Smart Jason

Anybody watch Veep? (It probably happened a lot in The West Wing or The Thick of It too but I've seen Veep more recently, regrettably.) Whenever the press undermined the politics by breaking a story, the politicians didn't blame the journalists for doing their job, they just had to adjust for it. The newsworthiness of the story in question will always be subjective. It's the principle that is ironclad: journalists answer to their readers, not the entities on which they report. If they held back on a toothless story for fear of retribution, then it is only more likely they would conceal a truly meaningful one.

So, Overkill kind of doubled down and now, in addition to stat boosts on weapons, the gun skins also give team-wide payout bonuses (minuscule percentage buffs on XP and cash after missions). This is actually better I guess than the (arguably pay to win, blah blah blah) stat boosts and really what they should have done in the first place. Now it's just another RNG thing to hope for when you unlock crates. And this was all rolled out as the secret Completely Overkill item that's been promised to the people who spent $20 during the Hype Train event a year ago - meaning those guys got a random weapon skin with this bonus as their long-awaited reward (read: purchase). It could be for any of the twenty-five weapons in the roll-out, obviously meaning one possibly that they never use, and to make things truly endearing - the arbitrary quality rarity still applies, so their skins come out with a cosmetic shittiness rating completely randomly. (Xtansic from the board posted screenshots of his uncrating and his weapon was Broken In quality, for instance.) Probably because I can't stop playing Fallout 4 anyway, this got me to uninstall the game.

I love this.

A Dontnod writer confirmed in a French interview that they're working on a sequel. Cool.

I like the synthetic morality issue for the game, as opposed to a BioWare title like Mass Effect, because it's just simple enough to promise some actual player choice - as the streamlined conversation system and refocused Charisma stat seem increasingly indicative that the game will only follow one narrative path. However, I'm now incredibly concerned that it's both obvious and subversive to the player experience in a Bethesda game that you're going to turn out to be a synth in a late game twist. It's just too convenient for this to be a major theme of the game and for you to somehow emerge from your vault after two centuries alive and without aging. Suspended animation seems like a useless element to introduce to the story when they could say that Vault 111 was established by the Institute to turn all of its inhabitants into synthetic copies of themselves. Not a fan! Not a fan at all!

The leveling system in the game seems really intriguing. Bear in mind that there's no level cap and you can choose to improve a SPECIAL stat with any level up (in lieu of a perk), so if it's a lower amount to begin with, that makes sense.

Detroit: Become Human has just been announced, so it's pretty early to make this thread. Spiritually inspired by their (as The Casting preceded Heavy Rain, although apparently more literally this time), the story trailer shows off an android girl roaming free through the futuristic city, juxtaposed against images of (stop me if this sounds familiar) Mechanical Apartheid and apprehensive recognition from her robotic peers, all looking as though it were the next hour of footage after the credits of Ex Machina. So, this post is here for two reasons: 1. I love David Cage and Quantic Dream. Let's all come together and reminisce about how good its previous titles were, sharing memories and questions and hopes for this game. (I should tell you all that I spoke to Doug Tabacco privately and we've agreed that the first person who says anything approaching "Press X to Jason" in this thread will be banned for life. This is your only warning.) 2. OK, but seriously, how are you going to literally call a game Detroit and announce it with a trailer that makes me feel like I've seen more black people in Hyrule?

The last I read, the system is that you get either one crate or one key per week, with a massive percentage preference to the crate. The first time you play post-update, it definitely seems to be heavily favored to drop a crate for you just to introduce you to the new model. I got it in my first game, as did many others, anecdotally. Should be pointed out that the drop at the end isn't random, no matter which card you pick (i.e., you'll always get the same drop, determined by the relative percentage chances of whatever small buffs you have on masks vs. mods, etc.). So it's not actually taking away your chances of getting something you want by a third (considering, as above, safe drops seem externally limited - and if they're not, they'd need to have a chance of dropping 33% of the time in any given payday to actually influence it as you said). Final note: weapons mods stop dropping when you have two of them in stock; so the more you get, the fewer you'll see in the future, if you're not equipping them.

I didn't mean to make this a contentious point.

I've been getting excited for this lately for a particular reason. At E3 they said that your robot buddy Codsworth comes packaged with about a thousand common names in his spoken dialogue, ostensibly allowing him to refer to you by your chosen name, which is a feature I found really progressive. Since I'm assuming Jason will be one of the names available, I've actually been inspired to roleplay the game as myself. Normally, games like Bethesda, BioWare, and other similar RPGs, I take advantage of character customization to try to inhabit somebody else (particularly women and people of color). However, with the advent of the name feature and the seemingly massive graphic overhaul on facial models compared to Skyrim and previous Bethesda titles, I've been encouraged to be the adolescent thing of just making myself - common name and stupid white male face and brown hair and all. At what's more, I'm going to take it to the extreme, and not allow myself to be (or at least start) as a superior version of myself. So, for instance, while in prior Fallout games I always specialized in agility and small arms by default because I found VATS gameplay with basic guns both fun and efficient, in real life I have no actual experience with firearms and I'm not gymnast, so I won't allow any kind of head start in those areas - or any others which have no analog in real life. Depending on the layout of the game, I'm either going to allow myself to roleplay leveling these skills up from scratch as I use them, or abandoning them entirely in favor of whatever suits actual Jason's arsenal. (Which is, I don't know, moderate intelligence and charisma?) So I'm actually really excited to try this experiment, since it's so outside my usual approach to a new game. Shame there's still so many days to go before it's out.

