Francium34

John wick 2... 3/5, still enjoyable and recommendable, but not as cool as the first.

I always prefer simplicity and novel ideas over bloated sequels (Portal 1>Portal 2, Bioshock 1>Bioshock Infinite)

Just like Portal and Bioshock, John Wick has a mysterious world that is never fully explained and a very simple story line that works. As the sequel drags on and tries too hard, more and more things are added that don't need to be explained or explained in unsatisfactory ways.

@wynnduffy said:

More than anything else, Microsoft wants people to upgrade to windows 10 and use the windows store. There's still quite a bit (some deserved) of hate for those things in the pc gaming community. Every purchase Xbox can push out of their games is contributing to the adoption of win 10 and store.

It's not exactly clear who pushed for this initiative, someone within Xbox department or higher ups. But considering the rumors floating around that certain voices/factions within Microsoft wanted to sell off Xbox even after the insanely successful 360 generation, it wouldn't surprise me if the Play Anywhere thing actually ensures the survival of Xbox internally in the company.

That said, as someone with an xbox one and a fairly new PC, I am much more likely to purchase Play Anywhere games digitally than if otherwise. For cases where my PC is running work stuff, or when I play with xbox live friends, the Xbox still comes in handy. I currently have 6 of the Play Anywhere games, and will likely buy a few more this year.

Definitely wait until the games/4k patches are out for Xbox X.

Depending on how much effort developers are willing to put, Xbox X could possibly perform as well as a 1070, or possibly much worse. For every report out about how easy the Xbox X dev kit is to use for optimizations (Ark, TF2, etc), I also see another article about some AAA devs (AC, Farcry, Destiny2) not committing to much.

Podcast-wise I strongly recommend the Co-Optional Podcast. They usually run 3 permanent hosts, Totalbiscuit, Jesse cox, and Dodger, plus 1 more guest host (mostly youtubers, Danny O'Dwyer and Xavier Woods have been on the show. And at the launch of Clothmap, Drew was scheduled to appear, but had to cancel last minute).

The podcast is a good mix of the strengths and interests of each host, while alleviating annoyances. All together, this means they cover both level-headed analysis and emotional feelings about a wide variety of games, from anime-weird stuff to story-centric indies to hard core sims, and card games and phone games.

The caveat is they are all PC-centric. For some, like me, this is great, for others (especially xbox people), they might be ignoring a lot of the developments or seemingly too negative (As an example, they had to google live on the show what the E3 mixer give-away was. Upon learning that Rare Replay was given away, only TB said "yeah that's worth it")

The hosts obviously like each other, as seen/heard from their chemistry on and off the show. Plus the guest hosts also bring in new perspectives. Podcast runs live on Twitch and then comes out in audio form (with very good time stamp show notes), about 2 hour-ish.

AVP and strike team feel like mobile game design, like the timed-chests in Clash Royale.

For the next game, I hope they either get rid of them, or make them manifest in more obvious ways than "100 points every day" (change appearance of your ship or settlement, a couple story missions, more engaging minigames, etc)

1. Ditch the loot system. The armor/weapons that do drop don't make sense lore-wise (initiative stuff dropping from Andromeda aliens,etc). There isn't enough variety to warrant a loot system, and picking up a ton of salvage isn't fun.

2. Ditch the research/development tier system. ME3 had a system that worked just fine. Here it's too much busy work, with no upgrade path for existing equipment. I can't be bothered to craft the same-looking armor more than a couple times (N7 chest has 10 levels?!?!)

3. Ditch the scanning system. In theory in a new world, with the aid of powerful AI, this makes sense as a lore device. However walking around, turning 360 to not miss anything red isn't fun. It also highlights how empty key story mission areas are--in the middle of kett or remnant bases, you'd think there would be more to understand.

4. Ditch the 4/6 wheel switch. I can understand moving uphill being slower, but going back and forth adds very little. At least have researchable upgrades to eliminate the annoyance.

5. Ditch on land mine scanning. As if scanning a globe wasn't annoying enough, now it's even more of a chore with less gain.

The above points definitely feel like Bioware looked at survival games popular the past few years and went in that direction, poorly.

6. Add back more control on squad members. This includes when abilities are used, new armor sets after loyalty mission, and some control of weapon selection.

7. Add back renegade options, or at least something that is more distinct. The renegade options weren't perfect, but one could at least play Shepard as an asshole with little patience. Now Ryder is either joking or serious, that's about it.

8. Less SAM and less space magic, because we sure loved those parts of ME3 (flashbacks to all the synthesis ending discussions...)!

Jeff and Brad are on point when they made fun of how often "pathfinder" is called.

Everybody on the nexus somehow already knows you are the "pathfinder" the first time you arrive, even though you weren't who they would be expecting, and you are not wearing any designation to stand out.

And then with Tann, you insist on being called the "pathfinder". I can understand that being a cocky option, but most people probably wouldn't talk that way?

When Addison asks what happened, what kind of moron doesn't know she's asking about your father? Instead Ryder asks in a very casual tone/facial expression "who?"

Definitely liked the first two hours (before I hit nexus) much more than the nexus part. Hope things will pick up later. Apparently the general agreement is more interesting stuff do happen, but usually after 20-30 hours, so I plan to skip most side quests.

Before ME3, I read every book, even ordered the art book, and pre-ordered the $80 edition. After getting through ME3 once, I didn't even play any of the DLC

Still shakes my head whenever I hear people saying synthesis is the best ending, but that might be my biologist bias.

I will always maintain though the initial endings, which lacked any "investigate" options before choosing and were largely color swaps, were really disappointing for how little effort they put in. The patch fixed things up a bit, which is good for anyone that picked up the game later. But my memories of the game is really tainted by those RGB endings.

Put 2.5 hours in last night (PC)

Thought "oh that looks really weird" on a few animations/faces.

Also got the "tampering detected" boot once (I was playing as the game downloaded in the background, so might just be my particular case), reloading was long but worked fine afterwards.

Everything was good until Cora T-posed in one cutscene conversation, and remained so afterwards. Sure bugs happen all the time, but that particular one did have me put down my controller and go to bed.

Also greatly annoyed how much of a hassle it is to change graphical settings, and window mode setting is weird as well.

Baseline for a big budget middle-of-the-road game is probably around 80. MEA's combat and multiplayer look decent though unspectacular. Gorgeous environments make up for subpar human animations. Barring too many game-breaking bugs, it will come down to the story (very important for an RPG). Will it have enough spark to elevate it into the 85+ range? Too early to judge now, but... not very confident after the crew's quick look. Personal guess 79.