StrickenBiged

It's quite amusing how the ABK acquisition may have turned out to be a poisoned pill that kills the XBox as we know it.

Nice, Tunic has been on my wishlist for a while. Don't care for football or Destiny, but great for those that are into that sort of thing. Still need to get to the original Ghostrunner at some point, but definitely interested in it.
I can stop Helldiving whenever I want, I tell myself. I don't know when I'm going to get to any of the above in reality.

I'm enjoying the new patch, personally. The damage reduction to the Guard Dog 'Rover' seems like a nerf until you realise that it now won't kill you immediately when it hits you, then you realise it's a counter-intuitive buff. The Sickle got fixed and can now shoot through foliage. The Quasar got a long cooldown between shots, but that's fine, just take the EATs instead - you'll get 2 shots in quick succession then, and can use its drop pod as a weapon too.
Personally I think every balance patch has improved the game so far, which is as it should be.

I hope whoever is responsible for this marketing reflects on whether it was worth winding up the game's fans over... Jeeze.

Fallout 4 killed my interest in Bethesda games generally. They're no longer RPGs in my mind, as they've taken player agency out of the story and questing (and, to me, those are more central to being an "RPG" than simply having character build options).

'Bethesda Games' are their own thing at this point, to my mind at least, and that's fine, I just don't find them that interesting compared to something that allows you to influence the story and world through your choices.

I love seeing them turn up and 4 red beams immediately land on their heads. Teamwork makes the dream (of Managed Democracy) work!

Reminds me I have number 2 on my backlog, I think I'll try and move it up the running order.

Seems fair enough to me. Devs that think that their game won't sell any more with or without the label won't bother patching their game - that's their prerogative - and those that do do the market analysis and conclude the costs of patching the game are worth it get a little kitemark to put on the store and their marketing materials.
I know I've ignored games because they didn't hit 60FPS this generation. Sorry, but I've been spoiled by the games that have managed to hit that performance and can't go back now.

Long live Helldivers 2. A few of those purchasers were mates of mine, who I've been guiding through their first few missions over the weekend and yesterday.
I think they were just humouring me as I wouldn't shut up about the game, but now they're hooked too.

Fine by me, but being able to apply colour filters to some of the items would be nice. There are plenty of helmets or capes that I would like to wear with other sets but wont because the colours clash (to my eye at least). Not sure if that's what he meant by transmog - I agree that taking the medic perk and applying it to a suit that was dripping in grenades wouldn't make a lick of sense.

"The multiplayer spin-off Crash Team Rumble doesn't seem to have moved the needle nearly as much, as its sales are not disclosed on the same page."

Didn't they recently announce that development of content was finished? Would have been around the time of the news that TfB was going its own way following the ABK acquisition. Neither are what happens if the game had a healthy playerbase.

@breakneck In edge cases, if I was on the fence about a game, then I might pass over it if it didn't have a platinum.

Now she dresses like my great aunt...

@ROTTIEMAN16 Fair play to what they're doing over on the green team with backwards compat, but I am not going to buy a second console to play retro games on when PS keeps me busy enough.

They'll all come to PS eventually too, and I am a patient man. But let's not get into that.

I doubt it'll get me to come back for a 6th attempt at playing it. My problems with F4 are all related to the very limited scope it gives you to complete quests your way or role-play.

I wish they'd do it for Fallout 3 or New Vegas. Those games deserve a glow up.

Been playing on iPad and wishing that I could play on PS5 with trophy support.

Day 1 baby. Fantastic news.

Whuff, a tough associated major order... "succeed in the defence of at least 5 planets".

@The_Pixel_King I think your PSN might be set to hidden, as I can't find the username you provided (I can find one ending "737", if you've made a typo?).

My PSN is the same as my username here and I think I'm searcheable, so feel free to add me in anticipation of some HD2 action when you pick it up. I quite like occasionally dropping into new players' games and helping them learn the ropes so I'd be more than happy to help you out too!

If you account for inflation, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time would have cost ~£112 in today's money. So we as gamers are objectively being very well served by the £60-70 range for AAA games today, which are far more advanced and complex than TLoZ:OoT was. Prices of AAA games have have failed to keep pace with inflation due to advances in technology which have smoothed production pipeline, e.g. middleware, engines, semi-automated localisation, etc.

