Smart Jason

Since some new players are coming into the game, I thought it'd be best to attempt to assemble a blanket introductory post. There are a few opaque matters on Payday which can be initially off-putting, as well as just a few Tips 'n' Tricks™ you may not know. 1. First off, you'll want to join the game's official Steam group, which will get you some more weapons, masks, and - with the recent conclusion of Crimefest - a whole lot else including a couple more playable characters, a new heist, and a general sense of community and belonging. 2. I am not usually the type to recommend a bunch of mods to people, but there is a rather essential one, endorsed by the developers of the game, called HoxHud. It adds much more information to the in-game HUD, some anti-cheating functionality (which is a pretty big problem in the Payday player base), and bunch of miscellaneous fixes and fun things (ask me about rainbow headshots). To download it, you'll need to join and remain a member of its Steam group, which gives you access to the download forum. It also enters you into a devil's deal of perennially waiting for the next HoxHud hotfix (and the hotfix for that hotfix) after every single game update due to how much the mod manages, but I think it's worth it. 3. For complete newcomers, there are loads of specific YouTube videos offering tutorials for every heist. Much of the game's Twitch streams are also done either by people quite knowledgeable in solo stealthing and while the major Payday clans (TCN and T$E) which stream loud missions nearly twenty-four hours a day aren't meant to be educational, you can glean a lot from them when you're just starting. I'd like to draw attention to in particular. It's unfinished and updated so slowly that I don't have faith that it ever will be, but I think it's the most easily digestible and informative collection of videos for the game I've found.4. Now, if you really want to sink your teeth into the game, the master resource is The Long Guide. Impossible to get through in just one sitting, constantly updated (and invalidated by future game updates and so on), it's a fascinating insight into the specific mechanics of every individual system of stealthing, skills, and every heist. As imposing as it is, there is no better way to learn about the game, although obviously no one should expect you to take it all in. 5. I suppose, of final note, if you are interested in picking up any DLC while the game's still on sale for Halloween but it all looks like an arbitrary mess of weapons of which you have no way of knowing the value. My recommendations would as follows: The Gage Mod Courier DLC is number one, as it gives purpose to the little hidden packages you're seeing around missions and unlocks a ton of excellent weapon modifications upon their collection. Weapon modding is actually extremely crucial to offense in Payday, as well as stealth. I would say the Gage Sniper Pack would be next, as the sniper rifle functionality is not going to be found anywhere else in the game and is uniquely powerful. Third, I'd advise the Gage Weapon Pack #01, for the inclusion of grenades and the very valuable Single fire and Auto fire mods. I know it may be tempting to buy heist DLCs instead of weapon packs, but you can actually play the "premium" heists so long as the host owns them - so consider playing them first as a preview. Anyway, this is a very minor point, and I loathe being an advocate for nickel and dime business modeling; I genuinely think that Payday 2 has a very ethical balance between free and paid content support. I hope this was helpful! I hope we play together! I hope the board doesn't realize I'm secretly a viral marketer for 505 Games!

Once you're leveled so much that normal and hard missions are trivial in terms of reward, you can reliably run them alone. But the solo component of this game is inarguably stealth. Every stealth mission can be completed solo, particularly the ubiquitous Harvest & Trustee Bank Heist variants, which I still grind whenever I'm just looking to play and no one's around.

I was kind of enamored with how Jon looked during the Halloween mission in his wolf mask.

For what it's worth, Payday 2 is a Steam Sale Staple. You'll find the base game for $7.50 or even less during the big seasonal events and its DLC regularly plummets so low that I've been able to afford most of it just as a byproduct of the trading card market.

As Sean mentioned in the most recent Thumbs episode, Payday 2 has done most of its promotional and in-game cinematics as live action FMVs, which include a bevy of genre-spanning original music. I included The Dentist trailer in an earlier post because it begins with a wonderfully cut reintroduction to Dallas set to the country track Drifting. This week was large one in Payday 2, marking the third anniversary of the franchise itself and concluding a series of small updates with the release of the Hoxton Breakout Heist, in which the crew helps one of the player characters from the first game escape from jail. Much like The Dentist's, the full trailer's first minute (of ten) teases a new original song, revealed in full to be the awesome and evocative soul song, This is Our Time. Say what you will about how cheap their cinematics end up looking once the firefights begin; their need of a more merciless editor or how gauche the original Payday 2 webseries was, but those first minutes absolutely build a mood. I've been listening to This is Our Time a lot for the past day or so, and it's all the better for its association with Hoxton's triumphant liberation.

