I watched a couple youtube clips after this to try and make sense out of that ending reel, and I think the game uses a bunch of those scenes to put together different endings. An ending I saw on YouTube showed the scene where Michael hits the nurse with the hammer, and it was followed up with the scene of her in bed as the daughter.
So it would be:
Ending A: Nurse gets hit, dies, Michael goes to jail (what the duders got)
Ending B: Nurse gets hit, becomes fake daughter
Ending C: Michael gets hit, dies, Jody's "murder" pinned on him
Ending D: Allison pushes nurse, Michael goes to jail
I can't find a plot summary for the novel anywhere (doesn't even have a Wikipedia page) so can't tell which one is actually "canon."
Edit: OK so I got curious. There's an eBook available for $10, but the Google Books preview contains the prologue...which is actually an epilogue (similar to the game but has nothing to do with John Hurt's character, who woulda thunk).
So the canon ending is one where Randolph, the nurse, has left and Michael goes to Liliam's room (they changed her name to Jody in the video game) to say good night and turn off her TV, but Michael knows that she isn't real and is only doing it to keep Miriam (Allison) happy. I think they took this scene and put it into the game, but just slotted it in the beginning instead of the end. This would imply that none of the game endings actually happened in the book, or that after this took place John Hurt came in and the "usual" ending happened.
BTW for those who were wondering I have two or so missions left and there are no Prometheans unless it's like a last mission reveal or something. You do get Halo 1-3 style enemy Sentinel units, though.
Only halfway through the video but most of these minigames feel like the Mario Party minigames, just removed from the context of Mario Party. Like the sneaky dice game is straight up just RNG just like so many Mario Party minigames. There's no way to apply skill of any way to it other than maybe trying to convince the other person to reroll when they shouldn't, but I don't see how you can do that without coming across really blatantly as trying to get the other person to reroll.
Also, there were three different setups for Mario Party jokes in the beginning and the guys ignored all of them to be friendly to the Nintendo people until Jeff had to get one out the third time around (when the board first showed up, the chest minigame being something you'd expect out of a Gamecube-era MP, and then finally when Jeff rolled a 1).
I want to play this but I also really want to see GBeast bring back Playdates in a big way and power through this at some point. Though since it's episodic maybe they'll wait to make sure it all comes out first.
The catch is that most of these modes don't have any AI combatants in them. That might seem like a weird thing to miss, but having some fodder in the maps gives you something to do as you're running back to the conflict after a respawn.
The AI wasn't just good for busy work, they added to the experience in a genuine way--they would actually interact with the enemy AI, fighting, dragging injured to safety, sometimes getting in a melee fight (Band of Brothers style) where if you came in at the right moment you could save a life or steal a kill. They had exclusive VO, screaming for help or exclaiming that they see a pilot or that they're under heavy fire from a Titan. In the Beta, the lack of them made the whole thing feel less like a massive battle and more of a empty map that happened to have player characters shooting each other in it.
guess i was blind to that as with the original game they really just seemed like dumb fodder that just was sort of there. that stuff must have been pretty subtle; i didn't play a ton but i'm pretty sure i would have noticed it. just didn't really seem that significant of a part of the first game and i don't think i'll miss it here. i never tried the frontier defense mode for full disclosure.
the rest of the changes probably won't bug me much as i didn't get super deep into titanfall 1 despite liking it a lot while i played it. maybe some of the battery stuff can be tweaked to be less canned and more of a back and forth like the first game, and the other maps might have more parkour opportunities.
i'm still curious what big fans of the first game would have wanted them to do with this to help evolve and move the series forward without just blatantly copying the first (unless that's what you really want, or just a few new maps). seems like they had to change things up to try to attract a new audience and hopefully have them stick around.
