marelooke

It's an Asian grindfest with absurd cash shop prices, good graphics, absolutely no character customization to speak of unless you pony up real cash. And apparently they've recently added pay-to-win elements. So really, the usual, as far as Asian MMOs are concerned. It had some "innovative" systems with trading and trade routes and the way the market worked etc (nothing EVE didn't already have though, hence the air quotes). And a supposedly innovative combat system (I failed to see what made that part innovative, but hey, that's probably just me). But after having tried it I can't understand why a Western audience would like it, consequently I didn't get very far in so the lack of anything to do as far as PvE endgame is concerned never even started to be an issue for me. Then again the majority of the Western MMO market consists of shallow World of Warcraft clones. Occasionally one picks up a feature WoW cut because WoW itself really started out as a stripped down EverQuest clone aimed at a more casual audience. So anything that tries something different and a tad more complex than Western MMO builders dare to include (like the trading in BDO) tends to stand out, and features that EverQuest 2 had like a decade ago are hailed as innovative (housing in Wildstar, too bad the rest of that game was "meh") because no Western MMO has the guts to tackle that complexity.

Because they are being acquired by a Korean MMO maker? Reason enough for me to be pessimistic. Then there's that acquisitions almost always mess with company identity as management moves around and social dynamics within the company shift as a result. And with them, more often than not, the actual focus of the company.

I was looking forward to it, but locking the challenge tombs behind a Season Pass (or the "Croft Edition") taking the price up to over 80 Euros has moved the game into the "buy when steeply discounted" category. My backlog is big enough that I can wait, even for a game I was looking forward to. Anyway, still mucking about in Fallout 4: Project Valkyrie (or rather "Outcasts and Outlaws", which integrates with Project Valkyrie). Ran into my first big issue with the mod: a prison sequence where they strip all your gear. When I found my gear a whole bunch of my stuff ended up being missing. *sigh* ended up having to make sure I emptied out my inventory and left any and all weapons I renamed behind just to make sure nothing would go missing. Annoying. Started playing Guild Wars 2 a bit more actively as well. Almost got world completion done for the second time, this time on my Chronomancer (aka, my first Mesmers, and yes, I have 2 max level Mesmer, I like Mesmers). Despite all the new content being good I end up still preferring the "old world" areas. The fact that all the latest expansion stuff run like utter garbage might have something to do with it though. Also, Mesmer being lousy DPS makes the constant flood of enemies with insane aggro and leash ranges a horrible chore. My new guild has also started raiding a bit more seriously so hoping I can finally tank Dhuum and get that one knocked of ye ole bucked list soonish as well... Well, one could just chose to ignore all the downloadables since you can't really know whether it will be worthwhile. Besides, the new way of selling a AAA game on sale is to heavily discount the base game only, hoping for microtransactions and DLCs to recover the loss. They always want you to be able to spend more and they figure once you are invested you will. I'd guess the DLCs will hover around the 5-10 Euro mark and there will be no option for an all in one GOTY edition, not heavily discounted anyway. Oh, I am a flawed human being, but impatience thankfully isn't one of my flaws. Steam games (and their DLC) tend to go on sale eventually. Origin is a lot more annoying in that respect, EA tends to stick to the tactic you describe pretty consistently and waiting for a "GOTY" version is usually more reasonable than waiting for DLC to go on sale on that platform (often the discount on the GOTY makes it slightly cheaper than buying the discounted DLC so they can do you over once more). Thankfully it's been a long while since there's been a game on there I really want.

But what is the story? We want that Destiny crowd...artifacts or some such that we can charge money for lootboxes or some such. And here I thought all those whales coming in Warframe lately already were that destiny crowd... So who exactly does EA still want to grab? I mean, at least Digital Extremes doesn't have a longstanding reputation for bending over their customers...

If they do something about the mini-games (I would suggest "Delete") I might be able to look past the timed conversations. If they do neither the likelihood I get any farther in than in the original is pretty much non-existent.

Well they do have a point about players being not used to this kind of interaction I can't have been the only one who paged back through the thread thinking this was a parody on something I missed, right? Right...? Folks......?!

