Like many others I just want to quickly chime in that Ryan was a joy and I do miss his presence on the site very much. I discovered Giant Bomb at a fairly low point in my life and Ryans intoxicating enthusiasm was definitely a big factor in helping me get over a hump in my life. Thanks Ryan.
@nodima: It would actually make for a neat risk/reward situation. Players would be incentivized to engage in firefights more aggressively in order to actually preserve the ammo of the enemies by killing them quickly in order to be able to loot more of it afterwards. Someone get Cowboy on the phone I'm sure he can still code this in!
Did Bran say what difficulty they played TLOU2 on?
Jan made it sound like he adjusted the difficulty from time to time, he definitely messed with some of the accessibility options throughout the game (mainly high contrast mode).
I think a few weeks ago Brad said he went with Hard and Jeff sort of made fun of him for always doing that with Naughty Dog games and coming to regret it, with Brad countering that he was actually pretty bored by the original The Last of Us and walked away for several months before reading about how tense the harder difficulties could be and winding up really enjoying how the gameplay felt like an extension of the story rather than a rough sketch of a stealth game tacked onto a TV show.
Haven't played tlou2 yet, but tlou is 100% better, more fun, etc on the harder difficulty, that's real. I would hope they heard this feedback from people, since it was widespread, and ran with it.
Eh I am always wary of this sort of advice and would generally advise people to just try normal first. I remember for years hearing that Gears should actually be played on the hard difficulty to be enjoyed and I always did that, but when Gears 4 rolled around and I once again started the game on the harder setting it just felt like a slog. Enemies were bullet sponges and your guys felt very squishy. Every encounter tended to drag out in length so I dropped it back down to normal and had a good time.
Generally I actually very rarely see any benefits from ratcheting up the difficulty setting in single player games. If it's a complete cakewalk then sure I'll bump it, but in the case of TLOU2 I'm playing on what is considered "normal" and it's plenty fun. I'm never swimming in ammo, but I'm also not constantly scrounging just to have 2 bullets in a gun. I guess if the enemies played by the same rules I would be more inclined, but if the game is limiting my ammo and asking me to fend off 8 enemies that infinitely reload then whats the point. I would like it if for instance the enemies actually ran out of their supplies as well and then shifted tactics to try and overwhelm me with melee attacks.
It's different for everyone but I just wanted to chime in since I do see a lot of this "always play on hard" sentiment going around.
@savutano: I guess it didn’t read to me as if he was putting anyone down though which is why I commented in the first place. I’m right there with you that folks who literally demand changes or say he/she is lazy or whatever is garbage and shouldn’t be even entertained with a snarky reply. This just read as someone that generally likes Jeff’s content but is increasingly tired of the overlay gimmick which is hampering their enjoyment of the content which I kinda get. Maybe it came off a bit irritated in tone but sometimes you just gotta say it. I know from experience how frustrating it is to write a small critique of the site and have to open up with a whole paragraph explaining that you mean no disrespect, that you acknowledge all the hard work, that they’re all doing a tremendous job...but..
Personally I wouldn't miss any of the soundboard and overlay stuff if it went away, but I'm mostly indifferent towards at this point. I don't want to see the overlays in actual QL like here so thats perfectly fine and the soundboard kinda is what it is. Jeff goes through phases where he is fascinated by something and goes in 200% so I assume this is one of those times. Also posting here for years I also know better than to suggest any change because it really does typically devolve into 50 people telling you that you're wrong because they like the thing you don't.
As for the QL itself.. well it sure is more Trackmania. It is a funny coincidence that here we are talking about Jeffs use of overlays in the comments and Jeff seems a lot more concerned with how much junk and wacky remixes you can eventually jam into this thing than the game itself. Hopefully they will allow modders to dirty up like before for the folks that are into that sort of stuff.
@savutano What makes the community even less awesome are weirdly passive aggressive posts that defend the staff. I'm sure Jeff and team can stick up for themselves, we don't need to be reminded by other users how hard they are working, especially as a means to put down another user cause they disagree with your opinion.
@pikapomelo: for a software giant a lot of their native apps really are just awful both in form factor and pure performance. They had that Xbox Companion App and Game Pass app and now they’re rolling them both into one but the new app basically loses all the community features of the companion app. All that carried over is a friends list and even then it took me a solid minute trying to figure out how to message someone from the friends list.
I had a game that wouldn’t uninstall because something got stuck and eventually had to end up installing all 40gb of it from the Windows store so that I could successfully uninstall it from the Game Pass app.
I really like the Xbox Phone App...but remote installing games NEVER works. Not just sometimes, it has literally never once worked for me properly. The PS4 app was clunky and bad but when you told it to start downloading something when you were at work it did it. I’ll queue something up from Game Pass, come home, and it’s not even in my Xbox queue.
It is really bizarre how BAD they are at this UI stuff. As much as I defend the XB1 dashboard as not being that bad when you get used to it, I have to admit that now after I’ve dusted off my base PS4 for TLOU2 the PS4 XMB REALLY is just miles better. Even on the XB1X it’s not very smooth and a lot of simple things feel like they’re always on the verge of crashing or stalling out. Good luck editing any clips on the XB1 - my success rate is 50% and it’s an incredibly clunky process.
It was a little underwhelming to see this mechanic be a simple, non-intrusive, detective vision where you scrub footage back and forth for clues. Ages ago The game Remember Me did “memory remixing” that allowed you to view a memory of an individual with video-like controls and then change certain parts of it, altering what that person actually perceived. This had profound implications and in the case of one character completely changes their allegiance based on a lie you implant in their brain.
The moral dilemma of altering memories of living people alone was a lot more interesting than simply reviewing a recorded set of events that the Brain Dancing appears to be, but I assume it’s vaguely modeled after the Blade Runner detective vision machine.
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