Sacrifice wrote on Jun 16, 2017, 12:32:
I recently started playing Elder Scrolls: Legends and I am enjoying it. It was just released on Steam and it is free. I'm not sure why I would want to pay to play Pathfinder. Is the IP known enough to compete with other collectible card games at its price?

It's a very different thing. It's a co-operative game and the card expansions are set, no blind packs in the physical version. The electronic version breaks a lot of content into blind packs though because it started as a mobile port and that is what you do there. It's awesome and a very different beast to MtG/Hearthstone/TES:Legends.

jdreyer wrote on Jun 16, 2017, 01:50:

Cram wrote on Jun 16, 2017, 00:34:
For what they're claiming the system can do, I would assume they're taking a loss on the system at $500USD.

Yeah, they've basically quadrupled the graphics processing power. The XB1X has 40 CUs, while the Radeon 480 has just 36. That's $250 right there just for the graphics. It's actually smart that they're adding 4x GPU power, so 4K games will be smooth as silk.

Smooth as silk? Doubt it. A 1080ti doesn't do 4k smooth as silk unless it's some miracle of optimization like Doom or an older title. There are always compromises.

But yeah, if I had the money for a decent low latency high quality 4k TV I would get this console for sure. My 1080 panel is already better than what my consoles can do smoothly so they would need more than 4x the power to make it work at 4k.

There are exceptions on the PS4 Uncharted 4, Arkham Knight, Metal Gear 5 and Destiny somehow maintain low but consistently smooth framerates at awesome image quality but that is mostly due to the optimisations you can make when your art department and technical graphic artists are fucking baller which unfortunately isn't most game devs.

I have this on my phone, it's great. It's a dice rolling quasi deck builder. It's all of the fun of a clutch ability check in DnD but over and over and over and over again forever.

But it is a port of a physical card game. And there is some annoying pay to win (easier) elements. I love it on the phone. I don't think I would ever play it on the PC unless you had some mates on skype doing it with you.

Also, unlike the physical game, it seems balanced for single player (As in, a single person able to min-max the builds and turn actions of all 2-6 party members). I gave up on the last scenario but got more than my money's worth out of the rest of it.

Careful with the DLC. Early on it was easy to buy the pack that filled it out with all the quests and characters that would make it feel like a fleshed out experience, afterwards a lot more confusing "Alt' characters and shit was added that muddy the waters and cost a fortune.

Burrito of Peace wrote on Jun 15, 2017, 07:52:
ED is one of those games that should be right in my wheelhouse. Unfortunately, the lack of proper tutorials (the last time I played a year and a half ago) killed my interest. I don't count "Go watch four hours of YouTube videos" as a proper tutorial, either. I'm not looking for hand-holding through the game, but at least take the time to give a solid framework for how the game mechanics themselves work.

I started about a year ago and there were quite a few tutorial missions telling you how to pilot, fight and trade and they added a team deathmatch mode that is good for practicing combat without losing your insurance/ship as well. The refitting system was the most obtuse for me and took a while to work out, but that seems to have gotten better as well.

Bub wrote on Jun 15, 2017, 07:43:

Wash Washburne wrote on Jun 14, 2017, 13:26:
I fucking hate their business model, selling ppl paint jobs, ship spoilers and other useless crap...but if you don't really want to do spreadsheets in space, this is it...at least until Star Citizen comes out.

The main issue with cosmetic items for cash, is that before you know it, the games core development grinds to a snails pace, because the devs are working overtime grinding out funny hats and shinies for the cash shop. There are new items in the cash shop at a furious pace, while bug fixes and core game development take a back seat. The game becomes from the publishers view, a fancy themed lobby for the cash shop profit center.

I'm no expert, but I imagine that the artists who make sweet ship textures are not integral to the development of new content and engine improvements anyway. I doubt they need any QA, programming or modeler support to put an Australian flag on a Cobra but I could be wrong.

I actually don't mind the paywall ship skins. It helps make everyone look unique whilst not devolving into the sea of dicks, anime girls and porno you get when the community has a free-for-all.

Compared to the wierdo-currency bullshit that has infected almost every other game Elite feels downright archaic in it's lack of shopping cart icons and microtransaction advertising in game.