I agree with you in a lot of ways, hirn1appen, but coming to the forum seemingly just to ask the podcast to revoke its endorsement of the game on such an academic level strikes me as the sort of brigading-activism that's more about soothing the wounded egos of gamers than about affecting change in policy. This has been discussed a bit in the de facto Payday thread in the multiplayer games section. Most people who've spoken up have already quit playing the game. I'm still playing (although not spending any money even on the DLC packs that I want), because even though I find the new business model unethical I don't think that it's so grossly different from what other publishers do in this industry to be worth quitting over. I've found the Payday community to be extremely unimpressive in the wake of this controversy (hard as it is to judge a congregation of people reacting against sudden changes). The issue is close to my heart, and I kind of want to quote my post from the aforementioned Payday thread, but it would just descend into egotistical self-parody at that point as I'd be quoting myself in a post in which I already quote myself, but that's where the sum of my thoughts are.

So it would have been nice if they'd clarified or provided some way of asking if: 1. The make-goods will be honored if you bought Arkham Knight through a third party seller such as Green Man Gaming and activated it on Steam. 2. If you'll receive giftable copies of the Arkham games in the (highly likely) case that you already own them. This is pretty unsatisfactory and disappointing! Obviously, they should have just given the season pass away for free.

Mock this all you want, but all I remember from that section is the part where you're searching for the base in a snowstorm. Quantic Dream has always done snow and winter extremely well, which is one of those things in games that I find extremely moving. Fahrenheit had an incredible sense of New York in winter that I don't think any other game of the PS2 era matched, and Beyond could actually make the player feel cold empathetically when Jodie's homeless in the snow.

I'm playing the game more now than I have in all of 2015. When this first began, I wrote Overkill a big long email, which is not something I'd normally do. I'll quote it below. Obviously, it accomplished nothing. But I think it's a lie people are telling themselves to say the game is no longer fun. The three heists added during Crimefest (which, overall, I agree was a mishandled disappointment - regardless of drills) are now among the best in the game, and I'm still finding lots of pub lobbies to run them over and over enjoyably. The AMA, I have a hard time vilifying Almir for, because of how gross the community was simultaneously. All of his responses were downvoted to the point that you couldn't even view them in the thread, the exact same questions were asked ad nauseam, some real issues went unaddressed while lesser issues (the weapon rebalance) were hugely inflated. The weapon rebalance thing really gets me. The fact that I saw it show up so ubiquitously as a complaint in the AMA as though it's somehow an incorruptible concrete slab upon the game, never again to be patched, worthy of the same indignation as microtransactions made the whole community seem as head-in-ass embedded as the people posting ASCII dicks and middle fingers comments on every Payday 2 community update in Steam. I changed my subweapon because of the rebalance. I really love my current loadout. If they nerf my subweapon, I'll change it again. I am not a baby. If we've lost the Long Guide, that's a shame. HoxHud is coming back in a few days. Most of the content-makers who quit probably were just tired and wanted an excuse, if we're being honest. You're right, Gormongous, that there are a lot of games out there, but Payday 2 is one that I find very fulfilling, and "naked greed" is not a trait exclusive to Overkill or Starbreeze. I'll make this very personal and ask where the outrage was across the whole Internet when Konami released an unfinished game a month ago called Metal Gear Solid V? It has DLC, microtransactions, and poor PR communication. It's PvP rather than PvE, and those functions are deeply ingrained in the game, and they're also pay to win, just more insidiously hidden (pay to buy more resource-gatherers, use the resources to become stronger, attack other players - using pure attrition if necessary). The game was advertised as something it wasn't ("The downfall of Big Boss") rather than a victim of changes in company policy ("no microtransactions"), and once again: released without an ending or even a second half, a fact which professional reviewers ignored and the community at large has plainly forgiven on account of it being fun on a mechanical level. I still like playing Payday 2. Here's what I wrote to Overkill: (I'm at 715 hours now.)

Haven't watched any of these yet, but this looks like an interesting and convenient to watch list of spooky short films. If they turn out well, note that there's an earlier list linked at the bottom with a few more.

