serious way. The open beta rekindled by love of the genre and I hope that the game’s release is smooth and helps to revitalize the series.

Empire Earth: The Nano Age and the Architecture of an Epoch

Starting in the Digital Age in Empire Earth, the architecture suddenly shifts to a futuristic style. The Capitol for instance, isn’t trying to replicate the St. Basil’s Cathedral in London now, but some theoretical capital in the future. Its architecture is rounded, like it belongs on some distant planet and not on Earth. The culture that it represents is one that worships efficiency over the idea of human culture. Compare that to the Colosseum wonder being built next to it.

The Colosseum was an expression of Roman culture using the technology they had in order to construct it. It also represented their many abstract ideas of how to organize their society. The Digital Age capital in Empire Earth is a representation of the technology overtaking the expression of human culture. What we see in the buildings in the future epochs is really a continuation of what saw beginning with the Modern Epochs; architecture is now functional. Now architecture is basically just housing technology within those structures.

Here is the great idea behind Cyber Labatory which is right behind the Colosseum; it isn’t about the structure which is mattering in here, its the technology which matters here. Gameplay wise, the Cyber Labatory is representing something new in military affairs in the game. These Cybers are made specifically to counter other Cybers not the remaining human units. This is Cyber on Cyber conflict not human.

This is the essence of the Nano Age.

Tech is more important than when we use it to make culture.

It is not surprising that the houses in the Nano Age do not have any distinctive cultural aspects to it. Art and Culture is subordinate to the interests of efficiency, or more specifically, how we use technology to interact with our epoch.

That is the essence of the Digital and more importantly, the Nano Ages in Empire Earth.

Nvidia’s GeForce Now is the future of mainstream gaming

There will always be room for tinkers working on their gaming pcs; the age however of everyone having to shell money on them is going to give way to cloud streaming games.

I have talked about Nvidia’s GeForce Now many times on here. I think that the service is great for those who have great internet connections and lots of bandwidth. With an internet connection, you do not have worry about the system requirements only the strength of your internet connection and to a lesser extent, the location of your router and bandwidth usage. Such requirements are easier to deal with than the arcane internal structure of computers.

The Strength of Nvidia GeForce Now

The main strength is the ability to play any device you have. This is a major change which will bring more opportunities for different kinds of gamers. One of the issues we have with our gaming industry right now is that there is genre orthodoxy. You simply cannot be syncretic like in the past; your game has to be certain way or have a certain style.

This is where the RTS genre began to stumble after the release of Empire Earth. There was no sense of how the genre could move on with Starcraft breathing down its neck. Starcraft II, while a great game, would ossify the genre and prevent it from growing here. There were many experiments and crossovers such as Activision’s Battlezone series. Such experimentation is rare now.

This is what Nvidia GeForce Now can bring to the table.

What we need in the gaming space is an opening up of the player base. Sometimes we are too arcane in the way we talk about our games. Sometimes we need new perspectives to help innovate. This isn’t to say that our traditions are not important, but we need to take our time to invite newcomers.

This is the only way that the industry can truly start being healthy again. New perspectives will beget risk but no great artform was able to change without someone taking the first step in an uneven river.