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Is there any point in favor of using the same three maps over and over? Or having most of the encounters be waves of dudes teleporting in?
It’s ignorant exaggerations like this that make me wonder if people complaining about DAII have actually played it.
Or it could be that there’s basically no reason to actively like them and lots of easy reasons to dislike them.
Their LGBT support is a big reason. Or maybe just the fact that they publish a lot of successful and popular games. Including the ones that idiots on the internet complain about and blame on EA for not being exactly how they think that the developers are obligated to make the game.
It’s ignorant exaggerations like this that make me wonder if people complaining about DAII have actually played it.
Well, a lot of the random waves are quite repetitive; everything you find in the parallel dimension known as Kirkwall at Night is a group of mercenaries/thugs swiftly followed by another group of mercenaries/thugs, just bigger. And a certain amount of quests requires you to go all the way across the same randomized set of maps, somethimes even getting in and getting out in the same mission (like for the Starkhaven mages’ quest), killing anonymous waves of enemies, hoping to reach as soon as possible the end of the dungeon where you’ll find the interesting point of the gameplay/story.
It’s ignorant exaggerations like this that make me wonder if people complaining about DAII have actually played it.
I played it. I wish I didn’t. I kinda wonder if you played it though. See how that works?
Still waiting on a valid artistic justification for the caves and waves reuse though since apparently it’s not corner-cutting.
Their LGBT support is a big reason.
I’d personally give them more credit for this if they hadn’t used it as a lame ass smokescreen when they won the Worst Company thing again. That just makes it seem like a cynical PR move.
Or maybe just the fact that they publish a lot of successful and popular games.
People who care about who made those games are more inclined to credit the developer than the publisher.
Including the ones that idiots on the internet complain about and blame on EA for not being exactly how they think that the developers are obligated to make the game.
This really reads like you’re implying that DA2 falls under this umbrella, but based on what sales data is available and the fact they cancelled the expansion pack, DA2 was neither successful nor popular relative to Bioware’s other games or their expectations for it.
I can agree with that. It was really just the first game; my interest in Desmond’s story waned significantly after that, and I was always more heavily invested in the historical setting. But the first one managed to pique some genuine curiosity from me, which is rare. Probably says more about the sort of games I play, though.
Yeah, I probably would’ve liked it more if it felt like they were really doing something with it.
Well, a lot of the random waves are quite repetitive; everything you find in the parallel dimension known as Kirkwall at Night is a group of mercenaries/thugs swiftly followed by another group of mercenaries/thugs, just bigger. And a certain amount of quests requires you to go all the way across the same randomized set of maps, somethimes even getting in and getting out in the same mission (like for the Starkhaven mages’ quest), killing anonymous waves of enemies, hoping to reach as soon as possible the end of the dungeon where you’ll find the interesting point of the gameplay/story.
...which pretty much sums up Dragon Age: Origins as well.
I’d personally give them more credit for this if they hadn’t used it as a lame ass smokescreen when they won the Worst Company thing again. That just makes it seem like a cynical PR move.
That would totally explain all of their LGBT support prior to a bunch of idiots voting for them on a poll for a sensationalist website pandering to said idiots.
Logic!
...which pretty much sums up Dragon Age: Origins as well.
I don’t know, in Origins there seemed to be more variety, except in certain circumstances (as the Deep Roads); at least usually encounters didn’t respawn each time right after offing the first wave, just to keep the player busy.
That would totally explain all of their LGBT support
Why yes, it would. Publicly traded corporations don’t do nice things purely for the sake of doing nice things. When they sponsor causes, it’s because they’ve determined that the net result of sponsoring those causes will make more money for their shareholders. It’s in their charter. If they ever determine their LGBT support is hurting their bottom line more than it’s helping them, they’ll drop it in a hot second.
Granted, it’s nice when you are able to do something good in the process of making money, but hiding behind it when people criticize you is cynical and gross.
sensationalist website pandering to said idiots.
Have you ever actually read The Consumerist before or are you just making assumptions?
Logic!
No, not really.
Publicly traded corporations don’t do nice things purely for the sake of doing nice things.
So basically, everyone’s a self-centered jerk because…well, if everyone’s a self-centered jerk, that provides you with a counterargument.
Have you ever actually read The Consumerist before or are you just making assumptions?
I’ve read their “articles” on EA. When EA points out several highly-successful games that idiots on the internet were whining about, the Consumerist said that those games had nothing to do with EA being in the poll. And then when EA “won” their “poll”, they listed those exact games as reasons why EA sucks.
So yes, they were blatantly pandering to the idiots who actually think that a video game developer is worse than companies that destroy the environment and people’s lives. EA-bashers practically parody themselves.
