New & Upcoming game discussion.

[Falchion]

HOLY SHIT, what have they done to the graphics programming of the game!?

Oh, yeah, Vigil made a pact with the Devil called THQ.

[IskatuMesk]

It's a straight console port, so it seems to be upscaling all the UI, and it's using console textures/settings/upscaling for everything else.

Also, it's unstable and does weird shit.

The game itself might be okay. I don't like how they shoehorned WoW into it, but the combat is very similar to DS1.

[Falchion]

I don't know if you've seen the videos, Mesk, but you should know they removed most references to GoW, starting with the Arabs (Orbs).

[IskatuMesk]

Yeah. They basically made a diablo/wow kind of a shift. Feels very unnatural and forced. I wonder why. (probably for their DLC platform, now that I think about it.)

[Falchion]

Reason Number 1: Must be the WDDI Syndrome (We Didn't Do It). Why to make orbs that are cash, health and special? Good sense states that if someone knows about a kill-to-heal system, you hire this person to make the research and assistance for you. Worked for Santa Monica but no one likes to make copycats, and reinventing the wheel seems more like fun. Probably that's why this Darksiders and Space Marine tried to make different and failed.

Reason Number 2: They didn't want to repeat/recycle the first Darksiders.

[IskatuMesk]

Too late for the repeat. They fucked up the porting like 10x as bad as the first Darksiders did, and people are getting mad.

If they wanted to diverge from GoW they could have done it other ways instead of introducing stats shit. The way keys and dungeons and smashing boxes for gold and shit works, is it really deprives the game of its flow. In Darksiders, GoW, etc. you're fighting or exploring. In this you interject random grindy shit into it. Breaks the pacing of the game a lot. I'm just going to turn off combat text and autoequip anything green and ignore the wow aspects as best I can, but I have a feeling the game quickly degrades into formulaic grinding like every other diablo/mmo clone.

I also have a good feeling any difficulty I encounter will be as a result of stat scaling... something you should never, ever see in an TPS ARPG.

[Taeradun]

Black Mesa is finally out, free to anyone with any of Valve's source engine games

http://release.blackmesasource.com/page ... nager.html or if the download servers are still getting reamed use this torrent http://www.mediafire.com/?khmzyygg4vetko0

GOTY 2012

[Taeradun]

also before mesk says anything, yes the voice actors are terrible

[IskatuMesk]

I don't care to check out other people's mods. I can forgive bad modding voice acting to an extent anyways, given that there's no one out there who tries to be a voice actor and they end up depending on random nobodies with radioshack mics.

[Taeradun]

I don't care to check out other people's mods.

but it's like a 1998 game with 2006 graphics!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pssONFssyXs

[Taeradun]

also I haven't got BL2 yet but I hear it's pretty good




GOTY 2012

[UntamedLoli]

I haven't really found anything wrong with Black Mesa's VA.

Stuffing PhysX into BL2 is enough to make me wait for a heavy sale. Because CPU's are under oh so much demand in every game. Acting like a GPU is needed for any of that is retarded. Not to mention PhysX's water and cloth simulation look like ass.

[IskatuMesk]

No plans on touching bl2 seeing as how the first one was a disgusting waste of my money. I can see it's still ugly as sin.

Anyways, incoming rant about Guild Wars 2.

I'm not sure what I expected. The Beta was pretty promising. My video showed that it was promising. Yeah, there were some very silly bugs, content was lacking, it was rough around the edges. But it was beta, and the first guild wars didn't turn out too bad. I was willing to sit it out, enjoy WvW, and see how the game releases.

The release for Guild Wars 2 has been amongst the worst I've seen so far. The bugs were not fixed. They multiplied ten fold. Super basic shit they should have had working on implementation, like skill challenge NPCs, remain broken to this day. Half of the events in the game break intermittedly and are only fixed for one round on a server restart. Basic shit, like escorts and killing enemies, are the ones breaking - not the "complex" events (which we'll get into in a moment).

Virtually every single bug I pointed out in the video, like animation transitions and the summoning bugs, remain to this day. Charr Female have some kind of bone weighting or attachment point issue because they literally do not hold any two-handed weapon in both hands, the offhand wildly clips or floats to the side. This is the braindead basic level shit you figure out on implementing an asset, you don't just somehow miss this shit all the way into weeks after release. Oh, but it gets better!

They broke the audio AND the video!

