Video Games: France not a WWI Nation

[Corvinus85]

23 minutes ago, KiDisaster said:

I don't think so. The one they added later was the "SO BE IT" ending if you shoot the small child deity thing. 

What shoot the child deity option? The only one I am aware of that was added due to the outrage was the green option, the synthetic-organic combination, in the extended edition. And I'm not sure if the survival one was put there too, or it was always there provided you met the requirements.

[KiDisaster]

29 minutes ago, Corvinus said:

What shoot the child deity option? The only one I am aware of that was added due to the outrage was the green option, the synthetic-organic combination, in the extended edition. And I'm not sure if the survival one was put there too, or it was always there provided you met the requirements.

I'm pretty sure the synthesis option was in the base game. You had three choices, Red (destroy), Blue (control) or Green (synthesize) and then the "Shepherd takes a breath" bonus scene was always there so long as you met the requirements (have a high enough war score & choose red at the end). 

The extended cut added a fourth option to the multiple choice question at the end. If you turn and shoot the little boy AI thinger with your pistol he says "SO BE IT...THE CYCLE CONTINUES" or something like that and then the camera pans out and it's over. It also added extra dialogue options with him at the end so he actually explains the three choices in more detail and a couple extra cut scene snippets. That was it as far as I know. 

[Fez]

KiDisaster has the right of it.

They did patch to make it easier to get Shepard living through the Destroy ending though. At release you needed nearly all the war assets, not sure of the exact number, and maxed out your readiness percentage at 100% through the multiplayer stuff.

[briantw]

29 minutes ago, Fez said:

KiDisaster has the right of it.

They did patch to make it easier to get Shepard living through the Destroy ending though. At release you needed nearly all the war assets, not sure of the exact number, and maxed out your readiness percentage at 100% through the multiplayer stuff.

I guess the issue was that Shepherd living or dying was never really the problem with the ending.  The problem was that it was just godawful in about every respect and made the collection of war assets during the game (which was the goal for literally the entire game) basically pointless.

I never cared if Shepherd lived or died.  I just wanted a suitably badass giant battle to experience to wrap up a pretty great action/RPG series that, let's be honest, veered much, much more toward action in the second and third games.

[Werthead]

32 minutes ago, Fez said:

KiDisaster has the right of it.

They did patch to make it easier to get Shepard living through the Destroy ending though. At release you needed nearly all the war assets, not sure of the exact number, and maxed out your readiness percentage at 100% through the multiplayer stuff.

That's not quite right. You could do it without the multiplayer but it was a titanic order. You needed the war assets rammed up to maximum and you needed to basically make the best possible choice at every single point throughout not just that game, but the whole trilogy.

[Rhom]

On ‎7‎/‎20‎/‎2016 at 10:50 AM, KiDisaster said:

Been messing about with WoW again. Got the old itch thanks to the xpac coming out next month. The pre-patch went live yesterday and I was playing my Warlock. The Destro spec hasn't really changed all that much. Pretty much the same rotation I was using before. Grimoire of Supremacy is the only major change in terms of talents, instead of upgrading the standard demons you can have either an Infernal or a Terrorguard as a permanent companion. I've been rolling with the Infernal because the new model for them is AWESOME and he holds aggro better than the other guy. 

The new cinematic is cool. Sylvanas has put some clothes on finally which is a nice change. Totally shipping her and Varian now. But the opening of the two airships crash landing in the new zone seems way too similar to Pandaria  

They made some weird changes. Honor is no longer a currency (when you log in you get a piece of mail with gold in exchange for your honor, 35 silver per point I think it was), Glyphs are no longer a thing (I'm kinda happy with that, they were annoying), party/raid wide buffs are no longer a thing, and now if you want to hide your helm or cloak you have to go to a damn transmogger instead of just enabling the option in the menu! So annoying. Transmog items being made into an account wide collection is really nice though, no more BOP epics and blues taking up space in bank tabs. 

Also I've been messing around with pet battles for the first time. Playing Pokemon with my Baby Winston pet and kicking squirrels' asses is cool. 

