marelooke
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Posts posted by marelooke
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Some credible info about Diablo 3 and Diablo 4 development at Blizzard, courtesy of the poster Fusion at Battlenet, and of course Kotaku:
https://kotaku.com/the-past-present-and-future-of-diablo-1830593195
- DIII originally planned to have two expansions but since it was perceived a "failure" after launch Blizzard decided to scrap the second one before seeing how Reaper of Souls performed to jump straight into D4 development.
- D4 started in 2014 as Project hades. over the should point of view, dark souls inspired title. Was scraped around 2016.
- D4's second iteration code named Fenris started around 2016. Want to make it dark, scary atmosphere like DII, remove cartoony graphics. Not sure if they want to do over the shoulder or isometric camera. (how can this even be an argument)
- much more. see below.
Even as speculation this already relieves me so much.
Pretty sad that this journalist has provided us more information than Blizzard has though.
The parts about Activision influence near the end are really depressing though. Based on my prior experience of being part of companies that got assimilated I'd say it might very well be the beginning of the end for the Blizzard we've known so far.
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So they released a shell of a game and are going to add in the features everyone wanted at launch a year later. I call this the No Man's Sky method.But how can you mod a 'always online MMO shooter'?
They said the plan was to add private servers and instances (as well as modding support) ~one year after launch.
Except that I doubt they'll add in NPCs and something resembling a story after the fact.
Given the pace at which the modding community created the tools (and figures out the systems) for modding Fallout 4 I expect "major" mods to start appearing 2 to 3 years after releasing the modding tools (assuming said tools are anywhere near usable)
Assuming they won't impose severe limits on what modders can do. I mean, the entire idea of the game was to jump on the "games as a service" micro-transaction train, after all...
Buuuut, we have another 2 years to see how this pans out, if they manage to turn the game around somehow (I think the core premise is broken, so I don't have high hopes) we'll at least be able to pick it up for a more reasonable price.
That tactic worked fine for Fallout 4 after all. I mean that game's still a broken mess, but modding support turned it into quite the fun sandbox, many of the big issues (that aren't engine related) got worked out and I got it pretty darn cheap too.
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Fallout 76?!
Pffft...I still haven't finished Fallout 4.
I don't think I'll ever touch it. I'd rather spend the time cleaning up my backlog or replaying favorites. The grind is too much to bear.
Fallout 76 looks like it's shaping up to be the trainwreck everyone who's ever played a Bethesda Game Studios game expected it to be anyway.
Now the question is whether the game will survive until modding support gets added (one year down the line) and in how far modders will be able to fix Bethesda's disaster this time around with the always online and stuff...
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^I'm one of the few who actually preferred Destiny 1's story to the second one. Neither were great, IMO, but the first one just seemed more interesting.
I usually get tired of Destiny after a while because I'm not into MP, so I don't do the raids or play the MP modes. Unless it's SP content, I don't really bother with it.
So do the raids and other MP stuff require organized groups? Or is it like Warframe where you just get tossed in a mission with a bunch of randoms and you just make it work. I rather dislike multiplayer modes/games where things revolve around a so-called "meta", that's just a recipe for toxicity (reason I've not killed many Eidolons in Warframe, kinda requires an organized group for the harder ones).
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If you dislike VATS that frees up quite a few points, criticals are also pointless without VATS as that's the only place you can even have criticals. Not using VATS also makes heavily investing in Luck a bit less interesting so you might be better off going full on agility then.
That should have been "full on intelligence", clearly I didn't invest in INT enough
Anyway, mostly playing Warframe's Fortuna update. It's actually really stable for a DE release. I've personally not had any crashes or glitches with major gameplay impact. The hoverboard tricks seem a bit wonky still but that's kind of expected with new systems.
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Looking to start a playthrough of Fallout 4 with the DLC and can't decide how to go about building a character. Any thoughts/suggestions here?
Because you can level up your SPECIAL stats with perk points (and thus can end the game with all 10's), I would go with a crafter for ultimate cheese. You get XP every time you craft something. Luck and Int are most important for a crafter build.
I usually go the stealthy VATS-enhanced rifleman/sniper with a focus on crafting/settlement building.