In beta, the audio was fine. In release, the balance is jacked up everywhere. You randomly get deafened by audio samples that bypass the entire audio system (including volume) for no reason at all. And, if you're in an event (it happens a lot), you may encounter the bug HKS and I both get on entirely unrelated hardware. The whole audio system crashes, resulting in a resonating drone on the left channel ad infinitum until you restart the game. Luckily for me, or unluckily depending how you see it, I don't have to wait long because the game usually immediately crashes after. The kicker? Arena.net knows about this bug and has known about it for weeks and has yet to make a single move to fix it. Even though it was never a problem in beta. Imbeciles.

The video bug is more arcane and is something I'm sure is related to ATI drivers. In essence, prepare to randomly crash your entire computer for no reason at all. Has nothing to do with load or FXAA. Again, wasn't an issue in beta.

Once you get past the fact the game is amazingly buggy and untested, where virtually everything outside the beta zones has something wrong with it, from pickup items having incorrect movesets that do nothing, to pickup items that were clearly never tested at all;

A single line fix and Arena.net couldn't be assed to even have a QA guy pick up the item to see if it worked or not.

To bosses and monsters resetting right on top of you while you're fighting them, this game seems like it was rushed out a few years ahead of time. It was not ready for release. The voice acting at times is decent, other times it's unbearably bad. What is with companies and voice acting? It's not hard to voice act. It's not hard to find someone who can voice act. Have some fucking standards for a change. Why does every game have to have horrible audio work? It isn't some fucking insurmountable mountain to tell an incompetent intern "no, you can't voice act, let's find someone who can". When I can say I can confidently do better voices than half of a game's crew, you've got some serious issues in your entire development structure you need to sort out before you hit actual game content.

Oh wait.

Well, fine. Games have shitty voice acting, their graphics are a conglomoration of internery and stupidity. I've been hardened by years of playing games from companies like Blizzard, Relic, and BioWare. I know how to roll with the shit. I know how to stomach unbelievably bad and lazy development. It's something I expect. Arena.Net was still a company I could respect if they patched it all up and focused on the really glaring problems post-release.

Ironically, GW2 had a very smooth launch as far as server stability went. Yes, there were zones HKS and I ran into that had 2-3 second delays. But, for the most part, it was a lot smoother than WoW. It was the company's conscious decisions behind the game that really boil my balls.

First of all, they implemented some kind of anti-farming mechanism that dramatically axes your drops the more mobs of the same type you kill. In massive areas like, oh, I don't know, the entire end-game set of zones, Orr, you don't have mob variety. It's all Undead. Even without this anti-farming garbage, you get crap for drops anyways. Allegedly this is some kind of anti-botting measure. Well, allow me to let you in on a secret, you brilliant anal rejects.

Bots don't give a fuck about drop rates. They're bots. And they aren't some unsophisticated auto-attack drone, either. At least not usually. We have run into bots in the game that basically sit at an event with the attack key held down. But the thing is, bots will happily grind through your ineffective drop nerfs and diversify their kills through algorithms. That is what they are designed to do. These anti-farming mechanisms only hurt legit players like me.

It gets better.

Arena.net has NO ingame GM's. They don't actively fight bots in any shape or form. They also don't penalize people for abusing the still-free server transfers to farm Orichalcum, but more on server transfers later (it gets ugly). So, instead, they've been fighting "exploits" and "botters" by restricting rewards from npcs, events, and even dungeons more and more and more.

I'm not a dungeon guy. You can ask HKS how opposed I am to dungeons. Mostly because they are boring. The bosses and mobs in WoW are boring. They have too much health, they don't do anything exciting, they stand there and die. GW2 is worse.

Guild Wars 1 was all about builds and shit. Mobs had builds. Particularly in Factions and beyond, mobs had some crazy setups. They spammed their abilities on cooldown. It made stuff hard. There was a little stat scaling in the form of mob levels and bosses. Bosses got a pretty severe damage boost. They could do a fuckton of damage to your party. But you know what? You could counter that. Disables were very strong in GW1. You could shut down bosses and kill them pretty fast. WarGiant showed me how to annihilate some of the endgame bosses without a sweat. It was all in the play and builds.

Guild Wars 2 takes a Diablo 3 approach. Which is to say, the game is extremely unsophisticated. It's all stat scaling and offers no AI at all. Bosses in dungeons, and the huge dragons you fight in the world, are all very simple. I have limited dungeon experience, only heresay from people, so let's talk dragons.



