GhostofAnakin

I'd rather it be compared to Skyrim or the Witcher since at least those are fantasy RPGs.

That had to be one of the worst design decisions ever in a video game. No matter how badly you wiped the floor with him, as soon as the cutscene plays it's as if he was kicking your butt. Talk about immersion breaking. The Kai Leng battles weren't fun but bosses appearing weaker or more powerful during cutscenes is in no way a first or unusual. The way it was presented was especially bad. A lot of games do use that sort of thing, but they don't seem as apparently absurd as the Kai Leng one. The only other BioWare game that has a similar (and didn't seem to me as annoying) sequence was in KOTOR with your first actual fight with Malak, where even if you're beating him up the cutscene shows him "freeze" you and run away. But even that didn't have the over the top "Haha I'm beating you like a stepchild!" vibe that the Kai Leng one did.

Picked up Diablo III for the XBox 360. So far, I'm not understanding the Diablo hype. It's like Dungeon Siege III, but with worse graphics and combat.

That had to be one of the worst design decisions ever in a video game. No matter how badly you wiped the floor with him, as soon as the cutscene plays it's as if he was kicking your butt. Talk about immersion breaking.

I keep trying to do that, but the origins+Ostagar part are such a chore for me that I struggle to make it past there to get to the "meat" of the game.

BMG depends on the weapons used by everyone else. If you have a number of people with sniper rifles, the damage spike will probably kill it before the next BMG tick. At least whenever I used BMG or infectors I didn't get the killshot. Up to 61 revives now. I would have had 62, but some sap had to self-revive himself when I was literally about to revive him.

That's good to hear.

Yeah, no. I haven't played it after the localization patch that supposedly fixed the awful translation, but even not taking that into account, the story is nothing to write home about. It's a pity, because the setting is interesting in an 80s sci-fi kind of way. That's too bad. So there's no real redeeming quality, other than the setting?

If you're having trouble landing the kill shot, try a BMG. The continuous stream of fire seems to do the trick. I got the kill shot on the Hellion literally the very first arkfall I used the BMG. I've got a secondary character who needs both kill shots yet, so I'm going to test my theory by using that character to see if I can repeat it.

I can't remember my current setup that I use for online (I'll look it up next time I play), but it's the Cloak one with all the various cloak-related boosts, as well as reduced damage from behind and ... some other reduced damage ones. I just don't really know which weapon to use. My latest attempt was a grenade launcher that did something like 1600 x 5 damage, but in the actual game it doesn't do near that much to the opponent since I've hit them with multiple shots and not killed them. If I could figure out the best gun to use, I'd be golden as I don't die THAT easily (except compared to the guy I'm shooting, but again, that's more my weapon issue). I can usually take 2 or 3 shots before I die. It's just I can't find a gun that will finish off the enemy in the same time. As a side note, I used one of the BMGs (it was an orange one I unlocked) to finally land the kill shot on the Helion. Now I just need some revives to finish off that pursuit completely. I've actually been getting quite a few revives lately doing the Dark Matter arkfalls, as a lot of players seem to go down hurt from those aerial strikes. I went from something like 11 revives to 55 revives in a few days doing the Dark Matter ones.

I do all that (the perks), and I also have tried all those weapons. None of them seem to do enough damage to finish guys off. For instance, the last game I played I had one of those sticky grenade things equipped. I launched 5 of them and hit the guy with all 5 shots (I saw the hit register icon), but he was alive. He launched 3 grenades at me, and I died after the third one detonated. I have no trouble at all seeing the enemy first, or even landing the first couple of shots. My issue is they don't go down, while my guy dies easily.

I'd would really, really like to know which weapon in Defiance actually works in PVP. I've literally tried every weapon in my inventory at one time or another, and every time it seems I can hit the opponent 5 times without killing them, then die because all they need is 2 or 3 shots to finish me off. It's the most frustrating part about this game.