So basically, everyone’s a self-centered jerk because…well, if everyone’s a self-centered jerk, that provides you with a counterargument.
What does this sentence even mean.
Let me explain it again, because your response doesn’t make it seem like you understood, since it seems like you’re assigning weird personal motivations to a giant corporate entity. The function of a publicly traded corporation is to make as much money as possible for as long as possible. The job of the board of directors is to make business decisions in the best interest of the company itself and the company’s shareholders. Understand that in this case, it’s referring to their best financial interest, not their best social interest. EA is not trying to make life in general more liveable for its gay shareholders.
If EA’s support for LGBT stuff ever began to hurt them more than it helped them, continuing that support would mean the board of directors were actively failing their primary duty and they would be violating their stated role in the charter.
If you want to love them and buy more of their games because when they were looking for causes to support they picked yours, go nuts. Just understand that getting you to do that was the reason they did it, not because they wanted you to be happy or whatever, and when they were embarrassed by an internet poll, they (erroneously) blamed their support of you for making them a target.
I’ve read their “articles” on EA. When EA points out several highly-successful games that idiots on the internet were whining about, the Consumerist said that those games had nothing to do with EA being in the poll. And then when EA “won” their “poll”, they listed those exact games as reasons why EA sucks.
So yes, they were blatantly pandering to the idiots who actually think that a video game developer is worse than companies that destroy the environment and people’s lives. EA-bashers practically parody themselves.
Well if you “read” their “website” you would “know” that it’s “about” “monitoring” “consumer relations.” The poll wasn’t designed to render moral judgments, just to indicate consumer dissatisfaction. If you actually had read the “articles”(seriously why is this in scare quotes, they were pretty clearly articles whether you agreed with the content or not), you would have seen the purpose of the “poll” explained.
The Consumerist thing was kind of annoying considering the competition is a lot worse in terms of morality. That doesn’t suddenly make EA a good company though. They’ve got quite a few years of bad will built up and have been pretty poor on actually fixing some of their issues, or did EA somehow have nothing to do with their servers crashing when they tried to launch SimCity earlier this year?
Though this whole thing did make me go back and reevaluate my views on Bioware. They have always been a pretty terrible developer as far as gameplay goes. I’d also like to flat out say I have the same view on Skyrim as Dragon Age 2. If I ever have the crazy idea to go back and replay either, I’m starting a tally on reused maps on sidequests. I know on Dragon Age 2, there was one map used at least three times for three different side quests.
On another note, a couple of friends made a game. It’s nothing ground breaking, but it does kill 5 minutes. http://www.rocketlizardgame.com/
they (erroneously) blamed their support of you for making them a target.
Oh wait, their usual haters did attack them for their LGBT support. In case you haven’t noticed, the same idiots who constantly bash EA will bash them for any reason. It’s exactly why sensationalist crap like The Consumerist can say two completely contradictory things: as long as what they’re saying is attacking EA, the bashers will swallow it down.
But if you want to tell yourself that all corporations are soulless entities only concerned with money, go ahead. Insisting that doesn’t make it reality about EA, just the same as what you say about EA’s games.
But if you want to tell yourself that all corporations are soulless entities only concerned with money, go ahead. Insisting that doesn’t make it reality about EA, just the same as what you say about EA’s games.
You’re right, my position that an organization that exists for the purpose of making money for its stockholders is principally concerned about making money for its stockholders is a less realistic position than your position, in which a multinational corporation willingly weakens its earning potential because it loves you and wants you to be happy. Such an organization would never do things like lock their gay Star Wars planet inside an expansion pack.
Just like how Dragon Age 2 was a actually smash hit that resonated with Bioware’s intended audience and got unfairly hated on by a vocal minority of haterzzz, and it definitely was not an unfinished turd that sold worse than every Bioware game in the Mass Effect era, so much worse that they had to cancel the expansion pack they’d already started on, so much worse that they never released an Ultimate Edition because they couldn’t get retailers to stock it.
My bad. In the future I will try to look at reality more.
I really enjoy how the flame war between Call of Duty and Battlefield continues to rage.
is this a metaphor rocky
so much worse that they never released an Ultimate Edition because they couldn’t get retailers to stock it.
And evidently the Mass Effect games sold horribly as well, because there was no “Ultimate Edition”. Because obviously a game has only sold well if there is an “Ultimate Edition”.
You can stop now; I don’t think you could possibly top that argument in terms of absolute nonsense.
And that means what you want it to mean because…you want it to mean that way and you’re incapable of accepting anything else.