 

18 hours ago, Jasta11 said:

Been coming back into XCOM 2 with a few mods, notably the Long War perk and laser packs as well as A Better Advent which adds a slew of enemy variants, and other mods which add Dark Events and mission types. And I'm enjoying it a lot, playing on Legend without Ironman. The mods add some difficulty so I have something like 7 dead soldiers so far, but the mission packs adds some missions that hand you extra soldiers that you can take home if they survive; to balance that, said missions are freaking hard so you usually have to use them as plasma fodder. The patches have also improved the performance quite a bit, it's far less choppy than it used to be.

Also went back to World of Warcraft because the new xpack is coming and I can now pay the sub fee with gold. Gotta say, I love what they did with Fury warriors. It's less about waiting for procs and crits and more about slashing and chopping everything in sight until you can slash and chop even harder. You feel like a meatgrinder, which is exactly my idea of WoW Warriors. I also tested out and liked the new Fire mage and Survival hunter, as well as the cool new transmogrification system. Once change I don't like is that we can't change talents on the fly as before, you need an item to do so now. Why Blizzard, why.

I had a friend that was going to kick back up with WoW a couple months ago, so I fell victim to the itch as well.  Got on this week after the big pre-xpac patch and gotta say... I'm disappointed to see just how much farther they've taken the simplification.  My prot warrior doesn't even have stances at all anymore.  I would say that I probably had more abilities at level 40 in vanilla than I do at level 100.

The removal of stances hits me especially hard, because it ties in so much with one of my greatest memories in gaming.  Early in my guild's progression through MC and BWL I was the third dedicated prot warrior tank.  We had been working on Nefarion (last boss of Blackwing Lair for those not familiar) for a couple of weeks.  On our first ever Nef victory, our main tank took a fear that made him lose aggro.  I grabbed the dragon and turned it from the raid before it had a chance to breathe all over the squishies.  We were at about 60% boss health.  I had clear control.  We had two dwarf priests (back in the day when only dwarf priests had fear ward) and everything went smoothly.  Something went wonky along the way and one of the priests died.  At about 20%, the other dwarf goes down.   From 20 to 0 was the most intense experience of my gaming life.  The mechanic was that the dragon would stomp the ground (screen would shake) and about a second later the anyone within melee range essentially would be feared.  If the main tank was feared, the dragon would turn and breathe on whoever still had aggro and likely kill enough people to wipe.  Without a fear ward, the only way to avoid that was to change from defensive stance to berserker stance and then pop berserker rage (which granted fear immunity) and then get back in defensive stance before you took a physical damage spike in that one second window between the screen shaking and the fear clearing aggro and the raid dieing, I had to be flawless in making those switches. The 5 or 6 minutes that it took to burn through that last 20% was edge of the seat flying for me and felt like an eternity.  My heart was racing and I didn't want to screw up.  When that dragon dropped and I heard 40 people yelling and cheering in Vent, it was an amazing high.

Ahhhhh memories...

Apparently, Berserker Rage has been available in defensive stance for a while now; so the mechanic itself has been nil for a bit... but to see that the different stances are gone entirely was like seeing part of my favorite memory get wiped away.   

I do like how they have the Transmog set up and how they have given you access to the model of every quest item you have ever had.  I can't transmog to look like my Thunderfury (legendaries aren't available in transmog) and my Quel'Serrar had been lost to an account hack that DE'd much of my bank years ago.  To have the model back as an option for me at least was a good thing.  I do agree that its a shame that you can't just show/hide the helm with ease anymore.  

The game still feels empty though and I don't ever really feel like I'm in a MMO anymore.

[Corvinus85]

43 minutes ago, KiDisaster said:

The extended cut added a fourth option to the multiple choice question at the end. If you turn and shoot the little boy AI thinger with your pistol he says "SO BE IT...THE CYCLE CONTINUES" or something like that and then the camera pans out and it's over. It also added extra dialogue options with him at the end so he actually explains the three choices in more detail and a couple extra cut scene snippets. That was it as far as I know. 

