Luseth

Hi, what sort of games are you into? And what platform are you on? We mostly play PS but there is some variety here and gamewise I think there are probably 4 or 5 mainstay games at the moment

So I realise I have not posted on this since completing it. I just wanted to say this is a brilliant game and a real gem so I advise not sleeping on it. I must admit I did not get the platinum, whether I will one day or not I don't know, I find myself not enjoying the trophy grind at the moment and just want to enjoy the games how I play them. On the game though, it is incredibly atmospheric, the audio and visuals are great and especially as you come to the end the story comes together really well. Just to echo James' point above the game is streamlined and well made, the story flows nicely and there isn't a load of filler, when you compare this to the Final Fantasy VII remake for example you sit there and wonder why they put half the crap in the remakes, why not lower the price, put less crap in and draw a bigger audience.

So I watched the latest season, I appreciate they have deviated from the books and all that but as someone who really enjoys the Witcher universe I still found some enjoyment in the series. I appreciate the need to be true to source material and all that but sometimes you can still enjoy something, a new take or perspective of something if you view it as something new or different. It will be a similar conversation happening with the Harry Potter series when it comes out, when you do enjoy something then watching someone change or alter it can be difficult. It is the same at work, I produce a design and if someone then tries to do something different from it or someone asks me to change it to accomodate them I can get a little precious of it. But yeah just wanted to say the latest series was alright, not dreadful and not world shattering but I did think they did a decent job of the battle on the Yaruga bridge.

I think that is why we have seen things turn a tide in recent weeks, all of a sudden trios has become a bit of a pvp fest because that is all there is really to end game. People have made a game of fighting each other in it but with stats not being tracked and things not being unlocked I do wonder for how much longer they will persist with the game or will we soon see them all drift away.

Trios seems to have descended completely into pvp now, it's not often we don't come across players looking to kill you which is a shame, it makes it a whole different game than playing solos but also makes it more difficult if we want to go after certain machines as a group. I also have only found 1 or 2 blueprints, seems some people have a fair few, is there anywhere in particular to go looking for them?

Will get you added, what are you playing on? We had Greboth and Crispy on last night for the first time too so we have a few newer players which is good.

I think it will get game time but it has come out at a time where there are quite a few new games coming out and a some tough competition, notably Arc Raiders which has took off really well. It is going to struggle to keep the momentum going with a map here and there that have been let's be honest are pretty crap. If that is what they are releasing at this point when they still have a sizeable workforce on the game then just think of the dregs we will be getting in a month or so. Worse still is they are just sections of the Redsec map which show's where yet again they put most of their energy towards and yet again it won't take off for them, you think they would have learned after last time. Battlefield will never be a battle royale.

Tagging @GazzaGarratt as I want to talk about how people are playing this. Lee frustrated the hell out of me last night being completely unaware of his surroundings and going for loot first which in one round led to us being shot at by other players & me getting stamped on by a leaper. I very much play this game cautiously, being fully aware of what is going on in and around where I am exploring first and then I will try to find what I jumped into a game for whatever item or quest that may be. I am almost always turning my camera looking in the sky, listening out for the machines as what can being as one machine catching you out can very quickly due to the noise of combat draw in others and result in you being quickly overrun. To me that is great as the danger is there and every encounter can quickly go South. My frustration with you Lee last night was that you were busy looting when @LordBaguette had just said a couple of times that he was being shot at by raiders, at that point for me it turns the game from a looter into a survival PvP game. That flicks a switch in my head and suddenly you should be playing the game differently and on trios you need your squad otherwise you quickly get overrun but I have a vivid image of you being quite exposed, looting a vehicle with your back to the direction the gunfire was coming from. There is no point picking up loot to be shot in the back because you won't then be extracting with it anyway! I think what it taught me last night is that even when you are part of a squad, don't expect your squad to have your back and going forwards if there are enemies I will be getting into cover or getting out of there and potentially leaving Lee with all his loot to fend for himself. 😄 And we won't get into the fact we had a bombarder right next to us at the church destroying everyone, Lee decides to ignore it and climb up the church anyway to complete his objective not really knowing what he was doing or looking for and Tom decided to attack & kill one of the raiders who were being friendly and fighting it. Only for a few minutes later for said raider to kill him whilst he was reviving Lee who had fallen from the church because he was too fekkin impatient to wait for us to deal with the bombarder first!

