Currently Playing

[Raid]

Thanks for perfectly illustrating why I don't play most games online with randoms anymore. Mechwarrior Online is the only team shooter I've played in the last five years with anyone but friends, but the time to kill in that is far longer than most shooters so an arsehole has to really commit to a team kill, during which time the rest of the team (it's 12v12) can just spin around and ruin said arsehole's day. If anyone does get a teamkill, they can be locked out of starting a new match for a set amount of time (based on damage done rather than just killing blows).

[Can't think of one]

Rainbow Six: Siege

So, returning to a game I'd long since forgot that I owned.

My team starts on the attack side, and we are situated on the always fun but tense plane runway map. I make my way to the plane's exterior and start looking for entry points for me and my team when out of bloody nowhere I'm instantly shot dead. Somewhat startled, I'm instantly of the mind that one of the enemy team managed to get a sneaky angle on me and took me out with a well versed sniper shot from who knows where. Not thinking anything else of it, I continued to view my team who eventually went on to win the round, minus myself. Little did I know I had actually been TKD and not spotted the blue on blue notification.

The next round my team is on defence, I pick my main which is and always has been Castle and begin to put up wall defences to aid my team. Right there and then I get surrounded by three of my own team and a voice comes over the comms saying "You, say you love BBC - right now". Not having my mic enabled, I then begrudgingly swing my mouse left and right in abject defiance, big mistake. All three of them open fire and kill me. My own team just executed me, and I've not even worked out my controls again yet.

The next round comes and once again we spawn outside on the tarmac and concerned they are instantly going to TK me once more, I leg it to the plane ladder and climb right up. The BBC dude then comes over the mic once again stating "If you don't love BBC you can't be on this team" and he begins to climb the ladder below me to my position and once he reaches the very top and my direct pov, I shoot him in the face. I know, pointless and escalating, but something deep within me got great satisfaction from it as he lost his shit not expecting retaliation as his lifeless body falls to the floor. He drops the bomb so one of his mates goes to pick it up as the dude I just shot goes verbally ballistic over comms and I notice two of my team have the almost exact same name and may be brothers - or something. The none dead one comes over comms "Don't shoot me, my bro" as he retrieves the dropped bomb. "My brother is an idiot". I may have just entered a growing family feud, but then both opened up on me the second game - just because I said I wasn't particularly a fan of BBC.

We both enter the plane at different points and make our way to the bomb and as we eventually meet up I turn a corner and get direct line of sight on him and can tell enemies are all around us, I manage to take out two enemies, and we are good to plant then right as I think he's going to do so he turns to me and shoots me dead. Sure, I asked for that one. But now he has to 2 V 1 and naturally he fucks it all up and my team loses.

Final round and the 100% expected happens, all three trap me in a corner throw insults and shoot me dead. I'm absolutely fine with this. Then it happens...

Player XXXXX has been removed from the match by BattlEyetm
Player XXXXX has been removed from the match by BattlEyetm
Player XXXXX has been removed from the match by BattlEyetm

I win, bitches.

May not have even been a ban or anything, I just found it hilarious.

I remember having a slightly similar match years ago where this clan of 3 wanted me to leave the game to make room for their team mate, They tried to kick the other random player on my team but I voted no so they started teamkilling me, and the other random players (this was before the teamkill ricochet update) So rather than leaving the match I kept giving away their positions through the text chat, Their reactions were priceless

[Wrathbone]

<Hugs single player games>

[Mantis]

Rainbow Six Siege is a lot of fun but it's definitely up there as one of the absolute most toxic online communities I've ever played with. Even on the unranked matching we found ourselves subjected to torrents of abuse from people for not being top tier players, or if it wasn't that it would be team killers or just your standard racist arseholes.

Too much of a try hard game for me to stick with it after playing it fairly regularly for a short while. Pity though because the gameplay is super tight and the map and class designs were very fun.

[Lenny Solidus]

Yeah, that's the issue. Love the gameplay gadgets operator's map's and sense of tension it brings, plus mostly all of its design. It's such a different vibe to every other online fps. But man the community at large are just complete fucking arseholes with a direct line to your earholes who never stop being critical of any action or inaction they warrant as you being involved with, they always feel entirely justified to comment on and team bicker and blame like a gaggle of cunts. The amount of times I've been told to uninstall the game just because I went say 3-5 with a bunch of try hard rushers who could no doubt complete a wave with their eyes shut when I'm here just trying to have fun and do my part.

Last night I ended up final man on my team, which happens far more often than I would like considering how try hard these fuckers all are and eyes all end up on you. I cornered the enemy player switching my gun to an angle and sprayed him winning a match to which someone in chat commented "wtf was that shooting you fucking suck". And you know it's utterly pointless throwing out any form of defence. I do truly enjoy watching how other people play though, again with all the design you see some crazy shit you just don't get to see in other games.