WHAT THE FUCK? I never knew about this. I've played the game at least three times to completion, and never once did I think about shooting the most annoying child character in video games. Yet on the other hand I gleefully try to murder the children in Skyrim. 

Time to play ME again.

[Jasta11]

1 hour ago, Rhom said:

 

I had a friend that was going to kick back up with WoW a couple months ago, so I fell victim to the itch as well.  Got on this week after the big pre-xpac patch and gotta say... I'm disappointed to see just how much farther they've taken the simplification.  My prot warrior doesn't even have stances at all anymore.  I would say that I probably had more abilities at level 40 in vanilla than I do at level 100.

The removal of stances hits me especially hard, because it ties in so much with one of my greatest memories in gaming.  Early in my guild's progression through MC and BWL I was the third dedicated prot warrior tank.  We had been working on Nefarion (last boss of Blackwing Lair for those not familiar) for a couple of weeks.  On our first ever Nef victory, our main tank took a fear that made him lose aggro.  I grabbed the dragon and turned it from the raid before it had a chance to breathe all over the squishies.  We were at about 60% boss health.  I had clear control.  We had two dwarf priests (back in the day when only dwarf priests had fear ward) and everything went smoothly.  Something went wonky along the way and one of the priests died.  At about 20%, the other dwarf goes down.   From 20 to 0 was the most intense experience of my gaming life.  The mechanic was that the dragon would stomp the ground (screen would shake) and about a second later the anyone within melee range essentially would be feared.  If the main tank was feared, the dragon would turn and breathe on whoever still had aggro and likely kill enough people to wipe.  Without a fear ward, the only way to avoid that was to change from defensive stance to berserker stance and then pop berserker rage (which granted fear immunity) and then get back in defensive stance before you took a physical damage spike in that one second window between the screen shaking and the fear clearing aggro and the raid dieing, I had to be flawless in making those switches. The 5 or 6 minutes that it took to burn through that last 20% was edge of the seat flying for me and felt like an eternity.  My heart was racing and I didn't want to screw up.  When that dragon dropped and I heard 40 people yelling and cheering in Vent, it was an amazing high.

Ahhhhh memories...

Apparently, Berserker Rage has been available in defensive stance for a while now; so the mechanic itself has been nil for a bit... but to see that the different stances are gone entirely was like seeing part of my favorite memory get wiped away.   

I do like how they have the Transmog set up and how they have given you access to the model of every quest item you have ever had.  I can't transmog to look like my Thunderfury (legendaries aren't available in transmog) and my Quel'Serrar had been lost to an account hack that DE'd much of my bank years ago.  To have the model back as an option for me at least was a good thing.  I do agree that its a shame that you can't just show/hide the helm with ease anymore.  

The game still feels empty though and I don't ever really feel like I'm in a MMO anymore.

 

I was really not sorry to see the stance dance go myself, as a warrior main. It just added hassle in most cases. But then again I started playing in late Cataclysm and didn't actually hit max level and start raiding until Siege of Orgrimmar. You could have farmed the Quel'Serrar again, it's a drop off Onyxia now by the way.

Personally, I really like the Prot warrior. Bad ones get splattered, good ones maintain Ignore Pain for a very long time and enjoy that 90% damage reduction. It seems that Blizzard simplified most specs, but at the same time made them not that easy to master. You always see people complaining about how casual the game gets in regards to specs, yet you have people who always manage to do much more DPS than others, while handling mechanics no less, at equivalent gear level, or tanks that constantly die while the other barely ever goes below 75% HP. To me that clearly says the game is nowhere near as simple as it appears, anyone can pick up most specs but mastering them in a raid environment is much harder than that.

[Fez]

2 hours ago, briantw said:

I guess the issue was that Shepherd living or dying was never really the problem with the ending.  The problem was that it was just godawful in about every respect and made the collection of war assets during the game (which was the goal for literally the entire game) basically pointless.

I never cared if Shepherd lived or died.  I just wanted a suitably badass giant battle to experience to wrap up a pretty great action/RPG series that, let's be honest, veered much, much more toward action in the second and third games.