That's great for us as consumers. The games we get today are just night-and-day more complicated and beautiful than they used to be, and keep getting better.

That being said, many aspects of being 'nickel-and-dimed' by AAA games today are very grating. I choose not to engage in any of those games, doing my part to send the message to the market that I like my games to be complete at launch and microtransaction free.

As ever, we pay for the games industry we get. Stop pre-ordering, read/watch reviews from people you trust, pay the price that seems right for you based on that information, stop falling for hype and marketing, and don't support/pay for things that you don't like.

@The_Pixel_King I highly recommend Helldivers 2 regardless of your fears around MP. I have had two or three instances of being kicked from a public game since it launched, and if you put yourself out there on comms you will find like-minded people to add to your HD2 friends list (in-game and separate to your PSN friends list, so they'll only see if you're in the game). I've met some cool people and squads to join up with on evenings when my IRL buddies are too busy to play HD2. The community is great, probably because it's co-op only.

@The_Wailing_Doom What's this "right to vote" of which you speak? Sounds like dissident thought to me. Every true citizen knows that, under managed democracy, you answer a few questions on your preferences on the Galactic Wide Web and then a Super Computer totally votes for you based on an algorithmic process. That way citizens can be assured that their true vote is captured.

I can’t play on less than 60fps anymore, I can literally see the individual frames at points now. I’ll even take1080p so long as it’s 60 frames per second.

@VaultGuy415 I disagree about super credits being hard to acquire. My regular squad and most randoms I find myself playing with typically go out of our way to clear the map. If you find all the "?" points-of-interest in a Lvl 2 mission or above, you're typically bringing back 20-50 SC per deployment. Occasionally we find one of the rarer 50 or 100 SC drops.
I've thrown a couple of £ Arrowhead's way for some SC when I wanted an armour set from the rotation and couldn't be bothered to wait for it to come around again, but otherwise I'm finding it very easy to ignore the micro-transactions in this game while still feeling very well served.

I think it's an outstanding question whether the meta-narrative has been affected by failing to take Tibit a couple of Major Orders ago. That Major Order noted that Tibit was believed by Super Earth to be a major bot manufacturing planet, and after we failed to take it, players noticed an increase in the rejuvenation rates of planets awaiting liberation. We also had a lot of Defences to see off in the next Major Order to hold three planets. It's possible that had we taken Tibit we'd have had an easier time taking the Creek afterwards, and have completed Phase 3 of exterminating the bots by now.
But that's the fun of this game having a GM; you're not just grinding out repetitive missions for the sake of random gear drops and incremental power upgrades, you're doing it in the context of a wider narrative, and win or lose it all contributes to the story and opens up new planets to fight on. A stroke of genius, really.

@UltimateOtaku91 Dunno, my regular crew weren't available last night and there's no way I'm going into 7+ against bots with Randoms! I played up to difficulty 6 last night with randoms and didn't see the new bots on my missions either.

Bravo to AH. This is the way to do a live service - a steady drip feed of activities to prioritise, new toys, new baddies, new unlocks, etc, etc. It has certainly kept me playing more than monthly or seasonal content drops would have.

Oh, that's not all they've added... Bot missions just got a lot more interesting.

Weirdly positive ratio and YouTube comments on the video hosted over there...

Let's hope the omission of PS5 was because it's not coming. Looks dreadful. No thanks.

Nice, I was thinking of picking up Immortals of Aveum at some point. The other two, not bothered by, but will add to my library all the same.

Ok, I was curious before, but now colour me extremely curious. Will happily check out the demo on the weekend.

I'll wait to see what Digital Foundry think of it once it's been released, but my thinking goes like this:
1. I'm a console gamer. Sorry, but sat in front of my TV is how I play games. I spend most of my working day at a desk as it is, and portable systems just don't do it for me. So I need a console.
2. That being said, I like my games to run and look as good as possible. I like gaming at 60FPS and choose performance modes wherever I can.
3. But I do lament that I have to forgo some of the 'shiny' graphical features in graphics modes when I do that.

So, taken all together, if a PS5 Pro can give me back some of those graphical perks while maintaining the 60FPS I like, I'll probably end up getting one. Once you factor in the resale value of the PS5 base model, an upgrade wouldn't be too hard on the wallet for me.

Like I say though, that's an "if", and I'll wait for reviews.

