Luseth

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.

I think I am similar to James in that none really stand out apart from the god awful firestorm map, why they thought that was the one to bring back I have no idea and I think they really missed a trick in that they should have made the central tower fully destructable. I think I lean towards the siege of Cairo as my current favourite as the destruction is really good and there is plenty on that map. On the point above I thought they had said they were already exploring naval maps or have them in mind for future release? I will say if you compare them to maps in BF1 or V I think they still have a way to go with this game and you can certainly feel the COD elements that have been brought over with the current people in the design process, not necassarily to the benefit of the game either.

So I am giving this thread a nudge because spotify are increasing their price again, this is happening a lot with a lot of the streaming services at the moment, regular price increases and I don't think it will be long before we are being asked to pay £20 a month for music streaming. At what point does it begin to become unviable for the average person? I could afford a number of subscriptions however I am at the point now where I am regining them back in because if I enjoy and rely on them too much now then in 10 years time it may be a whole lot more difficult to draw myself back when prices are higher. So how many subscriptions do people have? Do you limit them to games or do you have games, music, multiple tv subscriptions too?

Ah legend! Thank you very much!

It looks great but again another remake / remaster and honestly I am a bit sick of it ^_^ So many triple A game's these day's are just remakes or remasters and for some reason everyone is happy to keep rebuying the same games and if this is the future of triple A gaming there is really going to be a point where it all comes crashing down. Indie games seem to get things so right these day's it's a wonder that any major studio keep's managing to turn out a profit.

I enjoyed the first game, will pick this up as well at some point but I'm not sure when. Maybe will have to ask the missus for it as a christmas gift or something ^_^

I don't suppose this is still going is it Phil? Be a good game to play on my steamdeck if so ^_^

I have watched a couple of videos and people are actually saying good things about it with particular praise on the combat I am still leaning towards picking it up as I want a sizeable RPG to play. A lot of the issues are that it's nothing like the original, but in all fairness the original came out so long ago any sequal was going to be very different from the original.

I did give it a try and if you like tarkov I think you will quite enjoy this as it has the same sort of atmospheric vibe, it's great visually. Think my only downside is that the game is played in raids as far as I can see so you sort of start at a hub, buy things, craft things etc and then move into a round, find a load of stuff and leave again. The gameplay is great and some of the bots are genuinely scary to come up against.