I agree. But all things considered, including how otherwise shitty all the endings were, I'd rather have Shepherd live than not.

[Rhom]

1 hour ago, Jasta11 said:

 

I was really not sorry to see the stance dance go myself, as a warrior main. It just added hassle in most cases. But then again I started playing in late Cataclysm and didn't actually hit max level and start raiding until Siege of Orgrimmar. You could have farmed the Quel'Serrar again, it's a drop off Onyxia now by the way.

Personally, I really like the Prot warrior. Bad ones get splattered, good ones maintain Ignore Pain for a very long time and enjoy that 90% damage reduction. It seems that Blizzard simplified most specs, but at the same time made them not that easy to master. You always see people complaining about how casual the game gets in regards to specs, yet you have people who always manage to do much more DPS than others, while handling mechanics no less, at equivalent gear level, or tanks that constantly die while the other barely ever goes below 75% HP. To me that clearly says the game is nowhere near as simple as it appears, anyone can pick up most specs but mastering them in a raid environment is much harder than that.

Fair enough.  I don't have time to raid anymore, so the higher level mechanics aren't something I'm as familiar with.

I discovered to my great dismay today that in order to unlock an appearance, the character must be able to equip the item.  I've been wanting to get the Pally dress for a horde pally on another server and my very first Alliance character who I never did raid with.  Thinking unlocks were account wide and such, I ran MC first with my warrior.  (Takes me about 14 minutes from zone in to Rag kill... not a bad walk now.)  Judgement Plates drop.  I'm excited.  I log into the cow pally and don't see the transmog option.  The alliance pally isn't near a transmog option, so I log into a mage in Stormwind instead to see if the Arcanist gear that also dropped was available.  It wasn't...

Was a little bummed out.

[Jasta11]

26 minutes ago, Rhom said:

Fair enough.  I don't have time to raid anymore, so the higher level mechanics aren't something I'm as familiar with.

I discovered to my great dismay today that in order to unlock an appearance, the character must be able to equip the item.  I've been wanting to get the Pally dress for a horde pally on another server and my very first Alliance character who I never did raid with.  Thinking unlocks were account wide and such, I ran MC first with my warrior.  (Takes me about 14 minutes from zone in to Rag kill... not a bad walk now.)  Judgement Plates drop.  I'm excited.  I log into the cow pally and don't see the transmog option.  The alliance pally isn't near a transmog option, so I log into a mage in Stormwind instead to see if the Arcanist gear that also dropped was available.  It wasn't...

Was a little bummed out.

 

Yeah, I presume they did that to make it more ''fair'', or else a warrior would be able to learn pretty much al lthe weapon xmogs while clothies sit there only getting staves and wands.

It is, of course, also a way to pad content and keep you subbed, but I have no illusions. The entire game is based around that, it's why we have weekly lockouts (amongst other things) in the first place.

The system is still miles ahead of the old one if you have several classes using one armor type. My upcoming Death Knight will be able to use all the non-class item sets I have accumulated for my warrior, as wel las any weapons, that's pretty cool.

[Rhom]

16 minutes ago, Jasta11 said:

 

Yeah, I presume they did that to make it more ''fair'', or else a warrior would be able to learn pretty much al lthe weapon xmogs while clothies sit there only getting staves and wands.

It is, of course, also a way to pad content and keep you subbed, but I have no illusions. The entire game is based around that, it's why we have weekly lockouts (amongst other things) in the first place.

The system is still miles ahead of the old one if you have several classes using one armor type. My upcoming Death Knight will be able to use all the non-class item sets I have accumulated for my warrior, as wel las any weapons, that's pretty cool.

I can see that.

I also miss being able to dual wield with any spec as a warrior.  While running BT over and over and over again waiting for the Bulwark of Azzinoth to drop for my warrior transmog, I actually wound up getting both the main and off-hand legendary WarGlaives.  I liked to swap out the 1h/shield for them when standing around town.

[Kalbear]

12 minutes ago, Rhom said:

I can see that.