Oh Bungie you filthy minx. It's like you know what my brain wants to see. I'm thinking PC copy pre-order, and if it works out a second PS4 and two copies for that platform for Fireteaming up with the daughter. Hundreds of hours of value from the last one even if I didn't keep up with the expansions.

A wonderful game that made reasonable compromises to the Halo sandbox in the name of nailing network/co-op friendliness. It's starting to look like the cinematic and vehicle play at least are returning to form. Don't fuck this up.

Kxmode wrote on Jun 13, 2017, 06:00:
It took me six months to go from AC2 to Syndicate.

In order of best to worst:
1. Black Flag - Fantastic setting, story, pirate ship mechanics! IMHO the pirate ship stuff is hands down the best gameplay in the entire AC series.
2. Syndicate - A vast improvement over Unity's clunky controls and "pay 2 win" cash shop.
3. Brotherhood - Love the Roman Renaissance! It was handled quite well in this chapter.
4. Revelations - Great story cliffhanger! Also, provides continuation and closure of AC1.
5. AC1 - Good start to the series.
6. AC2 - Another great cliffhanger plot.
7. Rogue - basically a substandard clone of Black Flag with no attention to detail (e.g. when the pirate ship rides over big waves and crashes down there's no wash upon the deck as there is in Black Flag. Rains never hit the ship's deck, which is especially weird during a storm.)
8. Unity - TL;DR below.

Unity remains the worse in the series. It looks amazing, but the controls. Oh, my goodness, they suck! I am performing what I believe to be a "walk over and enter drain hole entrance" and instead Arno skips all over in the middle of an army that I "smartly" called over with smoke bombs; because, you know, stealthiness. The main issue is Ubisoft decided to add bizarre mechanics that require constantly aiming Arno where to go (e.g. you have to turn him 90 degrees to move in a particular direction). All past AC games used a kind of "fuzzy logic" to determine where to go and it worked 95% of the time. Unity created many sighing and bewilderment moments. Of all the AC games, Unity had the most checkpoint restarts. I believe one mission alone required about ~35 restarts. I would not have minded this, but some of the missions (especial the final) took a couple of hours to complete. The significant glaring issue is Ubisoft's removal of two fundamental mechanics that they established in AC3 and AC respectively: whistling and always-on eagle vision. Without those UbiSoft did not make Unity harder, they just made gameplay more annoying. Contrast with Unity; Syndicate is a vast improvement. Just the control improvements alone is welcomed. Whistling is back, and eagle vision is a temporary thing, but at least it will mark targets that remain marked after the image fades away. Eagle Vision II adds the ability to mark targets behind walls. Additional skills add quality of life features which make the game feel like an AC title.

I am REALLY looking forward to ACO! Syndicate ended on an excellent cliffhanger. Spoilers: At the end, Juno said she was ready to reenter the world. Be sure to play the World War II fracture to see Juno's backstory. I made the mistake of skipping that and didn't understand the context when she suddenly appeared in the post-credits.

As much as I like the series, I hope it comes to a good end. We are up to 10 main series titles. How long can the Templars and Assassins fight one another. They need to hug and chill out!

I am a big fan of this series as well despite it's many, many sins. Looking forward to a pre-gunpowder AC game again for sure, and Ptolemaic Egypt is awesome. A reinvigorated post-alexander Egypt aware of and struggling to emulate it's 2500 year old legacy of epic monuments and continuous shitty fashion is a rich tapestry waiting for an awesome story. And dastardly Row-manz! I wonder if they will bring back some of that cool emperor cult stuff from brotherhood.

The top 3 you list, AC1/2/3 are the only ones I finished and would recommend though. I notice 3 is not on your list, but I loved that one. It's like The Last of the Mohicans or the good bits of The Patriot. The game and all your targets felt interesting and hate-able-relatable, and the main character seems to develop as a human in a way only Ezio did, turning from a petulant genocide survivor into a vengeful nightmare person (But Ezio took 2 of his 3 games to do it in).

The first two games get/got by on setting alone. Digital time travelling tourism with some inoffensively unspectacular game play in the way. Still better than most crap 3rd person character action combo-yawnfests.