I was looking forward to it, but locking the challenge tombs behind a Season Pass (or the "Croft Edition") taking the price up to over 80 Euros has moved the game into the "buy when steeply discounted" category. My backlog is big enough that I can wait, even for a game I was looking forward to. Anyway, still mucking about in Fallout 4: Project Valkyrie (or rather "Outcasts and Outlaws", which integrates with Project Valkyrie). Ran into my first big issue with the mod: a prison sequence where they strip all your gear. When I found my gear a whole bunch of my stuff ended up being missing. *sigh* ended up having to make sure I emptied out my inventory and left any and all weapons I renamed behind just to make sure nothing would go missing. Annoying. Started playing Guild Wars 2 a bit more actively as well. Almost got world completion done for the second time, this time on my Chronomancer (aka, my first Mesmers, and yes, I have 2 max level Mesmer, I like Mesmers). Despite all the new content being good I end up still preferring the "old world" areas. The fact that all the latest expansion stuff run like utter garbage might have something to do with it though. Also, Mesmer being lousy DPS makes the constant flood of enemies with insane aggro and leash ranges a horrible chore. My new guild has also started raiding a bit more seriously so hoping I can finally tank Dhuum and get that one knocked of ye ole bucked list soonish as well...

Hiking through the Glowing Sea, Queen Jenna style. The Glowing Sea is the place for selfies, clearly. Didn't touch ENBs for forever in FO4 but I think I've been missing out Oh dear, and I have barely begun decorating, I think I might have a problem. How to kill your framerate, pt1 How to kill your framerate, pt2 Whelp, just going to sit here and watch

You didn't play Fallout 4? Speaking of which, that's the other game I'm still "playing" (more like mucking about with mods). Tried to do a Vault build in the open landscape. The 10FPS I'm getting around that area tells me I'm pushing the engine to the breaking point... Main reason I started another playthrough is Project Valkyrie, which is a mod that changes faction interaction and storylines by giving you a lot more options on how how to deal with everyone (including a few new factions). You're even supposedly able to make everyone live together happily ever after. Technically I haven't had any issues with the mod yet. There's some storytelling niggles though which appear in big part related to them not wanting to restrict player freedom, usually related to my PC talking about people or events she can't know about at that point. But given how I don't think anyone will run this on a first playthrough I wouldn't qualify it as a big deal. The new characters (and there are quite a few) are also voice acted and have so far all been of good quality.

Playing Space Hulk - Deathwing, the WH40K Vermintide. Game certainly isn't perfect but it definitely doesn't seem as bad as it's (still) being made out to me. Then again, I haven't touched the multiplayer yet (just completed campaign chapter 8 ) so who knows. But the single player bots are passable, they certainly have given me less issues than those in Vermintide 1. I also like the somewhat slower pacing when compared to Vermintide. But I have to say for the amount of armor the Deathwing are wearing they're kinda really squishy. The UI also leaves something to be desired, I seem to be getting armor upgrades from the Campaign missions but I have no clue where to go to equip them... (maybe it's automatic?) Probably should Google that, but yeah, if basic stuff like that is hard to figure out you have a UX problem I'd think EDIT: that was not supposed to be a smiley...

Started Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. Trying to like the game but kind of failing in that department. While the premise seemed appealing enough the story hasn't really gripped me. The fact that a bunch of lore is hidden behind collectibles annoys the hell out of me as well. Combat is "meh", more frustrating than fun and mostly gets in the way imho. This kind of action-y combat isn't really my shtick and I really have no patience anymore in "mastering" it. The fact that you have to sit through the damn death animation every single time and that the game gives you absolutely no information at all about how the combat works only serves to make matters worse as trial and error (or Google) are your only ways of figuring things out. The fact that the titular Senua moves pretty slowly makes figuring out the many environmental puzzles a chore as well. All of the above doesn't really leave much, really. I might try and push past the first boss (I picked Valravn, who has been kicking my ass btw) to see if the story picks up but I fear that I'd need to get past the second one as well before things start picking up and in that case I'm not sure if I can be bothered.