It’s always a waste of time to argue with people whining about DAII.
Ghosts looks quite interesting, especially the CoDdog (whom I will never refer to as anything but “CoDdog” or “Shadow”). It’s probably going to be the first CoD I buy since Modern Warfare 2. At which point I’ll probably discover that the multiplayer is as unbalanced as ever and lose most of my interest. Optimism!
I haven’t been paying as much attention (read: even less) to Battlefield 4, but BF3‘s multiplayer has been fun for me so far.
And that means what you want it to mean because…you want it to mean that way and you’re incapable of accepting anything else.
It means retailers did not believe they could sell a fancy version of the game. Maybe the retailers are part of the Hater Brigade too. I dunno.
All the publicly available sales estimates suggest that DA2 sold around half of what DA:O sold, and a huge chunk of DA2’s sales came from the first week, which has more to do with DA:O’s success than DA2’s.
And the fact remains that they cancelled an expansion pack in which they’d already invested significant time. You’ve never responded to this and I’m curious why you think they would do that.
I mean, sure, the official sales figures for games aren’t generally made public, but there’s a bunch of giant-sized red flags and the only hard number EA has ever released in an earnings report(2 million shipped, not sold, mind you, but shipped) is really low during what was apparently its peak sales period. Coming to any sort of conclusion, positive or negative, requires some amount of deduction.
you’re incapable of accepting anything else.
There is certainly somebody in this conversation that’s true of, but I don’t think it’s me. If you have arguments other than “because” and “idiots on the internet” and “haters” you should use them.
e:
Battlefield 3 I didn’t find nearly as much fun as Bad Company 2.
Agreed. I still like BF2 the best of all army man shooter games though.
(stopped caring about your arguments more than an hour ago…)
Sure you did.
I gotta go with Sansa. I liked DA2, but EA puts microtransactions in their games like its going out of style. They have little interest in creating an interactive narrative. It’s all about money. Which doesn’t make them any more evil than another company, I guess, but they also seem to have a flippant attitude towards their customers and have shown that they have little respect for the consumer.
I don’t really care if they support LGBT or not. Like, is that even a factor in a video game/software company? It feels like if my favorite sandwich supplier let me know that they support limited government. Like, I don’t care; provide better sandwiches.
Eh, as far as I’m concerned, I couldn’t care less if a game provides microtransactions as an option as long as they remain an option and not practically required to play. To use a sandwich shop metaphor, it’s like complaining about Subway giving you the option to pay a little extra for extra cheese or meat. The best example to point to is ME3, where the profits from microtransactions allowed them to put out the multiplayer DLCs for free.
I don’t like Microtransactions because they absolutely gut any sense of immersion I have in a game.
This Humble Bundle is looking pretty good. Worms Reloaded, the Bard’s Tale, Ticket to Ride, Greed Corp, Incredipede and Anodyne. I’ve heard good things about Worms Reloaded, the Bard’s Tale and Incredipede, though the others look pretty interesting as well. The only one I’m iffy about is Ticket to Ride.
They just released Squirrel Girl on Marvel Heroes.
what.
who?
Look her up. Apparently she’s pretty badass. She’s one of those Lethal Joke Characters.
Squirrel Girl! She took down Doctor Doom once, didn’t she? And probably, like, Galactus.
Twenty seconds on Google has made me more interested in Squirrel Girl than Iron Man, Batman, Spiderman, and Superman combined.
In other news, Planetside 2 continues to be great.
Not bad at all for their second game. Kind of curious what kind of skill they had on their staff though. (One of my favorite games of all time, Psychonauts, was Double Fine’s first game but they had a pretty skilled and experienced team working on the game.)
Every once in a while, I feel like I’ve become completely jaded to games and their effect on me. I breezed through Spec Ops: The Line with no issue, Red Dead Redemption never really tugged at any heart strings and I just kind of got mad at Mass Effect 3 for ruining one of my favorite songs.
Yet every time I pick up Mother 3, I can’t get through it a second time. That game gets to me.
Also, stay away from Time and Eternity, it sucks on every level a game can suck. The music is grating, the character designs are wonky, the combat stays pretty static through the game once you get over the neat initial features, the gameplay feels like one giant fetch quest, there’s a weird glitch in the saving screen where it always saves twice, the plot is interesting in theory but so poorly pulled off it’s offensive and there’s little to no replay value, and none of the characters are particularly endearing. I’d spork this game if I had the money to buy the equipment needed to record PS3 games.
