Jrad

This is pretty clearly a jab at how similar Shadows of Mordor and AC seem, but from what I've seen of Mordor, there are a lot of awesome directions they could take the game, particularly if they continue exploring more emergent and open-ended features e.g., the nemesis system. I'd love to see more sequels; games like this are infinitely more appealing than shit like Destiny. It'd be pretty cool if they added some sort of overarching castle/town development (hopefully better implemented than AC3's homestead) which is tied to your progression. Taking over an old fortress and rebuilding it slowly would be pretty neat, I feel, and potentially having to defend against orc attacks or assassination attempts on your own life.

No need to be cynical yet, anyway. Shadows of Mordor looks like it's gonna bring a lot of interesting things to the table.

@jdp83: Admittedly, I haven't tried the DK2 yet (just own the DK1, myself) but I'm not really sure how it's possible to be unplugging the HMD unawares? I guess if you're standing up and moving around a lot, but that doesn't seem to be what the Oculus is designed for. I mostly use mine seated (in a rotating chair) and haven't run into any problems -- and that's with the Oculus wires and my headphone cables as well.

There are only a couple of truly bullshit mechanics in Dota 2; pretty much everything else has some excellent reasoning behind it. The result is a much more balanced metagame where literally 80%+ of the heroes are competitively viable versus LoLs 20% or so. Stuff like stacking and pulling neutrals, denying (though denying actually used to be even more important -- it gave no XP at all, then XP in a smaller range, and now, just slightly less XP) let a lot of heroes who otherwise aren't excellent laners catch up elsewhere or harass the enemy indirectly. There are heroes in Dota that would simply never survive in LoL; they'd be utterly broken or overpowered within the relatively strict confines of the game's meta. Heroes like Tinker (teleport to literally any friendly unit pretty much whenever you want, use any item over and over again with effectively a 1 second cooldown) or Meepo (which LoL's terrible micro implementation prevents entirely) simply couldn't exist in League. Instead, you get the typical champions with a slow, a skillshot, a gap closer... pretty sure I just described half the LoL hero pool. The lore for Dota heroes might be kinda bland, but when it comes to actual design, you can't imply that League's heroes are even slightly more interesting, from a gameplay perspective.

I assume your sound card supports 7.1 output and you have its drivers configured properly? While personally, I've never understood the appeal of surround sound headsets (headphones literally only need two channels to provide a pretty much perfect surround sound experience: see virtual barbershop, and with only two sound drivers vs. 7+ the fidelity is much higher) it's entirely possible there's an issue with the mixing in Watch_Dogs.

A lot of people seem to think Dawkins is an asshole, but outside The God Delusion he's really not. He's a scientist first and foremost, and he tolerates absolutely zero bullshit. He can be abrasive because of this, but he devoted basically his entire life to studying biology and contributing to the field, and people who ignorantly disregard a hundred years of scientific progress because of their religion piss him off, and rightly so. If any of them had any decent counter-arguments or evidence to present, he wouldn't be half as dismissive. The big problem is that a lot of people seem to think that Creationism is valid science. It isn't. It's complete and utter horseshit. It's on the exact same level as the Flat Earth "theory", but disgustingly, it actually gets scientific funding in some states. Among the scientifically literate, there is no "controversy". But then again, if religious people could be argued with or convinced, they wouldn't be religious in the first place.

Have 360 games always looked this bad? This looks way worse than, say, Half-Life 2, which came out 10 years ago.

10/10

@trafalgarlaw: Except to achieve market penetration and actually make the social aspects worth using, they need the screen to not be complete trash. The 720p Oculus Rift is an amazing proof of concept, but it's not anywhere near good enough to use for any stretch of time. You can barely read text on it. I know. I own one. If they tried to bring that to market, it would fail. Horribly. What Zuckerberg was talking about -- virtual classrooms, for example -- requires high fidelity. The same fidelity games need. He's not making a 3D text reader for your Facebook news feed, lol. There's no market for that.

As for the SDK, it assists Oculus development, but that's it. The specifications are open source. You don't need the SDK to develop for the Rift, it just makes things a bit easier. I'm not gonna say it's 100% impossible for Facebook to fuck it up, but they would have to actively work against everything that OR's already developed, and no one benefits from that situation. Even if games aren't the focus anymore, the technology that makes virtual classrooms possible is the exact same tech that would make immersive games possible too. Facebook wants to make Oculus better. Developers and consumers want the Rift to be better. They are not going to shoot themselves in the foot here.

Explain to me how this is anything but good news. Oculus was never going to be in a position where they were developing games. Their primary objective was to deliver a platform to allow other developers make amazing games with their hardware. More money means Oculus can deliver even better hardware even faster. Facebook might be sticking its hand in the cookie jar, but that's not going to stop the Oculus Rift from being a phenomenal piece of hardware. Oculus is going to deliver the technology. Developers will make the games. This acquisition is only good.

There are people who actually think this?