Well, I finished up my Fallout 4 playthrough. Given that I spent most of my time messing with settlements, radiant quests (gotta get materials for building them settlements!) and mods and avoiding anything main quest related I managed to reach lvl135 after completing the main quest (which felt actually even more anticlimactic than I feared, tbh) Given how I went about this playthrough I didn't interact with most "main" characters for most of the game so I established a personality for my character (as one tends to do), but then I get to meet $IMPORTANT_CHARACTER in $SUPPOSEDLY_EMOTIONAL_SITUATION and the voice acting is totally off with the personality I created in my head. That's just a pretty great way to destroy any semblance of immersion left by the terrible writing. So the voice acting (which was good) ended up often detracting from the situation, so I'd still greatly prefer a silent protagonist in my open world sandboxes in the future. Thanks. The factions also weren't particularly appealing, all 4 of them are basically idealistic zealots: the Minutemen are your "stupid good" faction, the BoS are your fascist militaristic faction, the Railroad are your synth-loving hippies and The Institute are your typical loopy scientists lacking a moral compass. They're also way too in your face, which was arguably already a problem in Skyrim (hey, did you know? I heard Aventus Aretino is performing a ritual to summon the Dark Brotherhood!). I wonder if it's even possible to finish the game without being inducted into either the Railroad or the BoS. If nothing else I hope Bethesda finally gets the memo that "forcing" a family bond on the player does not usually work, there might be companies and games that can make it work, but Bethesda is not one of those companies and FO/TES are not among those games. Sure players need some sort of motivation to do stuff, but something like getting shot and left for dead provides ample motivation without forcibly trying to establish an emotional relationship. Anyway, got my money's worth out of the game, mostly thanks to the modding community, without which I most certainly would have shelved the game ages ago. I'll probably muck around with it more at some point, though whether I'll ever bother finishing another playthrough...not so sure.

And before Steam Workshop was a thing, there was Desura and Nexus Mod Manager for mod management - both with vastly smaller budget, yet far more impressive set of features.Yeah, I still have a Desura account with Underrail and a bunch of other games on it. I used Nexus for both Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 3. I'd still use Nexus mod manager because -you guessed it- there is no Steam Workshop support for either of the games. Skyrim does have Steam Workshop support but compared to something like the Nexus mod manager, it's crap. With the Nexus mod manager you can turn mods on and off anytime but with Steam Workshop...you have to unsubscribe?! Yeah, some unintuitive **** like that. And NMM isn't even that good compared to some of the alternatives like Mod Organizer 2 (which I'm using now) or Vortex (which is going to succeed NMM) which only makes all these "big company" mod managing "solutions" seem even worse...

Chugging along in my Fallout 4 playthrough and since I've cleared most side quests and both DLC I turned my attention to tying up the main story. So at lvl127 I went to find Virgil in the Glowing sea, which resulted in a hilarious series of fights as enemies in story missions apparently don't scale, or their armor doesn't at least. Then I made it into the institute and within 5 steps I ran into two progression halting bugs: there's a quest to insert a hack program in a terminal. I simply couldn't insert the holotape. Apparently I was carrying too many tapes and the code couldn't handle this (the quest one was the one-but-last in the list). Some great coding right there. Dropping all my other tapes somewhere fixed that one. when talking to Father I missclicked and gave a response that indicated I didn't want to work with him, then came around later in that conversation and Father told me to meet the division Heads. however the game still treated it as if I'd decided to just get the hell out of the Institute and the quest target was to take the elevator. Talking to Father again resulted in getting another chance to stick with the Institute questline, except it didn't work. I got told to meet the division heads (again) but now the target to take the elevator to leave disappeared and the entire quest basically broke down. No way to exit the institute, no way to continue the questline. *sigh* And then people wonder why I call this game a technical trainwreck...

So, well, this happened: Turn 10 announced prize crates are getting entirely removed from Forza Motorsport 7 https://forzamotorsport.net/en-us/news/forza_summer_update While they've never actually charged real money for them this is a pretty sure sign that companies are getting the message that these kinds of mechanics have no place in full price games (and that having them there must have hurt sales) As for the details: they expect this to be completed come winter and they've already removed all cars from these prize crates, leaving only cosmetics and those booster cards (that give you more credits after a race if fulfilling specific conditions, like driving without ideal line turned on etc)

I'll bite. What did Swen do to earn your ire?

