thepaulhoey

When playing Quick Play it's a shame that it never seems to do anything to try to balance the teams. I was playing this evening and the team I was on trounced the other team 4 games in a row(we even beat them when attacking on Anubis!) until I just got bored and left the game to find a new one. It would be nice if it mixed up the teams between matches if it's going that way. To give an example of how poor the other team were they only made it to the first capture point on Anubis once and none of my team died that match. :/

Yes that's also how I switch, if I feel like I'm not contributing or I'm just dying way too quick I try a different character to see if it will help and it usually does. Sometimes it's not even the characters of the other team but the fact that they know how to deal with Bastion or whoever that makes me switch.

Has anyone else been playing Arcade mode? It doesn't count towards your Profile stats(you still get XP and level up though) but makes up for it by being completely insane and a lot of fun. It's Overwatch but on set maps and with some modifiers and it changes each week. This week it's(I think) double health, abilities charge 4 times as fast and ultimates charge faster also. With these settings as Pharah you can spend the entire match in the air since your Shift boost ability takes 3 seconds to recharge. Just managed to live through an entire 10 minute match as her thanks to this. It's nuts and I love it.

Has anyone ever captured the second point on Anubis against a half way competent team? Any time I've played no matter whether I'm defending or attacking the defending team wins easily. There's so many blind spots for the attackers to deal with and if the team has Bastion he can just move to different spots so they don't know where they're going to get destroyed from when they come in. Couple that with turrets, mines etc. and a respawn that's right beside it for the defenders and you just get destroyed as soon as you're near the point, if you even make it that far.

Yeah it crashes a lot for me and sometimes the frame rate tanks and the only solution is to restart the game. From a technical stand point as good as it looks I'm not impressed with how well it actually works.

Or Region? I'm playing on PC in Europe.

Oh I'll have to watch that. I figured it was down to how they handle latency and it's not something I get annoyed about because I just play for fun. Also there's no way to handle latency that keeps everyone happy, someone is going to get the short end of the stick so it just is how it is.

Maybe that's it, although this guy was on our team. Maybe he thought he did something deserving of the award. After a few hours there's 2 things I find annoying. The first is that in pub games it only takes 2 people who aren't interested in the objective or are only interested in playing a character that doesn't work well within the team to lead to you getting steam rolled which can be annoying. I've had games with 3 Widowmakers on attack and no one willing to change and you just get destroyed. The other is that there's a lot of times where what I see in the kill cam is totally off with what I saw on my screen as far as positioning etc. goes and other times I can barely tell what killed me and it's something that I think will hold it back from being a competitive game.

I've had Kings Row a good few times today, but generally I'm getting a good mix. I'm still learning characters and I haven't even tried half of them yet. Those videos mentioned are a good way to get to know them, I previously didn't know how to get the level 3 turret. The community seems fine so far, most people don't talk or chat and just get on with things. Only negative I've had is just now, some guy called me "noob bastion" when I got play of the game for wiping out 5 people in tank mode. I mean... it helped us win the game, sorry if I'm meant to be taking out 5 people as a sniper instead? I just told him to piss off.

I find that it depends on the team you're in as to how easy it is to do well with a character. I've had games with Mercy where it's a breeze because the team is staying together and protecting me. I've had other times where the team is all over the place so it's tough to get anyone healed without getting destroyed by the other team on my way to them. I'm learning this the more I play that sometimes you can't play a character simply because they won't work well with the style/makeup of the team.

I usually leave the music on in these games, I find it's generally relaxing and goes well with the game play. I'm really liking the art style of this new Civ and everything I'm hearing about the game play changes so far has me very interested.

I really like how easy it is to jump in for one game, enjoy it and be done 10 minutes later. I never got that with TF2 as games could start to really drag if the teams were too even. It's great if you want to play something before you head off for work in the morning etc. I'm finding the public games getting better, people are starting to figure out how the heroes work and using them effectively. I still get the odd game where most of the team is made up of people who charge objectives alone and we get steamrolled, but for the most part I'm getting balanced games. I'm playing as McCree most of the time if I'm attacking, his gun is 100% accurate so it's best to stay behind and pick off enemies from far away, then if you're going to get in close use a flash bang and then right click to unload at point blank into whoever you blinded.