I also miss being able to dual wield with any spec as a warrior.  While running BT over and over and over again waiting for the Bulwark of Azzinoth to drop for my warrior transmog, I actually wound up getting both the main and off-hand legendary WarGlaives.  I liked to swap out the 1h/shield for them when standing around town.

Easy enough to swap specs, no?

[Rhom]

20 minutes ago, Dickwad Poster #3784 said:

Easy enough to swap specs, no?

Fairly certain you can only swap specs in an inn/Capitol city now or something.  

Theres no more dual spec, all characters can swap between all three specs; but as best I can tell you are limited as to where.

ETA:  But otherwise, generally yes.  All fury warriors get Titans Grip now as well.  Blizz was even nice and gave you level equivalent blues to equip because some skills require a certain weapon type.

For example, they gave my warrior two 2H axes for when in Fury.  I have a DK that's only level 60 that was Frost spec and they gave her two 1H swords.  (Her name is Serwa btw.  )

[KiDisaster]

16 minutes ago, Rhom said:

Fairly certain you can only swap specs in an inn/Capitol city now or something.  

Theres no more dual spec, all characters can swap between all three specs; but as best I can tell you are limited as to where.

ETA:  But otherwise, generally yes.  All fury warriors get Titans Grip now as well.  Blizz was even nice and gave you level equivalent blues to equip because some skills require a certain weapon type.

For example, they gave my warrior two 2H axes for when in Fury.  I have a DK that's only level 60 that was Frost spec and they gave her two 1H swords.  (Her name is Serwa btw.  )

You have to be in a rest exp area (so any friendly inn or city) to change your talents on your current spec, but you can change specs anywhere. 

[Rhom]

31 minutes ago, KiDisaster said:

You have to be in a rest exp area (so any friendly inn or city) to change your talents on your current spec, but you can change specs anywhere. 

Ahhhhh... That must be what I saw then.  The respec.

Are all friendly cities rest xp now?  Used to just be inns and Capitol cities. So if I went into Goldshire it wasn't rested, but if I went into Kings Rest Inn (wasn't that the name?) it was rested.  But I could go into Stormwind anywhere and get rested.

[Jasta11]

All capital cities, all inns, and your garrison are rest areas.

I'm not a fan of this new talent system. The previous one worked well. You can craft a Tome to allow you to change talents at will for one minute, but really, that's just using the previous system and making it more of a hassle. At least the items are not too expensive to make.

I like every spec I tried so far, to be honest. Survival hunter has a fairly complex rotation, does good damage, and has a nice flavor, what with chucking grenades and fighting alongside your pet. Fire mage is much less dependant on RNG and flows magnificiently, albeit Rune of Power is not fun to use. DKs are just amazing now, both Blood and Unholy play well and have great animations. I heard good things about Shamans as well, but mine is not 100.

[Rhom]

So what's the deal with Inscription as a profession now?  I saw that the Glyph wheel is gone.  Is it just an entirely wasted profession now?

[Centrist Simon Steele]

So I'm thinking about heading out and getting a PS4 game tomorrow. The PS4 is my son's machine, and he is out of town for the next month, and I thought it might be cool to try it out. I have a large Steam library (Witcher 3, Metal Solid 5, so I am looking for Sony games mostly), but I am sure there are PS4 games I'd love to delve into.

Right now I am thinking Doom or Until Dawn. I know I could get Doom on my PC, but it might be fun to play on the big TV. Also Star Wars Rogue Legacy looks like fun. Until Dawn sounds really appealing as I'm a horror buff. I love RPGs--Witcher 3 is probably my favorite game ever. I really like exploration and grinding. Anything that requires leveling up and character progression.

What are you guys liking right now? It doesn't have to be PS4 exclusive. Just throw stuff out there, I suppose.

[KiDisaster]

Until Dawn is good fun but it is very short. If you can rent it rather than buy it I'd recommend it. 

If you like Souls style games, Bloodborne is a no brainer. Otherwise, if you haven't played The Last of Us on PS3, get the remaster for PS4 and play it. 

Infamous: Second Son is also a lot of fun. So is Uncharted 4, but if you haven't played the first 3 it might not be as appealing.