RIP offset thumb sticks. That's one thing I miss from my 360 days. That, Gears of War 1-3, and Halo 1-3, but sounds like I'll be able to get on those trilogies again on my PS at some point.

I've come to terms with the fact that Bethesda don't make RPG's anymore. They've slowly and iteratively taken the RP out and they just make "Bethesda Games" now. Which is fine, they just aren't for me. Plenty of other games out there scratching that itch.

@Kidfunkadelic83 Too late. I've seen a clip (on Reddit I think) of a charger and shrieker (I think that's what they're being called) models becoming stuck to one another, and when the shrieker flapped its wings the charger took off. It was terrifying. I think it was a glitch, and not a deliberate tactic by the bugs to drop chargers on our heads.

WTF Sony? I'd love to have all this information like DualSense Battery, console storage capacity, etc, available at a glance when I log in. Why isn't this global, it seems so helpful!

Suicide Squad lost out to Skull and Bones despite the earlier release???!!!
Ouch... that really has to hurt.

They may not be in a Tennis game, but it's only a matter of time before they're all in Fortnight and CoD.

I played an operation campaign last night and had squadmates dropping out from time to time.

@ShadowofSparta Who's to say that the NPC couldn't have some lines that were written with intent? All you'd need to do is tag some part of the dialogue as essential to get across to the player, and then tell the LLM to improvise a sentence or two that get you from responding to whatever the player said (perhaps, say, when the player brings up a topic, such as a quest item or location) to the fully-scripted sentence in a smooth way.
I think this has the potential to be great, personally. You'll still need decently sized writing teams to do this well, as someone will need to be responsible for defining what the NPC knows and thinks about the world, other characters, the central plot of the game, etc, and make sure that this is consistent with your lore. Devs may even need to spend more time on writing than they do now. Currently, if I go speak to a minor NPC like a shopkeeper, I might only have two or three options of lore or quest related dialogue before they only thing left to talk to them about is trading. With something like an LLM built into the dialogue and no set dialogue trees, devs will have to flesh out every NPC's back-story much more to account for the player asking them about potentially anything.

I mean, if done right, this could be a huge shot in the arm for RPGs, and most especially for VR games I'd have thought.
Entering dialogue with an NPC in the next Baldur's Gate and then being able to speak directly to the character as if I actually were Tav, about pretty much anything, and have the NPC respond to what I actually chose to say, would be very, very cool.

It's really quite fascinating to consider why Helldivers 2 is doing so well in comparison to other live-service games. While I'm massively enjoying it and have no intentions of stopping playing any time soon, if I take a step back it can look rather repetitive. Having your grind contribute, even in a tiny way, to the overall meta-narrative, definitely helps.

There's a very interesting GDC talk to be made in comparing different live-service games and trying to discern why some succeed and others hit the skids.

Wow, it really doesn't screenshot well, does it? It's so dark (I geddit) that you really can't see what's going on. I hope for the game's sake that it looks better in motion.

Edit: Remembered PushSquare does video reviews too. Thankfully, it looks a lot better in motion.

@Golem25 It's not too late to jump into the game at all. You'll probably even find a veteran helldiver willing to show you the ropes - there's a few of us who like to respond to SOS beacons on difficulty 1 missions and help new players get to grips with the game. Before you know it, you'll be squashing bugs and blasting bots with the best of them.

@Helldiver367 In fairness to Liam, it isn't THE Helldivers 2 clothing range, as there is also one from PlayStation's own merch store: https://gear.playstation.com/Browse/HD

I want a Liber-Tea mug and an 18-24 month old baby vest that says "My Daddy is a Helldiver!".

@Stevemalkpus Really? This is the country that invented the soap opera... and that's all WWE is; high drama plus muscles, costumes, a bit of flesh on show, and the occasional bit of simulated violence. What's not to like?
I don't watch it personally, but I can understand the appeal well enough.

This isn't representative of the Fallout experience at all. I watched the whole trailer and it didn't crash once!

People who love the Breaker just haven't heard about/unlocked the Slugger yet (which is fair enough as it's all the way on page 8 of the free Warbond). I unlocked it last night and boy-oh-boy is it good provided you keep calm and land your shots.

As long as they’re ready and able to make that bet without endangering people’s jobs, fine.

Somehow I’m sure Perrette will be fine whatever happens though.