I was always wary of the Payday games and only finally bit this past June along with a friend when nothing else was really calling to me during the Steam summer sale. Having absolutely no relationship with its masked-up-bank-heist ancestral media, I was as surprised as anyone to find myself so compelled by the game and now, over five hundred hours later and one of the four horsebags. My early hours with the game were quite oblique and playing with strangers is essentially asking to have a foul time, more so than in similar games such as the perennially comparable Left 4 Dead - as Payday is far more demanding of coordinated teamwork from players, regarding the completion of multiple, disparate objectives and utilizing complementary skills. While the game's first person shooter violence is fairly easy to comprehend due to its ubiquity, the language of its stealth is particularly difficult to acclimate to and many missions will have unique fail triggers that will frustrate new players until they becomes old hat - at which point they themselves will be frustrated by the next crop of new players wrecking the heist. However, that amount of difficulty and minutiae also begets a huge amount of informational resources [1] [2] [ ] if you care to delve into it. Payday 2 is actually rather like Dark Souls II in that way for me, I went through a phase of watching any Twitch stream of it that I could, tearing through its wiki, just trying to be an encyclopedia for the game - I suppose the difference is that I've found Payday 2's DLC output continually stimulating (and relatively evenhanded), so I'm still engaged. So, in summary, I echo the recommendation that anyone intrigued by Sean's excitement check out the multiplayer networking thread for the game we've had going. I personally am definitely always willing to play whenever I'm around, and I try my best to be a good ambassador of the game for newcomers.

Cool. I'd be down for this.

I have Titanfall but I don't recall there being a coop mode when I last played it. Did they add this to the base game or is it DLC?

What's your Steam? Or you can add me if you don't want to post it.

That's actually Simon Viklund, the music director on the game and voice of Bain. I'm convinced that the dialogue for Wick is mostly if not entirely parody.

Not to put too fine a point upon it, but this goes back to my post from a few pages ago - I genuinely believe that GamerGate is abandoning en masse its pretense that the movement is about ethics in game journalism (perhaps because they're tired of being confronted with the double standards of which industry issues they'll actually spotlight depending on whether or not women are focal to them) and moving toward a greater goal of undermining and undoing the feminist creep of modern history which has only serendipitously taken foothold within this very fertile ground of gamers, The goal of detecting and alerting the community to "agenda"-driven media, because the Marxist feminist academics are brainwashing the populace at large through opinionated in a way that is different from me censorship. I've seen posts of theirs which dictate their refusal to be classified as a movement, but rather a consumer advocacy force, as though the latter will be less transient in history.

If the four of us can name a time, we have a full crew, just like that. Now all we need is to download the mod that lets us all play as Keanu-senpai...

Crimefest is (essentially) complete and anyone who feels like should feel free to message me on Steam at any time! The mission can be pretty tough but I think it actually has the highest base payout, in cash and experience, of any in the entire game - plus you get Hoxton! Also, as I was in the process of writing this post, this went up. Looks like things are about to get spooky!

Could you expound upon that? Frankly, I feel like you're either misinterpreting the comic or you're really cherry picking what one can and can't say about GamerGate.

Does anyone else find it extremely troubling that TotalBiscuit's (typically self-important) statement on Dodger contains the words "legitimate harassment"? Tell me if I'm being oversensitive: to me, that sounds like a means of disavowing the experiences of those with whom he isn't personally friendly that have been harassed; like dog whistle language to tell the GamerGate reader of his Twitter feed that this single occasion of misogynistic abuse is as it seems and not a false flag perpetuated by the professional victim. It also has some fairly disturbing Todd Akin echoes, to my ears. While it obviously isn't true that if GamerGate takes an action it absolves its targets from blame for that same action (and make no mistake: those are the sides of this issue; not "us versus them" - a hate group and its victims, direct and indirect), you talk as if every platform GamerGate uses hasn't been a means to dehumanize, harangue, and conspire against those whom they consider enemies. To call a series of innocuous lightbulb jokes "antagonistic bullshit" in the face of what people have actually undergone during the past several months is incredibly myopic in its attempt to police the response to harassment by the harassed rather than those who are actually actively engaging in structured, rigorous professional sabotage and criminal acts. What on Earth do you imagine would be accomplished by singularly changing this forum thread?

OK, yeah, that video basically confirms exactly what I was concerned about.

Has anyone bothered to freeze frame on that wall of text at the end of Measured Response? I can't tell whether or not the author is taking some lofty, superior to both sides position by calling Feminist Frequency super basic etc. and it's giving me pause.

This is an excellent way to respond to all the tedious, pedantic technicalities that sexists will rely on to deny misogyny in media, as though a contextual rationalization for one portrayal undermines the entire argument - which you run up against a lot on NeoGAF, etc. I'd love to contribute to this list as examples occur to me; for now, what comes to mind and is most dear to my heart isn't yet a totally known quantity, only a promise that once Metal Gear Solid V is out and whatever nonsense excuse for Quiet's appearance is canon, those of us who took issue with it will be ashamed of our words and deeds.

