Grimhild

Exactly my thoughts.

@stonyman65: Yeah, it's just a bit of dissonance in the feel of the narrative, which I mostly just find kind of hilarious more than anything. The game itself is perfectly fine from what I've played. Just from a technical standpoint, the faces look pretty fantastic, even if psychokiller Lara is wearing someone elses face. Or maybe it's some James Bondian thing where theres multiple Laras.

The only thing that's really throwing me off about this Lara and her new face (which was also a weird dichotomy in the last game, especially by the end when you're pulling the Captain Willard Apocalypse Now shot in a pool of water, which is mostly blood) is how she still sounds super exacerbated with every line she delivers in her breathy, delicate and vulnerable voice. You'd think after the actual HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE that she's murdered in the last game in countless ways and with plenty more to come in this installment, she'd be a lot less shocked and doe-eyed by the chaos and bloodshed surrounding her, if not just a tad bit aloof.

That said I haven't played it all that much, still in the Russian base, so maybe it changes a bit.

Or maybe she's just a complete psychopath that's wearing someone else's face the whole time, wondering why everyone around her dies horribly, completely oblivious to the blackout murder sprees she constantly goes on. She wouldn't even help the guy that got his eyes poked out when I tried to tell her to. Was like nope, I ain't about that.

Same here on all points. I recently played through EW more aggressively than I would have normally in preparation and, even though I didn't sit on overwatch constantly before, I feel pretty comfortable with the more aggressive tactics now.

I'm really looking forward to utilizing concealment as much as possible, not just use it to ambush the first patrol I see, and I'm already ruminating how to build a full team of rangers from what I know of the skill trees heh. I'm curious to see if you can ghost a mission objective and already be headed towards the extraction point by the time the opposition springs aggro.

So I bought into it simply because I'm a sucker for any sort of semi-realistic modern setting RPGs. I generally like Tom Clancy games, and after watching several videos of gameplay on YT and not being repulsed by it, I bought in. With tempered expectations after RB6: Siege, which just wasn't what I was looking for with the set in stone MOBA-like characters, equipment and confined levels, I was pleasantly surprised with how much fun I was having within the first few minutes of gameplay.

It looks great, especially at night, sounds great, and plays more than adequately for a cover shooter. Even with the options of customization and missions being limited for the beta, it was just enough to make me pretty excited for the full release.

I've been mostly soloing for the past few hours, and it felt perfectly fine in that regard. That is to say that I didn't feel like the game was constantly shouting at me for not being with a bunch of other players. So just from being on my own in the game as I tend to do, I can easily imagine the addition of some of my regular gaming friends will offer a fun coop/DZ experience as well if/when they get it.

Some points did telegraph the grindy and bulletsponge concerns, the latter of which I'm not a fan of, but since it's just as much cover and twitch based shooting, it felt dynamic enough in the middle of firefights to where it didn't bother me that much. And at the same time, there were also lots of sniping headshots that were putting targets down with a single bullet, and it felt cool to chip down an enemy with the AR and then transition to my side arm that does +100% damage to targets with <30% health for the kill. Super badass.

Short answer: Overreaction. All the things that make it great are still there, just with far fewer exploits to artificially lower the difficulty.

Slightly longer answer:

Most of the changes revolve around exploits some of the player base had found to circumvent the intended difficulty, ergo that segment of the player base feels betrayed by the developers. While there are some game mechanics I find somewhat puzzling, this is how the game system was designed. So, for example, changes were implemented to remove most of the benefits from keeping 1 weak creature alive in a fight just to keep healing up your characters while taking minimal or no damage from the remaining enemy. Also reinforcements show up if you stick around too long using this "tactic." I recognize that there can be a fuzzy line between sick vidja game strats and exploiting game mechanics, but pretty much every change that people are complaining about is to address the latter.

Also they added difficulty options, like to remove the much maligned "corpse clutter" from the fights, so there's really no need to worry about that.

If you like the amazing presentation via art style, narrator and music, all of these things are still there. You just can't cheat the system as much, and have to come to terms with the better part of valor on occasion.

I found a mod that makes the player character sound a little more fitting for the plot. It's no Int 1 dialog, but it'll do for the voiced protagonist we've been saddled with.

I liked it. But I also don't saturate myself with Ubi-like system open world games, the previous being Shadow of Mordor, and I only played one of the Batman games just because I'm not really into Batman to begin with. So I guess a lot of it depends on how much you like the setting of Mad Max (which I do, A LOT) and all the trappings therein, and if that's enough to pull you into the setting past the now well-worn open world mechanics.

A lot of the side stuff was vanilla, but I found the vehicle combat to be really fun. Cars exploding at high speeds while flying through the air raining down flaming gasoline is always satisfying. Also, I really enjoyed Chumbucket's character. He's probably one of my favorite new video game personalities of late.

I wasn't expecting much and was pleasantly surprised. The most disappointing aspect for me was that there aren't any actual war rigs in it.

One of the more interesting examples I've seen of this lately has been some relatively recent additions and/or changes to Darkest Dungeon. Personally, I've been having a great time with it and have probably clocked more hours with it than most of the finished releases for the past year, but some recent patches apparently made a number of the players tap out and accuse the game of being unfair and/or "just a cheating RNG." To me, it appears to make a visible split in the audience between gamers who seek out and utilize exploits they find to progress, then throw their hands up in frustration and demand a refund when it no longer works, and the gamers that learn to adapt to the changes and take it on it's own terms.

It's an interesting and fuzzy line between exploit and strategy, now that I think about it. Looking at something like Souls series, I'd guess most of the player base consider exploiting poor boss AI/pathfinding to be perfectly legitimate styles of play. There's really nothing in the game telling you otherwise, in fact it almost always rewards you for it. It makes me wonder if the developers saw most of them and just said "Meh, sure." I won't sit here and say I didn't let dozens of brigands in the woods of Dark Souls bounce off my head on a certain ledge sending them to their doom for free xp :D

3rd'd'd. The reboot was the only game released in the past few years that actually surpassed my expectations, and the only game to date that I've felt compelled to S-Rank. And even though there isn't an achievement for beating it on Impossible/Ironman, I did it anyway.

Very excited :D