NeoZeon

@spaceinsomniac: Very true, but I guess I should have said that I don't trust them to make a very good campaign after the one in the first TF. I do have hope though: There're robots with swords man!

Hello there Duders,

I have a concern that is lingering on my mind and was wondering if anyone could provide some insight. It isn't as serious as I'm making it sound, though, so don't fret or get nervous!

More or less, it comes down to re-releases of fighting games, the Guilty Gear series in particular this time around. I purchased Guilty Gear: Xrd -Sign- at launch and had a blast, but, with the recent release of Revelator, I've hit a snag.

You see, I mock Capcom for pulling this all the time. Regardless of the changes made, it always feels like an odd, almost offensive, move to me. Sure, the netcode gets changed or characters get tweaked, but I always felt an update file could accomplish the same thing rather than costing more money.

That feeling extended to the Arc games as well: I stopped buying Blazblue after it's second release (Of Many). Now I find myself wondering if I should just get it over with and buy the "new" GG or simply wait for a sale down the line.

Basically - I feel like a great big hypocrite you guys. What do you folks think I should do?

It's a battle of doubts on my end. One the one hand, Battlefield games always, always launch broken so I'm leery there. On the other, the first Titanfall had heart, but a terrible "campaign" and not much lasting value for me. I'm gonna lean more towards BF though: I mock them all the time for their problems and, yet, I keep buying them close to launch anyway.

I'll let you know once I'm done sitting through the download of a five gig update file and the mandatory 11GB install...

All I wanted to do was goof around in the single player for a bit before bed, but, nah that ain't gonna happen now. Rest mode and background download it is.

Times like this are the reason I'm not a fan of modern gaming sometimes. Unless that update stops some fatal crash from happening, just let me shoot some damn demons before bedtime.

I know a lot of games do this these days, but if this is the norm, why do we even bother with midnight launches anymore? It's not like you can play it that much earlier anyway.

Unless you count being able to see the install screen first as some sort of reward I guess.

I'm actually enjoying the Nioh alpha quite a bit. It has it's problems, being early and all, but I find myself going to it far more often than Dark Souls 3. It's gonna sound like blasphemy to some I'm sure, but the Souls games always felt "cheap" to me. Like the game was intentionally stacking the deck against you in ways you can't know about until you're already screwed over by it. Nioh does the same thing to an extent, but it seems to flow better and be more open about it's difficulty rather than browbeating you just because it can.

Some of that is skewed, however, since I really enjoy the setting of the alpha. It feels bleak and beautiful at the same time for some reason. Not sure why I'm a tall, blond-haired and blue-eyed white man in feudal Japan, but, eh, maybe that's just down to the lack of a character creator for the alpha.

@hestilllives19: That's been about my experience too. There are some cool moments that the design of the DZ can create, like a tense standoff as my group just the two of us hung around a four player squad while waiting for the extraction helicopter, but it seems to be that you either have a large group and you live...or you're less than that and you get stomped. I'm gear level 169 now, but I still feel like they absorb bullets and I go down within a few seconds. Not a fun time, more or less. I can't really see the point of supply drops either: I'm assuming that, besides the challenging difficulty missions, they're the only way to get Gear Set drops? Why lock something like that to the DZ? It's just going to turn already trigger happy players into supply drop camping monsters.

@catsakimbo: That sounds to me like the kind of person I would love to never encounter in the DZ to be honest. I know a lot of people have been trying to claim that it's some kind of social experiment in there, but, ever since the patch, it's just been down to one simple thing: If you give a person the means to be a ****, they'll be a ****. That being said, I do try and not let it bother me much. I have, however, been gunned down so many times when I didn't even have loot that it can be difficult to enjoy the late game anymore.

I can share a fun story though:

My cousin (Gear Level 172) and myself (GL 169) were playing earlier today and I was helping him do some of that weekly challenge; namely the "Kill 50 Cleaners In The Dark Zone" portion of it. As we were wandering around, just looking for dudes with flamethrowers, we managed to get some loot. Having seen a bunch of skulls on the radar, we figured it would be best to loop around to a distant, and hopefully safer, extraction zone. As we make out way up there, the extraction is called by someone else. The two of us make our way up and, not seeing any rogues, we do the customary Jumping Jacks to prove we're cool to the crew of three, and one random dude, that were there. Everyone is doing their jacks, having a grand old time, when a sticky bomb blows up just behind them. They swerve and shoot at the rogues, miss, and then clip some other agent who was not in their party...who turns and wings us out of confusion. Everyone, save my cousin and myself, go rogue at once. I pop the survivor link and the two of us book it out of there, barely alive. All eight of them end up getting killed. Every last one. It was nuts. We doubled back, grabbed the loot from who we could and filled up that rope with two separate loot bags each! After that? Oh we ran of course! Ran as fast as we could. Then it became a game of cat and mouse as we tried to sneak back to a checkpoint without becoming hostile to anyone (and therefore being locked out of leaving the DZ till "combat" was over). It was intense. That last stretch felt like a splinter cell game: Sneaking from cover to cover, moving when they weren't looking, that kind of thing.

@karlhungus01: As someone who often gets stuck without a crew (My work hours suck, yay!) and has to play solo, I appreciate the mercy on your part! It does seem to be a rarity though, at least when I'm on there.

@spaceinsomniac: Great video share: Some classic "signature link" skill use right there! Not sure why the people made it so obvious that they were going to go rogue though. That seemed telegraphed as all Hell...

Regardless - I would be a lot more forgiving of the ability to grief other players if the Dark Zone wasn't such a bigger part of the game later on. Sure, you can run the dailies, but once you hit max level, there really isn't any good hope for loot unless you enter the DZ itself. Again, it could just be bad timing on my part, but running solo in the DZ right now seems like a death sentence. That's made worse by the newer daily and (weekly) challenges requiring you to enter it to begin with. I'll stick with the game since I enjoyed it enough to hang around this long, but the lack of any real penalty for going Rogue, especially as part of a group, is definitely causing me to second guess firing it up.

@spaceinsomniac: Just reran the mission today and, with the exception of the line I already mentioned, I didn't hear anything beyond that. To be fair to the critics, however, I was in a firefight within a minute of walking in there so maybe I just missed it? I don't know.

As I recall it, it was your character (or group if you had friends along) about to fight Laurie Barret, the leader of the Rikers gang. She mentions how she'll be "just another black body on the pile." I'm looking for a link but the only thing I can find are videos of the fight itself: She says the line before the fight if I remember right. If I can track down the link I'll let you know. It's a high probability that I'll be fighting her again soon with all the "dailies" seeming to be reruns of that mission anyway.

I'd love to give people who see this as some kind of deeper topic a pass, but I just can't do it. Criticism is one thing; this just reeks of a separate agenda push on their part to me. Taking this outside of it's setting and genre, I just feel like the game had lackluster writing and this whole "controversy" is fallout from bad explanations/wording on their part. Not even about the so-called BLM comment either. Just the way the story is presented in general.

@hestilllives19: Ah so that's what it was! Good point. I think I just assumed they had patched that out completely by that point. Dailies are certainly a joke at this point, no doubt. Especially if you grab some of the named weapons with your regular credits (Pakhan, etc.) in addition to crafting a few, like a High End Vector, yourself.