Drowsy Emperor

That's some grimdark dialog right there.

I could never figure out why arena shooting gave way to tactical shooters. Now CS is a really a great game in it own right, and deserved all the popularity it got but CoD is mechanically a pos. And it turned out to be the preferred multiplayer shooter experience of everyone and their uncle. Why anyone would prefer to spend their time crouching to regain health while staring at muddy textures to precisely propelling a flying saw to rebound from a map obstacle and cut a target's head off, while jumping in mid air between two buildings is beyond me.

I don't know if it will be dumb but there appear to be some extreme abilities in that game. There are also hard counters in TF2 and impossible situations for any of the classes but there are no "insta-win" special abilities. Even the medic invincibility is manageable. I don't like ultimate abilities that give you easy ways to cheese your opponent.

Its called the Brazzers treatment.

Blizzard has also always been about making loads of money and party based tactical RPG's in 2014 are about as fringe as you can get. Not saying it'll never happen but I just don't see it happening any time soon.

Not my type of game but it does look cool. You know, there's a lot of something for nothing in that video. In TF2 you have to sweat quite a bit to become a good rocket jumper with the soldier, to bounce enemies around, etc. Its not an easy skill to master. Here, the rocket launcher character has a jetpack that they can presumably activate with a single button and something that looks like an ultimate ability where you basically spam an area with a dozen rockets. Its a symptom of games giving up what used to be skill based gameplay in favor of whatever makes you feel cool with the press of a single button.

Err, Blizzard has never made a game of that type. They aren't likely to either.

Not to mention that stylized graphics almost always wind up being significantly less taxing on the hardware than striving for photorealism. Yes, that's true. I just wish they weren't so obnoxiously "positive" by design. As in: if you compare the original Starcraft zerg and the Starcraft II zerg, the latter look almost cute. As in WoW cute. The look of the first Starcraft, taking from its WH40K inspiration, is rather dark, almost horror like. The second one is practically WoW in space. Cartoon graphics are like comics, you can use them to convey any atmosphere you like and the one they're predominantly used for is this extremely colorful, shiny, "everything is awesome" look which is so obviously made to appeal to everyone and ends up somewhat.. bland. I should be impressed by Overwatch maps, they look very nicely designed... but I've seen all of it before already, across different games. The character designs are basically standard superhero action figures, muscleheads, chicks with huge ****, thin freaky guys etc. etc.

They just rape you until you're jumping at your own shadow. I remember playing UT with some high difficulty bots on turbo mode. A person standing next to me couldn't make out what was happening on the screen and I had to switch to switch my brain to some sort of primal mode to get the reactions I needed because thinking was slowing me down. It was like a caffeine overload. Twitching after a game too. Later I tried the game back on regular speed and I was thinking... why is this all in slow motion now

I never found any of the ID games particularly hard. Dunno where that's coming from. I guess they are hard if you're used to the modern "play on autopilot" games. There's just a bit of trial and error as with all IE games.

cartoon graphics last longer without looking old that said, there is an infinite variety in the way they can be done and I don't like the way Blizz does theirs either in this game the thing I don't like, judging by the movie, is how the weapons feel, which is a bit too much like toys TF2 weapons may be more mundane but they're damn satisfying to use. UT had fantasy weapons but they were quite menacing. These look a bit too much like... pew pew

because you can get away with it pausing the game really comes into play when you have to manage your party, which only happens when they're in real danger and you need to optimize to win Why optimize when you can just barge through it without consequence? I don't think I practically ever took control of squad mates in ME. In KOTOR and NWN, you could auto attack your way to victory. etc. etc. Bioware combat hasn't been about that for a long time. The first DA was the only time they've done that in years and they backpedaled on it as soon as DA2.

Its growing older and being worn down by repetition. On the other hand, one of the reasons the thrill is "gone" is because games became a big business and there is less experimentation, personal input and obvious joy in their design. In some of the older games its apparent the designers had a free hand and did things because they could and because they genuinely found them fun. All the in jokes in Fallout 2 for example. Notice I said some, because there was a lot of "made by a committee", "made to make money off a better game's success" etc. junk back then, as there is now. When you get older its hard to swallow an impersonal product made by ticking design check-boxes, known player hooks and aggressive marketing because you see it for what it is. The Shadowrun expansion and the first Witcher were the last RPGs where I could relate to the game. The second Witcher is a prime example of everything I wrote above. Made to succeed by suffocating you with its bombastic production values, screaming ARE YOU IMPRESSED in your ear all the time trying so hard to be larger than life... without the low key humor and down to earth approach of the first one. When they actually made Geralt pretty and gave you the option to do change his hairstyle... I knew the series was done. Bioware is the same deal. Everything made to elicit the: OMG SO EPIC! DUDE DID U SEE THAT???! response. No its not ****ing epic, its the same **** you've been peddling for the last ten years in a universe you made so purposefully generic it makes Greyhawk look good. Its not just role playing games either. I'm currently playing Civ IV and V, and V will awe you with its production values until a few games in you realize its a mere shadow of the design genius the civilization series once was. Civ V is an ingenious product though, that will pull you in and make you feel good and clever and let you wiin and make the designers a ton of money. But making a good product and a good game is not the same thing.

