Considering how bad Bethesda is at understanding the concept of time I wouldn’t be surprised if the actual dates on events end up saying the bombs dropped before New Vegas. This is Bethesda after all, they literally had a plot twist around a person aging and to hide that twist they just made it so that another person didn’t age.

Nobody knows exactly how it would’ve worked, but people speculated that the bunker extracts would connect to the hideout.

The obligatory “I think you meant rogue-lite not rogue-like” because the roguelike community is very pedantic about their definition and Tarkov literally could not be a roguelike.

But it’s also not the EXACT same formula as a roguelite. For starters there are no PVP roguelites so the entire PVP aspect of the game is already huge deviation from that the formula. Secondly death is a mechanic in roguelites. You die, you made some progress, you start again usually with some new twist of the new character. In Tarkov death is a failure state. Sure, you can make some progress in some quests or hideout upgrades, but overall you will lose progress whenever you die (lost equipment, lost quest items that you took into raid, cost of healing up, cost of getting new equipment etc). Void Bastards is the closest roguelite that is comparable to Tarkov. There are a lot of similarities there, but they’re also very different in many ways.

Not to mention the Tarkov we are can currently play (and what most likely will also be the final release) is also a very different game compared to what Nikita (game director) originally envisioned. What Nikita envisioned was something between the current Tarkov and STALKER games. Not in the mutants and anomalies way but in the way of how the maps connect and how you need to actually traverse “the world” to do the quests. If you’ve played Tarkov enough you know that the maps already connect, some extractions literally tell you how they connect to the other areas and you can see the same landmarks on different maps. But it’s becoming clearer that they’re not actually going to finalize the original vision, they’re going to make the ending and then push the game out the door.

I think it means the same thing sprinkled with some poor communication. In the article they’re adding that you can’t make a 4th game if it was supposed to be a trilogy.

Which means in the context of the story the “4th” game is a new game in the same universe.

What are you comparing it with?

I’m kinda inbetween but more on the side of not liking them. I mean I like the idea of them, but I don’t like how insular they are. You do things specific to the royalty DLC or you do things specific to the ideology DLC but you don’t do ideology things for royalty or vice versa. I would’ve loved to see to see greater integration of systems between the main game, ideology and royalty.

It’s also why I’m not that hyped about a new DLC, because it’s probably going to be another insular DLC.

Helldivers studio is about 100 people, they’re closer to indie than AAA.

They nerfed the strongest options (most of which I completely agree with) and then buffed 4 things that were either completely unusable (breaker spray and pray) or borderline unusable (Laser cannon, 120mm barrage and 380mm barrage). All of those are now usable but effectively useless in higher difficulty. The only weapon that got buffed that is useful in higher difficulty is the flamethrower, and my take is that it’s going to be the new “meta” weapon that they will eventually nerf because I think that is now stronger than the pre-nerf railgun. As for the nerfs, they primarily targeted gear people used to complete higher difficulties.

On paper it seems like they hit it from both sides, but in practice they made higher difficulties harder. And if you play with randos most of them struggled without even getting close to the highest difficulty, so natually people are annoyed.

I think the difference is that in this case nobody really expected it to hit that big. The developers definitely didn’t expect so many players, they’ve scaled up services, turned off auxiliary features to reduce load and still yesterday the player count was so high that at peak you couldn’t even log in. It’s a game suffering literally from success.

I literally can’t fathom sending a death threat. It would take an effort to come up with the content of the threat. And that assuming I’d be so angry that I’d decide to threaten someone. It’s just so much effort, first to get angry enough and then express that anger in the form of a threat and then find a way to send that threat to the outlet person.

It actually makes me sad for the people who send those threats, because their lives must be so incomprehensibly shit to actually go through with it. They’re still bags of dicks though.

Don’t be hyperbolic. New releases have issues and CS2 issues are nowhere near how horrible CSGO was when it released. It’s by no means the worst followup and the reason you lost CSGO is so you could get your skins to CS2. Would you have preferred if all your skins would’ve been left behind into CSGO? Most people wouldn’t.

