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DjchunKfunK
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Re: General Gaming News

Post by DjchunKfunK » Wed Sep 25, 2024 4:16 pm

Image

This is pretty much what I expected when it came out they were pulling press previews. Their stock price has been in free-fall the last few months so they really need this game to sell which also explains why it is coming to Steam now on the day of release.

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Re: General Gaming News

Post by Mantis » Wed Sep 25, 2024 5:05 pm

I don't think a few months extra 'polish' is going to save them from releasing what I'm sure will ultimately be a very similar game to all of the other ones in the series. I think people are just generally burnt out on Ubisoft games. The formula is done to death now.

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Re: General Gaming News

Post by Sly Boots » Fri Sep 27, 2024 9:28 am


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Re: General Gaming News

Post by Raid » Fri Sep 27, 2024 12:15 pm

There's something almost refreshingly ballsy about announcing a Kickstarter by acknowledging they lied about their previous one. They could so easily have just pretended to be an entirely new setup and not be saddled with their previous lack of endeavour, but they chose not to. So either this is someone genuinely acknowledging that mistakes were made previously, or it's a case of "no publicity is bad publicity" and is all part of the grift.

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Re: General Gaming News

Post by Mantis » Fri Sep 27, 2024 2:03 pm

I expect the latter. Facing the media shit storm head on will get them enough press that I'm sure more people will fall for their next scam just by the sheer amount of extra traffic their page will be getting.

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Re: General Gaming News

Post by Animalmother » Mon Oct 07, 2024 10:20 am

https://www.eurogamer.net/halo-develope ... w=comments
Rebranding the studio and switching to the Unreal 5 engine. The games always looked good but it's the almost complete lack of writing talent that let the 343 games down.

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Re: General Gaming News

Post by Raid » Mon Oct 07, 2024 11:04 am

I'm not sure I get the rebranding; 343 Industries was already a clear link to the Halo franchise (named, as far as I'm aware, after 343 Guilty Spark, the AI monitor of the original Halo ring). Granted, the character itself was destroyed 15 years ago (and was Bungie's creation) so it's hardly relevant any more, but "Halo Studios" is just so mundane. It feels like a tedious marketing exercise ("we're not the 343 Industries that nobody thought much of any more!"), not anything positive.

The move to Unreal tech though? That's interesting to me, largely because with the UEVR mod, any modern Unreal-tech game (I think it supports versions 4 and 5, it may go back as far as 3) can be played in a VR headset with a bit of profile tweaking, including adding 6DoF motion controls. Microsoft don't appear to have any real interest in supporting VR as a medium so this could be the way into having an actual VR Halo game. Halo: Infinite looked fine, at least after release, but it didn't look impressive, which was surprising for a game with so much importance riding on it and paid for by the console manufacturer. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft had dictated this to them as a result.

You're right on the writing though. Halo Infinite's campaign played well, but it was dire from a story-telling perspective. 90% of the events in that campaign are talked about but not shown - you can put that partly down to the development hell it seemingly went through leaving no time to actually illustrate the stuff that happened off-screen, but perhaps that wouldn't have happened had they started from a well-known and well-supported game engine. Moving to Unreal isn't going to fix the issues they've had with major, story-dependent events happening in other media (I understand from the Eurogamer comments that Halo 4's antagonist was pretty much created in the books, which explains why he's never explained and seemingly appears from nowhere in the game).

And a final thought; Halo Infinite was originally sold as a platform, that it would be the base for new campaigns / expansions for a decade after release. That, like every other time I can think of where a developer has claimed it, evidently isn't the case. It's more fuel for why I've just straight up stopped believing any games company when they sell stuff on the promise of what it'll be later.

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Re: General Gaming News

Post by Animalmother » Mon Oct 07, 2024 11:50 am

Halo 5 was also a mess of a game plot wise. There was a point I stopped paying attention and just wanted to finish it (I'd completed all previous games), think that was only about halfway through. Had no idea what was happening by the end. Infinite I was enjoying up to a point until I came up against the first real boss fight, trapped in an enclosed area with a charging brute who could insta-kill you. I beat him after countless attempts, played a few hours more until the game hard crashed and reset me back to the start of the boss fight. I just rage quit, uninstalled and never looked back.

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Re: General Gaming News

Post by Raid » Mon Oct 07, 2024 11:59 am

Yeah, Bassus was the boss I gave up at too on my original play. I did beat him, but only after he'd sapped all of my desire to keep playing (I continued more out of stubbornness) and I didn't bother with the next level. I later came back to the game with our co-op group, we beat him first time on the same difficulty. I get the feeling he'd been rebalanced, as other sections of that level had been altered too. It was just so badly tuned on release, the map design for that fight was wildly inappropriate to face a bullet sponge with a Grav Hammer.

