Video Games: France not a WWI Nation

[Jace, Extat]

5 hours ago, Lyanna Stark said:

Come on now, Witcher 2 had loads of BEEWBS!!! 

 

Just had a discussion elsewhere of how I prefer the DA2 story telling to DA:Inq. I like DA:I, it's just not as I dunno, tight and edgy storytelling as in DA2? The sense of foreboding and doom in DA2 is so intense. There are moments like that in DA:I as well, like the Grey Warden campaign at the Western Approach which is just oooooooooh I get shivers. The Western Approach and the Hissing Wastes are just amazing environments as well.

That said, I don't know if it's Varric's more central role, or Hawke, or my in-game-love Anders that does it (Blondie <3 *sniff* ), but I just love the crap out of DA2. Unfortunately, the repetitive gameplay makes it meh for replay. DA:I is more challenging because it is so freaking big and takes sooo long to replay.

Anders is my moon and stars. I kinds like DA2 more than Inquisition myself. It's just a tight story and really compelling, warts and all. 

That said I also never finished Witcher 3 because I found the questing as tedious as DA:I with none of the story support.

[Lyanna Stark]

11 minutes ago, Pony Queen Jace said:

Anders is my moon and stars. I kinds like DA2 more than Inquisition myself. It's just a tight story and really compelling, warts and all. 

That said I also never finished Witcher 3 because I found the questing as tedious as DA:I with none of the story support.

Yay, another Anders fan! He is just the bestest. I have no idea how people do the rivalry romance with him tho. How could they do that to him?? 

It is kinda freaky when you end up in the Fade tho and realise you've been practically existing in a threesome for quite some time.  "Justice does not approve of my obsession with you". And he is soooooo emo. 

I guess that is why DA:I is not quite as engaging, since the characters are just not as complex and deep, in most cases. Dorian kinda comes close, I guess. Blackwall is just one, huge bad conscience. I never did try out the Solas romance (ELF HATRED!) but I understand it is a real tear jerker.

[MerenthaClone]

12 hours ago, Lyanna Stark said:

Meanie. That Mercy was probably me or someone like me. RIP! (Abeit I tend to stick to Zarya or Lucio more these days.)

Also, I can only Git Gud post 6 glasses of wine. This is massively unfair since I don't even drink that much and not that often.

I've spent all my time in Overwatch playing Zarya, Lucio, Mercy, and Roadhog while doing quickplay, so switching it up to Tracer was such a different experience.  Roadhog, by the way, is really solid in quickplay.  Zarya does best when there's another frontliner for her to shield, but finding a team that doesn't slam-pick Genji+Hanzo+Reaper is rough. Roadhog lets you pick off enemy supports, you can self-heal well, and because nobody in qp is on mics, you can ambush pretty well too.  I'm really liking him in solo queue'd quickplay while Zarya stays around for the games when there's a bit more coordination on my team. 

I just really want to see a double Lucio combination.  One just always heals, one always has speed up.  I think the passive benefits of both of them would utterly wreck something like a King of the Hill map, even knowing that your overall damage is down.  

e:  Can't wait to utterly fail at playing Ana effectively though!  She looks fun.  e2:  Actually the more I think about it, the more I get upset that her character is "awesome badass grandma" that I really want to play, but I am just bad at sniping in general.  Its been multiple years since I played shooters reliably enough to be any good at it at all, and even then I preferred automatics.  This is in comparison to an entire generation of people who played a ton of CS:Go, TF2, other sniping games, etc.  Why can't one of the Vuvalini be a character I'd be good at?  Woe!  Woe is me.  

W3 is still one of the best games of the last five years, hands down.  

 

[Fez]

3 minutes ago, Lyanna Stark said:

Yay, another Anders fan! He is just the bestest. I have no idea how people do the rivalry romance with him tho. How could they do that to him?? 

It is kinda freaky when you end up in the Fade tho and realise you've been practically existing in a threesome for quite some time.  "Justice does not approve of my obsession with you". And he is soooooo emo. 

I guess that is why DA:I is not quite as engaging, since the characters are just not as complex and deep, in most cases. Dorian kinda comes close, I guess. Blackwall is just one, huge bad conscience. I never did try out the Solas romance (ELF HATRED!) but I understand it is a real tear jerker.