Currently playing Recettear and Incredipede. Have Aquaria on hold until I can find a better mousepad. Both looking forward to and dreading the Thief reboot. I’m really hesitant about the gameplay, though the story is what’s going to sell or lose me. I’m also a bit worried that they’re going to gentrify the main character and make him more of a thief with a heart of gold instead of the absolute jerk he was in the original Thief trilogy. Can’t wait for The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth.
EDIT: Ahahahahahahaha! This game. I love it. I think I sprained my cheeks while playing it. (EDIT 2: Warning, blood and violence and stuff.)
I’ve played a bit of Spec Ops: The Line. Really, what ruins any sort of effect that the game is aiming for is based on two things:
1. The game constantly trying to shame the player based on an attitude that the game assumes anyone playing it would have.
2. The game constantly trying to shame the player based on events which the player had absolutely no control over.
And of course, on top of that, the gameplay just isn’t good. Really, making a game “deep” (read: pretentious) isn’t an excuse for lackluster gameplay.
I can agree with the gameplay portion, though I thought the plot came pretty close to getting the message they were going for. The things I think they really screwed up were two key plot points.
EDIT: I also really don’t like it when a game gets labeled as “pretentious” when it’s trying to tackle themes. It’s usually brought up in the same vein that games can’t be art and that people should stop caring if a game has something offensive in it because “this is supposed to be fun”. It says that games can’t even attempt to be anything other than toys.
I’m with organiclead on this. I think the point of Spec Ops: The Line is to be an unpleasant and disturbing experience. Yes, they railroad you a bit, but how many gamers wouldn’t even question doing some of that stuff if the game didn’t go to extreme ends to say “hey, this is messed up.” How many FPSs have the player character mowing down enemies without a second thought?
It might not be good as a game, but it’s kinda hard to have a dialogue like that when the player can just go “No, I made a different decision, so that didn’t happen, so you have no argument.”
I like to see games as art. I like to see games handle deep themes and ideas. Just look at, say, Mother 3. The problem with Spec Ops is that it handles its themes with all of the subtlety and precision of a sledgehammer, that there’s a clear difference between how much effort they put into pushing their message and how much effort they put into the medium that they were pushing their message through. The entire delivery of the themes is based around trying to make the player feel bad because of a mindset they are assumed to have and the consequences of actions they never chose to do. Saying “hey, this is messed up” in response to a horrible event that the player had absolutely no input in is an entirely different thing that saying “hey, you are messed up”.
I can agree with most of that, though I still think the game is solid and would be a good game if they just changed those two points I mentioned above. I’m not even saying it was a great game, but it was definitely above average.
EDIT: I also don’t think being obvious about your message makes anything any less artistic or themed.
On a completely different note, I just played the demo for The Stanley Parable. Saying that I’m confused doesn’t even begin to describe how I feel.
^^ that is exactly how I feel about it.
Okay, I bought the game, and it’s frighteningly addictive. I mean, most of my play-throughs might be half an hour at most, but my god, I just keep playing to find more endings.
Also, I love the fact that turning achievements on is itself an achievement.
There’s a lot of reasons why Spec Ops: The Line isn’t a good story, here in approximate order of appearance (spoilers, obviously):
Martin Walker waited. The lights above him blinked and sparked out of the air. There was darkness in the base. He didn’t see it, but had expected it now for years. His warnings to Cernel John Konrad were not listenend to and now it was too late. Far too late for now, anyway.
Walker was in Delta Force for fourteen years. When he was young he watched the wars and he said to Konrad “I want to be in the wars Konrad.”
Konrad said “No! You will BE KILL BY DARKNESS”
There was a time when he believed him. Then as he got oldered he stopped. But now in the dust bowl base of the UAE he knew there was darkness.
“This is Konrad” the radio crackered. “You must fight the demons!”
So Martin gotted his palsma mortar and blew up the wall.
“HE GOING TO KILL US” said the 33rd
“I will shoot at him” said Mega-Lugo and he fired the rocket missiles. Walker plasmaed at him and tried to blew him up. But then the gatehouse fell and they were trapped and not able to kill.
“No! I must kill the demons” Adams shouted
The radio said “No, Martin. You are the demons”
And then John was a zombie.
It’s actually because the plot was rewritten late in the day: originally the 33rd had deserted to loot Dubai following a war with Iran (this is why there are those newspapers about a fortune left in Dubai in Konrad’s apartment in the intro, which in the final plot he couldn’t possibly have got because he was presumably in Dubai when they were printed). The squad was a three-man team with a sniper and two riflemen (Adams used to have Lugo’s rifle, which is why his character model has magazines for it, and Lugo had a UMP instead of the Tavor) and Walker was presumably an errand boy sent by a grocery clerk to collect a bill. Apparently that plot was canned because it would take too much time to explain the fictional war with Iran, leaving us with the same three-man team trying to search the entire city instead.
