marelooke

It's even worse since they used the backer money to be able to make the game in the first place, then, when they have something they can shop around with they pull this bait and switch. Vile, just vile.

Hang on to your helmet Pretty places

Did BioWare even doing any testing at all before releasing the game? It seems like a lot of the issues are things that would easily have been caught early on in the testing phase. Doesn't look like it. Besides supposedly starting development before Destiny 1's release they seemingly managed to ignore every looter shooter for the past 6 years and learn nothing of the mistakes made by those others in that timespan. Honestly the game looks like it did an Andromeda, meander in development hell for years and then rush something out in the last year or so before release. It's mind boggling. Truly hope they can turn this ship around, but between the engine limitations, EA's reputation for shooting anything that smells remotely like it failed, and the negative press I'm not getting my hopes up.

Depending on how far they played you could just replay the "Vor's Prize" quest (which is basically the tutorial mission of the game) from the Codex, though you'll be stuck with whatever gear they chose during that quest, at least until you can get your hands on alternatives (everything can be acquired eventually). Although you'll probably miss out on unlocking all the functionality of the Orbiter if they already did all that, which isn't all that much (imho) Well, just checked ingame and turns out that, despite it being a heavily requested feature for like 6 years it's still not possible to replay "Vor's Prize" And of course you could try and see if support can reset the account, they won't on PC, as it's easy to just create another one, but I'm not convinced they might not do it on consoles. I guess you could, as last ditch effort, have them delete the account, there's some warnings attached but I'm not sure how relevant those are for the console versions (I play on PC). And in a severe act of desperation you could just play through the tutorial stuff on a PC (Warframe is rather well optimized so it'll run on most things barring a literal toaster) and then go back to the PS4 if that's your preferred platform.

re: void missions. It depends on the missions really. They're tier based (as you probably noticed) and the lower tiers are pretty easy, especially when you group up. That said, for solo play, the enemies that spawn from the Fissures can be rather nasty if unprepared (they're slightly tougher than their Void equivalents, so if those are no problem same tier Fissures shouldn't be too much of one either). Anyway, also been playing quite a bit of Warframe, given how there's a bit of a content draught I've started grabbing those last few items I don't have yet so I can maybe even make it to Mastery Rank 27 (which is the highest attainable at the moment). And while the other day I was proclaiming how Warframe, despite being grindy, respects its players' time DE decided they'd undo that feature by replacing the random "alerts" system with some sort of tiered (and time-gated) Battle Pass (or Reward Track, if familiar with GW2 PvP/WvW) type system that makes you do all kinds of random, and often annoying, stuff. It's basically MMO dailies all over again

Similar issue here. After ME3 and DA:I I didn't really want to play Andromeda, and definitely not at the release price, barring rave reviews (and we know how that went). If it had been more in my face I'd probably have picked it up in a sale by now though, if only to see what's what. But it only being on Origin and there not really being any reason for me to check Origin all the time it just never happened.

Yes, Desinty comparisons are rampant. However they ignore that (as SkillUp pointed out, I think on Laymen Gaming, not on his own channel) Destiny had "good bones" iow, the core mechanics were solid and the technical underpinnigs were solid whereas in Anthem many of the technical issues appear to be tied to the engine (eg. the incessant and long loading screens) and according to some the combat appears to be broken at a fundamental level (I didn't enjoy the combat during the demo, but that might just be me. Or me going solo and there basically being no scaling towards solo play). Anyway, another rather decent review: Didn't really comment much on all the Anthem stuff since I played the demo, game turns out kind of as I expected based on my time with the demo, unfortunately. Personally been hopping between Warframe and Skyrim lately. Warframe is, once again, in a bit of a content drought where most veteran players are mostly playing other stuff until DE releases something new. Which wouldn't be such a bad thing if they weren't making a habit of these content droughts... (I've never been this close to acquiring all the gear in the game ever before...) Skyrim's still an enjoyable exploration game, and can be made to look rather really pretty with some modding effort. For some reason I kinda lost interest in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, despite my misgivings with some of the previous reboot titles I did play through both of them at a pretty solid clip. Shadow just doesn't really grip me, unfortunately.