Bleh, Anders. Dorian was great though; possibly the best DA character IMO, up there with DA2 Varric at least. Part of it at least was that I almost always play as a female PC in Bioware games, but only ever go for female/alien female relationships; and with Dorian there was no danger of accidentally triggering an unwanted romance option (which always seemed a bigger problem in Dragon Age than Mass Effect) so I could easily talk with him about everything. And what interesting things he had to say. Plus he seemed much better at filling the Garrus/'always by your side friend' role than Iron Bull, who I think was supposed to be the one doing that.

On the other hand, the female/female relationship options in DA:I are really lacking; especially compared to when I did do a male playthrough and romanced Cassandra. Although none of the DA games have been that good at that; or maybe I'm just still obsessed with Liara.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

So roughly how long will it take Pokemon Go to lead to a full scale gang war? 

[Jasta11]

36 minutes ago, briantw said:

One of the things I disliked most about Overwatch was all the abilities that stun other players.  I think those types of things make shooters very unfun.  You should never lose control of your character.  The sleep dart looks to be another step in that direction.

Agreed 100%. Being stunned in multiplayer games sucks across the board, but in FPS it's especially annoying since you're almost guaranteed to die then, so you just wait out the inevitable. At least in MOBAs you sometimes have a chance to survive since your characters tend to be tankier. 

It's just a mechanic that has no place in a FPS. Stuff like knockbacks and silences, yeah, but not stuns.

[Jace, Extat]

4 hours ago, Lyanna Stark said:

Yay, another Anders fan! He is just the bestest. I have no idea how people do the rivalry romance with him tho. How could they do that to him?? 

It is kinda freaky when you end up in the Fade tho and realise you've been practically existing in a threesome for quite some time.  "Justice does not approve of my obsession with you". And he is soooooo emo. 

I guess that is why DA:I is not quite as engaging, since the characters are just not as complex and deep, in most cases. Dorian kinda comes close, I guess. Blackwall is just one, huge bad conscience. I never did try out the Solas romance (ELF HATRED!) but I understand it is a real tear jerker.

Yeah, DA:I puts forth a noble effort, but my Iron Bull + Cassandra + Dorian party pales in comparison to ridin' dirty with Anders + Varric + Fenris. We fucked the same 10 dudes up in the same 10 rooms for over a decade. Gods, how we lived though!

That said no Dragon Age roster measures up to the likes of Kreia, Atton Rand, HK-47, Mandalore or Carth Onasi, Bastilla Shan, Jolee Bindo, Canderous Ordo and HK-47. And all of them pale in comparison to my one true love Garrus Vakarian.

[MerenthaClone]

They said elsewhere that any damage at all cancels Ana's sleep dart though, so while its a stun that can set you up for big damage, its not something that lets you get utterly pounded while you can't do anything.  And with all the AoEs that get tossed around, I think its very likely that most of the time you'll get a very minimal amount of stun-time from each dart because your teammates will keep waking up your sleep target early.  It might be really obnoxious, but I don't think it'll be as bad as people think.  

It certainly won't beat Mei for terms of obnoxiousness, who is just hilarious.  I love her, both playing against and as.  

[Fez]

35 minutes ago, MerenthaClone said:

I just really want to see a double Lucio combination.  One just always heals, one always has speed up.  I think the passive benefits of both of them would utterly wreck something like a King of the Hill map, even knowing that your overall damage is down.  

Apparently in the pro tournament scene, the far-and-away dominant team comp for King of the Hill maps is double Lucio, double Tracer, double Winston. The pros seem to value mobility above any other trait (probably since all of them have such good aim that can all easily do enough damage to kill anyone) and nothing is more mobile than speedboosted Lucios and Tracers while Winston is jumping around (and Winston is basically the only one that can kill the other team's Lucios and Tracers; someone like Symmetra could too; except she'd die too fast). 

[KiDisaster]

Ana looks so cool but I'm way too bad at sniping to ever play her  

[DunderMifflin]

8 hours ago, Fez said:

I suspect I'm with you, but I never actually played Witcher 3; so I can't have a valid opinion on this. I absolutely hated Witcher 2 though.

Don't get me wrong Witcher 3 is an incredibly great game.

I just have a hard time with why the word on the street is that DA:I is vastly inferior. I thought it was a bit better than W3

[Talleyrand]

2 hours ago, Pony Queen Jace said:

Anders is my moon and stars. I kinds like DA2 more than Inquisition myself. It's just a tight story and really compelling, warts and all.