If there's one game I'd love to see modernized (but with all the same sort of C&C), it's Alpha Protocol. A better combat system plus today's graphics? Move over Splinter Cell. Can I put in a request to fix those abominable minigames while we're at it?

And someone made a pretty epic metal cover...already:

The story isn't anything to write home about but there are funny jokes pretty much in every mission. Shadow Warrior isn't about that though, it's mostly about shooting a whole group of enemies, similar to Serious Sam. If you enjoyed that game you could give SW2 a try. But yes, there is a whole lot to do once the game is over: -Collecting gems -Collecting orbs so you can purify gems, infuse guns or make your own gems by combining them -Coop with 3 other players -New Game+ -There are 70 Weapons in SW2 instead of 'Bazillion' weapons like in Borderlands(most of which is vendor trash in BL) -Not all levels are procederally generated -Mission goals are not procederally generated at all -There is much more variety in both weapons and enemies compared to Borderlands 1 & 2: Bows, pistols, smgs, gattling guns, heavy machine guns, assault rifles, grenade launchers, rocket launchers, swords, chainsaws... -Enemies in such games ARE bullet-sponges, this is a DOOM/Serious Sam clone, not Arma 3 Pardon me asking, chief, but did you play the game...like...at all?! At any rate, pretty much the entirety of your post is bull****. Personally I was disappointed in Shadow Warrior 2 because I liked the 2013 reboot (and the original game), I wasn't looking for a Borderlands clone, I still have two Borderlands games I need to finish because I got burned out on them. On top of that the story doesn't make sense after playing SW2013 (which actually had a somewhat decent storyline) and the weapon modifications didn't feel like they had much of an impact at all (at least at release) So yeah, I'd say the issue isn't that the game is bad per-se, but that it isn't what many of us who enjoyed SW2013 were looking for. Anyway, personally have been playing Warframe pretty heavily lately. I made it to the rank of Sage (Mastery Rank 25, aka the maximum right now) while gearing up for Eidolon hunting. As I mentioned before my clan dragged me into a Tridolon hunt a while back (which is killing the 3 different Eidolon back-to-back: the Teralyst, the Gantulyst and the Hydrolyst), where I didn't feel all that useful, so I did what I usually do in Warframe when I don't want to be a detriment to the team: learn how to handle the content solo. I started off by soloing the first (and easiest) of the three Eidolon: the Teralyst. Grabbed my Oberon and a Lanka built for Radiation damage and just about managed a capture before daybreak (the Eidolon only roam around at night). Since I didn't exactly start the fight right after dusk I'm not sure whether I was excessively slow or just started late. I did learn my Operator needs a few more skills to make this easier (more health and health regen would be real nice) so I've been spending time in Elite Sanctuary Onslaught, which is a great way to gain operator skills, coincidentally it's also a great way to level up weapons and Warframes hence the getting to MR25 bit I also spent some time with The Bard's Tale 4 demo, so far I'm liking it. There's some concern about the 3 active skill limit (see other thread on these forums) but within the confines of the demo it hasn't bothered me yet. I just hope they do something about the facial expressions. They're sometimes downright creepy...