This site has a good breakdown of the perks you might want for a sniper build: https://www.carls-fallout-4-guide.com/builds/sniper.php
I personally don't invest heavily into Intelligence early on as Idiot Savant more than compensates the XP loss of not min-maxing there.
Initially I tend to go for the Rifleman stuff and then level up Weaponsmith, Armorsmith and Science when I'm able. In between those I take perks that help out with the Settlement system (Local Leader being the most important, but a single rank of Medic is required to build the Infirmary)
My SPECIAL stats coming out of the Vault are usually (I'm not very creative once I find a build that works for me...):
Strength 3 - Armorsmith
Perception 4 - Rifleman and Lockpicking
Endurance 1 - Initially: just don't get hit by scary stuff.
Charisma 6 - Local Leader and Cap Collector
Intelligence 5 - Scrapper (need resources to be able to build), Hacker, Gun Nut
Agility 4 - Sneak, Mr Sandman, Action Girl
Luck 5 - Idiot Savant (2 points)
You can get one extra point once you revisit your house after the Vault btw, I usually get Science with that.
Few extra ones that I tend to grab once I'm "settled": Sniper (AGI) and Penetrator (AGI), one point in Aquagirl (END) and Ghoulish (END) and Grim Reaper's Sprint (LCK) then there's the obvious damage increasing ones (like Better Criticals and Bloody Mess) and all the other weapon skills, of course.
If you dislike VATS that frees up quite a few points, criticals are also pointless without VATS as that's the only place you can even have criticals. Not using VATS also makes heavily investing in Luck a bit less interesting so you might be better off going full on agility then.
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I would have said marketing, but I'm curious to hear what department you belong to. I'm design BTW.
Hah. Saying our "best developers" definitely is some sales department BS. Living that life now.
On this episode of how to burn off all of your goodwill with fans in two weeks...LOL Blizzard climbing up in the world, trollin fans
I guess our sales is marketing, but have heard the pitches given where our best devs will do X when it will just be who is free at the time. Also screws us with over commitment, but eh.
I do L3 support. Well ok technically L1,L2 and L3 and dev.
I'd be impressed if the sales/marketing department in most companies even knows the devs, and in the event they do I'd be even more impressed they'd be able to tell a bad one from a good one.
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InXile goes to Microsoft. Let's see if the loss of creative freedom will be balanced by bigger budget.
Oh god, I shouldn't have done bull**** bingo on that video. See you when I'm out of hospital.
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Playing Warframe's Fortuna update which is finally out.
And boy, is the intro song still epic.
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I'm playing Call of Cthulhu and... myeeeh. It's not exactly good.
Starts out pretty nice and I was definitely interested in seeing where it was gonna go. But I feel like it's just falling apart. It's hard pulling these types of stories together and this one doesn't succeed at all, throwing you into weird visions and dream sequences where you have to do gamey "puzzles" (using the term lightly). It feels very... "now this happens, now this happens and now this happens". It doesn't flow very well and I don't think it succeeds in the whole "slow unveiling of cosmic horror" that it's trying to do.
It's not scary in the least, which I didn't expect to be honest because RPGs rarely are. But the RPG side of things also feels very lacking and doesn't feel like it matters at all.
It's a shame because there's a lot of potential and it feels at times like they *almost* have it but it just doesn't come together into something that is interesting or even fun to play. I'm fully expecting the game to just completely fall apart anytime soon.
Started out promising but yeah... not particularly good overall unfortunately.
Bummer, I had been eyeballing that one, sound like it's a miss unless it suddenly picks up...
There ain't a single developer out there that could challenge Rockstar Games talent in storytelling. The plot/characters these fellas at R* create are better than most movies I've seen in recent years.
Is the mission/quest/plot/whatever design improved from GTA V? I mean, is it a linear "go from objective to objective, shoot men and god forbit you stray 2 meters from the path" again once you start a story mission or did the missions themselves get a bit more open-ended?It's basically what you'd expect from Rockstar Games
For that reason alone, I am willing to forgive R* for having used the GTA3 engine for the 5th time in past 18 years.
Edit: the whole 'we have employees at R* that work so hard they have to sleep under their desks' thing is also a very well fabricated publicity stunt, nothing more.
