Sly Reflex

A few hours to play the new dungeon in Anthem is all I'm talking about. Same as having a few rounds in the new SoT treasure hunt thing. You don't have to have 10 or 20 hours gaming time to consume whatever's come out. It's sort of piecemeal. Who really looks at the Anthem news that there's a new Stronghold and goes "Well, that's me for the next month"? You're going to play it a few times and move on. Only the maddest people with nothing else to play are really going to focus on it. Look at that Destiny 2 with the DLC with Mercury. I played it for a few sessions and I was done. Sure there was that whole build the guns thing from the tower, but I ain't fucking about doing world events to get a gun I'm never going to use. Same as when I aw the Wall at the end of Anthem I was like "Well that can get to fuck!". For some that stuff is going to be rewarding, for others it's just grinding in a game that's not got a lot to do. See this is really wrong. Not everyone has a squad of 6. And when there is a squad of 6, it only take a few weeks of people fucking up in the small window where you can get everyone together when you're doing nothing wrong to call it. If the raid is off the table then what else is left? Also in regard of LFG's, I've had nothing but terrible experiences with them. Both calling people in and backfilling games. Again when it comes down to it I'm doing my job, but it only takes 1 link out of the other 5 players and it's a wash. I'd rather not waste my time on that. I hate to sit with my dick in my hand because we're waiting on a 6th, or there's some problem, or an argument breaks out, or someone starts being a dickhead. Worst of all is having someone explain some elaborate cheese or some other bullshit method when everyone already knows what they're doing. I'm over that. Life's too short to be worried about it. You want to do that? Fill your boots. I ain't doing it in any game. It oversteps the boundary from having fun to feeling like work. It's very much a case of your mileage may vary. You met great people and I'm happy that that happened. Not everyone can be like that. On PS4 fewer than 1 in 10 has completed the raid in Destiny 2. I am in the majority and I'm OK with that. I think people bounce off the games after the story is done more than you would like to admit. I mean it's only anecdotal from the people on my friends list but there are definitely people there that are in, story, few bits and bobs after the credits roll and then done. You're projecting the way you play on all the base there. I put way more time in than those players, but not anything near those people that really devote themselves to a game. Mainly because I get to a point where I've seen everything I want to and the rest is gated off. Again, this is completely fine. Would I like to do that stuff? Yes. Do I feel I'm missing out because I've not seen it? No. The stuff I am going to see in other games will more than make up for it. Just because I tag you doesn't mean you have to write a post. Every time I happen to mention Destiny you get your dick in a knot and start up.