...damn.
Did you have that somewhere else online or copy that from somewhere? Because I totally want to share that.
It’s mostly rewritten from my notes for a playthrough / analysis video series I’m working on (slowly). Don’t have it up anywhere else.
While I disagree with the equipment portion (the US government functions on a “lowest bidder” policy for pretty much all of it’s branches, including equipment for the US military), you brought up quite a few points I didn’t notice and quite a few I haven’t actually seen brought up before, like the lack of research into Dubai and the misery doll thing. Thank you.
Oh, that’s certainly true for the normal military, not so much for top-tier SF like Delta: generally, what they want they get. You only have to look at those shots of what the SEAL DEVGRU team who killed Bin Laden were using to see that; it’s all custom top-shelf HK gear with every gadget you can think of.
http://i50.tinypic.com/5v7rd3.jpg
Maybe, though I still think the crappy equipment thing helps with the over all game and it’s attempts at not being glamorous (despite the fact it failed hard at this goal), even if it really went against the character we were supposed to be following. Guess that’s another big failing in the themes VS the story it’s telling.
Also, I have a sneaking suspicion the helicopter thing was only thrown in so they could throw it in their bait and switch trailers.
I don’t know, I think you could make it fit the theme with a sort of digital man being gradually stripped of his technology to reveal a core as ragged as anyone else’s, and it would strengthen the contrast between the desperate situation in the city and the calm of the world outside if you were very obviously an outsider with much better gear. In the actual game it just comes off as damn weird when the 33rd start pulling out pristine laser-sighted P90s and AA-12s near the end of the game since your top-tier special ops team never had anything like that.
Of course the big failure of the demo is that it did exactly what they wanted it to; most people who saw it went “oh, it’s another generic shooter” and didn’t buy it. Which, when you think about it, actually means the game undermined its own argument.
I didn’t take away a “war is bad” message from the game. I’ve always seen it as a game about Walker blaming everything else for things he’s done. The first step in the landslide of disaster that followed was Walker ignoring his orders. He then goes through the entire game complaining, “the environment forced me to… he forced me to… they forced me to…” when half the time it’s his own choice to do anything. The desperation in the beginning helps you sympathize with his actions until he goes into more and more terrible tendencies and drags you along with them if you don’t look for alternatives. In the same vein, I felt like they were trying to draw a parallel in the gameplay when it gives you two obvious choices but has a third, less obvious one not even mentioned or highlighted with a big marker.
I guess I feel inclined to defend it because it could have been an interesting premise if they didn’t screw up on so many of the details and executions and everything really. One of those games I really wish I could go into and “fix”.
Well, sure, but it’s a bit shallow to string an entire plot around one thing the protagonist happens to do (well, the protagonist, the villain and Adams all do), especially since we never really find out why he does it. Plus the beginning of the game is pretty easy (compared to the I WILL SPAWN MEN EVERYWHERE NOW excesses of the Uncharted games, anyway) so I can’t really buy that it’s supposed to seem desperate. Then again, I’m prone to playing Dark Sector and Shinobi for fun so my view of difficulty may not be normal. It definitely wants to say something about war, but I’m not sure even it really knows what.
I’d agree with you on the second point, it’s far more frustrating playing a game that could have been something than one that was never going to be anything.
Still think it’s supposed to be building up a desperate atmosphere over the game, just listen to how the combat dialogue changes between the first few missions and the last few. Atmosphere and difficulty in a game aren’t always the same thing, just look at Amnesia for an example. It’s a pretty easy, straight forward game but the atmosphere it creates is one of vulnerability and paranoia. And I agree that the big event that keeps being brought up was terribly executed. As well as the ending.
I look forwarding to seeing the full break down though. I only got to play the game once and I’d love to see the thing analyzed as a whole as well as in pieces.
I always thought the part with most potential was the idea of being inside a war you weren’t really part of, with the ability to decide to what extent you interfered with what was going on. Spec Ops originally had more of a focus on stealth (rather than the silencers being there but virtually useless), and I imagine it would have been pretty interesting if they’d played up that aspect of it.
I have already done a playthrough of this game’s opposite-twin Homefront, you can find that here: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL41F2A30FA4C8A2BD
silencers being there but virtually useless
i.e. true to life.
Naw, I mean “having almost no function in gameplay.” They’re still your average magic silencer that makes a gun sound like a mouse farting, there’s just something like four stealth segments in the entire game and all they let you do is skip the first spawn wave.
oh, right. J’disappoint.
