Good review. I really can't disagree even though I've enjoyed the 30 or so hours I've spent with it so far. I've been playing this with just 1 friend and we've actually been having a blast playing as a squad of 2. But, I almost feel like we're enjoying the game in spite of itself. The core systems seem solid, the environments are interestingly varied, and even though the tasks are essentially recycled, the new locales change them enough for them to be consistently interesting and challenging to us. It really does depend on playing with friends though. The fun for us has been cranking up the difficulty, limiting the HUD and tackling missions with only 2 when the squad size is supposed to be 4 (If you've got a group to play with, try no mini-map...things get real interesting). But those are imposed limitations that we've added to make it fun. The game itself didn't provide that, we did. I like the game and am enjoying it, but I admit that comes with a big asterisk.
OMG the VO though! I agree with everyone that hates it. Not only is it cringe-y A LOT, there's also no way to turn it off. We're rolling around with a squad of 2 and we have our own conversations going, but we're constantly interrupted by four disembodied voices sounding off on geo-politics and dicks. I wish there was an option to turn off that squad chatter. The "story" of the game is strained enough without the wannabe Bad Company "witty banter."
Re: the email about the CS driving mod, I can't remember whether you could drive the sandcrawler in that Star Wars map, but I imagine if you could it was probably something like this:
Yeah, the Dying Light comparison is only so helpful. While it's movement system was certainly faster and smoother, the focus of Dying Light was not traversal, it was survival, so there was an incentive from a design standpoint to remove any impediments from the player's ability to get around. In Mirror's Edge, the focus is on traversal, so, from a design standpoint, that's where the challenge -- and therefore the skill curve -- comes in. It doesn't make sense to make it too easy and or too smooth.The flow should be attainable, but not easily so. I might be one of Those Guys, but I loved the original Mirror's Edge because I always felt like the perfect route was just a little better/smoother/faster than what I was doing, but still attainable. It felt like I could get really good at moving around and when I did it felt great, but the margin for error was minimal. It was definitely a janky movement system.
All that said, maybe it's the way Brad is playing this game, but I'm not seeing much of the old flow of the original developing in the traversal of ME:Catalyst. The roll in particular seems to stop momentum rather than retain it. The movement feels like Brad never hits that rhythm that you want, even when he's doing all of his movements correctly. I'll have to see for myself if I get into this "beta."
@balshazzar precisely. It's interesting you mention that, because I often saw individuals, presumably the civilians you are there to "save," which ISAC does not identify in red, looting cars in a very similar fashion.
Some of this was alluded to by earlier posters (@shivoa and others), but in reference to @austin_walker and @halexandra64's dislike of the way the LMB's storyline went, I actually thought that all the first wave involvement with the LMB (Keener's story arc aside) is when the game's ludo-narrative dissonance got the most interesting. I agree that, as an explanation for why this whole disaster happened in the first place, it offers very little. But, I think (probably unintentionally) the game critiques it's own power fantasy by making you essentially fight yourself when you run into first wave agents and LMB, who are exactly the same as you and your JTF compatriots (As an aside, LMB soldiers often sounded like they had the same VO as JTF soldiers).
The narrative that might + legal authority makes right falls deeply into question when confronted by the first wave division agents. As Division, don't they have the same authority as you? Should you kill them simply because they are using violence to restore order? Isn't that exactly what you are doing as the player? What sort of violence is the "good" sort? Is your violence somehow morally justified when theirs is not?
Austin's remark about the hypothetical discovery of another "main base" would be exactly what I'm talking about, except that I don't think the game is self-aware enough to have included something like that. If it was that self-aware, some character somewhere would have questioned what you are doing, but no one ever does. Similarly, Heather referenced Conrad in talking about the Spec Ops: The Line. I think this game does something very Conradian (but again probably unintentionally), where, after traveling ever deeper into the chaos-ridden remains of post-apocalyptic New York, your final confrontation with the LMB and first-wave amounts to you using your highly advanced weaponry to shoot, kill, and restore order from the forces of individuals who have been using their highly advanced weaponry to shoot, kill, and restore order. As such, the inclusion of the first wave among the LMB and their supposed "descent into evil" is undermined by the fact that they are trying to achieve the same ends as you are, and by the same means. So what starts out as a righteous crusade against the forces of lawlessness and disorder, devolves into nothing more than a power struggle.
From an anecdotal standpoint, I felt uncomfortably amused, if you will, throughout the game. It seemed like your main job, as the player, was to roll up on unsuspecting groups of individuals whom you blatantly profile as "evil," and mow them down with impunity, using the best weaponry that you had access to--usually for the purpose of attaining even better weaponry so as to more mercilessly dispense with your antagonists.
This was particularly striking to me in the overworld, where I would often suddenly find myself almost in the middle of groups of "enemies" before either side had realized what was going on and started shooting. Sometimes, for brief moments before the games core mechanics took hold, no one would shoot and it left me wondering, what if we never did? In other cases, the "enemies" didn't even know I was there as I watched them and deliberated on my course of action. In those moments, I was faced with a binary choice, kill or walk away. Because the game is a shooter at its core, the clearly favorable choice is to kill, and so, obligingly, I would, even though many of these groups of "enemies" had been mostly minding their own business before I arrived. Or other times, I'd see NPCs in military garb in the distance through one of the games randomized white-out events, and I would wonder, "Are those JTF or LMB? Dunno, better shoot 'em." So, after tens of hours of such senseless killing in the name of "restoring order" and " bringing justice" to a shattered New York, the confrontations with the LMB allied with first wave Division agents brought that tension into sharp relief in a way that was strangely powerful in my own experience. Again, I would reiterate, I don't think the game intended to critique it's own core gameplay loop, but the possibility that it did so in spite of itself is fascinating to me.
TLDR: LMB + first wave Division introduces an interesting tension (possibly ludonarrative dissonance) because the game makes you fight a force that is trying to achieve the same ends by the same means as you, stripping away your supposed moral authority and leaving only a naked power struggle
Wow! If you haven't been listening to the Beastcast for a while, this episode would be the worst introduction to the Beastcast...but as a long time listener this was AMAZING!
Wow! Do they have assists on? I haven't played the latest F1 games but in the 2012 and 2013 versions that much contact always sent me or my opponent spinning into the grass or the sidewall, especially the moves Danny was making on Drew on that last lap, packing it in to the corners like that and bumping front and rear wheels.
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