That said, it wasn't the first time this had happened in a Halo game; the original featured a similar fight (it just wasn't a boss); the moment you board the Truth and Reconciliation you were faced with two Gold Elites with cloaking shields and energy swords in a tiny environment, and it was *painfully* difficult.

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Re: General Gaming News

Post by Animalmother » Mon Oct 07, 2024 12:38 pm

Raid wrote:
Mon Oct 07, 2024 11:59 am
That said, it wasn't the first time this had happened in a Halo game; the original featured a similar fight (it just wasn't a boss); the moment you board the Truth and Reconciliation you were faced with two Gold Elites with cloaking shields and energy swords in a tiny environment, and it was *painfully* difficult.
Fuck I remember that, much creative swearing was invented that day!

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Re: General Gaming News

Post by Animalmother » Sat Oct 12, 2024 10:40 am

https://gameranx.com/updates/id/511242/ ... p-of-2024/
May have cost between $650 - $850 million over 10 years of development. I assume that would make it the most expensive game (or film) ever produced? The source is a guy who claims to have spoken to someone inside Ubisoft but I wouldn't be surprised if it's accurate.

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Re: General Gaming News

Post by Raid » Mon Oct 14, 2024 2:50 pm



This is looking to be a far more in-depth story than I was expecting, which I don't think is unfair given PGI have almost zero experience with narratives. The "story" in MW5: Mercenaries is vestigial at best; it's a sandbox, it starts with an utterly generic "you killed me father, I will get revenge!" and then literally nothing else happens. I'm nearly 30 hours in, the missions that I *think* are story-based are absolutely identical to the procedurally generated ones, except they have a bit of voiceover when the dropship comes to pick you up.

Anyway, I know a few bits about the lore from Battletech, but the majority of that is meaningless to me. Fans of the franchise though are going nuts over this trailer, and I'm lead to believe that there are a lot of very prominent characters in it. What's important is that it's the start of the Clan invasion of the Inner Sphere, where the people who'd been exiled for 200+ years return with vastly superior technology and attempt to conquer the rest of the inhabited galaxy. Hopefully it'll explain the rest as it goes.

It's out at the end of this week, and they've just confirmed it'll be free on Gamepass, which was a nice surprise.

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Re: General Gaming News

Post by Snowy » Wed Oct 16, 2024 6:17 pm

Yeah definitely up for some co-op on that
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Re: General Gaming News

Post by Raid » Wed Oct 16, 2024 8:26 pm

The initial reviews are out and it's very positive sounding. There are apparently some bugs with multiplayer; occasional desyncs, you can't currently change which pilot you're playing unless you're hosting (each pilot has different skills), so it may be worth holding off a co-op run for a few days to see if these issues get fixed.

https://www.ign.com/articles/mechwarrior-5-clans-review

I've been getting quite into the lore this week, and given the story in this is apparently quite good, I'm tempted to play it by myself too. It's a 25 hour campaign (more generous than I was expecting), and I don't want to feel like I'm boring you by not skipping cutscenes.

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Re: General Gaming News

Post by Sly Boots » Thu Oct 17, 2024 7:25 am

Raid wrote:
Mon Oct 14, 2024 2:50 pm


This is looking to be a far more in-depth story than I was expecting, which I don't think is unfair given PGI have almost zero experience with narratives. The "story" in MW5: Mercenaries is vestigial at best; it's a sandbox, it starts with an utterly generic "you killed me father, I will get revenge!" and then literally nothing else happens. I'm nearly 30 hours in, the missions that I *think* are story-based are absolutely identical to the procedurally generated ones, except they have a bit of voiceover when the dropship comes to pick you up.

Anyway, I know a few bits about the lore from Battletech, but the majority of that is meaningless to me. Fans of the franchise though are going nuts over this trailer, and I'm lead to believe that there are a lot of very prominent characters in it. What's important is that it's the start of the Clan invasion of the Inner Sphere, where the people who'd been exiled for 200+ years return with vastly superior technology and attempt to conquer the rest of the inhabited galaxy. Hopefully it'll explain the rest as it goes.

It's out at the end of this week, and they've just confirmed it'll be free on Gamepass, which was a nice surprise.

Quite a lot of Steam reviews citing poor performance, currently sitting at a Mixed rating as a result.

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