My very sincere reply "My hands are a bit greasy, I'm eating a kebab between matches".

Another replied "What a Legend".

I actually was indeed rather stupidly consuming a large kebab while playing the game and was 100% surprised I even got a kill.

Also, never ever ever touch ranked. Don't say I didn't warn you, jesus christ.

[DjchunKfunK]

Diablo IV

A few other random thoughts

There is no overlay map. You can either open up a big map of the whole world/area or just use the mini map. I didn't find it to be a huge issue personally but it might be annoying for some.

As I made my way through the skill tree for Rogue the decisions I had made early kind of lock you out of making decisions later in the tree. By that I mean a lot of the interactions for Rogue are based around Crit or Vulnerability, so if you pick Crit you need to keep picking the skills that interact with that as you level up meaning your choices become limited and it doesn't feel like you have made a smart decision around builds, just that you have chosen one of the two paths the developer has designed.

Dungeon design is not the best and it concerns me regarding the end game as these dungeons are meant to be a large part of that. From what I understand the bosses you can fight at the end are randomised but the layouts remain the same each time you go into them unless you reset them using the UI. There have been a number of complaints online about the layouts being exactly the same in dungeons they have played which says to me that either they are not randomly generated or they are pulling from such a small pool of "tiles" that it is easy to get the same layout.

Also the Cellars, which are open world random mini dungeons, are exactly the same layout every single time.

[Alan]

I must just be lucky because in all the hours Ive put into Siege and Dota Ive had minimal bad interactions. Often the worst is telling me I'm crap which is often very fair critic :p The worst Ive had in Siege was teamkilling back when it was rife but with the new systems they've brought in I very rarely see any of it now. Ive actually had loads of positive interactions in both those games. Maybe I'm just a calming influence.

CoD and Halo on the Xbox when I played those, thats another level of utter shitbags. Worst communities around. Take off and nuke them from orbit, its the only way to be sure.

[Raid]

I know this is a beta, I know it's free for everyone regardless of whether they've pre-ordered, but I just don't understand how this has been happening with Blizzard games for a decade and a half now. I remember queueing to get into Wrath of the Lich King back in 2008. Do they artificially limit the logon servers on purpose, like some frustrating attempt at artificial scarcity to make players think it's more popular than it is? Anyway, it's a beta, it'll presumably be like this for a few days after the full game launches, and then you'll just log straight in. It happens every time. Fair enough.

The game itself is pretty good. It very quickly makes you feel powerful as most of the skills I tried (I started with a Necromancer) have real impact, and the physics mean that enemies die and bits of ruined detritus explode with real inertia which amplifies the effect. I like the streamlined potion system (I always hated how much micromanagement potions required in previous iterations), and while I agree that the new dodge mechanic is clunky with a mouse and keyboard (you dodge towards your mouse cursor, so if you're wanting to dodge away from something you're fighting you have to move the mouse to the other side of the screen and back again to continue fighting), it's still I think a good addition. Every class being able to dodge means that they can add telegraphed AOE attacks from enemies (ie: a circle appears on the floor showing the danger and you can escape before impact) which is a mechanic I've always liked.

And the presentation is as lavish as it usually is in a Blizzard game. The voice acting's good, the script is obviously better than 3's (the story of which was complete tosh), the animation and model quality is well above average for a game of this genre, and they've really doubled-down on the gothic horror theming. While I wasn't someone that really cared that Diablo 3 was more colourful than 2, but that looks like an episode of The Simpsons compared to this. The atmosphere is exactly what I want from this genre, and it's why I've never really been able to get into other titles when I could be playing Diablo.

...so it's an absolute bloody travesty that it's all ruined by the sodding online nonsense. I can take the fact that my skeletal minions were juddering around the screen, the model animating correctly but moving as if the game were running at 1fps, and I can take the rubber banding because, well, it's a beta and will probably be fixed. But the moment you enter the first town and realise that there's a bloody army of powerful heroes ready to take on the minions of the burning hells, all of that effort put into the atmosphere is entirely wasted. I couldn't run for more than ten seconds without my skeletal minions being ineffectively attacked by another player's AOE abilities. It's not as if the other players were doing anything to deliberately spoil my enjoyment, there wasn't any griefing or chat spam, it was simply their presence that did the damage.

It's exactly as bad as I was expecting it to be. It doesn't matter how much effort has been put into this, the insistence on making it a shared world spoils it completely.

[Mantis]

I haven't got far enough in yet to access the shared portion of the map but I am anticipating it to ruin everything in the same manner you feel it has for you, Chris. Unfortunately, after waiting for an hour in the queue whilst I made myself some dinner, I got to the hermit section of the prologue before encountering a network error which booted me back to the lobby and attempting to relaunch the game puts me back in a 45 minute queue.