Honestly, I think if you really wanted to you could play all these games as a service games between the usual releases. The more time I spend with them the more time I realise that there's just not enough to warrant any of us really investing all that time in in such a manner where we "Mainline" one game. Destiny 1 is a great example of this. When the Rise of Iron stuff came out I jumped back in and played through everything I missed, with the exception of the later raids, because they were too much an ask for my group. There got to a point where I was playing with @Sambob and we were really going for it trying to reach the cap. We put some serious hours in. And for what? I honestly think we made the best decision to knock it on the head at that point. As amazing as that package is when it's fully formed, there's not much to be garnered when you're asked to pull the same shit out of the games arse every day in the hope that you might get the thing that you need. All these Games as a Service stuff, you're best eating all you can and then moving on. There's enough of them now where you can bounce from game to game, play through whatever they've added and then as soon as you've seen everything they've added, bail at the first sign of boredom. Treat them like a finger buffet, eat what you want and then move to the next table when you're tired of eating that particular flavour. Like I said above, you don't need to be super dedicated. Boot the game up, see what the added content is and then once you're done you pull the plug and move on. Sometimes you're going to pull the plug quicker than others and sometimes you're going to pull the plug indefinitely like I did with Grand Theft Auto Online. Look at it this way. Destiny. Division. Elder Scrolls Online. Anthem. Whatever. If you can get 10 or 20 hours out of them before calling it a day before the additional content or improvements happen, then you've got your monies worth. You saw the credits roll on the main story and that's what most people will be doing. A lot of the diehards that expect to get 100's of hours out of a base game are asking for the impossible. Not to say that some games don't come with 100's of hours straight out the gate, because there's an exception to every rule, but with these GaaS things it's impossible for them to add content faster than eople can complete it. I always find it really amusing when people will buy the latest game, mainline it for 70 hours in one week and then complain that there's nothing to do anymore. For a lot of people 70 hours is 4 or 5 weeks of gaming, maybe more. Just because you've bought it doesn't mean you have to be on it every waking hour. People, especially in our circle, tend to want to get t the end of shit ASAP. We always want to be chasing the next big thing and chasing the next big thing and getting all excited tends to lead to disappointment. I don't know if it's a cultural thing or what, but we're consuming at a rate like never before. Not just games, everything. Whether you're second screening or listening to a podcast while playing games, we're all munching through content at a pace people before us never did. I think the fault likes partially with us as much as it does the people making the content. We could do with slowing down. That's because the people you're playing the games with are the best part about it. Being part of something and contributing is part of the hook. We've all got the friend that had the Gally or the Ice Breaker (for me it was the Vision for Nightfalls with Solar burn) that help us tackle those challenges and hope that eventually those jobs manage to get shared and past along to each other. This is just being part of a community and feeling wanted or needed. I'm not done with it. I shall go back to it where there's enough stuff for me to take a proper run at it and get invested for a week or so. Plus a lot of the crew that I plan on doing that with are balls deep in The Division 2. It boils down to having the community thing. Build a community with your friends and you'll always have someone that will tag along. It's a case of entrenching yourself in a community by either being nice, useful, funny, or any combination of the above. I know you did the whole Join my pirate/cowboy gang" or whatever back in the g™ days, but I think it takes more than that. If something is going to be a flash in the pan it needs to be a flash in the pan for everyone. Anthem had that forced upon it with the arrival of The Division 2 compounded by the issues players found prevalent in that game. There's however times where nobody is going to be willing to play a game. Maybe it's not fun, maybe it's grindy, it could just be a bad experience previously put players off it. Sometimes it's not going to work. Do I think Anthem will fall casualty to that? I think it partially already has, but I also think that for every person it pissed off there'll be a person willing to give it a chance. Who knows really? It sounds like the exact same as me, except for the is it good I'd replace that with do I find it enjoyable, because there's a very definite definition between a good game and one that you enjoy. For example I know Street Fighter is a good game series, but I don't like it. Similarly I knew Army of Two was pants, but it was super enjoyable because of how idiotic it was. Taking my last paragraph into accord, you could make the best game every that's perfectly balanced and has everything just right, but some people just aren't going to like it because it feels off. Something as simply as making it third person can put people off playing. Liking something isn't binary. Games aren't a one size fits all.

I'm probably going to have to think about that, since it's a more complicated answer than you might expect.

Rockband easily. Hundred quid plus for band in the box. £70 for the bundle with RB3 and the keytar. £20 or £30 on songs dlcs like AC/DC and other bundles. I've bought Borderlands 2 on 3 separate occasions now, sot they've had at least hundred quid out of me, even when I've bought it at sale prices. Pinball as well. The PInball Arcade I have spent over £100 on, I'm still missing some tables as well. Over in Zen's version there's 88 tables in the current game. It's like £7 for a pack, usually 3 tables but sometimes there's 2 or 4 tables included. Easily I've spent £200. Maybe even more because I bought tables on the PS3 and 360 and XO before migrating to PC and doing it all over again.