I've only played a small bit since release and I'm still enjoying it as much as the beta. The quality of team mates varies a lot, I've had a lot of people who keep going off on their own and getting slaughtered so we end up getting steam rolled as a result. It is very much a team game. My Battle.net ID is paulhoey#2628 if anyone wants to add me I'll be playing whenever I have spare time over the next few weeks for sure.

I've upgraded to the latest nVidia drivers and I'm having a pile of problems since. Constant frame rate drops which sometimes require a restart, other times they just go away and now it's crashing a lot. Bah.

I've played 2 or 3 levels so far and I'm really enjoying myself so far. The flow of combat is excellent and they've worked in a great way to force you to be aggressive with the glory kills. The encounters are really well designed as well, I got to an area with two platforms in the center and enemies spawning all around, it ended with me hopping from platform to platform while taking on 2 Hell Knights. Really intense, it's a long time since a shooter has gotten my heart racing like that.

I played Gunman Chronicles around about when it was released, I don't remember it being a very long game but I guess game lengths are perceived differently when you're a teenager. I really enjoyed it at the time, it's no classic but it was a lot of fun.

Did you know that when you die you pay credits to respawn?

I also do not remember ever taking on so many enemies especially that early in the game. Did you set off an alarm or something?

Oh man, can't wait to hear what you think. SS2 holds up pretty well I think, it has some old game things to deal with(controls, graphics, feel etc.) but the gameplay at a high level makes up for it. I might put it on as well.

Yeah it's more that kind of stuff which works better. I think it has some zombie-type stuff going on but it's way way less. As far as I remember Thief Gold was polish to existing levels and a few new ones too.

I always forget how quickly all that stuff comes into Thief, for me it just doesn't gel well when there's so much of it. Thief 2 had a far better balance of it to the point it was something I could accept. Are you playing Thief or Thief Gold?

I remember when I played Thief the controls were really awkward compared to other FPSes. Lots of buttons and strange mappings, I had to make lots of changes. It's a fun game, but I think Thief 2 is far better because it removes a lot of the fantasy stuff which I never enjoyed.

I played the Bank level in Sin and really didn't enjoy it much at all. The guns feel weak, even on easy the enemies take a pile of shots to go down. They have more oomphf to them than Quake 2 but that's not saying much. The level design was confusing as well I thought, mixed in with enemy respawns and it just got kinda annoying after a while. I got to some tunnel under the Bank then I got blown up as I was trying yo awkwardly platform my way out. I might give it another go and see if it improves. As far as feeling fiddly, even walking around the level as normal I noticed the physics being completely bizarre with my character getting knocked about a bit when I was standing in a spot the game didn't like.

I was also shocked at how much the panel seemingly hated the game. The rose tinted googles for XCOM EU is bizarre. I thought it led to a terrible discussion of the game, it felt like it was people who had played about 5 hours discussing it. They picked on the tiniest of things and blew them up like they were the most important thing ever. I've put about 30 hours into the game, I've never completed an XCOM game before and I'm about to start the final mission and I have never restarted this campaign. I also have a half filled Avatar countdown. At one point my Avatar countdown was at 11 and I was certain it was Game Over but I pulled things back. It felt like many of the panel restarted as soon as there was any sort of set back because that's what you had to do in XCOM. You don't in XCOM 2, things might look grim but it's definitely possible to pull it back. It's not perfect and they touched on some genuine problems(hacking is a waste of time imo) but they got lost in the noise of "XCOM 2 is a bad game.". I agree that the game is incredibly lacking in polish and some of the bugs are very annoying. Vipers totally don't follow the rules and there's been plenty of times I've had the enemies blatantly cheat(moving, shooting, moving again) none of which I think is intentional. The game just needed another few months to polish all of these things up.

I've played about 3 hours of the game, I only stopped because it's late and I'm tired and it was a struggle to tear myself away. I love what I have played so far. I disagree that it would be better as a movie, the small amounts of interactivity and exploration have added a lot to the story and characters for me.