Live service games really are pish.

Overall first impressions of the actual game itself so far are good though. Feels very Diablo. Performance is a little on the janky side.

[Raid]

Yeah, it's running quite badly in places, and the stuttering when it loads new assets in isn't great.

[DjchunKfunK]

There are always going to be queues for online games it's just one of those things unfortunately, servers are expensive and so companies are always going to low ball it, just have to hope that they aren't this long come release.

I didn't get any stuttering or issues with the level loading in last weekend but I have got quite a few issues this weekend which says to me it is down to the server architecture not being able to cope with the numbers. As for the shared world areas I hardly ever see people, might see the odd person running around a public event but other than that it's mostly empty. I believe the limit on people per area is pretty low so you shouldn't be seeing that many. I ultimately don't mind as I don't play ARPGs for the atmosphere and story, just to get loot so other people running around doesn't really bother me.

I'm not sure the writing is massively better than D3, it's still pretty bog standard stuff but again not why I come to these games so not a major issue for me.

[Raid]

Last night over the couple of sessions I played, I think my character rubber-banded every single time I entered a new area. I'd be able to move, but it looked like I kept running into invisible obstructions and just jogged on the spot for a short while. Then I'd get a little further and it'd happen again. Then when it stopped, I'd teleport back to the very start of the area. It seemed to be resolve itself immediately when I got the little xp boost for discovering somewhere new, so I wouldn't be surprised if it was a bug somewhat related to character progress rather than an actual latency issue.

I agree that it's not heavily populated compared to the average MMO (I kept seeing the same names pop up, it's possible there were only a handful out in the wilds with me but it was more apparent in towns), but the areas I've seen are made up from a spider-web of extremely narrow corridors that seem to funnel people towards one another.

I also don't like the towns in this. In previous games you'd have one town per act so you'd always be seeing the same NPC characters, and so you'd always see the same characters. In this one there's a new small town every five minutes, and the series-staple Waypoints seem to be located in them instead of out in the wilds. The problem is they're too common, and you don't really get that same feel of being out in the wilderness because of it.

[Mantis]

Less time in the queue to get on today but the rubber banding and general lag is pretty appalling. I hope they can iron out these issues before launch, but then then I recall how much of a travesty the D2 Remaster launch was and I don't have high hopes. Being an online game and so having to expect a queue to play is a poor excuse, plenty of other MMOs over the years manage to pay for enough backend infrastructure to support the peak launch player numbers. If they're marketing D4 as a live service game where the shared world is integral to the experience (which it isn't for a Diablo game but that's a separate argument) then they should pay the necessary costs to ensure their game is stable and accessible without long wait times. The D2 launch was so bad for weeks after it came out that they had to implement a lengthy queue system which when combined with the constant network errors made me just outright give up on it. Pity Blizzard already had my money by that point.

I have to agree about the general world design with the frequency of towns. It isn't awful, but it's far flung from the classic experience of a single town surrounded by a huge wilderness of lengthy maps all leading into one another. In D4, you snake your way through one small area and arrive at the next nondescript town with copy-paste NPCs. The dungeons are on par with Diablo 3 so far, functional but not amazing.

It's definitely better than 3 so far. Combat feels nice and meaty, the streamlined systems are a welcome change and the skill system is a nice take on the classic style. The obvious pains they've gone through to try and make it as dark and moody as possible in comparison to 3 is quite amusing. Everyone sounds like they desperately need a lozenge.

I won't be preordering it or picking it up at launch though until it's clear that they've resolved the technical issues. It runs absolutely fine and isn't cooking my GPU like it seems to be doing for some, but the lag is making it borderline unplayable at times. I run into a combat and by the time the freeze frame and rubber banding has ended everything is already dead to my skeletons, not the most fulfilling experience at the moment.

[Animalmother]

Call me odd but, I downloaded the demo (76 fucking Gb if it) on the Xbox. It then said I needed to create a Blizzard account just to play it so I uninstalled immediately. I'm already logged into one service and now need to log into another just to try a demo? Fuck that noise.

[DjchunKfunK]

plenty of other MMOs over the years manage to pay for enough backend infrastructure to support the peak launch player numbers.

I don't think they do. The last FFXIV and WoW expansion releases both had long queues, FFXIV was up to 3 hours. Lost Ark and New World, which are probably the two newest MMOs of recent times, both had crazy queues. I don't think I have heard of a popular MMO or similar that has launched without queue issues. You are much better off underestimating the number of servers you need than overestimating in terms of cost so that is what everyone does unfortunately.

I've enjoyed my time with the beta, got two classes to level 20. I still have concerns over late game and itemisation though. Despite that I would have picked it up but there is no way I'm pay £60 for a game.