the be all end all video game thread

I always feel like the rogue is the most entertaining of stock classes in any Action RPG game. I'm still playing through Kindgoms of Amalur, and even in Dragon Age. The high Damage, Low Health, but abilities require skill to executive balance always seem to be the most entertaining. I always feel like its challenging because you just just run in, but you have the most tools to get the job done.

 

If any of you Mac users wanted to jump into League of Legends, they now have an official client in open Beta.

 

Okay, so I'm going to go off on an unrelated rantish type of thing...I'm drunk so bear (heh) with me.

Has anyone else become less and less impressed or interested in the big AAA, major publisher type games? I've been really enjoying the "indi" type games lately, the small simple shit that is just straight fun. Sure they may only last 4-5 hours, but the more I think about it and look back at the games I've played recently, they tend to offer way more enjoyment per time played than anything else.

Thoughts?

(Edit: PS...I'm drunk)

 

AAA games are expensive, man. Back in 1997 it was a Big Deal for Final Fantasy VII to be the first "multimillion dollar" game. Nowadays, that's chump change.
What this means is that games are becoming more and more of a capital investment. Where AAA is concerned, it's all about putting out consistent product with reliable sales. Find what works and stick with it. Today it's Call of Duty, yesterday it was Guitar Hero; these are formula games, made to sell quick and often. Not even mentioning Madden, that's low-hanging fruit if I ever saw it. It's not surprising that so many people I know are suffering from FPS-fatigue. They're all starting to look the same.

 

I'm playing Heavy Rain for the first time right now. Just finished the fourth origami piece. This game is pretty fucked up.

 

They quit making the discs and selling new versions of the game, sure. But you can still buy peripherals, and they're still cranking out DLC for Rock Band, which they can do ad infinitum and it will be profitable.

 

Big problem is that a whole new $70+ game that is an exact knockoff of the previous version of it makes people bitter. One thing I will give Rockband (or what ever), when the company releases a song pack, that is priced right, people love it. They sell well because it is UNIQUE new content. Also, it lets people choose what songs they want, meaning I am not stuck with Rock Band: Nickleback edition

In the end, I do not mind if a new expansion pack (Cause thats what it is) for new, unique content, but after I played COD:MW2, and it was MW1 over again, I kicked that series to the curb.

 

I can't wait for shooter fatigue, and I think it is coming sooner than later. By now, all these shooters are almost clones of each other. Its all cover-based first-person with slightly different settings ("realistic" in games like CoD, or "Sci-Fi" in games like Halo), but they sell like crazy. Then what happens is one of them (right now, CoD) starts to do better than the others, they look at what is making it work and they start to copy it until they are all clones of one another.

So yeah, you're going to find much more innovative things in indie games, and it will be exceptionally rare for there to be a new property that is almost completely different from everything before. The last one that I can think of, honestly, is Demon's Souls, and even that has spawned pseudo-sequels (Dark Souls) and copy-cats (Dragon's Dogma). Otherwise, it does seem that most new AAA games are a copy of another copy.

Still, I enjoy a lot of them, so I can't complain too much. Its like they say about movies, books, and stories: there are really only seven basic plots, and then everything is just a derivation of one of the seven. With games, its basically the same.

All that said: should I pick up Dragon's Dogma? I'm really considering it...

 

Rare but not unheard of.

Personally, I'd like to see an RPG similar to Fallout or Elder Scrolls that puts you in the American frontier circa Daniel Boone or Kit Carson perhaps.

 

D26, have you played Killzone 3s Multiplayer? I honestly felt like it was the best/underrated Multiplayer ever. The roles, classes and game modes are fucking awesome. The Warzone is just the best part, it goes from VIP, to Domination, to Bodycount, to CTF, to Detonation in one match. Its all continuous. First to 7 wins. The only problem is not enough people played it because the COD hype machine was too big AND it didn't really take THAT long to max every class out. If they took that exactly system for KZ4 and just added more carrots, it'd be fucking epic.

I mean I think that's the problem with the yearly installments. Like these games come out, and its like every year, half the effort goes into fixing the problems from the last one, and the other half goes into adding another cool feature they has a glitch that prevents it from being "the perfect game" and the cycle contrinues. The next version has half the effort fixing that last cool feature, and yadda yadda.

 

So speaking of game series that come out with a basic update every year, Assassin's Creed IV was just announced. It looks like they're drastically increasing the focus on the sailing aspect of ACIII while likely reducing the free-running and eliminating the hunting aspect of ACIII. Basically, they're taking the good from ACIII and getting rid of what didn't work. Honestly, the frontier was huge, and hunting was fun at first, but holy shit did that get monotonous, and running across the frontier wasn't nearly as fun because finding climbable trees was a pain, and frequently there weren't any decent paths through the trees to the next village. I'm still not done with ACIII because the story couldn't hold my interest, so I'm not sure ACIV is going to be purchased right away like the past few Assassin's Creed titles have been.