No matter how good you are at Half-Life 2, it suddenly becomes a whole lot more difficult when you try playing with a controller and you’re awful with a controller.
I got shot—as in, lost several points of energy and health—at the very first train section, right after you leave Barney! And I fell off the roof ledges when going to Kleiner’s lab twice! And this was on easy!
how do you people use these things to play FPSes
It depends on the FPS, really. Half Life 2 is a game built for mouse aim and WASD movement, so on a joypad it’s assuming you can both turn fast and precisely, which you can’t because of the range of motion of the stick (the entire reason iron sights are so popular is they’re a turning mode / aiming mode toggle). Now with a game that’s designed for snap-to-target aim like Call of Duty 4 you’ll actually find it harder on PC because it’s assuming you can very rapidly snap onto targets despite using free aim.
Best example of how this works is PC Halo, where for the most part mouse control doesn’t really help because the guns are designed for console aim and so have ridiculously large cones of fire, enormous projectiles, scopes or homing projectiles. The one exception, the pistol, goes from being powerful to monstrously, idiotically broken with mouse aim.
That’s a good point I hadn’t considered, I suppose… you really can’t do the same precise control, or at least I think it’d take an awful lot of practice to get anything even approaching the point-n-click of a mouse.
Yeah, “practice” would be my answer, especially if you’re used to mouse and keyboard. The great thing about controllers is the simplicity; for example, you don’t have to push two buttons at once or a toggle button to walk instead of run. (Unless you’re playing an open-world game made by those stupid freaking morons at Rockstar.)
Also, Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions so far has consisted of me cursing in my head at increased JP requirements, the nerfing of summons (to be fair, they were ridiculously overpowered in the original), and how much effort I’m going to have to put in in order to unlock Dark Knight and make the Onion Knight halfway worthwhile. At least the cutscenes are nice.
I agree with Lily and Tim. I could go on a huge rant about the differences in how the camera and movement interact in a PC VS a console game, but I’m not actually an expert on the subject and most of that’s just personal experience. All I know for sure if computers do first person and third person omnipotent** games better while the consoles do better with third person limited** games. It really doesn’t make much if a difference if you’re playing something that doesn’t rely of time or reflexes, such as an adventure game or a turn based game.
**I don’t know if there is an official term for this difference, but I’m too lazy to look it up. Hack and slash games and platformers have a very different camera style than RTSes and simulators, at least with how the camera angle interacts with movement.
You’re talking about object-focused versus free cameras?
PC games will always rule because they can be cracked and trainers built for them.
Infinite health and ammo from an executable running quietly in the background FTW.
But even then, without trainers, there’s so much more you can do with a PC game than even a console version of the same game. Take Morrowind for example, the PC version comes with a built-in world designer where you can make your own races, spells, items, star signs, and even entire massive locations like new islands and castles and dungeons and so forth, with access to every single existing texture in the game and the ability wit the right 3d texture-rendering tools, to create your own.
It’s basically a game designer using the engine and existing props of the Morrowind game. People have created entirely new games (intricate new quests that can basically replace the main quest, etc.) with , and people have already re-textured the entire game to make it more like a happy green fantasy land rather than the drab swamp it is.
The console version, however, is stuck with the default game setting, you can’t even download mods for it outside of the extremely limited official DLC.
Or consider a game that doesn’t explicitly come witthe tools and instructions for creating your own mods, like Baldur’s Gate. People have cracked it and modified the game to add new bits, replace old bits, add entirely new sub-quests and so on, and re-texture the whole game (I don’t know why re-texturing is so popular…)
Basically, PC games offer an unparalleled ability to modify, and far more in the way of free user-generated DLC, compared to the big consoles like PS, Xbox and Nintendo.
I’ve always viewed it as a question of time. Do you have TIME to download and experience a billion mods, or are you just after a game to distract you and entertain you during the little recreational time you do have? If the first, PC, if the second, Console.
Started playing Fallout: New Vegas recently. I’m only a little way in, but I just took down a small-ish group of bandits that took over the first town after the beginning with what I assume is a homemade rifle. Really shows how repairing/maintaining equipment affects combat. Plus, I feel like a badass. NCR troops must be pretty incompetent.
You’re talking about object-focused versus free cameras?
Pretty much, though I don’t know the official terms.
I think “third person omnipotent” camera might be isometric view. That’s what’s used in older RPGs and RTSs (Baldur’s Gate, Command & Conquer, etc).
Not sure what the term for the other is.