There are three dragon bosses in the world that I know of. They are on enormously long 3 hour respawns. Some have pre-requirement events, all of them have some kind of build-up.

Their fights are best described as effortless loot pinatas.

The dragons literally do not attack you. It is physically impossible to wipe on any of them. The most dangerous is the one above, that I have dubbed Tea Quail, because every time I fight him I could be stuffing my face full of Tea and Quail and probably solo him. The only dangerous parts of him are his aids clouds, which you can simply step out of, and his adds, that don't ever congregate near the dragon at all. The big, fat, exploding adds rarely ever do damage to you. The dragon himself has a breath attack he always uses facing the one direction whose only purpose is to fear you.

CC mechanics are abundant on NPCs. The dragons have a fear. They spam it. It isn't threatening, it's just annoying. I'm of the belief that fear mechanics, and other things that take away control from your character, should plainly not exist, especially in an MMO. At the very most, they should be taken in astute moderation. GW2 doesn't take it in moderation. Sometimes dragons can chain fear you 3 times in a row. If you get hit by the breath attack you suffer maybe 100 damage. It's like they forgot to actually playtest the dragon and see if it did anything or if tony was just a lying fool.

The dragons are impressive for about the first 15 seconds because hey, they don't look too bad, and their SFX is decent. Except for the voice acting from NPC's you hear during the fight. They are unemotional script jockeys. Boring. But the gameplay is reminiscent of a Blizzard crapshoot. On top of it all, you get what you fought for - their chests always drop trash.

The gigantic meta events, the driving themes behind these zones, end in auto-attack snorefests that can last up to 15-20 minutes because the mobs have so much fucking health. It is unbelievable that a company in this day and age thought this was ready for release. It isn't. But here we are. It gets worse in the end-game zones. Legendary bosses, like the possessed statue of Dwayna, don't even have any abilities at all. At least the dragons stomp around and make noises while you beat them up like kids in a school yard.

Dungeons are apparently overtuned to fuck (which got a lot worse in a recent patch). The only reason you do dungeons, seeing as you get no loot off of them, is for tokens and (allegedly) speed farming money. Well, currently they nerfed the experience/money rewards, which were already nearly pointless for anyone not speed running, and dropped diminishing returns on them. Additionally, though I've yet to test it myself, they supposedly put diminishing returns on normal world events as well. What the fuck? Events needed to happen more often. More events, it's what the game is built on. So why is there so much anti-farming mechanisms geared at hurting casual and semi-casual players? Are the end-game gears easy to get or something?

Nah.

The dungeon sets have you looking at up to 80 runs a set pre-nerf. That's a lot of grinding. Legendaries, which are the pinnacle of grind, have much steeper requirements.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Legendary_weapon

Let's break this down.

Precursor weapon specific to the legendary
500 Dungeon Tokens specific to the legendary
Two level 400 crafting professions specific to the legendary

This is a bit ambigeous. I don't think you need the two crafting professions specific to the legendary unless the gifts are Bind on Pickup, which would be unbelievably stupid. The precusor weapons are not BoP, you can buy them for an average of 50-60 gold right now. The 500 dungeon tokens is, a wild guess, something like 40-50 dungeon runs. Ouch. Given how hard they are buffing dungeons right now, supposedly making some next to impossible, and destroying speed runs, this may or may not be bad.

200Skill point.png Skill Points
525,000 Karma
120 gold
100% World Completion

Now we're talking retarded. 200 skill points isn't a big deal, 525k karma isn't too bad either. But the arbitrary 120 gold and 100% world completion? That's way too much grind for me.

500 Badges of Honor
250 Globs of Ectoplasm
250 Vicious Fangs
250 Vicious Claws
250 Vials of Powerful Blood
250 Elaborate Totems
250 Armored Scales
250 Ancient Bones
250 Piles of Crystalline Dust
250 Powerful Venom Sacs

500 badges of honor is an immense amount of WvW grinding. Currently, you can't do that, because our server spawn points are camped by Eredon Terrace. So, currently, it's impossible to get a Legendary because of that alone. The 250 globs of Ectoplasm will cost you both your sanity and your wallet. The other items aren't too bad.

Then there's the gifts. The gifts also require insane amounts of mats as well. So, basically, more grinding/farming in a game that colossally punishes grinding and farming. There's a conflict of interest, a total lack of communication, barring Arena.net from understanding how their own game even works. They don't want you to have money - scaling waypoint costs, expensive crafting materials, and more keeps your pockets empty unless you were actively exploiting dungeons or server transfers. We've made an impressive combined total of around 20 gold or so far, I think. Nothing that drops in the end game zones sells at all, you're better off farming world completion for crappy exotics and selling those for a gold a pop.