Not bad for a 7 year old game...

What baffles me is that they've apparently been working on this game for 6 years and this is what they've come out with..? I mean, before release I was mainly worried about EA's monetization plans (which could still sink the game, assuming the shoddy launch doesn't already) and the possibility that I just wouldn't like the gameplay or "endgame" (I mean, always a valid worry for a game you haven't played, I'd say ) But the state the game's in, the content it's apparently released with...that took BioWare 6 years? Really? For comparison DE, a small studio, started working on Warframe a little over 7 years ago, with a skeleton crew. Anyway, Ars Technica is still rather positive about the game compared to some of what I've seen (quite a few people aren't quite as positive about the story and NPCs, for example) and they conveniently dodged the micro transaction topic, so I'll share what I"ve found. Apparently at endgame "coin" acquisition dries up severely. If you do your daily challenges you can get up to a couple thousand coins per day. With epic skins costing over 60000 coins, meaning a multi-month grind for a single skin (or paying 9USD, of course). Apparently there is a higher tier of skins as well (legendary) of which none have been released yet but which, one can assume, will be even more expensive... Of course, with new content there might be new ways to earn coins as well, but still, we're getting in the vicinity of that 20USD for a skin territory that the internet threw a fit over with that pre-release store screenshot... Bugs can be fixed, the UI improved, prices adjusted and content added, of course, but there's a bunch of things in there that might not be as easy to fix like the constant (long) loading screens. Will be interesting to see where the game goes in the coming months. Game could still end up fine, after all.

Kind of surprised this one didn't make it into the thread yet, as far as trailers go the Skyrim one is pretty darn good imho: And of course Warframe's Fortuna trailer: Though I don't understand why they even bothered with that trailer when they had this:

Heh, they canned that new Unreal Tournament they were "crowdsourcing" for Fortnite and their "Epic Store". That being said, UT3 wasn't exactly great (also the only UT without DE involvement, coincidence?) so if the new instalment (which, to make things easy on everyone, they just named "Unreal Tournament") is anything like it I'll stick to UT99 and UT2k4 for my UT fixes. It's not like many of the people that made UT still work there anyway, the Tencent acquisition burned quite a few of the well known ones out, if the stuff on Wikipedia is anywhere near accurate, and the other half of the UT team (UT = Epic + DE, after all) is happily making Warframe.

Warhorse Studios has been bought by THQ Nordic as per this. So that means another studio basically owned by Koch Media...

And it's the exact same in Europe. Gambling in games is fine, if you abide by the laws (that means AO 21+ here in BE though).

Hmm, are you referring to Riven mods? That's basically the only lootbox-like thing I can think off and they're honestly closer to RNG Diablo 3 gear when the marketplace was still a thing, except that you can totally ignore their existence in Warframe and do all content more than fine. There was a lot of controversy (that DE ignored entirely) about the introduction of these things, many veterans absolutely refuse to touch them and even many of the major Warframe Partners ignore their existence when creating builds for weapons (eg. Brozime). I'm a big fan of the Hek, myself. Fun fact: the Hek is one of the oldest weapons in the game and when DE tried to modernize it by updating its fire sound (back in 2015, apparently, ouch) there was quite the riot in the Warframe community, thankfully they saw the light and changed it back to its current sound. Come to the Church of Hek, we have guns with lotsa oomph: music to my ears: EDIT: linking the correct things is hard, apparently

Eh, nothing new to be sure, but given how this drives our economy (and not just video games) I guess it bears repeating. Anyway, I think Bright Memory was mentioned here at some point. It's an episodic FPS game made by a single Chinese developer that looked rather impressive. Well, it is on sale, and while debating whether I should get it I came across a Steam review that pointed to this. So it turns out the developer admits to using stolen assets, an "issue" he will try to rectify. He doesn't want to say where he stole the assets from but according to the aforementioned Steam review these were from Bless Online and Aliens Colonial Marines, which, it would seem, means those might have finally landed in a game with some promise Not really sure how this will affect the game going forward. It's still being sold on Steam but I imagine that if the rights holders feel like it they could very well put him out of business.