Isometric kind of fits, though I was trying to talk about the style of gameplay where you used the WASD keys for panning and the mouse and other keys for selecting. The best test I can think of is the ability to interact with something across from the room you’re currently in. If you’re playing God of War or Jak and Daxeter, what I was referring to as “third person limited”, you need to guide your character right up next to the object you want to interact with. If you’re playing Command & Conquer or The Sims, the style of game I was referring to as “third person omnipotent”, you click where you want your selected person to go interact with and they move there, even if it’s while moving through a wall of flames. It’s a minor aspect in over all gameplay, but one favors the controller and one favors the mouse.
Object focused VS free camera seems closer to what I was talking about than isometric 3D, which can be used in both styles in my experience.
PS: If you like modding, keep modding until the cows come home. As far as I’m concerned, if a game is good enough on it’s own, it doesn’t need modding. I can get behind fan missions and stories, but if you need to reskin the dragons in Skyrim to look like Fluttershy to keep the game from getting dull, it’s not a very good game.
So here’s some very interesting information on why Spec Ops is what it is, and why it’s not: Richard Pearsey, one of the writers, left before the project concluded and put up four chapters of the script as he wrote it on his personal site as a sample of his writing:
http://richardpearsey.squarespace.com/writing-samples/
Reading through, a lot of the stuff that’s just flat-out nonsense in the final game works a lot better in this draft: Konrad had gone full Kurtz and decided to settle as Lord of Dubai while a faction of his officers had split off and were trying to leave. Konrad’s control of the water supply was preventing an evacuation, which is why Riggs (a rogue 33rd officer, hence him wearing a military uniform with his name on it in the final game) was trying to take the water from him, as opposed to the mangled reasoning he gives in the final game. It’s amazing how much of the dialog in Pearsey’s script has simply been shifted around in the final one, if you’re familiar with that; it looks like the new plot was mostly created through cut-and-paste editing of existing material.
Also, apparently Walt Williams takes credit for things he knows he didn’t do, and tried to get Pearsey’s name taken off the credits: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/wsig-main/FRM57T9GKls
I think this game is more like Apocalypse Now behind the scenes than we might have been lead to believe.
It’s not “like” Appocalypse Now, it is Apocalypse Now. Or at least it’s heavily based off the same source material, Heart of Darkness. The biggest clue? Look at the Big Bad’s name. Heart of Darkness was written by Joseph Conrad. It’s not exactly subtle or anything.
Aside from the overall theme of a journey into darkness it’s barely related to either Conrad’s book or Francis Ford Coppola’s movie; in the final game, Konrad’s name is basically just a red herring to make you think he’s going to be Kurtz when he isn’t. What I was talking about was that it resembles Apocalypse Now’s infamously troubled production history (the 5-month shoot that went on for 16 months, jungle fever, nervous breakdowns, heart attacks and general personal horrors among the crew (Sheen is actually drunk in the hotel scene and punched a real mirror), sets being destroyed by a typhoon, and a seriously overweight Marlon Brando at the height of his egomania throwing away his script and insisting on ad-libbing all Kurtz’s lines). The game was by various estimates in development for 5-7 years, changed completely from its initial pitch and discarded almost everything it was trying to do, dropped into development hell for two years almost immediately after being announced, and from this was apparently hacked apart and reassembled at the eleventh hour to have a totally different plot.
Marvel Heroes is releasing Loki tomorrow. That ringing noise you hear is the stowing of all them Tumblr dollars they’ll be raking in.
They’re also shuffling the available starter characters, which is probably a good idea even if some of the new ones aren’t very good.
I must say I didn’t think much of call of zombie goasts (in front of a house) either, and I really liked Black Ops II last year. It seems Infinity Ward focuses too much on being cinematic rather than having fun, and aside from the fastest tank in videogames (which still wasn’t as fun as Menendez because it didn’t yell ARRRGH) there wasn’t really much to do but hear the tale of a nonentity and a boring man finding out their dad was the best dad ever and then going after a doughy secondary antagonist who had nothing to do with the main plotline because he’d killed like two people. Also something to do with a war but that never seemed particularly important.
There needs to be actual zombie goasts in a game sometime that you must exorcise by blowing up their house.
Future Shop and Best Buy in Canada are doing an insane event where you can trade in any current-gen game (provided it’s in its original case and it works) for Call of Duty: Ghosts, Battlefield 4, or Assassin’s Creed IV. I hadn’t planned on doing it, since I figured I’d be too late and I didn’t want to wait in any lines for it.
I just found out a few minutes ago that the friend that I “lent” (indefinitely) Sonic the Hedgehog 2006 to traded it in to get CoD: Ghosts for me.
I’m more than a little stunned right now.