How about CDPR?
Oh yes, been mostly playing Warframe, finishing up some stuff I had on the backburner before Fortuna launches somewhere this week.
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I think I lucked out by skipping D3 until the expansion came out - everyone seems to hate the game, but my experience was fine. Not exceptional, but I got enough fun out of it to justify it.
Same for SC2, which had a terrible story but other than that was a great game and I still play the odd co-op map which is by far the most fun I've had in a Blizzard RTS ever and I've been along for the ride since Orcs & Humans. Hell even WoW, Legion was fantastic. BFA's kinda **** so far though, hoping they can turn it around.
Blizz disappointed me before this, but it was never because they weren't trying. Even Warlords of Draenor, their only real dumpster fire, had some great stuff in it (raids and dungeons that expac were the best the game's seen IMO). But between this Diablo announcement and them caving to vanilla fanboys... now I'm not so sure.
Battle for Azeroth is up there with Warlords of Draenor as far as I can tell. I enjoyed playing through Legion (afterwards, didn't play *during* Legion), but BfA is just, meh, feels like playing through WoD again. I gave it a month and just cancelled my sub again.
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And fetch-quests have always been crappy, no matter since when they existed. It's the laziest quests possible, and if a game offers me more than one or two of 'em, I will feel highly offended and insulted. They just aren't fun, and if developers are using them as a filler for their games world, it is even worse. Yes, I'm looking at you, Fallout 4.
Not really sure the Fallout 4 fetch quests are, in fact, proper fetch quests. The fact that, aside from murdering everyone around, you also get to pick something up and bring it back, barely differentiates them from the ones where you just go murder everyone without picking something up as you need to go back to the quest giver either way...
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Anyone knows how big is PC download of Destiny 2?
I think it was a bit over 40GB for me (just under 80GB installed)
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Destiny 2 (base game) is free for a limited time. Was able to claim it by launching the Blizzard launcher.
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So this is just a reskin from another chinese trash mobile game.
https://clips.twitch.tv/AttractiveSpotlessStingrayTinyFace
Gotta love how they got boo'd out by what one would imagine, are their most hardcore fans...
You done ****ed up, Blizzard.
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WC3 is my favorite game ever. Late nights with Dota, tower defense, 4v4 arranged team games, toying with the world editor, clan wars...so many good memories.
I really hope they'll manage to preserve the gameplay in a good way. Played the Rexxar campaign the other day, it's incredible how smooth the gameplay is. Unit boxing, camera movement...everything is so ridiculously polished.
Just pointing out: "reimagined". Don't set yourself up for disappointment...
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Apparently the PC port (Wait, what?) of Fallout 76 is garbage. Note that this video is mostly about the game's underpinnings (though the second half touches on the gameplay)
So a typical Bethesda game without the ability to fix it through modding for at least a year after release.
Kinda shocking to see SkillUp go off on a game like this tbh, he's usually "neutral" to a fault. Which kinda tells me everything I needed to know, honestly.
So yeah, guess all those Youtubers that got wined and dined by Bethesda forgot their credibility at Bethesda's place it would appear.
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Still playing Guild Wars 2 when I have the time. Got myself a griffon mount. A great addition to the game, if a bit pricey and hard to get.
I've completed the core story a few time and the two expansions once each. Also completed Living World Season 2 and currently working my way through season 3.
But.... ffs ANet, if you mean for people to bring a raid group for a mid story boss fight, at least add 'Group' to the event description. It's a lot of frustration dying over and over and the look for hints on youtube, just to see that all the "solutions" is to bring a fully maxed out team in what is otherwise just a solo story. Looking at you, last fight in Heart of Thorns and Inquisitor Caudecus in Lake Doric (a bit more than halfway through season 3)
Starting to get the hang of playing Chronomancer... Alacrity on demand indeed, but still not getting maximum value out of my Continuum Splits. Dying a lot less on my thief too now compared to the beginning.
Most of the (story) bossfights range from annoying to extremely obnoxious. They've fixed the last HoT boss a long time ago though, most of the stuff you Google is probably just way out of date (you can just go stand in the shield bubble with the NPCs nowadays, which makes him trivial). Caudecus also was nerfed a few times but if you are there on the wrong class (or build) you'll have a bad time. I got lucky there from what I hear by bringing a Daredevil.