 

Well, you had three flavors of shooter (Halo, Gears, CoD). Now everything from Mass Effect to Dead Space is Gears-ified, Halo became CoD-ified, and so did everything else.

If you want to play a legitimately good, inventive shooter, pick up Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath (++, Xbox, PC/PS3 in HD). Inventive gameplay, switching from third-person to first-person; good variety of bosses that you're free to take down any way you like. There's many different types of ammo, so you can really go about things however you want. And the game oozes personality.



The chickens are douchebags.

 

You guys seem to have forgotten about (motherfuckin') Battlefield 3. Battlefield 2 is still my favourite and most-played shooter of all time, and Battlefield 3 is a near-perfect spiritual sequel to 2. I almost tore up when I saw the Back to Karkand expansion pack.

Pros:

- Awesome destructo-physics. You can literally bring down about 90% of buildings on the map, barring giant skyscrapers. Nothing quite like knowing there's a filthy camping douche of a sniper hidden in the top floor of a building so you go and put C4 on all the supporting walls and then bring the whole fucking thing down on his head.

- No ridiculous perks. Though there are some (very secondary) perks you can select, overall it just comes down to how good you are at shooting with the weapon you favour. There's no "ultimate weapon" out there, and often the base guns are the ones most players prefer.

- MOTHERFUCKING VEHICLES, SON. You want to blast shit apart with a tank? Be my guest. Fancy running people over with a Humvee? Feel free. Feeling like doing some white-knuckle dogfighting while piloting a jet? By all means. How about you pick up an Apache or Little Bird helicopter and strafe the shit out of some unsuspecting infantrymen? It's all good! And let's not forget the ancillary stuff like LAVs, Mobile Anti-Aircraft, Mobile Artillery, AC-130 Gunships, et cetera - or the time-honoured classic, the "C4-stuffed quad bike".

- No fucking killstreaks. Self-explanatory.

- Decent-paced action. Yes, in some game modes (which I largely avoid because they remind me too much of CoD) and on some occasions if you're defending a flag or trying to destroy an objective it'll be spawn-killsomedudes-die-spawn-killsomedudes-die, but usually there's a lot more strategy than exploiting blind spots to rack up streaks, mostly because many of the maps are nature-based and the environment changes when shit gets blown up.

- Teamwork is key. Sure, you can go all lone wolf, but every class has perks that are designed to supplement the others. The medic revives people, the support drops ammo, the sniper can throw out a deployable short-range radar or place a spawn beacon for teammates, the engineer can destroy/repair vehicles, etc. Even if you're not speaking via headset, players just fall into a rythm and it's pretty much guaranteed that your medic will pull you up, or your support give you some free ammo, etc. The fact that you get virtually as many points for performing these actions as for killing dudes helps.

- The knife works like a fucking knife should. No bullshit "single mini-slash to the foot" instakills. From the front, you need to hit centre mass twice for the knife to kill, while from the back, or if the enemy is prone, your dude does this awesome knife takedown where pulls him round and plants the knife in his neck. However, if you get shot while doing a knife takedown, provided you're killed, it will fail.

- Sorta-realistic (and really fun) sniping. Because many of the maps are so goddamn big, snipers can actually do what snipers are supposed to do - i.e. shoot from goddamn long-range. You can literally get kills at over 1000 yards. Because bullets have fairly realistic ballistics, you also have to compensate for bullet drop at extreme ranges, meaning you have to figure out exactly how high above your opponent you want to place your crosshairs. Also, unless you get a headshot, no sniper rifle has a one-shot kill.

- Crazy shit goes down all the time, in a good way. I've seen people snipe the pilot of a flying apache in the head, sending it spinning to the ground to explode (and carrying the hapless gunner, presumably thinking "what is this I don't even" with them). People jumping out of jets that were being shot apart, pulling out their RPG, and shooting the jet trailing them with it. People murdering dudes with a soldering torch. People getting run over by a MAV (basically a mini UAV designed to spot enemies). People planting C4 on a transport chopper that they'd deliberately abandoned in the middle of the map, waiting for an enemy to hop on, then waiting for that enemy to fly back to his base and pick up a cartload of dudes before blowing it apart in the air. Seriously. I love this game.

 

Agree with everything you posted. Thought I'd add a couple.
-Probably the best graphics on consoles.
-Best sound in any game I've played. The guns all sound like real guns. Sound different firing in a room compared to outside.
-Server browser on consoles!!!

Yeah I love Battlefield. This about sums it up...

 

Ive put a few hours into the new Tomb Raider game and I like what I've seen so far. Has anyone tried the multiplayer yet?

 

So apparently the new SimCity is a big POS, assuming you're even able to play b/c it has always-online DRM and the servers keep going down. That makes me so sad. I'll probably wait several months and pick up some GotY edition with the inevitable DLCs/expensions included.

 

Re: Re: the be all end all video game thread

Good to know, I was thinking of trying it out, I'll hold off now. It's too bad I was actually looking forward to it.

 

What is wrong with these people?