Combat is a bit meh I'm not too bothered by average combat. A lot of my favorite games, in fact, have had average to below average combat. I'm more of a story/character/atmosphere type of person. For instance, I much preferred Mass Effect 1 to Mass Effect 3, despite the fact ME3's combat was way, way more engaging.

Finished Tomb Raider this afternoon. I'll be honest, I enjoyed it. Not as a "Tomb Raider" game, but as an action/adventure game. The combat was incredibly easy, though. Even the "boss fight" at the end consisted more of just roll out of the way, shoot. Rinse and repeat. But that was fine with me. Games like this, I'm more interested in the exploring and jumping around. If only they'd included more actual tombs ...

Has the lag gotten any better? I read a lot of bad things about the XBOX NA server. I finally did my 5th daily for Echelon. Yesterday seemed like a good chance to get another easy daily "5 kills in Capture and Hold". But after 3 hours in queue with no PvP happening, I gave up. The servers were down yesterday afternoon. Not sure for how long, because I switched over to Tomb Raider when I first couldn't log onto Defiance and didn't go back to Defiance till later that night. The only time I experience game breaking lag is during major Arkfalls, but last night I was able to do a Dark Matter one without any lag. That might have just been due to it being in San Fran and less people having access to it, though. So I'm not sure how much they've improved the stability.

Bouncing back and forth between Tomb Raider and Defiance. I can't play two different story games at the same time, as I like to focus on one story to its conclusion. But Defiance is a decent "time waster" when I don't have time to sit down and play a lot of Tomb Raider, and just want to kill things for a dozen minutes. I'm near the end of Tomb Raider. While it wasn't what I was expecting (which I commented on earlier in the thread), I actually liked it for what it is.

Mars: War Logs looks interesting. I'm always leery when XBox360 games are straight-to-arcade though.

Man, the abuse Lara is taking in this Tomb Raider game should kill her. At the very least, it's like the game's lead designer has some secret BDSM fetish he's playing out with Lara Croft as the submissive.

Gotta admit Tomb Raider is getting more interesting now that Lara's got all sorts of cool gadgets to use that allow me to reach previously inaccessible areas. At least now it actually feels like I can explore a bit (relatively speaking).

I was hoping for a bit more ... mission structure, where you hunt for some relic to complete the first mission, then regroup and figure out that you have to hunt for another item elsewhere in your second mission, etc. Instead, I seem to basically just following one quest path -- stay alive.

Maker, with a capital 'M'. Show some respect for the entity that created Leliana, you blasphemer.

I'm very early into Tomb Raider, but they seem to have turned the whole raiding and exploring tombs instead into a "flee for your life ala Far Cry" type game.

Seriously, it's like the lead artist is a huge Cindy Crawford fan, and now all characters must have the lip mole.

What is with BioWare's obsession with adding moles to the characters as the series progresses? In the trailer, Morrigan now has two prominent moles on her face, one above her lip and one just under her eye (I believe). I don't recall her having those moles in DAO. Shepard, also, seems to have a bad case of melanoma, as by ME3 his entire back is covered in them, and he's got that massive one on the side of his neck. It's obviously a minor issue compared to everything else, but I'm just not sure why they seem to do this with a lot of their characters from one game to the next. Is adding these moles to characters who previously didn't have them some sort of artistic thumping of the chest proclaiming that now they have the technology to do it, they did it?

I think tonight's server issues (again!) were the final straw for Defiance. I didn't quite get to the level I was aiming for, or finish some of the pursuits I had originally wanted to complete, but the constant server issues as well as the terrible, frustrating lag during arkfalls, finally got the better of me tonight. Maybe I'll go back to Defiance if they ever decide to get stable servers. But I'm not holding me breath, considering these issues seem to have plagued the game since its release. It's too bad, considering I actually was having fun with it ... when I could actually play it. I finally decided to give Tomb Raider a try. It's been sitting on my shelf of unplayed games since I got it for a cheap sale price a couple of months ago.