Now the Path of Fire final bosses, those are just extremely obnoxious, I absolutely hated those fights (chances of running through PoF story with another character are, for me, close to zero)
As for Chronomancer (which is the class I play most of the time) I find it perfectly highlights the weaknesses of the game. It's a class that requires you to blindly follow a "rotation" for optimal result in group play because the UI doesn't give you the information you need for a more reactive play style. And all of that in the name of "avoiding players having to play the UI" bollocks, I mean, like how you don't have to play the UI during the Soulless Horror encounter, tanking at a boss while staring at a little debuff icon (that moves around) isn't playing the UI, according to Anet
They've now made it even worse and you have even less flexibility in the traits and abilities you can use if you want optimal result on top of making running two Chronomancers in raids pretty much mandatory (the flexibility was what attracted me to the class in the first place...)
In this case, the Caudecus fight went like this twice in a row... I whittle him down to 30%... remembering to use my counter magic ability, throwing rocks at his shield etc.... then he summons a veteran jade armour and it's pretty much game over. The jade guy jumps over to me and kills me in one blow (I'm a warrior with close to 25k hp). My companions get perma-dazed and can't rez me, they are just standing there, swaying on their feet. Ok, respawn inside instance, walk up to the mesmer portal leading to the fight, hit 'F' and... I'm insta-dead. As in not just downed, dead. I tried to create a sequence of 'F','Direction','Direction' to roll out of harms way the moment I go through the portal, but I never get to do the evade, goes from max health to dead (and as mentioned, really dead). Rinse and repeat 20 times with the same outcome and I gave up. Tried it two days in a row with the same result, once Jade guy shows up, I do not last 1 second and can't join the fight from a respawn.
Hmm, I never had one of those Jade Bows spawn. Apparently you can avoid them if you kill him fast enough, depending on how close you were trying to squeeze out a bit more damage might help.
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Still playing Guild Wars 2 when I have the time. Got myself a griffon mount. A great addition to the game, if a bit pricey and hard to get.
I've completed the core story a few time and the two expansions once each. Also completed Living World Season 2 and currently working my way through season 3.
But.... ffs ANet, if you mean for people to bring a raid group for a mid story boss fight, at least add 'Group' to the event description. It's a lot of frustration dying over and over and the look for hints on youtube, just to see that all the "solutions" is to bring a fully maxed out team in what is otherwise just a solo story. Looking at you, last fight in Heart of Thorns and Inquisitor Caudecus in Lake Doric (a bit more than halfway through season 3)
Starting to get the hang of playing Chronomancer... Alacrity on demand indeed, but still not getting maximum value out of my Continuum Splits. Dying a lot less on my thief too now compared to the beginning.
Most of the (story) bossfights range from annoying to extremely obnoxious. They've fixed the last HoT boss a long time ago though, most of the stuff you Google is probably just way out of date (you can just go stand in the shield bubble with the NPCs nowadays, which makes him trivial). Caudecus also was nerfed a few times but if you are there on the wrong class (or build) you'll have a bad time. I got lucky there from what I hear by bringing a Daredevil.
Now the Path of Fire final bosses, those are just extremely obnoxious, I absolutely hated those fights (chances of running through PoF story with another character are, for me, close to zero)
As for Chronomancer (which is the class I play most of the time) I find it perfectly highlights the weaknesses of the game. It's a class that requires you to blindly follow a "rotation" for optimal result in group play because the UI doesn't give you the information you need for a more reactive play style. And all of that in the name of "avoiding players having to play the UI" bollocks, I mean, like how you don't have to play the UI during the Soulless Horror encounter, tanking at a boss while staring at a little debuff icon (that moves around) isn't playing the UI, according to Anet
They've now made it even worse and you have even less flexibility in the traits and abilities you can use if you want optimal result on top of making running two Chronomancers in raids pretty much mandatory (the flexibility was what attracted me to the class in the first place...)