Jim pretty much sums up my feelings about the entire "restructuring" thing:

I've always been looking for games where you can actually be an archer without feeling like you're gimping yourself because the combat was primarily designed for melee/magic combat instead. In that case, the game you're describing is on my radar now. (Also, in the case of Dragon's Dogma, producer Itsuno last week outright said that Capcom already gave him the approval to work on a Dragon's Dogma 2, he just chose to make Devil May Cry 5 first - which heavily hints that DD2 is already in pre-production. When I heard this last week, I got really giddy. I need more Magick Archer in my life.) Oooh, I sure hope it can live up to DD1, a bit more polish and a better PC UI would be top of my wishlist. No, that's my story and I'm sticking with it! Been playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider. So far (but I'm not that far in, so take it for what you will) the game feels like a pretty big step back when compared to Rise of the Tomb Raider. It's as if Shadow was made by the same team that made the original reboot while Rise was made by an entirely different team. It's weird. Can't wait to start having a crack at those challenge tombs, I've found one but I couldn't get in because I didn't have the right tools, hope I'll be able to go back soon.

Bought the new Tomb Raider and Wolfenstein in the Steam sales.

That sums my feelings about Apex Legends up better than I ever could have. From what I've seen it actually doesn't. The "tell" system is so good that unless you want to really play competitive you seemingly don't need a microphone. Jim Sterling was rather positive about the game (barring the monetization: because lootboxes, obviously) and that's one of the things he praised especially heavily.

Let's also not forget that connectivity isn't exactly great everywhere either.

Grandmother, why do you have such big ... claws...? Meow! EDIT: hmm, thumbnails not loading for me. Though it was because I used PNG files at first but JPG doesn't seem to work either :/

6 is more entertaining than 5, but in a holy **** I can't stop laughing at how utterly terrible this game is way. Luckily, I have a video handy to explain! Speaking of which, I still need to play Revelations 2. I thoroughly enjoyed the first Revelations. Before Resi 7 came out, Revelations was the last bastion of hope for fans of the series' survival horror roots. It was a case of a spinoff becoming more like the main series than latter games in said main series, sort of how Bravely Default is more Final Fantasy than Final Fantasy is these days, if that makes any sense. [tangent] As an aside, I've grown to appreciate the setup Squeenix has with their big jRPGs. Squeenix has 2 big, famous, long running RPG series: Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. The former they have reinvented again and again and again and again, for better or worse. The latter, while there have been some refinements, has been largely unchanged over the decades. For the people that want a more action oriented, western style RPG, Final Fantasy has been going in that direction. For grognards, like myself, that just want their beloved jRPG series left the hell alone, we still have Dragon Quest. [/tangent] Revelations 2 was definitely a good game and they did fix some of the issues with the original Revelations (at least I don't recall the boss battles being quite as obnoxious in Revelations 2). Unfortunately the setting didn't really work as well for me, maybe it reminded me too much of the Tomb Raider reboot (that I played around the same time)? Then again, that cruise ship was just awesome and, I imagine, hard to top. I've never been able to get into the "newer" RE games (I think I tried 4 and 6, didn't get very far in either). Come to think of it I think I have RE0 and RE1 in my library, hmm, time to get to those maybe.

Usually game patches aren't exactly news (well, unless Bethesda updates Fallout 76, but, ehm, right, moving on...) but this one I thought was worth mentioning: ArenaNet published a pretty significant update to Guild Wars. Yes, there is no 2 at the end, the original, the game that has been basically discontinued since 2012 with the release of Guild Wars 2. There have been minor changes to the original Guild Wars before, mostly minor fixes generally related to yearly events and chat changes but this is the first time in a very very long time that there are actual AI, QoL and UI changes. Anyway, as a summary of the changes: updates to how the AI uses some skills, making both enemies and henchmen more adept at their use. Suffice to say this has the potential to be huge "standard" builds and group compositions that have stood for like 7 years might suddenly need revising. inventory and storage space have been greatly increased, which is a major QoL change I always thought it was pretty cool of Anet to keep the old Guild Wars servers running (they barely use server resources, apparently), but updating such an old game when a successor is out?