The combat looks like button mashing crap and enemies seem to take forever to die. When will they understand that its impossible to transform pared down RPG combat that hinges on a very limited set of attacks and abilities (with damage numbers jumping out above characters lol) into a fluid action game?

Team Fortress 2 with less arena shooter and more moba ability spam Obviously they couldn't let Titan go down the drain without getting some money out of it

You do know where the name came from right? The creator had done a bunch of failed games and FF was his last try, if it failed he was leaving the industry, his Final Fantasy. Which turned out to be wildly successful so it didn't turn out the way he thought. That's the joke Well, now its a joke

And the japs really need to move their teenagers beyond gay version of James Dean. A part of me wants to say the graphics are pretty but I'm so worn out on pretty graphics that all I see is tedious running around.

For the fifteenth "extremely final" time eh

Regarding Civ V. Apart from the nice visual presentation, its a pity they ditched the wonder movies. I know they get watched once or twice altogether, but still ... its 2014 and with every new game they make they cut more features out. The lack of any stats in Civ BE after you win a game is frankly ridiculous. If I was going to go as far back as SMAC the list of features that Civ BE doesn't have could be as long as my leg.

Civ V. I reinstalled it, along with the Gods and Kings expansion to compare it with Civ BE while the latter is still fresh in my mind. Civ BE is either exactly the same or worse gameplay wise to my eyes but the presentation is infinitely superior in Civ V. The budget for Civ BE must have been equivalent to an expansion or less.

I loved the atmosphere in Alien Isolation. The way they carried over the aesthetics of the first film into the game is phenomenal. The AI is hard but fair once you learn what not to do when the alien is around. However about two thirds of the way through the game begins to drag. It has the "princess is in the next castle" syndrome where the game makes you do arbitrary crap that never takes the plot anywhere significant... Pull this lever, press that button... Hmm, no you aren't saved this time tee hee. Add ten hours of that. And the gameplay (and the horror) wear thin due to limited things to do in the game and limited enemies to work around. Once you figure out how to deal with the alien and the androids it becomes less of a challenge and more of a chore and certainly no longer fear inducing.

I couldn't play it due to the atrocious interface (harder to navigate than any Fallout game, how did they manage that?) and graphics. Maybe someday...

Its low for a man to criticize his own audience, even when he's right about at least half of them. On the other hand, everything he listed on the tweets can, in fact be legitimate criticism. Sometimes a plot hole is a plot hole, a cliche a cliche and a cliffhanger a cliffhanger. @Endorsz: as for his work, I don't think Gaider has been among the best talent in the industry since ToB. In fact I haven't bought anything he's worked on since NWN because of the way Bioware's writing has fallen into stereotypes. The "soft spoken reasonable Carth Onasi" comprises 80% of BW character stable. Sometimes the characters are so similar in the way they "behave" you could swear they're the same person. Of course that's not the case, its just the same pen writing them but being unable to give them a distinct voice. I don't know or particularly care whether its Gaider's "fault" and it doesn't matter in the long run anyway. He may not be a fool, and the Biofans may be majorly annoying (my own stay on the Bioboards extended to three whole days, so maybe I don't know what the man has been through) but he's not proving to be any better by complaining about it on Twitter.

Its not brilliant, its sad. He makes games for these people so he must either like the treatment or he'd have jumped of a cliff a while ago. Or he's considering it and using twitter for therapy. In either case, all I see is a man in need of a career change.

Well, I made my money empire but couldn't take it to the end because in a fit of stupidity the designers made everything but wonders and endgame projects available for purchase. So I got to the end... and the mind flower project said 50 turns due to my low production. I can buy a building that has half as much production value in two turns of gold collecting, so I'd finish the game in 4 turns if it wasn't for yet another artificial barrier the designers impose to save the game from its wonky economy. Now, the previous thirty turns were spent launching solar orbitals and clicking on trade routes so I'd rather commit seppuku with a rusty fork than wait 50 turns for the thing to build. The AI failed to attack me yet again in 260+ turns. In fact, no one attacks anyone in the game it would seem and everyone is content to play their own civilization themed solitaire. So, in less than what a single turn of trade route management would take I won a ascent to transcendence victory by uninstalling the game and transcending to something else. I hope they skip making expansions for this one and go straight to Civ VI.