If you want PvP in a game like most of them, you'll need factions to drive it, though you can work around that I'd imagine via merc companies or something else. Not sure that would really effect much of a MMORPG's death, though. Is it a problem to just play the same faction as your friends and just have alt for the other side ? Or you do it the EQ2 way: have two factions for story purposes but let the players play together during general gameplay. Enemy faction NPCs are KOS but players can do whatever they want (which made some quests interesting as you might have to hike through an enemy capital to help someone or run into NPCs that are hostile to only some in your group). You can even betray your faction (which means losing your class: going from Good to Evil, for example, a Warden would become a Fury) and there's even a hub for people in between factions (or you can just stay factionless, though I never did the betrayal thing so the specifics of it I don't know either. It's a huge rep grind, that much I know)... The betrayal thing wouldn't be relevant in WoW due to how they just have the same classes on both sides nowadays, in EQ2 otoh it is the only way to have a Dark Elf Warden (since Dark Elves are an Evil race so can't pick warden on character creation). I don't remember how PvP worked, but having it faction based wouldn't be such a big deal though given how both factions had different classes it would be an interesting balance exercise. Mercenary companies, as you suggest, would also work. Or the Guild Wars 2 way: World vs World (which would translate to Realm vs Realm in WoW-speak) would be an interesting way to go for a game with the population to sustain such a thing. The reputation grind of the betrayal questline wasn't that bad. Having to camp named mobs on the other hand was. You could spend weeks waiting for the right mob to spawn even if you farmed it every day due to ridiculous spawn times and chances - either a mob only spawed once every X amount of time or it spawned in a couple of minutes with a sub one percent chance of spawning the right one. Oh, and there was no PVP in EQ2 for over year. It got patched in later, first as open world only, later with some WoW style battlegrounds, but neither Sony nor Daybreak were ever captable of overcoming the big problem of EQ2 PVP: It was bolted on due to how popular World of Warcraft was at the time. It turned out to be impossible to balance what with EQ2's 24 classes, faction class restrictions, alternative advancement paths, quest buffs (that even carried over into battlegrounds) and an equipment and stat system never meant for PVP. Since I mained a Warden I never had issues in PvP, making my team basically immortal might have had something to do with that *cough* But yeah, PvP was an afterthought and they were always honest about not balancing around it, which I think more developers should do (*cough* Blizzard *cough*) I agree. And PvP tends to imply (excessive) balancing, which usually ends up with all classes being practically the same and talent trees being reduced to mostly a cosmetic thing (see World of Warcraft, though they figured that one out and just axed that part).

If you want PvP in a game like most of them, you'll need factions to drive it, though you can work around that I'd imagine via merc companies or something else. Not sure that would really effect much of a MMORPG's death, though. Is it a problem to just play the same faction as your friends and just have alt for the other side ? Or you do it the EQ2 way: have two factions for story purposes but let the players play together during general gameplay. Enemy faction NPCs are KOS but players can do whatever they want (which made some quests interesting as you might have to hike through an enemy capital to help someone or run into NPCs that are hostile to only some in your group). You can even betray your faction (which means losing your class: going from Good to Evil, for example, a Warden would become a Fury) and there's even a hub for people in between factions (or you can just stay factionless, though I never did the betrayal thing so the specifics of it I don't know either. It's a huge rep grind, that much I know)... The betrayal thing wouldn't be relevant in WoW due to how they just have the same classes on both sides nowadays, in EQ2 otoh it is the only way to have a Dark Elf Warden (since Dark Elves are an Evil race so can't pick warden on character creation). I don't remember how PvP worked, but having it faction based wouldn't be such a big deal though given how both factions had different classes it would be an interesting balance exercise. Mercenary companies, as you suggest, would also work. Or the Guild Wars 2 way: World vs World (which would translate to Realm vs Realm in WoW-speak) would be an interesting way to go for a game with the population to sustain such a thing.

The UI in the demo doesn't seem to leave any room for more than three skills though. Hasn't really bothered me so far but then again, it's only a small part of the early game.

Well, fancy seeing you here...

Didn't know DE was involved in The Darkness 2 (which I enjoyed) until someone on these forums pointed it out but I sure as hell knew they were involved in UT99 Also, thanks for getting that song stuck in my head again, arrrrrrghhh! (oh, and if you want to see the entire TennoCon demo, I linked it a few pages back in the thread ) And yeah, pretty darn proud to be a Warframe Founder, it sure has been one hell of a ride As to Destiny, never cared for it as I was already playing Warframe and, well, Destiny didn't seem to offer anything for someone already invested in Warframe...especially knowing Destiny had an ... "end", which seems...weird, for a MMO...

I miss the times when MMOs would just stream content as you played. It's funny how technology always seems to inevitably move backwards in some aspects...