This is a much bigger discussion here and you can't just limit this to the gaming industry, then it becomes a question of where does it stop. We all know that 'ai is coming for our jobs', this is literally happening as is evidenced by these calling cards and such. But then if you do it here you have to do it in all industries and then all these big companies and rich people will fight back and before you know it we have some bigger issue being discussed that is not actually dealing with the problem like what happened with Brexit We either embrace AI as a society which means we ensure that everyone has an income or home, food, water security first and then hopefully find roles for people in an AI predominant world or we need to be incredibly strict and limited with AI so that never really fully get's to where it can do. What in reality will happen in my view is the first point won't happen because rich people wouldn't want to be paying in their fair share of tax to support non-rich people and no limits will be placed on AI, as to where we end up then is anyone's guess.

I had not watched a film for a while but sat down and watched the greatest showman with my wife yesterday, I kind of enjoyed it more than I thought I would to be honest.

I feel like the PS3 may die trying to play Arc Raiders tbh. On a serious note I am on PS5 however I plan to be on with some mates this evening and they are on pc, it's easy enough to squad up and get discord working.

I have played a few solo runs and quite enjoying it, the PvP will nark me I think but we will see. For now though I have just been pottering about doing my missions and picking up anything not nailed down! It looks great and the maps are good. Every moment you come across a player can be tense, almost mexican standoff esque until someone does something as you have no idea who you can trust and who you can't.

@GazzaGarratt asked me last night what it was I am disliking about the game at the moment and I had a think about it after I came off last night and I have swung towards the same thinking as you. The maps are just bad. The things I picked out about them:- - The maps just feel very chaotic and without any real structure to them, in some instances you can have snipers shooting people in spawn sat up on a mountain, in others you can have tanks not even leaving their spawn and being able to take out people across the whole map. - Moving from one objective point to another generally see's you having to run across open spaces leaving you completely exposed to anyone sitting around waiting for you. - A number of the maps have high rise buildings that you can only reach the top via flying over in a helicopter and ditching it. Now I am no builder or architect but I don't recall many buildings in the world where they have been built without fekking stairs to the top! So many times I have been killed on this battlefield game by people sitting on top of a point that is not reachable by any means so unless you snipe back you can not counter them. Before Lee say's it, camping by snipers has always been in Battlefield but there has always been a way to fight back i.e. cover to sprint between to get to the sniper and such. Unfortunately we can't scale walls in this one. Even on the smaller skyscrapers you find there are sometimes no route up which to me is a futile attempt to make the assault class worth playing with it's ladders. - The maps are smaller than historically, operation firestorm compared to almost every other map demonstrates this. Then the space within the maps is not utilised well at all. Think of all the routes through from one side of the map to the other on Cairo for example, there are no choke points or tactical routes which removes any tactical element of the map. - Then where we have bigger maps they are far too open and all of the objectives seem to be placed centrally leaving swathes of the map empty. - The new oilfields map is atrocious, it's like someone created an empty map, put some ridges in and then dropped in random geometry from the generic battlefield library and that's what we got. There are genuinely way better maps already in the community area. - Spawns are dreadful, the number of times I spawned on a point yesterday and I was being shot before I even moved anywhere. Oh on the game play side of it (we should just have 1 thread on this game) has anyone noticed that when you move from one lobby to another you can sometimes find yourself spawn in and start playing but other times you spawn in and the opposite team have already captured the first 2 bases before your side really get going? Like they load a number of players into the lobby at a time or something?

Saturday should be do-able, Sunday is a no go as it is my wife's birthday. I will jump in the game room about 8ish tomorrow once kids are in bed then 🙂

You are right, putting that up as a straight snip does not show so well so I will put it in the post manually how we did 🙂

I ended up picking this up @phil bottle if you are around at any point to jump on. I think it is really atmospheric and looks really good too. Did a couple of missions on my own and extracted with a bunch of gear and started building up my benches. Then played one with @GazzaGarratt & @Macca89 and Lee decided to take some walker thing on, some snitches etc after looting all the boxes so Macca had no loot to grab, we all lost our health to it then got took out by enemy players. I think my limited experience with Lee suggests he is not suited to the slower pace of these games and that you don't need to keep running off everywhere.