Ah, but it gets better!

In addition to the above, the player must also gamble the following materials to obtain Mystic Clovers. One success results in a single Mystic Clover and 77 clovers are needed. The chances of success are currently unknown, therefore depending on the final chances, the recipe could require anywhere from 77 to 1,000 attempts.

0.6 Skill points
2100 Karma
1 Mystic Coin
1 Glob of Ectoplasm

Guild Wars 1 was a very grind intensive game. If you wanted anything you were grinding or exploiting abusive builds and farming. Some people in that game had utterly ludicrous amounts of wealth. Something like 3,000 ectos a person. For me, who struggled to break 60 platinum across so many years of gameplay, those kinds of numbers seem unbelievable. But, on the other hand, fellow CC'er Gemini explained to me how he gold capped multiple chars on WoW - by abusing a very small Glyph economy, and controlling the market.

Maybe some people find the prospect of mashing their face against spiked walls enjoyable, but I can't say I find it very enjoyable. That's okay, though. There's plenty of weapons and gear I like without forcing myself through these systems.

What I liked most about GW2 beta was WvW. Even if the PvE was a buggy disaster, I'd enjoy WvW. Right?



Nope!

You see, Arena.net got very impatient and fucked up big time here, too. Initially, they were running WvW on daily rotations until the servers stabilized and the ELO evened out. Then, they released world rankings and set it to one-week rotations.

Problem?

Server transfers are still free.

The pre-organization behind places like Something Awful lead to several servers having a substantially larger WvW pop than others. On top of that, the game allegedly has no official SEA servers, so players made unofficial SEA servers, meaning those servers have 24/7 WvW presence in some circumstances.

Already, the balance for WvW is a big disaster.

Arena.net compounded the problem by releasing server rankings and putting us on a one-week rotation with free transfers still active. Thus, with servers like ET abusing the ELO system to pit themselves against lower ranked servers that have only oceanic presence and very few WvW guilds, these pvp juggernauts proceed to effortlessly destroy us with enormously superior numbers. If this wasn't enough to encourage pvp centric players to transfer off of these sinking ships, members from the opposing servers come to these servers to recruit us or misdirect us.

I'm pigeonholed into a server I am not really attached to, Isle of Janthir. We have an oceanic presence but next to no American presence. In circumstances where we aren't facing servers like ET with 24/7 pvp guilds running watch, we can destroy smaller groups rather easily. There is no semblance of balance anymore, though, because even though we're facing ET and possess no structures our points in the ELO are still going up. Given that we are placed right below the top servers, we're always going to be getting one of the prime evils and their thorny anus rammed into our backside.

Anyone who was thinking of joining WvW looks at our score and just gives up. There's no point. We have no co-ordination, no organized groups, and simply not the manpower to break the camps. It's even worse for Sea of Sorrows who, as I saw myself, have around 20 ballistas sitting in front of their door in Eternal Battlegrounds. It's a very different story from when myself and two guys were camping 15 Ehmry Bay players - they were just bad. This is just hopeless entirely.

So now, I have no reason to PvE in a broken game and I can't play WvW because it's inaccessible.

Hey, at least I don't pay monthly!

When you aren't bogged down by bugs/farming or bad WvW matchups it's decent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcitikSVfeU&feature=youtu.be

/edit

Oh yeah, I also used the 7 day free trial thing for WoW and checked out the pre-patch for Mists. In a nutshell, I was astounded how they could so dramatically casualify a game that was already the casual of casual. Also, pandas look more like badgers.

/edit 2

I went to verify the claims about event DR's in GW2 I think people are full of shit.

/edit 3

Ah, no, there we go. There is indeed an event DR. It halved the rewards out of the blue. Awesome. That defeats the entire purpose of the Temple of Lyssa. Good job you incompetent interns.

[DrumsofWar]

Me from 10 years ago just high fived me at this Morrowind for Skyrim mod.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cCsUCrUv9I

And if you can't wait, check out current mods for Morrowind that update its graphics; its results are pretty good for all but character model.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPcoOtYaW5I

[UntamedLoli]

Planetside 2 beta

Requirements:

>Not having a shitty computer
>Playing VS with me, Wibod and sometimes Mesk

also

>implying anyone actually goes to CC