Talking About Ubisoft and Tom Clancy Again

         Hey hey hey. Been a while. Miss me? Ha ha ha, don’t answer that, I know the answer. Anyways, you’re probably not going to want to read this anyway. Probably just reiterating things that I’ve already said but before that I just wanted to touch on a few other things. Saw Multiverse of Madness last Wednesday and I was pleasantly surprised. With other MCU movies I’ve been subject to spoiler speculation video thumbnails on YouTube or articles on Google or Twitter but I’ve not seen any aside from the initial trailer. It was nice being surprised for once. It was much different than I thought it’d be but it was great. In other news I’m still flip flopping on the VTuber thing. I’ve got my art work done for my Aztec girl from @Andaerz and sabzdunz is doing great work on my kaiju. There are just a lot of things that come with streaming that I don’t quite have the time for right now. I also feel like I’m holding myself back from playing certain games because I think “I’ll just wait and play it on stream” but then I sit around being bored when I could be playing something. But then I think about playing a game and if something funny happens I’d want it recorded so other people could see it but I don’t know. It changes every week. I think I’ll still have the rigger rig up my kaiju and if I change my mind again at least I’d have him ready.

            The other day on Twitter, Ubisoft put up some picture and said “the streets don’t forget” or something and the first comment I saw was someone posting a picture of Splinter Cell and Rainbow Six Vegas 2 sooo I’ma talk about Tom Clancy games! I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I keep coming back to this. I bought Splinter Cell Conviction again and the first thing I was greeted with was scrolling text on the bottom of the screen saying “Ghost Recon Future Soldier beta now live.” Oh man, what a time to be alive. Anyway, @NEETproxy and I were giving the co-op a go to see if it’s as good as we remember. The controls are very, very weird. Pushing the wrong buttons all the time, whenever you drop off a ledge or go into a window you stand up instead of being crouched which would be preferred, R3 is aim, it’s not great. The levels are very straight forward but there are defiantly different ways to go about the areas and the enemies don’t always do the same things to keep you on your toes. One thing I really don’t love is that when you put on a weapon attachment you can’t take it off. I have save data in the cloud or something so I had all the guns unlocked and I have a silenced shotgun that might be fun to use but it has a 2x scope on it and it makes aiming complete ass. If you can get the rhythm of the controls it is a fun game. Could use some modernization and honestly, I think Ubisoft should make Splinter Cell a co-op based game going forward and get away from Sam Fisher. Sam is being whored out to other Tom Clancy games like Master Chief but I feel Conviction really shines with the co-op.

            The thing that bothers me right now with Sam Fisher being everywhere (and getting a reboot game) is I don’t know what’s real right now. In the world of Rainbow Six you have something going on right now between team Rainbow and Nighthaven, Kali’s private military company. As any other video game or movie will tell you, if it’s a PMC, they bad. In a cinematic recently called “Sisters in Arms” it shows how team Rainbow has fractured with several of the members joining Kali and her other three soldiers (I guess there’s three now. I’ve been out of the loop for a while). So the narrative for this multiplayer only game is shifting but what does that actually mean? You have team Rainbow, essentially training in Siege and it’s even turned into quite the spectacle with the Invitational and now the narrative would suggest that something else is coming up. Something more like an actual game maybe? With a storyline? And we also have Rainbow Six Extraction where an alien parasite or something has infected Manhattan (I think) and team Rainbow front and center fighting the infection with… bullets. There are a bunch of the characters that seemed to have joined Kali in the line up fighting in Extraction so, again, what does this meeeeeaaaannnnnn? Separate timeline? Is one of these events later in time than the other? Am I reading way too much into it because they’re just videogames and I shouldn’t be thinking this hard? Probably that one but if you’re going to do this across different games with the same characters it’s bound to raise eyebrows. I can’t be the only one. (Saw a video on YouTube and was told after commenting that supposedly Siege and Extraction are separate timelines. It’s the cleanest way to make this work.) And, also, “rogue agents” is kind of reaching across the aisle and taking pages from The Division.

            The Division 2 just updated to Season 9 adding new targets. You know, same missions just different NPCs. But it’s like the other ones. You have one target to get to and several things to do in order to get them out in the open. Then you wait a few weeks for another target. So, when you add a new “season” with like two to three weeks between events you’d think there’d be a bit more than something that can be done in a few hours. If you’ve read other things I’ve wrote on Division and WoW you’ll know that I’m the kind of person that once I get to max level I kind of lose interest in a game and move on. I’ll come back when there are new things but I rarely stick around for long. I just don’t understand what I’m supposed to do right now.

            I wish the character creators in these games would be better. Wildlands was pretty good but I feel like Breakpoint and The Division are very limited. To me, if you’re not going to put that many options in the game then why bother have a character creator? When there’s a character creator I always have a vision in my head of what I want my character to look like and I’m always disappointed because my character never matches my vision based on the limitations of the game. I’d like to be able to make a buff girl. This mod for Tifa in Final Fantasy 7 Remake kind of makes me want to get the game. I’d also like to make a guy character that is big and tall. Someone like Ben from the HGTV show Home Town. While playing Division 2 @NEETproxy also brought up wanting a waifu Division game too. “Gah, why isn’t there anime Division yet?” He also suggested he’d be fine with a “gacha system” like Genshin Impact and you know what? I’m down. Do it, I’ll buy your first 50 characters if you make a waifu Division style game.

            The one thing Ubisoft seems to be good at, unfortunately, is their multiplayer focused games. These games are very different than the norm; Rainbow Six Siege, For Honor and the soon to be Skull and Bones, there’s no other games quite like these. And I say “unfortunately” because I like the single player, co-op side of games more than multiplayer games. I do like certain multiplayer games fine but it still doesn’t stop me from wanting a good, story based Rainbow Six. Siege is very good, it is very fun but everyone is so god damn competitive about it that it makes it not fun. Then you have For Honor that is still getting updates and I’m always surprised to see it show up on my YouTube feed like “this is still going?” A trailer for Skull and Bones came out recently and it looks kind of cool. It basically looks and sounds like Black Flag but there’s nothing wrong with that, I just wonder how long can they keep it interesting but like I said, For Honor is still going so maybe they’ve got a plan.

            So that’s it. What are your thoughts? What should I be doing in The Division right now? Are you excited for Skull and Bones? Seen Multiverse of Madness yet? If not, go see it! I’ve got things to do, I’m not thinking straight anymore so bye. I’ll be back some time, later.

               @AztecSauce