But.... ffs ANet, if you mean for people to bring a raid group for a mid story boss fight, at least add 'Group' to the event description. It's a lot of frustration dying over and over and the look for hints on youtube, just to see that all the "solutions" is to bring a fully maxed out team in what is otherwise just a solo story. Looking at you, last fight in Heart of Thorns and Inquisitor Caudecus in Lake Doric (a bit more than halfway through season 3)
Uh, outside of open world events I soloed pretty much everything.
Is not last 'event' in story basically highest level dungeon with full party?
That used to be the case and was one of the reasons I dropped the game early on. They've since created a solo version of it. It's a very long instance though and with the wrong class/gear it can still be a pain, but at least there's no need for a group any more (though with at least one extra player it becomes absolutely trivial).
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Watched a few of Citizencon panels and the vibe I'm getting of the economy is: first person EVE online.
Judging by what I've heard about the crime and punishment system they want to create areas similar to EVEs high and low-sec (null-sec is player owned systems in EVE, haven't heard any real plans around that so far for Star Citizen). The vibe I'm getting is that they want to create a bounty system that heavily discourages criminality in "high sec" without having to resort to the likes of Concord (basically in EVE crimes in hi-sec have your ship blasted to bits by Concord security within 30seconds and evading Concord is a bannable offense)
As for the insurance, only the earliest of adopters have life time insurance. They did away with it by now. Not sure if it will stay around for those early adopters though, would be plenty unfair to other people if some can just go crazy with little repercussions... Insurance is tied to ships though and I don't think any of the stupid-expensive ships were available then, meaning they'd have to be insured the "regular way".
Anyway, keeping an eye on this game mostly because I find the tech really interesting. I am generally just bad at these types of space games so I'm kinda worried about how punishing the insurance thing is going to be as I expect to be flying into quite a few more things that are sturdier than my ship...
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Getting paid for overtime assumes said overtime gets logged. That's not always the case, especially in IT.
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Still playing the Nuka World dlc. It is a whole lot better than I thought it was, initially. The dlc map is big and there is a whole lot to do. The characters you meet can be interesting but the quests you take usually boil down to:
a.go to place X
b.kill Y
c.bring back Z
Also, did any of you fellas ever built a so called 'contraption' during your time with F4? Is it worth tinkering with?
Nope, never bothered with the contraptions (if you mean the conveyors and stuff), built some of those cages though, not sure if that was part of that same DLC. I probably should mess with them some, if only to get the achievements...
Biggest problems with both big DLC is that they're separate maps and as far as I'm concerned and once you're "done" with them there's really not many reasons to go back there (especially true for Nuka World)
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They aren't using randomly generated dungeons or anything, they have to place every asset by hand. Given that the atmospheric storytelling is one of Bethesda's strengths, and the new area is supposed to be bigger than Boston, I just don't see the problem. Heck, I'd go so far as to say they created too many assets for Fallout 4 NOT to reuse them in future titles. It's not like I ever ran out of weird places to explore in that game, it was massive. I found myself more fatigued at having too much to do than anything else.
Is there any footage from inside areas of FO76, other than the titular Vault? I've heard it said that there isn't any (yet, anyway) and that there just not might be any real dungeons the way we're used to from Bethesda's Fallouts and Elder Scrolls games. Would explain the bigger map too as I doubt they'd put the amount of work in to basically build a Fallout 5 as a multiplayer experiment when most of that team is likely working on TES VI...
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Leashed me a new pet
RANDOM VIDEO GAME NEWS - CON SEASON
in Computer and Console
Posted · Edited by marelooke
I think you missed the part where I've been on the receiving end of something like this a few times.
Depending on management (of the bought company, usually), it can take quite a while before stuff starts trickling through from the "parent" company. Usually once it does it goes downhill pretty fast, relatively speaking at least, these are still "corporations". Sounds like Blizzard's management managed to hold off the boat for a very long time but I expect things to decline at an accelerating rate from this point on out.
And the reason why it usually goes downhill fast is that once the culture starts changing for the worse the employees with the option to leave for greener pastures tend to do exactly that. These are usually some of the most talented, or at least well known, individuals as they have the easiest time getting jobs elsewhere. Resulting in the company running worse than before, as core employees are now missing, resulting in more involvement of the parent company which results a nice downward spiral.