I want to like this game more than I do, but the rigid tiered weapon damage and random nature of the loot really puts me off. The TTK is extremely inconsistent depending on what kind of loot you've got, and if you get unlucky enough to go up against someone with purple armour when all you have is a light pistol or smg it's going to take you literally 20 shots to take someone down. It even takes 4 melee attacks to knock an unarmoured target.
Fair enough that loot is part of the game, but it just doesn't feel good to get worked over by someone you got the drop on because they had better gear than you.
I'm a pretty big fan of this style of Souls-like, but so far I've found this game to be kind of dull. There are some pretty vistas, but most of the level design is very straightforward, and it lacks all of the mechanical complexity that makes the Souls games great.
I feel like most of the simplifications they've introduced to make it a "kinder" one of these are more hindrance than anything. It seems very clearly balanced towards having a companion at all times, which means that when your AI buddy throws themselves into a pit you're left completely overwhelmed by large groups of enemies that you don't have the speed/abilities to deal with effectively. There's no real way to spec for those kinds of situations either because most of the weapons are near identical, and only have basic heavy and light attacks.
At first the quest log/map seems like a great addition, but because the open areas themselves are so simple the map isn't really necessary and most of the quests are just following a waypoint, picking something up and warping back.
Also, for what it's worth, I think people are dead wrong when they say this game doesn't punish you for your decisions like Dark Souls does. The enemies get very tanky, very quickly, and if you try to experiment with different weapons you're just wasting massive amounts of crafting materials you should be funnelling into your main gear, and having to grind out the resources if you make that mistake just highlights how bland the weapon movesets are.
Generally, I'm surprised how much I dislike this game, it feels like each successive entry since 2 has managed to be slightly less nuanced, and less fun. There's a lottttttt of shooting and defending objects from waves of enemies and the balloon/tether/booster combos are mostly pretty useless against them.
This game does an amazingly poor job of tutorialising its mechanics, and I got stuck in exactly the same place as Dan trying to find those generators. It's never explained, but there are conduits on the ground that lead you to them, so the search objectives aren't quite as arduous as they seem at first.
Also, goddamn... it was hard to watch Dan mostly ignore the wingsuit in this video, because it's easily the best part of the game IMO. When you figure it out you can fly forever, extremely fast, and the parachute pretty much just becomes an emergency break.
I absolutely do not get the "What is the point of playing the game, if you can't progress by playing it" argument. How did you enjoy multiplayer games before f2p era? How did you enjoy Quake 3 Arena? How did you enjoy Dota?
And Jeff says this too! I just don't get it.
It's kind of an apples and oranges comparison between this and an old-school FPS like Quake III. This is a CCG, and collecting and deck building has literally always been an integral part of CCGs. Without the ability to build your own unique decks it loses almost all of the interesting meta that actually makes it worth playing long term.
It's less about an absence of progression, but more about the progression being entirely limited to purchases, and even worse, those purchases are all blind boxes.
And yeah, I know that CCGs have always been expensive and exploitative, but this is a particularly obnoxious case.
I'm enjoying this update a lot more than I thought it would. All the little parts are slightly broken, especially the third person and the multiplayer, but it all adds up to something good. Not "great", but definitely good. Kind of the ideal podcast game.
The general gameplay loop is very different from when it launched, and it's actually not very grindy once you get past the early game floundering and start to know what you're doing. The life-support/hazard-protection upkeep isn't too heavy unless you're on extreme weather planets, which is kind of the point I suppose. Generally unless you're building a massive base or repairing a large ship, you do need a lot of different resources, but you usually don't need a lot of each individual one, so it feels more like a hunt, than a slog.
I was a little bit concerned at how similar this looks to ToG, but turns out the executable for this game is literally called "TowerOfGuns2.exe", so it feels a little less weird knowing it was explicitly developed as a sequel to the first game.
From what I've played of this, I'm not really digging it. It's a rad idea that seems poorly executed. It lacks the sense of progression you'd probably want out of it. It never feels like you're building a cool gun and making it better over time, because you start nearly from scratch with only a few parts on each mission, and then by the time you actually have something interesting, the mission is over and you have to start again.
As far as the Euro/US thing goes with single vs. double taps in the washing machine, I think it's might be more of a modern development than a regional thing. Here in Australia all the washing machines I grew up with had double input, and most houses still have both taps, but all the modern machines I've had in recent years have had a single cold input because it's more energy efficient to heat cold water up to exactly the right temperature when it's needed, rather than deal with it elsewhere.
Dan's overall cluelessness about pretty basic household things, ie fuseboxes, cold water need for washing machines, a heated towel rail, never ceases to amaze me.
Modern houses don't really have fuseboxes anymore, and I've NEVER seen (or even heard of) a "heated towel rail", mister/miss fancy-pants. :b
I'm pretty sure literally every building has to have a "fusebox" of some kind even if they usually don't have old style fuses in them anymore. Not having a main breaker and RCDs would make a building a complete deathtrap. I definitely agree about the heated towel rails though, those seem like some obscene luxury item, and I've never even heard of them before.
This kinda looks worse than the two previous games, what happened? Shadows are drawing in 3 feet in front of the character—in a runner game... This is a first in term of technical ineptitude in a 2.5D platformer, for me.
[EDIT] Yeah, I just checked to make sure, and the second game does looks way better, and the first also holds up being more visually simplistic.
I'm starting to think it may just be Ben's fault considering this could be on PC, and so could the Subaeria quick look which also looks dreadful. Maybe Ben has no idea what he's doing on PC, and that the shitty visuals aren't the game's fault, but his. If this is the case, then he certainly shouldn't be the one doing these quick looks in the future.
I'm not really sure what you're talking about because this game looks dramatically better than Runner 2. I don't really like the art style, but this is way more technically advanced. I'm pretty picky when it comes to pop-in and I didn't notice any in this video at all, but this game hardly has any shadows in the first place. So if you're seeing some issues maybe there's something wrong with the video on your end?
Also, I'm almost certain that Ben knows how to use a PC, and the Suburbia QL was recorded on an Xbox One.
EDIT: Nevermind, I can see what you mean by pop-in now. It's pretty strange, but I didn't notice it on the pickup because of the fade. I didn't even realise that the grey patches in the fridge thing were supposed to be shadows in the first place. Aside from that level, the fade in seems like the sort of thing you wouldn't even notice while playing the game.
Rorie might be underestimating the weight of liquid, a full tank of gas is very very heavy.
It's all relative though. Petrol has a density of something like 0.75kg/L. My Ford Focus is a pretty moderately sized car, and it holds roughly 50-60L of fuel, so that's 40-45kg of the total curb weight of about 1300kg.
Meaning the difference between a completely full and a completely empty tank is 4% at the absolute most, and that's not even counting the driver who probably weighs 70kg on their own.
MVHVTMV's comments