I think I preferred DA2 up until the third act - given the abundance of fantasy games and general stories about world threatening apocalypses and wars I was quite enjoying the story of a refugee just trying to get rich and survive, followed by a local conflict that got solved in the night. But then third act went all out with world wide magic war and bombings.

Also Anders got a stabbin, I liked him and Justice better when there was two of them - plus Paul Atredies asked me to do it. 

[MerenthaClone]

13 minutes ago, KiDisaster said:

Ana looks so cool but I'm way too bad at sniping to ever play her  

For what its worth, it looks like she can't headshot so as long as you can reliably land bodyshots you should be okay.  She also doesn't get mobility options like wall-climb or a grappling hook so you'll have to be close-ish to your allies.  She looks like she'd pair really well with S76 or Roadhog, and I trust that basically everyone can hit the giant slab of meat that is Roadhog with a hitscan projectile.    

She's playable on the test server thingie, btw.  I hope she comes out soon, she's looking more and more like someone I might actually be able to play well as.  

[Kalbear]

Ana is the character that makes me want to play Overwatch. An older Egyptian mother who snipes and heals? Awesome. 

[Fez]

6 minutes ago, MerenthaClone said:

For what its worth, it looks like she can't headshot so as long as you can reliably land bodyshots you should be okay.  She also doesn't get mobility options like wall-climb or a grappling hook so you'll have to be close-ish to your allies.  She looks like she'd pair really well with S76 or Roadhog, and I trust that basically everyone can hit the giant slab of meat that is Roadhog with a hitscan projectile.    

She's playable on the test server thingie, btw.  I hope she comes out soon, she's looking more and more like someone I might actually be able to play well as.  

There's a pretty massive list of patch notes on the test server beyond just Ana now being available. Changes to make overtime faster, implementing a 1-hero limit for competitive play, the long-gestating D.Va buff (something about her defense matrix, and her ult explodes faster and no longer damages her), a bunch of buffs to Zenyatta, a tiny McCree buff, a few Mercy buffs but also slowing down how fast her ult charges, and self-healing will now charge ults so they increased the ult cost for the characters who can self-heal (76, Bastion, Roadhog, Lucio)

It doesn't seem like it'll address the lingering bugs in competitive play; but maybe they'll just hotfix that as soon as they finally figure out the problem.

[briantw]

1 hour ago, Jasta11 said:

Agreed 100%. Being stunned in multiplayer games sucks across the board, but in FPS it's especially annoying since you're almost guaranteed to die then, so you just wait out the inevitable. At least in MOBAs you sometimes have a chance to survive since your characters tend to be tankier. 

It's just a mechanic that has no place in a FPS. Stuff like knockbacks and silences, yeah, but not stuns.

Yup, I remember when TF2 introduced the Sandman and there was widespread backlash because it basically made the Scout super powerful.  He could even stun ubered players.  That all got patched out to the point where it's damn near impossible to actually stun someone with the Sandman to the point where they can't move at all.  Now it makes it so you can't use a weapon for a short time but you can still move around, so it's not entirely game-breaking.  Plus you have less health, which is a big trade-off for the class that has the least health to start with.

[RumHam]

8 minutes ago, Fez said:

 the long-gestating D.Va buff (something about her defense matrix, and her ult explodes faster and no longer damages her)

I'm excited to try her out again when this finally hits consoles. She's a pretty shitty tank as is. Making the defense matrix more flexible (I understand there's a charge bar now instead of a hard cooldown) might really help. I feel like it's going to take a fair amount of skill though to time when to throw it up and for how long. I still don't see myself getting many kills with her ultimate even if it does explode a second faster. But maybe I'm wrong.

[Fez]

So, uh, this is one of Ana's legendary skins and one of her voice lines is 'Witness Me!'

Guess I am gonna have to learn how to snipe.

[Rhom]

13 hours ago, Fez said:

So, uh, this is one of Ana's legendary skins and one of her voice lines is 'Witness Me!'

Guess I am gonna have to learn how to snipe.

 

[Lyanna Stark]

22 hours ago, Dickwad Poster #3784 said:

Ana is the character that makes me want to play Overwatch. An older Egyptian mother who snipes and heals? Awesome. 

I know, she looks awesome too. Only thing makes me sad is that I, along with a lot of other people, are shite at sniping.   I already suffer from being terribad at shooting stuff so. Perhaps if I am to heal like a Rheinhardt or a Roadhog, but trying to hit a tracer or something? Not in a bazillion years no.