Well, just like last year, they brought back Crimefest - this time with a series of in-game challenges in order to unlock various community items (which are all promised to release in two weeks, so no waiting a year for FBI files and the new GenSec enemy last time). To the community's credit, at the time of this writing, all the challenges have been completed with the exception of two: whatever the single, final challenge to be announced tomorrow may be, and the "Crime.net Overload!" challenge - requiring 30,000 players to be online simultaneously. Those of you familiar with similar goals from early days of achievement design or something probably see where this is going: an organized effort to get everyone online at the same time. One was already tried on Wednesday, which failed. The next, and likely last, is happening tomorrow. At 11am PDT, people following the subreddit and some community figures begin the attempt. An hour later, the official Payday 2 Steam Group is apparently due to make an announcement about it, so despite that Reddit post, if you're interested in joining in, I'd stay on for longer to join whatever number comes in through that. All you have to do, of course, is have the game open.

Whether you want to be video game hipster about it or not, you're talking about the guy who's credited by countless people in the industry as, if not introducing the concept of cinematic storytelling to games, revolutionizing it. I know how easy it is to look back on with 2015 glasses and see Metal Gear Solid as no big deal amid the hundred other story-shooters that have come out in the last sigh of the calendar, but that's like saying that Shigeru Miyamoto isn't capable of a great platformer because, eh, what's he done lately? It's also worth pointing out that, in a Kojima game (and for all the criticism he receives about his indulgent use of cutscenes), narrative is gameplay. The failures of the story tie into failures of the game. In spite of the excellent core stealth mechanics, the game is a failure as well. Phantom Pain's lack of appreciable mission progression and character arcs, of moments of Kojima's exceptionalism like fourth wall breaks and discrete and conclusive boss battles, means players are missing out on iconic moments of intertwined story and gameplay for which every previous Metal Gear Solid title is known. I would enjoy listing examples of these but I don't have to, anyone reading this is already remembering some.

Animals count toward 100%, yeah. Development doesn't, actually. I'm amazed that managed that. After over two hundred hours I still haven't (unless you just mean base facilities, rather than weapons). Did you do every Side Op?

I don't want to interrupt any more intelligent conversation, so I'll try to keep this short. A brief return to Quiet that got under my (photosynthetic) skin this evening. The Jimquisition video on the subject of Quiet: A fairly well done video. I agree with the good majority of his points. It's very difficult not to. And so, considering that, the narrative of the anti-SJW, pro-objectification crowd has changed itself in the comments below. No longer is there a "Believe in Kojima, Quiet will be a great character like The Boss" or "authorial intent" line of debate. The new logic has become: The entire thread underneath (it's very difficult to clearly link a YouTube comment thread, but please try to look through it if you care) is just case in point.

I've been avoiding this thread for about a week now since finishing this game, out of both disappointment and shame. I'll put specifics in spoiler tags if they come up, but are people generally up to date now on what a disaster this game is? As succinctly as possible, Phantom Pain is an unfinished, underwritten, horribly paced collection of broken promises. And what makes me lose sleep at night isn't that this is the bastard swan song of my favorite game series of all time, it's that due to industry machinations, history might not even remember it as such. That's the most information that, as far as I can tell, anyone is willing to disclose about the pre-embargo review process for Phantom Pain. Tell me if I'm reaching. I just cannot fathom how it is otherwise possible for the critical reaction to the game to be so positive when the main, through line story thread literally fails to conclude. I realize how it looks like I'm stirring up conspiracies and arguing over subjective review scores, but I'm tempted to say that I genuinely doubt that many critics even finished the game at this so-called boot camp. Whether it was a combination of not taking the story seriously enough to care if it had adequate closure because a Metal Gear game is just an incoherent rubber band ball of plot threads they're only forced to confront every three or four years or just being satisfied with the gameplay mechanics and the ending credits roll of chapter one, I look at Metacritic and see a list of complacent reviewers which rewarded a narratively broken game in a way that should not be excusable. I hate being this guy who is writing on a message board to complain about game reviews. It sucks that caring about ethics in gaming journalism is the wackest, shittiest thing to care about in the entire world; even before GamerGate, which I'd venture is too busy doxxing people who complained about Quiet's breasts than to actually notice anything out of order here.

All right, obligatory emblems, to get my mind off of all the agita the game is giving me:

I am getting suckered in by being terrible at FOBs exactly like I suspected and dreaded that I would. It's dragging down my experience just like the multiplayer in Dark Souls II did for me last year in a game I otherwise loved. Whine, whine, whine, but it's just not fair that I'm on mission thirty-three in the main campaign and I've got S ranks and every task completed in all of them up to this point and absolutely none of that translates into the online which is deliberately designed to be ostensibly the same skill set. I can't even determine the basic mechanics half the time. P.S. And then, after all this time, I got the ending spoiled for me while watching a Twitch stream of FOBs. Fuck FOBs.

I appreciate someone posting the link to Baby Got Backstory in the Feminism thread so I could see a sobering old post of mine from 2014: In all my hype I probably became too complacent about Quiet, because I finally got her as a full-on buddy tonight. I've put over seventy-five hours into this game so far and I absolutely love it to death. I think it's one of the greatest I've ever played. It's pathetic that something like Quiet stands as such a blemish on something otherwise so brilliant.

I knew this was one of my favorite games of all time when I took down a legendary bear with a single stun punch to the face.

Is there a way to watch Mario Party Party 5 yet that I'm missing?