Mnemoidian

Victory!

We were instantly challenged however, so make sure to take some time to actually visit the dark zone while we control it, and get ready to defend the rail over the weekend.

It seems to me that unless people eventually get bored/discouraged of contesting, DE will eventually need to adjust either the duration of the challenge or the duration of the "preparation for the next challenge" - Dark Zones being available only every third day, while the challenge missions are a bit lackluster (other than for the Tenno specters, which are conceptually really cool - even if Trinity is the only real danger :P)

Also, seems likely to me that a big alliance with a lot of active people will eventually, through tax, earn enough to completely dominate the Dark Sector landscape, to the point where it'll take a huge concentrated effort to dislodge them from individual Dark Sectors.

And yeah, I really don't think the "NO TAXES!" crowd are going to get very far in the long run, as they will never be able to offer Battle Pay, and as a result - as WE saw - people will not fight for them, even if the challenging battle pay is only 200 credits.

It's an interesting feature though, and one that has quite a lot of potential in the long run, if they iterate on it.

I've been meaning to reply to you, as I think it's an interesting topic. It's just a pretty complex answer (and I can't access the details of my builds at the moment :| )

That said, as someone currently at Rank 13, with all Warframes (except for Rhino Prime and Hydroid) at max-rank, many which are multiple forma'd, picking a main is... difficult.

I do believe that my most-played Warframe is still Rhino. Built mostly for general survival - all skills except for Rhino charge.

Other than that, I've got a Blessing-built Trinity built for Duration and efficiency (still need to find Natural Talent though... :/). Nova built for power strength and range. Frost Prime build for power range and Nyx built for range and efficency (with short duration) for Chaos-goodness. But I'll pull out any warframe people ask for for a mission.

I believe that most people in the clan still identify me as a white/purple Excalibur Prime (flexible take-all-comers-build) :P

As for weapons - Brakk is my only real "go to" weapon, using the standard build from dpsframe.com, minus Expel replaced with Quickdraw.

From experimentation yesterday, Nikana Dragon may become my go to melee weapon - had a lot more fun with it than I've had with any other melee weapon since 2.0. But I still need to find the stance for it, farming yesterday did not result in much.

And Carrier is the only Sentinel I care for. Didn't think they'd manage to replace Deathcube, but a sentinel that allows me to be lazy is going to win any day, I guess! :P (unfortunately Helios is too dumb and slow to be useful - and I've not gotten into the whole codex thing very much yet)

I've had an idea to trick out a standard, default appearance Excalibur, using tricked out, default appearance Braton, Lato and Skana as well for the humor it could result in... but not gotten far with those plans :P

fwiw, I think you are getting the individual games mixed up with the franchise, or something?

MGS1's theme was gene, MGS2's theme was meme, MGS3 - scene, MGS4 - sense, Peace Walker - peace.

So there's nothing stopping MGS5 from having the theme of Revenge.

I feel like I should be posting one of those "single manly tear" image macros right now.

Am I playing Frog Fractions 2 now?

They appear to be running a anniversary thing right now, with a unique version of the Furis (Dex Furis) for people logging in, as well as a special cosmetic skin for Excalibur (for 150 plat - looks like Hayden Tenno in Dark Sector) - both only available for a limited period (7 days).

You should at least make sure you get the Dex Furis - though, obviously, I picked up the skin as well - looks awesome with my Excal Prime's color scheme!

Depends on what you're looking for - the Blade Runner stuff is very different from a lot of the stuff suggested in this thread so far. Maybe some Shadowrun stuff? The new game was pretty good - and I'm sure there are a lot of books for that as well (no first person experience though).

Warhammer is about the grittiest, grim-darkest you can get, though from a quality perspective, Games Workshop has managed ot put their name on a lot of really terribly poor quality stuff running the full gamut of stuff (movies, books and games) - though there are a lot of good stuff as well, if you know where to look. Start with Dan Abnett's books. Basically, everyone is corrupt, there is no one that is "really the good guys", everything is covered in a layer of grime. But it's very conflict orientated (as you should expect from a setting with the tagline "In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war".)

Frank Herbert's Dune is good, though it gets very philosophical by the 4th or 5th book in the (main) series. The movie by David Lynch isn't very acurate, but it is quite entertaining as it's own thing. The Sci-fi channel miniseries' are far more accurate, while still quite good.

Same with Ender's Game - and it's much more a near-future scenario at the start of the book series. (And unfortunately, the movie was pretty bad). Around the 6th or 7th book it gets quite existential - the series deals a lot with philosophies of conflict.