That part where she complains about not being able to play a first person shooter with a controller. #despair Game looks pretty good though, noticed I was already following it on Steam too. About $150 million a year, if I'm not mistaken. Not too shabby. To put that in perspective: it was one of the best selling games on Steam in 2018, purely through in-game purchases... https://store.steampowered.com/sale/winter2018bestof/ Daniel Erickson described it as "basically a huge, sprawling, ever expanding BioWare storyline with a multiplayer marketplace, social spaces and PVP". So, more like the episodic format of KotFE, and less like Ilum PVP. more on that from the perspective of someone who did QA for the game early on That was really interesting. I kind of wish they'd stuck with their original vision. But their inability to "sell" DA:O to marketing kind of explains that (also explains why all those AAA titles tend to end up looking so samey, I guess...) I found this interesting though: This is basically what Digital Extremes does with Warframe. At one point I took an extended break and an e-mail about an event got me back into the game.

Instead of only making games in genres they're good at, the developers try to expand into every popular genre, and usually fail miserably. Not only Obs but even Blizzard fumbled. I'm not sure I'd blame Bioware this time. It's worth remembering that SWTOR wasn't initially conceived as a MMO to kill WoW -which in retrospect justifies the awful choice of engine- and "sources claim" that they have repeatedly attempted to make a more traditional KotOR (even going so far as building a prototype), but EA just isn't down with the idea. This jibes with their constant push to make everything a service that players can keep going back to, which was precisely their reason for canceling Ragtag and Orca. Anthem looks to me like an attempt to catch lightning in a bottle in the vein of ME3MP, only designed from the get-go to be their billion-dollar-per-annum shooter holy grail. I don't need to consult my magic 8-ball to see that it's going to fall short of that. Out of curiosity, what was SWToR initially conceived as? I can't remeber it ever having been brought up that it was not initially conceived as a MMO. Also I'm pretty confident they could have had a WoW killer (or at least a decent competitor) if the game had been released in an actual finished state, as it was many a guild fell apart because it took months for them to get the "endgame" to a playable state (source: I was there). If instead they could have worked on new content they might have been able to keep something going, at least for a while. Indeed, and it's not just about the monetization aspect. Most other games in the genre are just first person "tranditional" MMOs (aka WoW clones), they badger you into playing daily with "daily heroics", "heroic dungeons", "raid lockouts", the works. The entire progression is locked behind these mechanics, this is the case for Destiny 2, it appears it will be the case in Anthem. I have no idea about the Division but I suspect it's also the case there. Warframe does not have any of that(*)(**), despite being grindy as hell the game oddly enough manages to respect your time to an extent very few other MMOs do. If I don't feel like playing for a week I just don't, there's no "need" to keep up or fall behind, moreover unlike other games Warframe is not in the habit of having "timed" stuff, as in there's no gear that is here and will be gone forever if you don't get it now(***) and the same goes for the vast majority of cosmetics (there is/was some minor stuff tied to partnerships with things like Twitch, Steam and some other things though). Rewards for timed events do, eventually, make their way back into the game in some form or another (sometimes takes a very long time, but it has always been the case so far in the 5 years I've been playing the game). Now this leads to some issues, but I'd rather DE continue innovating along this path rather than revert to the tried and, imho, tired time gating employed by virtually everybody else. (*) technically there are Sorties, which are daily, but their rewards are not mandatory for any content in the game. (**) there used to be Trials (raids), which did have lockouts, but those were scrapped pending a rework, their rewards were moved to Eidolons, open world bosses that you can kill as many times as you are able in a single day (or rather, night). (***) three very specific items excepting as those were part of the Founders packs, which basically boils down to them being "Kickstarter rewards" for those supporting the game before it was able to stand on its own.