Shivoa

@flameboy84: So the ilvl 31 stuff is around, the high-end yellows are around - it's not like you'll see none of them during light play; just that the very best itemisation is pretty random so people wanting to be top are going to have to grind a lot of them to get there. Right now, if you've finished the game and have generally ilvl 30 purples then you're probably going to be ok for playing new content as it arrives. At least I hope that's roughly what their gear level requirements work out (we find out in a few weeks when the first Incursion arrives). So don't feel forced to grind or play more if you're not into it - the act of playing is kinda the main reward (as noted above the end-game loot is nice and has gear perks and that 3rd weapon perk but that's not always incredible, you're moving from 5000+ stat points between the 3 categories to ~6000 and refining your itemisation to best suit your needs, or have several options so you can swap Firearms or Electronics builds as you desire or swap gear for skill swaps).

But, if you want to do a limited amount of play, you can do that. The dailies are generally worth it. Don't expect the lvl30 Hard missions to drop anything (except ilvl30 purples) so those are just easy fast runs to get used to team fighting with 15 Phoenix Credits handed out at the end of each. But the Challenging daily ends with one high-end drop and gives a fair number of Phoenix Credits (the drop and 20 PCs are for just doing any Challenging mission, plus 30 more PCs for it being the daily). And the focus on those dailies means matchmaking will go faster, because everyone will be probably doing that first for the extra PCs.

At least some of the missions on Challenging: not challenging. They're designed for groups of 4 and everyone has played them before so all the story and stuff you just sprint through to go between the actual fights (just like MMO Heroics, only without the fixed roles and need to know tactics for each fight to make them easy). So, assuming you don't get somewhere where you're stuck and keep on wiping, they're pretty fast. And that's 50 PCs each day just for doing the Challenging daily mission, plus a random yellow drop. Quickly adds up to enough PCs to buy blueprints (and all those worthless purples will mean you've got plenty of crafting materials for at least a few rolls on getting an ok stat combo on an ilvl31 yellow crafted) from the vendor upstairs in you home base.

If you like the DZ stuff then you can get those ilvl31 drops there too (from the higher level enemies), and a few PCs from named elites. I've not found that so fun at the level cap (as I was enjoying the DZ as a dangerous solo farming zone before the level cap), but if you've got a regular group then I can see how that would be where you go to play together if you're not eager to repeat missions. Clear Landmarks and extraction zones, keep your scavenging stat up, hope for good drops.

I'm not sure what Sony's expectations were. Driving games seem like they are slightly more at the mercy of bubbles of interest creating massive hits than other genres.

Where GT typically hits 5-15 million sales, DC only got to 2 million (sold to consumers, not PS+) by last summer. So if they wanted to get a GT hit, this wasn't it.

Despite being delayed into 2014, I think DC will be collected up into that launch window of the PS4 where a few exclusive games came out that were not for everyone, but for those they did work for they were pretty exceptional and very comfortable with pushing visuals (without scaling back to sub-1080p) while they did it. You can see how reviewers struggled with DC when they started justifying their dislike of the game by imagining faults that did not exist [before the servers died after their review was already written] ("the cars drive on a line and don't react" - something that anyone who spends some hours with the game knows is not true and yet appeared in more than a couple of review texts as justification for why the reviewer didn't enjoy playing, likely coming from a sub-concious post hoc justification for something else the reviewer didn't like but couldn't unpack). I think Killzone: Shadow Fall also falls into this category. At a push, so does inFamous: Second Son/First Light.

@mike: I don't know for sure (not sure if they've said or that anyone has enough data from running with and without to compare [stuff like this preliminary testing is far from conclusive either way due to small sample size]) but I assumed it pushed all random drops (ie ones not fixed to be specific tier/lvl) to be slightly higher in tier. It's certainly possible it only gives you better crafting mat pick-ups (in which case, it'll be time for a combat set without scavenging and a quick swap for collecting mats - very much worthwhile to get yellow crafting mats if you're doing a loop of mats drops).

