inspectorfowler

Well, it’s out. I bought it on PC and have played a bit there, and I have played a bit on Xbox through Game Pass.

It’s better than the beta but still has substantial bugs. Menus flickering, the commo rose coming in and out of existence, being unable to access your loadouts in some matches, and a persistent connection issue today.

The big thing that makes me sort of sad is the Cross Play stuff. We have a gang at work and I’m the only PC player. I’d be willing to re-buy if it was going to be ”our” game but we’re split between PS5 and Series X. The problem is that the consoles can’t wall off just the PC players - it’s either ”everybody plays together” or “stick to your own platform”.

I’m definitely not a pro player, but I can say that when I switched to console about 8/10 people who killed me were PC players and I doubt that 80% of the total player pool are PC right now. I wish we could set it to “console only” but ah well.

As far as the actual game, it has good bones but they need to fix the worst bugs before it’s that decent. It’s definitely Battlefield in a lot of ways. I appreciate being able to hack the damn chaff off a helicopter for 10 seconds :)

Wind Waker from this list - it’s a damn masterpiece -but SSX Tricky on Gamecube is my favorite because it’s the first game my wife and I bonded over. When she played until her thumb got a crack in the skin from the controller, I knew she was hooked.

Do they still have Audio Network in their current form? WILL WE HEAR LOCKDOWN AGAIN?!

We probably have and I missed it.

@wardcleaver: Yeah, the lack of context clues is a bit baffling. That text scroll is worthless - yeah, “so and so needs a revive” but how can you reasonably compare that to gamertags around you and see if somebody is close? Bleh.

Part of being the medic should be an ability called “triage” or something. Visual cues should appear to let you know who is wounded and where. Color bar changes with maybe something else for the color-blind folks. Have the “downed” markers give more info more readily about how close they are. Otherwise, with the “everybody shoots and carries everything” no-classes, the medic feels pretty meh. Higher health on revive and a mediocre healing tool aren’t much of a class.

Also - it doesn’t give a button prompt for a lot of things including revives, and watching folks just stand over you switching weapons, etc. while they face you and try to reposition to get the (absent) prompt to come up is a mix between hilarious and just sad.

I hope this build was months old because while I did really enjoy the gameplay the game itself was…uh….not working real well. I will still play it because I’m a sucker for Battlefield but I really do hope the release is more polished.

I’m in on their $5 tier and it’s fine. The thing I miss is them *trying* more games as opposed to playing stuff they already like. The mix between getting to know somebody’s tastes and then seeing how they react to a specific new game has been a huge help to me over the last decade in terms of not blindly spending money on things I hope I’ll like.

And yes, as others have said, no wild card personality does bring a sort of…”routine city council meeting” feeling to their podcasts and streams sometimes. When Abby is on being a weirdo it adds something the core three lack.

@bladededge: Holy crap you aren't kidding. Why...why was it on the front page of forum threads when I scrolled through?

I am old enough to have better forum sense, dangit.

@isomeri: The storage thing is true! My friend I mentioned with the e-bike lives on the second floor. No elevators, and he has to walk something like 80 lbs up the stairs when he gets home. That’s a good point to consider.

The only time this has really hit me was when a bunch of people at my office took up Overwatch. They all wanted to play ranked and were getting quite good. I wasn't even playing enough - or good enough - to go through the process to be allowed to play ranked so they would have to quit and do casual every time. For some reason the roles didn't click with me and we lost a LOT when I was on the team so I eventually just quit. I couldn't stand the feeling that everybody was losing because of me, so I 100% get that.

For me it has nothing to do with hearing randos talk - I could hear people whine on the internet all day long and care zero percent. It's more that if we're all there to have fun, winning is part of that. Not all of it but part of it. If I feel like I am actually killing a team then...ugh.

But that was just one game. In other games, though, I can usually find a role that works for me and feel like I'm contributing. It's not a joke that your brain slows down as you age and I'm in my mid-40s now so games that offer some tactical flexibility like Battlefield tend to be more my jam. In Destiny, as mentioned above, I skip the MP because I hate it so bad that I'll never be able to really contribute, but in the PvE I can help out just fine.

No real solutions for you here, but as somebody with anxiety about letting others down I feel you and hope you can find something fun where you feel like you can relax a little.

Our town has had contracts with two different companies, Bird and now Spin, to leave them lying all over the city for people to use. In that context, bleh - those rental ones get abused and abandoned and I feel like they’re an eyesore. It’s a college town with a downtown area with a substantial drinking culture so you can imagine where those thing end up.

In terms of owning one, from a day-to-day usability perspective and as people have mentioned, a safety perspective, I’d probably look harder at a bike; especially an e-bike if part of the appeal is not showing up to work sweaty. Something about the riding position on those scooters seems like it makes falls more dangerous. Also, to drivers you register more as a pedestrian and when you suddenly launch into a crosswalk at high speeds they aren’t ready.

That’s my $0.02. One of my co-workers makes his daily commute on an e-bike that wasn’t horribly expensive and he loves it. It’s about four miles each way for him and it’s been rock solid so far.

This is a good thought, and it absolutely was the issue with my Sony headphones at work. My work computer just suddenly decided that "hands free" was the right mode and the audio was terrible.

These only connect through a base "station" (a USB stick), though, and they use wifi instead of Bluetooth. They only show up as one device in the PC instead of two like the Sony headphones do (and your Bose headphones - same thing happened to my wife in the middle of an ESO session one time).

I have considered wifi interference but then why is all the other audio so clear? Gaaah. I'm in a two-day online training class and it's making me nuts.