It is yes, this been around a while then? It takes stats from EA’s own pro clubs website so you could go direct too if you wanted It does, I just clipped a few stats from there, there are other breakdowns on there as well such as your win percentage playing for the club and such.

So I got chatting with a new guy at work today and it turns out he plays quite a lot of clubs (in much better teams than us) however he has made me aware of a new website and I thought I would extract some bits off it from last night's session:- So for those wondering how we got on:- 10 games played, we won 7 and lost 3 so definately one of our better nights! & then one for @DrCasket at the end:-

So I have been looking at these, I think it is difficult to say if the price is wrong or right as similar to the PC market there is such a wide range of price points based on the hardware and specs. The base model puts it similar to the OLED steamdeck and looking at reviews performance wise I don't believe they are too far apart. Where you lose out with the screen though the screen is still meant to be decent but you then get access to all gaming librarys a bit easier and game pass which is a lot trickier with the steam deck. The more expensive model comes in a little more affordable than the premium options such as the Legion Go 2 and the onexplayer and such. It has reviewed quite well and the Xbox ally X is an improvement on the Rog ally X that it was built upon. However the limiting factor seems to be the OS still, it's windows and it is just not optimised well enough. I am planning to upgrade my steamdeck (my brother is having it) and have my sights on the Lenovo Legion Go S. It is comparable to the base Xbox Ally specwise but performs much much better and by all accounts it is just down to the Steam OS and it's optimisation of games and such.

I think part of that is the spawns as well, I don't know if you have noticed but if you are capturing a base and people spawn in on said base they almost always spawn behind you. I think this is about trying to keep everything happening at a fast pace for players, you know the ADHD aspect of COD.

Yes sorry. Yes it is a bad thing, progression for this series should have been smarter maps, more tactical gameplay, improve upon the building elements of BFV, improving the destruction (which they have but the battle royale show's it could have gone further), develop naval warfare. They had to do it with BFV as well when they first attempted battle royale, this is becoming a recurring theme now and if it happens a third time around and is not successful then I know a few people who won't return to the series. This is CODafield currently and that's fine if that is the direction they go in and it works, but as you say if those COD fans go straight back to COD when it is realeased it will be all for nothing and will have further alienated the fan base that has kept this series going.

I think this show's your limited experience of COD, I can't believe it but I am agreeing with James twice in one day, it is the pacing. The game wants you in constant fire fights and does not appreciate there is gameplay in a slower gameplay style, looking for ways to flank the enemy or sneak around to objectives on the other side of the map adding a tactical element into the game. There have been a few times we have gone to take the base closest enemy HQ but to get there you have to essentially run through the main pathways of the map. On other battlefield games you saw it more in that you would get certain vehicles associated with a point, so say the team that captured point C would get an extra chopper or plane or tank for example. This game is much more COD than I think you realise, in fact I would say this is COD ground war moreso than old battlefield. Yes the gameplay is COD esque but that's not necassarily terrible, however most guns are like lasers, the guns don't feel weighty and there is no skill required i.e. trying to allow for recoil or bullet drop. The range finder as we were discussing last night is mad the way it basically makes it a piece of piss to hit a target with. I am enjoying it to some extent but whether it will have the longevity in it I am not sure, it will really depend on the maps.

I don't think it being a WoW alternative was the issue, I think it's as James mentioned above that it has lacked a true roadmap with ideas for it's future since launch. My favourite WoW alternative was Guild Wars, though I have not been back to it in some time that still continues going and has just released new DLC, similarly Final Fantasy 14 still does quite well amongst others. It is no different to most games albeit more extreme, it is more important than COD and the like to keep these sort's of games feeling fresh. I think it's a shame, I did play it and there were some good ideas in there but as you get further into the game it get's a bit repetitive and the end game was somewhat lacking.

I have not picked it up yet as I can't afford it and with other games I want at the moment it is not my priority. From the recent beta I experienced the missions are simple, go in collect something, destory a certain number of bots and collect components from them and that sort of thing. I did not see any 'bosses' as such but then again I was not very far into the game and only did a handful of the early missions really.