this video showcases some of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zOaP7y5Da
As for your second question, I think most people like me would've been completely happy with the game if they hadn't gone so far to move away from so many good Titanfall 1 mechanics. Like the battery stuff by itself wouldn't have been that big of a deal if everything else was the same, but it's on top of stuff like tying abilities to player model, so if you like using stim but don't want to look like a robot, too bad, you're forced to choose between one or the other; all of the hacking stuff is gone, so you're no longer able to do stuff like build a mini army of Spectres to follow you around and kill Grunts and other Spectres as you hunt down pilots, nor can you hack turrets to provide distraction for Titans while you sneak up from behind and Rodeo them; the voiced updates on how much time until Titanfall and remarking on how well you've been doing was a nice touch and made the game feel a little less like a game and little more like something that was interacting back, as weird as that sounds; the burn cards were a really great mechanic that I found that I missed during the beta, and would've provided a path to monetization that EA and co. would've been happy with (though if monetization is just going to end up being skins that's fine too); the players on both sides look the same and as a result feel generic and boring, compared to last time where even the models lended themselves to the overall canon (the IMC used a more clean-looking white look, and when you could see their faces they were all white, whereas the Militia had a grungier camo-green look that betrayed their scrappy roots, and had a Black woman as one of the models, a minority that throughout history that has seen a lot of oppression; the hero Titans are promised to be good for Last Titan Standing but they end up making Titans in other modes a compromised experience, and not only that, they don't seem as well designed as in the last game when looking at personality--in the beta they would just be stoic and say the normal Titan things, like "You are under attack from an enemy Titan" or "You are under attack from multiple hostiles." I don't remember any VO that actually felt like it fit the personality of the Titan. In comparison, there were multiple voices added to Titanfall that did lend a lot of personality--my favorite was Jeeves who, when you entered the titan, would say "Welcome back Pilot, I've kept the seat warm for you."
And like, I could go on and on but I think you get the point. There isn't a false choice between this and just the same game again with slightly different content, you can change the mechanics and add in new things without breaking what was already there, but that's not what ended up happening. They've made so many changes that it almost feels like a knockoff of the first game where the people who made it misunderstood what appealed to those who liked it. In some way, it doesn't even feel like the same universe--the last game had a cowboys and Indians sort of "this land these planets, this way of life, it will kill you. It's a struggle, day in and day out. But it's home, and more than anything, we are free, we are our own people. But that damn railroad the IMC are trying to bring us down, bringing everything wrong with their way of life to our home, and destroying it, and now we need to fight back." In comparison, this game feels like the tech, the land, the people, are a lot more polished, a lot more clean, a lot more normal. You just don't get that feel anymore from the game.
@ripelivejam: sorry you felt that way, to me and a lot of other people the AI went a long way to build the aesthetic of the game.
I'm having this weird sort of cognitive dissonance in my head right now. Like, normally, I agree with Jeff's opinion on a lot of things, and seeing the five stars got me curious because as a big Titanfall 1 player, I kind of hated the Titanfall 2 beta...and the actual review just makes me even more disinterested in Titanfall 2 than before.
In multiplayer, titans no longer drop with a shield, so any damage they take goes directly to the hull. Now there's a large mechanic around securing batteries by either finding them on the map or stealing them by jumping onto an enemy titan. Delivering a battery to a friendly titan charges up its shield, helping it live longer.
That change was terrible in the beta. In Titanfall 1, there was a big back and forth for when you got a rodeo, a "does the titan have electric smoke? shit, s/he does, BAIL BAIL BAIL" or "fuck I don't have electric smoke on this class, should I get out and attack them? if I do they can jump off and get hits on me while the animation plays, or they can leave and get back on once I get back in" that was entirely destroyed by the change to batteries. No teammate ever bothered to pick up batteries to give to friendly Titans, and when taking down Titans it took way more effort to do any real damage to them as a pilot, and that's on top of the fact that the animation being canned meant that the Titan could just time it properly, turn 180, melee and get a kill no matter what the Pilot did (because the animation always ended with leaving the Titan in the same position no matter what).