Actually, I'm surprised no one has mentioned Bully yet. True, there's no driving, but the bicycles handle pretty well, and the combat was definitely improved compared to its PS2-era GTA brethren. In fact, at the time I was quite fond of saying it was the best Grand Theft Auto game yet made. And this one is available on Steam.

Bear in mind, they are looking at diversity and representation in games - the buckling to Anita Sarkeesian and the feminist cabal - as an infestation toxic to their hobby. Not unlike Anita would like games to be rid of elements of sexism and bigotry, they want games to shed the burden of any social agenda (see: the boycott of Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel). Obviously, the analogy breaks down on account of the fact that the former has cultural ramifications when presented in media and the latter is simply the privileged just trying to preserve the status quo.

So, to the detriment of my own peace of mind, I submerge myself in KotakuInAction fairly regularly. This is the much more moderate, restrained face of GamerGate - the guy politely asking for $20. When an "MSM" writer critiques the movement, he's pointed there, rather than 8chan - so I object to the characterization of the latter as their united front. If we ever wanted to indulge them, it should be based on the dialogue found on KotakuInAction, not the culture on 8chan or elsewhere which seems to force a social pressure onto its users to speak in slurs and hatespeech and so on. Something I would like to see media coverage address is the fact that GamerGate itself is in the process of changing its message. We've seen (and rightfully mocked) them cling to this general line that GamerGate opposes harassment in an effort to distance themselves from the hate campaign carried out, if not in its founding then certainly in its name. We also know about the false equivalence they've created by maintaining the insistence that there is harassment on both sides and that those who have allegedly been harassed by GamerGate are professional victims, using the experience for publicity, sympathy, and financial gain. Having always come from a place of manic persecution, they've commandeered the idea of being bullied and latched onto the idea that they're an anti-bullying cause due to Sam Biddle's (who writes for Gawker's tech site Valleywag) stupid tweets - but this has transitioned to the more insidious belief that feminism itself is a systematic means of bullying. However, in the wake of all these "Actually, it's about ethics..." jokes of the past two days, it's most and dreadfully important to point out that, in their own words, GamerGate seems more than ever willing to drop the pretense that this is about ethics in games journalism and savor the idea that they are indeed fighting a battle against the encroachment of social justice within society as a whole. Without meaning to whitewash the crimes that have been committed, it seems that this uniting tenet of anti-social justice is now central to GamerGate, and (to hear them say it) both harassment and ethics in games reporting are equally distant from that core issue. Suffice it to say, this is what I wish I could see broadcast by those willing to cover GamerGate in the media - if they're unwilling to call it a hate movement, say that they are a united force against liberalism, feminism, and so on.

It's convoluted, but I'd actually recommend playing The Third first just as a litmus test of whether you'll enjoy the franchise (as most will say it peaked there, although I prefer IV). If you do like it, then go back and play 2 - since it and the original Saints Row are so tonally different from the latter sequels that they're nearly a completely different series and are almost worth skipping unless you fall completely in love with the franchise. The reason I say to do it now is because IV is clearly intended as a retrospective on the series as a whole and not only begins directly after The Third in a way that The Third doesn't from 2 (including character importation), but contains a large number of references for, and reverence toward, the first two games, and knowledge of them will really help you appreciate its story. I hope you enjoy them. For a long time I thought Saints Row would never be a series for me; I thought it was far too proudly dumb and held games back and all that, but beginning with The Third I actually found its characters and writing incredibly charming and I think its irreverence - rather than just being mindless - is knowing in a way few or no other games actually are. Also, I agree that Sleeping Dogs is quite satisfying. I can't speak to whether or not it will disturb you, unfortunately. I found all of its systems very well done.

This was super good and would've been even better without half the crew being strangers. (I think I was also unconsciously being slightly silent because I was holding off on playing with another friend of mine when the opportunity to play with a Thumb arose and I was anxious about juggling the two.) We can play as Keanu Reeves now!

This is my first time through the show but I'd definitely like to say that I see where CLWheeljack is coming from. It's absolutely pigeonholing for Josie to be introduced by Truman to Cooper in that town hall scene as the most gorgeous woman in Twin Peaks (allowing for the fact that Truman is in a relationship with her), to have her character be an exotic beauty who, as stated, speaks in delicate broken English and dresses culturally appropriately. The fact that her motivations are sympathetic doesn't excuse this presentation (and I'm anxious now that this thread's implied there are more nefarious things forthcoming). Again, as stated, so far Hawk has it worse (I've watched slightly ahead) but that only serves to set a landscape of racial caricature on the show.

I'm actually surprised that hasn't been the subject of an episode yet, now that you mention it - a cutting edge clean energy nuclear company comes to Springfield and is horrified by the grim 1980s parody of nuclear power run by Mr. Burns. And in one fell swoop - my next spec script, and this thread's next nadir.