It's sad though, because the worst games seem to have the most awesome settings. Unity's setting (that crowd/angry mob rendering!) and story are phenomenal but the gameplay and a lot of the mission design should be regarded as some kind of crime, or at least banned psychological torture. Get this fucker in gitmo and those canaries will sing guaranteed. The ambition was there, and another year in the cooker might have made it the AC co-op dream it should have been but it was not to be. I have a sneaky suspicion that Syndicate with it's tag-team protagonists was meant to crib the 2p co-op from Saints Row in the same way it took the territory control/mission structure and carriage combat from it but had it cut at some stage due to quality concerns like those that sunk Unity.

Revelations should be removed from sale and forcibly deleted from history for the nonsense bomb crafting, tower defense and phoned in mission design, and the story seemed super slow and lame in the parts I was able to tolerate though your ranking of it suggests I should give it another go. Maybe it gets better? But who has time for that? An amazing city at an amazing time in history squandered. Bury it in the desert with Unity.

As for the music rhythm style combat, I prefer that to most solutions. But I played and loved all the Rocksteady Batman games twice each so maybe there is something wrong with me. The good AC games have ways of surprising you with new animations after even 20 hours of eye stabbing hijinks which kind of helps keep it fresh. Also you can almost always run away if you are that bored so no biggie.

Seems to be a bit more effort than the decent Skybox remakes, though the source material also needs it more than those awesome games did.

And unlike Cossacks 3, or Starcraft 2 for that instance, it seems to be willing to cast aside some of that 'Classic' baggage like the nasty zoom limit. If they get creative with the interface and modernize it, and maybe bring in some of the AOE/RoN style unit behavior AI toggles it will be a worthy rebuy.

I think I'm with Timmy on this one. The excesses of capitalism seem to require and encourage high order shitbagness in men, but it seems to be the only mechanism by which shit gets made/done.

Shitposters are oxygen theiving malcontents with basically no value to society. Wit and logic are great weapons against the rich and powerful but most of what we read these days just seems to be hateful tripe, like domestic abuse inflicted on keyboards and message boards instead of the women that are too smart to live with them.

Anytime I see a game like this come up I just add Motorstorm 2 to my "Play Next" list.

It's a pain in the ass to cycle the PS3 back into the back of the TV but worth it every. fucking. time.

A PC/PS4 re-release wouldn't go amiss. I don't believe there will ever be anything else like it to replace it. Even it's own sequel didn't do it properly. Like Stunt Car racer I have given up on anyone ever being able to re-bottle that magic and I hate Driveclub all the more for putting a nail in the coffin of a company that should have been launching the best PS4 exclusive in universeses far more perfect than ours.

Mordecai Walfish wrote on Jun 9, 2017, 11:43:

Wash Washburne wrote on Jun 9, 2017, 09:42:
What I find interesting is that the game size is about 19GB in total, tho there isn't really much to the game and it still looks like something PS2 puked out.

Last ditch moment to boost their numbers?

VaranDragon wrote on Jun 9, 2017, 05:40:
There is almost nothing worse than hipster beards. There are people who sport really impressive beards & manage to wear them well, but they are few and far between.

https://goo.gl/images/FBdIsl

Its because of the giant high resolution videos included with the game, which was not an issue when on BLU-RAY, but on downloadable versions of the game was never properly compressed. Kind of like that audio bullshit from the first titanfall. They're probably shoveling in all their DLC along in that package now too, whether the user owns them or not.

Yes, they do include all the DLC because it is all playable as long as the host owns it. (I guess a lot of the guns and hats/masks and extra classes and whatever are still pay-walled, but they won't be much of that 19GB).

The high-res videos/advertisements are kind of cool but not worth the space after you have seen them once so it would be nice to be able to option them out. Maybe you could pull the old warez trick and replace them with 100kb AVI's.

The "PS2" comment from Wash is ludicrous, though they are hardly cutting edge. And it is a game that you want to be running at super high framerate with massive waves of enemies in fairly large environments so it's worth it.

There is nothing else quite like it. The different missions, meaningful difficulty settings for each, the randomised aspects keeping them fresh and the themed objectives help make it a lot more interesting than the usual wave-based blast-a-thon (Some maps you can pull off without triggering the L4D nightmare part if you use your swat-4 skills properly).

It even plays ok with strangers. Random incompetent internet assholes kind of add the the fuckwit criminal theme it has going. Everything going wrong is all part of a good mobster flick after all.

I handle DLC by not buying it. Unless it's one that is actually good and on special for 90% off (Which eventually happens).

