I also found the Dying Light comments a bit irksome. Dying Light's "parkour" is super simplified to be something you don't think about. You also can't be very good or bad at it because the game does like 95% of the work for you.
Mirror's Edge is all about mastering challenging techniques, where a new and inexperienced player will take a ladder while an advanced player will have taken a split second glance at that entire area and went a different route by some wallruns/walljumps. Mirror's Edge does not forgive you for being bad at the game or not knowing how it works, it simply gives you alternatives until you get better. If it was more forgiving, it would lose a lot of what makes it fun.
After all, if there's no challenge in the parkour, then it's just kind of a... run around and do nothing game? Unlike Dying Light, combat is not a focus here. You might have to fight some dudes occasionally, but you're not out there gearing up (at least not in ME1) to fight better. I wonder how Brad would approach Super Mario Bros. if he had never played platformers until today, would he be annoyed by how demanding and exacting the game is?
That's not a knock on the dude or anything, a man is free to prefer one style of gameplay over another, but it felt like it came from a place of playing Mirror's Edge as though it were another game, and being frustrated when it wasn't like that game.
I think Nintendo not defending Rapp (publicly) was a very tactical decision. Due to the nature of the stuff shitty people were digging up, all it would take is some twisted and terrible "journalists" (of which we have plenty of these days) to turn the conversation to "Nintendo defends pedophile against concerned parents" or some such BS, and then Nintendo is targeted by all kinds of groups who only have a partial story and then it's an even bigger mess.
Note that constructing this potential outlook is not a sign of endorsement for their decision, just an explanation I think makes sense. If that is the case, it seems as though no matter the outcome there was going to be endless awful mudslinging, lies and potentially good people looking bad and being harassed. I don't pretend to know the whole story, but goddamn do I pity the people at Nintendo trying to make a choice there and Rapp for being the target of so much unwarranted venom. (I think all people are fairly subject to criticism, especially those who make their opinions public, but this is very different from that and is just people being assholes. I can only hope it's a bunch of kids, because at least then they can still grow up into decent people.)
On the bright side...
Hate for hate's sake doesn't appear to be winning out! Now, this isn't an endorsement of the expansion or anything, hell if I know much about it, but a lot of the reviews I read were actually talking about the gameplay and such. Despite what Austin said, even when the reviews were mostly negative I rarely saw the trans character in question as anything more than a side comment on how the writing isn't great, but I hardly read them all. This is mostly just me being glad that people yelling to dump negative reviews doesn't necessarily mean that the game will be stuck with all negative reviews, which is good, targeted review bomb campaigns can't win!
Now hopefully the dev begging for good reviews resulted in people who thought the game was deserving of good reviews made them, rather than just retaliatory positive reviews.
This post has gotten too long. Unlike Jeff and Alex, I'm very optimistic about human nature. If there's one thing I've found in every person I've ever actually met and spent time with, it's empathy. Alex and Austin are perfect examples of that! People act like that a few assholes existing means the whole world has gone to shit, but I think there's less and less assholes every generation, and those that do exist are far less assholeish than those that came before. A targeted bad review campaign because a trans character scares you is pretty fucking lame, but 15 years that would've been a story about a trans person being beaten to death in a dark alley. (Not that that doesn't occasionally still happen, sadly.)
Argh, turn down the game audio if you're going to talk over it!
At 12:40 and for at least two minutes I've been trying to listen to people talking over people shouting in-game. The game isn't as loud as Brad and company, but I still hear it well enough for it to be really disorienting.
I play Vindictus! Once you hit max level and start doing the same bosses day in and day out, it gets a bit old, but the combat, for being pretty simple, is a lot of fun. Just slamming enemies into walls and smashing them into the environment in general is great fun.
If you want a recently released Korean MMO then Blade & Soul that also just came out in the west is probably a better alternative.
As someone who plays both, Black Desert Online plays about a thousand times better and has way more interesting systems. Blade and Soul is fine, but gets old really fast and is a huuuuuge goddamn grindfest. I've been running the same dungeon over 50 times to get this weapon drop to "evolve" my weapon. I COULD just pay them money to guarantee it drops... but you see why that's a problem. There's a lot more dungeons...
Honestly I think starting fresh is the best way they can show off an mmo. They got deep enough in to show the quest system and a hint at the sort of grinding you'd have to be doing, and it looks crazy boring and clunky. They did the same thing for their Tera quicklook, and the combat and moment-to-moment questing actually looked pretty good. Good enough for me to try it and have fun for a month or so.
I actually like the combat a good deal more than TERA. Being able to do every move by a combination of button presses near WASD+Mouse clicks is waayyyyyy more satisfying than hotbar type stuff. Though you can go hotbar too, if you like. Just playing my Wizard feels really awesome.
Game actually has a ton of depth and a LOT of cool shit to do. Some of the LoD stuff is really gross, though. They built their own engine I think and it kind of looks like they had no idea what they were doing in regards to LoD/culling.
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