Just absolutely sleep-walked the daily Challenging (Lexington Event Centre) with none of us wearing anything special or even much coordination other than knowing where to set up some killzones to trivialise some of the spawns.

Until they patch in item sets next month and possibly increase level caps/just provide new ilevel tiers with the expansion content then there's not much room to grow into.

You hit level 30, you've probably got or are close to having a full set of purple ilevel 30 gear and weapons and mods. The room to upgrade is better itemisation (making sure every stat synergises with your build via reforging plus incredibly luck to have all but one stat already line up perfectly with your needs) and going up to ilevel 31 with either purple or gold/yellow rarity (ideally ending up with all ilvl31 yellows).

For a game where you can easily spend 60 hours just playing up to the cap, I'm not that enthusiastic about a really long grind for the top loot. The locks behind Phoenix Credits for that stuff (and even then, lots of random rolls for crafting to really get best-in-class gear) seems reasonable. It'll be interesting to see where the gear requirements for the first incursion end up (as I don't think we know what "150" means yet - does that mean you need to have some ilvl31 and yellows to run the incursion?) and how they're going to build out the end game. The Challenging difficulty treadmill does not sound like it has quite the same longevity as WoW Heroic raids have for a large percentage of that user base (who can grind that for a good 1-2 months after an expansion launch before being geared to enter to bottom of raiding, if they want to move up beyond completing dungeon sets).

I think the current crafting of end-game gear and RNG for the perks for almost all that is a really useless system in the Division. Lots of people seem to be grinding gear to disassemble to roll the dice on more crafting to get a perfectly itemised ilvl31 yellow despite how mathematically unlikely that is - and it's not like if they got it they'd have suddenly unlocked access to new content to play as it seems like people are already getting on top of the Challenge difficulty without needing the absolute best gear. You're going to be moving from 70-80% extra clip to 90-100% extra clip - it's worth having but that upgrade to the very best isn't huge. Your combined Firearms + Stamina + Electronics should be above 5000 by the time you start looking for good gear, it'll be 6000 once you've collected that gear - again, worth having and a boost but it's all about where you put it. If you spec it out and have a good weapon then 200k paper DPS is possible but that's more about the paper calculations than anything else.

Oh, one thing: scavenging. It's the key stat to push the dice rolls on drops so if you're used to getting bad drops, check your gear for that stat (as you can get a single piece with a decent stat for it pushing 70%+ just at the cost of one other stat and that's a lot more than the base 15% boost you get as a perk). It's not going to make it rain yellows but it's there for a reason. No content expects your gear to all be perfectly spec'd so why not give yourself a bit of extra luck with the RNG and make sure you've got some gear with some bonus scavenging to it. Sure beats that stat boosting a skill you don't use that most gear ends up with (or extra xp when you've long since hit the level cap) [again, the issue here being the entire game does not seem built to make it realistic to get perfect itemisation - maybe item sets will all have fixed perks and so be a lot more likely to give us what we want from an end-game loot grind].

Nope, got it on PC vs PS4 in part because the load times were bad on PS4 (fast travel was faster than walking but... I'd stretch my legs when doing so) and maybe 10-30 seconds on PC for the worst parts (PS4 was easily waiting over a minute at time for some loads). There are a few times when I've been left sitting but it's been the "connecting" thing before the progress bar so pretty clearly a server connection issue.

But I've only got 2GB of VRAM to fill so a third of the texture load you've got (and mine is loading from fast SSD not slow platter drives). If your drive can only sustain 50MB/s reads (really realistic for potentially fragmented files and having to jump through them for the local assets needed in any location) then that's 120 seconds of reads before that 6GB of VRAM is full of data. On a nice SSD, that's a 12 second read. The Division seems like it has a lot of assets it could load to fill out the memory while loading.

i5-2500K (@4.5GHz), GTX760 2GB [Pascal or Polaris can't come soon enough but this game is actually pretty amazing looking even turned down to get 1080p60], various recent mainstream Samsung SSDs, have run with 8GB 1866MHz but now using 24GB after an upgrade. Windows 10.