And of course movies like Equilibrium (Cubic?), Starship Troopers, Johnny Mnemonic, District , the Escape From-movies, The Fifth Element, Tron?... and even more if you are willing to cross over to Japanese Animated stuff - everything Ghost in the Shell, Cowboy Bebop...

Yeah, and from Gibson, at least Neuromancer should be required reading.

Of course, those are all pretty well known... >_>

5 hours in, Thief is really frustrating to me. I keep seeing the potential of the game - the stealth loop feels good. Levels may be very linear... but they are decent enough, and there are enough hidden paths to keep things interesting. I really like sneaking around, peeking around corners, pickpocketing guards and trying to get through the area without being spotted at all.

Then there are the things they use to break up the sneaking - like how they appear to only have 3 transitions between areas - 2 of which always play out the same way (and require a bloody QTE!?)... and the third one being fading to black (commonly being a QTE-less version of the other 2 transitions). Feels like a petty complaint, but it's really breaking immersion for me.

Then there's the third person sections. I assume these are here because they are using the same tech they built Deus Ex on - but they feel... off? The Third-person Garret feels like he moves differently than the First-person Garret. Much faster, smoother... wrong? While the First-person Garret has a nice natural-feeling gait. (Swooping, while not really all that natural, is also something I appreciate). I kind of wish they'd just left out the third-person sequences or made them first-person canned sequences. Not sure.

Then there's the enemy variety. I think it's fine that they only have a few enemy types (Mr. Swordsman and Mr. Archer)... but I wish there was more variety in their appearance. I keep feeling like I'm running into the same guard in every room I enter - to the point where I'm sometimes not sure if it's the same guard (thus meaning that he's left his old position, possibly opening up a new potential path there) or if it's a different guard who is just apparently nearly identical.

Also having some trouble getting into the story. And not sure why - since the game makes it utterly clear from the start what the story is about, but the whole supernatural angle just feels unneccessary to me.

But that's just me. Still liking the stealth, so I'm going to try to power through.

Got it sorted, thanks to some awesome clan support :)

(The hardmode one was easier than I expected though, pretty short mission.)

Yeah, I am looking to get a team running to get this sorted for me tonight - have a pair of keys ready to go, should be easy enough with a clan group, I hope :)

Not really first impressions - more like "impressions just before the end", seeing how I'm on "the extra day".

Really been struggling to keep my motivation up for this game, which has been getting harder and harder to do as I got through the game - at some point around day 8, I decided I'd had enough and started just sleeping through the days rather than farming for final creatures, or finishing the last few quests - I believe I only have the 2 quests left in the Dead Dunes - and I've read that Aeronite is the hardest enemy to defeat in the game, and especially hard to do pre-NG+. Whatever. Tempted to make a stab at the extra day dungeon, though I'm not sure if I have what it takes to grind my way through the Ultima lair fights.

I don't like how they've been gating abilities and upgrade mechanics through most of the game - as it just means that I probably won't use them as I pretty much stopped actually playing the game on day 9... :s

Also alluding to upgradeable weapons/garb but not unlocking it before NG+ is a bit of a jerk move.

As for the story, I hate how they keep harping about how emotionless Hope and Lightning are, and then they keep showing Lightning smiling and raging. I don't think making Lightning emotionless is a good idea - they've never portrayed her as someone who openly shows her emotions, so it's hard to tell the difference, and it doesn't give the player the dissonance that I feel it's supposed to... (I think they almost make it work with Sazh, though) but I think that if they were going to make her emotionless, they should at least stick to the script.

There are some interesting things they are suggesting with Lumina... will be interesting to see how that turns out. I'm pretty sure they'll take the easy way out... but we'll see.

Pacing is a bit weird as well - I admit I abused the hell out of Chronostasis on day 4-7 (or so), but suddenly just running out of content without any clear indicator if there are main quests that I should be finding in the world, or if there's just something that will trigger on it's on on the final days... (being on the extra day now, I understand that it's just the final day quest left now. I still don't like the uncertainty).

Overall, it's not a bad game, but I feel like my issues with the character portrayal, and certain mechanics being locked to NG+ (which I don't have time (or interest) to get into) really lowers the game to mediocricy for me.

edit: Wound up rerolling to a save I made before "sleeping away" the last couple of days, and have gone back to grinding my power level up to be able to defeat the Ultimate Lair and Aeronite. Guess I'm a sucker for self-flagellation and/or bored. :|