The on-foot loadouts for pilots are nicely expanded, too, with a bevy of guns that potentially fit different playstyles, but considering the map size (relatively large, though not "Battlefield large"), it's hard to find a great reason to use weapons built for shorter ranges, like SMGs and shotguns.
The maps being large wouldn't have been concerning if it had been like the first game where the maps had lots of surfaces to wallrun off of, but given the beta and how poorly designed those maps were it's a bit disconcerting. Also, shotguns and SMGs being not very useful? SMGs were the mid-to-high skill level workhorse in Titanfall 1, especially after they nerfed the carbine. Shotties also had a real high skill ceiling as tying high skill parkour with it made it nearly impossible to counter.
The catch is that most of these modes don't have any AI combatants in them. That might seem like a weird thing to miss, but having some fodder in the maps gives you something to do as you're running back to the conflict after a respawn.
The AI wasn't just good for busy work, they added to the experience in a genuine way--they would actually interact with the enemy AI, fighting, dragging injured to safety, sometimes getting in a melee fight (Band of Brothers style) where if you came in at the right moment you could save a life or steal a kill. They had exclusive VO, screaming for help or exclaiming that they see a pilot or that they're under heavy fire from a Titan. In the Beta, the lack of them made the whole thing feel less like a massive battle and more of a empty map that happened to have player characters shooting each other in it.
The Beta had already scared me off (for the above reasons and many, many more) so I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the end game turned out to be something I didn't want, but I guess it's just a big shock to me given that I normally agree with all of Jeff's opinions. Not that big of a deal or anything, but seeing how the game got positive impressions until the Beta when the everyman got their hands on it and absolutely hated it... I really wonder if the same will happen again once the game's actually out and the general public is playing it, or if those disappointed by the Beta won't even bother with the retail game.
Thankfully they added a wait feature to Shenmue 2, for impatient people like Vinny that want to rush through the experience.
You... you must be joking, right? No sane person would actually say this seriously. What experience? The experience of spending a full in-game day looking at a watch or doing uninteresting window-dressing because there's nothing else better to do? Yeah, amazing experience!
It was unfortunate that they didn't initiate this scene in yesterday's episode before 4pm, else this could have been avoided. In this episode they could have gone to Bunkaido Antiques and purchased all the move scrolls, trained moves in the parking lot (which levels up the moves, increasing their damage), bought food for and fed the cat, tried to win a Sega Saturn game at the Tomato store, played the arcade games to beat high scores, phoned friends for unique phone-only conversations, phoned and met master chen at warehouse no.8 to translate the 2 mysterious scrolls they found, filled out a specific capsule toy collection, visit the Fortune Teller (who was only unavailable last episode, because Ryo was in the process of saving money for a ticket) for a gambling lucky number, then visiting the slothouse and using the machine that corresponds to that number for better odds. You can call it window dressing, but that's part of the experience, and whether you're the type who digs the experience of existing in this virtual environment, or doesn't, is going to be entirely subjective.
The moves come up so rarely that sinking time into them seems like a waste of time, especially since Vinny just button mashes anyways. They bought food for the cat, couldn't figure out how to feed it so they gave up on that. Pouring money into a bunch of stuff they don't need in the hope that they get a RNG drop that isn't useful seems like a bad idea, given that in all likelihood they'll probably have to start saving up more money soon. The phone system is kind of obtuse and I would've never guessed you could do that, and I doubt they do either. They tried going to a bunch of Chinese people they knew and couldn't translate the scrolls, and so assumed that you can't do that yet. The game didn't make that clear at all and made it seem that the Fortune Teller is locked behind some in-game process, and even then that seems convoluted and opaque such that, like most of this stuff, you would only figure it out if you were straining the boundaries of the game in the vain hope of finding something to do. When it comes down to it, none of that seems particularly fulfilling anyways, which makes me wonder why they bloated out the story so much to force you to do this stuff.
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