See, there was a point in Black Ops II when I realised that it was the game for me. That’s the point where you’re riding around on a horse with a magic Stinger missile that can blow up tanks and then Kravchenko turns up in his giant silly land battleship. And I thought this is a game that knows exactly what it is and could no longer be annoyed at anything it did.
Camping is, after all, a legitimate strategy.
(more seriously, I feel that the way to deal with campers is not design levels such that camping is impossible—although good level design would make it a less attractive option—but rather give everybody abilities/weapons that allow them to deal with campers.
And at the end of the day, if it’s hard to camp and somebody’s still got the skill to do it, let ‘em do it.)
Yeah, not to mention the most consistently broken weapon choices (dual 1887s, FAMAS / Type 95, anything involving knives, etc) have always been short ranged in nature. From what I can tell, they’ve basically made huge, open maps which somehow still have no way to exploit their long sightlines, which takes some sort of talent but probably not the right sort. I’ve played the new Survival mode, whatever it’s called, and the number of times I’ve been bumrushed from four directions at once defies description. I’ve found myself discarding perfectly good marksman rifles and just carrying two SMGs all the time. Also, the laser effect on the ARX-160 is quite startlingly hideous.
Oh, is that what it does? I always figured there just wasn’t enough ordinance being thrown around to make it get dynamic or something.
Extinction is fun, though when me and a friend tried it seemed bugged as to how long it took for the helicopter to destroy the Barrier Hives. Also, it really doesn’t tell you much about what you’re supposed to be doing.
It at least doesn’t feature the ass-backwards moon-logic puzzled Zombies sometimes gets stuck with; it can be thought of as either simplified Zombies or Survival with an actual point. It really assumes you have multiple players, though.
Fuckers nerfed my Loki :(
It’s interesting to watch a speedrunner show you exactly how broken Sonic 2006 is.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jfx57q1Jxw
Arkham Origins was pretty much just a reskinning for the first two games with. I’d be satisfied if it were DLC or a fan game, but as is it’s too little to really care about. It doesn’t advance the “story”, it doesn’t add in new mechanics and even the boss fights are old and reused. There aren’t even any particularly memorable set pieces. It’s one of the most forgettable things I’ve touched in a while.
Plants VS Zombies 2 would have been a solid game, if not for the damn micro-transactions. The gameplay is varied enough from the original to actually call it a sequel with different plant types and stage set ups. The music isn’t as good, but that would be passable if they didn’t have those freaking ads on every freaking screen you’re on. You’re selecting plants? Hey, look at all these plants you can buy for 4$ a plant. You’re choosing a level? Hey, look at all these upgrades you can buy on your way to the next level, shine shine. Why not just pay 8$ to unlock the next level while you’re at it?
Recettear was fun, though it gets kind of tedious if you decide to play through a second time. Really cute graphics, alright music and a cute story to go along with those. I found myself having more fun dungeon crawling than actually running the store though, though luckily the dungeons took about three times as long as any selling session. It did what ti did very well, it just doesn’t have much replay value.
Somebody got an ESO invite…
I dunno, I always have a hard time getting into MMOs, and this really isn’t an exception. Regular ol’ RPGs, I take my time and mosey along and explore, but in MMOs, they’re all about QUEST QUEST QUEST and I feel like I’m just running from one random place to another without ever stopping to actually look at the stuff around me. But I do have to say, the quests in ESO make a lot more sense than just “kill 8 of this, collect 12 of that”, they’re a lot more story-focused.
Buuuut they also only take about ten seconds each. So it still has that feeling of me not actually doing anything. Instead of, you know, undertake this epic quest across the world to find X and retrieve Y, it’s walk ten steps to the left and do something over there, then come back. There’s just not the same feeling of actually doing stuff at all. Granted, I only had a couple of hours to play this evening so I only got up to, like, level 3, but I still felt like there should’ve been more to things, you know? More time to get a sense for a location and the story and characters before it’s like MOVE ALONG, NEXT QUEST, CHOP CHOP.
But it’s only a beta, so we’ll see how things change later.
I will say this, though: I may not have been able to make a truly fat female character, but I could make her ugly, and wood elves look genuinely weird compared to humans. So that’s a plus. :)
Dunno if MMOs will ever give you the ability to make an actual fat woman. I had heard they were gonna let you in SWTOR, and you could make a huge fat guy, but the corresponding female body type just had a big ass/thighs. If Bioware won’t let you do it, I don’t really see companies with less cred being able to do it.
There’s lots and lots of weird nerds out there who would get legit pissed at being forced to see fat chicks in their elfgames, but you probably know that already.
And probably a lot of weird feminists getting upset about the continued objectification of women in games.