What about the inevitable expansion to the critically acclaimed sequel? We clearly need a second poll, to which the right answer is clearly "SWAT 4: The Stetchkov Syndicate".

So I guess we can work back from that and conclude that the right answer here is numbers. But what about SWAT 3: Close Quarters Battle (not an expansion)? And if we really want to go down this hole, was SWAT not really the subtitle all along. This is the Police Quest: SWAT series.

At least we've not approached the infinite series of numberings and subtitles that starts with Star Wars: Dark Forces. Noooo!!!

I have to say the initial logo reveal, when it soaks through his t-shirt in blood and is reflected in the puddle below him. 14 year old me would find it impossible to think of anything cooler than that. As you say, it's iconic and this show seems to be all about waiting until the final episode of the season before the real outfit is finally taken up by the new character.

Isn't the hole (for which they're needing to move all the dirt out without raising suspicions) where they've found and extracted the resurrection chamber? Which they prep in case they need it to save and brainwash (assuming this is roughly based on the comic lore and the ritual also generates a bond) Elektra. Which is charged by the transformed blood of the kids, which also seems to basically perform the same brainwashing ritual on the kids (which is why I think that's being taken from the comic lore).

@colourful_hippie: Possibly lost in the desire of someone to turn a technical discussion about real-time rendering into a format war above, @jinoruhas posted this above. So it's no longer a rumour but confirmed. It's also quite an interesting explanation of exactly what's going on here.

DF did a test and then MS/Remedy responded explaining the temporal reconstruction (take an old frame, warp it roughly to match the camera's movement, use that as an extra point to sample information from on top of the new frame you've rendered to try and recover more detail) they're using on top of a 720p 4xMSAA native render for each frame to explain the results (which Drew and the crew commented on in the QL as being somewhat weird - definitely this sort of temporal anti-aliasing has had some weird results in the past, although the Division seems to get it pretty close to great and so we're hopefully out of the era where you'd get weird ghosting - I think Project Cars PS4 is where a lot of people saw this go horribly wrong before they patched it).

[To mods: so this is off-topic for this thread and may be too political for conversation on GB. Please delete if this is over the line for discussion on the GB forums.]

I don't feel powerless because I live in a nation with compassion and also no one is coming to my door with a gun (they're really rare). If someone wants to threaten your US family then they can still do that (it's easier, they can do it at the range of a gun without obviously breaking the law before they start shooting). Hell, with enough effort they can blow up your entire house from miles away with a remote detonator (that may be rather illegal even where guns are legal). We have something called society to stop that, not the threat of being shot back at. Without society there can be no meaningful law - we must all agree to common standards and behaviours.

We don't have thousands of people killing each other with guns here, we don't have kids accidentally killing their relatives with a higher casualty count than terrorism. Love, trust, and society is all that can save us, not being armed and living in fear of our neighbours. We have issues with racism and other forms of discrimination, but we don't have what seems (from outside reporting of the US) to be a two tier system where whites carry automatic rifles to the shops and everyone else can be shot, as a kid, for carrying a plastic toy in an open-carry jurisdiction. From the outside, it sure doesn't sound like everyone in the US has the same right to carry around guns. It seems better to just not have guns, including the removal of the need for police to generally use guns - that's a special case but as there are almost no guns, the cops don't have to assume anyone is armed.

My government have tanks. They have long range missiles, strike jet fighters, and aerial drones. They have nukes (deployed from submarines)! Nothing I could arm myself with makes a jot of difference to that (and the limited "how to shoot a gun" training I got as a cadet would not do anything if I was to try and stand against one of the professional soldiers my government employs and trains). We have democracy as our protection from the state. A mass uprising of the people as a nation, not as an army to fight a war with the lethality of modern weapons, is how we would survive the threat of tyranny - there is no government with no people to govern and we must stand united in love of our neighbours to break the power of a dictator.

@notnert427: Hi, I'm a rendering geek/engineer talking about the technical factors of real-time rendering (ie the topic of this thread). The actual game I pick to make the point about 720p output not being the only factor is completely irrelevant to my point.

So are you just trolling or did this all go completely over your head? Thnx, please try again!