Valve did good enough with CS2 which is why it’s making money and will continue to make money.

Personally I believe in supporting good games and practices, which is why I don’t buy Ubisoft games. I wouldn’t even pirate them because they haven’t made anything in the last decade that would even hit my radar.

Ubisoft would first have to make something actually interesting for me to even care about this shit.

Pretty much every BF since BC2 has had less destruction than BC2 and for good reason, flattening the entire map makes for very boring gameplay. IMO BF3 and BF4 hit the sweet spot of having enough destruction to have an impact while still maintaining some modicum of level design.

But now I don’t even play battlefield and I probably won’t return until the destruction is on par with the Finals.

These changes tend to be global because it’s cheaper to make the change for everyone than have two different designs and manufacturing (one for EU and other for the rest of the world). And more often than not EU is too big of a market to ignore.

These changes tend to be global because it’s cheaper to make the change for everyone than have two different designs and manufacturing (one for EU and other for the rest of the world). And more often than not EU is too big of a market to ignore.

I don’t really agree with the criticism of this review.

For instance saying that the teamwork is impeded because the heavies don’t have as many movement options and no movement gadgets. I don’t think so. If heavies had as much movement options as mediums then pretty much everyone would be playing heavy. Heavy is already exceptionally strong without needing to adopt a specific playstyle (for instance hit and run for light class) and Heavy movement options are nowhere as limited as the author makes is seem, you just need to be a bit more creative and have more map knowledge. As a heavy I can still move around pretty fast by knowing where the ziplines and jump pads are. And if they get destroyed I simply need to be a bit more creative. For instance if there’s a cashout at the top of the building and I don’t have a good way to get up there I just bring the entire building down. The only real weakness of the heavy are the moving platforms, but I’ve seen lights and mediums also struggle with them. There’s no other place on any map that the heavy can’t bring down or have an abundance of jump pads around that place. I’ve also kept goo nades as an option on the heavy because you can use them for movement and defense. Obviously the class is less mobile than medium or light, but not to the point where it would actually impede teamplay.

I do agree that the only really fleshed out gamemode is tournament mode, which can be a significant time commitment, but I don’t think quick cash is as inherently flawed as the author makes it out to be. You can’t just camp a cashout point and wait for the opponent to bring the box to you. There’s a clear benefit to getting the cash box that the author didn’t even mention. There’s always at least 2 cashout points on the map. By controlling the cash box you can choose which cashout point to use. For instance the location of the cashout point matters as well because if everyone on your team is using close range weapons and you start a cashout on an open field you’re just begging to lose that cashout, even one person using a close range weapon usually means the two other teammates have to pick up the slack defending the site. And if one team is camping a cashout point you can always go to the other one, wipe the other team and set up your defenses which then makes it harder for other teams to steal your cashout. Yes, the stakes are the highest at the last moments of cashout, when everyone is trying to take control of the cashout point, but the steps leading up to it can either give you incremental advantages or disadvantages. There’s also an ebb and flow to the match. The stakes are low at the start of the match but it grows and grows until it reaches the high point somewhere during the cashout and then it drops again when a new cash box appears. It gives players time to breathe and recollect

And finally I really don’t get the criticism of the presentation. The author literally says the game is lacking a distinctive identity and then continues to bring up clear design decisions that imply a distinct visual identity. I can understand saying it’s bland or boring or anything like that, but not that there’s no identity. The game is clearly inspired by modernism which at this day and age can feel pretty bland and boring and sterile and unimaginative. But that’s the identity. You don’t look at Mona Lisa and say “what’s the big deal, it’s just a portrait”. Well you can, but then nobody would take you seriously because you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Overall I think The Finals has much more depth to it, both in terms of gameplay and visual style, than what the author was able to see.

I probably played it for much longer than I should have. The main reason I stopped is the same you said, the latency is just too bad. It’s not always so bad and if the latency is low enough to be barely noticeable then there’s actually a somewhat fun game underneath it. But the issue is that 90% of the time the latency is noticeable and it makes the game feel extremely sluggish, if not completely broken.