Don't pass this up because of the roar of haters. Base game is not trash for $0, definitely some of the best co-op nonsense I've ever had.

Also why remove spilt screen for the PC? You know, the place where the horsepower and resolution make split screen awesome? Just because PvZ does it this way? Well, DD2 wont get my money either.

Agent-Zero wrote on May 26, 2017, 21:24:
so... how many quests will involve POLYGAMY???

and how many wives do you have to collect to unlock the super shotgun?

3, and you get the gold skin if their average age is 14 or lower.

I thought that first Prey game was awesome. I never replayed it but it's one of the few shooters from the last 12 years I actually remember playing and enjoying. Some fantastic set pieces and one-off gimmicks that helped it feel fresh through it's rather lengthy run.

I think the Bioshocks are awesome but flawed, and nobody seems to have actually contested Slick's point that the new Prey is a competent but unspectacular me to game so if I actually had it on my wishlist I would take it off. Thanks for the inoculation shot Slick! I've fallen for the "I hate this competent but repetitive game I can't bring myself to finish" positive steam review trap more than I'd like to admit.

I'm wondering now that Paradox is funding these mad frenchmen a theater specific Hearts of Iron style campaign mode could tie these battles together in the future...

Production quality seems to have taken a nose dive since Red Dragon, not in terms of graphics or sound or UI (Which seem improved) but in terms of content though it seems appropriately priced. Even Red Dragon dropped the co-op campaign from Airland Battle.

I hope Eugen can find their feet again and start delivering that same crazy kitchen sink style Wargame experience in the future, though the detail and attention you can give units and terrain when you pick a specific place and time is pretty awesome.

Eastern Front, Africa, Italy. Lots of places it could go. As with ARMA though my favorite setting is the pre 90's stuff alla Wargame EE. Maybe some fictional 50's setting on the Korean peninsular could work, could tie in all the fun post war gear from all the major players there. They already have a fair bit of research from RD ready to go!

Loved the beta, will try campaign tomorrow (Stupid slow internet)

Ship an amazing game and get fired! Wow!

I don't think any of them will have trouble landing a new job after the Hitman home run. But moving states/countries can be super annoying and any period of unemployment sucks even with insurance and now they are separated from an IP which they had just 'solved' and probably could have released content on for years. If more people had bought it that is... I guess too much good stuff came out last year.

Beamer wrote on May 23, 2017, 09:50:

I'm excited for the controversy of the new setting. While I'd wager they're going after everyone to some extent, I'd also wager the bulk of this is aimed at hyperconservative militias. I mean, it's Wyoming, it factually has hyperconservative militia groups, but doesn't factually have a significant amount of hyperliberals. Would not be surprised to have the main character be one, perhaps native American, or if they didn't learn their lesson from FC3, an obnoxious privileged white college kid that everyone finds at least slightly off-putting and Ubi later claims was a parody that went over our heads.

Yeah everyone hates the FC3 story. I think it might have been the best. I don't think I'm super smart or anything, and maybe I am reading into it, but I thought the douchebags in FC3 were awesome. The heroes journey was all about that kid realising what a douchebag he and his friends are and how he was starting to enjoy the murder (Which seemed a pretty cool mirror to games in general, the same theme drove Hotline Miami).

Fell off the Destiny train a few years ago. I am super hyped to get back in though on PC.

This trailer feels like old Bungie, I think this is the only game I am super excited about this year. Could be a bit bait and switchy again but hopefully they have tightened up their production process and the thinness of D1 post release is due to all the love this game has been getting.

Hell, if it's only as good as D1 but at 60fps I think I'm ready for that but... no. I cannot hope for more. I cannot afford another hype-stroke.

Edit: If I was on their marketing team I would suggest they rename battle.net to bungie.net for a week at release as a joke and homage.

JSP wrote on May 2, 2017, 21:01:
Half-Life 3 is in fact Steam, through which all the heuristic data and habits of PC usage and management figures are being harvested as we speak as part of the takeover by a hostile extra-dimension entity.

Oh shit this is actually scary! The combine will have us right where they want us, our wealth and free time spent on frivolous entertainment, distancing ourselves from society instead of working out, learning to shoot and maintain real guns without hitscan properties or building community networks that can later form resistance cells.

...diabolocal!