It falls between stools with these two. Sea of Thieves had barely any content. Only now is it starting to take shape. It worked though, I've played a fair old chunk of it and not had any glitches, crashes or bugs. In fact for the sparsity of the games content the actual technical ability of it is really accomplished. Think of all the people on the server seeing the same sea and how boats pitch and roll in complete synchronicity for all players is an amazing feat. I couldn't recommend it just yet unless you were into watching where water physics are going, but it can and will be good at some tenure during its life. I've not played 76, but I've watched a friend play it a lot on Twitch, and oh boy is that game fucked. Lots of disconnecting, the game likes to crash. It's ugly as fuck, it's a bad game with a Fallout skin. There feels like there's little point to it, despite the levelling up and making a base I feel so disconnected from when he started to play the game versus now. Again you could level that argument at SoT as well, after all all that's happening are some dials are going up and you're getting gold to pimp out your ship and pirate, but if you were to say to me "OK, Sly, we're going to play a game for a few hours, we've got 4 of us, what shall we play?" Then out of the two I'd always pick Sea of Thieves. At points that game is a glorified chat room, but it's a very pretty and well put together chat room. That brings us onto Anthem. Anthem when you play it in small hits is amazing. You can be competently acrobatic within 10 minutes of learning the game. Shooting is easy to pick up and works well between the powers your suits have. It suffers from aspects that Sea of Thieves suffered from, as well as suffering aspects that 76 suffers from. For a start, there's not enough of it. There's not enough variation. The other looter shooters when they came out were hobbled by the same thing, Destiny boiled down to doing the Nightfall and Raid and Division boiled down to trying to gank or avoid being ganked in the DZ. Anthem is particularly weak here with the options it offers players for the endgame. Three Stongholds. That's not great. The parity between Strongholds is ridiculous as well. Difficulty and running time vs rewards needs to be looked at, there's a reason why people were running the spider Stronghold so much when the game came out, and that's because it allowed people to gear up quickly. Speaking of which. Gear. And the Javelins specifically themselves. When you play Anthem the game busts its load way too early. For instance if you pick Storm, the lightning strike you get at the beginning of the game is no different visually from one you get at end game. For a game about loot and levelling up, there's little sense of progress, all the equipment and guns might have bigger numbers on them, but the impact they strike with is exactly the same as when you first run into the opening areas and discover what your Javelin is capable of. Honestly, it shouldn't be like that. Maybe the Storms lightning strike at lower levels should be a spark that does fuck all damage and over the course of the game grows into a ferocious fork lightning that jumps from enemy to enemy. Maybe the Ranger's missile pod should be limp as fuck and turn into a battery of missiles that scorch everything they manage to land a hit on? Maybe the guns should have game changing unique properties that offer new ways of playing other than just doing what you've been doing for the past 20 or so hours. There's a lot to take in from it all. The thing that stands out most to me is that Anthem is fun to pootle about in in the same way Sea of Thieves is. The core concept is a fun and engaging one, they just need to make it so that those loops are fun and engaging to do over and over again by offering visual and tangible excitement with the activities and gear going forwards. For what it's worth, I think Anthem will eventually be a game that turns itself around. EA has spent so much money that they're invested in it now in a similar way Ubi got invested with The Division, which was also fucking shockingly broken and people seemingly forgot about and decided to sweep under the rug. Sea of Thieves looks like it's going to be great now that it's finally getting some more meaty content to be going at, and I even think that eventually 76 will end up in a place that's way better than it set off in. You look at something like The Elder Scrolls Online which was a complete fuck up when it came out, but after a lot of hard work it's one of the top MMO's now. Things can be turned around. Warframe is probably the biggest success story there. It just takes work and a lot of listening to feedback and making sense of the criticism throughout all the outrage to come out the other side better for it. Metal Gear Survive will never ever be good though, fucking unneeded piece of shit that it is.

It sounds like they marred a good game to get some more bucks. It's stupid. WB won't be satisfied until they've fucked every single one of their properties with nonsense like this.

One is for news. When people start playing one is for impressions. You'll get used to it.

Bloody hell. Game and platform?

Get on this lads and lasses. It's mechanically one of the better games I've played. I think a lot of open world games could learn considerable lessons from it. Combat is up there with Bloodborne and I really like having the pseudo co-op by having friends pawns in my game.

I am all over that!

You might get the bag and the dark room, but what comes after that is much much worse. There's a reason he's contained on the island, and that's for all our safety.

I just want more A to B stuff that's co-op for 4 or more players.I mean we've had stuff like Vermintide but I wasn't so sold on that whole aesthetic or the melee focus combat. I own the second one and I'm going to try it at some point, but I don't think it'll be as good as L4D. We've also had co-op horde stuff like Killing Floor 2. I actually really like that game, but I wish it was more focused on traversal than it is. It basically boils down to going to one part of the maps and holding out every time. Going from point A to point B is the thing that sort of makes those games and I'm really hoping that something like GTFO can capitalise on that. Or maybe just World War Z finding a big audience that shows that people are into this sort of stuff when it's done right. It's such an easy concept to fuck up as well. Although it wasn't a 1:1 The Division tried doing it with The Underground DLC they did, it was kinda ass because the objectives were terrible and sucked the fun out of it. It never felt like fun, it just felt like a chore that could be over in the blink of an eye because of the terrible balancing and aforementioned objectives. L4D could be like that but it never felt like it was out of your hands. Maybe because you had to grind to do stuff in The Underground. I dunno. Keep us posted on this @AndyKurosaki, Hopefully it carries on shining once/if it's all fixed up.

I am keeping an eye on this. If they fix it I'm all over it. Although if I'm being perfectly honest, Valve shouldn't be dragging their heels on more L4D. I'm pretty disgusted they've left that series in the past, out of all the games they're known for L4D is the one I'd assume would be the easiest to put together.

Every parent loves their kids. Unless their surname is McCann.

Yeah, she loves her job taking care of the disabled.